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Source: Clint H – From Los Angeles, California – Date Unknown.mp3 File: clint-h-from-los-angeles-california-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 01:16:17
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My name is Clint. I'm an alcoholic. Happy, joyous, and free in Area 53. All right, now everybody on the count of three, take a deep breath. One, two, three. One more time. One, two, three. There, that gets some of that smoke out of the room. Bill Kay and I have been talking about this weekend for quite a few months, over a year. And I'm glad to be here. I'm glad that you included me. And you're going to have a wonderful weekend.
I can assure you that you have some wonderful speakers here. I know Jimmy, who's going to speak tomorrow night, and Clara, who's going to speak Sunday morning. And you will enjoy them very much. And I'm glad that I was included. I got here this afternoon, so I did not hear the first speaker. I got over to the hotel after getting picked up. Kyle, a pretty young lady, picked me up at the airport. She had one of those signs in her hand, so I'd know who she was. I don't know why, but I always know who the person is. I knew. Last time I was in Ohio was Cincinnati, a couple of years ago. And before I took off on that trip, maybe Wednesday of that week, I called my office for messages. And the receptionist said, well, you sure lead an interesting life. And I said, yeah, why do you say that? She said, well, I didn't know you were going to be in Ohio this weekend. I said, yeah, I am.
I'm going to leave on Friday. How do you know that? And she said, well, I'm just looking at a message here for you. The message says the guy that's going to meet you at the airport in Cincinnati will have a wooden leg and he'll be carrying a big book. And by God, he had a wooden leg and a big book. It says there in that book where people that ordinarily wouldn't mix. And this guy had been a hell's angel. And he had a little bit of sobriety by that time, three or four years. And he'd lost a leg because of some problems while he was drinking and motorcycle stuff. And he and I got to be pretty good friends that weekend. He met me at the gate, and we walked down to the parking lot, got in his Pinot.
I was glad it was a Pinot. Thanksgiving time in Cincinnati is no time to be on a bike going through town. So I'm glad to be back here again. Glad to be back. There is, you people here in this part of the country have a reputation for taking this thing seriously. I have sensed a deep respect for the program of Alcoholics Anonymous here, and that always makes me feel good. It makes me feel good because this thing has saved my life, and it has been an extraordinary trip for me since I have become a member in good standing of this program. I had a lot of trouble with alcohol, a lot. That stuff just kicked me all over the streets. But I didn't know what else to do. There never was a better answer for me than alcohol. There
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never was until a bail bondsman brought me to you in 1966 over in Glendale, and he brought me to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in July of that year, and nothing in my life has been the same since that meeting. It wasn't the last time I drank. I drank until August 14th that year, and I call him on my birthday every year, and I thank him for bringing me to you. I thank him for that, and I think he might be surprised as I am sometimes how well this program works. I don't think he knew what he was doing for me. I call him up. I say, Don, it's Clint Hodges, and there's always a little hesitation, and he says, yeah, Clint, where are you now? Because he had bailed me out a lot of times. And the last time I called him last month was 24 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, 24 years here with you, 24 years that I did not expect to get, 24 years of laughter and movement, 24 years of getting a glimpse of things I had no idea existed before I got here. And when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, somebody told me. If I'd known this was a participation meeting, I wouldn't have started here later. Where do I tell Clancy about this? Men's room right back here, that's what I'll do. I thought the problem, they said when you cut your problems in half by coming to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I didn't know how you could say that. I didn't have any idea how you could possibly know what my problems were. And I'm sure that there are some people here tonight that are relatively new in their experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I welcome you. If you're in, say, your first 60 days of sobriety in AA, just raise your hand so I get kind of a feel. Sure, there's people here. Welcome. Welcome. Half a dozen hands went up. I welcome you here. And it really seems to be the case that you have, as I had, cut my problems in half just by being here. And it's kind of funny because when they said that and I thought, how can you say that you can't possibly know what my problems are? I had a little bit of a misassessment about what the problem was myself. Just a little. I thought the problem was booze. I thought that's what the problem was. And then if it isn't booze, the problem must be quitting. I guess that's what we're going to do here is talk about quitting. And there isn't any, you know, there's 12 steps and none of them addresses really the idea of drinking alcohol. Not really. None of them says, you'd think that step one would be stop. Quit it. So it's a good idea to know what the problem is. A couple of years ago they told me about, I think I was in Oregon, they told me about a guy that, maybe one of us, he looked out his back window into his backyard one afternoon and he saw his dog out there and the dog had the neighbor's rabbit in its mouth.
The rabbit was bloody and he didn't want any trouble with the neighbor and he went running outside and he grabbed the rabbit. He was dead but he took it inside, he washed it off,
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he blow-dried the rabbit and he stuck it in that cage back there next door in the neighbor's backyard. And about a week later he saw his neighbor out in front and he said, how are you doing? And he said, I'm doing fine. And he couldn't leave it alone so he said, hey, how's your rabbit? And the guy said, funny thing about that rabbit, it died about a month ago and I buried it, now I see it's back in that cage back there.
So it helps to know what the problem really is. And it isn't booze, it isn't quitting. You know what we really look at here, thank God, what we really look at in Alcoholics Anonymous is how to live in such a way that we don't have to start again. That's it. That's what this is all about. That's what the steps are about. That's what the traditions are about. That's what the 12 concepts are about. That is what unity is about. That's what recovery is about. That's what service is about. That's what the book is about. About how we can learn to live in such a way that we don't have to go back to whatever it is that drove us in here. And for me that was booze. And I started to drink when I was 16 years old at a party after a football game in high school. Somebody gave me vodka and orange juice and I have never forgotten the feeling that I got from that stuff. I loved it. I loved it. It just did something for me that nothing had ever done. It gave me something that I had been looking for since I was a little boy. It gave me some peace of mind. And it was not really that it was that long lasting, but it was just, you know, when you've been carrying around some stuff for a while and suddenly it is removed and you have something that you call peace of mind, it makes a huge impact. And booze did that for me and it did it right away. And I loved it. And that began when I was 16 at a party. And when the party was over I was 29, living in a garage in Glendale, California with three other guys. And in that time span I had a relationship with alcohol that I thought would never end until I died.
I thought that relationship, and it's funny because we go through stages, you know, like I knew for some time that I could quit whenever I wanted to quit. People say, quit? I can quit. I can quit. I don't want to quit. I don't know why you would want to wake, go to bed at night with the same knot in your gut that you wake up with in the morning. Those people that didn't drink didn't seem that interesting to me. I got a big objection to not drinking. But I can quit if I want to. And one day it gets kind of bad and you've embarrassed yourself one more time and hurt some people and caused some trouble and the heat's on. And you say, okay, I'll quit. And by God you make an extraordinary discovery.
It isn't, I'm willing to quit, but I can't seem to quit. I'll quit tomorrow. And I paid the price to that, that awful going down through this, this is the last half pint of vodka I'm ever going to need. This is it. And I'd be down there six times before noon. And that second stage is a mess. It's just the idea that I really can quit and the painful discovery that I cannot quit. And then I slid into another stage and that is, you just drink, you drink. I had made so many promises.
I had made so many promises to myself, and I knew I could never keep any of them. I never
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did. I had absolutely no credibility with myself about my drinking, and finally about anything else. And the last part of my drinking was just around-the-clock drinking, where I was looking for oblivion, and it was in that period of time that I moved into the garage with three other guys, and was in the Glendale drunk tank regularly, was arrested for just stuff that we get arrested for. It's interesting, you know, you ask me if I was powerless over alcohol. Alcohol and powerless come into my life about the same time. And powerless is interesting. It's just like total strangers walk up to you and deprive you of your freedom. It's the damndest thing. People you have never seen before say, put your hands behind your back. Get in the car. No, our car, this one over here. And you know what? You do. You get in the car. You do what they say. You don't do it right away, but you will do it. Just depends on how many little raps on the head you want to take, but you're going to go in. It's called powerless. Powerless. And I have a little bit of an attitude about that. I want your badge number. I want a jury trial. By God, I want justice. My sponsor later said, don't be asking for justice. You've had about all the justice you can stand. That's what you're getting. Go for mercy, maybe. Last time I got arrested for drunk driving was a shock to me, I'll tell you. It was 10 o'clock in the morning. Can you imagine, 10 a.m.? They don't have anything better to do than come after me. I'd been drinking a little beer, but it wasn't working. And I was in a car and I was on my way to go get a real drink, and the light was red, and I stopped. Kind of a citizenship thing, you know. And the light turned green, and amber, and red, green, amber. I was resting. And the guy right behind me was in a squad car. So pretty soon, he's up wrapping at the window. Got me out of the car, had me touching my nose and doing that stuff they have you doing. Well, I was shocked when he told me I was under arrest. And they showed me the police report a couple of weeks later, and the guy had written this down. He wrote down, I discontinued the field sobriety test because the suspect was injuring himself. And I'm on a jury trial, all right? Hard to be cool, you know.
And cool is important. Boy, is it important. Heard a woman from the podium one day in a meeting say, you can't get well in style. And I thought, boy, that's a shame. I want to be cool. That's why you don't want to jump in and do these steps, you know. There's nothing more embarrassing than an overkill. What if you took a step you didn't really need to take? And it was real cool. I
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remember coming out of a blackout one morning in that little room. I had one of these great rooms that male alcoholics live in. It was, the garage had been cut up into four rooms, and I had a little room, a little $11 a week room. And those rooms, I don't know how they do here, but in Los Angeles County, the male alcoholics live in little smelly 8 by 10 rooms. And we sneak in and out of them late at night because we don't want to run into the landlady because there's going to be the rent question. Those rooms have a little cot and a wet mattress and a bad smell in there. Sticky linoleum floor. You kind of hear yourself walking across. You stick to it. A little bulb coming out of the ceiling. There's a sink. That's it. Well, there's a toilet out somewhere.
Well, you don't need the toilet. You got the sink. No decoration, nothing on the wall. A little food, but I mean, no wall. Oh, there's one more thing. We don't give up our social life easily, so there's always an old copy of Playboy magazine in there, right? They're like, honey, I'm home. We really gave up a lot to come here, you know what I mean? Well, I woke up about four, you know, and I was underneath the cot. And it was one of those awful times. I had been coming in and out of a blackout, and it was like at 3 o'clock, and it's pretty dark. A little light coming under the door, and then you kind of lay there for an hour trying to get whatever it takes to get up on the cot. And you look at the clock again after an hour, and it's five minutes after three. I mean, it never quits.
And I came around again, and it's still dark in there, and it's still dark. And finally I noticed across over in the corner a rat, pretty good-sized rat. And he's looking at me, and I'm looking at him, and we both knew he'd win. Made me nervous, man. That thing just, you know, you have a rich, rich reality in those days. I mean, it's like you don't step from the curb into the street, because you know a truck will come along and drag you for blocks. You don't take a shower, you'll fall through that glass door. And I didn't really want to tangle with that rat, because I knew I'd lose an eye to that thing. Just, you know, evil-looking thing. And it just went on and on and on. And finally I came around again and got conscious again, and the first light of day now coming in under the door. And I looked again, and in some weird way that rat over in the corner had turned into a pair of socks. That's how cool I was, I got held hostage by a pair of socks.
And it was out of all of that, and out of the jail, and out of the despair, and out of the bleakness, that that bail bondsman brought me to you. And he brought no prize, I can assure you. No prize. And what has happened to me in this 24 years allows me to report to you tonight that I love my life. I love my life. I love it here in AA. I love it that I'm sober. And it doesn't mean that every day is a holiday and every meal is a feast. It just means that there is peace. That happy, joyous, and free are not weird concepts. They're not just words. I live that way, much of the time.
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Much of the time. And I never thought I could, and it began before I drank. I was brought up in one of those homes that had conflict in it. My dad was a drinker, my mother was very religious, and I knew when my dad started to drink that he didn't want to be with us. He just, kind of like, he pulled the curtain down, and he was gone. I was very aware of that. I saw that as a rejection. I saw that to him the booze was worth more than me, which gives you a sense of worthlessness.
And I saw that to my mother God was more important. And I heard the questions that were posed, and I never knew the answer. My dad used to say, when are you going to be a man? Who knew? I don't know. My mom used to say, what will you do when you meet your maker? Apologize, I guess. Teach me. Where will you spend eternity, she'd say. I don't know the answers to those questions. I noticed a few years ago that they don't have anything to do with the date or time. But I thought I should know the answers to those questions. I thought I should know that. I got baptized when I was maybe nine. I was early March in the Yellowstone River outside of Billings, Montana. Yeah. I didn't find God. I didn't find much of anything for about three days. But I wanted to. You know, I'd sat on the pew in the back row of the Church of the Air in Billings, Montana, and the minister would get everybody going pretty good, and people would start going down front to get saved. And I wanted to belong and to believe and to do all of that stuff. I couldn't do it. Not really. My uncle did. He went down and got saved. They sent him to China to be a missionary after that. Which made me know for sure I did not want to go down there. We were laughing earlier. The great messages were just wonderful, you know. You're going to burn forever. And even while you're here, it's like in the sweet by and by. Nothing cooking now, man. It's in the sweet by and by. And it's about sacrifice. And it's about, it's about later.
And even the messages about sex are interesting. Sex, I'll tell you what the message is. Sex is evil and disgusting and dirty, and you should save it for the one you really love. about those people in church, you know there were a few of them that had something, and you knew it when you saw them. You knew that they did. They had something very valuable. And I could never quite get over that. I could never get away from it. I could never get disdainful enough of those people, or tired enough of that question, what will you do when you meet your maker, to not know Meet your maker, to not know that they had something. I knew that. And you know what?
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You know it's not available. It's not available to me. I have gone too far. I have blasphemed too much. I'm just never going to be included in that. And so you go the other way with it. And by that time I was mad at my mom. She wanted me to be an evangelist. An evangelist. And of course I wasn't about to do anything like that. There was no way. I didn't know then what I know now, that evangelism is a mixed work. I may have a certain gift for it after all. Yeah, she did. She wanted me to go to Prairie Bible Institute in Canada and become… No, thank you. And so I went the other way and so we bumped along. My mother died when I was 14 and I had been so angry with her for years that I could not grieve that loss. In fact, I had lost her years earlier and walked around then with a little shell and an attitude. And we get… It's interesting, you know, there comes a point I think for many of us and it comes early in life for many of us when we just say, you know what, caring is too expensive. My formula is if you care, you get disappointed and disappointment really hurts.
And my answer to that is don't care. And so I pushed the caring down. I pushed the dreams down and started living out my second choices. Because I wasn't born that way. I don't think… You see a little kid, two, three, four years old running around, man, they are happy. They're in love with life. They want to be the favorite as I did. They want to get that you love them. They'll do anything. They'll study very closely to find out what you like and they will deliver. And they have no objection to it. And they're totally dependent on everybody around them and they have no objection to that either. They're just having fun and they're in love with life. I don't think I was born the way I became. I don't think so.
I have an identical twin brother that was born into that home. He and I took different paths. I remember in the eighth grade, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Denver. And after class, somebody would give us a ride home after football practice. We went to a school on the other side of town where the kids folks had some money and they'd give us a ride. And I was so ashamed of my house. And I was so ashamed of my mother. I was so ashamed of my father. The dog embarrassed me for God's sake. Nothing was right. And I'd make them let me off six blocks away.
Glad to run six blocks so they wouldn't see that little rat hole we lived in. And if my brother was in the car, he'd say, no, no, it's down here. No, it's not. No, turn right. Yeah, that's it. Sure. Appreciate the ride. Thank you. It's right there. It's that little house right there. And I'd go, I asked him a few years ago, I said, didn't it bother you? Really? He said, you know, I never accepted the responsibility for the condition that place was in. You see how sick he is?
But I'd push the carrying down. And you walk around then with a little bit of an edge to you. You walk around then with a little bit of an attitude. You walk and we see them in Los Angeles. They're great teenagers that have pushed the carrying down. They got their hair all punked up and it's green. And they got a safety pin shoved through their cheek. And they want everybody to know they don't care. And it takes discipline 24 hours a day.
Because you might slip and care for a minute. Of course, Los Angeles got a lot of things. There's a shop on Sunset Boulevard and it's got a sign in the window that says, And it's got a sign in the window that says,
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So I pushed that carrying down and I pushed it down and I pushed it down. And when my mother died, it was hardly a ripple. I just kept going. And when I was 16, vodka and orange juice. And you pour vodka and orange juice on top of not caring for a number of years and you got yourself some relief. And I remember that first drink. I remember that first drink. And that may be a clue in itself. I don't remember my first baked potato.
But that booze, boy. And so I went through those teenage years. Went to college. Went to dental school for a couple of years in Oregon. They threw me out. Dental school was a mess. They expected me to have some manual dexterity in dental school. And I'm drinking a little too much for that. When you start your day out by throwing two 15 milligram spanchels of dexedrine in a cup of coffee, you're not going to have a lot of control over anything below your elbow.
They'd just come out with those new high-speed air-driven hand pieces and you could take a quadrant of teeth out twitching. And on Saturday morning in the clinic, we had a real live patient there expecting to be worked on. I hated it. And they didn't seem to be that comfortable themselves. They don't like to hear you say whoops when you're spraying out. One guy came up there. The first year I was there, they threw me out at the end of the second year. The first year I was there, I put a set of dentures in this guy's mouth.
And I mean, how much harm can you do, right? The second year he's up there, he brought his wife and somebody was working on her. And he'd see me down at the end of the clinic and he'd go, say, Quinn, say. That little whistle, boy, I hated to see him coming. I knew I'd ruined his mouth and something. Say, say. They threw me out of dental school. And I began to drink on Skid Row in Portland. That's on Burnside Street. And it was easier somehow on Burnside Street.
I mean, there's no pretense to it. It's just everybody knows what you're there for. They don't ask awkward questions like, how are you today? You drink and you go to jail and you drink and you do this. I came out of a blackout in a little Skid Row cafe one night. It was just one of these places that was brightly lit, neon tubes, rough cut tables and chairs. And I was sitting across the table from some delicate flower.
I don't know where we'd met. Indian lady. I had no idea the nature of our relationship. Somebody I'd invited to dine, apparently. She had chili all over her face, I remember. That frightened me and I'm fearless. I got out there, paid the bill. I was so disgusted. I got back to the men's room. One of these little places with a little mirror still on the wall in the men's room. I looked in there and I had chili all over my face.
We were a match set, man, just pitching slowly forward into bowls of chili. The sign that year outside of the post office in Portland, Oregon,
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said this. It said, the Marine Corps builds men. Oh, I hope so. And I went back to Quantico and I went through officer candidate school and I got commissioned as second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. And they gave me some more training and they finally sent me out to Camp Pendleton in California. And I spent those three years on active duty. You know, it was such a mix. I'll tell you something. I love the Marine Corps. I love being a Marine officer.
And I hated that I couldn't pack the gear. I hated that I stood in front of the commanding general on a couple of occasions at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and got a letter of reprimand and a second one. I hated that somebody came to me and told me that I ought to resign my commission for the good of the service and to avoid a trial by court martial. I hated that. I'd learned a lot of things from my dad and some of them were very, very good.
One of them was patriotism. One of them was a sense of fidelity. One of them was a sense of responsibility and work ethic got passed along in there someplace. And I wasn't packing the gear and it made me feel real bad. And I finally got out of the Marine Corps by the skin of my teeth with an honorable discharge. And that's when I moved to Glendale. And I started living in an apartment and I moved into a garage, into the car and then I lived in the garage. And you go through, you know, if you're new here, we pay whatever price we pay for our membership in AA. And the price is interesting.
It's never really quite extracted in a declared way, but the price is the price is the price. It's almost as if you go into a bar some night and they say, you're going to drink? And you say, yeah. They say, you know what it'll cost you to drink tonight? No. Well, the drinks are three bucks a piece and it's going to cost you your job. My job? Really? Yeah. You want a drink? Well, yeah, I want a drink, but I'll get another job. And you do or not.
One night you go in, you're going to drink tonight? Yeah. You know what it'll cost you if you drink tonight? What? Well, the drinks are three bucks a piece and it'll cost you your car. My car? My car? We're getting a little closer to home now. In fact, it was my home. Okay, I can get another car. You walk in one night, you know, if you drink tonight, you know what it'll cost you? What? Well, the drinks are three bucks a piece and it'll cost you your wife. Okay.
Okay. Some decisions are easier to make. I mean, it hasn't been going well. Somebody said not long ago, they said, there's nothing sadder than to see a guy coming to AA after having lost everything but his wife. So the price is the price is the price, and it's an inside price. And you look in the mirror and you don't even want to see your eyes. You don't even want to say, who are you? And there hasn't been any peace forever.
There's only oblivion now. You don't drink for fun anymore. It's not part of the deal. And it hasn't been for a long time. And you wake up in the drunk tank, and when the felony tank empties, you go down with the rest of the guys, and you stand in line, and the judge calls the calendar, and you get up there, and he calls your name, and he reads the charges, and asks how you plead, and you say guilty, your honor. And you do it a lot. Or guilty with an explanation.
We're guilty with an explanation. Judge Ken White was on the bench in Glendale Municipal Court in those days, and Judge Ken White had lost a son to a drunk driver, and he was very harsh with us.
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And we always hated it when he was on calendar call. And you listened very carefully to what explanations he might be buying that day. And then you went back to your cell, and that's the way that it was. And you sold encyclopedias. And out of that, a bail bond son that didn't really understand the gift he made to me, brought me to you, and I discover after a time, that the problem that we address here is how do I live my life in such a way that I don't have to go do that anymore?
And I must tell you that there is a way to do that, and it is here. If 24 years of sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous has given me nothing else, it has given me the absolute firm conviction that there is a way for alcoholics like me to find a life that does not include alcohol, and that is here. And as it turns out, it is in these steps that I was so disdained for. I was listening to somebody the other day, and he talked about the three components of our program, unity, and recovery, and service.
And I think the unity is found in fellowship, in our meetings. I think the unity is found in conferences like this, where we come together as a group, each of us a small part of a great whole, and we get a sense of unity. We get a sense of belonging to something. And the service, of course, is where we do just that, serve people. I got a big objection to being in service, because I got that word serve and servants linked up in my mind in some weird way.
But I think the thing that I'd like to talk about tonight is not the unity so much, and not the service so much, as the recovery. The recovery seems to be in those 12 steps that were read here tonight. Those 12 steps that I was never going to take. I'm not going to take them. And at first, it was like, there's nothing new there. I heard about God when I was a little boy. I know about amends. I know about paying the money back. I know about inventory.
We called it a different name, but it's hopping out on yourself. And it wasn't really so much that I disagreed with all of that. It's just that I thought that I had done it and it hadn't done it, somehow. Because they were familiar concepts, I assumed that if they were going to work for me, they would have already worked. And they obviously had not. And then as I went on and hung around here, I noticed another thing.
I noticed that there was a real fear attached to this, to these steps. I wanted to know what the least amount I could do was and stay sober. And I'm too cruel to want to get really carried away with all of this stuff. But that's not quite it. Right underneath the laziness, and right underneath the cruelness, is a distancing myself. I don't want to get the connectedness that exists here. I don't want to get that we're related. I don't want to get the unity.
I want to separate myself a little bit because I'll tell you why. What if I take these steps and they don't work for me? Where will I go then? And I got a hunch that they're not going to work for me. I mean, you're nice people. And you mean well. And you're decent. And these steps work for you. Jesus, I try these steps, they won't work. Not for me. And where will I go then? And I heard a lady from the podium one night at a meeting say something I've never forgotten.
[00:50:03]
She said, the steps don't know who it is that's taking them. They'll work for anybody. And by God, I jumped in and took a couple before they found out it was me. By this time I had a sponsor. Interesting, this guy. Clancy. My step-Nazi sponsor. I remember I went, you know, I was almost two years sober before I got a sponsor. And it was Clancy, and he's been my sponsor then for 22 years. And that relationship has served me very well.
And I, maybe five years ago, noticed that I had run out of purpose for that relationship. I mean, when you're 18 years sober, you don't need to call your sponsor and ask a lot of questions about day-to-day living. And so what is the purpose going to be? Am I going to keep this man in my life, and if so, why? Why? I mean, I have a purpose for coming here to a meeting. I have a purpose for sponsoring other people.
I have a purpose for working. I have a purpose for this and for that. I've got to stop a minute and make sure and check my purpose. But I didn't have any purpose for that relationship. And I looked to see, do I want this man in my life? And yes, I did. What would the purpose be? And you know what it came down to? The purpose is to serve him. And I didn't know how I could do that. I didn't know what I could do to serve him.
And one day, about a year later, it was very, very clear. And I was able to be of service to him in a very unique way. That made a big difference in his life. When they come into your life, you spot them. You go, great, got them. And you move on them, and you act on them. Anyway, he started to be my sponsor when I was less than two years sober. And I went to him one day, and I'd gotten kind of A.A. Slick by that time.
A.A. Slick is… Don't ever ask your sponsor a real question. You ask him a question, so he… What color tie should I wear today? Green or blue? And he says, blue. And you say, Oh, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard. Oh, you saved my life again. One day, I go to him with a real question. I say, you know what? I am furious with my ex-wife. God, I hate that woman. And he said, really? And I said, yeah.
He said, do you want to do something about that? When your sponsor says, do you want to do something about that, you are stuck. And the only thing you can say is, you bet. I wouldn't have asked you if I didn't want to do something about that. Did I want to do something? Hell no. I loved hating that woman. Loved it. But I love… You see, that's a problem, and I love my problem. God, I enjoy going to a discussion meeting, and there's my problem.
Oh, that problem. I'm the guy with the problem. I enjoy it. There it is. We get everybody talking about it. Take some snapshots of that baby. And somebody says, I got a solution. Not yet, not yet. So I gave him this problem. I hate my ex-wife. He says, you want to do something about it? I have to say, yeah. He says, you know what? If you want to change how you feel about somebody, you got to change how you treat them.
He is so rude, this guy. I said, yeah. He said, how's the child support coming? I said, I'm going to get to that. He says, you are. You really are. You're going to do it real quick, too. And we talked about it. And he told me that I was going to start making that payment every payday. It wasn't that I couldn't afford it. I was just being stubborn.
[00:55:01]
It was more fun to go over there and give her the money in person and tell her how to spend it. More fun to skip a payment every once in a while and get cute with it. Kind of lay in the weeds with it. And I got very clean instructions about it. I didn't have a checking account until I was five years sober. And he said, you just get another money order and you put it in an envelope. You have the envelope with a stamp on it and an address on it.
And you don't leave the bank without putting it in that mailbox. And you do that. And you do it every payday. And if you can't do that, you can get yourself another sponsor. We were kind of down there where it really is. He used to tell an interesting story. I haven't heard him tell it in a long time. I'm going to tell it three times and then stop giving him credit for it. About a guy that lived in a fishing village in Alaska.
And this guy was one of these people that didn't work. Didn't think he should. But you have to eat. So what he did at the end of the day when the fleet was back in the harbor, he would go to a skipper and say, give me a piece of fish. And they'd throw him a piece of fish. And he'd scuttle off someplace and he'd cook the fish and that's how he made it. One day there's a new boat in the fleet and he goes up to the new skipper at the end of the day and the new skipper says, who are you?
He said, I'm Pete. I came here for my fish. What fish? Well, give me a piece of fish. He said, I can't give you a piece of fish. He said, everybody gives me a piece of fish. He said, really? Yeah, they just… Give me a piece of fish. That guy said, for what? He said, well, so I can eat. He said, I can't do it. See, I tell you what I can do. I can bring you aboard for a season and teach you how to fish so you never have to ask for fish again.
But I'm not going to give you a piece of fish. I'm going to bring you aboard and work and learn how. And the guy was just like me because he said, hey, I don't want to be a nuisance, you know what I mean? Just give me a piece of fish and I'll be on my way. I won't bother you until it's your turn again. I won't bother you. The guy said, pass. Can't do it, pass. But that guy was just like me. And I had the extraordinary good fortune to fall in with a pack out in the west Los Angeles area that were not into giving me a piece of fish.
Insisted that I learn how. And this included this business about paying child support and I began to pay the child support. And it was so interesting because I told him very plainly that I did not want to pay the child support. And you know, that was okay with him. It was fine. I could do it without wanting to. He said, it'll make it a little easier if you want to, but you can have it either way. See, I got an objection to doing it because it's their way.
It's sort of like she wins somehow. The way I have it figured out. And the difficulty is always in the objection. Always. It's never in the task. I never need discipline to do anything I like to do, do anything I don't object to doing. I do it. I need no discipline to get to the movie. But then I don't object to going. And so if something is requiring discipline in my life, there is an objection to it.
So I can do the thing imposing discipline on myself, or I can take a look and locate the objection and drop the objection and then things get a little easier. And ultimately that's what happened. And I began to pay that child support and I began to take some real interest in that son of mine and began to enjoy our relationship. And oddly enough, I got a different feeling about that lady. It was strange.
I don't think she'll ever be… we won't be close. But I remember very clearly driving down the freeway with a guy that I was sponsoring one night about six months after I started this, and he's screaming about his ex-wife and what he's saying is that she's a bad mother. I don't know if she was a bad mother or not, but that's what he was sniveling about. Bad mother or not, but that's what he was sniveling about, and then it occurred to me, that lady that I used to be married to may never be somebody whose company I really love, but she is a terrific mother.
[01:00:02]
And I never saw that before. And she hadn't changed a bit. The only thing that had changed was I was paying child support. They really shape up when you start paying child support. But it's a wonderful thing, because you get a little glimpse, maybe, that it isn't, maybe, maybe it is up to me. And then you get a little more interested in the steps, and in the promises. And then you notice something that happens to us all after we've been around AA for a little bit.
And I'm going to take about ten minutes, and then I'm going to close, but I want to, this seems to me tonight to be very important. To be, I don't know who's here that needs this, but you will be told if you're new, that there are a couple of things you want to do. One is, you want to go to lots of meetings, and the other is, you want to take these steps. And doing it alone is just crazy. Doing it with a sponsor is going to make a huge difference for you.
And there is, then, an easy way to do this, and that is with a sponsor that is having fun around here. And you've already discovered something that is just astonishing. That is that you feel better at the end of the meeting than you do before the meeting starts. Isn't that weird? You feel better. I don't know how that could be. It isn't the coffee, I can guarantee you that. What happens at a meeting? I remember when I was new, I'd go to the meeting, I'm going to go get a drink after this meeting.
I'd take these donuts to the meeting, and then I'm going to go to the meeting, and then I'm going to go have a couple of drinks and relax. And I'd be back home after the meeting in my bed in that silly little room in the garage, about to fall asleep, and I'd say, God, I was going to go get a drink. Oh, well. Oh, well. How do we get to oh, well? Something happens in these meetings. You know what happens? We come into Alcoholics Anonymous, we have a very, very loud mind.
Boy, that baby moves around up there. That thing is always chattering. And we listen, thinking it has something important to say. Mostly it's about fear. And the fear is a lie. The fear is a lie. I mean, when I got here, my question, how do you get to sleep at night if you don't drink? Because I'd lay awake and stare at the ceiling and think of all those awful things that I did and didn't do. Chuck Chamberlain used to call it his Grand Central Head.
Whirring around. And we discover that there is a place we're safe. We walk into a meeting and we sit down and we kind of get in the room and we sort of relax. It seems like this is a safe place to be. We don't feel like we're subject to arrest. It's like for the hour or however long we're here, we can kind of laugh. It's okay to laugh out loud. The things we think are funny are going to be the things that the other people think are funny, which is a new experience for most of us.
And you see somebody taking a 60-day chip or a cake and you go, oh my God. And you find yourself in the room. I mean, we can either be up here in our heads or we can be in the room with one another. It's about the only two places we can be. And if I'm up here in my head thinking about my problem, I'm going to be upset. My sponsor used to say, oh, you're going to go home and get caught up on your worrying, aren't you?
But when I'm in a meeting in the room with you, I can get in the room. And that's a wonderful place to be. Because that's where I get that you love me. It's where I get a sense of an astonishing, surprising feeling. I'm glad that guy took a 30-day chip. I don't want anything from him. Isn't that interesting? I like that lady and I don't want anything from her. Isn't that something? And you get kind of a sense of, God, maybe I'm not as twisted as I thought.
[01:05:01]
And you kind of sit in a meeting. And you get in the room. And that's where it's happening, is in the room. I mean, every one of us is doing whatever we're doing perfectly. 100%. Right here. It's where the action is. A guy named Alan McGinnis, who wrote that talk that later became, reduced to writing and put into a pamphlet called A Member's Eye View of AA. Alan McGinnis is dead now, but he was somebody that I heard with great interest over the years in Los Angeles.
And about 19 years ago, at the Brentwood workshop, he said something I've never forgotten. He said there's only, he was talking about Step 11. Step 11 says, We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as an understanding. He says there's only one time that any of us can have a conscious contact with God. And I expected all kinds of stuff to come out of his mouth about that.
And he astonished me with the simplicity of his answer because he said, The only time that any of us can have any conscious contact with God is right now. Wow. I'm always praying for tomorrow. I identify with that guy in Los Angeles that used to tell this funny story about, he's at a party, an AA party. He's in a home. This guy's name is Jack. He's in the kitchen talking to a guy. There's about a hundred people there and a guy came up to him and he says, Hey, there's a lady in the living room. Beautiful lady from Honduras and I'll bet you would love her.
You want to meet her? And he says, Where is she? And they look through the dining room and through the crowd and he gets a glimpse of her sitting on the couch in the red dress. He said, Yeah. And they're walking from the dining room, from the kitchen through the dining room to go out to meet the lady. And Jack's thought is, God, I don't want to live in Honduras. I mean, we've got to do something to get in the room where it's happening.
And an AA meeting will do that for you. And you know why I think we feel better afterwards? It's because we have gotten some relief from being up here trying to work out our problems. Chuck Chamberlain said to me something one day that was interesting. I said, He's like in his mid-70s at the time. And I said, Doesn't it drive you nuts when they ask you to go up to LA to talk four and five times a week?
He said, Why? I love it. I said, Well, you're driving up there, aren't you? And he said, Sure. I said, Well, doesn't that traffic just drive you crazy? And he looked at me and said, Well, he did. And he said, Son, I just drive the one car. I drive every car I can see. So the meetings will get you in the room. They'll get you in the moment. We find it just like it's right here. And we feel better. And because of all of this stuff in our head, there's got to be a long-term solution for it.
And this stuff doesn't really go away. It does return. I mean, we kind of come back up here. It's like when this is real loud, it's like having a tooth out in your jaw. You can't keep your tongue out of it. You know, we go up here. Now, how are we going to handle that? Where's the peace in that? No happy, joyous, and free available. Unless we could take a paper and a pencil and write those thoughts down.
All of them. All of them. Just transfer them from here to a piece of paper. It doesn't seem like it would do much, but it does. It quiets us down. It's called step four. What if, after we got all of it written down, we could read it to another human being? You know what, that further drains the swamp. And that's step five. And the obligation thereafter is to look through that written stuff, our words and our thoughts, and our problem, and see where we have been the author of every problem in our life.
And once we get that, and that really is the essence of step six and seven, we get a fundamental sense that life is fair. That I do have major input into the things that I blamed everybody else for.
[01:10:09]
And if I could clean up my side of the road, that may be all there is to the problem. And then it becomes, if you really want to quiet it down, if you really want to be able to get in the room and have some fun, you've got to get rid of that edge. You've got to get rid of that sense of impending doom. You know what that's all about? That's all about, I'm going to walk out here into the street after the meeting tonight, and somebody that I hurt way back then is going to come up and hit me in the mouth, and I have it coming.
That gives you an edge. Gives you a sense of impending doom. What are you going to do about that? What if you could make a list of those people? And become willing to set the record straight. Become willing to pay the money back. That is to say, they don't want your money, they just want their own back. That's called step 8. And step 9 is paying the money back. Step 9 is the phone call. Step 9 is the letter.
Step 9 is, I'm so sorry. And what else can I do to make it right? And it took me a long time to do that. I owed $14,000 when I got here. It took me 12 years. It's funny, we have a schedule about how long these steps take. And we never get ahead of schedule. You know how long it takes to write an inventory? It takes two years and an evening. So it took me 12 years to pay the money back. I couldn't afford it.
And how did I know I couldn't afford it? Because I didn't pay it back. Too bad I had that idea. I would have started making money earlier than 12 years. Because if I can't afford it, how can I go out and make money? I've got to keep myself kind of impoverished. And I finally paid the money back to that father-in-law. I had one more on my list, a guy I burned his couch down when I was in dental school.
And I got out his address. I'd known for 12 years where he was. I wrote him a letter. I sent him a check. Sorry about that couch. I'm sober and AA. I should have done this long ago. And I'm really sorry about the couch. And about the breach. And about the loss of trust. And within a week, I got a letter back from him. He was so glad I was alive. He was so glad I was sober. He sent me the check. He was so glad I was sober.
He sent me the check back. He said, God, give the check to AA. Maybe someday I will. It'll calm you down. It'll calm you down to do those things. I was looking in the book, I guess last year. I'm reading Step 9. You know what it says about the timing of Step 9? The step we put off for so long. What those people who wrote the book had to say about the timing? It says you may want to put this step off for a couple of weeks to make sure you're on the right track.
A couple of weeks? Like, don't go into the second month with this stuff. And I'm at 12 years. But I'll tell you something. The last 5 years have been the sweetest of all. Because I've rediscovered the steps. Rediscovered my obligation. The special contribution I can make. They come over to the house, guys 5 and 6 years sober that have never really done it. Oh, a little inventory here, a little amend there, but not really done it.
And they show up at my home at 9 in the morning with an inventory that they've already written. And we start at Step 1. And we do Step 2 and we do Step 3. And they've taken an inventory, so we go to Step 5. And then we look at 6 and 7. And then we make the list. By that time the sun is setting. And we've been laughing and we've been crying. And they say, I can make this amends with a phone call. And I say, great, what's the phone number?
And they say, they always know the phone number. And I say, great, you know what that is right there on the desk? They say, well, that's a phone. And I say, well, that's a phone. to do it 100%. 100%. By the time they leave my place, it's dark, full dark, it's nine
[01:15:08]
o'clock at night, and they're different. They're different. The Steps will transform them. They've transformed me, and countless thousands. So if you're new here tonight, go to Lhatsanit, work the Steps, and don't be alone. And if you worry, as I did, about what will you do when you meet your Maker, I've got good news. My mom were here tonight. She would say, what will you do when you meet your Maker? And I used to think, oh, I'll tell him I got sober. But you know what? Tonight, I'll tell you this. It isn't about what will I do when I meet my Maker, because we already met. Those guys in that club in Glendale in 1966 introduced us. We've met. And I'm meeting here again tonight. Thank you.