Audio
Transcript
Source: DICOBE-00318 – Dick G – CORNHUSKER RNDP III – 1980-08-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00318-dick-g-cornhusker-rndp-iii-1980-08-15.mp3 Duration: 01:02:56
============================================================
Mr. Dick Gee. Hi, my name is Dick G., and I am an alcoholic. He doesn't follow directions very well, because it says here, take notebook to your seat. You just can't get good help anymore. I would like to thank the committee for asking me here today. This is a delightful experience. I am continually in awe of the whole AA phenomenon, but looking out there at you all on a Thursday night, I'm wondering what you're all doing here.
This is fantastic. It really is. The whole AA thing is just amazing to me. Obviously, you all are involved in something great here in this roundup. I know now, having been here for two years. I do appreciate being asked and being given the opportunity to share and to enjoy and bask in this AA thing that is my life, is the focal point of my existence, and gave me, for the first time in my entire life, a sense of what I'm supposed to be doing.
I did not have that when I was age 30, and I stumbled into my first AA meeting. We were laughing on the way in from the airport, because I got off the plane, and someone there to meet you. They never send the guys out in the old Falcons to give you a ride, and you get the big car. You know how we drunks, when we sober up, we kind of go first class anyway. And the whole treatment, and I get here, and they've already checked you in.
I mean, it's like you can't write your name out. They're not too sure about the brain damage or something. But they've already checked you in. You go to the room, and there's the big basket of fruit. Now, I couldn't figure out the fruit for a long time. The fruit threw me, for a long time, why the committees always have a basket of fruit in the room. And it finally occurred to me today. There is probably some concern that speakers are given to being stuffed with a certain element, so they provide you with a natural laxative.
We were laughing, though. Tom O'Sullivan and I were laughing. It's really funny, because here, people pick you up at the airplane, and they check you in, and they give you baskets of fruit. And all we ever did to deserve it was to throw up a lot and go to jail. You know, if I'd known this was going to qualify me for this kind of treatment, I wouldn't have stood for some of the verbal abuse I was catching all those years.
Well, I do appreciate being here very much. I would like to share with you this evening what it was like, and what happened, and what it's like now. And we'll try to get over that first part in a hurry, because I've never found a group of AAs together yet who needed lessons in how to get sick. So we'll try to get through that part. Just to prove to you the committee didn't get just a wild neurotic up here by mistake, I will talk a little bit about drinking.
And I cannot speak as an expert about drinking. I can speak as an expert about throwing up, going to jail, chasing checks on Monday morning, and things like that. But I'm really not an expert, and never have been. Because I happen to know the exact moment that I became alcoholic. I'm one of the lucky ones, you know. Most of you were just sitting on a bar stool one day and came down with it and didn't know it.
But I happen to be very special. Better get some more fruit. I know exactly the moment I became alcoholic. I had stolen some alcohol, and I was drinking it in some bushes. And I drank enough of the wrong kind of thing. I didn't even like the stuff that I was drinking. And I drank enough of it that I got drunk, and I threw up, and I passed out. And when I woke up, I immediately planned on when I was going to do it again.
And I had vehicular problems getting home. And when I got home, I was immediately enmeshed in a long diatribe with the current authority figure in my life. That happens to have been the first time I ever took a drink of alcohol. But I was alcoholic right from the start. I had the pilot light going. All I needed was the fuel. And when I got the fuel, we were off and running. My drinking went downhill from there, and it lasted for 15 years.
It lasted a lot longer than I cared to have it last, but I guess it lasted long enough. I was raised in a very comfortable, financially upper-middle class family
[00:05:04]
that included a very successful self-made head of the family who was an executive of a large corporation. We belonged to the country club. We lived on the right part of town up on the hill. My father was the president of the Chamber of Commerce. My mother was the PTA president and all those kinds of things. And that's the kind of environment I grew up in, and that's what everybody saw. What they didn't know was that I also had two alcoholic parents, and behind that shell was existing about as much mental, emotional, and spiritual illness as you can pack behind one shell.
And that's what I grew up in. That did not make me alcoholic. In fact, if anything, that gave me a reason not to become alcoholic, because I swore over and over again that I would never be like they were. But somehow, when I took that first drink of alcohol, something happened to me that had never happened to me before in my life, and I think you all know the feeling. And I've heard it described lots of ways, and the only way I've ever been able to describe it is that they used to have some toys that had pieces of wood all hooked with a string through them, and if you pulled those strings together, that toy snapped into place, like a marionette.
And that's exactly what happened to me, because I took my first drink of alcohol, and somebody pulled all those strings tight, and I felt put together for the first time in my life. I was a periodic alcoholic for almost my entire drinking career. Toward the end of it, the last few years, I was attempting and fighting so hard to maintain the facade of my life that I would only get drunk about once or twice a month.
I was willing to pay the price of not drinking in order to protect the right to drink, and that was the kind of alcoholic that I was. Now, I could tell you lots of episodes and lots of comedic things in which I was engaged as a practicing alcoholic. I'm always a little cautious about doing that, because I was also such a congenital liar in those days that I still have trouble remembering which ones are true.
But I can tell you that enough of them are true, that it gives the picture of a young man who had been given all the worldly opportunities that you could ever ask for as a start in life, that I had been given all the push and the momentum out of the nest that you could ever ask for, and yet I was hopelessly and chronically alcoholic right from the start when I was age 15, and I finally ran out of momentum, and the thing coasted to a stop at age 30.
And at that point I was absolutely without any answers to anything in my life, and I did not care. I absolutely did not care. And I think if there is one point at which we all find some kind of a common bottom, it's the point where you just don't care anymore. And I think AAs and Al-Anons and Al-Ateens all get there, at the point you just don't care anymore. And I got there when I was 30. I tried to attribute my drinking career as a 15-year streak of bad luck.
It had to be bad luck when you had as much potential as I had. It was a mass of unrealized potential all my life. And then one day I woke up one morning and realized I didn't have any more potential left, that the only potential I had was down. And that was the clearest view I had ever had in my life, was that I was engaged in a deteriorating process where I was constantly readjusting to a lower standard.
I had continually had to readjust my definitions of rights and wrongs as I continued to go down through lower layers of wrong. And it was amazing, and it's a tribute to the power of alcoholism, a rationalization process which will allow you to continually readjust to lessening standards in your life. And that's what I was engaged in when I came in the door. Those 15 years meant that I went through high school and through college.
And I went to college because I didn't know what else to do. That's what everybody else did. I picked my school in a state in Colorado. Naturally, I went to school in Colorado because you only have to be 18 to drink there. It occurs to me that's an odd way to pick a college. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. I got out of college. I spent a year working out in California, working at a job I didn't care about because I really didn't care what I was doing anyway.
I really had absolutely no sense of purpose in life. I decided that the Army was getting a little close, and that a suave debonair character like me probably ought to be a Navy officer, so I chose to bless them with my presence. For any of you who are thinking about joining the Navy, I'd like to warn you about something that I learned after having been in there that they don't tell you about going in, and that is they have an absolute paranoia about you showing up.
[00:10:06]
I think it borders on being irrational, but I was never able to make that point well. My commanding officer and I used to have a lot of conversations about how I should have been on my airplane when it left. Laughter We talk about the terror and bewilderment of alcoholism, but I remember the terror and bewilderment of people around alcoholism. We were flying long-range patrol planes, and there were four officers and about seven or eight enlisted men.
Fate had it that all four of us were bachelors, and the other three were problem drinkers. And, of course, I was just having some bad luck. Laughter And so being the only bachelor crew in the squadron, they used to give us the early Saturday morning patrols. That's a bad choice. If you're a flight scheduler, don't do that. And I remember one time the expression on that crew's face when the four of us were down there leaning against the side of the airplane, flipping to see who'd make the takeoff.
Laughter That is the closest thing to sheer terror you'll ever see on a group of people's lives. Laughter At about this point in life, I'd had some more strings of bad luck. Of course, I was one of those who said, look, I'm just living my own life, and I'm not bothering anybody, so why don't you all leave me alone? Unfortunately, however, that wasn't the case. I had just gone through an episode where the commanding officer and I in another one of our continuing series of discussions discussed the young lady who had shown up pregnant at the squadron and seemed to be throwing my name around a lot.
Laughter And that was when I saw democracy in action. It was either marry her or go to jail. Laughter Applause And being a gentleman of the old school, I did the right thing. I have an 18-year-old son with whom I probably spent a total of less than 100 hours. And that's the kind of alcoholism that says, don't bother me because I'm not bothering anybody else. Why don't you all just leave me alone? And that's a piece of alcoholism that I still have to play out.
But I do know something, that if I continue to work the steps of AA and try to practice the traditions in my daily life and read the big book and go to meetings and have a sponsor, there'll come a time when that boy will need a father, and I will be there whenever that time comes. And I thank God and Alcoholics Anonymous for that. But that's how you affect lives, and you don't even know it. Searching around for a way to straighten my life out at this point in my life, I came upon what I thought was unique, but I find out it's not necessarily because there's a whole organization that exists because of it.
I chose to get married at this point in life. If it weren't for people like me, there wouldn't be an Al-Anon. Laughter Ah, they're here. Applause Just remember, Al-Anons, we made you what you are. Laughter Nice people, but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one. Laughter Although they do get to drink and work steps too, and that's not bad. Laughter Laughter It's just a tribute to the God of my understanding that having gotten married for the wrong reason, he married me to the right woman.
And I have since seen the hand of God throughout my life in many ways like that. In any event, this rhapsodic struggle came to a head in Santa Barbara, California. I was 30 years of age. I had just been promoted. I was a young whiz kid in the big corporation, and I was just going right up the ladder, and I was living in a beautiful guest estate in the back of a ranch in Montecito, California, which is about as nice a living as you can have.
My wife was teaching school, and she was into her Al-Anonism so far at that point that she didn't even know I was an alcoholic. Laughter We're not the only ones with a denial system, you know. Laughter I had been clamming. I had been clamming at Pismo Beach on Saturday, February 15th, 1969, which thanks to God and
[00:15:08]
the program of AA, which is the way he expresses himself to me, is the day of my last drink. And I had been up there for no reason of my own. I didn't have anything else to do that day, which is typical of my life. And I almost killed some people driving home down Highway 1. And I got home and I finished off some cheap red wine, which is a darn shame. I didn't know it was going to be my last drink.
I wouldn't have had cheap red wine. I'm a pretty classy drinker, actually. You may not be able to tell it, but I was. I was the kind of guy that used to order drinks like Perfect Rob Roy's, you know, those kind of things that bartenders must want to kill. Right in the middle of a busy happy hour, I got to come in and have a Perfect Rob Roy, you know, that kind of thing. But it sounds nicer. And then I had a sponsor tell me one time, do you know that the best, the most expensive scotch looks just like Jim Beam when you throw it up.
I came downstairs that morning into my living room and my wife was sitting there with that Al-Anon look on her face. And suddenly a rush of thoughts came into my mind and things that had happened in the recent history. My father had died about six months before that and in the course of burying him and settling things with the family and the old family estate, I had had an overt spiritual experience, which I could not deny.
I tried to, but I could not deny it. My wife had begun going to a sensitivity group and somebody had loaned her a book called Just One More by a recovered alcoholic and it was everywhere I turned in the house, that book was there. I wondered how many copies she had. And one night, just previous to this, I had been sitting home while she was off at her sensitivity group, you know, that's the things for the people who aren't as intellectually superior as the rest of us.
And I was drinking port wine out of a silver chalice. We all know that you don't have a problem if you drink port wine out of a silver chalice, even if you're on the second bottle. And I was sitting there and my whole life just rushed before me and I realized that I was the kind of person who was afraid to go to bed alone with my own mind, that every morning that I woke up I was almost catatonic with fear and remorse, even when I hadn't been drunk the night before.
Even when I hadn't had anything to drink the day before, I would wake up so locked in fear that as a bright, young, dynamic corporate executive, I used to have to just drag myself out of bed for fear of going and facing the day. And I had all those terrible fears when the phone rang and the doorbell rang and all those things. And I walked downstairs and I remembered that that one night I sat there and I uttered some words I never would have dreamt would come out of my mouth, was that, oh God, I didn't mean to turn out like this, and I don't know where that came from.
I didn't know at the time. So I looked at my wife and I was shaking and I was crying and I was about as miserable an excuse of a young man as you could possibly think. And I was absolutely stripped of any defenses at that moment. And everybody, including me, could see me. And I immediately decided that my great intellect, which had gotten me to AA at this point, my great intellect could come up with an answer and right out of the blue came the answer.
And so I asked my wife to call Alcoholics Anonymous. And I can honestly tell you that I asked her to call because I was afraid they'd recognize my voice. That afternoon, coincidentally, was my wife's natal birthday and we were driving down to Ventura to meet my mother and sister who were driving up from Los Angeles to have lunch with us. And it occurred to me on the way down there that my mother had been sober in Alcoholics Anonymous for eight years at that point.
And I had never made the connection that Alcoholics Anonymous would have any place in my life before it had any answers for me. I went to my first AA meeting that night under protest. I only went because I was afraid I would lose face at home because I'd made the mistake of telling my mother that I was going to an AA meeting that night. And the only reason, by 7 o'clock that Sunday night, the only reason I went was I was afraid I would lose face at home.
And so I went. I tried to change the address. I tried to change the name of the street. I did everything. But my wife seemed possessed of a certain zeal to get me there that night. And we arrived. I walked into my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous and a little lady walked up to me
[00:20:03]
that looked like about 30 miles of bad road. And I thought to myself, I knew that's what they were going to look like. And I began a process of walking in that meeting, doing something which has become a decreasing problem for me, but only decreasing, in that I began to compare myself to everybody there. And when I compare myself to you, we never tie. But they played a dirty trick on me and I even figured out the trick halfway through the meeting.
A guy got up there and began. I tried to change the dates and the names of places, but he told my life story. And I turned to my wife in absolute anger, in honest anger, thinking that she had called them during the afternoon. And that's how I got to Alcoholics Anonymous. I did not come here to stop drinking. I did not come here because I thought you had something I wanted. And when I got here, I did not even like you, nor did I feel that you were my superior or my equal, either socially, mentally, or intellectually.
But you all had something with which I had no comfort and no acquaintance. And that elusive something bugged me so much the first night that I went back to try to figure out what it was so I could intellectualize myself into it. And I went the second night and I immediately decided that this was some kind of phony operation, that they were all lying to each other and it was some form of group therapy where if you all lie to each other enough, you start believing it.
And I went there and I was sullen and I was resentful. I would not talk to anybody. I memorized the floors in all the meetings in Santa Barbara. After four or five months of sobriety, I made a mistake of going to a meeting where they had the format where they went around and everybody introduced themselves as an alcoholic. I think that we really ought to post the formats outside the door so that people like me won't get trapped into those meetings.
Because they got around to me and I said, my name is Dick and I'm a… They came up to me afterwards and they said, we're so glad you're here for that reason we thought you were a student doing a paper. Isn't it a tribute to the power of alcoholism that we can come here with no other answers looking at this as the last resort and the first thing we try to do is to prove that we don't need to be here in the first place?
That's alcoholism. That's the cunning, baffling and powerful part of alcoholism to me. I wish that I could say that I looked up on the wall, saw twelve perfect answers to my life and launched with zeal and verve into the regular and frequent practicing of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous in my life. I wish I could say that because that would have saved me from spending the worst year of my life.
The worst year of my life was the year that I spent after my last drink. If you take the central and key part of anything out and don't replace it with something you have a pretty miserable organism and that's what I was because from me was not just lifted the chemical ethanol to which I'm addicted but the whole mystery and story that I had made up about myself that had to do and revolved around the drinking of alcohol and the lifestyle and the justifying of it and that whole complicated thing called the denial system because when my denial system went then all of my excuses and all of my potential and everything else was gone and I was walking around with a great big emptiness right in the middle of me, right smack in the middle and the very essential part of me was gone.
I spent a year trying to get along without that. I moved to Los Angeles during this time. I was transferred. I was in business. I had poor souls that didn't know what they had on their hands. I would like to tell you one thing about that and I think that we stress anonymity here very hard and for you who are new we will do anything we can within our consciousness to protect your anonymity but anonymity is something that each of us has as our own personal possession and we can spend that any way we want.
Well obviously one of the things that I had to deal with was coming from this type of
[00:25:01]
background that I had where we had the upper middle class pseudo success syndrome going on was that if you ever get to the point where you can't drink you know that right away will make you unemployable. You are now destined to some sort of menial task. You'll never get ahead in anything and they'll probably talk a lot behind your back. I was offered a promotion when I was four or five months sober and somehow at that point I had found something dear and precious.
I couldn't identify it. I was not participating in it. I was standing back aloof from it but nevertheless I had a sense of hope that I had never had in my life and they called me up and I turned down the job two times and finally they told me I had to come down to Los Angeles so there wasn't going to be a paycheck coming to Santa Barbara anymore. So I went down and my boss looked at me and he said I just offered you a fantastic promotion why won't you take it and I said because I'm a recovering alcoholic and Alcoholics Anonymous and I thought there goes the old career and he looked at me and he said see that's just the kind of man we need in this job.
Subsequently to that I received two promotions in that company, big promotions because I was the one guy they knew that could go in behind the alcoholic manager and clean it up that I'm the only one who would understand what was going on and it was true I could and those poor guys couldn't believe how I could figure out what they'd had going on all that time that fast. So I would personally tell you that the stigma of sobriety is not that bad, it really is not that bad.
I reached a point after a year of sobriety without practicing any kind of a program without filling that void at all in my life that I had one of the happiest, longest, not happiest but I look back one of the happiest resulting, longest most miserable dry drunks that I ever want to be on and for those of you who are new there are lots of definitions of a dry drunk. Mine is that when you are the only human being on this planet who understands what's going on you're in a dry drunk.
A dry drunk to me is characterized by that disease with which I was suffering when I got here and that's called terminal uniqueness. I had a temper tantrum at the office, which was not unusual. I went to a movie, the only unusual thing in that was it was a clean movie, took me a while to work out that part of the inventory, it was a Jack Lemmon movie named April Fool's, it's the story of a pretty nifty guy who is married to a whiny bitchy woman, has a miserable nowhere job, a meaningless existence, goes to a cocktail party and meets the woman who understands.
At the end of the movie he's racing down the concourse at the airport to catch the plane that she's on where they're going to fly off together into the perfect existence. I was the only person in the movie theater who was stood and cheered. I walked out the door and made a very fundamental, rational, logical evaluation. I realized at that point in my life I had been spoken to by a God in whom I did not believe and whose existence I would continue to deny for some time.
You try to put the logic of that one together and that comes up dry drunk. I went home and I told my wife I was leaving with no warning. Thank God she had been going to enough Al-Anon meetings at this time that she pretty much knew how to handle it and the last words I heard were, Do you want the color TV? You Want the Color TV.
[00:30:11]
So I woke up the next morning in a crummy little apartment in West Los Angeles realizing that at age 31, in the full command of my dynamic social position, I had just run away from home. Searching about for a meaning in my life and now realizing more and more that even though I wasn't drinking, my life was continuing to come apart. This is a personal theory of mine and it is not in the Big Book, but it is the result of my experience in having worked with other newcomers and having shared honestly with a lot of other AAs.
I have a theory that when we take our last drink, that's just our drinking bottom. That the emotional and mental and spiritual problems that we bring in here continue on well past that last drink. I don't know how long it is in your case, but I know how long it was in mine. It was five years. Because at five years of sobriety, having now had some introduction and some effort made on the part of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I found myself at five years, having had a temper tantrum because my wife had used the wrong kind of paper on the bathroom wall, that I was on my bedroom floor, pounding on the floor, crying and cursing God in all sincerity.
Cursing God saying, why did you make me like this and why do I have to live like this? And I know that at that point that I reached my final bottom, a place at which I have not had to go back since that time. And that was the point at which, and we were talking about a great simile, and he's here and he's going to talk after me, so I'll have to give Tom the credit for this simile. It just kills me to have to do this because it's a good one.
But he told me that if I didn't give him credit, he was going to take it anyway. That's the hell of going first. So much for sympathy. We all know where that is, right? Working the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and Tom's simile is the point at which you are in water, swimming, and the water's over your head. Not water that you can stand in, but water that's over your head. And it was at that point, with five years of sobriety, that I pushed off the wall out into the water and began to rely on the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the guide of my understanding that I found through that to keep me afloat.
I can tell you that he has kept me afloat since that time. I have choked down a little water to carry it on. I have sunk under a few times, but I have never been without the constant and sure assurance, deep down in my very subconscious, that I am exactly where I am supposed to be and that I am loved by a power that's greater than this entire universe. I know that, fundamentally, whatever happens is exactly what's supposed to happen and that I can only take the responsibility for the mistakes and the negativity in my life.
That's the only thing that I can create in my life on my own, and it was at that point that I found that. I began, when I was separated from my wife at this point, to go to an awful lot of meetings. I went to at least one meeting a day, and usually two, because I was desperate at this point because I could see my life deteriorating. I went to an awful lot of meetings, and I was all over the Los Angeles area going to meetings.
That's a good place to hate and resent people and not be a part of things because they have fairly large groups there. That fitted me just right because I had to hate and resent you and not be a part of the program long enough that I hurt badly enough that one night I got up and walked out of a meeting before it had even started, and I was walking across a dark park in west LA. I stopped in the middle of that park, and I have never been more frightened in my life.
Nothing that drinking held. Nothing that could have happened as a result of my drinking frightened me as much as that night did when I realized that I was walking out of my last hope and that all that lay ahead was a pretty crummy, seamy existence that would be another process of continually adjusting to lower standards, and finally I would have a successful suicide attempt. My alcoholism contained several honest suicide attempts.
I tried to commit suicide to the best of my ability.
[00:35:00]
I gave it my best shot, and I flunked even that. I walked back in that meeting because I was frightened. I didn't know what I was looking for particularly, and I sat down in the back of the meeting and I began to pray to the God that I had made fun of. I said something like, if you have a place for me or if you are willing to listen, I would like some help and I don't know what to do. Sure enough, I was one of the 15 out of the 50-odd people at that meeting who was called up to participate, and I got up in front of the group and I started crying, which is the first honest thing I had done in an AA meeting, and I said, I don't know what to do.
I walked back and sat down and a man walked up to me afterwards and he said, my name is Hal and I think you better stick with me. I thank God that somehow the awareness came to me at that point that I just simply had to go with that man, do what he told me to do, and accept whatever he taught me, and to finally try to find out something about this thing that I had been hanging around so long and felt so little a part of.
I didn't even understand your language. You used words that were still strange to me, serenity, rigorous personal honesty. I always thought honesty was when you didn't steal things, and I was an accomplished expense account cheat at this time, and that made me uncomfortable, but you used words that were irritating to me. They actually irritated me. This man took me under his wing and he gave me that special kind of non-judgmental love that you can find few places on earth and that I think that alcoholics find here, which is the reason that keeps us here, I think.
What we have for you who are new is non-judgmental love. Whatever you think you've done, however low, sick, and disgusting you think that your past is, I can promise you that either I or Dick have done worse. I'm good up to the major sins and he picks up from there on. But seriously, there's nothing that you've done that we haven't done. There's nothing you've felt that we haven't felt. We know the fear of being locked away from the world, being isolated by a pane of glass from the whole rest of the world and not being able to communicate with them.
We know the terrible anxiety and the frustration of waking up in the morning and being afraid to open your eyes and find out what's in bed next to you. We know the terrible fear of the phone ringing. We know that awful time when the monthly bank statement comes. We know all those fears and we know all those frustrations. And that deep down nine fear that there's something wrong with you that nothing can ever fix.
My group and I have a regular discussion about what we've come to call the fatal flaw theory. That is that even though we've been sober for some years now, and my group happens to have probably an average of sobriety of 12 or 15 years, and every single one of us have admitted that at some point we have had to deal with the fact after some years of sobriety that there is some lingering and deep fatal flaw within us that will never be cured, that will never be fixed, and will probably get us in the end.
If you have that in your quietest times, you're probably like me and you don't allow that kind of thought to go on very long. But if you've ever had that lingering doubt, I can tell you not how you're going to find your answer, but I'm going to tell you where you're going to find your answer. You're going to find your answer in the AA meetings and in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and on your knees praying to something that you don't even have to understand or agree with.
And you'll find your answer because all of us have found ours. Every single one of us have found the answer to that deep-seated fear that there is some lingering terrible thing wrong with us that can never be fixed. And we all found it in the meetings and in the big book and on our hands and on our knees praying to a God with which we have not been particularly comfortable. My work on the steps of the program of AA were faltering.
They were incomplete. They were the best I could do early on. I wrote the best inventory I could. I took the best fifth step that I could. My sponsor at this time led me as best he could. I made the amends that I could think of, as many as I could think of at the time. I was willing to go to any lengths. I did track people down through phone books in distant cities. And you've got to watch out about that prayer stuff.
God has a way of working with the telephone system to help you find those people. I sent them the checks and I tried to explain to them what I was doing.
[00:40:00]
I did all those things that I could to the best of my ability. I happened to have moved to Seattle about this time when I was engaged on steps 9, 10, 11, and 12. And I fortunately went to a group that called itself the Maintenance Group. In there I was taught the concept that steps 10, 11, and 12 are how we maintain the gift that we have been given. I had a little hard time with this one. I thought I had done the work and I was the one who had achieved what I had achieved by the end of the ninth step.
And so I had a little bit of trouble over that. But I finally came to understand that I had been given the gift of waking up one morning and for the first time in my life, as the result of the first nine steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, that I was back to even with the world again. That there was actually and honestly nothing from any day from yesterday all the way back to the date of my birth, there was no day that had a string on me anymore.
And then I was taught that we're to maintain that. We're to maintain that on a daily basis through the practice of steps 10, 11, and 12 and that we are to regularly and frequently go back to step 1 and to reacquaint ourselves all the way through the whole 12 steps with the increasingly broad or deep understanding that has allowed us by living a spiritual life and coincidentally, by the way, not drinking whiskey.
We are of an opinion here, in case there's some confusion in the groups you've been going, that sobriety has a lot to do with not drinking. I will add a personal aside. I think that sobriety equals reality, which means that we are to live unassisted by any chemical boost. I believe that what I was looking for and what I found here was absolute, honest, and open reality, unclouded by chemicals, alcohol, activity in order to deaden my mind, excessive intellectualism, pride, ego, any of those things.
If I can clear my mind of all those effects and finally know that I am capable of standing all by myself, unaided, and looking straight in the face of God, then I know that I'm sober. There's a beautiful poem called High Flight and the last line says, and I reached up and touched the face of God, and you all have given me that. You may be sitting there tonight as a newcomer or an old timer. You may be sitting there with the hum of your self-awareness so loud in your ears, as I was for a long time, that what I'm saying doesn't compute.
I for a long time had a problem with the fact that my self-awareness, thinking about I, me, my, mine, I, I, I, was so loud in my ears that I couldn't hear what you were teaching me, and I missed out on a lot, and I went through a lot of emotional pain because of it. If we can do nothing else than to impress upon you, new or old, that the words I'm saying aren't what counts. Because I'm up here proving to you that I'm a chronic and hopeless alcoholic, but I haven't had a drink for 11 years, and it might pay you some dividends to find out why, and we sure pray that you do that, and we would love to help you either discover or rediscover the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I can say rediscover because I've had to rediscover the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, because at various stages in my sobriety I have now had to go back and get the career in shape, or really work on my family life, or finally get to that spiritual life put together, and I've kept forgetting my source. I kept turning away in all those periods of activity, certainly well-meaning, and heaven knows they're good works, but I kept forgetting from whence I come.
I am a chronic and hopeless alcoholic, left to my own devices, I am absolutely incapable of functioning in this world, unaided or conscious, really, but it works. It really works. We had our first daughter, our first child, in Seattle, and at that time… In Seattle, and at that time, we're now two and a half, two, two, three years on the program, we're a nice shiny young couple, my wife's going to Al-Anon meetings, and I'm going to AA meetings, and we have this beautiful new baby daughter, and we're living in a beautiful, our first home overlooking this lovely park in a charming part of Seattle, and everybody is saying, oh, isn't it wonderful the way the program's working for this young couple, aren't they lucky that they found it so young?
[00:45:22]
They've got their whole lives ahead of them, and we would smile and be terribly cute, and then we would go home and destroy one another. How come? How come that kept happening all that time? How come right up through today, I am still incapable of dealing with marriage all by myself? How is it? I'm still just a human being married to another human being, and it seems like it takes daily effort at that end of the deal.
After all, we've reached spiritual nirvana now, certainly after ten years of practicing the program, must have reached some vast spiritual height in which all those things are taken care of. It was at this point that I discovered the wisdom of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous on an increasingly deep level. In my great intellectual capacity, I put two things together. On one hand, I heard somebody say, do you know that they had so much trouble among themselves in the early days of AA that they had to write some traditions to teach them how to get along with each other, which meant they didn't know how to get along with other people.
Now, that's great thought number one. Great thought number two is, my wife is a people, among other things that I had described from time to time. Well, you know, I finally put the two things together. If she's a people and these things teach you how to get along with people, maybe this would work on that. So I tried it a little bit and it worked, so I quit doing it. And some more years went by of emotional roller coasters all the time.
And you know what really got me one time? My wife really zinged me. You know, she goes to Zingers Anonymous and they teach them these things. I was on the phone one night busily saving some poor soul that I was sponsoring. I had just verbally attacked her. The phone rang. I pick up the phone and launch into my spiritual guru voice from my pigeon. Get off the phone and she says, you know what I wish? I just wish you'd talk to me like some damn stranger. That hurt. That hurt. It's unfair. It's unfair.
They ought to make them stop going to those meetings after a while. They learn too much. We have had an increasingly better marriage. I have had an increasingly better relationship with my employers. The problems that I have had in applying the traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous have not been because I have not had every complete and perfect tool for working at these areas of my life. It's because I have chosen not to use them, and that's the only reason.
I'd like to give you a few examples. As long as in our home there is only one ultimate authority, and it ain't Dick, then we can never go wrong because our ultimate authority doesn't make mistakes. As long as our only requirement for belonging to that family is a desire to do God's will in that family, then we'll never go wrong. As long as that family has only one primary purpose, and that is to do what God left me here on earth to do, then we're not going to have any trouble.
[00:50:05]
As long as I'm willing to accept, like each group is independent, that my wife is an independent human being, she even has the right to be wrong, and I don't need to tell her. As long as I am willing to do things for my family in a way that only God and I understand, which I understand to be anonymity, if I can love them without having to show them that I love them, then we're probably not going to have any trouble.
As long as I will apply the principles that I have been given through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and through my religious life and keep my personality out of it and her personality out of it and the children's personalities out of it, then we're okay. It really works. It really does. About a year ago, I was speaking at a conference in Texas, and I was about as full of self-pity as I had been in some time.
I gave what had to be the worst talk ever given at an AA conference. Still, all those folks are men. I was taught one Saturday evening during that thing. Somebody who has not been around this program as long as I have, I don't think, or at least not much longer, somebody who never lived with a practicing alcoholic, had to teach me about Al-Anon, which is the same program I work. AA and Al-Anon are the same program, in my opinion.
Must be the same steps, same traditions. I even found out something tonight that I didn't know. Did you know the big book and the 12 by 12 are Al-Anon conference-approved literature? Can they do that? But I had to have a lady teach me how to release. Now, I've been around. I qualify for Al-Anon. Isn't that an odd coincidence? I had never thought of that. I was one of those bleeding AAs who tolerated the cookie club, as I thought of it in the early days.
And yet my home wouldn't be there. I wouldn't have my children if it weren't for Al-Anon, because my wife and I never could have made it together if we weren't working at it. We were too sick. Our mutually compensating illnesses, which attracted one another in the first place, continued to do some pretty severe damage to each other well after sobriety. I never will forget the night she came home from an Al-Anon meeting and she said, You know what we talked about tonight?
There had to be something wrong with us. We married you. We figured out later it wasn't that lucky. We saved two other people. I deeply believe today that I have been given absolutely everything I was looking for all my life. I was a kind of dramatic alcoholic who was given to meditating on beaches and mountaintops, sitting at the end of bars, thinking mystical thoughts, or trying to look terribly intelligent.
But deep down I had such a craving in my stomach. I had a hunger and a craving in my stomach and it used to just almost drive me to the point. And it was that sense of that motor running in the stomach, that sense of that motor running, and it would start getting faster and faster and faster. And there was only one thing that would make it slow down and go away. And then I took that thing away. And I couldn't use alcohol any longer to make that thing stop getting faster and faster.
And I had to find some kind of peace, something else, which would make that terrible winding up sensation in the stomach start to go away and to leave me finally. And I found it. And I found what I'd been looking for all my life. And because I know somewhere in this audience there's a pseudo-intellectual, socially correct alcoholic, I'm not going to tell you what it is. Because if I told you what it is, you would compare yourself and find a way out.
Well, there are at least two of us, hon. We know that.
[00:55:03]
But I found it. You know? You ever seen those bumper stickers? I found it. I did. I really did. I honestly found it. The big it. The big it that I thought the big they had and knew they had and I didn't have and they were talking about me behind my back. And I found it. And it's so simple. It's so simple that I walk by it from time to time. I get so caught up in the narcotic of daily activity that I miss it. And I miss it.
And the simplicity and the beauty of it is here tonight. It's the reason we're here tonight. Why are we here tonight? Did you ever ask yourself what are you doing on a Thursday night in Omaha sitting in a thankfully not too smoky room? Answer to prayer, right? How you doing, Dick? Fine. About another hour? You ever ask yourself why are we all here together? We don't belong together. We don't come from the same places.
We've all had that terrible sense of uniqueness which would keep us away from a place where everybody is here on the premise that we're all the same. If you can follow that, you're alcoholic. But why are we here tonight? What brought us here? What are we looking for? What don't we have that we came here for? And you know, we do come here for a selfish reason. We come here for the highest of selfish reasons.
Just to be able to feel good about living. To feel comfortable and at peace with this business of living. That's why we're here. Well, why are we here of all places? Why aren't we somewhere else? If the isms and the ologies and the professionals and the self-proclaimed professionals and the centers and the this's and the that's, if they all had the answer, then why did we all have to come together in the first place?
Why is it that the only answer we found was that we, who were helpless and hopeless, whether we be alcoholic or affected by it, why did we have to come here with the rest of the losers to find the answer? I believe that in my case, it's because the God of my understanding had a perfect place and made a perfect program and designed the perfect people for me. And this and it and you are they. I belong to you and you belong to me.
Stop and think. If you would get to know one new person at this conference this weekend, if you would just make the effort to meet one new person, think what that would do to the sum total of all of your programs. Think of the strength and the unity that that could build. And as I became aware in my progress in this thing that all of my attentions and energies were being focused inwardly, and wondering why that did not bring a sense of ease, why concentrating on my recovery did not necessarily bring me a sense of ease, I happened to notice one time on an AA piece of literature that we have a triangle and that that triangle has the bottom base of recovery but there are two other sides to it.
And those two other sides are service and unity. Our service and unity. And it occurred to me that maybe God didn't need to sober me up to prove that he could sober me up. Maybe God didn't sober me up to accumulate or to spend, or to have, or to own. Maybe he sobered me up. Maybe he sobered me up because he has some spiritual and eternal purpose for me being alive here in Omaha on this night and that he will have that purpose each
[01:00:04]
and every day of my life for as long as he chooses to keep me around. That, ladies and gentlemen, was the first time in my entire life that I ever came to grasp the fact that I am here for a purpose and I belong and I am cared for and I am loved and I am sustained beyond my wildest comprehension. I am a chronic and hopeless alcoholic who had as deep and fundamental as emotional and mental problems as anyone can bring in here and how do I know that? Because I was going to die from them. That's how I know. When they're terminal, they're serious.
But more than that, pervading the whole thing, was that I was suffering from a spiritual illness and that was the last illness I was willing to face. I have a theory that alcoholism permeated every thought and every motion, emotion, every part of my life, so that I was not sent to Alcoholics Anonymous to just patch up a fundamentally basic nifty little package. I was sent to Alcoholics Anonymous to be stripped down to the smallest parts and then allow the God of my understanding to put it back together again. And at the same time, that my alcoholism in my active life, active alcoholic life, also had places in it where there were things fitted in my life, like a wife and a career and an education and intellectual disciplines, that were useful to him after recovery.
But I have to be willing to give up all of them in order for them to be used by him for his purposes. And that's the journey I'm engaged on now. I dearly love God. I love him sometimes with a fervor that I was given to driving down the street to work crying. And I am so grateful for the knowledge that I love God that much. And then I think that he loves me so much more that I can't even imagine it. And I know I love him and I know he loves me because I can honestly tell you tonight that I very truly love you. Thank you.