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Source: DICOBE-00631 – Rick J – FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT – 2002-07-26.mp3 File: dicobe-00631-rick-j-fellowship-of-the-spirit-2002-07-26.mp3 Duration: 01:14:00
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Well, to paraphrase a well-known AA speaker, if I had one meeting left before I was going to go and meet St. Peter up at the Pearly Gates, I would want this one to be it because it has already lasted a lifetime. I am a slowly recovering Al-Anon, and my name is Rick Jituck. Hello, everybody. And as they say in Nebraska, by the grace of God, a program called the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, a fellowship called the Al-Anon Family Groups, and the loving and very firm guidance of the Big Book Black Belt Al-Anon Sponsor, it has not been necessary for me to plan any kind of murder, mine or yours, since April the 10th, 1987, and for that I am extremely grateful. The air is thin here. I get out of breath just walking from my room. Actually, my room, I think, is in another state, actually.
I get out of breath walking from my room just down to the meeting room. But this is my first time in Colorado, so I really am very appreciative for the invitation to come here. It is a beautiful, beautiful state. I must say, it beats the hell out of the Shriners Clubhouse I was in last weekend in Des Moines, Iowa. No offense to the people from Iowa. Great people, but they don't have mountains there. A lot of corn. I'm really quite honored to be amongst some of the speakers that you have here this weekend. Just one of my dearest friends on earth is here today, Mildred, and it's just a real pleasure to share any time I have an opportunity to with my dear friend. Mickey, I'm looking forward to hearing you tomorrow night, and Howard, I heard you once in Toronto, and it was a marvelous, marvelous talk, and I'm quite looking forward to hearing you again tomorrow morning. I'd like to thank Mirian and Dave and JC and all that stuff. Mirian gave us a great drive up from the airport, and it's a good thing. You guys have a wonderful thing going on here. There is a spirit here that is different from other places. As a member of Al-Anon, I must say it is wonderful to be in a place that's Al-Anon positive. I don't need to come up with a shield, say, hello, I'm from Al-Anon, or actually stand up and say, hello, I'm from Al-Anon. There's actually people in the room. It's quite a neat thing, especially on a Friday night.
See, normally the Friday night slot is the AA spot. Normally the Al-Anons, you know, we get Saturday morning at 9 or Saturday after lunch, and Sunday morning at 7 a.m. after the dance, yeah, we'll plug the Al-Anon in there. But you gave me Friday night at 8, well, actually 9. Thank God there were more people. How many states do you have? I know you read the big book a lot. It says, you know, half measures of ALS, nothing, and you certainly took that into consideration when you planned your potluck. What do you bring into the party? Every food known to the human race. But isn't that an amazing thing? I'm not quite sure why it says that in the book, that we approach our illness with no half measures. I'll tell you, I approach my illness with all of the energy I could give it. If I could only approach my recovery with the same energy I approach my illness, I would be getting that rocket to that fourth dimension just like that. Anyhow, it's a hot room. So why don't you take like 60 seconds, stand up and shake your booty a bit, and just kind of get yourself a little rested before I start this deal. I didn't say leave.
[00:05:00]
Okay, class, let's get back to it. I have absolutely no memory of a time before alcoholism. It's been there as long as I can remember. Kind of like my parents. I never remember meeting my parents. They've just always been in my life. Never remember meeting the uncles, the aunts. They were just always there. And alcoholism is the same thing. There was never a time when I remember my mother sitting me down and saying, you know, Rick, your father is an alcoholic. It was just always there. As a matter of fact, I'd like to tell you, at this point, just as a matter of identification, I've had five alcoholics in my life. Two by birth, a father and a grandmother, and a three by choice. I met two of them in Al-Anon. So I'm just here to tell you that tonight, if you're in Al-Anon, and female, and might be wondering if you have a problem with alcohol, ignore the 20 questions of Alcoholics Anonymous. Simply come up and ask me if I find you attractive.
If the answer is yes, run like hell to AA. Just got to have the radar. Must I also have it for the alcoholic women, as I stand before many of you. It's an amazing thing to me, how many times I get to stand in front of all of you, and I can point these out, ba-ding, ba-ding, ba-ding, ba-dang. Just don't have to act on it anymore. Anyhow, I was really quite a nervous little kid. I peed a lot. Still do, as you can see. Threw up all the time. It was the only way I could relieve the pressure. I just, it was. I didn't, and I, you know, I didn't know that there was pressure. I just knew that I needed to pee a lot. And my mother, my mother became a little worried about her son, and so she brought me to the doctor. And they gave me this test, and they put little pinpricks up my arm and down my arm and across my shoulders, and they tested me with some allergies, and they gave me a blood test, and all that kind of stuff. And we sat around for a while, and the results came back, and they said to me, Mother, the message you took, there's nothing wrong with your son. But I peed a lot, and I threw up all the time. And I used to do odd things.
Like I would go into my bedroom closet, and I would take all the clothes out and put them on my bed. And I'd bring a little table into the closet, and a little chair, and I'd put a light over the bar that would hold the clothes, and I'd write a sign that said, Keep Out. And I'd put it on the closet door, and I'd go inside, and I'd close the closet door, and I'd wait for someone to come in. But there was nothing wrong with the message you took, son. I can tell you that in my adult life, I outgrew the closet actually. But in many ways, a big part of my life was saying to you, Keep Out. When inside, I was screaming, Come In. And for whatever it was about me, I could not let you in. I said, Keep Out with my body language, with my eyes, with my mouth, with simply leaving you. That was just part of who I was. But I'd like to tell you this evening that if they had a little test that they could give someone like me, where you could simply put a little pinprick in their arm and it would glow red with the disease that I had, mine would have glowed really red for this disease. Because the disease that Mrs. Jatuck's son had then, and has to this very day, is called alcoholism, the family disease. I do not drink, but I have alcoholism, the family disease. And it is a definable illness. It has symptoms as much as those of the alcoholic. Now, I did have an alcoholic at home. Nobody ever asked me that. You know, I had a big one, my alcoholic, you know, like a pet, came on a leash. You ever hear the alcoholic say, My Al and I? You always hear us say, My alcoholic. I think that's because,
[00:10:02]
you know, we need to have one of you to get in here. How sick is that? God, got to know someone to be an Al and I. Like, you know, the tradition says, you know, there must be a problem of alcoholism in a relative or friend. I always think, well, if the alcoholism isn't a problem, you can't come. But anyhow, we had that at home and, you know, we had this alcoholic at home. And he would do crazy things. I'll just tell you one thing about it. My father used to love to do basically three things. He liked to garden, he liked to drink, and he liked to remove his clothing. And he would kind of start on a Saturday afternoon, and you'd think somebody who kind of had those three little things that he would do, that he'd start gardening in the front yard. But that really didn't happen. He'd start in the backyard kind of early in the Saturday morning, and he'd start drinking beer. And as the sun came up, because it actually does get hot sometimes in Canada, and he would start removing his clothes, and he would drink more beer during the course of the afternoon, more clothes would come off. And finally, he'd reach to the front about mid-afternoon. And he'd kind of come in and want us to slather, you know, like suntan lotion all over him. He was kind of like really a greased pig, actually. And there he's out there. And ladies and gentlemen, you know, who are, you know, no alcoholics like we do from our side, you kind of just know the vision that I'm talking of here. It's like some nudists just say, you know, put the clothes back on. And so there's my dad out front, and he also had an anger problem as well as his drinking problem. And really, he wasn't naked. It was kind of like a thong.
And you just take like some Bermuda shorts and roll them up as high as you can, and get them down as low as you can, and the belly hanging out, and the brown stubby bottle of beer, and the cigarettes, and the gardening, and all the neighbours going, oh, my God. And then sometimes he'd get pissed off at somebody in the street, and he'd go running after them. And he'd catch them. And, you know, there's this lathered-down alcoholic in the middle of the street, you know, the belly flopping, you know, like, and just visioned my mother, oh, you hunk, get in here now. I want you. Just got those juices flowing.
And isn't that amazing? Those of us who've been with alcoholics, as I have, you know, we kind of lie in bed, you know, and they kind of crawl in smelling of alcohol and cigarette smoke and all that stuff, and you kind of go, man, I've never smelled like that before. Did you bring that garbage in with you? It's like, you just don't know what that's like if you're an alcoholic. But there we would lie. I don't know if you did lie there. I'd just lie there. There she is, and, oh, okay, how are we going to handle this? And then, you know, you'd smell the other guy's aftershave, and you'd go, hmm, I really don't want to know this part. But then, you know, there's my dad out there screaming, screaming at somebody, and there we are in the home, looking out the window, afraid to show our face. He's out there doing that. We are embarrassed. Years later, I'm happy to report to you, my dad got sober. That was a happy day. Stopped taking his clothes off in public anyhow. And he got the stickers, and he put them on the back of the car, you know, easy does it, and let go and let God. And along the way, my mother said, for God's sake, Donald, everybody's going to see those bumper stickers. I said, Mom, they've seen everything else. But that's another part of our disease. You know, there we are, like, the whole neighborhood knows the illness. And then health comes in, and we don't want them to know that. What is that about those of us who are the families of alcoholics? What is it? That's us. That's not them. They aren't doing that. They're having a good time. Honest to God. They're just out there drinking, and getting naked, and gardening. They want to come in and go to bed. Us, we're going bananas on them. And ashamed and afraid to show our face. Amazing thing, eh? Along the way, my mother met some kids in Allentown, if you can believe that, in 1967. I was 11 years old. She invited them into my house. They were coming to a conference in Toronto. This active alcoholic home came, these four Allentown members, and an absolutely incredible thing happened to me when I was 11 years old. I met you. And for the first time in my life, I felt that it was okay just to be with people. And they brought me to a conference the next day, and I just enjoyed being there. And I went to an Allentown meeting a few weeks after that, and I heard incredible words. They said, Rick, your father is an alcoholic. He is not a bad man. Listen to that. Rick, your father is an alcoholic. He is not a bad man. He has a disease. He is not a disgrace. Drink that in. As a young boy, I absolutely needed to know that. And that's helped me a lot, because there was like eight or nine more years of drinking to go. And the Allentown program brought me, the Allentown fellowship brought me through that. I can't say that when I was in Allentown, I really practiced the program a lot. I don't know that it's possible for a 12-year-old, a 13- to 15-year-old boy.
[00:15:02]
You're just starting to feel it. Like, I mean, it's surging through you. You say, maybe we were powerless. Like hell! I was really enjoying that. But what it did do was it put me in with a group of people who understood what it was about to live and love, live with and love an alcoholic. My dad got sober when I was 18, 19 years old. That was a great thing. When I was 21, they kicked me out of Allotine.
I loved Allotine. A wonderful thing. A couple of times, my father stood up at these podiums and shared together. What a great thing that was to be able to do, to share with my dad about our own growth and our own recovery. I wish we could do that today. Six years ago, on an Easter Monday, I went up to visit my father. And after 20-plus years of sobriety, I sat down to have dinner with him, and I watched him drink again.
And that hurt. And the relationship that we had been building as me, a person in my own recovery, and he, a person in his, became strained. And I went back, and I phoned my sponsor immediately, and she said, Rick, remember that alcoholism is a cunning, powerful, baffling, and patient, patient disease. And so if you were here tonight, and you were in Alcoholics Anonymous, and you've heard your peers say, hey, buddy, if you go out and drink again, you're not going to pick up where you left off.
You're going to pick up where you'd be if you had never stopped. If you will accept an observation from the son of an alcoholic, your friends in Alcoholics Anonymous are right, because he did not pick up where he left off. He's way, way farther worse than he was when he stopped. It is a particular challenge for me in my own recovery now to be the son to my father that I need to be while he is drinking the way he's drinking.
But anyhow, I reached 21, and they kicked me out, and I found an Al-Anon group. It was full of women. It was kind of like my harem, really. Another guy had come in, you know, and my mouth would say, hey, welcome. My eyes would say, get the hell out of here. Go find your own women. And I kind of hung around in Al-Anon for a while, but God had a lot to do with me before I was really going to start to get this program.
Because I really wasn't doing the deal. I was just kind of hanging around. I hung around for a long time. I really never admitted that there was anything wrong with me. I was always focused on them, because it's easy to focus on them. It's easy to focus on the alcoholics. This alcoholic grandma died when I was 21. What about us? So if you were here tonight and you were in Al-Anon, I want to ask you a very simple question.
What's wrong? Why are you here in Colorado on a Friday night listening to me? Why? Why do you go to your weekly Al-Anon meeting? Why do you get involved in service? Why do you travel from all these incredible states here to Colorado? What's going on with those of us in Al-Anon? I'm here to tell you that if we're here because of them, we're going to die. That alcoholism, the family disease, is a terminal illness unless we treat it.
And if we are coming to Al-Anon to recover from something that someone else has, Al-Anon will not work. It can only work on one person. I've never met, I have met a couple, but I haven't met many. Most people who come in Al-Anon come in with this one focus. How do I get them to stop drinking? We never hear anybody come in Al-Anon and say, I love this person. Their disease is killing them. Is there anything that I can do to help them so that they will be healthy?
We never hear anybody say that. We hear the Al-Anon say, how can I get them to stop drinking so that I will be okay? Right? That's the self-propulsion of the Al-Anon. That's the selfish, self-centered, egocentric approach to life that the Al-Anon takes. We don't drink. We take hostage an alcoholic. We want to protect them. We want to help them because we really love them. No! Because we want to look good.
We want to feel good ourselves. And that's what's wrong with this Al-Anon that you're looking at here tonight. And that is a big, big pill for those of us in Al-Anon.
[00:20:03]
A big one. Because it's so easy to say it's them. Because it's so identifiable. But this is what we have to do. There's no have to. So I'll suggest to you that there's one. That we absolutely have to cross the bridge from the side that says it's them to the side that says, oh my God, it's me. And when we get to the side that says it's me, we have available to us what I believe to be the single most powerful tool for recovery known to man.
And that is the 12 steps. Bill had some kind of inkling about that too when he wrote this book. The page I'm looking for isn't in the book. I'm looking for page 81. At the bottom of 81 it says something like, the program works for both people. Have you got it there? What is the exact quote at the bottom of page 81? Our design for living is not a one-way street. It is as good for the wife as for the husband.
That's in your book, in the AA book. In today's language it's as good for the Al-Anon as it is for the AA. But we have to cross the bridge before we can do it. And that's hard to do. But when you do it, our lives change. And we can have the single promise in step 12 that we will have a spiritual awakening. If we have a disease, it has symptoms and they're identifiable and they're observable. And I'd like to tell you about a few of mine.
Politely we call one of them people-pleasing. It has absolutely nothing to do with pleasing people. Nothing. It has everything to do with getting approval from you so that for a brief moment in time I can feel like I belong on this planet. It's called approval-sucking. I'm going to take that in a bit. Because, you see, I am a selfish, self-centered, egocentric Al-Anon. And really pleasing you has no relevance to me.
However, the way you look at me is of profound importance to me. Or at least the way I perceive you look at me is what is of profound importance. So if I can do things that will get you to approve of me, then I will do whatever it is that I can do. Another thing we say that we have in Al-Anon is politely we say we have low sense of self-esteem. What a load of… that's a load. I wish I had… I've kind of risen up to low self-esteem.
I didn't have any. Just none. I'm talking about the no kind of self-esteem I had was this. That I'd be afraid to go to get my hair cut. I did have some at one time in my life. And what happens when you go to the barber? You sit in a chair and you look at yourself in the mirror and there's a guy standing up behind you and he says these horrifying words. How do you want to look? Well, if you can't stand your image like I couldn't, you can't say I want to look like this.
What I wanted to scream was I just want to disappear. Or I'd go into the store to buy a pair of pants. And they have three mirrors when you buy pants. I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand to use the telephone. I was afraid to call you. For whatever this was about me, I'd be walking down the street and I'd see my full image like, you know, reflected in a store window and I'd look the other way. Or somebody would point a camera at me and I'd make a funny face or I'd run away.
I absolutely could not stand my own image. That is not low self-esteem. That is self-loathing. Nobody ever told me to loathe myself. Nobody ever told me that. But, dear friends, somewhere along the way, that happened. On the outside, I did the best to fabricate and manufacture to look as good as I could, but inside I was a mess. And I was terrified that you were going to see that. But there's other things, too, that this Al-Anon did.
And one of them, the absolute top of my hit parade for Al-Anon symptoms is this one. I was not looking for someone to love me. I was looking for someone to desperately need me. I did not know that. I did not verbalize those things. It was just some kind of unconscious approach to life. I'd been in Allentown for about ten years and I met her. And it was a marvelous thing. And all the Al-Anons kind of always giggle when we talk about meeting that one person.
And the way I met this one person, it wasn't even face-to-face, it was on the telephone. And this was the circumstance. I'd applied, I was a music student, and I was going out to study kind of in the Rocky Mountains in Canada in a little town called Banff. They had a marvelous music school there. And I had applied to go to this music school
[00:25:00]
and I had been accepted. And the program I had applied to go to and was accepted to was a program for brass quintets. I played the tuba. And we had these four other brass players. And the guy who accepted me said, hey, why don't you contact the other four people, have a few rehearsals before you come out to the school, and you'll be that much farther ahead when we start the program. Now, that makes sense.
That's a good idea. I phoned three of the people, we made an arrangement for a rehearsal, and then I phoned her. I had never met her. But over the telephone, I'm here to tell you that my antenna go bzzz right over the telephone line too. Kind of like it was a lust fest. It was supposed to be like a five-minute conversation to arrange a rehearsal. We kind of got into this hour-long, like I was drooling practically, talking to this woman.
And she had done so many things. You see, when your fundamental approach to life is as a nothing, and you meet somebody who has been places that you want to go, and has played music with people that you want to play music with, and has met people that you want to meet, and has done all these things that you want to do, and she's done it, it's kind of like bzzz. And I found that starting to happen to me.
And we started to talk on the telephone, never having met. And one day, I was at my summer job. I worked in the liquor store for my summer job. How about that? The alcoholic father of a guy I knew in Altean got me the gig. So I was at work in the liquor store on this Saturday afternoon, and she phoned me, and she was drunk. And she said, my boyfriend stood me up, I drank this bottle of wine, do you want to come over?
I've been in Altean for ten years. A small little part of my brain went, bad. Another gigantic part of my body went, yeah! No, I didn't know that. I did not know that. I just kind of went, and we started talking more and more on the telephone, and she started telling me about these other things, like horrible things that happened to her, like her father would beat her up. Inside, I'm going, oh really?
I can help you with that. I didn't know I was doing that. But there was something sickly attractive about it. She told me about her brother throwing her through a plate glass window. I said, I'll get the bastard for you. It was amazing. The magic day came, and we were heading off to this school out in Banff, we were sitting in the airport in Toronto, and I was a very sheltered 21-year-old guy, and I phoned around and talked to people about this woman that I'd been talking to on the telephone, and I found out that she'd been around, she was experienced, and I wasn't, at least not with other people.
I said that in Iowa last week, so I went, and so I'm sitting in the airport, excited, and in she comes, and it was an amazing thing. My mother's on my right side, my father's on my left, and she kind of comes in, and guys, she was bouncing. She had this beautiful black hair, and it was shining. She had her suitcases in one hand and her trumpets in the other, and we just kind of watched her. Just kind of come along, and she comes right in front of us, and this big, incredibly beautiful smile, and she says, Hi!
And kind of leans over with her trumpets and her suitcase, and my eyes popped, and my mother went into mild cardiac arrest, you know, my father stopped breathing, and I'd been an adult teen long enough to know I was about to have a spiritual experience, and I definitely wanted what she had, and away we went. And it was powerful. It really was. And that's the thing about SEX. It is powerful. And so we got onto the airplane, and I ordered a beer, and she ordered a beer, and a second, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.
And if there's any one thing I say tonight that you can absolutely take to the bank, it's that she had five beers, because if there's anything an Al-Anon knows how to do, it's cabs. That's right! And a day or two, I got what she had, and it was great. A hell of a lot better than by yourself, I'll tell you that. But you know, but there was still, my sickness was still, well, it was kicking in, I'll tell you, big time, but there was something amazing that was about to happen, and we'd play music, and you know, we'd do it, and then an incredible thing would happen.
We'd have therapy. And she would tell me her problems, and Ricky Duda would fix them. And it felt great, because you see, if your fundamental approach to life is believing that you are a nothing, and somebody is coming to you with their problems, and you are fixing them, Problems, and You Are Fixing Them, and You Have Not Truly Accepted a Higher Power, and
[00:30:00]
You Need a Power, This Became My Power. In a couple of weeks into this arrangement, Mildred calls it a parasitic entanglement. I heard another guy a couple of months ago call it two ticks without a dog. She said these incredible words to me. She said, Rick, I've been seeing a therapist for an awful long time, but I don't need to see that therapist anymore, because now I have you. Because if you're a nothing and she needs me, I'm not a nothing anymore, baby.
I got her. I was kind of walking around, like Bill talks about it in his story, he talks about he took his drink and he felt like he had arrived. I felt like I had arrived. I kind of walked around with my prize, kind of like a dog catches a card or a bone or something. Yeah, look what I got, look what I got. People are going, what's he doing with this person? And when I got home, the guy who was my sponsor in Alteon at the time, he said, Rick, what are you doing with this woman?
And I said, well, Jerry, deep down inside, there's a beautiful person and I'm going to help bring her out. Did I was going to help bring her out because I cared about her? No, I just cared about me. And if I could do that, would you not look at me and say, boy, that Rick is one hell of a guy. That was where I was at. But after a while, I was like a dog that catches a car. What do you do with it when you get it?
You keep it. And you go looking for another one. I was at a teacher's college and I found myself sitting in front of a principal in the inner city downtown Toronto school. We chatted for a little while and he said, Rick, we have a lot of very needy students in this school. Brother, I'm the man for you. If there's anything in Hell and on like me likes, it's a mission. And he said, you know, these kids haven't been able to do a lot.
People really don't think that they can do very much. You know, they don't think they're that smart. And I go, oh, yeah, just you wait. Now, was I doing that because I wanted to prove to those kids that they're really smart and talented? No. I was doing that because I wanted to show the world that Ricky Duda was great. And if you could see that for a brief moment in time, I could believe that I was okay and I would not have to feel the absolute screaming inside.
And so three years later, these kids that couldn't do anything, we put on a show, Fiddler on the Roof. The whole deal. Kids played the music, they sang, we did the lighting, the stage, the whole thing. It's an incredible show, really good show. And in front, the principal called me up in front of a thousand people, came up to talk to everybody. And after the last performance on the stage, called me up out of the pit.
And in front of all these people, he hugged me. And he kind of pushed me back and he looked straight at me. And in front of all of them, he said, Rick, I've made a lot of decisions since I've been the principal of this school. But the best decision I ever made was to hire you. Yeah. It was a good one. Lost it a day for sure. And that's the thing about self-will run riot. And that's what I was. Self-will run riot.
Because I had not truly accepted that there was any higher power. I had some vague school-learned concept of what a god looked like. But I had no experience of a god. And at this time, I had basically stopped going to Al-Anon. And I was becoming my own god. And I was finding things that gave me brief glimmers of comfort to quiet for a moment the screaming that was inside. Because the alcohol didn't do it for me.
And I tried it. I'm one of those sick social drinkers. Mildred and I love going to the symphony together. And after, I think it was a year or two ago, after the opening night of the symphony, you know, it was kind of a really swishy affair. And, you know, everybody's in suits. And they come around, you know, with champagne and strawberries and chocolate and water. So I have a strawberry with chocolate on it.
Mildred has a little glass of water. And I take some water. And she looks at me and says, why don't you have some champagne? I said, because I got to go to work in the morning. She was dumbfounded. That's the kind of drinker I am. The booze just doesn't do it for me. But what does it for me is this kind of stuff. But that's not it. That's not the end of it. How about anger? Anybody here an angry Al-Anon?
We got any angry Al-Anons here? This is the only place on the planet where you stand up and introduce yourself as someone who hasn't had to plan a murder for 15 years. And everybody claps. You talk about planning a murder in a meeting, and everybody goes, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Doesn't happen anywhere else. You show that to somebody at work, and they go, you are one sick son of a bitch. Because we understand what that mania is like.
We understand the insanity that says, I can't stand my life, and the only way that I can see it getting better is to kill you.
[00:35:06]
It's one hell of a definition of insanity, don't you think? You know, we hear the definition of insanity that says, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. That's a good definition. But I do propose to you that there is another definition of insanity. And it is this one. That when we can truly believe that ending your life or ending mine is a legitimate solution to my problem, I am truly insane.
My anger problem kind of came out in really weird ways. I was standing alone at my stove one afternoon. I'm a bachelor, I was making a fried egg in the afternoon. Cracked an egg into the frying pan and I broke the yolk. Aww. And something happened. And I reached in and I grabbed that squishy little egg and I threw it against the wall. And I took the frying pan and I went bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, on the stove.
And I kind of look around and I'm like, there's nobody there. And it kind of started to catch my attention. I'd be getting a glass of water to my water cooler and I was like, I just want to fling this glass against the wall. Oh, and I forgot to tell you, I married that trumpet player. Go figure. Actually, this is the way we got engaged. She said, are we going to get married or what? I said, yeah, I guess so.
Nine months later, I found myself walking up the aisle going, what the hell am I doing? Three and a half years later, she left. Me. I went running back to Al-Anon. And I was like a sick, sick, sick Al-Anon because I had been in Al-Anon for all those years and hung around in Al-Anon. And I kind of went back and forgot to tell people that I'd been away for three and a half years. And I kind of knew the lingo.
We can learn the lingo in Al-Anon real quick. It does not mean we are recovered. It just means that we'd listen and we'd learn the words. But we don't know it. And I wasn't living it. And I was sharing at my meeting one night about step 12. I'm having this marvelous spiritual awakening. I was the group representative in Al-Anon. That's what we call your GSR. I was the group rep. And as I was sharing about this marvelous spiritual awakening and how this higher power was my best friend and how I just hang all my trust on the hook of this higher power, these two people next to me were playing with each other's shoes.
And a rage came out of me in my Al-Anon meeting that I really had not known. And I screamed bloody murder at them that I was sharing. And then I went back to talking in sweet, soft, dulcet tones about this marvelous spiritual awakening. And there was kind of this collective gasp in my Al-Anon meeting. The GR is killing somebody at the back of the room. And they sure didn't want what I had at that moment.
At the end of the meeting, nobody had talked to me. They were afraid of me. But there was a part of me that liked that they were afraid of me. This is how sick my disease is. Because, you see, if you are afraid of me, I have some protection. Because if I can hold on to some of my anger, or if I can just veil it, and if you get too close, I can burst out at you and push you away. Keep out when I want you to come in.
I started having these odd things happen in my meetings. I'd be standing, talking to somebody, and they'd be telling me what's going on in their recovery. And I'm kind of looking at them, nodding, and thinking, I'd like to put my fist right in your face. That got my attention. Then I did this thing in the meeting, and someone said, Rick, you've got to do something about that. And I was finally ready to do it.
So I opened up the book. You know, it says count to ten. So if you've got the kind of rage I'm talking about, count to ten does nothing. It just gets you ten times more angry. One, two, three, and by the time you get to ten, you're ready to explode. And so I sought outside help for my anger and for my rage. And I'm here to tell you that there are incredibly gifted human beings out there to help us with this stuff.
There are. And Al-Anon brought me to the point where I just needed to go seek some help around that. And this guy did a lot of stuff with me, and I found out the root cause of my anger and rage. Because you see, in actual fact, my dear friends, I was not angry and I was not rageful. I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified of you and of life. And the only way, because I had not accepted a higher power, and it was self-will run riot.
The only way that I could find any semblance or any perception of protection was to be angry.
[00:40:02]
And that's what it was for me. Knowing that, the program has really helped me to get through it. So I'm here to tell you tonight that I haven't felt like smacking anybody in the mouth for a long time. So please do come up and have a little chat with me if you feel like it. I promise I won't hit you. I'd just like to end this section with this one little thing. Remember that anger and rage has two sides.
Homicide and suicide. Two other things, too. I love being a victim. It's sweet. Being a victim is just really one of the most sick, sweet things you can do. You just kind of wallow around in this, and it's really quite pathetic. You know, there I was, like a 35, 36, 37-year-old man, blaming everything in my life on my father. And the sad thing is I found many people who would just kind of go along with that.
That's okay, that's okay. Man, if you find someone like that, run from them. What we need is someone to say, Hey, don't you think it's time you took responsibility for your own actions? I was a whining victim. You know what the definition of whining is? Anger. Escaping through a very small hole. And that was Ricky Duda. Right here. That's what my sponsor calls me. Ricky Duda. Had some other things.
I was a martyr. A martyr is just a victim with a mission. Controlled everything around me. See, control is just a really fancy word for I'm terrified. If I can control everything around me, I don't have to fearfully identify what's going on. And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on. And all these people are drinking around me, and it has absolutely nothing to do with my problems. As a matter of fact, I am selecting them because of who I am.
I am not who I am because of them. As a kid, I was affected by alcoholism. That is true. But I am now afflicted with a disease, and that is called alcoholism. A family disease, and that's why these 12 steps can work. But they can't work alone. For a little too long, I sat down and kind of BS'd myself that I was practicing this thing alone, and I was practicing it with an idiot. The seminal moment in AA's history was not when Bill kind of saw that white light come through when he took his last drink.
The seminal moment is when he met Bob in that gatehouse. And that's when it started, when one met another. And until we can really work with another human being, there is no way to recover from these things that I'm talking to you about. Because don't you ever dare tell anybody or help somebody reach the point of knowing what's wrong if there is no solution. Because basically what I've been talking to you about is step one, that my life was, I am powerless.
Absolutely powerless, and I was seeking power in every place other than in the right one. And my life was absolutely and totally unmanageable. And thank God there is a solution for that. But the solution must begin with me saying these words to another human being. Will you be my sponsor? It has to start that way. And I was without a sponsor for a long time, and Mildred actually has introduced me to my sponsor.
I have a long-distance relationship with her. I know that our stuff says men sponsor men and women sponsor women. But what it goes on to say is, but what really happens is that people sponsor people. And I was without a sponsor for a long time, and I was getting sick, as I've described to you. And I needed someone to work with, and I'd kind of come up with this definition of who I wanted to be my sponsor.
I had to be a man, I had to live close by, I had to be involved in service, I had to be all this and this and this and this. And I phoned up this one guy who kind of fit my bill, and he said, Gosh, Rick, it's good to hear from you. I haven't been to an Al-Anon meeting for a while. Well, I'm here to tell you that if you're looking for a sponsor, there's a few requirements. One of them is that they have a home group.
That they must go to Al-Anon. Or A, I guess, if you're in A. But they must. And the second requirement for a sponsor is that they have one. I absolutely love it. When I talked to my sponsor, and she said, I was talking to my sponsor. A couple of years ago, I went down to visit my sponsor who lives 1,200 miles away from me. I went down to visit her around New Year's, and I said, you know, I'd love to go see your sponsor.
So we went over to see her. She lives in the south, and her skin color is different than mine. I'll tell you that. And we had a great chat and took a picture. And I have it on my mantle. My sponsor, my granny sponsor, and me. People come in and say, who's that? I say, my granny. They look at me and go, it's my granny. Because we have that. We have that line of sponsorship. We have people who have practiced a program, and they have passed it on to somebody.
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[01:00:01]
a made the commitment, a year, and you know it was an incredible thing. I started to have friendships with women and I absolutely knew that there's going to be no playing around here, there's gonna be no coming on to anybody, it was just, I was gonna, I was gonna try this out. But again in my mind I thought, you know, after one year, one year and one second, and she's gonna come and ha ha, we got it.
Well, God had a totally different plan for me because one year was up and nothing happened. I had some good friends. I was living alone. And a second year went by. And a third year went by. And a fourth year went by. I started to get a little nervous. My sponsor said, if this is meant to happen for you, God will allow that to happen. You just continue doing what you need to do to become the best human being you can be.
Two years ago, I was at an Al-Anon thing in Toronto, sat in a chair in the back of the room. A person came and sat beside me and I kind of looked over and went, all right. And I simply reached out my hand and I said, hi, my name's Rick. She said, I know who you are. I like that. And that's all I did. And then six, and I didn't do another thing because it was very, very important for me and remains important to me to this very day that we respect our rooms in the sanctity of what it is that we do here. This is not a place to pick people up.
We do meet people here. I heard a guy say it this way last weekend. He said, you know, if you're coming to Al-Anon to meet people, the odds are good, but the goods are odd. So don't come here to meet people. I tell you, we come here to meet God. Six weeks later, I met her again and we had a little chat. And again, I was not going to use our program to pick anybody up. So I phoned a friend of hers and I said, would you mind phoning Lise and asking her if I could have her phone number?
And this is not an Al-Anon call. Direct, direct. I got a call back a few days. She said, yes, you can call. Well, I called and of course, you know, I thought the celibacy would end immediately. And in my speech, she says, no, you still have to wait. God, because now, now you have to develop a friendship with someone you're interested in. God, does this ever end? And I'm here to tell you that that again was the most amazing thing, because I have never met a single person in my life who said that they've gone too slow in a relationship. I've met many, many, many, many, many people who have gone too fast, me included.
So we've taken our time in a slow, loving, beautiful, healthy relationship is developing. A few weeks ago, we celebrated our two year, two years to our, since our first date. And I'm really, really happy about that. And it's, I don't know where that's going to go, but I can tell you that I believe it's a healthy relationship because my sponsor invited the two of us to come and share at a conference on having a healthy relationship.
And my father, who is drinking today, but was not always, and I wanted to really have that relationship with my dad. And as a man, I, I responded to my father always as a boy. And as the older I got, I was uncomfortable with responding to him as a boy, but it's going, looking for approval all the time and all that kind of stuff. And along the way, it just dawned on me that I need to be a man with my father. And that's what he wanted.
And I needed to spend time with my dad as a man who's recovering. I wanted to have a relationship with him. And so I started to say, you know, why don't we try doing some things together? And my father is a great outdoorsman. And he said, well, you know, let's do a little bit of canoeing. So we took a one-day canoe trip and it was really, really great. And then we took a two-day one and, you know, that was fabulous. And of course, half measures avail us nothing.
So I said, well, you know, let's try a really good one. Let's go for 14 days. So he said, sure, let's do that. Not just some little dinky thing around where we live. I said, let's go like so far north that the sun doesn't set. Good idea. And so we paid for this trip and went away. And it was like four planes to get there. It's in the Northwest Territories. And we were so far north that the sun did not set. And this tiny little plane landed on the shore of this river, unloaded all the stuff and said 14 days that way. And the plane took off. And there we were, my dad and I and a guide and another fellow, two canoes,
[01:05:03]
four people. And I think, man, I'm going to bond with my dad. So, you know, now it's one thing to go away for a day or two or, you know, to kind of talk to dad. But, you know, when you haven't lived with somebody for a long time and all of a sudden you're with them 24 hours a day for 14 days in a row, you start to find out things that you forgot. So we're in this canoe. Now, we were going down this raging whitewater river. The first half of it was, you know, relatively calm, but the bottom half was murderous. It's so, so, like the water was so high, you had to put these skirts over the canoes so you wouldn't swamp. And so the deal was that in the first half of the trip, they taught you how to do some of the manures to get through this wicked whitewater at the second half. And one of the things you have to do in whitewater is you have to make a, you have to stop in the canoe. And the canoe doesn't have any brakes. So you need to kind of, you need to do this thing called an eddy turn. So basically, you're going down the river, you do a few strokes and bang, you kind of turn 180 degrees around and you float into the shore. My dad's at the back, I'm at the front. And he's kind of barking, telling me directions about how to do the eddy turn. So for one or two days, that's okay. But after the third day, I know how to do the eddy turn. Do I say that? No. But am I getting angry? You bet. But I just keep stuffing it down. So day four, day five, day six, dad's telling me how to do this eddy turn. And finally, you know, if you're like me, it kind of builds up enough. And one day, this one time, he says, you know, crossbow over here. And finally I turn around and said, I know how to make a goddamn eddy turn. And he kind of just says, oh, I love you. I go, what? What are you trying to tell me that? And I'm pissed. You know, like my sponsor says the octopus is on my face. And I can't get it off. So for the rest of this trip, I am mad. I'm looking at this thing. There's no phone for anybody to call. There's no eddy turn in this stupid, useless book. Anyhow, nothing. It's on me and I can't get it off.
I get home. I phone my sponsor. She says, how was your trip? And I go in this litany of how bad this trip was and all these rotten things my father was doing. And finally I stopped to take a breath and she jumps in. And she says, you mean to tell me you just spent 14 days in the most beautiful country, beautiful place on the earth and there was nothing good about it? Yeah. So she gave me an assignment. A good sponsor gives assignments. Mine gives me lots of them.
She says, you will write down over the next week all of the good things about the trip. Okay. Thought about that. Wrote it down Monday before I called her. And you know, I found some amazing. I found some. And so I read them to her. I said, hey, I got them and here are some of them. I said, you know, my dad helped me raise some of the money, helped me pay for some of the trip. It was an expensive trip. I said, that's a good thing. And I said, you know, my father is an incredible outdoorsman. My dad knew more about the geography, about the weather, about the plant life, about the animals than the guide. He was teaching the guide about that stuff. And his son was proud of him. And his son forgot that. My father was over 60 years old when we were doing this trip. And it, it challenged me. The guide could not believe my father was 60 years old doing a trip like that. But then something else happened. See, I'm afraid of heights. And one of the activities on the trip was to stop, have a little bit of lunch and hike up a mountain. I went, I don't know why, I was unconscious. Half, we get halfway up the mountain to stop. The other guys are standing around admiring the view and I'm going too far, pal. And so after the break was done, the other three guys, the two other guys start going up. They say, are you coming? I'm frightened.
I'll be real honest with you. I'm frightened. And I say, no, I think I'm going to go down. And there was an incredible magic moment that happened with my father. He looked at the other guys who were going up and he looked at me and he said, I'm going to go down with Rick. And my father took a little bit of walk down and he said, Rick, come on down this way. Another little bit and he said, Rick, come on down this way. And my dear friends, my father led me down the mountain. I forgot about that because I'm so blinded by all that other stuff. So I said that to my sponsor and she said, I want you to write him a letter.
She did not say, I want you to write a hate letter. She said, I want you to write a love letter to your father and thank him and tell him all those things. I said, do I have to mail it? She said, yes, you do. Action and more action. And so I wrote it out and I said, dad, thank you. Thanks for the help of me with the money. I was so proud of you that you knew so much. I hope I'm in the kind of shape you're in when I'm 60. And thanks dad for leading me down the mountain. This was an incredible trip and I feel so much closer
[01:10:01]
to you as my father. I said, dad, I do love you. And I sent it away. And as I was walking up to the mailbox and to put it in, I said, this is the action. This is doing it. This is doing the deal because he's going to get this. A few days later he called me and he'd been crying. And he said, son, I got your letter. He said, Rick, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever received in my life. He said, this is a real keeper. He said, when I'm feeling down, he said, I'm going to take this out and just have a read of this. And you know what my dad does today? He has the letter in the, in the, in the little photo album and he shows it to people. He said, look what my son gave to me. Then he started to drink again and I didn't know what to do. And my sponsor said, Rick, you have to be the best son to your father that you can be. And I stopped again, seeing that my father was a talented, wise, intelligent, smart, gifted human being who loved his son. It's because you see my father's an alcoholic. He is not a bad man. And at the beginning of June, my dad sings in a choir. And I went to see a concert of my dad singing in a choir with these other 50 elderly men. And I saw a man. I did not see an alcoholic. I saw someone who is musically talented, who is energetic, who is kind and loving to people around him.
God allowed me to get through the vision of the alcoholic to the person. And Al-Anon does that for us so, so beautifully. I have discovered a power here. And I am not it, as we all know that. There is a power in this universe. The God that I have come to know today is so far removed from the God I thought I knew before that I can't even make an A to a B comparison about that. But there has been an experience with a power in this universe that is working for me. And that has happened through doing the things that my sponsor said to do. She said, Rick, you cannot think your way into health. You have to act your way in. There is a picture that hangs in a chapel off the side of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, England.
It is a picture of a traditional robe figure standing at the door with the right hand raised knocking on the cottage door. In the left hand, it is holding a lantern. The top of the picture says, the light of the world. There is a conference in Southern California called the South Bay Roundup. At the end of each of their meetings, they ask everyone to stand and have a moment of silence. And they say the Lord's Prayer there. But to hear the Lord's Prayer before they say the Lord's Prayer after the moment of silence, they hear this. In the picture that is in the chapel off to the side of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, England, of the traditional robe figure standing with the door hand knocking on the door of the cottage, says this underneath. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come into him and have supper with him and he with me. And as we all know, there is no doorknob on the outside of the door.
It's on the inside. And our God is knocking. And at the South Bay, they do that each time. Listen for the knock. Listen for your own knock. Because God is there. God will bring us to sanity. And remember this one very simple thing. Our problem is a problem of the mind and we can't fix it with the mind. We need to act our way into right thinking. God bless you all. Thanks for inviting me to Colorado.