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Source: Nick K – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: nick-k-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:40:08
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Our next speaker is from the Matt Talbot Group of AAs in South Bend, Indiana. It is my pleasure to introduce to you Nick K.. Thank you, Rudy. I'm kind of caught in the middle here and don't know really which way to go. This morning, Jim, I think, painted a wonderfully clear picture of the kind of mental attitude that makes up a fellow like me, and the weird thinking and the weird actions and the hard, terrific job he has of learning to control and channel these things into the AA way of life.
I don't know how it could be done any better. And then, of course, Ross dissected my personality problems and my alcoholism with those charts to the point where he left me nothing much to say on that particular subject. And then if I got up here and tried to tell you about the great, wonderful work I've done in AA, you would only have to remember the remarkable talk just made by Father Mac. And you just wonder, I mean, where do you go from there?
It happens that I am an ex-con, and you had Jack up here, who's an ex-con this morning, and he talked. So I sat there wondering, you know, I should earn my way somehow about what I'm going to talk. Now, Wally, who's been a friend of mine in years and we've traveled around together, he said that he heard I was on this afternoon's program and that I was splitting an hour talk with Father Mac. So he ran an old tape of mine and found that it ran an hour and 45 minutes.
So he says, where do you go? What are you going to do with that thing? And I said, well, we'll just have to skip it. I'll tell you what we'll do. Jack started with the story, the rather tragic mixed up but happy ending life of an ex-con. And this evening I want to ask you, and this I mean with all sincerity, not to miss Glenn's talk. We up in our area and in the Ohio and Detroit area have had him for a friend for a great many years.
And we think there is no finer, I don't say there is not his equal, but there are no finer speakers on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous Alive. And I certainly am not going to attempt to compete with him this afternoon, but I want to ask you to be here. I think, I think that without question you will find it a most memorable and moving story. And it may, by the grace of God, somehow affect at least one or two lives here.
It's been known to happen before. So you see, I was struck as Father talked here by the fact that he mentioned that there are angle shooters around among us in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I became aware, while he's talking, of the fact that I, in at least this particular instance and in a great number of others, am that particular person, the angle shooter. I don't belong up here at all this afternoon.
I have no particular remarks that I can find that are more brilliant or more moving or more concerned than those that followed me. So I am going to assure you that though you might have been held a little late at the other meetings this morning, you're going to get out of this one on time. Now I want to tell you that some long time ago, by the grace of a good many friends I've met up here who used to come to the Indiana State Prison at a time when I was a resident there, I became slowly, very slowly, a part of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And somewhere in there, through looking at God through the eyes of a great many of you and still finding him there quite frequently, I have been able to fit a sort of a loose mantle of cloth across my life that I wear very loosely. I don't take myself very important and I don't think I'm going to make any moving changes in the world of life, though I once thought that I was terribly important and I was going to make a great many momentous decisions and do a great many constructive things.
Somewhere in this program, among the weird people that I have met who have been able to turn their will and their lives over to care of whatever they can find here, I've met a delightful few who couldn't care less about anything except they'd like to maintain their own sobriety and help you maintain yours, and they will share about anything, including that, with anyone who asks.
[00:04:59]
And I have tried hard to become a part of this because it's changed my life.
[00:05:05]
It's been a sort of a wandering, wonderful, quiet, miraculous, miracle. And about that I might talk, and in there you'll find that I am not kidding when I say that in this program I am one of the angle shooters. For example, Glenn came to my house, who's going to talk tonight, a month ago. He says he's 70. I figure he must be 90. You couldn't get in that shape in only 70 years. And he says, I'm going to Chicago, and they've asked me to talk up there.
I don't want to drive in Chicago, and you used to be the warden chauffeur, so I know you know all about it. And I assured him I did. And he said, I'm going to call Frank and ask him if it's all right if I bring someone along and they'll reserve a room for you. So he called Frank, and Frank said, gee, we've had a cancellation in Canada. Can this guy talk? And Glenn said, well, he'll do anything for a meal.
So he said, well, we've got a little spot in there where we need some fillers. So he said, if you bring him along, that way we can pay his expenses out of the fund here. See, whatever loot they generate from you people. And so this is an angle, right? This is a cunning, ingenious alcoholic getting a free ride. And I want to tell you and to thank you most sincerely for every one of us who've been asked to speak here, because we have had the best accommodations I've ever had, the most wonderful kind of consideration, and a grand time.
It's been a ball. I speak not only for myself, but those other nice people I've met here, some of whom came in from a long way. There's been one or two problems. I said my prayers when I left home very devoutly and asked for a day's sobriety and asked also not so much that I understand God, but that he somehow understand me because I'm crazy as hell and I know it. Now, if you can picture for just a second a small town boy coming to a remarkable, wonderful city, who for years thought that Chicago consisted of 63rd Street, about three blocks, starting out at my house there in Washington.
I only knew that little dark place under the tunnel. I thought that was Chicago. And I always come over here to ballgames, but that is as far as I got. We'd stop there to drink our lunch, and I never left. Some of the other guys would see the game. But anyhow, here in my sobriety, I've gradually become aware of the fact that there are other things over here. And I've got two days, and my wife is staying home.
Now, this thing called Conrad Hilton, first cabin. You know, I never first cabin nothing. Glenn said to me, do we go in and go back to the freight elevator? I said, you better call Frank. I'm not sure. So we come up. Now this, I asked God, you know, for help this morning, and you can see I got it. The only thing is, he sometimes proposes different conclusions than I have in mind. We check in at the Conrad Hilton.
Fine, wonderful. 2,000 girls are checked in at the Conrad Hilton. 2,000, I'm not kidding, I counted them. This is a 24-hour program, and my wife is 100 miles from here. It's apparent that there's nothing I can take back to South Bend that won't be regenerated by the time I get there, right? The trouble is, all of these girls, the oldest is 15. So I says immediately to Frank, the wheels are turning.
And I said, what kind of accommodations we got? He said, well, all we could get were these two conventions. There's another convention in here. It's a double room. Well, I said, can't you get us two singles? I'll take a little cheaper one. You know, anything to get a single. I want to get away from Glenn. He can't get one. I'm in a hotel, beautiful, wonderful, biggest hotel in the world. 2,000 girls.
I sleep with a 6'4", 92-year-old man who can't sleep. For the first time in years, he's got a bed. About 4 o'clock, he lays on the floor. I told him, I said, roll some old newspapers up and lay them on the floor and let me sleep. Well, we've had a wonderfully delightful time. I have gotten, once again, a free ride on the program of Mount Holly Phenomenon. It's taught me an awful lot. We've had a lot of fun.
I did get an opportunity to thank some people I have known for a great many years.
[00:10:02]
Some long time ago, Easter Sunday, 1944, I came into AA for my first meeting. At that time, I once sat on a priest's stump. I thought his father was talking in an orphanage in Tucson, Arizona, and dreamt of becoming a priest and doing some or a few of those things. I thought, when all the alcoholics that I have met along this way once had great ideals and great dreams, and they were going to make the world a better and a healthy and a more wonderful place, and sometimes, somehow, it all went out of kilter.
And it seemed then that we had some terrible necessity to destroy ourselves, especially to destroy all of the so-called things that other people call decent and practical. At least I was one of these people. And at the time that I made my first AA meeting, I went in at the assistance of a friend. I am still an English shooter. This friend of mine died drinking a few years ago, and I just want to tell you this about him.
He's a graduate of Marquette University. Brilliant. Remembered every single word everybody ever told him and everything he read. He played shortstop on the baseball team with some of the old Raybeards who remember that Dave Ruth took to Japan to teach the Japanese how to first play ball years ago. This kind of a man was reduced to living with me in the Indiana State prison and doing bit time. He was a check artist when he drank, you know.
He had to have more money, and he would write checks, and he would come up and do two years. And his brilliance would soon place him in one of the favorite positions in the institution, and he would work his way up. And he read the article by Jack Alexander, and it inflamed him. From that day until the day he died, he did very little good for himself, but he done a tremendous amount of good for some of the rest of us.
For example, he insisted on, he talked to me. I didn't talk to very many people. I was frightened of talking about myself. I could talk about anything else. But Tim somehow had appealed to me, maybe with this affinity that even prior to AA, we found in jails themselves where one drunk would help another to get over the shakes and roll his cigarettes for him and try to get some chicory or something down him.
Something that we felt, the sort of a legion of the damned, those people caught on the edge of nothing with nowhere to go, that made us combine what little kindness we had, because it was the only chance we had to express it or show it. No one else would accept it or would in any way find it worthy. So we were caught kind of together even prior to AA. And Tim apparently felt some of this in me and insisted on my going to this first meeting because he had promised the warden he would get 20 people there to hear this guy.
This was a maximum security prison. The warden had no idea of letting these men in or encouraging them to stay. It was everything most difficult. And he made Tim go on the radio and say to the inmate population that there will be a spiritual meeting in the education department on Sunday about the problems of alcoholics. At this meeting you will be asked to sit in a room with a guard, of course, and talk about yourself.
Well, there's a thousand and one things wrong with this. In the first place, most of us even who walk this way have a tremendous amount of regard for the person who practices what he preaches and who talks and believes in what he says. But we have a great deal of disdain for those who practice out of one side of their mouth and talk out of the other. And in prison you find a great many of these. The rape artist was a great one for running through the door with a two-foot Bible under his arm.
And somebody was sure to say if you had grabbed that two years earlier you wouldn't have had to come down here, you know. Within that framework we had a high regard for those few who really, really, because we live closer together in there than you do with your wife. You know, you were there under each other's faith and you couldn't talk and act differently. We just were practically stuck together.
And we were stuck together. If we moved in any direction, they too nudged us back where we belonged. And as a result of this, Tim encouraged me to go to this meeting and I was not at all anxious about it. I had a life sentence for murder that I had committed. I had had I don't know how many arrests. I had reached the point in my life where I had tried to commit suicide three times. And I meant business, suicide.
I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I didn't see any chance of any relief. I didn't want to do that damn life sentence. And I wanted just to get rid of the day. I tried very desperately to kill each day as it come out and to get myself exhausted and tired and worn out as I could. And I did try to commit suicide three times. And Tim kept talking about this AA stuff. It sounds to me something like a Holy Roller group or a Salvation Army outfit without a drum or something.
And I didn't want to bite into this. This didn't sound like it offered any permanent hope. So he told me that if I did not go, he was going to cut off he used to steal pies for me occasionally out of the dining room. He was going to cut off my pie and even then I loved food. And also he was going to see Also, he was going to see, he had charge of the library, that I got nothing to read but western stories, and I despised the damn thing.
[00:15:07]
So I went to my first meeting without hope, but because I did, when little time I felt I had left, I did want to read something besides western stories, and I did enjoy that piece of cherry pie. Or raisin pie, it was. No cherries in prison. All raisin. Anyhow, I went, and I sat through this meeting, and I sat through two years of them. I quit four times in two years, because it would come my Sunday to have the meeting.
They had little closed meetings in there then, and they'd go around the table. There was only eight of us in the A. And they'd go around the table, and on my Sunday they'd say, next Sunday's your meeting, and I'd always say, oh that's fine, that's seven days to wait, you know. And all week I'd dream about having the biggest, most important, loudest meeting that you could ever hold. I was going to have the best, I was going to tell bigger lies than any of those guys told, and I was going to have, I was really going to tell them boys something.
And I'd get up there, but I couldn't talk, so I quit. I never quit because I was afraid to talk, I quit because Tim C. was a school pigeon, I told everybody, and he was sending notes out to the warden. Father just asked that we consider the guy who's confused and mixed up and reconsider him and reconsider him, because eventually there may be some hope for him. And about two years after this kind of floundering around, messing around, a guy stood there in a little baggy suit, and I was sitting there with this cunning, ingenious mind, trying to figure out what in the hell he had driven from South Bend to Michigan City for to talk to us, little eight or nine folks, when he could have driven five miles into the 36th and been in Michigan drinking beer.
I knew that somebody must be paying him. You just don't do this. There's something wrong. He's got an angle going. At least I got a steak dinner, you see, for coming down here. I still got the angle going. But anyway, I was thinking about this, and this guy stood there and he said something that changed my life, and if I had to say the thing that I'd most like to give to somebody else, it would be that.
He said, I don't care what your position or your condition in life is. I just don't give a damn. If you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, just so sick and tired of being sick and tired that you've contemplated suicide, let me suggest a way, a way of doing this. Take this little 12-step card that's available to anyone into the quiet of your mind and turn your will and your life over to care of it with what you find there, remaining only willing to discuss what you think and what you see and what you feel, not with everybody, with those other people who walk this quiet way, so that you can learn from them and they can learn from you, and so that you'll share the mistakes and the successors of one another, and so that eventually you might somehow find reason to hope to fade to some side of God in each other's eyes.
He said, if you do this, if you will try this for 30 days, full blast, you're ready to commit suicide, you're sick and tired, what have you got to lose? What have you got to lose? And so I tried. He bothered me. He said, if you'll do this, you'll soon come to know one day with which you'll be satisfied. You'll be satisfied. Maybe nobody else, but you'll be satisfied. One in which you feel inside there's a reasonable reason for being alive.
Reasonable reason for being alive. And one day, if you continue this, you will come to realize that those qualities that this day make death necessary have departed and do not have to be allowed to return unless you find some value in them. You find some value in them. So what did I have to lose? I never owned a suit of clothes. And I turned my will and my life over to care of God. I just wished that I could.
With the complete abandon to which I had turned my life over to care of alcohol. I never had owned a suit in my life. I couldn't work there. I couldn't get that much money to get it. I worked hard. I had to. I quit school in the seventh grade and never went back. I was a strong, young pollock. Had nothing to sell but muscle. I was a construction worker. Worked around team games and buildings and stuff.
The kind of work you can come and leave and go back to and eventually if they need muscle, they'll put you on. I had never had a wife. I had never had any friends. I left home when I was seven years in Orphanage. Left the Orphanage.
[00:20:00]
Was home one year. My dad remarried. I left home. Never went back. Don't know only vaguely where my brothers and sisters are today. I had given them up. Some place in this process, in spite of the fact that I'd been with the nuns, I had lost complete sight of God. I figured that they somehow, that I was a misfit or something in this pattern of life. I didn't exactly disbelieve. I just thought they didn't work.
In fact, I used to pray all the time. I'd say the Lord's Prayer zip, zip, zip when I was in jail and when I got out and get me a job and get me a sandwich and get the landlord off my back. And I realize now, as you've taught me, that if my prayers had worked, I'd have been God and he'd have been working for me. That's true. That's true. That's true. I snapped my fingers and I expected him to jump. I still try it, but it isn't working any better today than it did last time.
So I came into AA on that day. I walked up and down my cell and realized it had been a long time since I'd slept all night. That I just tried to kill the day and tried to wear myself out and I was just looking for a way to get rid of myself. And so what did I have to lose? A life sentence for a murder I'd committed in a drunken brawl in the front. No place to go. Nothing to lose. Not a friend. Hadn't had a letter in four years.
Now, I had people come up to see me and visit me, but I always felt like they came because I was some kind of a curiosity, you know. So I just told them no visits and no mail and no letters and I canceled them all out. And so I hadn't had a letter. I had lived in the cell for the first four years. I was there without turning the radio on. They had earphones. I didn't want to know what was going on outside.
I was sick and tired of what was going on outside. I'd never been able to understand why other people could have clothes and money and cars and wives and girlfriends and I couldn't have nothing. Nothing but a lonely corner and a bottle. And I probably hungered for all these things more than those who had them. And I just was mad at the world and mad at everybody, most of all sick and mad at myself.
So I decided to try. And I'm still trying to decide to try today. I'm still trying. But out of this, for the guy who sits here today and wanders, I don't give a damn whether you got a penthouse or a jail sentence or a parole. If this thing would work, I must tell you the rest and I want you to realize that the power that built it is in this room. The same old carcass that never could own a suit or never have a family and never did get married.
I never once questioned whether or not I could support a woman in the booze bottle. And no woman was going to support me the way I drank. So the result was that I had never been married. But I decided to apply this in prison, quiet and cooperative, unable to talk, unable to stand up and be counted, and I tried. And I leaned heavily on this little old guy that you pray to, this little thought of mine, this spiritual concept, and I lean just as heavily today.
And it's a delightful life. I was trying to kill myself and terribly afraid to die. I was afraid to go on living, afraid to move, and afraid to jump. And yet I wouldn't change places with anybody today, no one, under any circumstances or any conditions. Applying this program on a one-day basis, 24 hours, listening instead of talking, telling the truth where possible, in line, trying to learn to live.
I worked the program Alcoholic Knowledge for nine more years in prison. And one day I realized that I was sleeping real good every night. It's been a long time since I've been awake. A long time. One day I realized that I didn't even think about the wolves. I had so many guys. Somebody's wife was leaving and I was writing a letter. I don't know what the hell his wife looks like or whether she wants to come back or not, but I'm going to write anyhow.
Something to do. I was thinking about someone else instead of myself, and I got so involved and so busy and all of these things that I had forgotten about being in prison. And they asked me if I wanted to go outside and be a trustee, and I told them no. And they asked me why, and I said, well, I don't know exactly, but there's three or four guys in here, about a dozen of us, and we get along so well, I just don't want to leave.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid to leave. And that was the first time I'd ever admitted that I was afraid, and I lived in fear, just barrels of it. Nameless anxiety and fear made up my life. And outwardly I blustered and blew and stormed and ranted and raved and was called tough, but scared to death. Scared you're going to call my bluff. It's been a great relief to admit that I got a yard white, yellow streak down my back, and I'll show it to you.
It becomes a problem rather than a fight. I'll switch every time. You don't know how much pressure that took off of me and how many weapons it's kept me from having to take. But anyhow, if this world is too tough and if you find like me that you just can't make it out here by yourself, you might buy this little thing this guy taught me way back then, because since then, after nine years, I got a parole.
[00:25:01]
At the time I got a parole, I had been the warden's chauffeur for seven years. I'd made friends across the state of Indiana, guys who'd come up to the prison and who talked and who lived there. And I left December 1953. With the kind of parole, it's a kind of a miracle in itself. They don't give those kinds very often. They turned me loose on the 23rd of December, and they said I could go anyplace in the state of Indiana I wanted to.
And of course, they're on the 8th day of January, to a prolation of my own choosing. They were going to try something and see if I could hold myself together somehow. And I walked uptown, and I had no place to go. On the 23rd of December, you don't want to call somebody up saying, I'm coming in for Christmas. You know, they might not have anything for you. They might not be prepared. So we had a little nut over there named Tex H., ran wild around there, a wonderful guy.
He's got the only loner group in Texas, and I think the only reason he's a loner is because no one can stand him very long. Anyhow, he was running around, and I called him up, and I said, come down and get me. He said, did you escape, or are you really free? I said, why? He said, well, I want to know what to do with you. Can I put you in the front seat, or you got to lay down in the back? He never did say whether or not he was going to take me back.
But I said, no, I'm loose. So we made a, he never went home anyhow, so we made meetings for the next seven or eight days, and then I had to decide where I was going to go. And I decided to go back to South Bend, because that's where I'd had this last blast. And I knew if I ran off the first base, I'd keep running. And if this thing provides strength for the little things, for the big things, it'll take care of these little things.
There's such a tremendous power in this program, it scares me sometimes. It positively frightens me, all the possibilities within myself and within you, if we would turn our will and our life over to care of this thing. The way that I did with alcohol, we could really make this program move, but I kind of hold back because of the long distance. I don't have the inner inspiration, I keep sliding along.
But out of it, now let me tell you, I never could get married. So I'm scheming, you see. I went out and I got back laboring and went to work in a hotel, because I had to have a job where they could check on me, you know, on parole. And I went to work in a hotel in the basement, and I got, it's almost time to quit, so I don't have time, but that's the kind of remarkable story. Anyhow, I went back laying brick because there's more money in it, and then I was running around with Leon.
I was 40 years old then, she was 26. I got to tell you this. My wife's a remarkable woman. She is more well-known in AA than I am. And she talks to more people on the phone. I keep trying to tell her, why don't you get up and give an Al-Anon talk. It scares me to death that I can't do that. I said, Christ, you talk for an hour on the damn phone, and you give a better talk than I ever give. And she worries all the guys in AA over there.
Somebody, she gets a 12-step call and I'm working. She just gets on the phone and keeps going until somebody goes, and I mean it. And she always says, you're just like doctors. You've got to get out there. And they say, Christ, but I've got to earn a living too. Well, eat later. Go, go, go, get going. I'm glad that I don't have a regular assigned position, or that woman would never let me earn our bread.
But anyhow, she was 36, and we didn't think we was going to handle it. And, well, you know, I thought, my God, she's a, I don't know, some big wheel in the phone company. She travels a lot. I lay brick. I even get a job anyplace you lay your tools down. We'll work six or eight months a year and bum around in AA and have a ball. She's not an alcoholic, but she's completely made the complete program.
I don't think she has a friend outside of AA. But anyhow, so we got married, you see. Eight months a year, we'll work hard, and then we'll take four months and travel around in AA. We had seven children in the next 11 years. Man, man proposes and God disposes. That woman ain't brought in a dime. And I'm going to tell you, she got me tied to a grindstone with these kids. I'm going to be the only guy on Social Security with a kid under age.
But we have a lot of fun. Several years ago, we, by the way, I must say, we lost three of these. We have this RH business. We lost three of these children, but we have saved four and have four wonderfully healthy kids. But in the process of this, we became terrible and terrible. If I was drinking today, with the financial troubles I had, I'd have been clear past Mexico if I walked. But you see, I gave those to God this morning, and he fed me a filet mignon, I think I had for dinner.
Now, you can't beat that. When you owe, I don't know how much money, I'm not going to count it. Anyhow, out of this, Now, out of these four children that we have, and this house, and this wife, several years ago I got involved in this bit that happens to be perfectly normal, perfectly honest, but the only trouble is I am neither perfectly normal or perfectly honest.
[00:30:11]
You know, I'm way in debt, I can't pay these people. People in AA told me, well, if you worry about all these debts, and they worry about it, somebody's going to have a heart attack, just let it, don't worry about it, and they'll have the heart attack and you won't owe them. But I couldn't wait. So I went out and got two jobs, and I began meetings, and this got all terribly involved. And my wife had a reverse with her tuberculosis, she's actively tuberculous, or was, and she had to go back into Health Wind.
So I'm left with, I think we had three kids then, I don't know. We had three little kids, and I got two jobs, and a house, and I'm hiring and firing housekeepers like they're cotton. Some of them can't stand me, and some of them I can't stand. And then at night I have to take the kids out to Health Wind, she can't touch them, let them walk around the yard, then take them back home, and all this was getting to me, and I got tired and tired and tired.
One night I'm sitting up there talking to her, and she said, you know, when we got married, you used to believe and practice and walk a real straight line, and I think, I know that basically you do yet, but something has changed. She said, just for this money, you're going to give up all the friends we have. She said, I gave up all mine, I don't know anybody. And the phones don't ring as much. And what do you got to show for it?
A canceled receipt from some bill, some old bill. You're going crazy. Now, if you're going to change your way of life completely, I am not going to try to stop you. But at least, at least, do something to make us some other friends, so somebody stops by or somebody comes in until that damn phone rings. And I got to thinking about that, and I went back to this little delightful loose bit of cloth that I put on, and I began to take care of it just for the day, you know.
And keep these guys far enough away from the door so I can get by, and to let me remember where I belong and what I am, an alcoholic, member of Alcoholics Anonymous, a convict. Now, the word alcoholic and convict are written on me just the same as if they were tattooed. I know it from my heart and my mind and my soul. But by the grace of you kind people today, I put a little X in front of that with a pencil, a lead pencil, on an X-con, and really an ex-alcoholic as far as drinking is concerned.
And I can add, by the priors and your pleasant kindness and all this friendship and this kooky fellowship we know, we're way out someplace, but it's a wonderful land, a lot better than most people know, a lot more fun, a lot better. Somehow especially blessed by God, maybe because of the terrible tragedies and things. And maybe somehow, some way, I don't care what your religion or your faith may be, maybe look down and see these 265 different religions and denominations all contending and fighting and all having the perfect answer.
And he thought, I'm going to give those people just one more chance, some way that you just can't miss, you know, some way that you just gotta see it, you just can't miss it. So he picked up two old drunks sitting on a curb, helpless, hopeless, spat upon, disgusting, despicable, nothing. Not to anybody, and mostly not to themselves. And he taught them without any other help, except by looking closely in each other's eyes and feeling their way and humbling that they could come to know him.
And that once that was done, they had all power, all power that God can give a human being, provided they were willing to turn it on. Nobody's ever explained these lights in this room to me, and I could go through my whole life, somebody could tell me if I'm going to turn that switch, the night would turn into day in here. If I didn't go turn it on, never light up, never light up, I'd never know the beauty or the wonder of electric light.
And I can't make you turn this switch on if you're having trouble with this thing, I just can't do it. And every guy that stands here hopes and prays he can, just somehow, for one guy or one gal, just make you turn it on full blast. Because you'll never know fear again, and if you knew it like I knew it, that alone makes life worthwhile. You never have to know shame or remorse to any great degree. You can change your thinking and your values to a point where you can do a great many delightful things.
I never danced so late before, I do quite a lot of it. Now, my wife went to a Polish wedding last night, she said, I know you're doing something right, or you'd never miss a Polish wedding. My boy, I got an eight-year-old boy who makes his first communion to my unholy cross in South America. And she said, you kind of hate to be away from that. And I said, if I hadn't found this, there would be no boy there at all.
This is fine. This is fine. This thing is for those people who have some little mustard seed, you've got a mustard seed group here, just a little teeny bit of faith. Just if you can take the fact that I tell you that I don't care what your position or your condition in life may be.
[00:35:03]
I don't care, I don't care where, why, when, what's the problem, trouble, what. If you're so damn sick and tired of it, sick and tired of it, you want to slit your throat or hope somebody else will. You want to fall in a truck, in front of a truck like a friend of mine in South Bend is here, and jump right out in the middle of it. If you have this feeling, let me suggest to you a way, a way of doing this.
Take this little false step card, just you and the card. Nobody can push you, nobody can make you, nobody can change you. If you decide to go, it's up to you. Take that card in the quiet of your own mind and turn your will and your life over to care of whatever you see there. A little big indifference. The thing is to turn it over and put it into action. Just remain willing to talk, not with everybody, with those other people who attempt to walk this quiet way so they can learn from what happens to you, the good and the bad, the successes and the fails, and so that you can learn from them.
And if you do this, you'll soon come to know a day with which you'll be satisfied. One in which you'll be satisfied. I never knew what the feeling was or what the word meant. One in which you have the inner feeling that there's a reasonable reason for being alive. I didn't know what this meant. You're going to hunt it through a thousand bars and gutters for it. A feeling, just some feeling. Call it what you will, that life was worth living, that this was a good day, good, good day.
And if you continue it, I can assure you that one day you'll look at those things that make death necessary, that make this continually kind of drinking that really is a long-range, miserable, trying attempt at suicide, that makes it necessary in this state. You will realize that you have destroyed within you those qualities that make this necessary, and that life is not only for the living, but boy, you're right in the middle of it.
And you, too, become a con artist and just find this a wonderful, delightful way. I had a friend die the other day, 12 years sober, not the other day, quite a while. We used to go out every night to see him, and he had emphysema so bad he was choking to death, and he couldn't eat. He was on the program a long time, had one of the best spiritual bases I ever seen. Some of you knew old Shia W.. He was another friend of mine who died three or four years ago.
But the first time I went out to see Jim, I said, I'm going out to the hospital to see Jim. And the gal in the ALD, wonderful heart-warming gal, said to me, you ain't going to help Jim any. You go on out there and talk to him, and you'll feel relieved when you leave. And I went out there, and he did help me, and I went out about three times. And the last time I went, he couldn't hardly talk. And when I left, I said, I'll see you tomorrow, Jim.
And he said, I don't know, Nick. He said, you know, it's just a race of time here, whether I choke to death or whether I die of malnutrition, I can't eat anything except liquid. It's just a kind of race of time. But he said, I'll tell you what, if I'm not here when you come tomorrow, I'll tell Shia that you'll be along soon. And I thought, if I could just attain this. Shia went a couple of years ahead of us.
He said, I'll tell Shia that you'll be along soon. And I will be, and I hope I go clean in the conditions of that meeting where I'll see you when the good Lord calls us all. He said, thank you, I lied to you, I carried you past your closing time. I have to say the same thing, what a message. There will be a shorter break. There was a 30-minute break to the next meeting which will convene at 4 o'clock.
And you'll have two wonderful speakers at the next session. I invite your attention to the fact there is literature at the back of the room available for free with the exception of the books. All of the AA literature. I would like to thank Monsignor McDermott and Nick K. of South Bend for two wonderful messages. I'm advised that following the next session at approximately 5.15 or shortly thereafter, there will be an informal meeting in the north room which is at the back of the room, the next room, at which all general service representatives and intergroup representatives are asked to attend, if they care to, to get appointed with Beth K., our charming general service secretary for world services of our New York office.
And so any of you who care to attend that session, it's an informal deal,
[00:40:01]
in the north room next north. And with that, we stand adjourned until 4 o'clock.