Hi, everyone. I'm Nat, an alcoholic. Is that coming in pretty clear? Well, you better move up here then. The pain on the roof. As I said before, I'm Nat, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi. And I'm Cherokee from, uh, the holy land of Oklahoma. And you folks, if some of you'd understand that, I see a guy from Tulsa right here. Most of my, uh, most of my life, I guess, drinking life was in Southern California. I left, uh, Oklahoma in World War II and, and, uh, really didn't go back, just occasionally to bury somebody. Uh, family-wise, I guess you'd say, when you get back into the old story of, of what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now, four brothers and two sisters in my family. Um, a brother, uh, and myself are the only alcoholics that I know of in the, in the family. My dad used to drink quite a bit, but I didn't, I wouldn't, uh, call him an alcoholic as I know alcoholism today. Uh, can you hear, Sam? We need to raise the mic a little bit. Can you raise it up any? Down there a little. No. No, that one. Okay. There. How's that? Any better in the back? Hooray. Okay. Good. So here we go. You know, I don't want to get into a real big, long drunk log, 'cause I think they're so traditional that, uh, people just wait till the time that you try to find out what the hell happened to getting sober. As I think back, um, there used to be a, a, a hillbilly band. I call them hillbilly bands. Western swing band back there in, uh, Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Some of you folks probably may find an old scratchy record that, uh, that they made and because you're not old enough to, to remember who it was, some of you. What happened was that they was holding a big dance in the, uh, city hall in, in Muskogee, where I was born and raised. And, uh, this friend of mine and I, we went up to watch the adult people, uh, have fun and to listen to this music. We couldn't go in because we were too, too young. Now, what I'm building up to is, uh, my first drink of, uh, white lightning. And some of you guys have probably tasted white lightning or drank some of it. It's about 1,000% alcohol. If you, when you first put it in your mouth, you may think it's probably some of the hottest stuff you've ever put in your mouth, and that's including, you know, some of the chorizo that we eat. But anyway, we stood outside the door of this, uh, city hall there in, in Muskogee, and we were watching all you adults have fun. We were just kids, around 14 years old, something like that. And, uh, occasionally, there'd be a body fly by me, you know, with his mouth all bloody or something like this, and, and laughing like hell, and people were just raising hell. And it didn't seem like anybody's crying. It seemed like it was all having fun. So we sat there on a, on a car fender and watched this go on for a while. And, uh, pretty soon, one of my brothers came out with a cousin of mine, and I knew they had a, a fruit jar full of whiskey someplace. So they went down to, down the alley and, uh, got, kicked up some old weeds and found an old sack. They had this fruit jar with whiskey in it. And, uh, I had been around drunks all my life. You know, my uncles were, in the family, I guess, in the family tree. I don't, I can't think of an Indian family in this world that doesn't have a lot of alcoholism in it. But anyway, they took this jug and, and they, uh, took a big drink of it. And this brother of mine, you know, he spit and cursed and raised hell all of a sudden, and he'd said, "Goddamn, that's good stuff." You know what I'm thinking? "What in the hell is he talking about?" You know, he, but… And that cousin of mine, he took a big jolt of it, you know, and spit and, and messed around a little bit. And pretty soon, he, they put it back, and, and Louie and I sat back over in the, in the dark watching them. So we, uh, we was gonna experiment with, uh, what these people were drinking up there that had all this fun. Well, sure enough, we sat down there, and I think we had, uh, some kind of stew or something for dinner or supper, they call it in Oklahoma. And, uh, we took a, a little swig of that stuff, and Louie took a big jolt of it. And I don't know whether you remember your first drink or not, but as hot as that stuff was, it hit my stomach, and all of a sudden, all that stew and everything else just come out, flying out, you know? And that, uh, I couldn't see where in the heck they was having any fun drinking this stuff. But you know as well as I do how persistent we are at doing anything. And if we pursue something that makes us feel good, we'll try until the Nth degree to find it. And that's including, uh, sex on top of that. So what we did, we kept on nibbling a little bit and nibbling a little bit, and pretty soon, after two or three times of burping it up, it stayed down. And this time, it stayed down with a sensation that I guess I pursued, uh, probably the rest of my drinking career. It seemed like it went in my stomach, then it went down my spine or up my spine and hit the back of my head, and pretty soon, everything was cool. I mean, there was no troubles in this world. And I could see what these people were doing when they were in there dancing and raising hell and having fun. I don't know about you, but when I found out what the magic of alcohol was, I stuck with it. And it seems as though that most of you in this audience did tonight, same thing. Well, that was just the beginning of a long run, and I call it running because as, when I, when I get my head full of something that I cannot take care of, I try to get away from it, and alcohol done that for me for a long time. In fact, I'll say that alcohol saved my life, to tell you the truth about it. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't had a pop-off valve with, with booze, then I would probably killed myself a long, long time ago. Well, from then on, this run started. I don't know what you young guys in this group have done in, about your younger life, but I took off about 14 years old and, and hardly had ever returned home since then. First thing I did was, um, was grab a freight train and during the Depression days. And, uh, the road was full of hobos and people, men, women, and children on freight trains and nearly any other thing. That was after the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma. And there wasn't a whole hell of a lot to live for. I mean, I look back on it now that there wasn't very much to live for. So we started running all over the country and went out to California and, and, uh, run into a whole bunch of, uh, fellow Oklahomans. And we just traveled. Went up to the Washington State, up through Chicago, back down the South, all over the United States and watching, uh, what happened, and it was really something. What you read in The Grapes of Wrath and these different books, it was true. I mean, it was one hell of a time in, in my life to, to live. And it seems as though that anything we could find that had alcohol in it, we drank it. I don't know whether you guys, uh, remember or know of what we used to call Bay Horse. It's Bay Rum. I know Bob there, he'd probably drink five gallon of it, but, but the, uh, but it was some real, real heavy stuff. It, it was made to, uh, to kind of a made for aftershave, what it was. It's alm- almost like some of that Aquavit some of you guys would drink. But anyway, when we were, uh, when we'd take some of that Bay Horse, you know, and drink it, you could smell a guy like formaldehyde. You could smell him for a week. I mean, that stuff just stayed in your system. So we was going all over the country and, and, uh, finally went, settled down a little bit and went back to school. And, um, World War II come along and, um, we was all volunteering. They were all volunteering, I should say, because that's something that I never did. I still don't volunteer. In fact, old Sam had to come get me out of bed while ago, for Christ's sake. But, you know, duty called, as the old saying is, and then, and he said, "You can't say no to anyone when they ask, uh, ask you the favor." Well, I told Sam, "When you get 30 years sober, you can say no." And, uh, but you know, I, I feel privileged to be here tonight. And I'll tell you a few episodes about, uh, some of the drinking career, then, then we'll get into what I call a recovery program that has helped me in my life. Um, I came to California to live in, uh, first part of 1946, and for the first time in my life, I was a free person. That gave me the privilege of drinking as much as I wanted to drink. It gave me the privilege of not having somebody to answer to. And everybody else was being discharged from the service about the same time, and we were all a bunch of drunks. I mean, we just walled up in them bars, I'll tell you. There was a lot of us. So one of the things that happened to me was that I, uh, and I'll tell you, it happened. It, it was something that really didn't, uh, intend to come to happen, was I got married. And, uh, today it's, it's like all together like another person from another world that, that, uh, that was in this marriage. Well, needless to say, we had two kids out of that marriage, and, uh, I could not understand where this head was coming from and this whole thing. Maybe some of you guys that's been in two, three marriages know what I'm talking about. But there's a lot of alcoholics that I know that don't just have one marriage. It's, that they seems to go through quite a few. Okay. The, uh, this wife I was married to was a Seventh Day Adventist nurse. Uh, and you can imagine me, an alcoholic, being married to a Seventh Day Adventist nurse. Now, that's the reason I'm saying this story is weird. And if you know me a little bit more, you would understand why I'm saying it's weird. Well, this poor little old gal didn't know what the hell to do with this drunk Indian. I mean, she just didn't know what to do, and nobody else did, tell you the truth about it. So she announced to my mother that we were gonna get married, and I'm drunk in the other room and I hear, I hear her mom tell her, said, "If you think you're gonna save that boy in there," she said, "you got another, uh, thought coming." And the reason I bring her up in this, in this story is because it, it may, uh, you may identify as an Al-Anon here. It was something that I had to live through, and that was the nth degree of her being a martyr. Now, do you know what a martyr is? See, I mean, this gal was going to save me at all costs, and, uh, she was a missionary on top of that and a few other things, and she was doing her damnedest to, to save me. I mean, save me from what, I don't know, but she was doing something to save me. Anyway, I'd been on about a three-month drunk. See, by this time, my drinking had progressed to the point where I couldn't stop. I had to be incarcerated. I had to be in a hospital. I had to be in s- nuthouse or something before I could stop drinking. Now, that's what the book calls a real alcoholic. And some of you were able to stop and go and stop and go, but, but I'll tell you a little bit about this later on. Well, I came home after this long drunk to sleep it off. I came back to the house, in quotes. I won't call it home. So I came back to sleep it off, and I heard the, the neighbor next door telling my wife, she says, "When my husband was like that, I went to the district attorney," and about that time, you know, when I heard district attorney, man, I jumped up. My ears came up quick. "And they sent him out to the county hospital to sober him up." Well, that didn't sound too bad, but I wasn't in too good a shape, actually, to do much running at that time anyway. So I just said, "Well, maybe it'll pass. Maybe she won't say anything about it." Well, it didn't happen like that. I went downtown the next day to try to recoup. You know how we do. We, you know, the, the hair of the dog that bit us. And I got drunk again, and some way or another, I was, um, I was, uh, laying there on the couch, and somebody rapped on the door, and here comes a couple of sheriffs about this tall. Looked like about eight feet tall, you know, standing there like this. They said, "Your name Hendricks?" And I said, "Yeah." And they says, "Well," he says, "We got a superior court order to take you out to the county hospital." Well, you know, hospital always meant to me a regular hospital, where you go in the bedroom. You know, they got a bed and then a court. So I just got up and I said, "Well, I got to go in here a minute and get my shoes. I was going to take another jolt," you see. "No, we'll go with you." So they went in with me, and, well, I just act like I got a jacket or something, 'cause it, I knew damn well I couldn't take another drink. Well, that was the beginning of, uh, a little, my experiences with nuthouses. I wish to hell they'd thrown me in jail a lot more than, than in a nuthouse, but this is the way it was in San Diego County. But anyway, about three weeks later, I'm going through a, a door in this, it's kind of like a big, uh, velvet, uh, cloth they had over this door and this bar, and I bumped into a guy. I didn't know who in the hell he was. Well, it was my probation officer looking for me. Well, I get home, and here comes these sheriffs again. Take me up to Patton State Hospital. And that was my first experience in doing a 90-day cure, so to speak, in, in a state hospital. Uh, one last question right now about a lot of you people. Uh, how many of you people ever had shock treatments? Anybody? Well, if you never had a shock treatment, you don't know what you're, you don't know what you're missing. You really don't. On the street, they call it GE therapy. Okay. We were, uh… They let me out, and there was a, there was one of the guys that worked around there. He had a young nurse friend of his, and they were going to Tijuana. I was up at San Bernardino, up Patton State Hospital. And I say this because this tells you a little story about where I come from. And, um, we go out in the car, and we was waiting for a guy over at Social Services to get out to go to San Diego with us. And, uh, he was a piano player in a nut band. And that's an experience, too. You get a bunch of nuts and alkies together, and you expect to dance by one beat, there's three beats. There may be four beats. Anyway, we're waiting and waiting for this guy to get, get, uh, to come out to the car to go to San Diego, and this guy says, "Hey," he says, uh, "Hendricks, I bet you'd really like to have a drink, wouldn't you?" Man, oh, man, my ears perked straight up, you know. I'd done 90 straight days without drinking. Sure enough, he had a football jacket in the back of his car, and under there, there was a fifth of whiskey about that long. It looked to me like it covered the whole seat. I reached back there and took me a big jolt, you know, and he said, "Easy, easy." He said, "You haven't drank anything in a good while." So I, I sipped along there and got enough. Then I was going to go get this guy. I said, "Goddamn, I can't wait any longer," so I started, and he said, "Man, you better get back in here," goes, "You're not off the ground yet. They'll throw you back in here, throw you another psychosis on you." But anyway, that started, uh, about three months of, of wine drinking. See, by this time, I had turned into really a converted wino. And that was from, for different reasons. One of the things, whiskey had too much alcohol in it, and for economics, wine was, was the best thing I could afford, was… And once you get hooked on wine, you might as well say you're hooked on heroin. 'Cause wine, a wino is a full-blown wino. There's no, there's no difference. He's just a wino. You get a guy drinks booze, he drinks booze. Somebody smokes pot, he's a pothead. But you get a wino, and he's a wino, and that's what I turned out to be. And I, I drank exclusively wine. Santa Fe all the way, they used to call it. Well, anyway, about three months later, I'm coming off of this drunk, and, and while I was up in Patton State Hospital, I seen them giving those shock treatments. And the guy would walk, he said, "Okay," there's another Oklahoma guy was in charge of this big old hospital, and he says, "Well, shock treatment day." He said, "I want you to walk up to, uh, the bullpen with this little guy here," little Black guy. He said, "He usually runs." He said, "If he runs, trip him or tackle him or just get him up there some way or another." So I'm feeling real good by now. So we go up there, and I watched them wire these cats up, and, and I'm looking at them, and I, I see this jolt hit them, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And, and I, I could, wouldn't, I would wonder now why this guy would run because it knocked the heck out of him. Well, we go to San Diego, and I'm drunk, and I got home after writing my wife, you know, that I'm, that I've turned a, I've turned a page and I'm changing my life and the whole bit. However, when I crawled up on the porch, it had been raining about like a little heavier than it is now, and I had mud all over me like this, my hands and my hair and everything. This is my homecoming from my cure at Patton State Hospital. Well, what happened was when I was coming off this drunk, I used to see a dinosaur. How many of you guys had hallucinations and seen things? How many of you seen things that weren't there? Okay, you're one of us then. You haven't lived until you've been there. Well, anyway, this dinosaur, I laid in the front room. I have to give you a little setting in this house. Now, this is a wino's house. It's hardwood floors. I don't know how in the hell they've got hardwood floors. Usually rock or, you know, dirt or something. Had an old couch over there that had springs sticking up in it I got from the Goodwill. And it had two little lamps at the end of it with the light bulbs, you know, just hanging down. You know, they weren't standing straight up. A couple old chairs and maybe a little woven throw rug someplace. And this was home for us. And this woman of mine, she was working every day. She's a nurse every day trying to keep things together. Okay, I'm going to come off of this drunk. And I don't know about you, but it's one of the damnedest things that I ever tried to do was to come off of a drunk. You know, it's a hell of a lot easier to stay sober than it is to get sober. A lot easier. So when I got, it was about 1.30, I guess, in the morning. And I'm laying there and this dinosaur appears. Had great big old feet. It had a big horn sticking out and a little baby face right on the end of that horn. Right up there. I'm laying there like this looking at him. And I said, well, there's this damn dinosaur again. Mind you, the wife and the kids are in another room. So being that I'm about the sharpest cat on the street, and that's after, you know, walking down the street with the water in your pants and wet and stinking, I still thought that I was probably as cool as anybody that ever lived. All you had to do was ask me. And I see there's some identification in that. But this was my night to use this head of mine. Of course, now I'm going to get rid of this dinosaur at all costs. I'm going to get rid of him for good. So this light bulb goes on and I get the bright idea that, well, if that GE therapy up there in Patton State Hospital knocked those nuts back into sanity, it'll knock this damn dinosaur, right? You know, I figured this thing out. Now, this is me by myself at 1:30 in the morning with all this brain power that I have. And I'm thinking, I'm thinking. I said, "Well, how am I going to do it?" So I said, "Well, uh, take the bulb out of one of those lamps." And, um, so I had to get a little courage 'cause I was shaking like hell anyway. So I eased over to the edge of the, over at the edge of the couch and un-screwed the bulb. And I'm sitting there thinking, "Well, all it can do, you know, it's not really heavy stuff anyway." So I just grabbed it and stuck my finger in it, and man, it pulled me and lamp and everything else. I was standing straight up in the air. And laid back down and the dinosaur was gone. Now, success. Now, I'm saying this one little, little feature for one thing, and that's to kind of get your identification in how you think. 'Cause there's one thing that I do know. I know an alcoholic. You may go all different varied color, sexes, and everything else, but I know an alcoholic, and any time that you don't think that you're like that, you better go to Al-Anon for Christ sake and find out. But anyway, I laid down about 10 minutes, and what happened? The dinosaur come back. So I'm set, I'm laying there and I said, uh, "Well, maybe I didn't give myself enough juice." So with all this smart thinking I have here, I eased over, you know, and I grabbed it again, and this time I could… did just like this, and I just shook it. It burned a little bit. What the hell? So I slung it against the wall and threw the lamp over there, you know, and cursing like hell, and the wife peeked out the door and she says, "What's going on in there?" You know? I said, "Shut your goddamn mouth," you know. You know, that was a real good marriage, by the way. But, uh, anyway, that's just a little story to tell you about how I thought in all conditions, even to the day that I come back to Alcoholics Anonymous. Okay. It wasn't too much longer before I was, um, I was down on the street again drunk, and I heard my voice called from a distance, and it was a guy by the name of Marv, Marvin. He owned, uh… I, I drank with Marv for a long time, but Marv disappeared. We figured he's… You know, when a drunk disappears, you figure he's dead or, you know, moved away or something. Most of them are dead. But Marv was up there, and I couldn't see him 'cause I wore glasses most of my life. And, um, he said, "Hey, come on up here." So I went up to him, and he knew what I was looking for 'cause Marv had been to the program, and I didn't know it. You know, when he disappeared off the street, hell, you don't go to AA looking for him. And, well, anyway, he was, uh, he said, "Come on over here." And I went over, and, and my hair wasn't in, in a ponytail, but it was damn near that long in those days. In those days, pomade was the thing. You know what I mean? You'd splatter half a jug here and a half a jug there, then you'd slick it back and put a ducktail in. I don't know how in the hell women ever did run their hair. I don't guess they did. They, if you can remember running their hands through your hair, you know, like a lot of women like to do. They like running… With that stuff, they would've stuck on it. But anyway, my hair was long, and, and I had a little stubble of beard. And, uh, he said, "Come on in the shop." And I told Marvin, I said, "I need a drink, man. I'm about dead." He said, "I know it." He said, "I know you are." He said, "I'm gonna buy you a couple of jugs." Sat in the chair. So he scraped off a little beard, you know, and cut my hair a little bit, and threw some all kinds of crap on me to make me smell different. Then, uh, he said, uh, "I'd like for you to go meet some people with me tonight." He said, uh, "They're down Chula Vista, and I'm going to get you a couple bottles of, uh, whatever you want, a bottle of wine, and I want to put you in a taxi, and I want you to go home, and about 7:30 we'll come by, and we'll go meet these folks." Well, you know, I wasn't thinking about meeting folks. I wasn't thinking about a damn thing, but, man, where's them two jugs? You know? But Marv's promise. Now, I don't know about you guys, how you, how your emotions are, but once I knew that I was going to get those two bottles of wine, I could feel adrenaline. I could just feel getting stronger. You know, I could just feel everything, like, like I was almost well, for Christ sake, and hadn't even taken a drink yet. Mind over matter, right? Okay, so at 7:30 that night, sure enough, here comes Marv and Ben Edgerton. Both of them are dead now. Marv was my old sponsor. And, um, I don't know… I, I don't want to say this against any kind of religion, but it's like these two guys would always go ride bicycles to someplace all over and, and, uh, and, uh… But these guys had, these guys had blue serge suits on, white shirt, blue tie, black shoes, and white socks. And they had the book like this, you know, the AA book, and it's like the Bible. And I'm thinking, "What in the hell?" 'Cause Marv, you know, he wasn't that kind of a guy, you know, he's gonna be turning Christian on me, you know? But anyway, he says, uh, "Let's go." So I had about a half bottle of wine. I said, "I, I'm gonna dart in the bedroom and take me a couple of big jolts, and I'm going with them. Hell, I'm not gonna meet these people like I am." So I go over to Chula Vista, and we go down in… We go, first thing we did, turned into this church, and man, that was it. That was, I damn near jumped out of that car. Now, down in Los Angeles, and some of you guys have lived there, they have an, they have two, three missions on, down there on, on, uh, on Fifth and, uh, Wenton, Sixth and Wenton, and the old, uh, Midnight Mission. Now, you used to be able to go down there and get a, get a, a flop, and, and some, sometimes if you was hungry enough and could eat, something to eat. Then you had to hear the man talk a little bit, John 3:16 or something, you know. But anyway, sang Old Rugged Cross, and then you'd go get, lay down a while. Well, we went down in this tri-level, and here was a group of people about like you are in here. And see that smoke? That smoke is, is, is nothing compared to what that place looked like. I mean, I went in there and I smoked, for Christ's sake. I went in and I couldn't see. I was looking around, and there were some people. I'm thinking, "Guys must be a, you know, what? Some kind of a clan here, for Christ's sake." Well, the first thing I know, uh, noticed was, uh, a lot of talking. I mean, jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber. And the, the irony of the whole thing, there wasn't anybody listening. You know, when, when this is over and you're around here socializing, watch yourself. Watch and you'll see. I'll bet you 20 to one that somebody will come right in the middle of your conversation, and come right in and start talking and not excusing themselves for it. And I'm thinking, "These are the rudest bunch of people I've ever seen." And they were laughing, though. That was the thing. That's the, that was the key. 'Cause I wasn't that damn dumb, but I couldn't see what these people were having some kind of fun. I don't know what it was, but it was, it was different from what I was used to. And it didn't look like the people that I drink with. You know, they had clean pants on, and they didn't smell. So here's what happened. I sit in this meeting, and the first thing that happened, some old codger, damn near old as I am now- … jumped up and he said, "If ye be alcoholic…" And I said, "Holy Christ." And it sounded just like some old guy that'd come off the, the Baptist tour, you know. But anyway, I listened to this thing out, and I had to see things. I don't know how much of an agnostic that I really was, but I, I always believed there was God. At least they, they said there was, so I went along with it. And I could see that something was happening to these group of people that was not happening in my life. Because they weren't coming, you know, to the meetings in, uh, 15, 18-year-old cars. You know, these people are coming in, uh, at least five-year-old cars on up, and most of them are new. And they had good-looking clothes on. I mean, they, they, you know, they were well-dressed. The guys were shaved. And they weren't, uh, they weren't seeing things. And they, they seemed to have little groups where they were talking, and they'd go on out to, to, um, "Let's go out to a restaurant after," and all that kind of stuff. They were socializing, something I'd never done or been all the time in my life that I could remember. The only time I ever socialized is when I was going to get something from you, and that was my key. But anyway, I stayed nine months. Now, maybe some of you guys and gals in here are trying this thing on for size. And I stayed nine months with you, and that was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. 'Cause you brainwashed me to the point where I could not look in that back bar with that mirror. And I could not look in. I don't give a damn how drunk I got. I could see that guy in there drinking, and it was me. And later on, I heard in AA that, uh, that we s- really can do definitely one thing, and that's screw your drinking up. And that's what happened. I'd like to say, that was in 1953 that I first came to you folks for nine months. That'd be 41 years ago. I would like to say, I don't know why I'd like to say it, but I'd like to say that I would've stayed sober all that time. But I didn't stay sober all that time. It took me seven years to get sober. Now, I can, uh, there's probably some guys and gals in this group that, uh, that hasn't made it the first time. I haven't seen an AA meeting yet that, where, uh, everybody got the first meeting and stayed sober. 'Cause this is a very complex thing as far as I'm concerned. It's a very subtle type of an illness. And I didn't even consider it being an illness. You know, I just thought it was all a moral issue. I just, uh, I was a sinner, and that was it, period. Just go to hell with it. Couldn't do anything about it anyway, so you might as well join them. But there's something that happened on the way to the forum in this church school that I was going to. Damn them preachers, you know, and them teachers. What they did, they give me a set of values. They gave me some values that I didn't… I wasn't an imbecile. I wasn't crazy. They gave me a set of values that says, "You got a choice. You either can do this and go to hell with it, or do this and walk straight." Now, was I able to do that? I was not able. When this little bell rang, it says, "Nat, don't do it," I was not able to not do it. I was wondering through my life, why isn't, why is it like that? Why is it when I get tempted to do something and this little bell rings, why is it that I cannot resist it? Why do I have to do it although I know it's going to kill me? It's the very nature of the disease of alcoholism, a twofold nature. We talk about an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy, or what I call a sensitivity of the body. Now, you're not an alcoholic unless you got both of them. There's a lot of people that comes to AA that don't have both of them. There's a lot of people that comes to AA that has the mental, but they don't have the physical. Once the mental is taken care of, like the wife, she comes back to you, you, you don't drink, and you bring money home to her, and you pay off the bills, and she keeps, keeps, uh, stops nagging at you, when do you want to drink? You don't… You've already got the, the problems that really bothered you. That's the mental end of it. You're able to take care of it. Not knowing, within myself at least, I'm speaking for me in this, in, uh, tonight, not knowing that I had a disease and that there was something different about Nat's body, something different about me. That was the hardest thing in the world for me to, 'cause I didn't, and a book tells us, what is, nobody likes to think he's bodily and mentally different from his fellows. But there was something that happened, and this doctor told me, he said, "I can go home tonight and, uh, have a, a martini, and maybe have two of them, watch the news at 10:30, 11:00, and go to bed and never worry anything about it." He said, "But you're different." He said, "Once you ingest alcohol, there's something happens in your body that sets off the phenomenon of craving, and you are helpless because by now it turns chemical." God, that, you know, that was a line of crap, you know. I just don't listen to this. But it was true, and I had to prove that that was true. See, I had to prove that what these guys were telling me about this disease was true. Time and circumstances, not virtues, time and circumstances, time and circumstances continued. I'd come back to Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, when you first come back after you so-called slip, you know, all the guys, you know, they put their arm around you, you know, and the girls say, "Glad to have you back, Nat," you know, and all this. Now, you let that happen for about five years, three years, and they really don't give a damn whether you come back or not. Yeah. And that's what happened to me. It really did. I'd go in there to a meeting, I might as well been one of them chairs, for Christ's sake. But the old-timers knew what they were doing. Leave them alone. Leave them alone. They tried to kill me one time with kindness, and they damn near did. And you can literally help an alcoholic to death and not even realize it, 'cause you mean well in here. But if you's like I was, any time that I can get in your pocketbook and you're trying to help me, I'm gonna get in your pocketbook. When I was on the street, all you had to do was say hello to me, and I had you. Some way or another, I'm gonna get in your, get in there and get some money. But anyway, this group of people, uh, and I've made some pretty good friends with this group of people. So, uh, time kept going and time kept going, and as any kind of an illness that any, any, any illness there is, well, any illness has, uh, it, it has, uh, relapses. I don't care what kind of illness it is. Then in AA and the people out there, when we relapse, they call us all kinds of things. "Look at that goddamn drunk Indian again." You know, they don't say, "Here's a sick man," you know. If you had a heart attack, you know, they'd throw you in a hospital, put pumps on you and everything else, and give you the best that there is. But you let some Indian guy get drunk on the street, man, they'll throw his ass in jail, and that's it. Sober up or die. That's the funny thing about the, the stigma to this disease, and it seems as though that people have been hiding their head in this disease for so long that it's almost a cultural thing now. And they're professionals, especially, because there's one reason that they cannot accept that for the m- for the most part. They cannot help you. They can put you on pills. They can do you anything that, that there is, but they cannot get you sober and clean. Okay. In 1960, my mother died back in Oklahoma, and I went back to bury her. That was on November the 6th, 1960, and I got sober November the 11th in 1960. Now, is when it all, the fun began. And you know what I mean. The separation from the men from the boys. It's either crap or get off the pot, 'cause this is it. And that's what I told the group when I came back. I said, "You folks had better be right, 'cause there's no other place for me. This is it." Well, I, I was pretty lucky. I got sober in Riverside, California. And there was an old man there, he's still living, Keith Moore. And Keith, uh, presented the program to me and to us in a different way than it had ever been presented before. We're sitting in a meeting with about 15 to 20 of us, and he says, um, "I'd like to know how many of you guys would like to study the steps." Well, I'd been to step studies with Aunt Jane's Reading Circle. You know, hell, they'd read, they'd read five steps in one night, you know? But he was different, this guy. And besides that, I was ready. That made the difference. Now, he said, "I want you guys to bring a pad, a, a Big Chief writing pad, whatever you can write on, and I want you to bring that to the meeting next week." Well, there was six of us out of that bunch that are still sober, and that's been almost 34 years ago. Now, now I tried to start understanding me more. I started under, trying to understand what it meant by the first step. Now, the first step is almost to me like a mini s- mini inventory. Reason I say that, because I had to start looking at different areas of my life. I admitted I was powerless over alcohol and that my life had become unmanageable. And it was, it was unmanageable due to my use of alcohol. All right, guys will say, "Well, no, my managed life was unmanageable a long time before I started drinking." Now, if you take a ba- Taking really a good look at that, when did you start drinking? Probably started drinking when you can't even remember. So taking the first step was probably one of the most important things that ever happened to me. And Keith said something that, uh, that kind of, that kind of echoes through my whole existence, and it means something today. He said, "If you take the first step in its entirety, it's going to be imperative that you take the other 11 as long as you live." Now, that's the trick of Alcoholics Anonymous. All those cats that put this thing together were cool, I'll tell you. Because once you do take it in its entirety, you're going to have to do something about your drinking. Now, on the other hand, if you don't take the first step in its entirety, he said the other 11 are fairy tales. Now, take that home with you and think that out, 'cause it meant an awful lot to me. So he says, uh, the first meeting. He said, "How many, um, how many of you guys feel that you're powerless over alcohol?" Well, we all stuck our hand up, you know. And we didn't want to be, 'cause he was, he was taking up good time with this. We was going to be subservient to him. We stuck our hand up. "How many of you guys feel as though your financial life is, uh, in order?" Not a hand went up. "How many of you people feel that your life and your marriage is in good order?" God, I thought that one over, you know. Then he says, uh, "How about your career? Your, your work life? Are you satisfied with your work life?" I think there was one gal there stuck her hand up, and she, uh, she operated about… I think she operated two different Greyhound bus stations, so what she was thinking about was money and not what he was talking about. So he says, uh, "On the bottom line, let's ask you another question." Says, "What… How about your self-esteem and your self-worth? Due to your drinking, how do you feel about yourself?" He said, "Now we've got something here to start on. Let's do a little writing on it." So I started writing on my marriage, or marriages, and I'm thinking every one of these marriages, every one of my relationships has always been shot down the drain due to me getting drunk, running off and leaving them, or something happened. Then he said, "How about relationships?" Now, he's not just talk- About a sexual or romantic relat-relationship. He was talking about relationships with all people. And our book tells us that we had one heck of a time, and probably never had a working relationship with another human being when you really think about it. 'Cause if you're like me, the only time that you ever had a relationship with another human being to see what you could get out of them, it had to be to your advantage. So we started to writing on these things, and if you're in that stage tonight, if you're in, in a position to where you're kinda like on the fence, and you come out here to do, to see the birds or run the rabbits or whatever, instead of doing something about your drinking or socializing, that's all cool. That's good. But the name of the game is, is to… See, I, I know that AA, AA meetings won't keep you sober. I know that. I… They will not keep you sober. There's a key to sobriety, and that's working these 12 steps in your life. That's the key, 'cause that's where the change starts, and there has to be a change or you'll go back to the old way. And our book tells us it's a daily reprieve and the contingency of our spiritual condition. Okay, so we got into that. Now, the next question was, where am I gonna get, uh… What's the second step say something about restores to sanity? Okay. Now, if we believe that a power greater than ourselves is going to restore us to sanity, where am I gonna find that power? And that was a big one with me. That was a big one. Now, see, I wasn't raised a traditional American Indian. That's not too obvious and not too hard to figure that out. And my whole life has always wanted to be here. I was always going to be here. I was always going to retire and be here and move here and be a part of walking through the woods and seeing a little rabbit or hear a bird sing. Or watch the storms and the lightning. But no, you get down that LA Basin and you don't see nothing. I mean, you don't see nothing but smoke and cars and people hollering and shooting. So here's what the, here's what the story was about this power greater than yourself. And some of you may be on the fence about that tonight because you're, you're like I was when I was trying to control my drinking and walking down the street with my, with my pants full, telling everybody I'm the sharpest dude in town, and I can run my life. Isn't that obvious? So I had to create. Now, that, that's kind of a harsh word sometimes, but I had to create a power greater than myself which could restore me. I don't like the word sanity 'cause I've been in them nuthouses, man. I like to use the word straight thinking. Straight thinking. I've always used the word just straight thinking. Now, if I'm going to be restored to straight thinking with all the effort that I have put into this thing, now I'm going to have an outside power. Now, where's it gonna come from? I can't turn to God because I just don't think that old man up there hears me or wherever he is. And I damn sure can't go that JC route, you know, 'cause I've seen some of them weird cats on that, up to JC. So I had to create. By creating, I mean you, you, and you, and you. Tonight, you are a power, and you've always been a power greater than myself. That's what I told you when I came back to you. You had better be right, and you were right. So I hang on. I grabbed ahold to the apron string and hung on. There's an old saying that, "Grab ahold with both hands, even if your ass falls off," and sometimes it takes that. It took it for me. Now, for 14 months, I immersed myself until I became a nuisance in a group. I mean, you, you could… That group couldn't think about opening up unless I was there. I mean, right in it, right in it, every night, every night, 14 months day and night. 'Cause since that little light bulb incident, I figured that I had better, you know, get some power with some straight thinking because that's not straight thinking. And that was the best I had at that time. And I think that when we come to AA, that was probably the best we had at that time. Which if you look at this, uh, I call it the world's largest outpatient clinic, and I believe it. 'Cause if you get into this program, you're gonna find out some stuff that you never thought was, uh, was possible in here. I never did 'cause anytime that any bad stuff would come up, I'd repress it. Push it back, man. Don't look at it. I was used to being able to kill it with some anesthetic of some kind. But as you dry out, and you brought the bod and the, and the mind had re, re followed, now you had to start facing these things without drinking or without using drugs. This is the separation. Very few of us make it. Very few of us make it. That's not a threat or anything. That's a fact. If you don't believe it, listen to Father, Father Martin's tape, and he says 35 out of the 36 alcoholics die of the disease. When I was working, I was… We went to this seminar back in the East, and I told him, I said, "That's the worst statement you ever made in your life." I said, "I'm working with alcoholic counselors and everything. We're trying to put things together, and you come up with this stuff. Hell, they, they're not gonna get in the field of alcoholism 'cause it's futile." That's the reason most doctors in the, in psych, they don't want anything to do with alcoholics 'cause it's futile. Has to take some grassroot bunch of people like we are here tonight that understand each other and love each other to the point to where we can identify what's going on in our lives. Finally, I went back to my church up-upbringing and started calling God, God, and I don't shy away from that at all anymore. Now, if this power greater than myself was going to help me, I had to nurture. I had to nurture things. So I had to learn how to turn my life and my will over to the care of God, as I understand Him, and no one else. A real scary point come up in my life about 30 months, and maybe it's starting to happen to you or maybe it will happen to you. It was a dead point, a dead spot. Like, is this all there is? Is this all there is? What, Peggy Lee had a song out, what, "Is That All There Is?" And that, identified with that thing. Is this all there is? Man, is this all I'm gonna do all my life? You know, work, go home, go to meetings, and work, go home, go to meetings. If that was it, I didn't care too damn much about it, so one little thing started to happen to me. There was a little, little flying, I don't know whether it happens to you like that, a little flying thought of suicide. And man, when I, I know this thing here to the point where I don't like anything like that to go across because I don't… I usually follow those kind of things. So I go back down to the ye olde clubhouse, and sure enough, there was old Keith coming in from work. And he, uh, came in with a big old legal pad and a whole bunch of golf pencils, 'cause him and I played golf together. And he come in the club, and in no uncertain terms, threw this thing, these, this pad down in front of me with these pencils, and he said, "Here, you Indian son of a bitch." He said, "You better get to writing before you blow your head off." And then I understood what it meant by having old-timers. People that knew me better than I ever knew myself, 'cause I didn't tell anybody I was thinking that way, but you could see it. So then I started work, getting on working the fourth step over again. And so on until it comes all the way down through the point until some of the promises are fulfilled. In my life, there had been added to this time, an added power. It was nebulous. It was shaky at times, this power, but I still wanted to take the, the control. And sometimes I let it take control. This thing would take control. What happened? I got slapped on the hand again. Now, behavior. Behavior. I think we all know what behavior is. I'm not a student of modification either. I'm just saying, if I behave the way that I ask my Creator to show me the way to go, then I'm given a signal in some form or fashion to do something that's right rather than do something that's wrong. Most of us have a little bell. A little bell that says, "Nat, don't do it." Yeah. Yeah, just that simple. That's no big deal. Just don't do it, Nat. And one day He told me, He says, "I've given you a power of choice. You can either do it or not do it." Now, think about that. And that was the beginning of the building of my self-worth and my self-esteem. Now, when I started to do more good than I was starting to do bad, I started to feel better about me. And as time goes on, I started to feel better, more better about me because I was doing a heck of a lot more better things. I was working with other alcoholics. I was taking them to meetings. I'd started to name a s- a step study group of my own. I was giving a little bit, giving back. Then they, then H and I got ahold of me. God. And I'll tell you, them people can ride a good horse to death. For two years, I was going to every road camp and every, every jail and county jail, city jail, hospital in San Diego County, up and down and, and, and I'm working concrete there all day long. You barely have time to take a bath and jump in a car and go to Pilot Rock, which you get back at 1:30 and go to work at 6:00 in the, especially in the summer. So finally I just said, uh, "I think I've done my duty." I said, "You get another horse to ride 'cause I'm gonna do some other service work." But they'll do it. So feeling good about yourself until the word, the greatest word that I have ever entered my life. I thought all of the time in my life that I had known what love was. I had never knew what love was. I knew what sex was some of the time, you know. I don't know whether I'll take back, rescind that statement. I didn't know what it was part of the time. I knew what these things meant. I knew what a, a relationship meant. But always the relationship, like I said before, was, "What can I get out of you?" I had ulterior motives and ulterior motives, ulterior motives, until I started to asking this power that had entered my life to help me change to straight thinking. Now, this maybe seem technical to you, but it don't seem technical to me 'cause at times I had to create this thing using those steps. Well, I had a privilege. Well, needless to say that I'm not gonna go in any further into that area. Needless to say, a divorce come up and then, and, um, that was probably, folks, the greatest relief, other than the fact that I stopped drinking, that I had ever had in my life. Do you know what pretending is? Sure you do. Playing the game, having sex with somebody you just don't want to have sex with. Huh? Coming home at night after work, put your arm around your wife and kiss her on the cheek and say, "I love you," and you don't mean a damn thing you're saying. That's pretending. But now, when I was given these divorce papers, I was free of that. Free of it. God bless the woman, but I'll tell you, she raised those two kids. One of them is not doing too good, but my other daughter is a college graduate and in occupational therapy and the whole bit. But the point being was that these things were starting to happen. Now I'll get to something here that meant something more, probably one of the greatest thing that ever happened in my life. I was running, uh… I was managing a, a, an El No Club in Anaheim, California. And a fellow from, uh, he was from, uh, Miami, Oklahoma, lived down in San Diego, named Bob Moore. And Bob called me up and he says, "Are you ready?" I said, "Ready for what?" He said, "We're going to develop programs for our people all over the United States." And I said, uh, "Yeah." He said, "Sell the house and go with us." And we just sold the house and go with him. Took off. He said, "We're gonna meet in Denver." We met in Denver. Then my wife got, uh, got rid of a lot of the trash we had and got a, one of them U-Haul trailer and hook it up behind that old car and I drove another car, and we got to Denver. Well, we developed 160 Indian alcohol and drug programs throughout the United States in the early '70s. We didn't miss much, didn't miss many places. That was un- it wasn't under Indian Health Service at the time. It was under, uh, Office of Equal Opportunity, OEO. Then it went into NIAAA, then into Indian Health. But I had the privilege of doing something in my life that I've always wanted to do because I knew the fatal, the fatality, what th- this disease was doing to us, the American Indian people. I've been rewarded a thousand times by that. By people that I've known throughout the United States give me a call. People I've seen here since th- since this little, uh, get together started. And the returns have been through telephone calls from all over the country at different times about people that got sober through the programs that we helped develop. When they first were looking for staff, we had, uh… I needed 25 men. Now, you can say that real quick. In 1972, it was almost impossible to find 25 sober male Indians in the United States. Think that over. We had some that was, uh, temporarily sober. We had one heck of a time staffing ourselves. And we didn't care about the educational background. All we wanted to do is see if the guy would be there tomorrow. And then, you know, and if the, uh, if the deer dance in Oklahoma was coming up, that he was gonna stay here instead of going to the deer dance, you know? Or the corn dance in Oklahoma. A lot of people that stay hell, you know, they tell Whitey, "Hey, Whitey, I'll see you next month. I'm going to the corn dance," and just gone, you know. But we got the staff together, and we, we had our job to do, which lasted a little over five years. So today and, and tonight, I, I feel privileged, very privileged to have been asked to, uh, to share a little bit of me with you and to, to know that something has happened. Las Vegas, for instance. Las Vegas is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Approximately three thousand Indian people in one place. Some of them, I think 99 and nine-tenths of them were sober. There's probably a few of them went out and tried to, you know, have a few and come back in. But to see something happen like this. And there was four of us there that was in on the beginning of these things, and we were sitting there at the table. Nobody but nobody but us knew who we were. You know, pro– Some program directors. But your heart felt it. You felt it in here. We knew one thing when we started these programs, that they would not be successful without the Alcoholics Anonymous program. So we had staffing. We, we'd send one, a guy on detail to a, to a, a new program. "You stay there until you get an AA group going." That would be his duty. Sometimes we did, we'd think we'd lost him. But you get, you get, uh, some places, I'll tell you, then there may be one or two Indian guys will come to AA meeting, but you won't see them the next time you have the meeting. Until all of these programs started and until AA finally got a hold. It's got a good hold in the United States now, and I think it's the only salvation we have. I'd like to say one little thing here about marriage. My wife and I are married 26 years. Some of it tumultuous, is that the word? Okay. Most of it happy, most of it contented. But there was a beginning of that. See, I come from the old school. See, my dad was born in 1874, so you can figure how old that cat would be if he's still alive, you know? And he come from the old school of man, man, man, man, man stuff. Not John Wayne, you know, but man, man. And he always, he'd get us boys in front of him like this, you know, and he'd say, "Let me tell you, boy." You know, "You guys something here," you know, he'd talk about this and this. "Another thing," he says, "Don't ever marry a woman that's got kids." And I can hear his voice just rattle through. "Have your own damn kids." And my feeling was, don't ever marry an alcoholic woman. I'm saying this to you alcoholic women because I married an alcoholic woman with two kids. Okay? So some of you young bucks in here tonight thinking about, "Well, I can choose my package," forget it. You're not going to be able to choose your package as much as you'd like to. She could probably be Miss, Miss Indian of USA last year, and you might meet her. But most likely you'll meet, uh, Mary Doe from over here, and then all of a sudden just knocks the hell out of you, and you're married and hope that you have a, a good life together. I found this probably the most rewarding thing that I've ever done in my life. In fact, it's the only thing I ever really did do, was, was come to Alcoholics Anonymous to try to save my life. I didn't come here to be moralistic at all. They play a major part in my life and recuperation and, and, and coming back. So the, um, timeframes, I don't know what the time is. I mean, I don't even know when it started, but I know Sam woke me up. I'll, I'll put that blame on him. I thought this thing started at 7:00. But anyway, I'd like to, uh, I'd like to kind of end this, end this little, uh, session at saying that if you had, um, a PTA meeting, you'd be here tonight just like this. But I'll tell you one thing, once you get to one of these meetings like this, you've been had. You have been had. This is not a PTA meeting. This is an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It's about what alcohol is doing to you and your family in your life. God bless you.
