Audio
Transcript
Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 809 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: ken-c-25-years-in-cocaine-anonymous-recovery-service-and-miracles-ca-2007-archive-809.mp3 Duration: 01:10:03
============================================================
Okay, now we get to raise it back up. Okay, I am Ken C.. I am an alcoholic. I am a drug addict. I shot cocaine for 15 years. That was my primary way of enjoying that Class A narcotic. The first drug I ever injected was black tar opium, followed by heroin, followed by anything I could fit into a syringe, whether I had to beat it with a hammer or cold soak it overnight. That is the kind of drug addict I was. I shot LSD and I used heroin to come down after the peak. I loved injectables. I loved injectables because I am a jaywalker kind of an alcoholic. I am the kind of guy that I would shoot something and ten minutes later I am like ready to go again. The best part is because when you injected things you went from point A to point triple Z in a nanosecond. I was just sitting here thinking for the last hour or so my left contact started to bother me, which I realized is going to be a really good excuse when I start to cry tonight because I will just tell you now it is really my left contact that has nothing to do with my gratitude for being sober. For those of you that were here earlier today you know that I just can fall apart really easily. See it is happening already. The reason it happens is because recovery is about love. Because God is about love. Because service work and gratitude are about love. When David said what he did it was out of love. When I got here almost 25 years ago living in a stolen Volkswagen Rabbit not knowing where my next meal was coming from, having just done a coke deal with the son of one of the most famous mafia leaders in the history of the United States and ripping them off on purpose and making a mad dash out of the city I was living in in the middle of the night, there were not a lot of people that would have said much of anything like David just said. Because I didn't know how to give. I knew how to take.
I knew how to steal. I knew how to rob. I knew how to cheat. I knew how to lie. If you had drugs, if you had a girlfriend, if you had anything I wanted I was there with no scruples and no second thoughts or considerations. Because I was a drug addict. I started taking drugs when I was probably 14 or 15 years old. I grew up just outside of New York City in the 60s. I was a Greenwich Village hippie. I was running around the village in 68-69 slashing peace signs at people and hanging out at the Fillmore on Osley. We were going to change the world. Then somebody introduced me to Class A narcotics and the hippiedom fell kind of by the wayside. I was in prison for the first time at 17. That was just the beginning of a career of in and out of jails and in and out of institutions and in and out of insanity. I say I'm an alcoholic because I suffer from a disease called alcoholism.
CA operates under the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. At my very first meeting, which was Cocaine Anonymous, I shared earlier today. If some of you guys were here earlier, pardon some of the repetition, but you know, so what. I got sober. CA was five weeks old. There were two CA meetings in the world. I got sober in group one of CA. I know what I was thinking about. I do this a lot. I'll explain that later on. Part of it's age, part of it's medical, part of it's just that I just can't remember anything anymore. When I went to my first meeting, I was given the big book. The old timer that was running the meeting asked me if I had a big book. I said no. He gave me a big book and he said, I want you to take this back tonight. I want you to read chapter three more about alcoholism. He didn't say I want you to go back and stare at the blank page for a minute and contemplate on that and then turn to the next page and start there and read to the end. He said you are sick.
I want you to go back and read more about alcoholism. If you have any problems with the word alcohol or alcoholism, change it to anything you want. Cocaine, cocaineism, heroin, heroinism. Today it would probably be crack and crackism or Vicodin and Vicodinism
[00:05:03]
or Oxycontinism. I was sharing with Victor today, if the winemakers hadn't been making wine and the crackheads were in charge back in the day, we might have been Cocaine Anonymous long before Alcoholics Anonymous ever came around if the Peruvians had had their way. Because I tell you what, they were chewing the leaves long before the Egyptians were drinking the wine. If you have a problem with anybody who identifies as an alcoholic, guess what? You got a problem. Because I suffer from a disease that's called alcoholism that wants me dead every single day. It affects my thinking every single day.
Drinking and using was nothing but a symptom of how I needed to find relief. I needed to find relief from the way I thought. I don't know one person that relapsed that wasn't sober before he relapsed. So what does that tell you? Something was wrong with their thinking. I don't know about you guys, but my thinking has been screwed up since the time I was about six or seven years old. I come out of an alcoholic home. I was never going to be a drunk. I was never going to be an alcoholic. I was a jock for most of my life. I'm 6'6". I was the tallest kid in school my whole life. I played basketball 12 months out of the year from the time I was probably eight years old. I watched my mother drink and chain smoke herself to death.
I think Leanne said last night your mom died at 37 and mine died at 47. She was 6'2", strapping big, beautiful woman. She was 19 when I was born. When she died, she had half a lung, one kidney. She was in a halo bed, which is what they put you in when you break your neck and back in a drunk driving accident. The last time I saw her, she had screws holding her head in place in this bed with blood dripping down her forehead. The only way she could communicate with me was by blinking her eyes. She lived in that state for three weeks before her body finally quit. I got sober at 31. 47 seemed ancient. I'm sure some of you guys in this room think 47 seems ancient. When you turn 47, it ain't so ancient.
When I was a hip, slick, 31-year-old rock and roller coming into meetings, I was lucky to be alive. Seriously, I never thought I'd see 30, no less 30 or 40. When you shot dope the way I shot dope, there were nights I would shoot yellow jackets, for those of you that remember barbiturates. I would shoot yellow jackets and wake up the next day and not remember a thing. Here's the other part. When you've been around and speak as much as I do, people actually have favorite hits. I have stories over the years. Percy tonight said, I've heard you six times, so I'm going to figure out how this talk fits into those six talks. I've heard myself way too many times. If Percy thinks six is a lot, just be grateful you're not in my shoes. I've got to do this at least once a week. It gets old quick. You talk about thinking. This is how I know I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict. I worked in the rock and roll business in the 70s. I did a tour. I used to live in Atlanta and in Macon, Georgia.
I moved out to LA in 73. I had finished some work and was gone for a long time. I said, I'm going to go back to Atlanta and visit my old friends. I went back to Atlanta, hanging out in the bars, hanging out in the nightclubs, hanging out with the locals and one of my good running buddies. I came out of Atlanta or I was in Atlanta in the days where it was like the hate. There was a street with head shops and bars and the Allman Brothers played in the local bar. It was a street scene. I sold drugs on the street. We all walked up and down the street selling our wares openly and verbally. When I went back that time, I ran into a friend of mine who was my first dealer buddy that had made it. He had a 9-11.
He was burying double hefty bags with cash in secret locations because you really can't do much when you're making that much money. He had bought a big house in the country. I'd run into him at this nightclub. He said, let's party. Who doesn't agree to let's party? That's the best invitation in the world. Some of the old folks in the room might remember this kind of stuff. We went to his house and he pulled out this great big round thing that looked like a block of cheese. It was red wax. What it was, it was a giant ball of cocaine that weighed about a pound. He took out a very large sharp object and cut it in half. All these large Peruvian flaky things that smelled like cat piss fell from
[00:10:04]
the center cut. Then he pulled out a box of brand new syringes. My eyes just went, oh man, is this going to be fun? I said, well, so what do we do? He goes, just do as much as you want. Do what you want. Now, my idea of a good hit is a butter knife. I did a good butter knife kind of size into this spoon. I did my little job at the table. Because I was the guest, I got to go first. I do this little shot. Now, I've been living in L.A. for three or four years. I've been hanging out on Sunset Strip. I have my own table at the Rainbow. Our slogan is the very best is barely good enough. That went to pot, cocaine, kvassier, whatever worked. I mean, I was running around doing crazy things with crazy people. I'm sitting there thinking, okay, this will be fun. I do this nice little hit of cocaine. I'm sitting there. I'm kind of turned sideways in my chair. I turn back around at the table. There's a glass. I take the syringe. I put it in to get some water to try to clean it. All of a sudden, my hand starts going like this. The syringe is kind of banging against it. I'm going, okay, maybe I should put this down. So, I put that down.
Then all of a sudden, I kind of hear this train off in the distance. But the problem is that while I'm hearing things, not only am I hearing click, click and whoom, but now my feet start going side to side. I look down and my feet are going. In a minute or two, my eyeballs, my feet and my shoulder are all moving in opposite directions at the same time. So, I'm sitting there kind of like going, you know, okay. I'm starting to lose my hearing.
My friend says, you know, are you okay? I guess the beads of sweat that were coming off my head were a sign that something was wrong. So, he goes, come on, come on. So, they take me in the next room and they sit me in a rocking chair in front of an air conditioner. And they turn on the air conditioner. They get towels and wrap them with ice and they put them around my neck. And I'm sitting in this rocking chair like I'm at Magic Mountain or I don't know if they have Magic Mountain up here. So, I'm like, you know, it's like a couch, you know. It's like Space Mountain had nothing on me. And now these old houses in Georgia have grandma wallpaper on the wall, you know. Nice floral velvety designs. So, I'm sitting there and I'm hallucinating now. So, now the flowers are twirling and the room is spinning and I'm shaking and the chair is going back and forth and the sweat is coming off of me. And I realize that the wall is getting very small. So, I start squeezing the hands on the rocking chair going, whew. And it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And it got to be about the size of a dollar, silver dollar or, you know, coin maybe. And I'm sitting there and as sure as I stand here, I know that if I lose that spot on the wall, I'm gone. I am toast. I have never been here. I've been doing coke, shooting cocaine for that time six or seven years and had never gone there. And I got there and I held on for that ride. I rocked until I almost broke the damn thing. I melted every ice cube in the towels. I soaked myself through with sweat and that rush broke. My friends were still in the kitchen shooting coke. They left me alone because, you know, they had things to do. I would have done the same thing. So, I got out of there, I got up, I walked back in and they said, are you okay? And I went, man, that was fucking great. Let's do another. Now, I think normal people don't think that way. I think some people do. I think somebody that socially snorts cocaine or maybe socially smokes pot or socially drinks with dinner doesn't think that way. I do not know how to do one of anything. It doesn't matter what it is. If it gives me a taste, I'm gone. That's the disease of alcoholism.
I suffer from an allergy of the body and an obsession of the mind. And what happens when
[00:15:03]
I stop taking drugs is I don't react to the allergy, but the obsession of the mind is there. I have a lot of friends that have allergies. I got a friend who's allergic to penicillin. You know what? He doesn't carry a Petri dish in the trunk of his car. You know what I mean? When his wife goes to bed, he doesn't sneak out to cop some penicillin down at the pharmacy. He has an allergy to penicillin. Funny thing, my allergy drives me to do different things.
My allergy literally has me in fist fights with my roommate over who gets the last shot of cocaine at 5 o'clock in the morning. My allergy has me thinking, where do I go with my pistol tonight to find more of anything, be it money or cocaine? My life, my obsession, my allergy, had me do things to people and do things for cocaine that I would probably not have done on a normal Sunday morning. My thinking is eschewed.
The reason we come to meetings is because this is what fixes our thinking. Because when I come here, I hear good, orderly direction from a group of drunks or drug addicts. Because what's happened for me over the years is that my insanity has been relieved. It hasn't been removed. My character defects have been relieved. They haven't been removed. They're removed on a daily basis when I pray and ask for them to be removed on a daily basis and stay conscious of them on a daily basis.
I can be arrogant, rude, critical, envious, jealous tomorrow if somebody says the wrong thing to me. But you know what? The miracle is that I don't have to be that way. I've already experienced two miracles tonight, maybe three. I know I've experienced a few already over the weekend. Where's Jimmy L. from Niagara Falls, right? He came up to me and says, Are you Ken C.? I said, Yeah. He goes, Do you know Jennifer?
My friend Jennifer, who lives in Costa Rica, had told him stories about me from 25 years ago. Now here I am in Toronto, and he gets to share with me his experiences. What David had to say was a miracle. Theo and I shared a miracle earlier. There's miracles everywhere in this room if you take a breath and understand that they're here. You can get out of your own way and understand that it's here.
I came here living in a stolen car, not knowing where my next meal was coming from. My sister said she wouldn't spit on my grave. I watched my mother die of alcoholism, but I was too cool to be a drunk. I was too cool to be an alcoholic because I was a head, and it was the heads against the juicers. You've got to be old to understand that one. But it was the heads against the juicers. I was never going to be a juicer.
My stepfather was a full-blown drunk. My stepfather was a Christmas present, actually. I woke up one day, I was 14 years old, I came out to open up the packages, and my stepfather was under the Christmas tree. See, alcoholics and drug addicts can laugh at that because they figure something weird was really going on in that house. And what was weird that was going on was that we lived in a small cottage after my mother got divorced, after we had been kicked out of my grandmother's house because of her drinking.
My sister and I had the bedroom, and my mother slept on the pull-out couch in the living room. So she had picked him up from Sing Sing, where he'd been released from prison for doing 3 to 5 for armed robbery the night before. He wanted to get laid. It seemed like a perfect fit, so why not come back to the house and sleep on the pull-out bed next to the Christmas tree? So that's how I met my stepfather, who not only was an ex-con, but he was an ex-marine drill sergeant who was a full-blown alcoholic that was going to teach me how to live my life because he was not Mr. Unmanageability, a guy that just got out of prison and was a marine.
He tried to beat it into me, but like any other good alcoholic or drug addict, it just wouldn't take. I didn't know better just like he knew better. So I was never going to be an alcoholic. I was never going to have anything to do with alcohol or drugs or drunks. They were beneath me.
[00:20:00]
I'm a hippie. I'm cool. I'm better. I know about peace and love, and I'm going to change the world. What happened in 1977 when I shot that cocaine was that I chased that high for the next 7 years. Maybe not. Maybe 5 or 6. But the reality of that statement is I lived in my bottom for 6 years. Because when you're looking for a grand mal seizure and you're crawling around on your hands and knees on a daily basis to secure the house, when you live in a gated security compound, there's something wrong.
When you manage a strip bar and the strippers don't want to go home with you no matter how many free drugs you offer them, something's wrong with your life. When the only time you feel secure is when you have a loaded .44 in your hand at all times, something is wrong with your life. I have no idea what time it is or what time I got up here. Is anybody paying attention? Oh, it's a free-for-all now. It doesn't matter.
I don't have a watch. Okay, I guess we're changing direction now. It's fun though, isn't it? At least it's not a canned pitch. I don't even know where I'm going. So what happened with me is I ripped off the Bonanno family. Not a good move. They own the strip clubs that I ran. I loaded up the car and moved to Beverly. Unfortunately, the hills I was living in, I was living in the front seat of my Volkswagen Rabbit Inn.
Because what I would do is I would drive up into the hills at night and find some place where they hadn't built a mansion yet and I would pull over and park on a dirt turnout and I would put towels in the window so that I had curtains. So that if the cops came to roust me, at least I'd have a second to get my act together. Now you've got to realize, I'm up here tonight and I showered and I got a haircut last week and I shaved, but when I got here, I didn't look like this.
I come out of Georgia in the early 70s. I worked for the Allman Brothers. I was a street hippie. I moved to L.A. When I got here, I was still basically a crazy rock and roller with really long frizzy hair and a ponytail and I loved pistols. I was a crazy, crazy human being. My last couple of years when I was down in Tucson, I rode a Harley with a .44 and a shoulder holster and it had bullets in it because that was the law.
And I loved it, you know, because you don't carry a pistol unless it's loaded. So, well, if you're going to pull one on somebody and somebody else is going to pull one back, they better have bullets in them or you're in big trouble if you're just showing, you know, trying to be cool. Look at my shiny gun. You know, and we laugh, but unfortunately I've been in shootouts. I watched a guy that I was associated with six feet away from me get the top of his head blown off with a .45.
I watched another man in a drug deal get his throat cut six feet away from me. I've seen the underside of drug addiction. I've seen the side of drug addiction that we can kind of laugh about now when we were in it. I walked away from it. I watched a friend of mine with 12 years get carried out of his house in a body bag from a heroin overdose because he thought he could drink a little wine socially, take a few steroids at the gym, alter his thinking just a touch.
This is a guy that would go into the hood in Venice in his Rolls Royce and ask for rocks. When they would stick their hands in with rocks, he'd hit the gas and take off and they'd shoot the car. Thinking? There's not a thinking problem there, is there? Let's see, I can count on two hands how many Rolls Royces there are in Venice, let me tell you. And Venice ain't that big. The hood and the main part of town are only separated by a street.
So when I came back to L.A., not knowing what the hell I was doing, as I said, my sister didn't want anything to do with me, my friends didn't want to have anything to do with me, my gigs in rock and roll had pretty much all but dried up. The last decent job I had, I was fired by a practicing heroin addict because I couldn't do my job. And you know what? We pretty much did work sober, so you know there was a problem.
When you work in an industry where it's okay to start drinking beer and smoking pot at 10 a.m. and that cocktail hour comes at around 3 and that cocaine is okay any time of day. I got fired in that business. So to say the least, I was kind of finding a desperate bottom there. And I had no idea what I was going to do. I went over to one friend's house who told me I could come crash on his couch and he didn't answer the door.
[00:25:00]
I walked in, I found him in the bedroom trying to hook his toe into this trigger of a 12 gauge. He was getting ready to take himself out. Because those are the kind of crazy people I knew. Depressed, insane, alcoholics and drug addicts. His life was falling apart all around him. And it was it. And if you're new and you hear us talking about one day at a time and just for today and don't drink or use for today, I tell you what, that's a piece of cake.
Because my life sucked. My life was about one hour at a time. At best. I would wake up in the morning when the sun came up. I would go to a 7-Eleven. I would buy a cup of coffee. They sold these nasty blueberry muffins that like weighed about a half a pound. And I would buy an LA Times. And I would go to the park and I would eat this muffin and soak it in coffee so it would sit in my stomach like a cinder block for the day.
And I would read every word in the LA Times regardless of what the story was about because I had nowhere else to go. I had nothing else to do. I had no one person to talk to or to hang out with. You know? It was before cell phones. It was kind of like hanging around looking for people, looking for friends. And I was able to get a hold of one friend of mine. You know? One person said, you know what, I'll have dinner with you.
And he said, meet me at Barney's Beanery. Now you guys don't know, but if you saw the movie, The Doors, that's where Jim Morrison's favorite hangout was Barney's. 180 brands of beer and pool tables and rock and roll. And I got 12-step in Barney's Beanery which was, you know, one of my favorite hangouts. And this friend of mine showed up and he said, you know, there's another guy meeting us for dinner.
And I said, well, who's this? He goes, it's Charlie. Well, who the fuck is Charlie? And he goes, well, he goes, I was afraid to come by myself. And I said, what do you mean you're afraid to come by yourself? He goes, well, I've been in AA for a year and a half and I have 90 days of sobriety and Charlie's my sponsor. I had dinner with Charlie the other night. I talked to the guy who 12-stepped me the other day.
They're still both in my life. I don't remember one word that was said at the table. I remember what was being thought at the table. Listen to what these guys are saying. John owns his own business. He'll let you stay on his couch. He'll feed you. He'll give you money. He'll put you to work. Just nod. So, are you sick and tired? Are you life being sick and tired? Do you have any money left? Do you need a place to stay?
Just tell me what you want me to do. I know how to act out. Tell me what you need. I'll be just the person you want me to be to get by one more time. I'm in survival mode. I'm in drug addict survival mode. How do I get over? Just for tomorrow. And my friend said, you know what? If you think you can go without drinking and using, you can stay at my house. We'll see what we can do. We're going to go to a meeting tomorrow night.
Why not? My friend had a business. I said, okay. They bought me dinner. I knew I was set for at least 24 hours. For 24 hours, I didn't have to sleep in the front seat of a Volkswagen Rabbit. And when you're 6'6", sleeping in the front seat of a Volkswagen Rabbit doesn't leave you much room for rolling over. And if you do, it's not the thrill that you really want. And the next day, the next day, they loaded me up and they took me to a meeting.
And I shared about it earlier today. The room seemed overwhelming. There might have been 35 or 40 people there. They sat me in between two people so that I had no chance of escaping. The speaker got up, talked about making millions of dollars. This is during the powder days when cocaine was a high-end drug. Not quite the way crack is a little bit today. When I got sober, coke was $2,300 an ounce. So it cost a little bit to do a blow, a line of blow.
So this cat was doing his story and doing all this stuff, and I was just not getting it. I didn't know where my next meal was coming from. I didn't even know how much money I had left in my pocket. I was sitting there counting Rolexes and looking at New Balance running shoes thinking, in here. I do not belong here. I'm a drug addict surrounded by drug addicts and alcoholics and I feel less than. And I couldn't get out. I couldn't escape.
[00:30:00]
And then they opened up the meeting of participation. And I was kind of listening and not paying attention and then they called on this guy. And this guy stood up, man, and he was nasty looking. He looked like Kramer on crack, you know. I mean, he had a great personality. had black hair that was standing up. And he was, you know, how tweakers are, right? I mean, he had just come back from a run of Smoke and Freebase. And he started to share.
You know, he shared what his relapse was like. He shared that he'd been standing in a bathtub with tinfoil on the windows with pinholes poked through it so he could look for them. Anybody else do that? I was sharing. I forget if I was telling David, you know, the other great one I used to do besides that one is I would have stare down contests with space people. I don't know about you guys. I had two kinds of space people. I had the really tall ones that had like pointy heads and red eyes, and they never moved. They would stare as long as you would stare and never move. So it was like you would hold on until you just absolutely had to go do that next hit before you would let them go, you know? And then there were the other guys that were short. And they were like Ewoks, you know? They scampered.
Like they ran from bush to bush or behind car to car or chimney to chimney. And you knew you were really into it when you would chase them. And you would pray that your neighbors wouldn't be watching this scene at 3 o'clock in the morning, you know? And I was in one of those merry episodes one night where I called the police on myself. And actually it wasn't on myself. It was on the guy with the rifle and the tree in the backyard. But when the two patrol cars showed up, because there was a gun involved, at least I saw a gun, and they searched the trees in the backyard. Now this is another one of those nights. I got to back this one up because I was living in a house with a woman who she got so sick of my drinking and using, she abandoned her own house. She turned off the power. She turned off the water. I was living with plastic bottles with water and plastic bottles filled with other stuff. And candles. I had long hair and I answered the door when the police showed up. And they said, we don't find anybody. And then somehow later they got in the closet and were hiding in the dirty laundry. And I had to call the cops for a second time because I just didn't feel safe anymore. And then when they showed up that second time, they decided I needed a night in Fulton County Jail. Now back in those days, I come from a business that doesn't know a lot about Blue C. Blue Shield or whatever you guys might have for health care. And when you're in that situation and you're fighting off spacemen and men with rifles, you start to think that maybe I do have a problem. I remember people telling me in 1970 when they saw my track marks that, you know, you might have a problem.
But like, did I care? No. But when I started to care in 1976, I thought, well, what do I do? I guess there's a Georgia Mental Health Institute, which is basically a prison for the criminally insane type deal, you know. The only good thought I had was if I check myself in, will they let me out when I want to leave? And the way I was looking and the way I was thinking, I thought, they might not let me out. And I wasn't ready to be in a lockdown doing the Thorazine shuffle with paper slippers quite yet. So that entire train of thought that led to all of that has left my mind. So where I was going with any of it, I guess, is irrelevant, unless somebody can remember what I was talking about before I went on. Oh, and I was sharing with David one day, I was speaking on a panel. Do they have panels up here? Do you guys do panels where you go into lockdown institutions and share? I was in the Veterans Administration. Now, you can imagine American vets after Vietnam, smoking all the tie stick they want, doing all the heroin they want, and then living on the streets for 15 years. There's some interesting people in those lockdowns. And I was sharing one day, and this guy came up to me and went, man, I am so glad you talked about those space people. I thought I was the only guy that saw them, you know. So either we are them or they are among us, one or the other. So anyway, I remember what it was.
[00:35:01]
I was sharing about the guy who relapsed, and he was in the meeting. And he was standing up and he was, you know, just insane. He had like two days back from a free base run. And he was talking about the insanity of the disease. And I related to every word he said. Because what the speaker had to say, I didn't get a word. They were talking about steps. It was like Chinese arithmetic going over my head. It was like, I don't get it. What is going on? And then the guy said the one thing that changed my life. He said the reason he was back in a meeting was because this is where he knew the hope was if he wanted to get his life back. And when you are 31 years old, living in a stolen car, and your life has come down to complete desperation in every area of your life, you start to think that maybe you have grown up to become the piece of shit that your stepfather told you you were going to be, or that you are just completely insane. And I was pretty much bordering on both of those at the same time, you know. And when I heard that, I thought, you know, maybe there is something here. I did not make a decision to get sober. I did not make a decision to not take drugs or drink. I made a decision that maybe there is something here, and I'll come back. You know? And that night, and I shared this story earlier, the night that man came up to me, and in my opinion, he's the man who started Cocaine Anonymous, and for those of you who aren't here today, his name is Tom Kenny. And he asked me if I had that big book, and he told me to read more about alcoholism. And as I said, by the time I got to the Jay Walker story, I felt like my whole life had just flashed in front of my eyes, because I had tried everything it described in that story. I had tried living life so many different ways. I had tried drinking, using, and controlling my drinking and using.
I tried to control my drug dealing, which always seemed to fail. I was great at hooking up for good fronts, and I'm talking good fronts, like a pound a blow, and really bad about paying for it. And it doesn't win you friends and, you know, interesting people when you do that. But it hit me. It hit me like a wall fell on me that I suffer from a disease called alcoholism. You know? And what is going on here? And it took me a couple of weeks, you know, because I had to hang out with a few old friends. I had to like bounce around a little bit. I had to look for something. You know, I didn't know how to say no to a mirror, to a joint. And I'll tell you, I don't tell this story often, but the last time I used cocaine, I lived with a playboy bunny for a lot of years. So it was fun. Quaaludes, cocaine, and a playboy bunny. And actually, it was almost as much fun as my wife, who was a bisexual, heroin, cocaine addict that liked to shoot up that was into bondage. She was fun. I don't know if any of you guys like to play on drugs, but I loved to play on drugs back in those days. And this was a good drug addict relationship.
I met her on a job in December. We figured out we lived a few blocks away from each other in Manhattan Beach. I did a deal. I had some leftover. Basically, I stole some and mixed an Isotol into the bag. And I called her up and said, let's get together. I walked into her house. I broke out a quarter ounce of blow. And she says, do you know how to shoot up? And I was like, oh God, is this going to be fun? And then I found out about her sexual interests. And three weeks later, I moved in. That was the end of January. On June 21st, we were married. I actually drove by the church where I was married the other day on my way to go speak at a meeting. And it's still there. And all I remembered was sweating and doing mounds of blow in the bathroom. I'm sure the preacher thought something was really wrong with these two people. And the day after I got married, I went on tour with the Doobie Brothers for about five months. I actually think I came to Canada, if I remember.
I went to Nova Scotia first. And I came home in October. She'd been sleeping with the coke dealer because what else does a woman do that doesn't have a lot of money that wants blow? And we were divorced like three weeks later. But it was like being married for five years because we didn't sleep a lot. We packed a lot of stay awake time into those few months. But I was working for my friend in his studio as a gopher. Now when I was new and they say you go to any length to stay sober, my friends, they really didn't give me money. I didn't get paid to work. I worked as a gopher. I would go get lunch for these guys at the studio and they would buy me a sandwich. I would go to a meeting with them. They would give me a dollar to put in the basket. We would go to coffee afterwards and they would buy
[00:40:00]
me a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. That's how I lived for about the first five months. I lived on my friend's couch for five and a half months. I drove the stolen car for about three and a half years, but that's a whole other story. But I was hanging out at my friend's studio and my ex-girlfriend of many years called me and said, let's get together. I said, why not? It was a rainy night in California in February and we're in this restaurant and I'm like, oh no, I don't drink anymore. I'm just going to have Perrier because I'm that newcomer, got to be good kind of deal. She's looking good and drinking wine and then she goes, I got some really good blow out in the car. You want to get high? So my mind instantly goes to blow, playboy bunny. What did we used to do when we did blow with the playboy bunny? Yeah, let's go out to the car. And she opens up this big bag of cat piss blow and just starts packing my nose. I mean, I was scrambled like bad eggs in about five minutes and I'm sitting there thinking, okay, so when's the party start? And she goes, well, I have to leave now. I have a date. And I'm like, what?
You know, I just blew my two weeks of sobriety or less thinking I was going to get laid over all this cocaine. And I took myself in the car and I drove to a meeting and I identified as a crazy stoned out of my mind person. And that was my sobriety date the next day, which is February 3rd, 1983. And I'll be 25 in a couple of months, actually about, I don't know, a few weeks. But anyway, so now I'm bouncing all over the place again. I have no idea how long I've been up here. Anybody getting bored or have to go to the bathroom yet? Because if you've got to smoke, I don't give a shit. But if your bladder is bothering you, that I worry about because I'm getting old, so I understand that one. But, you know, I have an incredible life. I've had an incredible life. I have, you know, you ask somebody to come up and talk about 25 years of recovery in like, you know, 45 minutes or so. It's impossible. It's impossible. You know, I met David being of service. You know, I've been of service since the beginning. I was a chip and literature person in the beginning. I was elected to be on the first, you know, I was asked to be on the first board of CA.
I was involved in a lot of different areas over the years. I've been a chairperson. I've done everything, everything from coffee cups and chips to being a trustee of Crocaine Anonymous. You know, today I'm a chip person still at a meeting. I'm treasurer, I think, at four meetings. They trust me with the money. I don't know what they're thinking there, but, you know, I'm treasurer of probably the second biggest AA meeting in the world. I mean, it just blows my mind that these people want to do this, you know. My life is full of opportunities.
You know, I'm surrounded by people and things that are going on. You know, I talked about how, you know, my family wanted nothing to do with me. I had no friends. A week ago I was hanging out with the head of the National Council of Substance Abuse who flew in from Washington D.C. and I had lunch with this guy. You know, I hang out with people that just blow my mind. You know, I mean, people that I was sharing with Sarah before. You know, I worked for a company. When I got here, I had nothing. I had nothing at all.
I did anything I could to survive. I rebuilt my life, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. And now that I had that thought, I'm backing up again because another thought came to me that's even better. But, you know, when I was new, I read the big book and I read Bill's story and I read the white light experience, you know. And when you're living in a place of desperation and hopelessness, boy, that white light experience feels good. You know, and when I got my first apartment down in Venice by myself, I lived in this little one bedroom place. I mean, it was crazy. I mean, it was crazy. It was a few blocks away from Drug Central, but it was my place, you know. And I would go home and I would pray, God, please reveal yourself to me as you truly are because we hear all these little quaint prayers that get bounced around here. I grew up, my experience with church was it was where my mother sent me to sleep off her hangovers, period. The only reason I went to church in this uncomfortable suit was to get me out of the house. I didn't want anything to do with Sunday school. I didn't want anything to do with people and incense and all that crap. But I prayed for God to reveal himself. I kept waiting for my dresser drawers to pop into a burning sensation. I wanted that white light to come through the room. And you know what? It never did. It never did. Baby Jesus never came walking across the Pacific Ocean and invited me for a swim. Never any of it. And what happened to me one day at about three
[00:45:04]
years of sobriety was that we had a birthday party for somebody. And he had turned one year. And we had a huge party on the beach with about 350 people. And it was a beautiful day. The sun's going down over Malibu and the seagulls and the ocean. It was like a TV commercial. It was just one of those deals. And the man that was leading the meeting was an old friend of mine. Some of you that have been to CALA or World might have heard of him. His name is Al.
Angeles and and he led the meeting he called on me and we were talking and at the end of the meeting we got up to to close the meeting he said would you lead us in the Lord's Prayer you know and we got in a circle and it was probably a hundred and fifty yards across you know and all these people are holding hands and we took a deep breath and we had a moment of silent and you can hear the seagulls squawking and the waves breaking and at the top of my lungs I was shaking uncontrollably. I had tears running down my cell, down my face, and I couldn't speak. And people were coming up to talk to me and I couldn't even say a word. Because I had had my first sober spiritual experience, where I really felt God working in my life. It took three years to have it. I didn't drink or use for three years. But you know what, I had it. And now I've lost count of how many times it's happened. I forget who I was sharing with earlier. But my friend, Lyle, and I went to Costa Rica about four or five years ago on an adventure. And being the good men that we are, we thought we knew how to read a map. But like we're a half hour out of the airport, we're lost, you know, in a foreign country where neither of us speak Spanish. And I finally see a bunch of, you know, Latin men off to the side. And I said, Lionel, let's just pull over. We pull over, we get out of the car, and as we walk up to the men, they kind of move away. And it's a Spanish Alano Club. They tell us where to go. A few weeks later, we're looking for this convention that we're going to. We drive up and down this road that's only seven miles long. We drive up and down it about five times, can't find the hotel. We see the sign, we have no idea what's going on. Completely lost. I finally say, let's just pick the halfway point and pull over. We pick the halfway point, we pull over in front of this place that says Mana Azul, which Jimmy knows. I get out of the car. As we get out of the car, we hear, keep coming back. It works. They just finished having their 10 o'clock morning meeting by the pool. And all of a sudden, I hear somebody go, hey Ken, is that you?
Just another little miracle. Everywhere. Everywhere. If you don't think we're carried on the wings of angels around here, once you stay sober a while, and once you see what's happening around here, boy, are you in for a surprise. You know, you'll hear a lot of stuff about working the steps. You'll hear a lot of people talking about do it this way, do it that way. This program is the best one. This one is the right one. These meetings are the right one. You know what? When I got sober, somebody gave me a big book and a meeting directory. CA didn't even have meeting directories when I got sober.
You know? They told me to read this stuff, go to a meeting every day, get a commitment. Guess what? Somewhere in this building, there's a big book and a meeting directory. If you're new, you have the exact same tools and opportunities that I had. There's no secret way to work the steps. Joe and Charlie might want you to think that. But I don't think they were sitting with Bill when he wrote the book. You know?
There's a lot of different ways to do it. The thing that we're here to do is to establish a personal relationship with a power greater than yourself. Recovery from the disease of alcoholism is based on a personal relationship with a power greater than yourself. The exact purpose is outlined in the book on numerous occasions. There are promises all throughout the first 164 pages. Not just on page 83. Go to page 75. Read those. And if you don't know what's there, go to page 75. And on page 77, read those. Because you'll get goosebumps when you start to look and see what's really in black and white.
[00:50:15]
There's no secret interpretation of the steps. What it is, is the interpretation you need to learn is how to get from here to here. And if somebody's teaching you the steps up here, walk away. Because I've lost count of the gurus I've buried. And the ones that are still alive, I haven't seen any of them take a walk to Catalina. Which, that's a reference you don't get, but put it this way. Nobody's walking to Buffalo from this end of the lake. Right?
So find somebody who's had a spiritual experience with the steps. Because the 12th step says, having had a spiritual experience as the result of these steps. Not having had an intellectual experience. Not having had a dry, drunk experience. Not having had a misunderstanding of 6 and 7 because there's only two paragraphs about it in the big book. There's 43 in the 12 and 12. I don't know about you guys, but guess what? The big book was written by a bunch of newcomers with less than three years. Divine inspiration is wonderful. There's spectacular information in there. All of it borrowed from another program. Be it the Washingtonians, the Oxford Group, Emmett Fox, you know, many, many different people.
Sarah has been to Bob's house and seen the books that are in the jewelry cases on the second floor, you know. And if I'm in trouble, I'm probably going to pick up a guy, call a guy, pick up the phone and call a guy that's got more time with me. Not anything against people with three years, but you have your own stuff to deal with, you know. And so the 12 and 12 started to be written when Bill was nine. And it was published finally and actually approved at the conference in 50. So you had almost an 11-year period there of the 12 and 12 being developed. And when you read 6 and 7 in the 12 and 12, when you read 10, 11, and 12 in the 12 and 12, there's a whole other understanding. Even of how to do a fourth step, there's a whole other understanding, you know, for further down the line.
And when you do step studies in my town, they usually end up having to break the 12 step up into two meetings. And if you read the 12 step in the 12 and 12, you know, we talk about working with others. The majority of the 12 step is not about working with others. If you truly read the book, you find out it's about practicing these principles in all your affairs. And the really sad part is, and I don't mean this in a bad way to you guys, because everybody does it. When somebody reads the traditions, and you get to the last part, and you all chime in, how quaint. But guess what? There's 11 and a half other things you really need to know about, because the traditions will save your ass. Because what they will do is they will save the group that will save your ass.
You know? The same way practicing these principles in all your affairs will save your ass. Because there will come a time where you will be defenseless against the first drink or drug. And the only thing that will get you through is spiritual principles and spiritual values and your spiritual condition on a daily basis. And then if you back up one more to the 11 step, it doesn't say we pray and meditate. Not at all. It says we seek to improve our conscious contact with a power greater than ourself. I contemplate.
My friend, the monk, taught me what contemplation was. You know, I hate getting on my knees. When I was new and people said, you got to get on your knees, it was like, come on, I don't get on my knees for much of anything. You think I'm going to get on my knees to talk to a guy I don't even want to deal with? Forget about it. And I was sharing this with my friend, the monk, one day when I was up on a retreat and he said, we don't need to be on our knees. I said, well, what do you mean? He goes, well, you know, he's Catholic. I said, well, what's the deal? You guys are always on your knees. He goes, that's just Catholic aerobics. We just do that because we're told to.
He said, when I get up in the morning and I pray and meditate, I sit in my favorite chair, looking out my favorite window onto my favorite view, and I open my palms and I face them up and I close my eyes and I start with the Lord's Prayer, which is the perfect prayer. I'm not Christian. I'm probably closer to Buddha than anything.
[00:55:09]
But our Father who art in heaven, I mean, how perfect is that? Thy will be done. My will sucks. Give me this day my daily strength. What strength do I need? I need love. I need compassion. I need understanding. I need patience. There's a lot of daily strength or daily bread I need. Forgive me my trespasses. How many of you guys feel like you need to do a 10th step on a regular basis? Forgive those who trespass against me. There's nobody in this room that has a resentment against anybody, is there? Lead me not into temptation. You know, you go to a barbershop, guess what happens? You get a haircut. Go to the barbershop enough times, you will leave with a haircut.
So keep hanging out in nightclubs and with friends that are smoking crack and smoking pot. You will get a haircut, guaranteed. You know? I mean, there's a lot of beauty to what we have around us that's offered to us. Read HFC. Read A.A. Comes of Age. Read all of the pamphlets. I was a trustee. Ask me if I care about literature, conference-approved literature. Ask me if I care about where the money goes unless it's going to carrying the message of Alcoholics Anonymous or Cocaine Anonymous. You know, every dollar raised tonight in that silly little auction that everybody laughs about is probably going to help somebody get a meeting directory into their hands.
Because why we're here is to carry the message. And I fall out of favor with myself now and then. You know? I was in Winnipeg a few years ago and I was having a bad day. I had to get up at four in the morning to get connecting planes, right? And I had a hot dog for breakfast. Really good. Airport hot dog. My plane was late. I fly to Minneapolis. I have a two-hour layover. I have pizza. I get on the plane in Minneapolis. Guess what gets on the plane with me? About 30 guys in camouflage that are going hunting somewhere. You know? And they got like, you know, they're drinking Jack Daniels and Bloody Marys and I'm smelling alcohol and I'm sitting there with my iPod listening to Father Martin from Philadelphia. You know?
And I'm just trying to close my eyes and not smell the booze and they're talking about, well, we'll strap the kids on the roof of the truck to make more room for the beer. You know? And then I get to Canada and they scan my passport and they go, Mr. C., would you step over there for just a minute? And as the paper comes out of the printer, the lady goes, so what was this drug and weapons charge in 1970? And I'm like, 1970? This is 2005. And I start laughing and she goes, this is not a laughing matter. I'm like, oh man, I'm in trouble.
And then she read every single arrest that I'd had in my entire life off to me and then went in the back room with a big book that was your penal code or whatever you guys call it and she matched my convictions to your convictions and figured out a nice dollar amount to let me through the doors. Thank God for American Express. And, you know, and then I go outside and the poor guys that were picking me up had been standing there for about an hour. How many of you guys have been to Winnipeg?
For sober events? I hate to tell you this, but it looks like a Mickey Bush convention over there with all the mullets, you know? But, you know, I show up, everybody's smoking cigarettes. I don't smoke. I haven't slept all day. Guess what they give me for dinner? A hot dog. Right? The speaker gets up and does an hour drunk-a-log or drug-a-log and I'm thinking, what am I doing? This place sucks. These guys don't know what they're doing. If we were in California, I'd show them how to put on a convention. You know, my head is just off to the races. Hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Right?
So the next morning I wake up, oh, and here's the best part. So they take me to the hotel and check in. And we walk into the hotel and there's a girl behind the desk. Now, the four-inch platforms didn't bother me. The almost up to the, you know what, lace hot pants didn't bother me. The hair extensions didn't bother me. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a pretty wild hotel clerk. And then, you know, while we're checking in, they open the door to the sports bar that's right next to the check-in place.
And I realize, wow, there's people dancing on poles back there. And I'm thinking, this is where we're having, like, a convention?
[01:00:02]
So I'm really just thinking, what the hell have these guys gotten me into, right? So the next morning I wake up and I think, okay, we'll go down, we'll do the best we can, give it a shot. I've got three days, make the best of it. So I go downstairs and it's a basket meeting, you know, tickets from a basket. So they're calling people up and I'm listening to everything, and they call this man up and he introduces himself.
And I think Winnipeg is in the middle of nowhere, for those of you, I mean, I think it's further north than Edmonton. I don't know anything, you know. I think I'm like three feet, you know, three miles away from polar bears and shit. And this guy gets up, this guy gets up and says, you know, I just drove down from the reservation. We drove four and a half hours, my wife and I. And he said, I called central office here on the pay phone from the reservation, and they told me about this convention and said that if I wanted to get some books and some meeting formats that I could come down here.
See it's my contact lens, I told you. And, you know, he'd come down for this convention, he and his wife, and I got right sized really fast because the only reason we're in this room tonight is to carry the message to another suffering drug addict or alcoholic, period, end of story, to share the fact that I have a life today that's incredible. You know, I made friends with this guy. I got his mailing address.
He doesn't have a computer. He sent me some mail saying that he went back and he and his wife started a meeting. First meeting they had three people, within a couple of months they had ten people, within a few months they had twenty people. Within a few months they had more than one meeting a week, you know. But I was going to tell them what they should do better at this convention. Because God didn't have a purpose that night in that room, you know.
Well, I've torn the napkin to shreds, I've almost drank all of my water, I'm pretty much getting myself in a corner that I might not be able to get out of, so. And probably people have to go to the bathroom, but oh well. Oh poor Sarah. So anyway, twice in the last five years they told me I had ninety days to live to get my affairs in order. I've had brain surgery, to make it nice I'll call it, I've had Lance Armstrong surgery, you know.
I've had seven tumors taken out of my body in five years. I've been on more drugs than I care to name. I've been on drugs the doctors gave me that I used to pay for, and I hated every minute of it. I hated every minute of it. Because I like to think clearly, and I love to be clear-headed when I'm around my friends. Because I don't want to isolate anymore, I don't want to hide out anymore, I want to be surrounded by love and by friendship and by companionship.
And you know where that happens? It happens in meetings. It happens when I'm of service. It happens when I stay in a sense of gratitude, you know. We are so blessed. We are so blessed. I was sharing with Sarah before I got to go to Akron a couple of years ago, and I was really excited about going because I wanted to go to Bob's house. And the minute I hit the hotel, somebody take me to Bob's house, you know.
And I went, and a little old lady took me on the tour and made me coffee, and I got to see where Bob hid all his bottles of booze, and you know, I got to watch the reenaction of Bob and Bill meeting on the real hotel, you know, using all the real backgrounds. And I cried my eyes out, you know. This lady came up to me and went, it's okay, honey, it happens to everybody. And then I really lost it, you know.
And then, you know, you go down to the basement, and the basement is where you get the swag, you know. And I was buying my Dr. Bob coffee cup and ashtray and T-shirt, you know, because you got to load up on the good stuff. And so I had all this stuff in bags, and I looked over to the side, and there was these bushel baskets full of rocks.
[01:05:01]
And I said, well, what are those? What's that stuff? And she goes, well, we have rot in the house, and we have to tear out the back porch, and we're going to rebuild the whole house piece at a time. And I said, so you're telling me that's part of the foundation of Bob's house? And she goes, yeah. And I said, well, can I have some? And, you know, she looks at me like I'm crazy and says, yeah, I guess so.
So I'm like loading my pockets with these chunks of rock and filling up my coffee mug with chunks of rocks. And, you know, I still have a piece of rock that sits on my bedroom dresser, and my cleaning lady must think I'm just crazy, you know. What the hell she has to dust this thing for all the time? You know, and the next night I spoke at this banquet, and I cried almost the whole way through, you know.
I was so overwhelmed. And basically, when you see me cry, and you hear me talk, and you hear me lose my voice, it's gratitude, you know. What happened for me is that I got to be a rock in the pond, you know. When the rock hits the pond and the ripples go out, I got to be a ripple, you know. I get to be a ripple today. I get to kind of go move away from the center and keep carrying what I've taught.
And the old timers before me were the ripples in front of me going out, and now I'm going out. You know, my son has never been beaten. My son has never had his jaw broke, his fingers broke, his arm broke by me. My sister's kids have never been sexually abused or victimized. The chains of alcoholism are broken in my family. Hopefully the chains in your family are starting to break and disappear. And you know why?
Because two crazy old men that couldn't stay sober got together in Akron, Ohio. And what they had, they shared with us. And what I've been given, I get to share with you. There are no secrets. Your big book is the same as mine. Your meeting directories are the same as mine. Believe it or not, your God is pretty much the same as mine. He might feel a little different sometimes. You might think it's a little different sometimes.
You know what? I do the same things today that I did at 60 Days. I wake up in the morning, I have a little coffee, I pick up some books, I sit, I pray, I contemplate, and I meditate. And if you think you can't meditate, I don't know, you can work a computer. You know, if you can find the patience to work a computer or to operate a TiVo, I think you can learn how to meditate. You know? There's no secrets.
If you're new, sorry it's come to this, but I've actually gotten to like church basements and bad coffee, you know? I have a great life. You know, I live a block from the beach, I go to seven to nine meetings a week. I have commitments. You know, if you're new and you're going to one or two meetings a week, God bless you. My disease of thinking won't let me do that. You know, the funny thing about it is, you know, you guys, you learn to swim, you learn how to swim for life, you learn how to ride a bicycle, you learn how to ride a bike for life, you come to meetings, it's good for about three days.
So I keep my ass in meetings on a really regular basis. When I leave this one, I know where my next one is. When I go home, I know where my next meeting is. Before I leave that meeting, I know where my next meeting is. I always know where my next 12-step meeting is. You know, I don't give it time to move back into my head. I like my head the way it is. I don't need anybody living up there rent free.
You know, there's a line on page 66 of the big book that talks about resentments, but it also fills into all character defects and a lot of other things, and it talks about, you know, you shut yourself off from the sunlight of the spirit and the insanity of alcohol will return. Guess what? It doesn't mean you're going to drink. It means you're going to be crazy as a fucking loon if you don't drink.
And I don't want to be crazy anymore. I like my peace. I like my serenity. I like my happiness. I like my joy, and most of all, I like the love I have in my life. I can go anywhere in the world tomorrow and be welcomed with open arms. When I got here, my sister wouldn't spit on my grave, you know, and I've only been given this life because of the 12 steps, because of the principles, because of the values, because of having an understanding, a personal relationship with a power greater than myself, from learning how to take the long journey from my head to my heart and learning how to live there.
And I can only hope for you guys you find the same kind of blessings and same kind of grace in your life and in your recovery that I have found in mine. Thanks.