Audio
Transcript
Source: Allen B – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2026-07-30.m4a File: allen-b-box-of-chocolates-2026-07-30.mp3 Duration: 00:56:01
============================================================
My name is Alan. I'm an alcoholic and I just had to check again to make sure I was not muted. I'm really glad to be with you all this. For me, it's afternoon. I guess it's evening. I'll explain in a minute. I just want to say I totally know that not everyone can have their camera on. I have no judgment about that. But I think that for a self-obsessed alcoholic of my type, having to talk about myself for a period of time while only looking at myself is a form of torture. So if you are able to keep your camera on, thank you. I mean this sincerely. You are doing a form of service in Alcoholics Anonymous, which, as we know, is that's the trick. The trick to keeping it is to give it away. So if you've done nothing else, if you feel like you've done nothing else, I suspect you've done other things. But if you feel like you've done nothing else to be useful, if you keep your camera on and don't have to leave me to be sort of trying to tell my story while I try to reflect on the percentage of gray left in my beard, I would appreciate that.
Again, I'm Alan. I'm an alcoholic. I do live in Woodbury, Tennessee, which nobody in Tennessee knows where Woodbury is. If you don't know, if you know where it is, you are unusual. It's mid-Tennessee. I'm about an hour outside of Nashville. I don't actually even live in Woodbury. I'm shelling off. I live in unincorporated Cannon County on a goat farm. I moved there about two years ago when my youngest, my twins, went to college. I had lived in Los Angeles, which is actually where I am right now, for many years. I've been sober in Los Angeles and I've raised my family, stayed sober. I was active in a group called the Pacific Group for a very long period of time there and wanted a change. I moved to mid-Tennessee in September of 24. I moved to Cannon County, which is just to the east of Rutherford County, where Murfreesboro is. I discovered something. If some of you are from rural areas, it won't surprise you, but other people will understand my astonishment.
I lived in Los Angeles for over 30 years and it never occurred to me to check to make sure that the county I was moving to had meetings of alcoholics anonymous. It just never occurred to me. I lived in LA, where basically every half hour you could find a meeting somewhere, and if you had a resentment, you could easily find a coffee pot and someone to start another meeting with. Cannon County had no meetings. I'm not somebody who does well in my own head.
I did a lot of driving. I would regularly drive 30, 50 or more miles to go to meetings in places like Lebanon, Franklin, Nashville, and McMinnville. That was really interesting. Shortly before I'd gone, I don't know if any of you have moved in recovery, but I got sober in 1990 in New York. Then when I was three years sober, I moved to LA and I'd been there for a long time. I have a friend who some of you may have heard over the years, a woman named Pat Wise, a 50-year sober and a buddy. When I was getting ready to move from Los Angeles, from the famous Pacific group to Cannon County, Pat looked at me and said, Alan, when you go to Mid-Tennessee, here's a piece of advice. Pat, if you don't know her, is not somebody to give a lot of advice.
When she gave it to me, I really listened up. She said, when you get there for the first year, make an effort not to improve Alcoholics Anonymous where you find it. She said, you will not succeed and you will be surprised to find out that they do not appreciate the effort. And that was wonderful advice. And so I spent that year driving from meeting to meeting and taking it in. And it was wonderful for me. I see that Steve and Annette are in Alabama. We played Sweet Home Alabama. I'm guessing some of you are from around here. The way we look at the literature in Mid-Tennessee is a little bit different than what I was used to. The way that we organize the meetings is a little bit different. In California, and I want to be clear, I love California recovery. And I am happy to make jokes about California. If anyone is on here, I'm telling you right now, I joke about California, but I love it. But we talk about spirituality a lot, almost with a vague sense of apologeticness. It got to be so desperate that I've actually come to believe in something bigger than myself. And now I live in a place where
[00:05:01]
people embrace spirituality with a lot of unambiguous enthusiasm. And that's how I feel. And I want to be clear to anybody who might be new or Alcoholics Anonymous does not have an opinion on what other people believe in Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't mean like there's a right or a wrong answer. There's nothing wrong with having a sense of irony about like, I can't believe I came to believe. It's just sort of fun to be in a place where I can talk about absolutely believing that my life is managed by something bigger than myself and people are like right on. And so I spent that first year driving. I make a big point of how I drive and then occasionally people want to, Alan, you're talking about driving an hour to a meeting with Southern California traffic and people drive an hour to a meeting all the time.
They're just going eight miles. And that is true. But I'm going to tell you something that I learned. It takes an hour to drive 50 miles on country roads to a meeting and then it takes an hour driving back. In Southern California, the gift is it only takes you like 18 minutes to get home after it took you an hour and a half to get to the meeting. So there's a difference. But the point was, I did discover that we don't have a lot of speaker meetings in mid Tennessee, which is interesting because we have a lot of great storytellers and speakers. There's just not a lot of speaker meetings. And so I started going to a men's tag called the Jaywalkers, which meets tonight on Thursday night. I actually agreed to meet to speak for Ramona tonight because I knew that I would be in California and couldn't be at my usual men's tag. And we meet in the basement of First Baptist. And one of the guys who helped start the meeting about a few months before I got there got sober in Scottsdale, where if you aren't familiar, they have a really great Saturday night speaker meeting. I said, I think we should have a speaker meeting. And he loved the idea. And I said, well, here's the thing. I've only been here nine months. And he looked at me like, so what? And I go, well, Pat, why made me promise I wouldn't do anything for a year? So when I was here a year, we started the Tennessee Pacific Group, which meets on Monday nights in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. We have a 10 minute speaker and a main speaker. But more importantly, we have really good fellowship. We have a lot of enthusiasm and people show up and they know who's new there and they say hi to them. And we try to give people little jobs, commitments. And I am a goat farmer and I make goat cheese. I am a fromage right now. And so I will bring goat cheese to the meeting and and share it. And we're having a lot of fun.
And I'm getting to see a fellowship grow up, spring up, as it says, where I live. And I'm really, really grateful for that opportunity. It's also very different. I mean, I was I was in the Pacific Group for 25 years. And if you've never been, that was a massive meeting. And my sponsor for 21 of his years was a guy named Clancy. And he had started the group and he he was. People use the term Nazi now and I hate it because the Nazis were terrible and they did terrible things. And Clancy was not terrible and he did not do terrible things. He was strict and he was unambiguous. And I don't know if anyone else is like this. I have I sound at 36 years of sobriety like a sensible person. And amazingly, I often function like a sensible person. I get put on boards and things for sensible people because you've taught me how to come across as sensible, but I have a thick head. And sometimes for me, it's really great to have somebody who lays out the truth in a very direct, unvarnished way. And I have a capacity that I would encourage to anybody in a to develop if you don't have it, which is I hear the love and and the concern in blunt, honest advice, not deliberately cruel advice. And I've seen that in a and I'm not recommending that. But Clancy was blunt and and easy to understand. You didn't walk away wondering what he told you to do. He didn't speak in riddles and rhymes. He was not like something out of Greek mythology when he when he said, go get a cup of coffee and sit down there and talk to that person. He didn't mean to go do something else. He literally meant go get a cup of coffee and sit down there and talk to that person. And I discovered in the 21 years that I was with him that when I take direction from somebody in a who's sober a little bit longer and who I trust to be dedicated to the path and to know what they're doing and motivated to help me when I do what they say, my life gets better. And so I've got a pretty good life today. These talks, these smaller, more intimate talks always go in an interesting direction. And I realize you are perhaps thinking this is wonderful. He's a nice, articulate guy.
[00:10:02]
He does have a pretty good sense of humor. I wonder if he drank and I can assure you I'm going to get to that. I have a little bit of time. And as long as I check all the boxes, I'm hoping you'll give me a passing grade. I hope. I mentioned I got sober in 1990. I got sober on April 16th of 1990. I was 25 years old. I lived in Manhattan. I'd been drunk for about a decade. And I was miserable and I led a small life. And I'm going to say that I often hear people say, and I believe that they mean it, that if they hadn't gotten sober, they would be dead.
I hear that all the time. I'm sure you all hear that all the time. First of all, I want to be clear. I don't know. I don't know if I'd gone down a different path or the outcome would have been. But I will tell you that in my heart of hearts, what I believe is that I would not be dead because I already lived in hell. I lived a small, depressing life and it was getting smaller and more depressing. And I actually just think I would have missed it all. I'm 61 now. I have a wonderful life. I love sobriety. I love Alcoholics Anonymous. I love these opportunities to come and meet some new people, to speak our language of the heart. But even more to fill my heart, I have a family and I have three kids. My son's 22. He just graduated college. My daughters are 20.
They talk to me. They call me to say hi. They call me when they don't need money. They call to ask my opinion. The lament of every parent of kids in their 20s is they don't want to hear what I have to say. I have so much to offer. My kids call me all the time. They ask stuff. I have friends. I have a partner. I have some stuff. And I feel like I just would have been living in a studio apartment, which is what I got sober in New York, getting by bitter, angry, resentful, with a sense that something had passed by me and I didn't know why and that it wasn't my fault, that life had just abused me, that life didn't appreciate me. And instead, I got this.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and my dad was a military intelligence officer. He'd gone to West Point. I'm Jewish. It's a fairly unusual story in that regard. He was a West Point cadet, an army engineer, and he was doing military intelligence in Manhattan when I was born. Mom was a kindergarten teacher in the 1960s in New York City, and middle class women generally retired from teaching when they became moms. So mom taught kindergartners. And when she had me, I was her first. She went home and became a full-time mom. My dad is alive. My mom passed away nine years ago.
I was raised by good people with good values. And I say that for the following reason. One is, I'm not going to have interesting stories about child abuse to tell you. And the other is, I am proof, for whatever it's worth, that child abuse is not a requirement for developing alcoholism. I come by it on the natch. And if a traumatic childhood was necessary, you'd have to have a different speaker. But I will tell you this. Dad was a military intelligence officer. And what I grew up understanding are that far from being something that will kill me, I thought secrets were a good thing. I thought secrets were power, that knowledge was information.
And that when you know something, what you do is you keep it to yourself. And you wait to play it to advantage. That was how I understood to look at life. And my initial secret, my first secret, if you will, was that I was uncomfortable. There was nothing wrong. We lived in Brooklyn when I was five. We moved to an acre in Stanford, Connecticut, a lovely home with nice neighbors and good schools. And I'm just uncomfortable in my own skin. I'm nerdy and uncomfortable and awkward. And I can't figure out why. And all I know is to be ashamed of it and to want to fix it. But what I know not to do is tell you what's going on.
And I lose myself in television, which was much more limited back then. If anyone is new, we only had three or four channels. And they just it was different back then. They just aired stuff. We didn't have playback or on demand. They're just really shows. And they went by. And if you walked out of the room, you missed them. You didn't get it. And I didn't start drinking until we moved to Chicago. We moved to the Chicago area when I was 10. I lived in a suburb. I lived in a suburb called Elmhurst. It was a leafy green suburb. It was Midwestern. There was a It was Midwestern. There was a sign when you drove into Elmhurst that said,
[00:15:02]
Welcome to Elmhurst, a nice place to live, which just if you aren't from the Midwest, everything you need to know about the Midwest. In California, where I lived for many years, it would say, Welcome to Azusa, the best place to live. Welcome to Downey, the capital of the, you know. No, Elmhurst was a nice place to live. Lombard was fine. Glen Ellyn was dandy. Like, nobody wanted to show off, but it was green and lovely. The Tylenol scare where people died from poison Tylenol started in Elmhurst. But, and Keebler cookies were made in Elmhurst. So, I grew up with the elves, if you remember them from the cookies. And, and I was uncomfortable.
And I got there and I used to have big bushy hair. I'm Jewish. I haven't mentioned that. And we called it an ISRO back then. I don't know if you're allowed to call it that now. I don't really care. But it was like big and bushy and red. And I was sort of husky. And I had an East Coast accent in the Midwest. And I really didn't fit in. And all I wanted to do was fit in and be left alone. And it was all so awkward and uncomfortable. And, and finally, I found alcohol. And I found alcohol at Temple. In my faith, on Friday nights, we go to Temple. And at the end of the services, before you retire to the social hall for, for punch and cookies and polite conversation, you say a few prayers as you would in a congregation. And you light candles and then you say a prayer over the bread, over the grain of the earth. It's called challah. And then you say a prayer over the fruit of the vine. And it was wine. Back then, nowadays, I think it would often be gracious. But back then they served wine. And they served a particular wine that was called Manischewitz. And if no one's ever had it, I don't know how common Manischewitz wine was in Alabama. But a Manischewitz I would describe as a red wine that was carefully produced for the palate of an 11-year-old. It was basically alcoholic grape juice. And you would get literally a shot. And the moms set everything up. And they would wildly overpour. If there were 50 or 75 people at the services, for whatever reason, they would pour at least 150 of these shots. And so we would all take one. And then the younger kids and the parents would wander down to the social hall. And my friends and I would stay behind and do shot contests of Manischewitz. And I discovered a few things. I discovered that I liked the effect produced by alcohol. As I may have conveyed already, I had a busy, loud head that did not say nice things. And it silenced my head. I also discovered some really practical things that I kept with me for the rest of my drinking. I would do 12, 15, 20 shots of Manischewitz. And I need to assure you, there's nothing subtle when you're 11 or 12 about downing 15 shots of Manischewitz.
Your lips are purple. You smell like a vineyard. There's nothing nuanced or under the radar about this. What I discovered was, when we made it to the social hall, that as long as I didn't insult the rabbi's wife, as long as I didn't throw up on the temple board's president's shoes, nobody cared. They didn't care. They weren't going to stop me. And that's what I carried through with me. A lot of people's stories, in my opinion, are stories of people taking whatever action they can to try to get stopped, getting arrested, getting institutionalized. It's not recovery, but they're crude but effective ways of getting stopped. I didn't want to be stopped.
I finally had found a medication that worked to solve my secret anxiety, my secret discomfort, everything that I didn't want to talk about. And all I wanted to do is medicate myself. I didn't want you to bother me. I wanted you to leave me alone. And I drank. I went off to high school, and we got access to heavier proof stuff. And then I went to college, and I went to college in the South. I went to college in North Carolina. That was my first experience in the South.
And I joined a fraternity, and I fell madly in love with beer. I want to be unambiguous right now. I got sober in 1990 in New York, and I'm an alcoholic. People in AA have been doing drugs for a very long time. And I want to be clear. If I knew that you could offend old-timers by talking about drugs in AA, I would have made a point of doing a lot of drugs before I got here. I just didn't know. And I found that alcohol worked effectively for me.
[00:20:02]
And I will say in the 80s when I was in New York, I did supplement my drinking by smoking a little bit of recreational crack cocaine. But that was just the 80s in New York, and kind of everyone did. The truth is beer really got me where I needed to go. And it got me there slowly, because I am the kind of alcoholic who enjoys drinking for very long periods of time. I don't want to medicate my discomfort for an hour. I want to medicate my discomfort for six, eight, or ten hours if I can. So I really loved beer. And after college, I moved to New York. I got a job there.
Here's the story. I'd been sort of more or less insanely drunk. And I had planned. I went to a good school. I'd done fairly well, good enough to apply to grad programs. I had taken the LSATs and the GMATs, which are the boards for law school and business school. And then in what I can only describe as a combination of the amazing ability of alcoholics to mess up anything, and also living in an era before things like the internet and email where you just could fall off the grid a little bit more easily, I neglected to apply for anything. I just was too busy going to frat parties and drinking. I had perfectly good law school boards. I could have absolutely gotten in somewhere. I just didn't put in any applications. Fun fact for anyone who may want to be improving their education in sobriety, a wonderful thing for people who choose to do it, I can tell you from experience the percentage of programs you get into if you don't apply to any, it's zero.
So I get to like March and I suddenly realize I don't have anything going on. I've not applied. Nobody knows this. And I better get a job or I'm going back home to live in mom and dad's house and take my old job selling sheets and towels at Marshall Fields, which Marshall Fields was a wonderful old department store. But selling sheets and towels is the absolute worst job you can give an alcoholic because unlike other things, the people who come to shop for sheets and towels, pretty much housewives back then, want to talk to you about their like they want you to be invested in their decorating decisions and their color schemes. And God, I don't care. And it's just too painful. So I better get a job. And so I find an opening for a New York investment banking job on a signup sheet somewhere. I have enough charm to sweet talk my way into getting that interview.
And through a series of just ridiculous over leaps, I wind up getting a job at Morgan Stanley, which is an investment bank in New York. Really good job. And of course, in the way that the alcoholic mind works, I am I know that I am shooting way above my league until the moment I get the job. And then I think they're lucky to have me. But I moved to New York and I moved into the studio apartment and I I think that I'm going to be a banker. And what I discover within a month or two is that I've really just found a way to fund a very successful pub crawling career in downtown New York and dive bars. And and that's what I do. I just go from one dive bar to another and my world gets smaller and smaller. And I'm going to jump ahead because I want to have enough time to get sober and be sober again for a little while. But in February of 1990, I am I am no longer pub crawling because my friend Sharon, Sharon B., then Sharon C., now Sharon F., likes to talk about how our packs get heavier when we're drinking and and how we let things go because we just need to travel with a lighter pack. And I I approached New York in 1986 when I arrived as a big adventure. But by 1989, it's all too much. And I I've moved into one dive bar called the Village Idiot and a good name. And it's a long, dark, narrow bar. There's a jukebox.
Interestingly, Alabama, a lot of country western on it, a lot of Patsy Cline and that Band of Gold song about the woman whose husband leaves her on their wedding night. And my all time favorite drinking song, Brandy, You're a Fine Girl, What a Good Wife You'd Be. Fat Tommy's the bartender at the Idiot. And as long as you tip him occasionally, he just doesn't really care what you do. And and all I know is that I'm there every night. And all I also know, although I don't realize this until years later in recovery, is that my case is different. I know when you're drinking in the Village Idiot every night, you understand that you're drinking with barflies. But Clancy used to say the battle cry of the active alcoholic is my case is different.
[00:25:04]
And this is how I know he was right. I truly imagined a story because I had gone to the school and although I had lost the job at the bank, I had had a good job at a bank. And I decided that what I was doing in New York, what I was doing in New York, by the way, was I was doing cater waiter gigs and temp jobs and barely getting by having a roommate in my rent stabilized studio apartment so I could stay there. But I believe that I was enrolled in a master's program in cultural anthropology. I believe that. And I am the phone is like three times.
I want you all to know I'm not nearly as popular as it would suggest that I am. I don't know what's going on with my phone. But I, I believe that I was doing a cultural anthropology degree, studying the denizens, the barflies of dive bars in New York. I thought that I was the Margaret Mead of downtown New York. This is a fantasy. I am not enrolled in anything. I just have decided that I am an undercover cultural anthropologist and that I am impressed with my ability to fit in with the barflies while I drink with them every night. That's how small my world had gotten by 25.
And and here's what happens. In in Bill Wilson's story, Bill Wilson, I think, you know, but in case you don't, Bill Wilson's one of our co-founders in Alcoholics Anonymous. And in Bill Wilson's story, he talks about having a white light experience. It's beautiful. He talks about being in a sanitarium, which is a form of rehab and people trying to help him. And it's very clear that Bill has been in rehabs before and sanitariums before, and people have tried to help him before and it's never worked. And in the story, he has this moment where the room gets very bright and he has a sense of the presence of his creator and it's transformative. It shifts him on this path towards recovery. And all I can tell you is in February of 1990, I had a dark light experience in a dive bar and it was just the literal opposite. If Bill felt the nearness of his creator, I had a moment, very unexpected, just what was I thought just another night of being drunk in a bar. And in this moment, it got really dark and I suddenly had a sense of how alone I was, of how physically isolated I was. I saw the space between me and the other people in the bar in a different way. I saw people in the bar holding hands and I imagined that they felt like they were connecting with each other, but I understood on some level that there were atoms and molecules between their hands and they weren't really connected. And what I got and what I felt in that moment was this awareness that I'd been a lonely, alone person for a very long time.
And that as I had drunk and made my world smaller and had a harder time dealing with the concern of loved ones, I had pushed people out of my life and built this very small, sad life that I drank to ignore. And all of a sudden the curtains, as you might say, fell and I just saw what was going on, which is that I was completely alone and I was going to be alone forever and I couldn't drink it away. And alcohol, I may have been in New York, born in New York, but I grew up in the Midwest and we are practical people. I understand that alcohol requires humiliations. I get that and I think that it's kind of BS when people pretend that they're surprised. If you've been drinking a long time, you understand there's going to be a certain amount of humiliation and desperation and compromise of principles involved in being a drunk. But I thought it was worth it for the payoff and now I couldn't get the payoff. And it was sort of like being abandoned by a lover that you hate and they're terrible, but you think at least they'll never leave me. And alcohol left and I didn't know what to do. And I tried a brief extermination control drinking and that was terrible and didn't do anything. And so I came up with this idea because Mardi Gras was coming up. It was the beginning of March in New York City, very Catholic city, Chicago, very Catholic city, the suburbs I'd grown up in, very Catholic. And what happens after Mardi Gras is that everyone gives up things for Lent. And I decided to give up any form of drinking or self-medication for Lent in 1990. And as I've mentioned, I'm Jewish and we are not a people known for any Lenten practice, but for any Lenten practice. But it was funny. And so people didn't ask me questions that I didn't have
[00:30:01]
answers for like, Hey, Alan, we've kind of known you to be drunk all the time. You're not drinking. Are you okay? Are you okay? It was just too tough a question. And so I made it a joke and I white knuckled it through 40 days and 40 very long nights and I got manic. That is my experience for whatever it's worth to anybody of being drunk for a substantial period of time with no AA and no program of recovery. And I can tell you I was crazy. I was sober. I was physically sober. But occasionally I think new people are confused. And I think some of it is on us, to be honest, and we have an obligation to explain it. Alcoholism is a somewhat vague word. And to me it does suggest that our problem is alcohol. And Clancy would explain, and I agree, and I'll give my best explanation of it now. My solution is alcohol. My problem is I cannot live. I am too uncomfortable in my own skin. I am too self-obsessed. The walls are just closing in on me all the time. I need to get out of self before I explode. And alcohol is a way of doing it. And once I do it, I can't stop and I can't predict where it's going to go. But the alcohol is less my problem and more my solution, even though the solution is, as you would say, the equivalent of having a splinter in your finger and solving it by smashing a hammer down on the finger.
And I'm crazy and manic. And on Easter Sunday at the end of Lent, so I've come to the end of my 40 days, I go dancing because I got a lot of energy and I'm in a club called The Sound Factory. And I meet somebody at three in the morning who's two and a half years sober and Alcoholics Anonymous. And I want to say I love the big book and I recommend it highly. I also love the 12 and 12. I'm not one of these people who prefers to pick one. I think there are qualities to both that are commendable. And the third step in the 12 and 12 is to me a particularly well-written chapter.
If anybody is new, the second step asks me to come to believe in something bigger than myself, which I need. And the third step asks me to take the leap of faith of turning my life over to this thing that's bigger than me. I call that God. You don't have to. And in the chapter in the 12 and 12, it compares this approach to faith and surrender as sort of the equivalent to approaching a door that is locked with a keyhole that seems invisible. And then it says, if we have the littlest bit of willingness to have a life of faith, it's as if the keyhole appears and the door magically opens and allows us to walk through to a new way of life.
And for whatever it's worth, that's what it was like for me to meet somebody unexpectedly at three in the morning in a very, you know, loud, dark New York City disco who was sober. And I think it was this. I'm a big fan of contempt prior to investigation. I don't have a lot going on in my life, but in my mind I do. And I love to rule out things without even bothering trying them. And I know that AA works. It's 1990, folks. There were plenty of stories and TV movies and all that, that people's lives are held by AA. So I had to figure out why it wasn't going to work for me. And I had to do it without going. And so I had some vague story.
And so I had some vague story. I think that AA was great, but it was for much older people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was not cool. I mean, I wasn't cool, but whatever. And I met somebody out having fun and living in the sunlight of a spirit who was sober. And I think that I was desperate to have something to hope. And it intrigued me. And I will tell you that I went to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous on that next day, on Easter Sunday. And I, as I've mentioned, with physical sobriety, but no program, I'm pretty manic. I remember going to a meeting. I do remember a woman spoke. I don't remember a word she said.
I couldn't focus. But what happened was that somebody who knew me from out and about saw me at the meeting. And they swept me up and they took me to a diner for a bite afterwards. And it was a woman. Her name is Alaysia. And she talked about her alcoholism. She didn't talk about my alcoholism. She didn't tell me what to do. She talked about her alcoholism. And I had a moment of identification. And I have a pet opinion or two, for whatever they're worth, take them or leave them. But one of them is this. I don't think that identification guarantees that we'll get sober. I think there are a lot of actions that we take in AA that really move the needle in favor of that happening, the steps, service, all these good things. But I do think that identification in Alcoholics Anonymous pretty much guarantees that an alcoholic's drinking is ruined. I think that is likely. But I didn't know that. And I had only committed to be sober for lunch. And I went to an Easter supper that night. And I had half a glass of white wine and half a glass of red wine. And that wound up being my last drink. And I've
[00:35:04]
wondered why I only had half of each. And I'm guessing, as you can guess, and as we certainly read more about alcoholism regularly at meetings, I was already formulating some plan for how I was going to manage my drinking effectively. But what I can tell you is after just 40 days of nothing but physical sobriety, no program, but just physical sobriety, and only a glass of wine, the equivalent of a glass of wine, I could feel the allergy that we have set off in me. I knew on a cellular level everything that I needed to do. I needed to survive the rest of the dinner. I needed to get with my friends back to the train station to get back to the city. I needed to lose my friends, get back to the apartment, lose my Easter clothing, get my grungy downtown clothing on, scrape together whatever money that I could, and just get drunk for as long as I could.
And I got to tell you, I just gave you an explanation. And that was like 400 times longer than it took me to understand what I just understood on an instinctive level. Everything that I needed to do next, it was muscle memory. And I got back to the city, and I lost my friends. And I felt so, I want to tell you, I felt so exhausted knowing what I had to put myself through next. And the miracle, or the grace of God, if you will, which I guess is what a miracle is, is that when I got back to the apartment, rather than going back out, I passed out on my bed. And it was just a glass of wine. It wasn't enough to knock me out. But I was just so exhausted at what I needed to do to myself next to feed my alcoholism.
And the next day, I turned myself back into AA. And my life began to change. I was not a happy newcomer. Some of you are happy newcomers or were happy newcomers. Good for you. I love miserable newcomers. I just do. By the way, that doesn't mean that I say nice things. I say snarky things back. They're miserable. They can handle it. But I went to your meetings, and I drank your coffee, and I ate your cookies. The cookies were good back then. Sometimes there was food, and I would eat your food. And I would listen to your honesty, and I was so fascinated.
Nothing to me seemed more shocking and brave than people being honest. And I think there's a quality in Alcoholics Anonymous that we can recognize when other alcoholics are telling the truth and when they're laying it on too thick. I don't think we always like people's truth, but I think we know when other people are telling us the truth and when they're not. And I could tell that these people were telling the truth. And I'd lived an entire life devoted to keeping secrets and telling lies. I lied in my drinking in the bars when it would have been easier to tell the truth. I didn't like the feeling of the truth in my mouth by the end. And I was unbelievably fascinated at these people's clear conviction that their life would get better by being honest, because that's just not how I was raised. And I stayed sober, and I got a commitment or two, and I got worse. Because meetings are wonderful. We're in a meeting right now. I am not one of these people who disparages meetings. Meetings are where we get attached to the solution, but I don't think meetings are the solution. I think the solutions are the actions. I think they're the steps and sponsorship and service and all those other things. And I wasn't getting hooked in. I was just going to your meetings and not identifying and convincing myself my case was different. And I saw that I was taking actions that were moving me away from AA. And I did something. And for some of you, this would be really small, but it was a big deal for me. And I want to say this. Fortunately, we don't all have the same fears. And some of us find certain things easier, other things harder. I always try to be impressed when people take on their own fears. And my fear was being vulnerable and being honest and being immediate. And I was in discomfort, and I was getting worse. And one Sunday night, I went to a meeting. And in New York, you raised your hand to share. And I raised my hand. I hate it, because that makes me vulnerable to begin with. If you pick me, it means what? That we have to become friends or have sex or something. I don't know. And if you don't pick me, I have to plot your painful demise. It's a lot. But I raised my hand. And then I did something really radical for me. My preferred form of sharing when I did it was to tell you about something that I had already solved, to bring it to the meeting, boxed up with a little ribbon and bow, and present it, not to be immediate or vulnerable. And instead, I told the truth, which is that I had a bicycle that I was riding later and later at night into sketchier neighborhoods, and that I'd heard about the steps, but I hadn't worked them. I will say, and I hope that I've earned enough faith that I'm telling you the truth, that you're going to believe me, because some of you are going to have a hard time believing this. But in 1990 in New York,
[00:40:01]
they were commonly telling us to work one step a year. It was a thing. By the way, I've heard a circuit speaker who got sober in New York in 89 say the same thing, so I know that I'm not making it up. And I think that it was New York, and they were very brainy, and they meant it in some deep way of like, the first year is about an experience of surrender, and the second year is about an experience of faith. But they just had shortened it to work a step a year. And I didn't have five years to get to my inventory. I was not going to last that long. And so I gave my share. And I hated it, because I hated being vulnerable in front of people. But a miracle happened, as miracles will happen when we open ourselves up to them. And Alcoholics Anonymous, there's a woman, Karen, at that meeting with five years of sobriety, who was on fire for AA. And Karen was playing the vixen on a soap opera that shot in New York. She had blonde hair and blue eyes, and was gorgeous and on fire for AA. And she called me. She had my number somehow.
And she said, I think you need to work the steps. And she said it with a lot of profanity. I don't use profanity when I speak. But she looked like an angel. And she swore like a truck driver. And that was a great combo. And she got me to get my big book down. And she explained to me how to work the steps. And she explained to me how to write an inventory. And I wrote an inventory. I wrote an inventory for a stupid reason. I thought that I was getting, I thought there was like, I make up stories in my head, folks. I make up stories in my head, because I don't know how to be honest and vulnerable. And I assume that you're not being honest and vulnerable. And I've just got to figure it out. And so I decided it was some sort of celebrity outreach program.
And I was going to get like a celebrity friend if I did what she wanted. But the point was, she laid out exactly how to write a four step as laid out in the big book. And I may have been doing it to please her, but I did it. And I went to her apartment with my little piddly list of resentments and fears and sexual conduct. And I read it to her. And and something miraculous happened two or three days later. For the first time I understood that I was that I belonged in Alcoholics Anonymous that I drink like you and I think like you and I feel like you. And I stopped being somebody sitting in your rooms drinking your coffee and I became a member. And that's what it took for me to become a member. I moved to California when I was three and a half years sober. Those people in New York had given me a good foundation of action, service, respect, all that good stuff. And and I made a series of crappy decisions when I got to California. I took my will back. You know, it says in many meetings at the end, we say it works if you work it. Hey, it says it works if you work it. And here's what I will tell you. It also doesn't work if I don't work it. And my experience was I made decisions to stop working the program and to and to transform AA into a self-help program. And New York had taught me how to be in the center of the lifeboat and I moved to the edge of the lifeboat. And here's what happens on the edge of life. I hope you never have to be on the edge of the lifeboat. But if you're ever there, I'm going to tell you what happens. You're on a lifeboat and sometimes storms swell up and waves break over the bow and the people who get swept over the edge are people who are on the edge of the lifeboat.
And that's what it looks like. And I, I moved to the edge of the lifeboat because I was resentful of the center, which is dumb, but I did. And then the day came when I realized I'd been happier in the center of the lifeboat. And I'm telling you the God's truth here. I did not know how to get back to the center. It was invisible. I couldn't find it. And I realized in that moment that eventually one of those waves was going to break over the bow and take me over. And I became really sad because AA had been something that had been very good for me for a long period of time.
And it had stopped working. And I'm eight years sober. And I do something that, again, as you know, because I've told you I hate, I tell the truth, which is that I'm not doing well. And this guy, Bob Kay, comes up to me after this meeting. There's a Saturday night meeting and Bob wasn't having it. He was not like, oh, poor sweet Alan, poor Alan in pain. Like you're such a nice guy. We love you. Do you want to hug? He looked at me and he goes, I believe you're going to get loaded. He goes, but you're eight years sober. If you not notice that everybody at eight years, you get sober, comes back at least once or twice because you're basically getting ready to be a newcomer. Why don't you just start acting like a newcomer now?
And then he walked away like he just wasn't having it. And it was brilliant. I heard exactly what I needed to hear. And I thought about what I had done when I was a newcomer. I had a home group. I had commitments. I had a. When I was a newcomer, I had a home group, I had commitments, I had a sponsor, I had a sponsor at that point who like lived in Europe and we didn't even have email back then. And I went to the
[00:45:01]
Pacific group because it was a big group and I could have a home group there. And I got a commitment. And a few months into it, I got Clancy to be my sponsor and he got me involved in things like going to the yard, which is where we play softball and working with new guys and having commitments. And I thrived. I want to say this. Almost everybody loves the story of a Pacific group talk who like loves having commitments and loves being of service. I get that other people have different paths. Find your path. If you're staying sober and thriving, great. I love being busy in Alcoholics Anonymous. I love being inconvenienced. Somebody, I've stolen it so many times that I forget where I stole it from, talked about it as divinely inconvenienced.
I love when AA has divinely inconvenienced. Somebody had me speak in Johnson City a month or two ago. That's like a four hour drive. And they didn't give me gas money. And I still came back in the best mood. I really did. Like, because this life is so great. And when I started doing AA again, AA started working for me again. And, you know, there have been miracles in my life. And I just have a few more minutes. I'll tell you about some of the miracles. When I was like about 11 or 12 years sober, I was sponsoring a lot of new guys.
And, and this funny thing happened because in the Pacific group, if you don't know this, we make it clear to newcomers that you shouldn't date for the first year that the guys should stick with the guys and the girls should stick with the girls. But there's always drama. And sometimes the guys stick with the guys and the girls with the girls. But you get the idea. You know what I mean. And there's always like drama. But somehow or other, I was sponsoring these guys who would get crushes and be like, I talked to her at the, you know, at the, at the watch, which is where someone's turning here. And then all of a sudden she was pregnant. And I never really quite understood how you get pregnant drinking coffee at a watch. But maybe someone can explain that to me after. But they were goofy and, and filled with optimism and, and getting ready to be parents. And I didn't have children. And I made a decision when I was 13 years sober to become a dad. And I was a single guy. It was an unusual story. And I went down to talk to Clancy and, and Clancy was a very traditional person. And I didn't know how it was going to go. And I did not, I did not have a game plan for, for not being on the same page as my sponsor. So it felt like a consequential talk. And I said, I was planning to become a dad. And he said, he said, I've seen how you honor your commitments and Alcoholics Anonymous, you are a dedicated person, you are a good person, you are good for your word. He goes, being a parent is a massive commitment.
And if you are willing to take it on, I'm willing to support you. And, and because of that, my son was born in 2004. And, and then because I'm alcoholic and don't understand timelines very well, I had twins 20 months later. So I had three kids under the age of two. And we didn't have Zoom meetings back then. I somehow or other raised three kids on my own, while being super active in the Pacific group and sponsoring people and running a company. And it was insane, and blessed and useful. And my kids grew up really well. My son just graduated from Duke and moved to Miami to take a job actually for the same company that I took a job for 40 years earlier.
But he he doesn't drink and he runs marathons. He actually, he ran the Miami marathon in January and finished second. He's a good kid. And one of my daughters is, she's ADHD. And she's, she's super lovable, but super hard to parent. And she goes to a small private art school in outside of Columbus, Ohio. And then my other daughter is a rising junior at Harvard where she majors in economics and has had leads and shows that are so brainy that I can hardly explain to you what they even mean. And I could have missed it all. I could have missed it all and just sat in the village idiot and pretended that I was working on a dissertation in cultural anthropology. Two years ago, shortly before I moved out to Tennessee, I went to the doctor.
I, I've almost certainly convinced you that I'm pretty intelligent by this point. I'm aware of that. Nobody can be as stupid as an intelligent person. I had been having blood in my urine for a year and I decided that it was interesting. I didn't even Google it. I, Googling is too much work for me. I just Google it in my head. And I think I decided that it was kidney stones
[00:50:03]
and it turned out it was cancer, which two things, cancer sucks. I didn't want it. The other thing is I was 33 or 34, 34 years sober. And I'd seen a lot of good people dealing with unfair things. It never occurred to me that, that it was unfair. It just never, I just, it never occurred to me. And, and it scared the crap out of me. And, and what it made me realize was, as I think I've conveyed earlier, I was somebody who lived a small depressed life and barely wanted to continue. And, and I suddenly realized I'm not a suicidal person. I felt, I felt that really, when faced with a three inch tumor in my bladder that needed to come out, I, I understood that I actually had a very strong opinion, which was that I wanted to be around as long as God would let me. And we live in an age of medical miracles. I'm so fortunate. I am so personally fortunate. I'm sure other people are too. And I had the surgery and two weeks later, they came back with results, which is that my tumor had not spread. And so I am considered to be in remission. I, I do quarterly checkups, but it changed everything about me. It, it changed most profoundly how I interact with God. It just changed how I interact with God. God, I'd never not believed in God, but I needed a bigger God. And my friend Leslie, who's another Pacifica person, had had her own, she had ocular cancer, which is honestly a much funnier story.
There's nothing really funny about bladder cancer. Ocular cancer is like, you like, like, it's funny when she tells it. But she, in terms of her healing, had started doing two-way prayer, which is something that comes out of the Oxford group. And which is what we come out of. And it's a, it's a practice of writing a letter, actually writing a question to God every day, and then letting God write back. I've done it every day. Today actually was day 747. It was just sort of poetic. If anyone remembers the old big planes. For 747 mornings in a row, I've had a conversation with God. And what I've discovered is that God is endlessly patient and loving, kind. I don't know if intuitive is the right word, because God obviously sort of knows everything. But the way that we communicate, and I can't explain it super well, but because I can tell you from 60 years of living, I don't speak to myself that way. What comes out of my hand when I write has nothing to do with how I speak to myself. It's just endlessly loving and supportive and kind and clever.
And I trust it. And what it has filled me with is a conviction that on my human scale, on my understandable human scale, I am nothing. I'm, I'm 10% of the people on this Zoom. And, you know, not, not a, not a grain of sand on the planet or in the universe. On a human scale, my life is insignificant and not to be disrespectful, but so is yours. But when God's in the picture, it's completely different. And I don't understand why, but I understand that that's the difference between my finite mental human capacity and God's infinite capacity. I matter. You matter. And most significantly, there are people out there who are going to need Alcoholics Anonymous, who we are going to get to help, and they matter too. I went from leading a useless small life to leading a life where I get to be a part of something that matters, where I get to have importance, and I meet people who have importance, and we add to the goodness of the world.
And I feel like I could have missed it all so easily. And, and I feel like there's not a guarantee that I'll have it forever, but I feel pretty confident that I have it for today. And I'm really grateful for that. So I know that Ramona can be here. I want to thank her so much for introducing me to all of you. I hope somebody got something helpful out of this. And I hope we all have a good sober evening. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Well, you never know what you're going to get. You'll just have to keep coming back. Next week, we hope to see you next Thursday. Jeff H. from Dallas, Texas is going to be our special guest. If you liked this meeting, please do as Bill Wilson always said, pass it on. You can help others right from your phone or computer and tell them about this special meeting. Everyone is invited to hang out with us afterwards in the meeting after the meeting, the porch. Alan, do you have any closing comments? And would you please close us out with a prayer or reading of your choice?
I will close this out with the Lord's Prayer in a moment. And you've just heard a lot from me. You
[00:55:03]
don't need to hear anything more, in my opinion. But I just want to thank you all for being here so I could be a part of a meeting and and just say what a pleasure it was to meet everybody. And now for anyone who'd care to join me, let's say the Lord's Prayer. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not to temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.
All righty, everyone can unmute and thank our special guest star speaker. Thank you so much, Alan. Thank you for being with us tonight.