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Source: DICOBE-00565 – Tom W – 6TH DISTRICT II MINI-CONF – 1986-03-22.mp3 File: dicobe-00565-tom-w-6th-district-ii-mini-conf-1986-03-22.mp3 Duration: 01:10:02
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My name is Tom W., and I'm an alcoholic. I've been around Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, and I've never seen such a happy group of people. I just am so impressed with the friendliness and the warmth of the people of Nebraska. I don't know that I've ever been to Nebraska except when I was a child driving through, and I guess that's all we Californians do, is drive through, but I, yeah, he's thanking God right now for that.
But the generosity that I've received and the well-taken-care-of activity that's been going on, I just can't quite get over it. I'm just sort of overwhelmed. I'd like to thank Ike and his lovely wife for their kindness, and Marv here. I know that Marv has a bad reputation, and I realize he deserves it, but what can I say? And his humor is the kind of humor that keeps us all going, and Click and Wilma for their hosting me and picking us up at the airport and taking care of us, and John for his kind invitation.
Click and Wilma, we all kind of got sober together back in West Los Angeles in Brentwood, which is a suburb of Los Angeles, a number of years ago, and it's always fun to be with people that you haven't seen in a long time, because we remember what each of us used to be like. And so often, I've been sober a while, and I have some kind of an idea in my head that I walked through those doors, you know, and I wasn't all that bad, and I kind of got sober, worked the steps real fast, and here I am, and it's been real fine, and thank you very much.
And Click, for any particular reason, good or bad, has reminded me over the last couple of days about some of my early sharing and how insane it was and how crazy it was and how hard it was, and I wonder sometimes, if I had known how bad it was, I don't think I would have stayed around. I just, it's hard to believe. I'm very happy to see the new people that are here in their first month of sobriety.
It must be awfully awesome to be here in such a big group like this, where, you know, you're kind of intimidated by it, but we all have to go through that kind of stuff. The nice thing about coming to a conference like this is that we see the enormity of Alcoholics Anonymous, and we are not alone, and we have so many people, there are just so many of us, and the marvelous thing about Alcoholics Anonymous, and the thing that makes it so unique is that we share one with the other in love, and we share our experience, and that's about all we share, our experience, strength, and hope.
We have a 12-step program, and that's about all we have. We don't get up and preach to you, we don't tell you what you should do or how you should do it or whatever, we just sort of tell you what we did. And I love to participate in Alcoholics Anonymous and watch people's heads go up and down as if they were there, too, and had done that and felt that way, and they know that there's a chance for them, too, and I have felt that way for the last few years, and it's just beyond my wildest dreams, the fact that I've been sober in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I was sharing at a meeting Monday night at our regular MnSTAG, and I was just overwhelmed with that idea, that we have this common denominator, this alcoholism, this addiction, and we all understand what it's like, and when I say my name is Tom Whalen and I'm an alcoholic, you all know what I'm really like, and for the next hour or five hours, however long it takes, as I watch you all fade away, I'll share my story, and that's all I have to share.
I don't really have an excuse to be an alcoholic. Those people that you hear today have a great excuse. They had drinking parents and alcoholic parents and terrible childhoods and all that sort of thing, and I just don't have any of that. I was raised very well, a very loving mother and father. They were an embarrassment to me, and this is a tacky thing to say and an awful thing to say, but they were an embarrassment to me because my mother was fat and my father was an electrician, and it was just, you know, not really much to shoot for, and my mother's
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big deal about drinking, they just didn't drink.
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It just wasn't in their experience. My father's father, incidentally, had died a periodic alcoholic, and he was raised with the background of alcoholism and had little or no use for alcohol or people to drink it, so it just wasn't in our home. My mother's biggest problem, if they were entertaining, having a card party or something, was what kind of cake she was going to bake with her coffee and tea, and that's the way I was raised.
My sister was a very well-known movie actress in the late 30s and 40s, and I was exposed to not only this kind of a regular family life, growing up during the, I was born in the middle of the Depression, and they didn't have much money or whatever, and my sister was discovered, a famous Hollywood story, and she became this actress, and it was almost like a whole change of lifestyle. We moved to better houses, we had better cars, we had a better, like a lifestyle, and I liked her life.
I liked what was going on in her life, because there was alcohol involved and nice clothes and dinners at fine restaurants and sound stages and all that sort of thing, and when she went on to New York, it was to go, I was able to go to New York and go to the store club and El Morroco and 21 and those kind of exciting places, and alcohol had a lot to do with it, and whether that made me drink, I don't have any recollection.
I just don't know. I don't even remember my first drink. I don't know whether it was not that important or what it was. My brother, who was ten years older than me, he drank, I guess normally, I suppose, and I used to like to sip drinks out of his drinks, and I don't know whether it did anything for me or to me. I just know that every chance that I had to have a drink, I would take a sip out of somebody's glass, and I found myself going into neighbors' houses and stealing bottles and stealing drinks out of their bars and stuff, and I really didn't even start drinking until I was in grammar school, so I put off a long time, but I was kind of a weird kid, at least so I thought.
I was fat. I stuttered. I bit my fingernails. I was not a person that entered into sports because I was afraid of getting hurt. I was a devout coward, and I just couldn't seem to get into all that sort of stuff. I hung around the nuns at St. Paul the Apostle Grammar School and was kind of like a weirdo as far as I'm concerned. I don't know. I screwed up badly enough that my sister decided I needed a better education, so she shipped me off to live with her in New York, and I went to this very fine rich man's reform school, a very fine military academy actually, called the Sal Military Academy, where I was to shape up, and what it did for me is it allowed me to move to a state that had drinking at 18, and I was 13 and going into bars and ordering drinks, and I will tell you, I had it made.
It was just fabulous, and on weekends I could go down to places like Bop City and Birdland and see Charlie Parker and Miles Davis when they were getting their start, and it was an exciting deal, and drinking rye and ginger with all the big guys. It was just absolutely fabulous, and I loved to drink, and I loved to go to the places that served alcohol, and it was just heavenly. Other memories than that, I just don't have any other memories, but very pleasant memories.
I had an opportunity to talk up in Sacramento recently, and after I finished talking, a young fellow came up, a young fellow who was my age, came up to me after the meeting, and he introduced himself, and he and I had gone to grammar school together and high school together, and he said he remembered me at Loyola High School, and he said the only thing he really remembered about me is that I wore this kind of a strange overcoat and carried a silver flask, and I said, well, I got rid of the overcoat, but I still have the silver flask, but I was kind of strange, and I wore dark glasses, and I was kind of weird, and that was not really the right thing to do in the 1950s when everybody was looking like happy days, and I just wasn't that way.
So a little bent, a little strange, you know, and I drank secretly, and I kind of entered into stuff that I had to enter into, and I just got through it, and I got out of Santa Monica City, I got out of Loyola High School and went over to Santa Monica City College, and I screwed around there for a few months, and by this time, I didn't know any of this. I didn't realize that I'd become a daily drinker, but that's what it was.
I was a daily drinker ever since I was a junior in high school, and I would come into class loaded all the time, and I came into, there was zoology once at Santa Monica City College, and the instructor, the professor stopped the class, and he pointed at me as I was lurking in, and he said, behold, the ghost who walks, and I was just some kind of a, I was either terribly hungover and could hardly move, I felt like I was filled up with an embalming fluid, or I was loaded, you know, and so I had what I'd never considered, which was a geographic.
I joined the Army in 1953, and I went in the Army, and I went overseas immediately. I went to Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky, and if you're a native Californian, that's
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overseas enough for me as far as I'm concerned, and I just drank right along with the whole deal, and I did, I took care of records, and I was shipped to these different places, and when I was going to high school, I was dating this girl who was going to Marymount, which was a very fine lady's high school, Catholic high school, and the nuns at Marymount told her not to date Tom W. because he had a drinking problem, and I want to tell you, this was years before I had the drinking problem.
I just had the reputation for having a drinking problem, but she just, when I moved down to Fort Smith, Arkansas, she just couldn't wait, because, you know, every alcoholic needs someone that just loves to suffer, and she was the one in my life, and so she, her folks offered her a month's trip to Hawaii, and she picked Fort Smith, Arkansas, to show you how sick she was, and we got married, it was something to do, you know, I don't know, I, it's a kind of relationship, you know, we shouldn't even have talked at a party, you know, we got married, you know, it didn't last very long, only 20 years, but we got out of the army in 1956, and not only was I married, but I had one son, and one on the way, and I went back to work for my father in this family business, which that was an electrical contracting business, and I hated it, I didn't want to crawl around underneath houses, around attics for a living, I wanted something better, I wanted somebody to stop me on the street and ask me for my autograph someday, but I was, that was to be my reality, that was an electrician, I don't know, again, whether that's why I drank, I have no idea, I don't, I'm not sophisticated enough, I just drank, and I have a memory of my drinking, and it just seemed like it went through all of my drinking, my early years, and my last drink, I just felt like having another drink, no big deal, it sort of got out of hand once in a while, but I just felt like having one more drink, it just seemed like a good idea, I'd be in a bar, I'd order a double vodka, or a double scotch and water, whatever I was drinking that day, and I was already, before the drink was handed to me, I was already thinking, how am I going to get another drink without them wondering, whoever they were, about what is he having another drink for, and this is the way I drank, I just felt like having one more drink, and this is just the way I drank, I didn't want to get drunk, I don't have any memory of tying one on, or drowning my sorrows, or all the stuff that we do, I just felt like having another drink, it just seemed like a pretty good idea, and I think I'll have one right now, as a matter of fact, anyway, we started this marriage, and I don't know whether I had any conscious idea, but I think it must have been knowing me semi-well, that I knew how to behave, I know that you don't drink during the day, during the day, this is the late middle 50's, and people didn't drink in the construction business like they do now, Christ, now they have morning beer breaks, and they drink for lunch, and they have an afternoon beer break, and about 3 o'clock they all send out for a case, and it's just a little beyond my experience, but I drank respectively in the back seat of my car, but I don't know, I just didn't drink during the day, I'd go into a coffee shop and have a respectable iced tea, or a cup of coffee with my sandwich, and that is pretty much the way my drinking went, I just didn't think it was correct to drink during the day, and I would drink in the evenings, and I would get drunk periodically, but again, no big deal, it was just an understandable thing, you work hard, and guys should have a little bit too much, you know, and get a little drunk, or a little forgetful, I guess you could call it, or fall asleep on the couch, or whatever, and I'd get drunk on weekends, but again, if you've worked all week, it's kind of understandable, and this is like my drinking was in those early years, my early adult years, and I didn't understand that I was involved with a disease, a lot of us want to know, how come we're alcoholic, and we're always blaming the past, and I cannot blame the past, I can only blame my alcoholism, is that I got a disease, called alcoholism, and my body doesn't tolerate it like other people do, and it's just, you put alcohol in an alcoholic's body, and you got alcoholism, and this is what was happening to me, but I didn't know any of this, I didn't know any of this, I just was very naive, and one that would just felt like having another drink, and so what happened to me, is that I found myself in the middle of the morning, shaky, and nervous, and quick, and I was diagnosed as being a sort of a high-strung person growing up, and I figured that's what it was, just being a little high-strung, and nervous, and it was just very strange, and I found out by taking a couple of second-off sleeping pills when you get up in the morning, it sort of made the day go a little smoother, you know, I found out that I didn't shake all morning when I did that, you know, a lot of times I'd be at people's houses looking at their…
A lot of times I'd be at people's houses looking at their jobs, and they were trying to show me their ceiling outlets, and I'm looking at the floor plugs, you know, and I'm just sort of out of it, and I found out quite by accident that if you have a couple of drinks at lunchtime, and you've had a bad morning, and a better afternoon, there's a message that you new people can take with you today. There's no point in suffering through this. I understand these periodics. There's two kinds of alcoholics. There's daily drinkers and periodics. I happen to be the more normal type of person. I'm a daily drinker.
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I can't even understand, thank you, I can't even understand, I can't even understand periodics. They must have an innate love to suffer, I don't know, they just, why they put up with all of those shakes, and those headaches, and the pain, and all of that, when drink is literally a swallow away, you know, relief. And so I found out early on that there's no reason to suffer like that, and I found out that having a few drinks for lunch is a perfectly fine thing, and who's going to be upset about that, and that's what I did. That's not alcoholic. Have a couple of double or triple vodka tonics with your pastrami sandwich. I don't think that's a terribly alcoholic story, for crying out loud.
And today, everywhere you go, even to the coffee shops around California, which they do it here, everybody's got their white wine, you know, it's no big deal. They're not all alcoholics. And so that's kind of like the way I was drinking. And I didn't understand that these shakes were coming on, and I had to have a few drinks. You'd think it would have taken just a few days to realize this, but I couldn't get the connection. But my lunches started getting earlier and earlier, you know. Sometimes I'd have lunch at six o'clock in the morning. It seemed like a normal thing to do.
And that's what I was doing, and I was passing it off and pretending like it was the practical thing to do, to have a couple of drinks with my scrambled eggs instead of waiting till lunch, and I could work all through lunch, and I didn't understand all that sort of stuff. I thought I was just fine, and I would have enough to drink and be okay and go back to work and be just fine, thank you. And all of a sudden, two or three hours later, I'd find myself shaking and nervous and just a wreck and just have to, excuse me, I'll be right back, I've just got to go down to the hardware store for something. And I'd just lay down in the front seat of my car and drink a little hot vodka, and that would get the motor running where I could last until lunch, and I could sit in these bars and have a few drinks and go back to work, and that's the way my drinking was.
And I didn't know I was an alcoholic, I just knew that there was something wrong with me. I would have found myself, I've always been sort of an emotional person, I suppose, but I found myself uncontrollably emotional and very strange, and I would get myself into these bizarre, depressing situations where I'd find myself crying and just wondering what's wrong with me. And I resented the hell out of the people that I worked with because they were buying new cars and new vans and all the stuff that everybody seems to want to do in life, and I was just constantly stuck with bad check charges and that sort of thing.
We were buying a home in West Los Angeles, and my monthly payments, this is in the early 60s, were $79 a month, which is not a lot by anybody's standards. And let me tell you, I never once made the payment without a late charge attached to it because I was never able to get enough money together, and I'm the kind of a person that had every advantage. I was raised very well, I had a good education, I never wanted for a thing, I have no reason in the world for being an alcoholic, and yet I could not do the simplest things that the other guys were doing on the job. And I've always felt like just a little boy, like a guy, like a young person. I didn't seem to have it together.
I was not responsible. I acted and tried to be responsible, but I just couldn't seem to get a handle on responsibility. And here I am, a husband, a father, a son, and a manager of a business by this time, and I just couldn't get it together. And I'm in debt, my father having to bail me out over and over and over again and having to go to him and cover some more bad debts and some more check charges and some more overdrafts.
And my father said to me, even after I came into Alcoholics Anonymous in a couple of years, he said, how many more years am I going to have to continue to bail you out, Tom? And I felt even less of a man. And I thought, God, am I ever going to be a man? Am I ever going to be an adult? And here I am getting chronologically older, and I just can't seem to function. I'm trying everything I can do. I'm taking the kids to Indian guides and the movies and the baseball games and all the stuff that we take our kids to, and I couldn't do anything unless I had entree to my glove compartment box where I could take a long, tall drink of vodka or reach under the front seat or whatever it was. I don't know what was wrong with me. It was a sick situation.
And yet, on the other hand, I might be the wildest, gayest guy at the party and just drink you all under the table and drive you all home and just sing and just be crazy, wild, high. And I sought the help of a psychiatrist because these are the things that we do when we're alcoholics. At least we did that in the 60s.
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I told this doctor about my highs and my lows and my depressions and my bad relationship with my wife and the strange relationship with my parents and family and the problems with the kids and some about my childhood and all the stuff that we talk about. And he would ask me periodically, how much do you drink, Tom? And I told him six or eight ounces of alcohol a day, doctor. It seemed like a normal amount for a heavy drinker to drink.
And I'm more than happy to be a heavy drinker because it is, after all, a sign of manhood. It's a sign of adulthood to be able to enjoy and control. My drinking is all I ever wanted to do. And he would ask me periodically and I would lie to him like you're supposed to. I just told him that I only drank six or eight ounces of alcohol a day, doctor. And I don't drink during the day. And I just, it's remarkable.
After I was sober a number of years, it dawned on me and it turns out that my number one problem is my alcoholism. And the one thing that I will not discuss with him or anyone else is how much I drink because I don't want anybody messing with my drinking. And so I just lied about it. And so I got sicker and sicker and sicker. This man didn't have a chance of helping me to get well. And I just got more morose and more depressed and it was just absolutely ill. But the alcohol was working. And that's what I hope the new people that are here tonight, that the alcohol has stopped working in your life. The thing is with me is that it worked almost too long.
It seems like the people that can come into Alcoholics Anonymous and not drink anymore and find sobriety on a lifetime basis are those of us that the alcohol simply doesn't work anymore. And I'm convinced that I cannot drink like other people and I cannot use alcohol anymore. And I'm very fortunate that I have that in my story and in my life, that I know that. I don't kid myself anymore about being able to chippy around with a drink or two.
But anyway, in those days, of course, I was lying about it. But the alcohol worked. And what I mean by worked is I could sit in a little club in Beverly Hills right around the corner from my psychiatrist's office and my hands would be shaking. I hadn't had a drink since noon. And I'm uptight and I'm going there and I have three or four double vodkas and I could be just fine and hold my hand out like I can tonight and go and talk to this doctor for his 50-minute hour and I'd be just fine.
Argue with my wife or bid a job or do a job. Whatever had to be done, I could do as long as I had fresh alcohol in my system. And something else I forgot to tell you that I got another habit that I had from when I was in grammar school is that I started to stutter. I don't know what that came from, but unless I had fresh alcohol in my system, I could not talk. I could not talk without stammering and it was an embarrassment to me, so I had to have fresh alcohol in my system so I could talk, so I could work. I can't do electrical work when you're shaking a part, so you've got to blow on up switch boxes and stuff. You've got to have enough tranquil stuff to keep you down.
And so I couldn't work or talk or do anything, even drive a car, unless I had fresh alcohol in my system. And that's the way it took me. And I didn't still understand that I was an alcoholic because you just really don't understand. I'm just having a few drinks and just one more little drink, thank you, and that's the way I saw myself. And in these stages I'm into now, I was drinking a quart and a half to two quarts a day. And the end of my drinking, the last two years of my drinking, it took over two quarts a day for me to stay even. So I was not getting drunk particularly, I was just sort of maintaining this miserable life that I had created for myself. And I didn't see any of that, I couldn't even begin to see any of that.
Anyway, the alcohol stopped working. I don't know when it happened, I tell it like it happened on a Thursday afternoon, but over a short period of time it stopped working. I could not predict how much alcohol that I needed to get in through this particular situation. And I would have three or four double vodkas and I would be just fine. And then I would have one little drink and I would be practically on my ass, just staggering and slurring my words and I just didn't know the combination anymore or what I had had, I didn't understand. And this particular day I'd had what I thought was enough, I went to see this doctor, I was about halfway into the session and he looked at me and he said, you're drunk.
I said, what do you mean I'm drunk? He said, you look drunk, you act drunk and you smell drunk, I assume you're drunk. And I said, well I had a couple of drinks for lunch. He says, I think it's a little bit more than that and a little bit more recent. And he was going to help me with my drinking problem, albeit my non-existent drinking problem, but I'll go along with the gag. And, you know, he put me on a heavy dose of Stelazine and a heavy dose of Librium and I was going to be just fine. And I guess if I had been like I thought that I thought I was, just a little neurotic, that I would have been just fine. I'll take the pills as prescribed and I did, I took the pills as prescribed. Hell, I even took them more than prescribed.
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I want to get well now, I don't want to wait around for any particular time. And I went back to see him a week later. And I said, doctor, I feel better this week than I have felt in a long time. There's a certain tranquility that goes along with me all day long, a certain calmness on the job, there's a certain peacefulness around the home. He said, that's amazing. Not this soon do people get this immediate result from these tranquilizing drugs. And I said, well, I guess I'm very fortunate. I said, incidentally, I need another prescription. And he said, you couldn't possibly, I gave you a month's supply. I said, well, they're around somewhere, I don't know what happened to them, they're gone here somewhere.
And I just, so he gave me another prescription of each drug and I had his two now going. I had some other doctors, I started popping these pills like M&M's and I want to tell you, I got real strange. And I would drive down Wilshire Boulevard, you know, and get to a little innocuous corner like Wilshire and Westwood, you know, and I'd sit there and wait for the signal to change, it'd take an hour and a half.
And I'd wake up, you know, and the lady wanted to have her car in front of me fixed too, you know. And it's not like this happened once. This happened over and over and over and over and over again and I want to tell you, as God is my witness, it was never once my fault. It was always their fault, it was some sort of extenuating circumstances, I just nodded off for a moment. And I couldn't understand it. Some nights I'd come home and rip that house apart and terrorize that wife and family. Some nights come home just as peaceful as I am this evening, even more peaceful. Come home at 4, 30 or 5 o'clock, lay down in the living room rug, take a little nap before dinner time. Sometimes I'd even miss dinner, but those are their meals. Get up at 10, 3, 11 o'clock, go take a leak in the linen closet and go to bed, you know, just another evening at home.
My wife was losing her sense of humor over a lot of this sort of stuff, so she filed for divorce, but not to worry. She does this all the time, you know, all the time. And we kept going back and forth through divorce court and reconciling and going back and separating and I was always dragging that trunk across the front lawn and getting six pairs of socks and no shorts and it's all real unsatisfactory, you know, and it was just so boring.
But this particular time I left and I got myself a one room right behind my favorite drink and bar called the Cork and Fork and I was in there more than I was in my apartment, I think. And I just had a routine of sitting on the edge of my wet bed from perspiration or what have you every morning about 6 or 7, somehow lurching to the linen closet where I hid the booze for myself and pouring a long, tall drink of vodka and having another one and another one and another one and by 8 o'clock in the morning I'd had a half a pint to a pint and I felt better and I could go to work and I put some murine in the eyes and put the dark glasses on real fast so anybody could look in there and see there was nobody home.
You know, some breath purifiers and go off and go to work and my only desire was to last until lunchtime and sometimes I lasted until lunchtime, most of the time I didn't. 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock those shakes would come on me again and I'd just have to go down and have a few drinks and usually the hot vodka that I had to drink because it was warm in California and that's the way it was in the last couple of years of my drinking.
It was being alone and being without anything and I just didn't know what was wrong with me. I just couldn't imagine what was wrong with me. I don't know, I would sit in this bar every day for lunch. I didn't sit at the bar now. I think you've got me mixed up with an alcoholic. I sat in a booth and read my newspaper and had my three or four double vodkas while I had my sandwich and the alcoholics, now I knew who they were, they were at the bar and you could see them, they were there and they were there every single solitary day for lunch.
It never once dawned on me, the only reason I knew that is I was in there every day for lunch but they were the alcoholics and I'm just this poor guy with these problems and I don't think I was ever tacky enough to say that if you had my problems you'd drink too but I think I felt that way. I had some notion that somehow, someway, someday somebody would come and take me out of this situation and I didn't know that it was going to happen or how it was going to happen but it was going to happen. It wasn't too far in the future but I couldn't see how it was going to happen.
It Happened. It wasn't too far in the future, but I couldn't see how it was going to happen. October of 65, my wife came to visit me. She said she wanted to see me while I wasn't drinking.
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She had no idea I was home on my vodka break. And, well, it was 10 o'clock in the morning, as I say, and I, I listened to her for about 20 minutes. She took, told me what kind of a husband I was, what kind of a father I was, what kind of a son I was to my own mother and dad, and the kids needed clothes, and they were turning off the electricity, and they'd turned off the, the gas, and we had to get the attorney to pay. It was just a series, a litany of these things, and I just had to listen to them. And usually I had a fight left in me that I could argue and justify what was I, what I had been doing. And this time I had no fight left. I had nothing to justify. It was all true, and I could not deny it. And I listened to her mercifully. She left in about 20 minutes, and I just went temporarily insane, I suppose. I just went crazy. I was shaking and crying and laughing maniacally, and I just didn't know what was wrong with me. I went out and got in my car, and I realized that I couldn't even hardly see to drive. I was so crazy. And I came back to my apartment, and fortunately for me, I had a brand new bottle of second oil sleeping pills, and I took all of those and a bunch of scotch, and I just checked out. And it was the understandable thing to do. There was no real reason for me to go on another five minutes. I was hopelessly in debt, and I owed over $12,000, and there was no way of paying it back. In 1965, there was a lot of money. I was losing my business because people don't need drunken electricians around their projects. They have sober people to do our work, and I'd lost my wife and my family and my house, and everything that was near and dear to me was gone. And I guess it had to be gone for me to be put in a position where I could no longer defend, not so much my drinking, I could no longer defend the way I was living. And I had gotten myself involved in these sordid situations and these dirty things, and I just couldn't imagine how I'd ever, the person that I had been raised to be, the background that I had had, that I found myself in these sordid situations.
I thought, what is wrong here? And I just checked out. I wanted out. It was the understandable, smart thing, the bright thing, the only thing that was left for me to do was to kill myself. And a kid that was working for me part-time thought I was acting kind of bizarrely, and they came to my apartment, and he found me in this coma. And they called the ambulance, and they rushed me up to UCLA Medical Center, where they pumped me full of holes, and I don't know what went on that day. I wasn't around. And I guess they pumped my stomach.
And anyway, I came out of this coma about 13 hours later. This funny-looking green room, and I thought, Christ, I've even screwed this up. I can't even get out of here. Talk about bad breaks. And when I got my vital signs, I guess, came around, and they put me in another ambulance and shipped me off to a mental institution, where I was to stay for a while. But not for alcoholism, something respectable, suicide. And I was in there for a while. It wasn't all that bad, really. Oh, I said it was, but it wasn't all that bad. I could read my books, and I could listen to my jazz music, and I could not receive any phone calls, and I did not have to get any letters, and it was peaceful and quiet. I had my drugs, and everything was just fine, thank you. But, like most alcoholics that I've known, we have this swinger, sick, bizarre-type person. And there's another little guy over here that's sort of a responsible or tries to be responsible good person, and he said, you've got to get out of this hospital and get back to living again. And so I got out of the hospital, and I went and drove down Olympic Boulevard. And the first place I stopped was Jerry's Liquor Store, of all places, and I got a quart of vodka and a quart of scotch. But what am I going to get, a quart of milk? You know, I've got to, I'm an alcoholic, and I have to have something to drink. I'm not overly bright, I don't have a very high IQ, I don't think sometimes, but I knew one thing. I knew I wasn't an alcoholic. That wouldn't even come up. But I knew that I had to get a quart of vodka and a quart of scotch, because I could not stay sober that weekend.
And I stayed sober, I stayed drunk that weekend, but nothing's new, I'm drunk all the time anyway. And I went to work on Monday morning, and I was shaky and sick, and I was afraid to drink too much because of what had happened, and I knew the people that were driving up and down Sunset Boulevard were looking at me funny, and the kind of people that go to mental institutions and they're strange, and I just felt this from everyone, these strangers, and I just was so paranoid. And I got on the fourth rung of the ladder and I changed some light bulbs, which is not overly technical, and I was shaking so badly I had to get down and I walked into this woman's house and I said, Miss Pauli, I'll be back another day, I think I have the flu, I can't work today. And I didn't know what I was going to do, I can't even do my electrical work now, and I don't know what I want to do. And I went back into therapy with another psychiatrist, this one five days a week, and I guess you want to know how I was going to pay for all this? I don't pay for this kind of stuff.
You see, I'm not responsible enough to pay my bills. I can't take care of my own needs. I can't take care of my family. My father has to keep writing checks and bailing me out. And I think that makes me feel. I can't do things on my own. I'm now 32 years old
[00:35:02]
and I can't even take care of myself. And I just went into therapy with this doctor five days a week and he would ask me the same stupid question that other doctor asked me, how much do you drink, Tom? And I told him six or seven ounces of alcohol a day, Doctor. Do you drink during the day? And I said, of course I don't drink during the day. How can I drink during the day? I have to, you know, do work. And I just left the parking lot where I had a long, tall drink of vodka just to last for his silly 50 minute hour. That's how overtly dishonest I had become about my number one problem, which is my alcoholism.
I'm lying to him and lying to myself. I don't want him to know how much I'm drinking and I don't want to know how much I'm drinking. I just want to be left alone. Leave me alone. And yet I was so lonely and wanted someone but afraid to be with anybody because they were always watching my drinks. And I just really want another drink. I just don't want to make a big deal about this. But I just was hopelessly addicted to alcohol and couldn't even see it. I went to Mass on Christmas of 65. And the end of the Mass is a prayer called the Agnus Dei. And at the end of the prayer it says, grant us peace. I remember saying, grant me peace. Screw the rest of them. They look fine to me. I'm the one that needs the peace. And I didn't want to get sober. I didn't want to stop drinking. I just wanted to sleep for more than two hours at a time. I had to wake up at the start and reach over and grab that glass of ice scotch and quell that burning sensation in my throat so I can maybe get back to sleep. And wake up another two hours and go through the same rigmarole. And just wake up hungover and go to bed sick. And this is the way I was living. And I just, I just didn't know. But I just wanted to just have two, I wanted a decent eight hours sleep.
I mean, was that too much to ask? That's all I wanted. I didn't understand that my prayer was to be answered. And a couple of days later, on a Tuesday morning I woke up. Much like any other day, nothing new had happened in my life. I got up and I went to the linen closet and I poured my morning vodka. And I had another one and another one. And I felt warm enough to go to work. And I put the bottle of vodka back on the top shelf of the linen closet. And I noticed a bottle of Ballantyne scotch. Had about that much left. And I thought, Christ, that's a lot of scotch at eight o'clock the night before. And it was remarkable how much I was drinking. And it was no more than I had been drinking all the way along. But it was remarkable to me how much I was drinking. And it gnawed on me. It was almost like an obsession. And about ten o'clock that morning, even though I had a few drinks to kind of get that idea out of my head, I went to the phone and I called Alcoholics Anonymous. And they told me there was a meeting at Ohio Street in West Los Angeles. And I went in there at eight thirty that night. And I sat in the back where you're supposed to sit when you're new. Don't get up close in the clubs. Don't get close in your meetings. Sit in the back.
We don't have to hear everything. And for Christ's sake, don't pick up any coffee cups or ice trays. I think you'll remember. And I sat back there on my hands because I was shaking so badly. And that was an embarrassment to me. And I had dark glasses on, which is a little bizarre in an AA club. And I was sweating profusely. And I had green slime coming out of my mouth and the breath purifiers I'd chewed. So nobody would know I was drinking.
And they asked for newcomers. In those days, they asked for newcomers to raise their hands. Some jerk raised my hand for me. And I thought, what is this? I'm just here visiting. And I did what they told me. I kept coming back. I kept drinking, but I kept coming back. And I came back for about ten days. And I finally walked up to a man who was my sponsor. And I said, excuse me, sir, you seem to be some sort of a big deal around here. How do you join Alcoholics Anonymous? How do you become a member? And he says, you don't drink, kid.
And I said, yes, I'm finding I'm cutting down. And he said, no, you don't have a grasp of our program. We don't drink here a day at a time. And I said, well, it's very easy for you to say apparently you can do that. But you see, I can't go a whole day without a drink. I tried it one day in July and it damn near killed me. And I just can't do that. He said, well, for you, a half a day at a time. Ha ha ha ha. You know, he had a bunch of people around him. You know, if you can't make fun of the newcomers, what good are they, you know? And so anyway, I, so I, so I went back to my psychiatrist and I said, I'd been to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. And he was right, surprised, because we'd never discussed my drinking. And I told him about those stories that you hear in those ANA meetings. I mean, they'll just scare you to death. And he said, not to worry. And he reached in his drawer and he pulled out a whole big bag of Librium. And he said, take these. It'll get you through the rough spots. And I thought, great. Well, I made the mistake right off of sharing this with my soon-to-be sponsor. And he informed me that if I was going to be a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, not only do we not drink alcohol, but we don't take pills that affect the neck up. And we don't, we don't, we don't smoke marijuana cigarettes. And I guess we don't even shoot non-habit-forming heroin. And on the West
[00:40:00]
Coast, and I'm sure it is here because of this morning's paper, they'd tell you to cut back on your cocaine a little bit, you know, and just, but he tried to convince me that to be sober is to be sober is to be sober. And that if you're taking anything that affects your emotions and your psyche, that you're not sober. And so I couldn't quite assimilate all this. And being dumb and not terribly bright, a miracle of miracles, I took the advice of this advertising man who was in Alcoholics Anonymous about eight years. And he sort of convinced me that he drank like I did.
And I walked up and down the Santa Monica beach, like he told me to, walking and shaking and sweating and freezing to death and walking and shaking and freezing to death in this cold January day. And every nerve ending in my body is calling out to give me some booze, give me something. I didn't have anything that morning, nor that noon, nor that afternoon. I went to a meeting that night, and I was crazy. And I just was bizarre. And I went to bed that night. And I realized it was the longest time I've been without a drink since I was a junior in high school. I thought, how amazing, how miraculous. And I didn't drink the next day, nor the next day, nor the next day. And weeks went by and the months went by. And of course, I stopped shaking eventually. And my hands are so dry now, I have to put lotion on them. But in those early months, I was kind of a newcomer hands. It was just awful. I thought I would never be well. I could not talk. I could not read chapter five because it was rarely have we seen a person fail. They had me read chapter five. It was the whole meeting. And so I, but I did what I was asked. And I asked you to participate, and I did. And I was so dumb and so stupid that I didn't understand turning down an A request.
Somebody asked you to do something, you say, sure, okay, whatever. And get to the meetings early, as Bill was talking about last night, and help out and see what you can do for other people. And I was schooled very on, very early on. And that is what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous. In order to get out of ourselves, that is, is to see what we can do to help you. That's what we do here. And my life has been that way in these last few years. I, I got a year cake. And last, last January, I got a cake with 20 candles on it. You really can't stay sober that long. You know, no one that had to drink and wanted to drink and needed to drink the way I drank and stay sober that long. It's a physical impossibility. And a day at a time, I've been sober that long.
And that's what makes this thing so miraculous. It's not that I've stayed sober 20 years. It's that I've been sober a day at a time for 20 years. A lot of people, please, as Alabama, as Alabama said earlier, and I'll just paraphrase, you feel to applaud, you want to applaud yourself, go ahead. Because I, I just came to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I worked the program. I'm not one of the believers that says you come in the meetings and just sit down and shut up and listen and do nothing. You learn it by osmosis, because I don't believe that's true. I believe you come into Alcoholics Anonymous, and you find out what there is to do and go out and do it and get a sponsor and to get a book and to get into the steps and do all these things that are available to us.
Most don't, you know. I know it's hard to believe in a room this huge, but most don't stay sober. There's less than, I think, 1% of the alcoholics that ever find Alcoholics Anonymous, and very few of us, really. And you find this after you're sober a while. As you look around the room, I was at a meeting, as I said, in a Sacramento meeting. It was a huge, huge meeting in this church, of this cathedral. And they asked for people in their first year, in their first five years, in their first ten years. And it was so neat to stand up with anyone from 10 to, from 20 to 30. And after, after 30, there was like one guy stood up, you know. And it just, it's a very sobering thought. You go to a meeting and watch the people take their, their birthday cakes, you know. And you see maybe one or two birthdays, 18 newcomers. And over a period of time, you watch that. So it's indeed a gift.
Everyone that's in this room, everyone that's come into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, has received the gift of sobriety. But it's up to us, at least it was taught that way to me, it's up to us to maintain our sobriety with God's help by doing these things that, it says, these are the steps we took. This is what we've done. And this is, this is what I'm involved with now, is to share you my story. I just hope that there's someone in this meeting that says, yeah, I was a little bit like him, and I'll do what he did, and maybe my life will be all right. Because my life has been all right. I've had some very difficult times in the last few years. I mean, beyond difficult. I mean, hopeless situations that I've had to go through.
And yet I'm still here. I've survived it all. And I've survived it with a, I guess a sense of dignity and a sense of humor that's kept me going. And without Alcoholics Anonymous, I would have long, long gone. Without Alcoholics Anonymous, I would have long, long gone. I know that. Or locked in a mental institution, which would be my thing to do, I think. Anyway, I got very active on the program, and as I said, got this man to be my sponsor.
[00:45:03]
And I started to go to meetings. I went to meetings every night during the first year of my sobriety, and practically every night during the second year of my sobriety. And even now, I go to three or four meetings a week. And I, it's not a chore anymore. I go because I enjoy it, number one. And number two, I have this great sense of responsibility to Alcoholics Anonymous. When I was drinking, and in my early years of sobriety, I was one of the most irresponsible men, young guys, I suppose, boys, that you'd ever want to find.
And yet, over the years, I became a responsible husband, I became a responsible father, a responsible son to my mom and dad. I had to bury them both, and guess who made the arrangements, and did all that sort of stuff. Because that was, I was a sober one. I was the one that was responsible. And I'm a responsible businessman. I'm responsible financially now. I've paid off the debts. I've done the amends, and all that sort of stuff.
And it didn't happen in the first couple of days, the first couple of weeks, the first couple of years. It took a lot of work. But I've ended up this kind of a man. And that's why I feel a great sense of responsibility to be at those home groups that I have in Laguna Beach, in Dana Point, in Laguna Niguel, that I live in, in Southern California. Because I want the new person to come in and say, who's that guy over there?
He said, oh, that guy, he's been around a long time, and he still comes to meetings. He's still active and still waiting to help other people. And most of the time lately, and I was sharing this with Vince, I don't want to. I want to just stay home, you know, and watch television, and go to bed early. I'm just tired, I'm just bored, and all that sort of stuff. And yet I get up, and I put my clothes on, and I go to work.
I get up in the morning, and I exercise every day. I either swim for 45 minutes, or run, or both. I eat breakfast, even though I don't like to eat breakfast in the morning. And I take my vitamins, and I go to work every day, whether I want to or not. And I show up at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And the main, and the end of this whole thing, is that I feel better. And so I have a great responsibility to myself also.
But anyway, in those early years, it wasn't all that way. And I think there was some sort of a Mickey Mouse honeymoon, I suppose. The family was put back together again. I had some idea my wife was going to go to Al-Anon, and get the kids to go to Al-Ateen, and Al-Atat, and all that stuff. I met a German shepherd that could have used Alipet if they'd have one, but they didn't have anything like that.
I… And it was exciting. The first Easter sober, the first Christmas sober, all that sort of stuff. It was great. The second year was not all that much fun. The second year, all this stuff was kind of boring anyway. My wife said, you're just going to go to meetings all the time, forever? And I said, yeah, I guess so. My mother couldn't understand why I deprived my family. Because I drove all over for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I should be home with my wife and family.
Now that I know the error of my ways, as she put it, why I still had to go to all those meetings. And I just had to keep my eyes closed, the blinkers on, and keep moving across, and see how things came out. I got into terrible debts. I had grave difficulty working the amends step. Oh, I didn't mind turning my life and my will over to the care of God, for instance, which is our third step. In areas like the weather, and what was on TV.
But not my business. How can I turn over my electrical business to a higher power, for crying out loud? They didn't have electricity in his day. What does he know about electricity? And I had this wife, and this family, and these kids, and all this kind of stuff. How can he relate to that? He walked around the desert in that moo-moo. How would he know about that kind of stuff? I prayed for things. I got a brand new Chevy van.
All I had to do was pray for it. I got a new Chevy van. That'll help with the newcomer. The only trouble was that God didn't send me enough business that year, and they came and repossessed the damn thing, which taught me to go back to praying only, as it says somewhere, for the knowledge of his will for me, and the power to carry that out. And every morning I get up now, and it's just part of my life.
I get up and I ask for guidance, and direction, and protection, and care, and I expect to get up, because that's his job. His job is to get up, like I said earlier, and get out of bed in the morning when the alarm goes off, and just go out and show up and do what I'm supposed to do, what I'm supposed to do. And it turns out that is my idea of being responsible, is doing what I'm supposed to do when I'm supposed to do it.
And it's not easy sometimes, but that's my program. That's what I do. Anyway, I had these debts, and I went out and I put a second trust deed on the home. And I'm not a financial wizard, but it seemed to me like, this is great. So I paid off some of these debts, and it turned out that I really, when you go out and borrow money to pay off money, all you do is get deeper in debt. But I couldn't quite see it that way.
[00:50:01]
And what happened to me, because I was afraid to really list all of those people that I had harmed financially, I didn't mind making amends to people where you walk up to them and say, Hey, sorry, just kidding, you know. But where it took my business and my debts, I owed the credit cards to this company and that company, and the wholesale houses, and all of the stuff I owed money to. And I finally was talking to a dear friend who's passed on now, Eddie Reagan, and he said, why don't you go home and open up that drawer and get all those envelopes out and those bills.
I don't know how he knew about that drawer of mine, but I had to go out and I had to list all of these creditors and write them and call them on the phone and tell them where I was. And you know what it did for me? It allowed me to answer my own phone after two years of sobriety. I had an answering service. I had a cover, see, and I could filter the calls. But I got so I could answer the phone on the first ring because I was already out.
And here I am, this is where I live, this is where I get my mail, and this is where I'm physically and whatever. And, of course, I had a lot of lawsuits and a lot of collections agencies and on and on and on and on and on. It was not fun. I didn't enjoy paying the people back either. It took me 11 1⁄2 years to get out of debt. That's not exactly rocket to stardom, but that's what it took for me, paying them back little by little by little by little.
And I was out of debt for a short while when the IRS found out about it, but that's a whole other evening. Four years or five years after that, I paid them off, and I really felt like moving to Brazil, you know, getting out of that. As it stands now, I'm out of debt tonight. We'll see about Monday. Anyway, I alluded to this so-called honeymoon, as we talked about, and I started to flip out. I was sober about eight, nine months, and I had gone to a meeting like all good little alcoholics and all those members are supposed to do, and we all know you feel better after going to a meeting.
Not me. I came out crazier than when I went in, and I was just in my car shaking and crying, and I thought, Christ, I'd be better off in a mental institution, just like the good old days. I didn't know what to do. I went to my sponsor's house. I drove up on his front lawn. He came out. Well, I know why I wouldn't park in the street with the rest of the cars, and I said, I have to talk to you, and I have to talk to you now.
I can't wait to park the car. So he made me park the car in the street. We went in, and we talked. We had a few cups of coffee over the kitchen table, and we talked, and I'm a very pragmatic, practical person. I do troubleshooting in my electrical contracting business, and I look around this room. There's a couple of lights out here I'd like to call to your attention, and they're very simple. You just get the ladder out.
You go up and find out what's wrong. Fix it. Give the guy a bill and go on to the next job. And life sometimes isn't that black and white. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons, and I felt awful. I felt anxious and crazy and depressed, and I didn't know what was wrong. And we talked, and we couldn't put our finger on anything that was wrong, and he suggested after walking around the block a couple of times that I take a four-step, and I said, I don't believe this.
How could he want me to take a four-step, for Christ's sake, after all the years that I'd spent in the Catholic system with all the examination of conscience and confession? That's not a fourth and fifth step. What is? And he seemed rather bored through that, so I laid on the fact that I'd been in the great psychiatric couches of the world, and he seemed rather bored through that one, too. And he asked me if I was an alcoholic, and I said, yeah, I'm an alcoholic.
He said, well, these are the steps you've got to take if you're an alcoholic. What does that mean, the minute's left? And so he cursed me into taking a four-step, which is a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself. And against my better judgment, I took this four-step, and I was able to put in that four-step things that I was never able to share with a Catholic priest in confession because they were too tacky, too sinful, if you will, too bizarre and strange that I'm sure he wouldn't have understood, and I couldn't tell a psychiatrist about because they were too crazy, and you can't let a psychiatrist think you're a little strange, you know, they'll lock you up, so you've got to maintain some sort of semblance of sanity when you're talking to them.
But I was able to put in these things, these deep, dark secrets, things I was, as the book says, willing to go to the grave with, and I was able to put them down and share them with this man in this fifth step. And I didn't think he was going to like me after he heard it all. And he seemed rather bored through it all, and of course he was bored. He heard it all before. I've heard a couple dozen of them.
There's just so much you can do, and there's just so much you can think about, and there really are no big deals. And the longer I'm sober, the more I know there are no big deals,
[00:55:02]
and you can get through literally anything if you simply will not take the first drink no matter what. You just don't take the first drink no matter what. You just don't take the first drink, and you hang on. As Mary Regan says, even if your ass falls off, you just don't take the first drink, and you get through. It'll pass, and that's what happens. The kids were getting into drugs and alcohol, and it was kept away from me.
We had a, as I alluded to, kind of a bad marriage, and we had different philosophies and ideas on how to raise these two sons, and they didn't have a chance in hell of not ending up drug addicts and alcoholics. And that's what both my two sons did. They both went down the same road, only in different divergent ways, I suppose, and they kept it away from me. I had to go down and bail my youngest son out of jail one night when he was 16 years old, and he and some gal were down on the beach with a little bag of marijuana and stuff like that, so the probation officer psychologist lady person said, you know, we decide that we ought to restrict him for a month, and I thought, that's just fine, that's what we'll do, we'll restrict him for a month.
That evening he was at the movies because his mother let him go to the movies that evening. So that's the kind of background my kids had. There was no solidity in the host. There was no continuity at all. It was just, if I said black, she'd say white. And it was just, I don't know whether it was a game or what the hell it was, I don't know, but these kids just went down with it. And I didn't understand all this sort of thing.
It was just bad. The marriage was falling apart. We had little or no communication. I had these terrible financial problems that went on and on and on. I thought it was never going to be any better, but little by little I worked myself out of it, as I said. But finally in, I guess, January of 74, my wife said that she wanted a divorce, she couldn't go on living this way in this sterile household that we were living in.
And so I said, fine. I was delighted. Because I stood in that marriage and let her make the move. I continued to do all the things that I thought that I was supposed to do, even though there was a loveless existence there. And so I still tried to be as good a husband as I could and follow the program suggestions that I had learned here and do whatever I could do. But finally she filed for divorce and I was delighted.
And usually I moved right around the corner, you know, and then reconciled again and tried to recapture what never was. But this particular time I moved 80 miles away from where I had a business, where I had a home, where I had a family. For me it was just like moving to China. One thing that I cannot stand, I cannot stand change. I like things just the way they are. Even if they're horrible, I like them just the way they are because I know the rules and I know what to expect.
And my whole life in the last year has been complete change. Everything is different. But I like things just the way they are, even if they're bad. And this particular time I moved 80 miles away from where I had a business, moved into a little community of Dana Point. And as I was driving down the freeway, I said a prayer that my sponsor gave me and I'll share it with you. It goes like this. God, I have no idea where I'm going.
I do not see the road ahead of me and I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think I'm following your will does not mean that I'm actually doing so. But I believe this. I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in everything I do and I hope I never do anything apart from that desire. And I know if I do this, you will lead me by the right road.
Though I may know nothing about the time, I may seem to be lost in the very shadow of death. I'll not be afraid because I know you will never lead me to face my troubles all alone. And with this I continue on down the freeway. And, of course, I'll tell you about the apartment I wanted. I wanted the business to be run, of which none of which happened. I got a Nashville apartment for a lot less money.
And as I said earlier, I got out of debt, so my business went along fine. And it was a great move. And I just loved it. And I just loved the community that I live in. And it's just heavenly. They've got a little marina and a crashing surf. And it's just absolutely heaven. And I'm just blessed over and over and over and over and over again. But I dated around a little bit. It was different for me because I never really dated.
And I never really did much of anything because I was drunk early on and I never really experienced very much. And here I was single and, you know, one thing after another. And I met a little girl who was helping her dad set up a Palm Springs Roundup. And she had some banquet tickets, and I didn't have very good banquet tickets, so I asked her out. So I got a nice table that evening, and we started to date and see each other, and she
[01:00:01]
came back to Orange County, where she was living, and we dated for a while, and we went to the International in Denver, and a few months later, her dad became very ill, and we sort of split up anyway, and she moved back to the desert. And our natal birthdays, our AA birthdays are right together. Mine is the 6th of January, and hers is the 9th, and her natal birthday is the 20th of August, and mine is the 19th of August.
And so she called me up, and I said, I want to have dinner for our birthday, and I thought, okay, why not? And we just stayed together from then on in, and it was just a wonderful relationship. We just had fun, and we laughed, and went to meetings and movies and little tiny vacations and conventions. Just had a wonderful time, and at the end of that year, she was diagnosed as having a malignant breast tumor, and had a mastectomy, and while she was in the hospital recovering, I said, what are you going to do?
And she said, well, I don't know, I can move in with my mother or this or whatever, I don't know what's going to happen. I said, ah, come on home with me, I'll take care of you until you get better. And so I moved her in with me, and we lived in sin for a couple of, two and a half years, I guess, and finally we got married. We got married on St. Patrick's Day, and had a big wedding, and all the area, ate friends and stuff.
It was just glorious, and we just had a wonderful life. We just had a lot of laughter in our home. We shared with each other, and we have a bunch of kids, I have these two kids, and they're all drunk, and her kids are all loaded and drunk, and it was just no end of fun, I'll tell you that. We just, it was absolutely wild. My youngest son came, called me, they called me from General Hospital in Los Angeles, which is not exactly the finest hospital around, it's a fine hospital medically, but it's not where the better people go, I'll tell you.
And I went down to see him, he was stoned on cheap wine and some angel dust, and he was wheeling this little tiny baby around, it was a neighbor's baby, and somehow the mother miraculously grabbed the child, and Jim spinned around and fell out of the second story window and broke himself all up, and I went to visit him up at the hospital, and I said, Jim, this is no way to live. I said, if I could ever be of any help to you, you know, give me a call.
I said, you know where I am, and we just put it to bed there, and about a year later he called me and he said he needed a job, and I said, well, come on down, but I said, you can come down a day and a point, and I'll put you to work, but there'll be no drinking, there'll be no drug-taking, because I simply can't tolerate it, I don't want to, and I won't do it. And so finally he came down, and of course he uses drugs and drank, but not in front of me.
And he came to the wedding, our wedding, and after the wedding he went out and had a few drinks, and anyway they picked him up for drunk walking. And they put him in jail, and he came back, and he realized he had to quit drinking, and he quit drinking just like that. He did it all in Quaaludes and marijuana. I never found that part in the book, but it's somewhere. And I didn't know any of this. I wasn't aware of any of this, and I said, you know, we've got a great speaker tonight at our home group, Norm Alfie, come on over and listen to him, you'll enjoy it.
And he came and listened, and he's enjoyed the meeting, and John Akerlund talked the following week, and John had been our best man at our wedding. So he came to the meeting, and my son Jim stood up as a newcomer, and I thought, wow, you know, he'll never stay, he can't possibly find it, and whatever. And I just turned him over to a guy who sponsored him, and the sponsor suggested he try it without marijuana and Quaaludes.
And May 1st he'll have seven years on the program, and I'm so pleased for him. Wait, there's more. I'll get down in a minute, there's more. My oldest son, he's got three and a half years, and your tomorrow's speaker is his sponsor up in West Los Angeles, and he's doing a fine job. And it was just great. Colleen had, her oldest daughter was burned out on cocaine, beautiful girl, she looked like a Playboy model, she was just gorgeous.
And she could not get off the cocaine, no matter how much alcohol she put in her system, she couldn't get off the cocaine. And she went up to Marin County, and she tried to get sober up there and couldn't. And so she took a razor blade and slashed her wrists and left herself to die on this lonely beach up in Marin County, and had presence of mind in some way.
[01:05:02]
She went to the phone, she called her girlfriend, and they found her and put her in a hospital and patched her up and put her in a recovery house for a year and a half, which seems to be about normal for the cocaine users. And she got out of there, and she goes to Alcoholics Anonymous, and she has three and a half years of sobriety. And she is a straight A, a 4.0 average in pre-med up at Dominican College.
And it's interesting though, you know, she goes to Alcoholics Anonymous about four or five times a week, and she sponsors people, and she has a sponsor, and she's a GSO representative, and she is vitally involved with Alcoholics Anonymous. Isn't that remarkable? I have another son, Colin's youngest boy, who, he's had a rough time. He's got, I guess, more problems than alcoholism. He's 22, going on 11, and tried to love that boy back to health.
And he had almost a year, a little over a year of sobriety, and then had another suicide attempt. And it was just a sick situation, trying to hold him together, physically hold him and kiss him and love him and hope he would find some way to help himself, and he just hasn't been able to do that. It's been a very tragic journey for him. I say journey, my wife always reminds me it's a journey, it isn't an end, it's a journey.
And it's been hard. Well, in Christ, we've even got a Hare Krishna, they're fun to watch, I'll tell you that. I was sitting in Laguna Beach having lunch with my best friend, Lynn Wilder, and all of a sudden I heard clang, clang, clang, clang down the street, and here they were, coming down the street. And I said, hey, there goes my son-in-law over there. And he said, which one is he? I said, he's the bald guy with a starter rope coming out of his head, you know, it's just absolutely bizarre.
But they're sober, they're having a good time, you know, what the hell. Anyway, but we had a lot of love in our home, we had a lot of activity and a lot of caring and sharing. Our whole marriage was based on Alcoholics Anonymous, it really was. I was very blessed for the years, although short, that we had together. And she went through surgery, after surgery, after surgery, and laetrile, which of course was foolish, and so much radiation they couldn't give her any more radiation, and chemotherapy wasn't working.
They were even talking about the pituitary gland surgery, and it was just bizarre. And her malignancy, her cancer metastasized the bone, and she lived the last several years with bone cancer, and it was absolutely unbelievable. But you know what? She didn't take the first drink. Now, you hear oftentimes in Alcoholics Anonymous, well, I haven't found it necessary for me to have a drink. Well, we found it goddamn necessary many times just to blot out that pain, the mental pain for me and the emotional pain and the frustration and her physical pain, and yet she just somehow lasted to the end.
And even the pain medication wasn't even working any more, and the day after Christmas she passed away. Actually, I'm lost, I'm just absolutely lost. I'm not by nature a depressive person, I am not that kind of a person, and I'll be just around and all of a sudden this wave of depression comes over me, and I'm just so unhappy. I'm just an unhappy person, and interestingly enough, most of my sobriety, I think, and I think it's natural to look into the future and wonder, that check will come in, if we get that job or this person or whatever, and we're living in the future, that we're going to be fine, and we have to learn in Alcoholics Anonymous to come back to the present, live in the now.
We're right here right now. And I've mastered that pretty good, because I kind of stayed out of the results of all the stuff that I got involved with, and I was pretty good at that, and somehow it snuck in that I'm now living in the past. I'm living in the wreckage of my, not the wreckage of my past in the classic sense, but I miss her so much. I mean, she was just, you know, I just want to talk to her and share with her.
I left Bill's talk last night, and Bill, Colleen, we're real close friends, and all of us are very tight and close, and I want to go back to the room, and I want to call Colleen and tell her what a wonderful talk he gave. She's not there, and I want to hear from her again. But I know I'll get through this whole thing. You know, I've got to, and I know I will, the bizarre sense of humor that we have and the crazy stuff we come up with.
And my life is really good if I can just live in the present and know that I'm having a fabulous time here in Nebraska tonight, and I wish it all upon you. Thank you very much.