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Source: Rich B – Came 2 Believe (2023) – Steps Two and Three – Date Unknown.mp3 File: rich-b-came-2-believe-2023-steps-two-and-three-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:58:53
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Good evening everybody, my name is Rich, I'm an alcoholic, and I'll tell you, if one, two, people cancel and you're a waterlogged, bald, deadhead guy from Ocean City, Maryland, you get invited to something like this, and I'll take it, I'll take it, because I'm just glad to be here and see a bunch of my buddies and mentors and pals, and I'll tell you how burnt out I am, I called David like five days ago, and I'm like, because I put on my calendar for some reason, came to believe New Jersey, and I'm from Ocean City, Maryland, and I go, well, you got to give me an address or something, because I could drive, I don't even need a plane ticket, this is a close one, and he's like, what are you talking about, right, and I'm like, you didn't tell me a hotel or an address or anything in New Jersey, and he goes, well, it's in Connecticut, and I'm like, well, now we're talking like 12 hours, I'm going to write, and I'm trying to, you know, figure out what happened, and I'm also not, I don't know about you, you don't just admit you're wrong right away, right, I'm like, so are you like originally from New Jersey or something, and I swear I said to ask you, I'm like, are you from New Jersey, like why would I have written that on my calendar, and he's like, no, no, pretty much always, you know, up here, and after like a couple of minutes of this, I go, well, I guess I'm wrong, right, which is like a tough sentence, you know, at any point in sobriety, but guess what, I'm glad to be wrong and to get to be here, right, and I get to talk about like the name of the conference, right, steps two and three, and came to believe something, which is really the step, could say, right, came to believe something, we don't really care what, that's pretty neat, and then made a decision to do some things we're going to talk about, but I picked that reading, I think it was Bob could, I don't want to clear it up if I'm wrong on this, and I might be, but to me, it doesn't matter who said stuff, it's that I remember it and apply it in my life, but I think there was, there was a old lawyer named Clint Hodges that would refer to those as the formal terms of surrender, and in my line of work, what you just heard read to you is a contract, that's all contractual language, and that makes sense to me, right, like if I do this, I get this, if I don't do this, no this, right, not going to happen, if I don't, right, you know, I got to stay close and perform work well, right, and if I don't stay close and perform work well, I can't expect, you know, these cool things, and as I look around the room, and the faces, and the people that I've met, and where I've met you, my sobriety date is August the 30th of 04, so that puts me in my 19th year, which makes me a baby compared to half of the people here, and there's probably some people here in like months, and stuff going, my God, that's terrible, I'm sorry you've had to stay sober that long, right, which is what I was thinking when I was new, I'm like, they're bragging about it, like, you know, and I felt like bad for you, right, like you don't even know how bad that is, you're saying it as if you're like proud of it, and I guess, you know, when I look around, my buddy that introduced me, he's like, man, I haven't seen you in years, and you said that sober crew, that time we were sober in Jamaica, I mean, that's a weird sentence, right, you're not supposed to be sober in Jamaica, right, but we were, you know, and I've got to do some fun sober things in Las Vegas with this crew, and, you know, boat cruises, and all, you know, we can do anything sober once we make this deal, which is what I think the third step kind of is, is this deal that I'm going to live life a different way.
And I guess I've got to get started where the formulative points, because steps one, two, and three were really a very simple thing between my sponsor and myself, and the prerequisite for steps one, two, and three to make them really simple, right, where I don't have a, the only thing that makes steps one through three difficult is my resistance to them. Right, it's really the only thing that makes any step difficult, but particularly one, two, and three, because there's not that much to do, it's like an intellectual fight, where I want to intellectualize things, and understand things, and concede things, and I don't like it, I mean, it took me ten minutes to concede that he wasn't from, are you sure you're not from New Jersey, right, like he doesn't know where he's from, right, I'm going to convince him that he might be from New Jersey.
[00:05:25]
He still might be wrong. So I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and neither of my parents drank, I have one sister, she never drank, no aunts and uncles drank, no grandparents drank that I'm aware of, my parents love me to pieces, but I couldn't really feel it, I don't know if anybody's, if that makes sense to anyone. I mean, they just, I also know from some steps other people are going to talk about, and that's one of the fun things to be, I like challenges, you get kind of sick of telling your story, right, and it's kind of neat to be asked to talk about something, but not something else, and to me the 12 steps all kind of mesh together, but at these things you don't want to step on the next dude's toes, right, like that's their step, stay out of that step, right, which is kind of hard when you're talking about certain steps.
Just rein it in, stay on task. But in that amazing family, they were not particularly anything in the realm of the spirit, which is interesting, because they were incredibly moral and had a bunch of integrity and really good people. And I remember getting off the school bus, and much like a lot of my life, if I would have known that one day I would be doing this, which is sort of like an AA book report, right, but the problem is I read the book when I was in like third grade, called My Life, and I didn't take notes when I read the book, because I didn't know that I'd have to be doing the book report, right, when I'm coming up on 50, which is next month, and that's probably not going to happen.
That's probably another problem, but anyways. I think I was in second, third grade. I remember hearing some kids on the school bus talking about God. We never talked about God in my family. We'd never been to any particular church or place or spiritual thing, and we lived in the suburbs. We were not, you know, loaded, but we weren't broke. We were like a middle-of-the-road family, and we were about 20 minutes outside of Baltimore City, which can be a pretty rough place, but where we lived was like horse farms and pretty mellow place, and I remember sitting at dinner, and we had family dinner every night at 6 o'clock, and that should tell you something, right?
We'd come home, get off the school bus, play in the yard. We had this big black bell that my dad would ring, and we'd come running from wherever we were to dinner, and that's pretty cool to look back on, and I remember sitting at dinner on that night, and I said, hey, dad, these kids on the school bus were talking about God. What's God? And my father said, do you know down in Baltimore City where things are really rough, and those folks are struggling day to day, and there's a lot of shootings and killings, and people are just trying to get by?
God is an idea that makes them feel good that when they die, they're going to go somewhere, and it gives them something to look forward to, and it gives them hope. It's a wonderful thing, but you come from a nice family. You don't need to worry about any of that. Wow. And that was the last I really thought about it until I got to AA, and that started off on my – I listed that as one of the things that, you know, where my dad had screwed me, right, on my four-step, you know, dad, this, that, right, right.
And now if I was writing one of those gratitude lists that Kelly was talking about, it would be on there, because you know what I've heard you guys talk about almost incessantly at 18 years' worth of AA meetings? I'm a recovering Lutheran. I'm a recovering Catholic. And you guys have had to suffer through years and years of unlearning, of getting rid of old ideas, of getting rid of old wounds, of getting – very real things that have happened in your life.
I'm, you know, joking, but I'm not discounting, you know, that experience. And I have heard it over and over and over, probably more than not, people that have come into Alcoholics Anonymous with some type of spiritual slash religious wound where they've had a lot of unlearning to do from whatever went wrong.
[00:10:11]
And I'm really grateful. I had none of that. And I came into this place more or less – the Latin phrase would be tabula rasa, right, a blank slate. And that's a pretty good way to come in to Alcoholics Anonymous is with no ideas about any of it other than that my life is a disaster, right, and that drinking has ruined it, you know, every area, every relationship. And if anybody in here has any ideas, right, I'm kind of open to them.
That's a pretty good way to come into alcohol. And I could thank my father for that, right, who I started off angry with. And I like talking about that because there's a lot of steps in between coming in angry and being on somebody's gratitude list. And while I was listening to Kelly, you guys have taught me all kinds of – well, everything that I know or have experienced spiritually has been in here for me over the last 18 years and changed.
And one is that word enthusiasm. And you didn't have to hear anything Kelly said. You probably did because she's loud like me. But hopefully you could feel the enthusiasm, right? And what enthusiasm is is a Greek word, and en is within, and theos is God. So when you're – what you're actually experiencing is the God within Kelly, right? And when you say that person is an enthusiastic member or I can feel their enthusiasm, you're feeling the God in them coming out, right?
Which is what all of the steps are about is letting the God within us out, right? We're not letting anything in around here. We're getting rid of enough of us, right, so that God can come out and touch and help those around us, right? This is a letting God out program. We were already born with everything we need. We just decided to pack it all down in there with some alcohol and drugs and whatever else we all did, right?
Pomp, calamity, circumstance. So anyways, I have always admired your enthusiasm, and I love to be near you for that reason. And I think people can just feel that despite anything we say. So thanks for being an enthusiastic member of AA. With that said, my journey progresses through school, and I start drinking, and I think seventh grade. Some of the older kids said, do you want to skip class and do some drinking?
I'd never skipped any class. I'd never done any drinking, but it was the older kids that asked. So I said, you bet, as if I'd been doing it all along. And they said, what do you drink? And I said, bourbon. I don't know where I got that or why I said it, right? And I wished that I would have had bourbon. And again, this is proof that I didn't know I was coming to Connecticut. My buddy, my oldest sponsee, when I admitted that I screwed up and was coming to Connecticut instead of New Jersey, he lives here in Hartford.
I've sponsored this guy for 18 years. I started sponsoring him when I had like six or seven months sober. And miraculously, he's sober, which shows how important we really are, right? And sponsoring, that was one of my favorite, well, they kind of got me at lunch. Bob was talking about, you know, interacting with Clancy the other day. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And it turns out he got a dog that he named Clancy.
And I'm thinking, like, you're channeling the dead or something, right, that you mentioned. But one of my favorite Clancy things is he would say that the 12 steps and sponsorship, it's just kind of a ploy, right? It's a ruse that really our job as a sponsor is just to keep the monkey busy until the miracle happens, right? And to think that this guy, Chris, is up here in Hartford having a nice life because anything I could have offered was six months sober is just comical, right?
But you know what I did is what we do, right? Come on, we're going to read together. We're going to do the steps together. We're going to get in the car. Here we go, right? And 18 years later, I get to have dinner with him, right, before hearing Kelly in Hartford, Connecticut. And that's pretty cool. And I guess I better get back to the school bus. So. So that day we're passing this peach schnapps around, right?
[00:15:05]
digression is it sucks to have to come somewhere and admit that my first drink was peach schnapps, right? Chris, who's now, you know, a Connecticut guy, that means he drives something that's he for real has his Alaskan Husky in the back, right, which is what I think of, right, of the Northeast. My other friend, Sandy, used to tell a story, too, about the Northeast, the New England area, where people would say, hey, Sandy, where's New England? And he'd go, oh, you know, we're the upper right part of the United States that looks down on the rest of the country.
He went to Yale and, you know, that kind of stuff, and I was just following the Grateful Dead. Anyways, I love it up here. My wife is from Brewster, Massachusetts. So she's one of your peeps. But that's what I had, was peach schnapps, there was no bourbon, there was no tough New England cold winter drinking. Weenie boy has peach schnapps, right, with a couple of guys, and we're passing it around. There's a girl on the school bus that I really like, her name is Nikki, and up to that point I didn't know how to talk to Nikki or any other girl, it wasn't like Nikki was unique.
There was a rule on the school bus, and I always check the different places. I don't know if it's a Connecticut thing, but in Maryland, there's an unwritten rule on school buses that there's a social hierarchy where the older kids sit in the back of the bus. And if you go to the back of the bus, you take a beating. And my guy's name was Reed Carter, and his job was to just beat my tail for something every day.
And it didn't take much, he was good at his job, too. On this day, though, I got a bunch of these peach schnapps in, and I get on the school bus, and I'm going to sit next to Nikki. And it's just in my head, and for some reason I intuitively know how to handle the situation with women that used to baffle me. And I'm walking to the back of the bus to sit next to Nikki. I mean, and Nikki's hot. She looks like a lot of the women sitting here tonight, right?
And she's good looking. And I start to go back to sit next to Nikki, and Reed starts to get up to give me my daily beating. And in his defense, he was not all the way to his feet, but he was starting to stand up. I gave him everything I had in my little body, and he went down, and he went out. He was actually out cold. And I sat next to Nikki, and I'm looking at Nikki. Nikki's looking at me, and I'm looking at Nikki, and Nikki's looking at me.
And there's like this long overdue silence on that school bus, like probably 13, 14 years worth of overdue silence. You guys remember this? Like that feeling of like, finally you know who I am, right? And we got to Nikki's bus stop, and she leaned over, and she gave me this little kiss that was like half on my lips and half on my cheek. And it was different than when my mother and my aunts kissed me.
Like I felt this in my toes. This was a big deal, right? And then I went inside that house when we got to my bus stop with my wonderful family and that mother and father and morality and integrity and rules and sobriety. And I'm falling down drunk. And I was in big trouble. They left me in the bathroom to be sick all night long. You know why they left me in there, right? That was to teach me a lesson.
That was going to become a common theme in my life. A whole lot of well-meaning people were going to try to teach me a lesson. And I don't know what that's all about, but I will tell you that as I look back through some of these other steps, because that's what they're designed to do. And it turns out that there are a lot of people in my life that were well-meaning, that all they wanted to do was to give me a little friendly nudge down the road of life to help make life a little easier for me.
That's it. And as I look back through this AA process, anyone that has ever tried to help me, I perceive it that you're trying to hold me back. You're trying to tell me how to live my life. You're trying to tell me what to do. Back off. This is my life. You let me live it. And I do know that the book talks about defiance, one of our outstanding traits, right, of the alcoholic. It sure fits me as far back as I can remember.
And I get drunk as much as I can through high school, which in Maryland means cornfield drinking. We get kegs of beer that you pay somebody to get, or there are certain places that will take a pathetic fake ID from a ninth grader. I look at ninth graders now, and they look like such little kids. And I'm like, they were selling us kegs of beer. But anyways, we get kegs of beer, and you build a bonfire in a cornfield, and everybody stands around.
[00:20:06]
Maybe you get lucky in a cornfield. Who knows? But they were exciting times, right? And I'll tell you, I mean, that should have told me something, right? If you could stand around with a metal keg of crappy beer in a cornfield with red plastic cups, and somehow that's entertaining for like six, eight hours, right? Like, your relationship with alcohol might be a little weird. I mean, it's like children of the corn.
I mean, you're just in a dark cornfield drinking crappy keg beer, right? And I thought it was the most glorious thing that I'd ever participated in. And I still have these amazing memories of cornfield drinking, standing around the keg, right? And I love, I had a CJ, that was a manly thing. I'm happy to report this to Connecticut. I did, my first car was a CJ7 Jeep, another super cool thing my dad did.
And I discovered every super cool thing my dad did in the steps, by the way. Because when I got here, like I told you, he was just a jerk, right? Guy left, never looked back, left my mom, left us kids. Son of a bitch, you know, blah, blah, blah. When in fact, the guy taught me tons of amazing things and did lots of amazing things, right? And I decided that I didn't like the way he divorced my mother.
That's the truth of it, right? You kind of see things different on the flip side of these steps than going in, and that's neat. And we call that a weakening around here. And if you want to get super weird, you call it spiritual awakening. Hello, hello, hello, hello. And that'll freak the newcomer out if you start. But, and what my dad did that I look back that was so cool, now I'm a dad. And I have an eight and a five year old, and I think about some of these things, and what do I want to do, and I'm getting to employ, you know, some of my dad's techniques.
And he said, you know, for your first car, you can get whatever you want. If you save up 50 grand, I'll give you 50 grand, and you get a Ferrari. You save up two grand, I'll give you two grand. You know, you get a Hyundai or whatever. And I remember working at an Ace Hardware where they delivered pallets of two by four before they were wrapped and stuff the way they come into Home Depot. And a couple of convicts and me, who my dad signed a work waiver, I was 14 and a half saving to be 16 to get that.
I mean, I wanted a car when I was 16, I knew that. And I would unload and stack two by fours with like full grown men. Looking back now, I know that they were, you know, the tax, and those are the jobs you get when you get up and you get blisters and, you know, splinters, and I'd come home, and I'm 14 and a half, and my back's hurting. And I'm going, dad, this is a terrible job. And he goes, good. There's two ways to make a living in this world.
One's with your brain, and the other's with your back. Maybe you ought to pay attention at school. Part of working is learning what you don't want to do. That's just as important as learning what you do want to do. And I'm going, hmm, I didn't think that was such a cool lesson back then. But my daughter, my one daughter, has this obsession with these things called American Girl Dolls. Anybody know?
Yeah, they're like dolls, like any other doll that they charge like 10 times more money, right? And she goes, dad, can we go to Tyson's Corner, Virginia? I want to get the, you know, whatever the girl's name was, American Girl that just came out. And I said, well, I'll tell you what. If you save half, I'll pay the other half. And I'm like, did I just say that? I'm like, I'm channeling that guy that I didn't used to like, right?
So I get this CJ. I worked all summer, right? Stacking two by fours, splinters, hands. This was something precious to me. I saved $3,000. My dad matched it, and I got a CJ7 Jeep. They're the ones with the narrow wheelbase. I had big tires on that thing. No door, no roof, because those are for sissies, right? If you're going to be a man in a jacked-up Jeep, you got your leg up on the side, right? When you're driving, right?
And chicks dig you, right? And you don't even wash it. Like, the more mud on it, the better, right? And I'm that guy, right? And I got the keg in the back and a couple of buddies, and we come around a corner too fast, and that thing rolls three times. And I had my three best friends in there, and boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. And everybody's got cuts and bruises. One guy broke an arm, but everybody was more or less okay.
I look back on that, and apparently my definition of okay
[00:25:02]
is like anything short of dead, right? But really, my truthful thought of that, and I talked about it all the time, is I would say, did you see that? That was some good drunk driving, right? I just rolled that car three times, boom, landed on my feet. That was like NASCAR. I mean, that thing rolled. I walked away from the car. Like, there was this sick pride in the fact that I rolled a car, and three of us walked away.
I think a normal person might have seen the hand of God somewhere in there, or at least considered themselves lucky, right? They wouldn't have claimed that. You know what I'm saying, when we claim something? That's kind of what a resume is, right, is when we claim things that aren't ours. I got straight A's. Oh, really? With that brain you practiced building, right? Not so much, probably, right? And a whole lot of events like that happened, where I drank as often as I could through high school, through college.
I get in all kinds of trouble. My parents leave me in jail for the weekend because my father and mother were good. Parents, and they would say, you get yourself in, you get yourself out. We didn't raise you like that. You only got one phone call. I wouldn't waste it on me because I'm not coming. Call somebody that might come get you. And they held to that. So they weren't, I didn't know what this was as a teenager, but they weren't enablers, as I've learned around here.
That's for sure. I end up going to the University of San Diego. I get in a bunch of trouble there. All kinds of stuff happens. Federal prison amongst them. Eventually I wind up in Alcoholics Anonymous. Federal government had taken everything, houses, cars, things I thought I acquired along the way as the result of career choices I made. And I'm coming to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I don't like Alcoholics Anonymous.
I don't like the people in Alcoholics Anonymous. We had a lady in my area named Janine, who I really hated, and I hated Janine because you're laughing. You know who you hate in AA. If you don't hate somebody, you're not a good person. And I hated Janine. You know who you hate in AA. If you don't hate some people in AA, you're not coming to enough meetings. Your first four steps are going to probably have some people out there and stuff and childhood in it, but pretty much every inventory after your first two years is all AA people.
It's things that happened in AA, and who screwed you in AA, and who's not acting right in AA, and those people over there think that they're 12 and 12. No, the big book people. The stuff we get ourselves wrapped up in. But AA resentments are great resentments because that means you're in enough AA to care. People that don't get upset about stuff don't care. And I've learned that that's one of the neat things is to take a position on things in AA.
There's nothing I've ever read, and we're going to hear Billy tomorrow, and everybody say that we don't have any opinions on things in AA. I think it's awesome to have opinions on AA, and if you like the 12 and 12 more than the big good, tell me about it. Let's argue after the meeting. It'll be fun. We don't do that stuff in front of the newcomer, but it sure is fun over some chicken wings. And if you like the 12 and 12, I sure want to know why so much.
God, I'm going off tonight. This guy's name was Kurt, and I hated Kurt. He was in one of my things, because Kurt would always share, I've never read one word in that big book, and I've never taken one of those steps. And I've got my new guy with me at the table, and I'm trying to convince him to write a fourth step, and you're going to get free, and this is going to get good. Then he hears Kurt, right?
And to me, he was like, you know, it was bad. I go up, and after I'm whining, and do all this writing about what's wrong with Kurt, my sponsor goes, yeah, but there's just a couple of things. I don't know if you've noticed about Kurt. Kurt's 41 years sober. He's married to that gorgeous woman. I think they just evaluated his real estate, because he doesn't have a job.
[00:30:01]
almost half the hotels in Ocean City. I think they just evaluated his business at a little over $10 million last year. The guy's, like always, happy. Did you notice all those people that he takes through the steps in the Twelve and Twelve? So other than having an amazing marriage and completely happy and 41 years sober, I think he might be on to something that he's doing it all wrong. I'm like, so what do I do? He's like, well, why don't you ask Kurt to take you through the steps the way he does it with his guys out of the Twelve and Twelve? Maybe you won't hate him so much. Different story, different day. But they make the mistake, right? So now I'm inside and I don't like this Janine, because Janine, what Janine does is she doesn't call her sponsees, sponsees, which is what you're supposed to call them, right? And if you're sober longer than 30 years, apparently I'll let you call them pigeons, because I've heard old timers call them pigeons. So that's okay with me.
Get where we're going here with step three, with me, right? And I don't even know that I have all these rules and requirements about what you all are allowed to do and not do. And it turns out I have them for, like, almost everybody, right? And there's a problem with that, which is that if you're laughing and nodding your head, it's because you think you've been given the same gift, right? And that you also know precisely what I should be doing and everybody else and what's acceptable and what's not and how you should dress if you're at the podium, what you should say and not say, how you should behave at a meeting, which leg you're allowed to cross and not, right? I mean, like, we've got stuff. And Janine is referring to her sponsees not as sponsees, not as pigeons, but she calls them duckies, right? And that makes me want to vomit. Janine is also, like, 16 years sober when I meet her and she's always got the big book with her, right? And I got this thing that God gave that when I read something, I remember it. So why do you still have the book with you? It's like, you read it one time, I can tell you what's in it, I can usually tell you what page it's on, and you're carrying it around 16 years later. So she calls them duckies, she's carrying the book, I'm pretty sure she should be in, like, the remedial class of AA or something. And when she comes in and sits down, there's always, like, you know, six of these little duckies that sit at the table, right all around, and that bothers me. And at the end of the meeting, we give out these chips, which are designed to shame a newcomer. We act like we're celebrating certain lengths. We're not, right? It's shaming.
And I know that, but nobody else agrees with me, right? So then at the end of the meeting, they do this exercise that's directed at me, right? Where they go, does anybody have 30 days of sobriety? And, you know, one of Janine's little ducky, Rebecca, would come bounding up to the front of the room, and she's got her book, right? My name's Rebecca, Janine's my sponsor, I have 30 days, I'm starting to write my fourth step, I think I'm getting free. And the whole room would be like, right? And she goes back to her, does anybody have 60 days? My name's Teresa, Janine's my sponsor, I'm starting to make my amends. Right? And I'm in the back of the room, and I'm thinking, like, I'm going to knock her teeth so far down her throat that Teresa will never smile again, right? And all of this is just getting everybody ready and excited for the moment they've been waiting for, which is, does anybody have 24 hours or a desire to start over? And then I do the longest walk in AA from the back of the room all the way to front to get my, like, 50th, you know, 24-hour chip, feeling like a total loser, and all of the duckies just did big smiling nice things, and I sit down like humiliated one more time. And eventually, you know, I'm in and out, I'm in and out, I'm in and out, and I don't like AA, and I don't want to be here, and I can't do the steps, and at 36 days without a drink, no sponsor, no steps, no nothing other than a whole lot of meetings, and I just say that not to really mean anything other than maybe there's one person here that's like me that's been to like a whole lot of meetings and can't stay sober, and if that happens to be your story, I'm your dude, right? I could talk to you a long time. I would go to the 7.30 meeting, the noon meeting, the 8 o'clock meeting, and I wouldn't just like sit in the back. I mean, I would mop the floor, I would clean up, I would set up the litter, I will do anything you ask me to do in Alcoholics Anonymous other than the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, right? And then I get drunk later that night.
7.30, noon, 8 o'clock meeting, drink, right? But I made it to 36 days without a drink,
[00:35:05]
without a step. I had my liver biopsied at 29 years old. There was fatty spots on the liver. It was pre-cirrhotic. I wasn't supposed to take any Tylenol. It's the worst they said. This will shut down your liver nearly immediately. You're supposed to eat this special diet. If you do this, the liver, you know, will probably recover. I knew at 36 days without a drink, I couldn't go one more day without a drink and I knew that I couldn't take another drink. I take everything in the medicine cabinet, my body collapses on the floor. When I fell, I fell into the refrigerator which hit up against the wall, right? And I live in a crappy apartment because that's where drunks are supposed to live. That's where they keep us, right? And the lady next door, because the walls are thin in the crappy apartment, hears the refrigerator like thud into the wall and it scares the daylights out of her. She runs, looks through the front window, sees feet on the ground, dials 911. I woke up in the Atlantic General Hospital for probably the fourth time. It was the third or fourth, I don't know, that year as the result of my alcoholism. And when I, interesting tidbit, that lady had not missed a day's work in nine years. She was one of those weirdos that like pride themselves on a perfect work attendance, right? That's, there's nobody that even knows what I'm talking about here about that. There are people that seriously are into that. They're like, I haven't missed a day's work or used a sick day in nine years. And it's like, oh, good for you, right? And they look at us the same way, right? We're like, I have 19 DUIs.
And they're like, well, we don't brag about that, right? If you're new, I'm just trying to drop some things so you might know if you're in the right meeting, right? If you're thinking to yourself, well, I never have missed a day of work either, you might be in the wrong place, right? But if you're relating to the, you know, well, I have double digit DUIs, you know, welcome. So I wake up in the hospital. I'm in a paper gown. My rear end's hanging out because it has like one string across the back. My butt's hanging out. Things are beeping and it occurs to me like I'm coming to that I can't even kill myself the right way. Like that's what a loser I am. You cannot even kill yourself the right way. And as my eyes clear, you all know what I, at the foot of the bed, there she is, Janine, right? With the duckies, right? And I wasn't sure if there was a place called alcoholic hell or not, but if there was, I'm pretty sure that I'm in it. And Janine didn't talk to me that day because Janine had tried to talk to me so many times she was like blue in the face.
But she did talk to the duckies and she said, girls, I want you to take a good look. This is what happens to an alcoholic that refuses to take our steps. Let's go, girls. And she left. And so I'm the guy you get when all the other speakers cancel because I'm the guy that you bring your sponsees to point at to see an example of poor alcoholics synonymous, right? This is what not to do. But I got to tell you that after that experience, I tell you all of that to give you a little idea about my drinking and rolling a car that was precious to me and at the same time having some pride in it, right? And I mean that's a peculiar mental outlook, right? You might say that like the way that I see the world and events in it is skewed. Their sponsor would talk about our perception an awful lot, right? And we get to the step two. And I'm not an idiot, few of us are. And what you're suggesting to me in step two is that I might be a little off, right? And I'm a little off and I'm offended at that suggestion, right? When I'm new. I'm like, I know what they're saying. They're inferring I'm slightly cuckoo, right? And then there is a line in there that talks about that I grasped on to. And that's all I have. So by the way, if I say anything different than your sponsors have ever told you, listen to your sponsor. And if I should say anything that is different than is in the book, listen to the book. But also come show me if I do that because I try to be very careful about that and I like learning
[00:40:02]
from you. So if I ever say anything contrary, go, no, no, it says this, right? But you know, there's some stuff that talks about this peculiar mental twist and this outlook and my attitude and outlook on life. There's several suggestions about what's going on here and I don't like them, right? The thought that went through my head in that hospital, in that moment, with that series of events, with the right amount of booze that I'd put in myself over those years, which was every bit of booze I could put in, right? I absolutely look back and believe that alcohol played the divine role that it was assigned in my life was to get me exactly where I was in that hospital bed in that moment where I couldn't have been there any other way with a slightly more cracked mind than alcohol and really humiliation, right, in that moment. And then the thought came through my head, if I ever get out of here, if I live through this, I'm going to find one of those old guys with that big book in their hand and that goofy smile on their face and I'm going to do everything they tell me to do. And I've never had a thought like that. I don't do anything anybody tells me to do. But it was the only thing I hadn't done in Alcoholics Anonymous, right? And I'll be honest, I was a little pissed. I start going through the book. My first sponsor was a man named Jim and Jim had a sponsor by the name of Clarence Snyder. He had a sponsor named Dr. Bob and Jim starts reading this with me and we read Bill's story. You guys remember what happened to Bill. He's in the hospital and this bright light comes and this cool breeze blows through and through. I mean, it sounds like majestic, right? And I get Janine and the duckies. I'm like, I got gypped around here, right? But it turns out that what happened was every bit as significant. And I start coming to the meetings with Jim and Jim is helping me pick meetings and I'm in a place to listen because of all of that experience. All of that drinking, each and every drink, right, helped beat me into a place of reasonableness. That's the role alcohol played in me. It beat me into, you know, I'm not here because I made any good decisions. I'm not here because I wanted to be spiritual, right? That second step, I came to believe some stuff, right? And I'm going to just share me because that's what I got. I came to believe that I was going to be okay with you guys.
And I can show you in our literature where it says that's a wonderful place to start. And my experience has been that coming to believe in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I think, is an essential first part of step two. Because if I've come to believe in something else, whatever it is, and I haven't come to believe in Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to tell you why I don't need to do your steps because I've come to believe in this other thing, whatever it might be, right? But what happened, there is a line in Bill's story that where he says, at long last, I saw, I felt, I believed. Got that order? And think about your AA experience. I mean, isn't that true? AA is not a program.
You guys haven't convinced me of anything. You haven't sold me any of your beliefs. Very few of us are like, are convincible. We're like skeptics, right? We're resistant or belligerent. The last day, you tell me what to believe in and I'll tell you what I'm not going to believe in, right? But what Jim started doing is just bringing me around you guys, right? And what I'm doing, how many of you, in all honesty, have said that line at some point when you were new and thought it sounded super cool in the meeting? You know, I've never left a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous where I don't feel better than when I got there, right? And you know you've said it because it's true, man. When we're new and we're shaken and I started off in this place, when I got out of the hospital and the jails and stuff, I went to a homeless shelter called Diakonea and you know the best part of my day is when I was sitting in a room with you guys. I could take a full breath, man, and I could full breath. And for one hour I was safe. And I also had this weird feeling that I was going to be okay. I mean, think about your early days. I know at these things, I'm talking to people that are mostly sober a long time, but if you remember back at the early step two, right, what it really was for me.
Right? What it really was for me was being with you and a feeling that I was going to be okay in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'm watching. Right? Much more than I'm listening. I'm watching
[00:45:05]
every single thing you guys do. And it almost reminds me of, I like Monty Python. You guys remember the Holy Grail? How do you know he's the king? He ain't got shit all over him. Right? And there's that great line. And you know what I noticed was like Bob doesn't have dirt all over his shirt like I do. You know? And the knees aren't torn out of your pants like they are mine. And Kelly talked about driving here with a license. Right? Which impressed the hell out of me. Right? It took, it was a solid 18, 19 months before I had a valid driver's license with insurance. Right? And a registration with my real name in the state I lived in.
Right? I called that the trifecta because you had a better chance of hitting the trifecta than getting me with all three of those documents. So you guys impressed me. Right? In the beginning with what I saw. And almost across the board, thank God you guys had some unity. No matter what media. If I pulled Kelly aside and I'm like how did this happen in your life? It's so many words she would say by and through the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And of course I'm doing a survey because I want there to be a different answer. Right? And then I go, you know, how did your life, you know, it looks like you're doing pretty good.
How did your life get like this? And you would say, you know, I took the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And then I'd go somewhere really far. You know, you like go out to where they keep all the like hardcore crazies in Vegas. And you're like, hey, you seem to be doing all right in Vegas. What did you do? And he's like, well, we did the 12 Steps of Alcoholics. I'm like, oh, I got to go 2,000 miles home. They all keep saying the same thing. Right?
So I saw what was going on around here. I was feeling it. Right? Maybe there's hope for me. I'm feeling a little better when I'm with you guys. And then we say this other thing that's indicative of Step 2. I started to notice my luck was changing. Right? I started to notice my luck was changing. You know, before I got into AA, the only luck I had was bad luck. Right? And then we start to say things like, I found a parking spot. I got the green light today. Right? And, you know, things are just starting to go a little better. Right? And over a period of time, which is what Step 2 is about, over a period of time, I came to believe in this thing in alcohol, you know, this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous. And I want to be more specific in case I'm not all the way there yet. Right?
More specifically, when I say this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous, if you look in that 12 in 12 book that the crazies, Curt and them use, right, in the beginning it says what Alcoholics Anonymous is. Right? A set of principles, the 12 steps that when practiced as a way of life enable the sufferer, that's a guy named Rich, to become happily and usefully whole. Right? And the obsession to drink is just expelled. Huh. Pretty good. Right?
So when I say I came to believe in this thing called Alcoholics Anonymous, I meant your 12-step process that I was so kind of scared of and reluctant to do. And that brought me to Step 3, which was if that's true, right, which is why I think it's important that I first came to believe in Alcoholics Anonymous, because in Step 3 I made a decision to go through with the thing I just told you I believed in. And I have all kinds, if I was going to give a 18 years down the road talk of like the way I see things now, I could talk to you about all kinds of super fun, fascinating spiritual adventures, things I believe, things I do, things I practice. Right? But I thought about this and prayed and meditated when I was told what steps. And I think the most amazing thing is our initial, right, our beginner, our first time Step 2 and 3 experience. When I came to believe in your program and made a decision to give it a try, because the only thing that distinguishes Alcoholics Anonymous from anything else, there's lots of paths to enlightenment, so to speak, right? There's lots of paths to awakening. And AA's is the 12 steps, that's it, right? Buddhists got the Eightfold Path, others got the Ten Commandments, others got all kinds, there's lots of paths, right? Ours is called the 12 steps. And if you don't really, really, really, if you haven't
[00:50:00]
come to believe that the 12 steps are going to make a difference in my life, I'm not going to do them. And you guys showed me that, right? Through your actions and your lives and the demonstration and doing this and Kelly talked about the importance of, I mean, let's face it, what these things are is we're not an advanced organization. There's lots of organizations with higher criteria for membership, right, than us. I mean, what these things are, right, our conferences, our big conferences are essentially first grade spiritual show and tell, right?
And you can grab anybody up here and if we wanted to be brief, which our egos will not allow, we would all tell a story in one minute. We would go, hey, my name is Rich, I was an alcoholic, I drank all these booze, I burned my life to the ground, it was awful, I did the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and now I'm doing much better, thank you. We would bring the next person up, right, and be like, hi, my name is Bob, my life sucked, I burned it to the ground, you know, I did the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, now I'm doing much better, thanks. And then we could just parade them up here and that is the AA experience, right? And then I get to step three and I make a decision to go through with the very thing that I just told you that I came to believe in, not you, not my parents, I came to believe in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous so I made a decision to go through with them.
That is not what I first, in that first period of time, I'm going to tell you where I started and why that door was ever so slightly cracked, which I think practicing step three is like the opening of a door, which to all appearances is still closed and locked. All we need is a key and the decision to swing the door open. There's only one key, it's called willingness and once unlocked by willingness, the door opens almost of itself and looking through it, we shall see a pathway beside which is an inscription. It reads, this is the way to a faith that works. In the first two steps, we were engaged in reflection. We saw that we were powerless over alcohol but we also perceived that faith of some kind, if only in AA itself, is possible to anyone. These conclusions did not require action, they required only acceptance. And you guys made the, I was at a third step meeting, I have 30, 60 days sober, I don't remember, and you made the mistake of calling on me. And you don't ever call on a newcomer in a meeting like that but you did by accident. And what I thought the topic was, and think about third step meetings, you know, third step meetings and eleventh step meetings. I mean, we're dealing with people who haven't done any steps yet.
But what I think the topic is when I'm new is that you're asking me, hey Rich, what do you think about God? Nobody asked that. They were asking about a step I hadn't taken, right? But I answer, you've been to meetings like that where it seems like people start off with, well, when I was growing up, my idea of God, right? And it goes around the room. And that's what I said, that's what I thought you very much wanted to know about what I thought about God. And I said, I don't like God, I don't like talking about God, you guys are pretty much hypocritical. I'm listening to you, you read a preamble that you're not allied with any sect or denomination or faith, and then you say the Lord's Prayer, which is right out of the Bible, I'll show you where it is, it's when he asked his father how to pray to him, and you're going to tell me you're not allied with anything, you guys are a bunch of liars, and then you're going to get in a circle and you're going to hold hands, which is weird. And I don't even like when you use the word God, because you said you wouldn't, but you did. But I'm going to tell you a couple of things here, because you asked, you know, you asked, and I'm a surfer. And what waves are is energy that travels thousands of miles across the ocean at a very particular angle. And after traveling thousands of miles across the ocean at a particular angle, what makes a wave break is hitting precisely half the depth of the size of the wave. So a ten-foot wave will break only when it hits five feet of water. And when it hits, it stops the bottom of the wave and the top keeps going.
But that's not it alone. Whatever it hits at the bottom of the ocean has to be contoured to make the wave break from left to right or right to left, or there would be no path for the surfer to surf. The wave would come down all at once. We surfers call that a closeout. So the sand has to be configured at an angle on the bottom of the ocean so that when it starts to hit, it follows the contour of the ocean floor. Or a coral reef has to be formed at the bottom of the ocean way out there in Hawaii, which is why waves could break a quarter
[00:55:03]
mile out, where it hits the coral reef and the depth, right? That depth ratio happens and it comes up. But that alone wouldn't do it, because then the wave would come right over. The wind, the wind has to be coming from the land to the sea. We call that an offshore wind. An offshore wind happens when the temperature of the water exceeds the temperature of the land. Wind always blows, right, from warm to cool. That generally happens in the morning. You guys have all seen the videos of good surf when the top of that wave is feathering back, right, and it holds the top of the wave up and it creates that, we call it a barrel or a tube ride. It lets the surfer get inside. And that, when you get the wave coming thousands of miles from the right direction, it hits the proper contour at half the depth with the wind going in the right direction, we get a good morning of surfing. And I am willing to concede to everyone in this AA meeting that I could not make all of those things happen at once. And one of the old timers grabbed me after the meeting in the hallway and said, hey, that was a fascinating, you know, expose on surfing there that you just gave for 40 minutes. I don't know if you know this, our meetings are 60 minutes and there's a lot of people here that would like to share. And we now, after your dissertation, we know that if you just refer to the thing that makes the wind and the waves and all that, you know, we have a word in AA. It's got three letters. We call it God. And it's really fast to say. And if you say that word, we'll know that you mean the thing that makes the wind and the waves and the contour of the ocean and you won't waste our entire meeting. And for the last 18 years, I've just referred to it as God.
And that's that paragraph I just read to you out of Step 3. That was the door that just cracked that one of you said, what a great place to start. If that's what you're willing to concede that you can't make all those and that there is something greater and you've already come to believe in Alcoholics Anonymous and you've made a firm commitment to your sponsor that you're going to go through with the remaining steps, right? And if you want to know, this was the other thing Jim said. I mean, right when we did that third step, we said that prayer. He explained to me what I said, right? And what it meant and that it wasn't all about me and that it was the formal terms of surrender and that I just agreed to become a servant and I just agreed to accept whatever life was given to me on the flip side of these steps. And that's what's scary, right? Because we don't know what that's going to look like. You're asking me to make a commitment to be willing to have my life look like whatever the universe or God wants it to look like when I'm finished this AA process and I'm going to go, okay. And you know who says okay? A person that's drank enough because I don't really care what it's going to look like because I know it's going to be better than the day I walked in those doors. And I saw, I felt, I believe what I've seen with these two eyes, I haven't met a person yet that's been through that 12-step process that has become a servant and their life isn't a million times better than when they thought they were the king of the world. Thank you guys so much for listening. Enjoy the ice cream.