Hi, my name is Earl. I’m an alcoholic. Hi. Hi.

I, uh, I wanna thank Bob for asking me to come up here. I wanna thank, uh, Bob Z, is it? For, uh, keeping track of me, communicating with me regularly since, uh, Bob D blew out of town.

And, uh, I wanna thank, uh, Doug and Corey for coming and picking me up at the airport. It was very nice. Thank you. Um, those lights, man.

You’re out there, right? So I’m an alcoholic. Either you did that, man, or I am in the zone. All right.

All right. All right. You wouldn’t believe the stuff going on in my head. Sure you would, hey.

Okay. I, uh, I, uh, I drank. I, uh, I did not start drinking till I was 12. I, I held off as long as I possibly could.

I had been restless, irritable, and discontented for quite some time prior to that first drink. And, um, what happened was I had been shipped off to boarding school. Um, my father had walked into my room one day and said, uh, “Get in the car.” All right. I got in the car, and we drove and drove and drove and drove, drove.

A couple of cars, caravan of people, pulled up to this place. I got out of the car. He got out of the car. I put a suitcase down next to me, said, “This’ll make a man out of you.” Shook my hand, got back in the car, and everybody drove off.

I was in boarding school. Um, nobody bothered to tell me what was going on, and the fact was I was being given an opportunity for a wonderful education. The feeling was, was that I’d just been thrown away by the people who knew me best in the world, and I had absolutely no idea what I had done to be thrown away. I was just emotionally devastated.

I was 12 years old, five feet tall, 104 pounds. I was a, a child. And it turns out I was the… The school was– it was this think tank for smart kids, right?

And they’d done an IQ test. I mean, apparently, I had a real high IQ. I don’t have it anymore, so I’m not bragging. You know?

Yeah. And, uh, it was like they scoured the Earth for 250 of the brightest, most disturbed young men they could find, and they put us all on this campus. It was like Lord of the Flies in this place.

And, uh, I had no tools for living. I was scared of my own shadow. Truth, everybody in the school was 13 to 18, and I was 12 years old. That doesn’t matter to anybody but a 12-year-old.

When everybody there is a teenager and you’re not, you know you don’t belong. You know that it’s been a– there’s a terrible mistake that’s been made. I, uh, called my mother crying like a 12-year-old boy for three days begging her to come get me, and they didn’t come get me.

And then it was like something broke inside me, and I thought, “You know what? You don’t want me. I don’t want you.” And I pretty much never went back. Um, to embark upon my solo life.

H- when do I stop talking? Ten minutes? Twelve minutes? An hour.

Hour. Get comfortable. Anyway, I, uh… Shouldn’t leave this up here when I’m here.

I wanna be– I just I wanna do that so bad. I, uh… You can see I’m a little fragmented. I’ll land in a sec.

I just got off an airplane, my least favorite thing in life. Ugh, just an unnatural event. I can’t believe it, man. I mean, you get in this big, giant metal cylinder, and they just blast you off the planet about five miles up in the air.

You rocket through the sky, and people are in there sleeping. It’s nuts. Anyway, I’m in this school, and, uh, I met Tiny. Every high school’s got a guy named Tiny.

He’s, like, six four, 240, you know? Guard on the football team, right? You know, or he found me, and he came up and he said, “How you doing, punk?” And he slapped me in the back of the head, sent me and my books flying, and I had this, like, out-of-body experience, you know, where you, you get up and you’re moving towards Tiny and your, your brain and your head’s saying, “Bad idea.” As I walked up and I hit Tiny as hard as I could, which had no effect on Tiny at all, and Tiny

looked down at me and said, “You got a lot of guts, kid.” And he beat the crap out of me right there. This is, like, day two, you know, of boarding school. And, uh, all I remember thinking while I was taking this beating was, “This is going pretty good.” ‘Cause I knew how to take a beating.

Uh, but what was important to me was I was absolutely terrified of this guy, and he had said, “You got a lot of guts,” which meant… Uh, that was my first tool for living. Violence masks the fear. If you’re attacking people, they don’t know how frightened you are.

My first, first rule of life for me, when frightened, attack. It had nothing to do with being a tough guy or a bad guy. I’m neither of those things. Never have been, never will be.

But I’ve been extremely violent in my life simply as a result of self-centered fear. I, uh, I went back to my room, sitting in my room waiting for the bleeding to stop, and, like, word spread like wildfire across this campus. “Watch out for this little Hightower kid. He’s a maniac.

He attacked Tiny,” right? So now I got this reputation that has absolutely nothing to do with who I am. My world’s just getting smaller and smaller and smaller as far as I can see. And the cool guys started coming around.

Matt swung by my room, and he wa– stuck his head in the door, and he looked at me and he goes, “Hey, man.” 13-year-old, right? I’m 12. Children. He looks in the room, he goes, “You wanna smoke a joint?” And I said, “Well, yeah.” You know?

I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. But what I heard was, “Do you wanna come with us?” And as far as I could tell, I was alone in the universe, and this guy’s saying, “You wanna hook up, man?” It would’ve made no difference what he said. He could’ve said, “Listen, we’re gonna go kill the Spanish teacher. Do you wanna come?” I would’ve said, “Yeah, I’m with you.

Let’s go, man.” And we picked up Steve on the way, and Steve had a, uh, a, this Tupperware container wrapped in tinfoil that was, uh, a cheap red wine. And I mean cheap, no grapes involved wine, you know? That fortified stuff, you know what I mean?

And we went behind the dorm, and, uh, Matt fired up the joint and handed it to me, and I just did what he did, and burned, and then here came this thing of wine. I took a pull on the wine, and ugh. You know what I mean? I’ve got knots on my head, man.

I’m standing with these two complete strangers. My family’s throwing me away. I’m not having a good time. And I don’t get it, you know, with the burning and then the other kind of burning and the thing.

And we get there, standing there, you know, these teenagers, and I mean, just like that, that thing that makes me bodily different from my fellows occurred. You know, this warm feeling just kind of came up over my body, and suddenly I was comfortable standing where I was standing, doing what I was doing with the people I was doing it with, and I had never felt that way before. And I thought, and, and you know what? And I didn’t know, is it the pot?

Is it the wine? Is it the fact that I’m standing here with my two very close personal friends, Matt and Steve? Something’s ha- I’m connected now, man. Like, there’s a connection going.

I don’t know, and I don’t care. What I know is all those things I’d been told about that, you know, evil weed and that demon rum weren’t true. I was standing here. We were partaking of both, and nobody died that night.

Nobody went to prison. No blood was drawn. Nobody went to the nuthouse. All those things were gonna happen, but that was not my experience at that time.

This, my information was, do these things, feel better than you’ve ever felt before in your life, comfortable, more comfort than you’ve ever known, and nothing bad happens? I can figure this out. I’m in.

I’m in. I made a commitment right there. I was a very focused boy. I said, “I need to do this as often as I possibly can,” you know?

And I did every day for the next 16 years, no matter what, and I was given many good reasons along the way to stop. Many, many good reasons. And I’m not talking about little minor reasons, you know? Little peripheral messages.

I’m talking about big, giant neon signs o- hanging down over the road, right? “This is a very bad idea,” and not even touching the brake, you know? Just right on through, you know? Well, we’ll see about that.

You know? Um, and I think that’s the difference between me and a problem drinker. You give a problem drinker a good reason to stop, they actually can. They can make a decision to stop and then follow through on that decision, and I can’t do that.

Can’t do that. Problem drinker, I don’t know what… What’s a drunk driving charge here? It’s a 502 in California.

You know, problem drinker gets a 502, goes before the judge again. Judge says, “You know what? I’m sick of you. I’m sick of seeing you in my court.

You, you know, one more time, you’re doing a year. You’re gonna do a year in county. We’re not gonna talk about it until you get out, and then we’ll have a conversation about that.” Problem drinker hears that and says, “You know what? I don’t wanna go to jail.” Actually stops drinking and driving.

Can do that. I start wondering what it’s gonna be like in jail, ’cause I’m going. You know what I’m saying? “Thank you, Your Honor.

I’ll pencil that in right now.” “I’m going to jail.” You know? I don’t stop. Um, they got a saying in my neck of the woods that they tell newcomers, “Just don’t drink or use no matter what, period.” That’s what they tell them. “Just don’t drink or use no matter what, period.” And I hear that, and I think, “I hate that.” “I hate that.” That’s like when they said, “Just say no,” to

me. Yeah, okay, I’ll just say no. Sure I will. I mean, if I could just not drink or use no matter what, I wouldn’t be here tonight.

The hell for? I know like three people in here. You know, you wanna drink, drink. You know what I mean?

It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m at home. You know? Work the steps?

Absolutely not. Go to meetings? I don’t think so. You know?

Take phone calls at 3:00 AM in the morning for wine and suffering alcoholics who have done absolutely nothing all day long to promote their own recovery but figure- … 3:00 AM’s a good time to call me. “Earl, I don’t seem to be able to invest an iota of effort into my own recovery.

Would you mind putting a little pump and a little in here for me, please?” “Yeah, all right. What do you got?” I’m the flip side of that coin. I drink no matter what. I drink no matter what.

Given a good reason? Well, you know, it’s just the way it goes, you know? It’s just right on through. Require, you know, a good reason to stop just requires more drinking, just to remove that thought from your head entirely.

You know- … humble beginnings for me, a little pile of wine. Thirteen was pills, any kind of pills. The only reason I took a pill was some guy said, “Would you like a couple of pills?” And I said, “Well, yeah.” You know?

I mean, I’m trying to make it clear to you. I don’t wanna give you the impression that I knew what was going on. You know what I mean? Yes, I understand my problem, and I think a couple of pills would be a great solution to what I’m feeling particularly at this moment.

No, just be like, “Well, yeah, all right.” Took a couple of pills. Twenty minutes later, I’m laying on the floor and very happy there. I was very happy on the floor. You know?

Thirt- you know, two and all, second on Placidyl, got strung out on all that stuff. Um, 14 with psychedelics. The only reason I took a psychedelic, you know, is I had no intention of taking psychedelics. I was on a 10-hour pass from this boarding school, and this girl, Debbie, Debbie was a bad girl.

And an older woman. Debbie was 15 and a half. She opened my eyes in a lot of ways, man. And she said, “You wanna drop some acid?” And everything that had been going on between me and Debbie was working out really well as far as I was concerned.

So I said, “Well, yeah. Yeah, I would like some- … like some of this a- acid you’re talking about.” So she handed me this thing, and I took it and threw it in my mouth, and she said, “Did you take that whole thing?” So yeah, it was, it was a very tiny pill.

I’m used to these horse caps, you know? She said, “That’s three hits of white lightning.” Oh, little identification right over here. This woman just went, “Oh my God.” Yeah, next two days were odd. I remember I kinda came to in this market.

I was in a sh- supermarket, and I got a cart, and she’s next to me, and apparently we were pretending we’re married. And I looked at her and I said, “Do we have any kids?” And she said, “Two.” I said, “Then we’re gonna need these diapers right here.” And to this day, man, I gotta have a list to go into a market. If I don’t have a list, I can’t just wander around in there, you know?

I got to get these things and get out. A lot of decisions to make in there. Everything you want, there’s like five different kinds of it. Identif- have you ever seen the abandoned shopping cart?

There’s just a cart there, right? I understand that guy. I get that You know? Guy just says, “Nope, no more.” “I’ll come back later, man.

I gotta get some takeout. I can’t deal with this.” 15, I, uh… I mean, you can tell already, I’m like 14 years old, it’s not going well. You know?

I developed a, you know, a terror of supermarkets. Um, estranged from my family. I mean, I don’t get it. 15 I started shooting dope.

The only reason I did that was I was at a boat in Marina del Rey, and this girl came up and said, “Would you like me to stick this in your body?” And I said, “Well, yeah.” And she did, and I just went, “Oh, oh.” And all I remember thinking on the way down was, “Oh, yeah.” “That works really good.” Now, identified as an alcoholic, and here I am talking about drugs, and I gotta show respect, um, you know? Um, I was born in the ’60s.

We were very, very focused on the fact that we were, you know, bad little drug boys, you know? That was the thing we were focused on. It was the ’60s, all that stuff was going on. Um, but any, any real information I have about my past is in retrospect, having been sober for a while and done my inventory work and stuff.

And looking back on it, what I recognize is this. The drugs would come and go. I’m not a specialist. You know what I mean?

I’m, my drug of choice was what do you got, you know? I mean, it’s all anti-Earl medication. If I can get enough of what you got in my body, it’ll kill the fear and I can move. I can breathe.

I can interact with other people. Without it, I can’t. Drugs would come and go. There was only one thing that was on the table every single day, and that was alcohol.

That was the only constant in my life, and I believe there’s a reason for that, and that, for me it’s this. It’s that drugs are completely unreliable. I mean, there’s no quality control going on out there you know what I mean? You don’t know what you’ve got till you get it in your body.

But you go get a fifth of Jack Daniels, you go get a quart of good gin, you know what you got, man. This is reliable stuff. So you’re covered, man. Your back is covered.

If you got a fifth of gin on the table, you can go get the cocaine, right? Do so much cocaine you can’t get your mouth open anymore. You know? And it’s 7:30 and the party just started, and you’ve completely overshot the mark again, you know?

Don’t worry about it. You suck a little gin through your teeth, it’ll loosen you right up, and you can go on with the party. You’re all right, you know? Not enough heroin to get you to that cool, quiet, dark, just heart and lungs working place?

Don’t worry about it. You don’t got enough? Jack Daniels will get you there. This is reliable stuff, this alcohol, and you got to have a lot of it around at all times just to make sure.

16 I dropped out of high school, decided I’d had enough, had had enough Latin. And, uh, I only remember one thing in Latin. Ubi est ubi suavi. It means, “Where oh where is my underwear?” It came in handy later The, uh…

I dropped out of high school. My father stepped back in my life, said, “You’ve gone insane.” Threw me in my first mental institution. I was there for three months of observation, a year of rehabilitation. Um, I didn’t start cooperating till they started, you know, discussing shock treatment with me.

I, uh, talked my way… I tried to escape from there. You know, you’re getting your little three cups of pills a day and your shot every day, and go into these little groups, and psychiatrist walking in going, “How do you feel?” It’s like, “How do I know?

I’ve been loaded since I was 12. How do I know? Fine. I feel fine.

Can I go now?” “No. Well, we’ll talk again tomorrow.” Very in-depth discussions with the psychiatrist. I decided to break out one day, and the, uh, um, I’d have all my meals with this girl named Kilday. Kilday was nuts.

And Kilday, all you had to do to flip Kilday out was just say to her, “Well, hi Kilday. How you doing?” Kilday just, “Wow, man.” So I always had my meal, every meal with her was like dinner and a show, you know what I mean? You eat a little food, and Kilday just flipping around the room. So I used her as my diversion, you know?

I’m gonna make my… I mean, shuffling around in this joint for weeks, right? That’s what you do, you’re shuffling around. I’m gonna make my big move.

I’m gonna break out. You know, I’m in the cafeteria. I flip Kilday out, and she went flying that way, and I’m sitting at the table ready, ready, go. You know?

And I’m- One ass. That’s all I got, you know? Arms are working And over that, over the loudspeaker from the nurse’s station, you hear, “Uh, Ed, when you got a minute, you wanna grab Earl?

He’s making a break for the door.” Ed’s in there having a sandwich going, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get him in a minute. He ain’t going nowhere.” It’s a very demoralizing moment. I mean, I’m like 16, 17 years old. I’m an alcoholic.

I’m a drug addict. Um, um, um, it’s not going well, you know? So, and, uh, my tools for living were drugs, alcohol, violence, and to run, and now if you’re gonna get thrown in nuthouses like I do, you gotta get out before they get the Thorazine in you, or you’re leaving when they say, you know?

So the next time I got thrown in a nuthouse, I escaped the first day. I’m sitting in the intake process and going, “Yeah, yeah, glad you got me. It’s really bad, you know, bad.” “Hey, look at that.” And I took off. None, none of that stuff in me yet.

And I’m running through the place, and whistles are going off, and I hit a backyard, and I’m heading for this… I can see it like it was yesterday. I’m heading across this long lawn, and there’s this 12-foot ivy-covered chain link fence, and I got this guy in a uniform like right on my heels, and we’re moving across this lawn.

I’m like 16, 17 years old. I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m a high school dropout.

I’m at any moment, hopefully, an escaped mental patient. This is like my resume. This is what I have to say for myself, and I’m thinking, “I, you know, if I make that fence, I don’t have any problems ’cause I’d drink and use no matter what, and I’ll be loaded in 20 minutes I get over that fence. This is LA.

This is my town. I’m over the fence and gone.” I made the fence. I stayed on the street for three years doing what we do to stay loaded on a daily basis. You know, I thought it was gonna be real romantic and the stories, you know, legends are made of this stuff, right?

And it was just this demoralizing, dehumanizing experience. You know what I mean? You do what you gotta do to stay loaded, right? Met this woman at a party.

We talked for 20 minutes, went really well, so we were in love. Um- … alcoholics, we don’t, you know, waste time. Details, you know?

We’ll work that out later. We good here? Good. Let’s go.

That’s what, right? So I, uh… We realized that, you know, we’re, you know, just a couple of drug addicts and alcoholics at this point. There’s no point in trying to, to, uh, kid ourselves.

We need to do something with our lives. So I went on an interview for a very good business college in Northern California, and I got accepted based on the interview. And, uh, went back to my father and said, uh, “Look, I got, I got accepted to college. Don’t ask.

Uh, give me a check for the year’s, first year’s tuition, and I’ll leave town.” He said, “Beautiful.” In fact, gave me a check. We piled all our belongings and eight pounds of hash in the back of this truck and drove to Northern California for higher learning, you know? And she got a straight job, and I went to college and t- when I didn’t even have a high school diploma. Just gave them checks, said, “Transcripts are in the mail.” They said, “Don’t worry about it.” Went down and got my GED at night, going to college in the day.

She gets a straight job. I become a drug dealer. I have no qualms about becoming a drug dealer. I mean, I have no morals or ethics.

I have no sense of family. I have no sense of community. I’m not connected really in any kind of a substantial way to another human being on the face of the earth and I’m already, and I’m only 19 years old. And, um, I’m st- I mean, I’m going to bu- I’m studying marketing, production, distribution.

I’m applying it to my business. Business is booming. I went international. It was a trip.

And, um, 20 years old, I got diagnosed to have malignant cancer, which when they said, “Well, sorry to tell you, you have malignant cancer,” I just remember thinking, “Well, of course I do,” you know? Isn’t that the way it goes for a guy like me, right? So I fly back to LA.

They prepare me to die. They prepare my family for me to die. Everybody’s flipping out. And I’m looking at the doctor thinking, “You don’t even know who you’re talking to might die.” I mean, the way I’m using at this point, that’s coming up like twice a week, you know?

You know, I’m having like real hardcore people looking at me going, “Dude, you gotta take a step back, man.” I mean, I’m starting to overdose and get stomach pumped and do all that kind of stuff, and it’s not even slowing me down. So I need major surgery on my upper back and put me in a nuclear medicine program, and I decided, uh, I didn’t, uh, I didn’t li- you know, going in and getting their drugs every day, and I didn’t like the drugs they had, so I just stopped. Um, went home and got loaded the way I get loaded, and I, I firmly believe that the way I was drinking and using in those days, my body had become so toxic cancer could not live in my body.

And I’ve been a long-term cancer survivor now. It’s been, oh God, 27 years. Um, but I don’t even, I mean, I don’t even think about that that often. You know what I mean?

Compared to alcoholism, that was a snap. I, uh, I just kept going. Um, 21 years old, I’m a junior in college. I got a high school diploma.

My ducks are lined up pretty good. I got an early acceptance to go to USC Law School. I’m editor in chief of my college newspaper. I’m writing inflammatory political articles.

They’re threatening to expel me every day. Um, every Friday they’re I’m getting called in every time the paper came out. Says, “Earl, you, these inflammatory article, you’re…” And I’m just thinking, I start, you know, yelling and screaming about the Bill of Rights and all kinds of other stuff that I didn’t even know what I was talking about. “Fine, fine, fine,” going away.

And my mother called me and said, “We haven’t been anywhere as a family in 10 years. We gotta put this family back together. We’ll go anywhere you wanna go. Let’s just go somewhere for your birthday.” And I said, “Fine.” So I flew back to LA, and on my 22nd birthday, we, uh, got on a plane to fly to Guadalajara, and on the way there, the plane crashed.

And my mother and my father and my little sister all died in the crash. And I woke up on this mountain in Mexico, and my, um, I had a fractured skull. My back was broken in three places, leg crushed, arm crushed, paralyzed from the waist down, a lot of internal injuries, and I was awake. And, uh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t move anything but my right arm, and my, my mother was laying right over there, and my little sister, Kimberly, was right over there, and my father was laying right over there, and I couldn’t get to any of them to help them.

Um- So I just had to lay there and watch them all bleed to death in front of me. And I had this little chat with God, and I said, “You know what? Any God that would take a kind, gentle, poetic, loving little creature like my little sister Kimberly,” who was 15 months younger than me, “and would take– leave a lying, cheating, thieving, dope fiend, alcoholic like me on the planet, I have no use for a God of this type,” and I renounced God.

And then some guys came up to the crash site, got up on the mountain to the crash site, and they, uh… I got my wallet out, and I was head on my chest, and I was tapping on my chest ’cause I want– I knew I was gonna die. I just wanted them to know who I was for some reason. I don’t even know what you think about when you’re dying ’cause that’s who I am.

And they took my wallet and took the money out of it and threw the wallet back on my chest and moved on through the wreck and scavenged the wreck, rest of the wreck, and then went back down the mountain and left me up there to die. I had no more love for you either. You know what I mean? I had no love of God.

I had no love of my fellow man. You had shown me who you were. I’d never really been any good at this human thing anyway. It had all, uh, you know, anything in my life that was about getting next to any of you was just about getting the facade up so that I could go ahead and drink the way I wanted to drink, and you’d stay out of my face

about it. Now, there was no more need for the pretense, the illusion of that. And, uh, I just kept banging myself in the side with my arm ’cause the pain, it hurt so bad when I did it. It, like, pulled me up out of the shock ’cause I knew I’d been hurt bad before, and I knew if I shocked out I was gonna die.

And eventually some guys came up and they got me down, and they, they, uh, put me in the back of a flatbed truck next to my mother and drove us to a Mexican aid station. And they tagged her dead, and they tagged me dead, and they sat there waiting for me to die, and I didn’t. And they finally, they took me to a hospital and started to give me some care there. Um, my ID got passed along, so the Federales showed up, and I got interrogated through the Federales by an interpreter for three and a half days

because they wanted to know what I was doing back in Mexico, which is a whole other story we don’t need to get into here. But it was– They weren’t happy to see me. And, uh, finally I called a buddy of mine up in Northern California who called the family in Mexico City, who flew in the plane, paid a few people, and they plastered me from the neck down, threw me in this plane, and flew me back up into Southern California.

I stayed in the hospital there for a long time. They told me I may or may not walk, and I’d probably have a withered left hand ’cause of the metal they took through my arm, and I’d probably be blind in my left eye because when I’d fractured my skull there was so much blood in my skull from the, you know, pressing on the optic nerve. They thought I’d be blind.

And, uh, none of that’s true, and I worked really hard so that you wouldn’t know. I walk with a limp, but nobody knows that, but I do. Um, usually about halfway through my talk I can’t feel my left leg anymore. Just standing up here, it just goes completely dead.

So if I just all of a sudden go Just pick me up, man. Pick me the heck up. I’m fine. And, uh, but I worked real hard so nobody would know that there was anything wrong with me.

And I was in that hospital for a long time doing, uh, maximum doses of Demerol every three hours around the clock. So I came out of that hospital, and three hours and ten minutes out of that hospital I was sweating and looking to connect. I came out of there and I went on my last run, and it lasted for six years. I was sober three times, and that was when I’d go to this little bootleg sanitarium in West Hollywood, uh, over in Hollywood, near North Hollywood.

And, uh, you give them 150 cash, and give them your wallet and your car keys and your big bottle of Valium and your gun and whatever else you had going on, and they’d take you and strap you to a gurney and shoot you full of anticonvulsants and let you ride for 72 hours. At the end of that they’d either send you home or to the morgue, and they didn’t really care which way you went. You had their money.

And I’d reintroduce myself to God kicking like a dog. Um, I’d say, “Get me out of this sane and alive, and I’ll never, ever, ever drink again as long as I live. I can’t take it anymore, man.” My life, the violence in my life, the blackouts, the coming to in different cities, the coming to in conversations with police, all this crazy, crazy stuff is going on and, and I can’t take it anymore, and I will never drink again.

I’m an alcoholic. I knew I was an alcoholic when I was 16 years old. I’m like, “I can’t do this anymore.” And I’d get up off that table after 72 hours, and they’d give me all my stuff back and they’d say, “You be a good boy, Earl, and don’t you drink anymore.” And I’d say, “Yes, ma’am.” You know? “I’m never drinking again.

I can’t take this anymore.” And it was just rock bottom time. I did that three times, and the last time I walked out of there I drank for two more years ’cause I could not stop drinking. And I had stopped using pretty much everything ’cause I was overdosing so– I overdosed so many times I could talk to you while you pumped my stomach. They’d run the tube and, “How you doing, Earl?” “Uh, bad day.” You know?

And I drank for two more years, and it was just nothing but madness. And when I got sober I was 28 years old. I was 215 pounds. I was yellow.

I had hair out like this and a beard out like this. I was psychotic, and I do not use that term loosely, man. I could not– I’d come to and I’d remember something, and I didn’t know, did I do that? Did somebody tell me that?

Did I read about that? I don’t know. I didn’t know. It was just this mad blur.

And, uh, I’d broken 74 bones. I had over 650 stitches in me. I’d been stabbed twice, shot at. My family was dead.

I had no friends. I had no place to live. My life was just a wasteland. I burned my life to the ground, which is the only way a guy like me is gonna come here is destroy your life.

I mean, there was no place I could– There was no area of my life I could look to and I could say, “Oh, well, that’s going pretty good.” It wasn’t there. And I just thought– And I came out of the blackout, and I’d done it so many times, and they were deciding whether or not to charge me with attempted murder. And I had both my hands were broken, and I just looked up, and I threw up these two busted paws and I said, “Somebody help me.” And that was the first time I’d asked anybody for help that I could ever remember. I just said, “Somebody please help me.” Not since, since I begged my mother to let me come home.

And, um, they took me by ambulance … eight years old. And they took me to another place.

They kept me five days instead, get him out, he was getting worse. They took me by ambulance to another place, and they kept me for 12 more days of detox. And detox there again was just seizure medication. You threw a seizure, you got seizure medication.

Um, and it was one big room, and there were 42 guys kicking in this one big room. There were 21 cots on each side of the room with sheets thrown between them, and you all hung in there, and, and it was free. And how you earned your bed was you faced your kick. You got to get up close and personal with how pissed off your body was at you for doing what you’d been doing.

First information you got was, “This is just how bad an idea that was.” You know? And you didn’t sleep at all. I did 12 more days in there, uh, ’cause somebody was flipping out every minute. Somebody was flipping out, you know, or introducing you to imaginary friends, you know, and stuff.

And, uh, I just knew if I– and, and I came out… Now you have 30 days on a free bed, and I came out, and I knew one thing. You don’t wanna die, you’re gonna have to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, Earl, ’cause that’s the only place that can save a guy like you. It’s gonna take a complete psychic change for somebody like you not to die drunk.

And I said, “I don’t know what that means, but okay.” And I went into a basement of a church on a Friday night, 8:30 meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. I went in the back, sat in the back of the room, my arms folded, my best tough guy look on my face, mad dogging everybody. And I was nuts. And the old-timers stayed off of me ’cause they saw, you know, I wasn’t a bad guy, man.

I was just really scared, and that makes pe– some people really dangerous. And they’d, they’d go, “Glad you’re here, brother. Coffee over there. Get yourself a seat.

Welcome.” And, you know, look at my coffee, you know. I had the yips bad, man. You know the yips? Where you’re just sitting there talking to somebody, and all of a sudden you just It’s

bad. All of a sudden just jump up out of your chair. I see guys do that, man. I was just…

Ugh. Those bright lights going pop, man, out in the peripheral vision for like six months for six… And, uh, like when they dim the lights in here, still, I still, it’s like, “Huh?” Hope everybody else saw that. The, uh…

This guy got up, and he shared his experience, strength, and hope, and I didn’t know that’s what he was doing. I sat in the back ’cause I needed my back up against the wall ’cause I didn’t trust a l– a human being on the face of the earth. Didn’t love anybody. I swore on that mountain I will never love another human being again as long as I live.

There’s no way you’re gonna love me ’cause I’m not gonna tell you who I am. It’s not gonna do it. And this guy got up, this old guy, he was like 65 years old. He was a skid row bum.

He was a wino, and he was an ex-boxer, and I thought, “Pfft. None of these things, man. This guy don’t know nothing about me.” It’s my first reaction ’cause I’m very good at noticing the differences between me and everybody else. I can spot a difference between you and me like that.

And I need to see that because if I can’t find one, then I gotta listen to you. I have to find some way to discount you, so I was very good at it. If you’re five years older, five years younger, you don’t know about me. It’s not a better or a worse thing.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s just I gotta find something different. Five years older, five years younger, you come up with something else, you don’t know about me. Black, Hispanic, Asian, a woman, gay, you don’t know about me.

You’re coming up through your stuff, but it’s not my stuff, and you don’t know about me. I was so good at that by the time I got here. I had the wagon circled so tight it’s like if you’re not Earl, you don’t know about me. And this, I knew this guy didn’t know anything about me.

But luckily for me, I didn’t have any place else left to go, so I just had to sit there. I mean, when I came to AA, if you’d have said, “Look, we have meetings. They’re every day. They’re from noon to midnight.

We have 12-hour meetings. They’re 12 hours long, right? And we bring you in, we lock the door, and then when the 12 hours is up, we unlock the door, and we let you go,” I would’ve had to say, “All right. I ha- I have no scheduling conflict here that I can see.” “Guess I’m available for those.” You know?

And it was just… And I sat there, and the guy got up, and he shared his experience, strength, and hope. Didn’t know what that was at the time, but it did something to me as I listened to him. And he talked openly and honestly about his feelings as a man, and I’d never heard anybody do that before.

The men in my family did not do that. They talked about their genitals and their wallets, you know? And they lied about both. You know?

I didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. And he’s up there, and he’s talking about all these feelings that I was having, and he was describing them so beautifully and talking so, with so much dignity and grace about these things that he was feeling and, and how his head would be chewing on him, but he had these tools he’d gotten from Alcoholics Anonymous.

And he would get up in the morning, and no matter what his head was doing, he’d get up, he’d take a shower, he’d get dressed, he’d suit up, he’d put his best face on. He’d go put in an honest day’s work. He’d go get something to eat. He’d go early to an AA meeting, and he knew what an AA meeting was for.

He knew an AA meeting is– We have AA meetings so there is a place where a newcomer can come and hear a message of recovery and a message of hope. That that is the whole point of a meeting. And that a meeting wasn’t the, the program, it was the fellowship. That the meet– the program was in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And he would find new guys, and he would get them big books, and he would tell them to read this stuff, and here’s his phone number. call me in. He would do all this stuff, and then he would go home at the end of the day, his head telling him he was no good and never would be, all the way through this day, right? He would get home at night, no wreckage.

Head on him, no wreckage. I was blown away by that, man, ’cause I had, I’d never had a day like that. I was scared every day, and I had wreckage every day. I was committing felonies, and I was using people, and I was hurting people, and I was lying all the time, and I just couldn’t get it together at all.

And then it was like he looked right at me and he said, “You know what? I don’t care whether you like what I got to say or not. You don’t like it, go to another meeting.” I loved that, ’cause it made it clear to me this guy wasn’t selling me something, you know? He wasn’t trying to convince me of anything.

He was sharing it with me. If I wanted it, I could have it. It was for free. If I didn’t want it, cool, go to another meeting, maybe you hear somebody else you can identify with.

And I thought, “This is cool. I’m coming back.” And right that second in my life, I, I found something. That man gave me something that I had not had in years, and that was hope. I’m a hopeless guy.

I took it to the gates of insanity and death. I’ve been locked in nut houses, and I’ve been tagged dead, and I’m sitting in the back of a room, out of my mind with no tools for living, no idea how to be sober, never been sober since I was 12 years old. No idea how to be a man. All kinds of ideas about it was to be a man, what it meant to, to walk proud, what it meant to get respect.

I had my ideas about that, but they were all so distorted and warped. I had no tools that would allow me to come out into the world and be with other people. I’d made commitments to myself that blocked me from doing that. And this guy, without me wanting him to, just reached over and plucked at something inside me and gave me some hope, and I said, “This is pretty cool here.” Now, I had a look of disdain for you on my face.

I didn’t want you coming up and talking to me at all, because I knew if we started talking, you were gonna find out who I was, and we can’t have that. Because if I tell you who I am and I tell you the things I’ve done in my life, you’re gonna ask me to leave, because you look like reasonable people and that’s what reasonable people would do. I mean, for Christ’s sake, my family knew me better than everybody, anybody, and they threw me away. Why the hell would I wanna get to know you?

I just need to find a way to live. And I came and I sat in the back, and I came back the next Friday night, and I sat in the back to hear that guy talk some more. And a woman got up. I went I nudged the guy next to me.

I said, “Where’s the guy?” He said, “What guy?” I said, “The guy that talks here. I, I saw him last week. I came back to hear him some more.” He looks at me and he goes, “You’re new, aren’t ya?” I said, “Yeah, what’s your point, man?” He goes, “Oh, well, we got all kinds of meetings that we have. We got speaker meetings, participation meetings.

In this meeting, we have a male speaker, a female speaker, a male speaker. We have a different speaker every week. Then we got, we got, uh, participation meetings, and we got candlelight meetings.” And I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” “Too much information.” I was good with get car, go meeting, hear guy, go home.

I could wrap around that. But this guy was, you know, “Don’t tell me all this stuff. It’s too much.” And this woman got up and I thought, “Again, I got nowhere to go. I’ll have to listen to this lady,” right?

And she gets up. She’s like everybody’s grandma. She was just this nice, sweet little lady, you know what I mean? I thought, “Yeah.

Yeah” Right? She… Our stories are gonna be real similar. Right?

She probably, you know, little sherry spilled by the pool and right into AA, you know? And Granny gets up, and when this nice soothing little voice says, uh, essentially says, “Any alcoholic woman worth her salt should be able to drink out there for two weeks on 50 cents,” and then breaks down exactly how you go about doing that, right? And I was sitting there going, “Goddamn, Granny.” “She’s our girl, man.” I got in

line. I was like, “I gotta thank that lady. That was amazing.” And now I’m looking around the room going, “That looks like a normal guy. He’s probably not.” “That was a very stable individual over there.

It’s a mask.” And it’s slow… And I’ve never left. I stayed. I’ve never left.

Last November, I celebrated 20 years of sobriety, and I couldn’t stay so… You’re just clapping for yourselves. I’m telling you, you are. You’re clapping for yourselves because I’ll guarantee you there’s not one single good idea that I brought to that.

That 20 years got absolutely nothing to the best thinking I brought here, I assure you. But I stayed, and I just stayed, and I kept staying, and I kept doing what they told me to do because I didn’t have any place else left to go and I was scared to death. I had no tools for living. I didn’t understand the steps.

I didn’t understand your cute little slogans on the walls. I hated them. I hated that one day at a time. Okay.

You know, keep coming back. All right. My favorite one was just turn it over. What are we talking about?

I’m completely lost. I don’t know what we’re talking about. Is, there must be some deep spiritual significance behind these little statements you’re throwing at me, but I don’t know what it is. Y’all seem to nod your heads.

“Yeah, yeah, good thing to say. Tell them, tell them. That was very good.” Y’all are, like, in on it. I don’t know.

I’m the loser. You win. I’m loving AA now. This is great.

And I’m sure at 3:00 AM when I can’t go to sleep and I’m ready to snap, that just keep coming back thing’s really gonna help. And you know what? If you’re new, I hope you have more courage than I did. If somebody does that to you, if they look at you and go, “Hey, man, you new?

You got a day? You got two days? Cool, man, just, you know, yeah, just turn it over,” just step up to the plate and say, “Excuse me. I don’t understand the deep spiritual significance of just turn it over.

Would you mind expanding on that for, for me a little bit?” I mean, in my neck of the woods, if they were honest, about 70% of them would say, “I don’t know what it means either.” “They said it to me when I came in. I’m just saying it to you. I don’t know what’s going on.

There’s a guy over there who reads the big book. Let’s ask him. Maybe he knows,” you know? I mean, how sad is that, that you can single out the guy who reads the big book, you know?

Ugh, it’s my opinion. Don’t get alarmed. Anyway, so I stayed and I did all the things you asked me to do. I told you they were crap.

I told you that these things were silly. They were not pertinent to me. They were not addressing the deep-rooted emotional problems that I was suffering from, and then I did them. And luckily, this is a program of action, right?

Not acknowledgment. You know, it was… I did it. I would not acknowledge the value of these things, but I did them, and it worked.

It worked. I took the brain of a madman, set it down on the body, a willing pair of feet, and walked off and did the things that my sponsor, whom I had gotten, who– the late great Donald Madden, who in my opinion was the greatest example of Alcoholics Anonymous ever. Um, he was bigger than life.

He did not tell me how to do Alcoholics Anonymous. He showed me. He– I did not have a God. He loaned me his until the day he said to me, “Earl, you cannot be mad at a God you don’t believe in.” And I looked at him and I said, “I have to go home now.”

And he would do that to me all the time, where we’d be talking and he’d say something, and I would just get up. “Don’t go and– Don’t say another word ’cause that last one just hit me right between the eyes. I’m, I’m gonna go deal with that for a couple of weeks. I’ll be back.” And he’d wave, you know.

“Good to see you.” Donald. He was magnificent. A magnificent human being. He took a completely useless human being like me, who had absolutely nothing anybody wanted.

I had absolutely nothing of value in my life. I had nothing of value to say, nothing of value I could do, no way to participate in the real world. Nothing. I had nothing.

And he took me and he said… When I went and asked him to sponsor me, he said, “Yes,” and I just started to cry. And he looked over my shoulder to his assistant and he said, “Oh, wonderful. He’s destroyed.” And I looked up on the table and I said, “What?

You’re happy that I’m destroyed?” He said, “Yeah, there’s just a lot less in the way here. That’s like an empty vessel I can just pour AA into.” You know? “There’s nothing in the way.” And I just went, “All right,” you know. “All right.

I have no idea what that means, but okay.” And I just did everything that man said, and he, he was my sponsor up until the day he died. Uh, it’ll be just this July twenty-fifth, it’ll be seven years ago. And, uh, one day this guy, a friend of mine called me up and he said, “Hey, they have a book.” I was, I think, six and a half years sober at the time.

He was eight. “I got this book.” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I got one.” He goes, “You know it?” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. More About Alcoholism: We Antagonists, I believe is the term.” And, uh, he said, “We gotta get into this, man.” So we started following around these book thumpers, these guys you avoid at all costs.

You know what I mean? We started following these guys around, and we started getting tapes, and we went to this Joe and Charlie, the Big Book Comes Alive thing, and we started getting into the book, and we were reading the book going, “Are you… Hey, there’s that thing right there. That thing they say?

There it is. And it actually kind of explains why they say that right there. Isn’t that amazing?” “Who knew this? How come nobody told me about this?

This is remarkable.” And we went through it, and the way we read the book was we just opened it up. There was stuff written there. We read the black part, first of all. And when we, we’d read it, we’d go…

We’d try to understand what it meant. And when we got that, we’d just read the next paragraph and then the next paragraph. And every paragraph thought, you know, “Does this inspire us to continue on?” We said, “Yes, it does.” Either somebody should answer their pager or someone’s about to explode. The, uh, um…

And it got pretty simple for me, and I had to get it simple. I couldn’t get it all… I couldn’t leave it here. I don’t live in here.

I live here. I’ve– The facts are not the feelings. I understand that. I never really troubled myself with the facts a whole lot.

It’s the feelings, right? And this book hits me right here, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. And it got real simple for me. There was this circle with a triangle.

It’s this ancient spiritual symbol that stands for mind, body, and spirit brought together as a whole human being, and therein lies the balance I had sought my whole life and never had drunk or sober. Alcoholics Anonymous adopted that symbol, and it’s unity, service, and recovery. It’s the same stuff. Unity is the body.

I bring it here. I didn’t s– I couldn’t get sober, but we seem to be able to. I have to be with my fellows. I have to engage with you.

I have to come into meetings and be with you. To make sure that I will come to meetings, I have to get commitments at meetings. I have to get out of self and be of service. Out of self, more God.

Out of self, more God. I have to do that, or I will separate myself from my people, and I will s– I will become resentful, twisted, and I will drink, and I will die. So I have to stay with my fellows. I had– What I realized early on for me was, is that I have to get a…

Find a way to be comfortable sober, or I’m gonna drink. And the only way I can be comfortable sober is if I’m relieved of the obsession to drink. It has to be removed as an option in my life, and the only way I know how to do that is to… The second side.

Unity is the body. I bring it here. Recovery is of the mind. I must be relieved of this obsessive thinking.

I must be… The promise of step two has to happen for me. I have to be restored to sanity, soundness of mind, relieved of the obsession to drink. And the way to do that for me has been to work the 12 steps.

That’s what the book’s for. So I read the doctor’s opinion in the first 164 pages, and I did the things that were suggested to me in there, and I wrestled with the concepts with others that were suggested in there, and the steps became pretty simple for me. Step one is what’s the problem?

Well, lack of power is my dilemma. I can be normal in every other area of my life, but in this one particular area, I am powerless over alcohol, and my whole life’s unmanageable as a result of it. If that’s my problem, what’s my solution? Step two, that it’s gonna take a power greater than myself to restore me to sanity, relieve me of this obsession to drink.

And I, I mean, I’m sitting on the couch. I mean, I don’t leave the house, man. I mean, that’s the problem. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Yep, that’s gonna have to be the solution. I tried everything else. And then step three says, “Well, you better make– Knowing what your problem is and knowing what your solution is, you better make a decision to do something about it.” So, okay, what do you want me to do? “We want you to get down off the couch, get down on your knees, turn your will and your life over to the care of God by reading this third step prayer, then we want you to get right back up on the couch.” I said, “Well, all right.” Got down.

It’s a little spooky. Third step prayer. Got down there, did it, got back up, and then it’s like the humor of the book. Then it says, and I paraphrase, it says, “We hope you were serious about what you just did.” Now you tell me.

You feel like that place on the rollercoaster where you’re… it’s going click, click, click, click, click, and the clicking just stopped. You know what I mean? It’s like, here we go.

And then it says, you know, I must embark upon a plan of medi- of immediate action, and this is all a big waste of time. And I said, “Okay, what do you want me to do?” And he says, “You got to embark upon a plan of action right now.” What’s the plan? Four through nine. Four and five is me, six and seven is God, and eight and nine is you.

Nobody else to play with. That’s it. That’s everybody I know, right? Four and five, I swallowed large chunks of truth about myself doing a four-column inventory on resentment, fear, and sex.

Good areas to look in if you want to find out how I can wander off the path. Then a guy actually came in the house. First guy comes in the house, step five. Before God, I read all this stuff to this other guy.

He looks at you and says, “Good luck.” “Walks out the door.” He walks out the door, right? All right, read on. Right on. Six and seven, I hook it back up with God.

I ask God to remove my defects of character because I’ll remove the wrong stuff. So I ask God to do them, constantly requesting this information from God. This, this change– That I have the willingness, and I’ve been humble- Hi, everybody. I’m Dick Toussaint.

I’m an alcoholic. Hey. Which reminds me of a joke. Well, it’s not that funny.

I am Dick Toussaint, and I’m an alcoholic. Dick. I said it twice. I, uh, I’m reminded of a, a guy who used to go to meetings, and he decided he graduated from AA, and

then he could do some social drinking. And, uh, he was at this bar and having a few tiddlies, and he decided to go home. And, uh, he got up off the barstool and turned to walk towards the door, and he fell down. “What the hell is wrong with me?” So he crawled back to the barstool and worked his way back up, and he’s standing up straight.

“Okay.” And he turned around to walk towards the door, and he fell down again. He said, “I gotta go home.” So he crawled to the door, got ahold of the doorknob, stood up straight and said, “I’m okay now.” He opened the door, and he fell down again. Got outside on the sidewalk and the parking meter, and he got up the parking meter, and he’s standing up straight, and he said, “I wonder what’s wrong with me.” He let go of the parking meter, and he fell down again.

So he crawled home on his hands and knees. He got to the door, and he got up right. He opened the door. By God, he couldn’t walk.

Fell down again. So he crawled up the stairs and got in bed. The next day, his wife said, uh, “You probably did too much drinking last night.” He says, “No, it wasn’t too bad.” He says, “I, I, I, I did drink,” but he said, uh, “It wasn’t bad.” She says, “No, you drank more than usual.” “No, I didn’t.” “Yes, you did.” “How do you know how much I drank?” And she says, “The

bartender called. Your wheelchair is still down at the bar.” He probably wasn’t one of us. Uh, I’ve learned quite a few things in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I, I’m very grateful to be, uh, a member of AA. I’ve, I’ve learned a hell of a lot, really. I learned recently, in the last two or three years, that there’s three words that are prevalent in my mind, a-and they all start with the letter C.

They’re– I call them the three Cs of recovery. For me, the three Cs of taking my tenth step, and that’s criticize, condemn, and complain. And if I don’t criticize anybody or anything during the day, if I don’t complain about anything or anybody during the day, I’m having a pretty good day, and I know that when I lay my head down.

Criticize, condemn, and complain. There’s a… I don’t, I don’t do that to… Sometimes I criticize under my breath or I complain, you know, where you can’t hear me.

But I have to judge myself accordingly. Those are still my thoughts going on in my head. I’m still complaining. I’m still criticizing.

There’s three other words that became very important to me early in my sobriety. I think I was sober maybe four, five, or six months, and the guy talked about the how of the program. H-O-W. And the H-O-W stood for honesty, open-minded, and willingness.

And, uh, I thought, “Gee, I wish I was smart like that. I wish I could figure out little words where the letters meant something important to me.” Honesty, open-minded, and willingness. I wished I was that smart. Then eventually I read the book, and I found out he wasn’t smart.

He just read the book ahead of me, and it- It was back there in the back of the book, the back of the first hundred and sixty-four pages. Uh, I was not a person, to be honest, when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. I, I didn’t know anything about it, really. Uh, I, I was a perpetual liar, a storyteller.

If you told a story, and I wanted to use it, it was my story. And, and if you acted like you believed it, the next time I told it, it would be bigger. So by the time I quit drinking, I had some big stories, and they all had to do with me, things that I said that I had done, and I’d never done them. I, I, uh-