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Source: Carl W – Austin Public Parts – Source 1965.wav File: carl-w-austin-aa-recovery-and-the-twelve-steps-assembled-source-1965.mp3 Duration: 01:08:40
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Any new prospective members, all the old regulars and everybody that's here, we're honored tonight to have a speaker from Houston, who I know you'll all enjoy, because he knows what this program is all about. Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. It does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. And that is the only purpose that Alcoholics Anonymous have. We're not a lending institution, we're not a housing institution, we're not a matrimonial council bureau. The only thing we do down here is to try to show people the way to remain sober and enjoy their sobriety. Now, I sobered up hundreds of times. In fact, that [unclear] cure will sober you up regardless of whether you want to get sober or not. That or the bar cure, in time they get you behind those bars while they don't furnish you any drinking liquor in there for some reason or other, so you can get sober that way. So sobering up never was too much of a problem. The greatest problem that an alcoholic has is learning to remain sober, learning to do without that first drink. And that's what the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous does for us, is tries to teach us how to remain sober. And just sobriety, just dryness, just remaining without alcohol is no good. I was so miserable and discontented and so unhappy being dry or being sober that I went back to the bottle until I came into AA and AA taught me how to have a peace of mind, happiness, prosperity, everything that I looked for when I was searching for it in that bottle. You know, I could take a drink and I could build air castles plum out to the moon. I was the handsomest man there was, the best dancer, the smartest, anything that I wanted to be I could get it out of that bottle, but it was such a temporary thing that when I come to the realization that it was all phony, wasn't any of it real, well then the horror set in. So that's why we're gathered here tonight, and that's why we have this man who's kind enough, our big book says that we will go to any lengths to help others to stay sober. This man's been kind enough to drive all the way up here from Houston tonight just to bring us a message of what Alcoholics Anonymous has done for him, and he's been around quite a quite a while, but I'll let him tell you about it now. Carl?
My name is Carl W., I'm an alcoholic. The grace of God and the help of the AA way of life, and the help and fellowship of people like yourself, I've been sober for 22 years and five months and 24 days. One day at a time by the simple expedient of not taking that first drink. Bill said that I come all the way up here as a favor to y'all, the way it is they don't let me talk at home, I've got to get away from home to talk. And he said y'all was all going to enjoy it, and I don't know how he knows, but I hope, I hope some of you do. He got me rung in on this deal, and he wrote me a letter and told me what he wanted me to tell you, and I can't do business that way, I never know what I'm going to tell you. I've made a lot of talks in those 22 years, and I've planned some of them. I know Mississippi State Convention last 1964, I was invited down there in 59. I had five years to prepare that talk, and when I got there I didn't say one thing that I had planned. But you know I
[00:05:05]
never did plan my life too good. If I had, I wouldn't have been in the shape I was in when I got here. And the reason I've stayed around, the reason I stayed around for a while, I was more scared of getting back in that shape than I was anything else. He wanted me to tell you a little about what AA has done for me. And no further than I am in the world it wouldn't do you much good unless I told you how sorry I was when I got here, because I mean I'm living proof that a man can stay sober and not amount to a damn thing.
I did hear a little joke the other night that I liked, it sounded just about the kind of way we think, you know. A nun ran out of the doctor's office screaming, and the patient asked the doctor, what'd you tell that sister doctor? And he said, I told her she was pregnant. She said, good God, she wasn't was she? He said, no, but she sure did cure her hiccups. July the 4th of 1942, this miracle of AA or the grace of God or whatever it is that gets us here happened to me, Skid Row Flophouse, down in Congress Avenue section of Houston, and I had had to accumulate a little money to have the money to stay in the flophouse instead of sleeping in the weed patch, how I got there is a long story and it started I was 27 years old then, I had been on that skid row for a year and a half, and when I made that surrender or whatever it is that we make that morning, it had to be me and God, there wasn't a soul in this world that cared enough about me to come down there and get me, nobody, and for that year and a half that I was on skid row in Houston there hadn't been anybody that cared, and this is a sad state of affairs when a human being that Van Dyck says is half animal and half spiritual gets to the point where nobody cares and he don't care himself, it's a very lonely way to be, I weighed 150 pounds, I didn't have the strength to get up out of bed and go to the bathroom until I made that decision that now is the time to go to AA, in January 1941 I caught a freight train and come to Houston to join AA because I found out about AA and I knew if I joined it that was the answer and it took me a year and a half after I knew the answer, I had had four years of married life that put a woman through hell, I had been through paralysis, I had been, oh God I've been through them jails, but in those days they didn't hospitalize drunks, they jailized them, my kind anyhow and that's how I got sober most of the time because I found out when I was about 12, 13 years old that you didn't have to have a hangover, just drink some more of that juice and you wouldn't have a hangover, so I had been paralyzed, I'd been partially blinded, I had had all kinds of hallucinations, and when I found out about AA it was I just come out of alcoholic apoplexy, this ain't good either, and some of you out there ain't gonna be able to identify with me as an alcoholic because you haven't been there, and all I can tell you is you're just lucky because if you stay with that jug you can get there, if you want to have all these things happen just keep drinking, they will, we can guarantee that, we can't guarantee much in AA but we can guarantee if you keep on drinking that all these things gonna happen to you if you don't die or go nuts first.
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Now I've told you some of the physical things that happened to me and they don't they don't really mean a whole lot because all they do just sort of keep you sober two or three days till you make up your mind that that was all a bad dream and this time it's going to be different and you start drinking again, but the heartaches and the loneliness and the fear and the guilt, I can't tell you about those things, you have been there, you know, and if you haven't it ain't no use me trying to tell you what it's like. I started drinking before I started the school and I liked it from the very first, I like what it did. I was willing by the time I was 15, I was willing to sacrifice anything it took to keep on drinking. At that time I was still able to go or I kept on even after I got out of school, I could keep a job a while but I didn't have any friends. I never did belong anywhere when I was sober and when I got a few drinks, they better belong. When I was 18, I was hard rock mining and I was pretty rugged and so they had to belong. I go in one of them bars, you know, and set them up for the bunch. As long as they'd listen to me, I keep buying the drinks and the first one of them wanted to say something, I cut his drinks off because I was doing the talking.
This is a miserable way to go but I didn't know any different. I thought I was having a good time, maybe I was. I was doing some of the things that I wanted to do and I couldn't do them without a few drinks. I go to a dance cold sober, I stand over in the corner and sweat and stink. I wouldn't have guts enough to ask a gal to dance or anything. You give me a few drinks, it didn't make him. Me and my mother got kicked off the gunner ballroom floor for indecent dancing one time.
She's still at it. She ain't quit yet. She said this is a good thing for me and it is. It's a real good thing. But this morning of the 4th of July 1942, I had got tired of paying the price that I had to pay to keep drinking. I don't know why it was any different. I hadn't been drunk as long. I wasn't as sick physically as I had been. But that old remorse had me that morning and so I went to AA. I got up and I washed and I put on my little skimpy clothes and I went down there and they took me in and for the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged where I was with the people I was with.
There were some people around me that cared for the first time that I could remember. I was the kind of guy when my dad and mother separated, they didn't argue who was going to get me, they argued about who's going to have to take me. And I was just 12 years old then. Between them, they couldn't keep me all the time. They had to ship me off to some relatives every once in a while to get a rest. And here was a whole bunch of people that wanted me around and they was on my side. And up until then, I didn't even know I had a side when I was sober.
And I come in here and they told me to read the big book. I never will forget the first meeting that I attended to after I got my eyes uncrossed and knew what was going on and I don't know how long that was. They sat with and on me for three days and nights. They didn't leave me alone for a minute because I wasn't sleeping and I wasn't staying very still. And they tried to get me to take a drink because they was afraid I was going to die and I was afraid if I did I would. And I thought that them people want me to take a drink so they could say, well you don't mean business going down the road boy. Because that's what everybody else had ever always told me, just take off. So I didn't take that drink and I went to this first meeting and you know what the topic of discussion was that night? They said we're going to talk about what have you done for the good of AA
[00:15:03]
this past week. Well hell I hadn't hardly got there yet. And I'm afraid not to have something to say because I didn't know what the rules and regulations were for this organization but I damn sure wanted to live up to whatever they were. But I didn't want to get run off. So when they got around to me I said, well I haven't had time yet to do any good. I said, well I belong to local 84 down here. We got about 755 members and at least 750 of them need this thing and I'll have them all down here eventually.
As soon as I get so I can walk I'll have them down here. Well I haven't got any of them here yet. I was one of these winos and I had drank so much of that fortified wine, that ethyl alcohol in it. I didn't have a whole lot and they recognized this. I remember them telling me, said now we ain't gonna expect much out of you Carl and I'm glad they didn't because I didn't have much. And they told me to read that big book and you know we hear about this ego and this self-centeredness and these alcoholics. God knows if anybody should have suffered ego deflation and death I should have but I wasn't even welcome on Skid Row. I didn't even fit down there.
For two or three weeks I started figuring out, yeah I read that book the first time. I said, hell somebody been following me around just checking up on me and wrote a book about it. I didn't think I was very important and then I got to studying it and I read it. I like what they had in there. I like the people. I like the white shirts and the smiles on their face, the friendship, the fellowship and all that. And then I got to that fifth chapter and then I said now there ain't this awful here is a fine organization for people like me.
And they let you in here and then they throw 12 rules at you nobody can live up to. I'll never make it. And I studied them and looked them over. I picked out about five or six of them that I might need. And back in those days that was all the group it was so you didn't go over to some other group and tell them how smart you was. The only contact with other AA that we had was with general service. Well it was the Alcoholic Foundation then in New York. And we wrote letters back and forth all the time because we didn't have any precedence for what we were trying to do.
And so when something come up and we didn't know what to do about it we wrote them up there and I said well now all these other poor people got to have 12 steps to stay sober and they got an old boy down here just smart as a whip. Don't need but about five. I thought maybe I better write and tell them about it. I would have to if I hadn't got drunk. Because I really meant to. You hear people talk about these slips and these reasons for getting drunk and all that.
Hey you don't need the reason. If you're an alcoholic a natural state of an alcoholic is drunkenness. And if he gonna be sober he got to do something unnatural. He got to do so he got to get out of the pattern some way. So I just I fell right back into the pattern and I got drunk and stayed drunk for six weeks which was not unnatural. Again in September September the 11th Friday afternoon this miracle of AA or God's grace was dropped on me again and this time I really wanted AA. Now don't ask I don't know how these things happen.
It's uh every one of you people out here that's an alcoholic might think you're pretty smart because you're here but you just stop and think you're about 22 out there just like you don't know about they ain't here yet. And you try to figure out something better that you did than some of them and tell me what you found out because I haven't found out because I haven't found out yet anything I did before I got to AA that would make it worth God's while to bring me here or let me stay. So I know that if I had two three hours
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I'd tell you how sorry I was. I had enough of it so you'd figure it out but I know that it was God's grace because I I didn't nobody begged me to come back. In fact they just told me said when you get ready to quit drinking let us know and we'll be here. And this afternoon I was ready but I didn't I you know I don't know why this is but an alcoholic has got an innate streak of honesty in him that he does everything in the world he can to drown all of his life and all of a sudden it overcomes him. I know this thing was prevalent one time back in oh back when I had that paralysis I paralyzed for six weeks and I was going down to the doctor be examined to see why I was paralyzed and I thought that joker might just accidentally ask me about my drinking. So I didn't drink for a week and sure enough he asked me how much do you drink and I said oh I don't drink. I didn't tell him I've been drinking a fifth of gin and a half a pint of whiskey and six or eight beers every day for three months before I quit. So we got a little streak of honesty in us somewhere, and so when I got ready to come back, now I come in once drunk and they sobered me up, so this time I'm gonna get sober before I come back, and I did, you know, I said I'm gonna whip this thing if it kills me, and it just damn near did, it just liked about that much.
Saturday morning the 12th of September I drank a bottle of hot beer, got my stomach settled enough and my nerves settled enough, and I called them, and they came and nobody fussed, I was right back where I had left from, right back with those people that were interested in me, and this is back in 1942, we don't have the churches and the policemen and the psychiatrists and all these people that's writing these books, you know, now, I mean when I come in here, hell, they didn't recognize, now everybody wants on the bandwagon cause we got something going for us here.
So we didn't get too many new ones then, and actually we had what we called the true alcoholic, and I was one of them, and that's the kind that if you got a wristwatch you ain't ready yet because if you, you got to hock that wristwatch and pull one more drunk before you get ready. You hear a lot of jokes, but this was the actual, if a guy come in there and still had a job or a family or a home to go to or anything that he could hock, if his shoes matched, we was a little dubious of him, we'd let him in sort of on a trial basis, but we didn't much believe he was going to make it, but some of them did.
Now it's just the opposite, I'd have a hard time getting in now, I smell bad, and people, I mean they want these clean, intelligent looking alcoholics nowadays. You think, I don't know about Austin, but you let them call you down there in Houston and talk about one that ain't been to the bathroom for a week and want you to go out there and wash them up and bring them in, hell you can't get nobody going to call like that anymore.
They say send Joe or Carolyn or somebody, I'm busy. I like what Mary S. said down at the convention, she called somebody to go on one of them steps with her and the old gal said, I can't go, my girdle's wet, two o'clock in the morning. But I came back, I was accepted, I was back in, I belonged again, and I got back and they told me that that stuff in there was good medicine, of course I wanted a shot or pill of some kind that would take this desire to drink away from me and they didn't have any.
So I went back to the big book and I start studying to see what these people that were in there was doing, and it says in that fifth chapter, it tells you just as plain, I mean in every one of them words is simple so a guy without any education like myself can understand them. And it says in there, it says, rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.
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It don't say you pick out five steps or you pick and choose, it says those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program. It said usually men or women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with their self. Well I knew I was capable of being honest with myself, but I wanted to dodge, I wanted some legitimate excuse not to be an alcoholic.
And I tried that one on for size and it wouldn't fit, because I knew I belonged here. But down at the bottom of that paragraph, it says there are those too who suffer from grave emotional and mental disorders, and it said many of them do recover if they have the capacity to be honest. And I think this was my first hope. The first real thought that maybe I could make it, because certainly I knew I had mental and emotional disorders.
Did our stories disclose in a general manner what we used to be like, what happened and what we're like now? Well I've told you pretty much what I used to be like, and I've told you what happened. I don't really know, I just know that somehow or other I had enough, and I hollered for help and I got it. It's just about that simple. I didn't have sense enough at that time. You drink enough of that fortified wine, you ain't got no brain.
You don't rationalize or think rationally at all. It's sort of an animal instinct to live, I think, is what you got left. Sort of like, well I was more animal than I was human at that time. And it says, if you have decided you want what we have and are willing to go to any lengths to get it, then you're ready to take certain steps. And this next paragraph, it shows that they got these alcohols, the people that wrote that book got us figured out, because at some of these we balked, we thought we could find an easier, softer way.
And that's just what I've been doing all my life, I was looking for an easier, softer way. And that's what I was doing when I come in AA, they said we could not, and I didn't, I got drunk. They said some of us tried to hold on to our old ideas and the result was nil, until we let go absolutely. There's no equivocation in there, everything, it's right down the line, either you want it or you don't. And if you want it, it says you can make it.
It says in the fourth chapter, it says it works, it really works. And I read that the first time that I was aware of it, I read that next paragraph, it Remember that we deal with alcohol, cunning, baffling, and powerful, and I'll never forget the impression that made on my mind that day. It was an afternoon, and I wasn't physically able to go to work yet, and the boys was mostly gone, down there by myself.
And I thought, cunning, baffling, and powerful, I thought what alcohol had done to me. I didn't start out to be what I became, I never meant in all my life to do the sorry things that I did as a result of drinking, but I invariably did them. I never did go to jail on purpose, but hell, I was there a lot of times. Never did learn to like it. And watch me, they'd be wondering though, it looked like I might.
It says without help is too much for us, but there's one that has all power, that one is God, may you find him now. It says half measures avail us nothing. It doesn't say half measures get you half sober or half happy, half your money back or half your wife back, it don't say, it says half measures avail us nothing. Again, it's definite, it's there, it's all of it. See, we stood at the turning point.
We ask his protection and care with complete abandon. That means we got to give up and quit fighting. We got to turn it over.
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And then it says these are the steps we took. It don't say these are the steps that I told Bill he ought to take or Joe take, or it don't say these are the steps that we study and see what they talk about, it says these are the steps we took, and it lists all 12 of them. And that first one, we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable. I had taken that first step the first time that I read about AA in 1941 and called a freight train to come to Houston to join.
But my life was still unmanageable and I was not ready to seek this outside management that they tell us about. That second step says we come to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity. We come to believe. Now we all know that no one of these steps are more important than the other, but unless we can do something about this second step, unless we can believe that there is a power greater than ourselves that can help us, it ain't much use reading the rest of them because it says in the book that the simple purpose of the AA program is to show us what can be accomplished when we enlist the aid of a power greater than ourself.
Well I wasn't going to bother God with this business because I had asked him to get me out of jail, I'd asked him to get me out of trouble, I'd asked him for money and women and cars and none of these things had ever come. And then I know now, I didn't know then, but I was really scared of God because I had been taught as a child about this God that follows you around and making marks in the book against you.
Every time it lightened and I thought sure he was apt to strike me, I was scared. So I was afraid of that God. And I didn't know what kind of God I could believe in, but you know I could believe in those people that were sober because they had something that I wanted. I didn't know what it was, but I didn't have it and I needed it. And so that was my higher power was the AA movement. You know what it says in there that it will restore us to sanity, or sobriety if you will.
It doesn't say anything about getting our job back or our money back or our health back. And all of these things are important, but they are not important to the extent that sobriety is. Because without sobriety you've got nothing. With sobriety you've got a hope or a chance to get whatever you're capable of getting. It actually doesn't tell you that you'll have peace of mind or serenity or anything else.
But it gives you hope for these things if you go through the other ten steps. You attain these other fringe benefits to the extent that you practice the rest of the program. And being an alcoholic you'll get off the beam every once in a while. These things will come and go. And sometimes even with twenty-two years of sobriety things get so messed up that you get to wondering, was it ever this bad when I was drinking?
And you go back to that first step and you think back, and it was. It was worse. Because my life was unmanageable before I came into AA, before I became a compulsive drinker. It was unmanageable in the sober periods I had between drunks, and it's unmanageable today if I'm going to be the manager. Because I take full credit for getting myself where I was on that fourth day of July because I had done things exactly to suit myself.
And I hadn't been able to make other people cooperate, and that's what kept me drunk. But I had run the show. So the greatest insanity that I could have today would be to believe that I can run it again. This time it's going to be different. Well actually if I got drunk now it probably would be different. It'd be worse because that's the way it was all the time that I was drinking.
[00:35:03]
You know, the pattern of alcoholism led steadily downward in my case. If I take it, now some drunks were better than others, or I'll say less bad than others. Sometimes I didn't get my head beat off. Sometimes I didn't get put in jail. Sometimes I run out of whiskey and money before I passed out. But year in and year out, if I take it on an annual basis, each year was just a little worse until they got more than I could live with.
So these people had something, and it had to be spiritual because I was convinced that all of these people were alcoholics and I was one. And they had this thing and I didn't and I wanted it. So I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of this power that I could see in you. And that meant that all, I guess it was 15 or 20 of them around there that was active in the group at the time.
I didn't know which ones of them had the answers that I needed, so I tried to use the answers that all of them had. This gets pretty confusing, but it kept me so busy I didn't have time to get drunk. And that is the name of the game, really, is sobriety. We call it a lot of other things, but that's really the name of the game. Eventually I began to figure out that what some of them told me worked a little better than what some of the others did.
I don't think I ever got to the point where I had some ideas of my own, but I got to the point where I could use other people's ideas to my advantage a little better. We'll put it that way. We do a lot of work at home on 12-step groups where we work just one step at a time. And we have, down there at the Women's Center, we'll have girls for their first AA contact, they'll come in here and maybe we'll discuss in the 8th or 9th or 10th step up there, and this is their first meeting.
And, well, I don't know about that step yet. Well, this is true. You don't come in here and get a feeling for all of these steps in a short period of time. But you never waste anything that you learn about the steps. So if you're new and don't feel like it, you are ready for this particular step, whether you have taken it or that you're working on it, don't worry about it. You'll hear something in these meetings about these steps that when you get ready, it'll come to you.
I've heard a lot of guys say, you listen to these speakers and you take what you want and you throw the rest out the window. Well, don't throw it too far because you'll be out there looking for it for long. There's not any ideas in here in this meeting at all that are directed towards staying sober that are bad. Some of them might not work for you at this time. Now, this third step where we make this decision to turn our will and our life over to the care of this power, this is a deal that presents a big problem to an alcoholic because he knows if he does this, it ain't going to be run to suit him.
And so we nearly always have reservations about this. We'll turn over the part of it that don't mean much. It's all right, God, you see to it that I get a good job and I'll go out there and work, but don't mess with my love life. If you can stay sober that way, fine, but a lot of us don't. The main thing about this step to me now and anything that I say tonight is the way I feel tonight. I might not have felt this way last Wednesday when we had a discussion group and I probably won't feel this way tomorrow, but right now the main thing about this third step is when we get in a rat trap and get all boxed in and don't see any light, if we can say, now God, I know that this thing will work out and I know that you ain't going to make me get drunk today, and just let me stay sober until you get around or get time to work this thing out so I can live with it, it's getting burdensome.
[00:40:05]
Because you know things are going to happen like they're supposed to in spite of us. And I think really that we are fortunate that we have been given this power of decision. You know, for 27 years of my life, I didn't have the choice of whether I drink today or not. If I was breathing that day and got a hold of some alcohol, I'd drink that day. And then I was given, I still have this power of decision.
I can drink tonight when I leave here if I so choose. People tell you if you're an alcoholic you can't drink. They're crazy as hell, you can drink. I proved it. But what you want to do is to learn how not to want to drink. It wouldn't be much benefit to us if we didn't have the power of decision. I know I had lots of periods of sobriety, 90 days, 60 days, 4 months, 6 months. Stone cold sober, but I always got drunk when I got out.
So there's no credit to me to stay sober in there. I feel like I'm doing something good now every day that I don't drink. I'm doing something that I never had the chance to do before I come to AA. Said we made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. And this is a step that makes most of us real sad and we back off We read what the book says about it and we don't like it because it says write it.
I know my particular reaction, well hell I've taken a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself in jails all over the country. When you get sober and broke and locked up you start thinking about how sorry you are and you think this is an inventory. But really this is not what they mean in that step. This fourth step is to enable us to find out who we are. Most of us don't know when we get here because we have been whatever the crowd, what we thought other people wanted us to be.
If you was at a chicken raisers convention you was the biggest chicken raiser in the country. If it was a crowd of lovers you was the best lover in the bunch. I used to have a terrible affliction, I thought I was a fighter. When you get around a hard rock mining camp that's a hell of a notion to get. Because somebody is going to try you out. So we get into our background and I like to think the best way to go about this fourth step is to go all the way back as far as you can remember.
Not just when you got sorry from drinking but as far back as you can remember. And put down everything that you can remember that stands out in your mind and figure out what happened and why. And don't read it, just write it and get it all finished and go back through. And the amazing thing is you will find every damn bit of it is either guilt or fear or resentment. You hate people, you hate them because you resent them.
Try it that way and don't make it a morbid inventory. Look for some good, there's always some good in there. And it says we admitted to God, to ourselves and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. You know this is the first chance that we've had to be honest with anybody. Because we wasn't about to tell anybody anything about ourselves that was the truth before we got here. And when we find, it says in the book that you can talk to a preacher or a doctor or a psychiatrist, anybody.
But I think you need to talk to another drunk because you want somebody that understands. These preachers and doctors, they're not going to look down their nose at you. But when you get through, their hair might be standing on end, they're not going to understand what you're talking about. But you get some old sympathetic drunk, he's been there. And be sure you get a close mouth one, don't get a blabber mouth.
So don't come in here in two weeks and pick out somebody because you like the way they wear their clothes or something. And run and tell them all about yourself because it's liable to come back to you next week and be added to and edited a little bit.
[00:45:01]
Said we were entirely ready to have God remove these defects. Oh, I want to say one thing. When you find that one person that you can trust and that person trusts you, it's going to let you begin to get out of that shell that you've been in for so long. Because you ain't trusted anybody. And here you've trusted somebody, they know all about you and they accept you like you are and you can begin to be yourself.
It's a slow process but eventually you get to where you trust other people. And they trust you. And first thing you know, you want to stay sober. Because you don't want to betray that trust in those people. And this is a marvelous experience when you make that transition from staying sober because you know you have to to staying sober because you want to. It's a marvelous feeling. And you were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character and you [unclear] ask him to remove your shortcomings.
These things have kept you drunk all these years. And it says you're ready to have God remove them. And we know through practical living that nobody's going to have all of these character defects removed. So don't be a perfectionist. Don't expect everything to be gone. If you read that stuff it says we were entirely ready to have God remove our defects of character. And he ain't going to take all of them so learn to live with some of them.
They get to bother you too much work on them. Humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. The beginning of humility, the final acceptance of the fact that you can't do it alone. And this is another [unclear]. It's something that you have to go through to understand. You begin to realize that this life is unmanageable. You cannot run it. And so you humbly ask this power to help you. You make a list of persons you've harmed and you become willing to make amends to them all.
You make direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others. This is just a way to get back in society. The people that you've hurt the most are the ones that you love the most and about the only practical restitution you can make to them is to stay sober. And all these people that's been butting in your business all these years and you hate their guts and you'd skin them alive if you could.
When you take that inventory you're going to stop and figure. You have beat these people or lied to them. And the only way you're going to learn to like them again is go to them and get straight with them. This is a hard problem. I'm not going into how long and tedious it was for me but remember this. It says we became willing to make amends to them all. And if you are willing the opportunity will present itself and you will do it.
Some people you'll never see again. Some cases there's nothing that can be done. But the spirit of the step has become willing. Then it says continue to take personal inventory and when we're wrong promptly admit it. This is a maintenance step. This is what we do on a day-to-day basis. It also tells us that we're not going to get perfect because it says we continue to take personal inventory. So this tells us first we're not going to get perfect and that we're going to have to continue to work on this thing one day at a time.
And it says we sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him. Pray only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Now I'm not going to try to tell you how to pray because I don't know. I just know enough for me. And there ain't nothing fancy about it because the relationship that I have with this power greater than myself that I can accept now it's a pretty informal relationship.
And actually I don't have to pray so many times for His will for me because most of the time I know what I ought to be doing. I have to pray more for the power to carry it out because there's a lot of things that He puts on me to do I'd rather not do. But if you believe that this step means what it says then if you sincerely pray for knowledge of His will for you
[00:50:03]
then the things that happen are His will for you. And if you're going to be happy you've got to be happy the way things are. You can't be happy yesterday or tomorrow. You can't say I'd be happy if I had a million dollars if you ain't got but ten. If you want to be happy you better be happy with ten. And be glad you got it. I've seen the time when ten cents looked big. So pray for knowledge of His will for you and the power to carry it.
Live one day at a time and enjoy it. Now these are practical steps. These things fit in daily situations. This is not something that's abstract that we study and learn about. This is something that we apply. When I get out on that job and I'm doing the kind of work I don't like to do I just do it because I like to eat and it pays well and you don't have to have any brains to do it and they get me messed around on the job and I get mad, what am I doing? I'm doing what, I mean I'm out there because that's, I could go do something else if I didn't want to do that, God don't care what I do for a living, He just don't see me go hungry. You know I've been to numerous funerals lately and hadn't any of them people starve to death. So I am bucking the will of God when I get unhappy because I got to run that old drag line. So I mean I got to run it, there ain't no two ways about it, I owe too much money to quit. And I can sit out there and be happy on it or I can sit out there and be mad as hell and it don't make a bit of difference, I'm there eight hours every day. So the choice is up to me.
Heard a little old gal get up in Galveston not long ago, six months of sobriety and said the smartest thing that I've heard in an AA meeting in a long time. She said, I am content to be sober, whether I'm happy or not depends on how much I put into it. And you stop and think about it, everything in those steps is our willingness to comply. And then it says having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, spiritual awakening, oh man I wanted to feel spiritual. I never will forget, you know, I was more of an alcoholic, I said I was a true alcoholic, you know. And so by the time I got through reading these steps I figured I should have had this spiritual awakening. And I got feeling around, you know, and I didn't feel any wing brackets anywhere, no halo mountings on my head. I got worried about it really and I read back there in the back and it said that don't worry about these things that other people will notice it before you do. So I'd go around, you know, and sidle up and see if somebody had noticed me turning spiritual yet and nobody mentioned it. But it don't mean that. It means that if you do what these other steps said that you're going to begin to get different. Now you know an alcoholic is a perfectionist and if he's going to have a spiritual awakening, hell he wants hot and cold flashes and blinding white lights and sweats too. He don't want just one of them, he wants the whole works. And I never did have any of them.
But a long time after I sobered up I realized that I want out of life now something I never did want before. My life is altogether different. I come in here, I was a stiff. If you don't know what that is, that's a guy that makes construction jobs between drunks. When it gets too hot for him in one place he catches a freight train and goes to the next one. And he didn't always go to work because he's got to be twice as good as anybody else on the job because he ain't there half the time. So a stiff don't have any trouble. If you think, I had 57 jobs in 1941, that year that I was drinking down in Houston. This is the kind of life I want. I got out of high school, I went to hard rock mining. I had, my dad was a superintendent in an insurance company. I had a job ready for me. No, I went to hard rock mining because that was my kind of people. And I come into AA and I'm an iron worker by then, and a good one. Hell, I got to be. I know I sobered up one
[00:55:07]
time down there on Trinity Portland cement. So I'll always be 96 feet up there and I sobered up and couldn't get down. So I come into AA and I got perfect. I mean people had always told me what a good feller I was if I just didn't drink so much and here I quit altogether. So I'm gonna be a deluxe stiff. I'm not gonna have to ride the freight train between jobs. I'm gonna have a good car. And I'm just gonna have a small suitcase full of good clothes and a big wallet full of good money and about 20 blondes in my book. And when it gets tiresome here, I'll go there. That's what I thought I wanted out of life. And it might have worked, I don't know. If I hadn't have made Sadie, I might have. But anyway, I'm sober about four or five months and I meet her. And we fought off marriage for months there. I tell her I didn't want to get serious and we better quit seeing each other and she'd agree with me. I'd get off of work and get to a hotel. I couldn't wait to call her and see if she still felt that way. She didn't and I didn't. We'd go out again. We decided to get married. And I told her, you know, just exactly how life was gonna be. I said, now we'll have a good car. We'll have a light housekeeping apartment. We'll eat out most of the time. If things get tight here, we'll move on. That just suited the hell out of her. That's just what she wanted.
Lying heifer. But we nearly didn't get married. I got drafted first and I almost escaped because I told her it wouldn't be fair to marry me and me fixing to go off over there and fight. I might get shot up and she'd just have a half of it. She nearly fell for it. But I checked him out. I couldn't make it stick. I got up to San Antonio. I've always swore that I called her up there to marry me so I could get a three-day pass. But it really wasn't that way. Because I could have got a three-day pass without that. We got married. She followed me around from Army camp to Army camp till I went overseas. And I came back. And really I had some real delusions of grandeur because in some of my rambling around, I had got to be a pretty good percentage gambler. And I never did draw any of my money overseas. I made my money and I had all my money in soldiers deposit. And she'd worked up there in Seattle and she'd saved a bunch of money. Boy, we was sitting pretty. So we bought that good fast car when we got out. And she got to leave her absence for 90 days in Seattle, come down and meet me in San Antonio. And we was going back. We ain't got back to Seattle yet. But anyway, she said, well, honey, why don't we got this good car? Why don't we get a little house? Oh, no, no house trading, nothing at all. You ain't gonna tie me down.
No, hell, I can't move it fast enough. So we're working there in San Antonio. I get a chance to go out in West Texas on a job, a little bitty town, no apartments. And one Sunday I said, let's go look and see can we get a house trailer. We did. We came down on this Gulf Coast in 1947 to get a rig and take out the El Paso. And the rig was under about two feet of water like they usually are. Spring of the year down here. So we wound up going back and getting a trailer and we moved down here. I said, but just temporarily.
February of that year it got cold. My butane regulator froze. And I said, honey, reckon we can trade this house trailer in on a house? She has damned your house broke me already. I'm almost civil. It didn't take her but about two and a half years to get me to wear socks and underwear. And she has changed me completely with my consent. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm liking this business. But we have lived right here on this Gulf Coast since 1947. We lived in Texas City most of the time. We've had, oh, I guess six or eight houses. And we just moved into Houston in December.
[01:00:07]
But I am what we derisively used to call a home guard. I worked right out of one local for 17 years. Worked one week out of that jurisdiction in 17 years. And this AA has done for me. It has made me the kind of person that I thought I never wanted to be, but it has shown, I mean, this is what I have wanted. It's happened. I went in business for myself. Stayed in business for seven years and went broke. That 11th step saved my life. But I was really feeling sorry for myself.
But you know, AA has been there every time. The answer is there. If you're new in AA and unsettled, learn about the AA program. Learn what the book says. The answer to anything that come up is in the book. And you might not need to know it now, but sooner or later there's going to be something come up that one of them steps will be the answer to. So learn about them. I don't know how y'all are up here in Austin, but I went out to a group not long ago, about 35 people.
And they called on over half of the people. It was a discussion meeting. They called on over half of the people to talk about the 12th step. And I think three of us knew what the 12th step was. And most of them didn't even know about the steps. Now this is a sad situation. I don't know whether that's a universal condition, but hell, you know, you had to use a book to learn how to read or to add two and two.
If you've got a trade, you had to study something to learn your trade. This is the most important thing that you'll ever do in your life, is learn how to live sober and be happy with it. Successfully sober. So read the textbook. It says, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other alcoholics. They told me when I got here I didn't have the right to refuse any time I was called on to try to carry the message.
And it don't say anything in there about sobering up drunks. I haven't sobered up a drunk since I've been here. I've talked to some of them that wanted to get sober, and they are, and I've talked to a whole lot more that didn't want to get sober, and they're still drunk. If I get up here and tell you I've sobered up so many people, then I've got to take the blame for the ones I talk to that's still drunk, and the percentage is against me.
So I'd rather turn it over to God, because the book just says we tried to carry the message. And I don't just mean the people that's still drunk. You've got to get them sober before you can carry them a message. And after you get them sober, you've still got to carry, somebody's got to tote me a message every once in a while, because I'm an alcoholic, and I still get messed up. And I might not be much good to y'all, but I'm good to me. I like me. It took me a long time to learn to do it, but I like me sober a whole lot better than I do drunk.
And somebody's got to help me stay that way. You know, the meanest trick that you can pull on an alcoholic is to take his jug away from him, and louse up his drinking, and then don't tell him how to stay sober and be happy with it. That's the meanest trick you can pull. And old Bill over there, he needs a message brought to him every once in a while. All of us do. And that's what we have these meetings for, is to get together.
You might be sitting out there, or you might be standing up here talking, or you might be making coffee, or setting out chairs. But you're doing 12-step work, because you're helping somebody. Just being here. You know, if all of you here tonight that felt like you didn't need this would go home and didn't leave, but two or three of us here, and somebody brought a new person in and was telling what a wonderful thing this was, and he got there and saw three people, he'd say, if it's so good, how come there ain't nobody here?
So just being here is 12-step work. You know, the message that we've got to carry is sobriety, and you can't carry it unless you're sober, so just staying sober is carrying the message. And practice these principles in all our affairs. Now this is the thing that I'm trying to impress on you, is that these things are practical ways to live in the day-to-day stress that you used to have to drink to live with.
[01:05:03]
Every one of these things is a guidepost to show you how to continue to stay sober and like it. And then sometimes to show you how to stay sober when you don't like it, because there'll be times like that too. And not something abstract. This is a program of action. All the time. But you know, again, that old boy that wrote that, he knew just what he was going to… Yes, he had us figured out to a net's eyebrow, and this is why I believe in that book, because I haven't found anything in there that didn't fit.
And he says right after those steps, he said, Many of us exclaim, What an order! I can't go through with it! He said, Do not be discouraged. No one among us can claim anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We're not saints. The point is that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set forth are principles of spiritual progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection. Thank you for inviting me, Bill.
Thank You, Carl. I know we'll all go home tonight with a better attitude than probably what we came with as a result of that message. He's talking about coming in here anew and took him to that meeting and discussing the steps and he didn't know anything about it. We got an old boy up there in Abilene sober. At one time he had been one of the leading surveyors of the state of Texas. But he'd done some 27 months in Wichita Falls Mental Hospital before they found out that alcoholism was his trouble and he was just on the verge of a wet brain and just not completely good.
And we were having a study of the 12 steps. The first meeting we got him to there in Abilene and we were on step 9 and 10 and he sat there and listened to us. It was on a Thursday night. Monday night he's back to the meeting and he said, you know, I learned something here the other night and I think maybe y'all might like to have it. I've had a bunch of little cards printed up with it if y'all like it or you can use it. And I thought to myself, oh no, no, this old boy, this is his second meeting and here he had come up with some profound knowledge. Don't let him make a fool of himself.
Apparently he got up and said, I'd like to read it to you and he doesn't read very good. But the card said, oh Lord, let me even remember 24 hours a day that [unclear phrase] is but one swallow away. And I got furious. I said, man, I've been around the A for 13 years and I never did pick up anything that good. There are no dues or fees. But our expenses are met by volunteer contributions from our members only and we ask visitors and guests to please refrain from contributing.