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Source: Kevin M – BOX OF CHOCOLATES – 2026-05-21.m4a File: kevin-m-box-of-chocolates-2026-05-21.mp3 Duration: 00:52:01
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Thank you so much, everybody. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me. Thanks to Ramona, who said she'll try to get on at some point. She's stuck in traffic for asking me to speak. I spoke here, I think it was almost two years ago, and I enjoyed it very much. And when she asked me to come back again, I said, sure, absolutely. You know, I definitely want to do this. I like this meeting. So I'll tell you, I'll start at the beginning. You know, I was born in Manhattan, New York, in a section called Hell's Kitchen, which, you know, is just as it sounds. It was a rough and tumble Irish neighborhood, lots of bars, you know, lots of places for trouble to happen.
And my father and mother had five children and decided we needed to get out of there. We needed a bigger place to begin with, but we also needed to remove ourselves from that environment where, you know, everything was, you know, it was it was a bit crazy. My grandfather was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic. You know, my grandfather was one of those people who, you know, bounced around relatives from relative to relative because he always wore it as welcome and he wore it as welcome with us at one point when he hit my mother. You know, my father was working two jobs and he didn't come home till late. And my grandfather was somebody who drank every single day and tried to get drunk every single day.
And he would, in the beginning, he was a lot of fun, you know, for us kids when he came to stay with us, we would, you know, he would he would play with us. He would, you know, he would, you know, he would entertain us. And then his drinking would take, you know, he always seemed to be sober when he got to the next relative's house, stayed sober for a little bit, and then it all crashed and burned.
The story I like to tell is that I had a churchgoing aunt who was big in the church. The priest used to go to her house to have dinner. And so we used to even call her the church lady, my Aunt Edna. And my grandfather took me and my younger sister, we were both about five, to the local bar on a Sunday morning, as soon as it opened. And, you know, he sat us down in a booth, and he knew that the guys in the bar would come over and drop some quarters on us. And so all these guys came over and said hello and met, you know, introduced themselves and put some quarters in front of us. And every so often, my grandfather would come around, scoop up, scoop up the quarters and go to the bar and buy some more liquor and buy another drink. And we, my sister and I were sitting in the window of the Tivoli bar, and my church aunt comes up the block, and we're knocking on the window, waving at her, with all her church friends. And she, of course, was mortified. And, you know, she got home and called my father and said, get those kids out of the bar, or they would pop down the block. And so we had to come home. We didn't understand what was going on. We just thought it was a good time, you know, drinking cherry Cokes and scooping up, watching Grandpa scoop up our quarters. But then, you know, his drinking got to him, and he, you know, he would come home, and he would come home, fall down drunk, and he fell down in the bedroom one night. And my mother said, go pick up, you know, your grandfather. And I was too small to even help him, you know. And he was cursing at me, telling me to get away from him. So I went away from him. My mother went in, and he smacked my mother. And that was the end of that.
My father called some of the other relatives and said he can't stay here because, you know, he's a menace to my wife, and he's a menace to the kids. So they packed him up, and they, you know, he got a little sobered up and moved on and went to another relative in New Jersey. So that was my first introduction to alcoholism, and it didn't help me any, you know, down my path. I really forgot that that had happened until many, many years later. We moved up to the Bronx because we could get an apartment in a brand-new project building that had five bedrooms. So my brother and I would share a bedroom. A bunch of my sisters had their own. One sister had their own bedroom. She was the oldest. And the rest all shared bedrooms. And my parents would go on and have two more children. When we first got to the Bronx, my mother was pregnant with twins, twin boys. And one lived a day, and one lived a day and a half. And they both died very, very young, obviously, a day and a day and a half, very, very young. But that was the point where my father stopped going to church. That was where my mother's depression, my mother was someone who suffered with depression, from what I remember, just a little bit in the beginning. But then once this tragedy happened, she really sunk deeply into her depression. My father started to drink more heavily, and you could see the effects of it on him. When people were saying to my
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parents, I remember phone calls from relatives when my mother was pregnant with the twins, and people were saying, when are the two of you going to stop having kids? This will be your sixth and seventh kid, or seventh and eighth kid, actually. And you shouldn't have any more children, blah, blah, blah. My father would say, children are a gift from God, and it's none of your business. I often wondered years later, was my father angry with God because God was taking away his gifts or what? But I know it was a tragic time for the both of them. My father gave up on God at that point. We never had a conversation about it, but I just know he did, because he didn't come to church with us anymore. He sent those kids on by ourselves. My mother hardly ever went to church after that either. She'd go for our sacraments and things like that, but she was no longer a regular churchgoer. As kids, we basically fended for ourselves. We took care of each other. A good day is if we came home and if I saw that the morning breakfast dishes had been washed. I know it was a relatively good day because it meant my mother got out of bed and actually did something. That was kind of our childhood. It was kind of like taking care of each other. Myself and I have a brother who's developmentally disabled. He used to call it mental retardation. Now it's called developmental disability. He was always somebody everybody had to watch out for. We had to take care of him because he couldn't really take care of himself.
He couldn't feed himself, dress himself, bathe himself, those kinds of things. You had to be careful crossing the street with him because he would run out and all kinds of things. We had that as an issue. Then I had four younger sisters. My parents eventually would have one more child, another sister. I had five sisters, one older and four younger. It was our responsibility to take care of each other. That's how we grew up. I went to Catholic grammar school. I always had a belief in God. I always had belief that God was going to take care of us. I always believed that it was good to be good, to behave myself, not to get in trouble. That's pretty much how I went to grammar school, not being anyone who got in trouble, not being anyone whose parents had to be called. I was an altar boy from fourth to eighth grade. Then I went on to Catholic high school. By the time I got to Catholic high school, the finances were rough. There was now seven of us in Catholic schools. The tuition was due in the grammar school and high school. My father said to me, you better get a job. You're really going to need to get a job. I went to the local supermarket and I asked them if they would hire me. Of course, at Catholic high school, I wore a dress shirt, tie, jacket. The guy looked at one. It was an old Irish guy. He looked at me and he said, yeah, you look like somebody I'd want to hire. I was only 13. He said to me, you can't work until you're 14. You have to get working papers. Go get your working papers and come back when you're 14. I'll certainly give you a job. On my 14th birthday, I went and got the working papers, marched right back to that guy at the supermarket and said, okay, I'm ready.
He goes, when did you turn 14? I said, today. I needed the job. We needed the money. I paid for my own Catholic high school tuition out of my paycheck. My parents took a little of the rest of it. I got to keep some money. I was a guy with some money in his pocket. I was a big shot in my neighborhood. We lived in the South Bronx. It was another Irish Catholic neighborhood, but there were some German parts and there were some Italian parts.
Then it became a lot of minority parts. Black and Hispanics were moving in also. The neighborhood was changing rapidly. If you ever heard anything about the South Bronx, you realize that. You'll know that in the late 60s and early 70s, the Bronx burned. All of the tenement building owners burned down their apartment buildings for the insurance money. Every night, there was a fire somewhere. We lived in the more newer housing, so that wasn't an issue for us, but we did see a lot of people get burned down. We saw a lot of the neighborhoods changing over to a poor or rundown type of person. We did the best we could. I think my parents did the best
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they could. I didn't see that at the time. I always felt like we were lacking. I always felt like the other kids had more than I had. I always felt like the other kids' parents were more involved than my parents. A little chip on my shoulder about that growing up. One of the things I discovered in working in the supermarkets because of something that happened. Thursday night, the store stayed open until 9 o'clock. The assistant manager would say to me, go get two six-packs. Put them in the Jerry box cooler because it was cold in there.
He says, we'll have a beer before we go home. We would close the store at 8 o'clock. They would always come at the end of the night and rob us because we had the most money then, but also there were very few people in the store. We would lock the door so they couldn't rob us, and then we'd sit around. We couldn't leave until 9, so we'd sit around from 8 to 9 and drink. I'm only 14, and he says to me, I'm going to give you one beer. He hands me one beer, and he says to me, this is all you can have, one beer because I know you're underage. If your parents come here and complain that you went home drunk or any of this other stuff, I will fire you. I don't need you that bad. I don't need the nonsense, so have the one beer and be happy with it. Okay, fine.
Had the one beer. That was great. I took the second one when he wasn't looking, and that was the beginning of my drinking. That's how it all started. I found that you could always get some guy to buy you beer at the delicatessen or at the bodega, and that's what we would do. As kids, we would leave the store and we'd go buy more beer. We had money in our pockets. Like I said, we were big shots. We could pay some guy to buy us beer, and so we did. We were weekend warriors. We drank Thursday night, Friday, Saturday, and we usually would sober up on Sunday. I was still going to church at the time with the hangover. I found that if I drank, the dating scene got a little better. My tongue got a little looser, and I could talk to the girls. I thought alcohol was the great elixir, the great cure for all of my problems. I felt a little less shy when I drank, and so it was something that relieved my anxiety, so I did it more and more. I went from high school to public college, Lehman College here in the Bronx or there in the Bronx. I started off as, I'm going to do good. I'm going to get a college degree. All of my father's family got a high school degree and got jobs right away. Most of the men were in World War II, and most of the women were secretaries and things like that. We come from a family who espoused, you got to go to work. You got to do the work.
The college degree was certainly an opportunity for me to get a good job, and that was the idea. I would get a college degree, and I would get a good job. Again, I was fortunate that my father's salary allowed me to have a stipend and some tuition reduction, which was nice. The city college had a small tuition. It was nothing like the private colleges, which I didn't even try to go to look at because I knew I wasn't going to be able to afford it, but they also gave me some money to live off of, which was nice, which I, again, shared some with my family and then used the rest to drink. My freshman year, I figured out very, very quickly that nobody takes attendance.
There's no dean of discipline in public colleges. They just expect you to go to school and go to class and do all that stuff. I like to say that my first year in school, I majored in poker, softball, frisbee toss, and drinking. Those were the things that I majored. I never went to class, barely could pass an exam at the end of the year. At the end of the year, they called me in and they said, we have a lot of guys like you. We don't need any more, so you can go on your way. They at least allowed me to resign so that if I applied again to college, which I did several years later, the record of what my first year of college looked like would not want me. So, I resigned from college and I went back to the supermarkets, the only job I knew at the point, the only job I know I could get a job in. So, the drinking continued. Back then, I could go for periods without drinking. I couldn't give up drinking for length and fool myself that I'm not an alcoholic or I wasn't becoming an alcoholic.
an Alcoholic, or I wasn't becoming an alcoholic, I could, you know, I could, you know, stop
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drinking if I had a cold or if I really felt sick or, you know, I could stop drinking if a girlfriend got on my case about my drinking, I could stop for a while and appease them for a little bit if I, you know, if I needed to. But then it's really, it really just started to take off. And what happened to me was, you know, I eventually went back to college, I went to Baruch College in the city. The nice thing about Baruch College is it's all scattered throughout office buildings in the area of 23rd Street in Manhattan, classes as far up as buildings in 28th Street, and then far down is 23rd Street, about three avenues each way.
So you had to run from one class to the next. And you were lucky if you had two classes in the same building. So there was no time to, there was no place to play cards or drink or play throw a fizz, but you had to get from one class to the other. And that was a good enough discipline for me to stick it out and get my classes done. And I got a, I got an undergraduate degree in industrial psychology, which meant I should have been somebody who was working either in an HR department or doing headhunting, helping people find jobs kind of things and helping employers find the right people for the jobs that they had.
I had a guy straight out of college that I worked with on a couple of projects and he offered me a job in a company he was starting as a headhunting firm for, you know, to research for big companies to find employees for them. And I was too scared to venture out into something like that. So I turned him down. I always wondered how that would have worked out if I had said yes. I'm sure I would have drank my way out of that job as I drank my way out of a few others.
But basically, no, I went and I stayed close to home and I had a friend who worked in the field of developmental disabilities, which was, you know, it was an interest of mine. I have a brother who's developmentally disabled. So he said that they were looking for assistant managers and, you know, any degree would do. And so, and I could walk to work. So I took a job managing a group home with my college degree.
And the agency was in a growth spurt. They had opened four group homes and they were looking to double in size in what was supposed to be five years and actually all happened in three years because the need was so great and the state was under so many mandates to get people out of institutions and things that they pushed the dates on everything to say, you got to get these done quickly. And I could control my drinking enough to put on a good show every day to show up and do my job.
And I liked the work. It was good work. The people were all high school graduates who mostly, when I started, mostly mothers going back into the working field after their kids had gone off to school. And so, you know, it was like working with a bunch of mothers working with a bunch of kids, which was really, really nice. I moved after my first year into administration and they needed more people to help open these new group homes.
And that's what I did. And, you know, I went from place to place, work with architects, work with, you know, contractors. You know, we need it this way. We need that that way. We need to be able to fit two people in this bedroom, that kind of thing, you know. So so it was interesting work, but it was always changing. So, you know, if I drank, nobody noticed because I was out in the field and, you know, I was I was out more than I was in the office.
But after that, they after the group homes were open, they brought me into the office to stay. And I said, OK, you know, again, I had to I had to put on the dog and pony show to show them that, you know, I'm not a drunk, I'm not I'm not a guy who drinks too much. So I was able to do that for a little bit of time. And eventually I moved up to assistant director of the agency. And my one responsibility, my biggest responsibility, there's a lot of responsibilities, but my biggest responsibility was to respond to any deficiencies that the state noted when they did their inspections, which was fine.
I knew how to go to the house beforehand and make sure everything was appropriately out there. You know, as a big as a big note with any state, any state monitored job in New York State is if it's not on paper, it didn't happen. So, you know, we were big pushers of you got to write it down, write everything down. You do everything that happens. You got to write it down. So so I was I was able to teach people that, you know, especially people who had a tough time writing, I would say, well, it's similar to this note that you wrote three or four days ago.
So just go get that note. We didn't have computers. Everything had to be handwritten. So so it was it was tough for folks, but I told him some tricks on how to how to copy stuff from one thing to another one. It's the same kind of situation. Just change the ending or whatever. You know, it's fine. And so that worked out well for me. And then they got me involved in doing rate appeals where the state worked as if you spent all your money at the end of the year and you spent over what you were supposed to spend,
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you could appeal that money to the state and say, these are the reasons why we had people in the hospital that needed somebody there, because if we didn't send somebody with some of these folks, they would starve to death because the meal would come and the meal would go. But nobody was there to feed them. So we'd have to have somebody there with them. And so we would constantly overspend. And I got very good at writing those appeals, you know, documenting the fact that these people were in the hospital, they needed it, needed more care.
This was going on in the facility. Someone had a broken arm, so they needed more care. They were they used to feed themselves. Now they can't. And those kinds of things. And I made some connections in Albany. I worked my way into a position where I was kind of untouchable and my drinking kind of started to really take off then because I kind of sense that they can't get rid of me. I'm the money guy, you know, and and what happened was, you know, I got to the point in my life where I said I wanted to I wanted to stop.
I really did. I wanted to slow down my drinking somehow, you know, try to be a social drinker. But I was already too far gone. It was always that next thing in my life that I said, OK, when that happens, I'm going to have to stop drinking. And so it really started with my my first with my first and only marriage, my marriage to my wife, Josephine, where I said, you know, when I marry Josephine, we're going to you know, I'm going to slow down my drinking because, you know, I'll have to be a responsible husband and I'm sure she doesn't want to see me get drunk every night and all of this stuff.
And of course, I didn't that didn't happen. You know, once we settled in, I did curtail my drinking for a while, but, you know, we rented an apartment and every once in a while the landlord would see me taking out the garbage and he's going, how many days beer cans is that? Like that was last night, you can but, you know, so it was it became it became a problem again. And, you know, we worked through it and then we were pregnant with my first son and that was going to be the thing.
That was going to be the thing that that we're at the point where I would stop drinking. That would be the I have to be a responsible father. I have to teach my kid to play baseball stuff and I didn't that didn't happen either. You know, he was there and I was drinking and, you know, I got to the point where, you know, he was ready for school and and some days I would I would pick him up from either my mother-in-law who watched him after school or, you know, I picked him up from school and nine times out of ten I was drunk when I did it.
I drove drunk with him in the car many times. But then it was going to be my second son or my second son, the one who had two kids and I really have to buckle down and, you know, take care of this drinking problem I have. And, you know, I wasn't going out to get any kind of help. I wasn't looking for any kind of help. I didn't really want to stop drinking. I just wanted to slow it down a little bit and make some sort of mark on the lives of my two sons and my wife that I could do this if I wanted to.
I could I could I could stop on my own. That went on until 1998. Now my kids are coming on 14 and six. My wife is, you know, no longer counting on me to do anything. You know, she I would drive my car home drunk. That's at the point where I was starting to go out to lunch during the day and not coming back to work because I would just stay out drinking and driving my home or home. And when I turned down my block, I can see if my wife's car is in the driveway.
So I would turn down the block and I would see the car in the driveway and I'd say, OK, this is it. She's gone. She took the kids and left. I know it. I just know it. You know, and I had all this that impending sense of doom that happens towards our end of our drinking. And that was starting to happen to me. And then, you know, and go inside the house and and I would there'd be a note that we got tired of waiting for you to come home.
I took the kids for pizza, for dinner, you know, good luck finding something to eat, you know, those kinds of things. And I would be relieved enough that I would just take my bottle and go down the basement and finish myself off. And every day from that point on really became the same day over and over. I get up in the morning. I look at myself in the mirror. So, you know, come on, dummy, you did it again yesterday.
You got drunk and you got to stop. You got to stop. You know, every day I would swear I wasn't going to drink, go to work and I would I would be lucky to stay, you know, to stay sober to 12 o'clock. Towards the end, it was the bottle of scotch in the desk drawer. So if I didn't go out, I could at least drink from my desk. It got to be, you know, I knew that that impending sense of doom was just laying over my head. I knew I was going to get a DWI.
And this is how close I came. I'm driving home one night and I get sick and I puke all over the dashboard. I puke all over myself. I go to pull over to try to, you know, at least clean off the windshield.
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And I see the state trooper car behind me and I'm like, OK, this is it. This is where I get it. And something said to me, get out of the car. You know, so I just got out of the car and I walked back to him and he didn't even get out of the car yet. And he rolls down his window and he had to know I was drunk. And I said, I got sick, you know, I'm sorry, I got sick. I had to pull over. And he looked at me and I think I could see in his eyes he had that flash of like, I don't want to put this smelly drunk in the back of my police car and smell him all night, you know, when I lock him up, you know.
So he looked at me and he looked me square in the eye and he said, get off my effing highway and stay off. Clean yourself up and get the hell out of here. So I did. I cleaned myself up. I got off at the next exit and took the streets home from there. And that's how close I came to get my getting a DWI. So it just it just really compounded the sense of I'm going to kill myself driving home one night or something's going to happen.
But it didn't stop me from drinking. It couldn't stop me from drinking. I was, you know, I was a full blown alcoholic at that point, you know, drinking as early as I could at work and, you know, some days going out to lunch and not coming back. In the summer of 1998, I got a call from a friend of mine who had done some accounting work, probably helped us kind of start the agency 403B plan and things like that. And he said he was going to be in the neighborhood and he wanted to know if I wanted to have lunch with him.
And I said, sure, because, you know, he was an old drinking buddy. And I figured, OK, well, this will be a day I don't go back to work. I think I'm going to go out and drink with my friend Steve. And, you know, I got there and he he looked absolutely terrific. It was very evident that he was sober. And this was a guy who I would get a phone call from his wife. Can you come and help me get Steve out of the woods behind the house?
He's back there in his socks in the snow trying to find a bottle that he hit, you know. And he was a guy who was my barometer and not as bad as him. Not as bad as that guy. So I can't be that bad of an alcoholic. Right. So here he is. He's got this wonderful tan. He looks absolutely marvelous. And this is my Ebby Thatcher moment. I mean, here's here's this guy in front of me. And I said to him, holy shit, what happened?
You know, I had heard he had gone into rehab and I didn't hear anything more about it for a while. And I hadn't heard from him. So I figured, well, I'll just let sleeping dogs lie. I'm not going to ask any questions. But here he was, you know, like, you know, fresh as day. And and all he did was tell me his story. You know, he didn't say, hey, Kevin, you've got a problem or anything like that. He just planted with me his story enough that I wanted what he had, you know.
And the next day I woke up and I still went through the motions of, you know, shit. You did it again yesterday. You can't drink like that. And you have to, you know, you got to stop, you know, but I but I still had that notion that I was somehow, some way going to figure it out myself. I wasn't going to call Steve for help. I wasn't going to call anybody for help. I was going to do it for myself. So from August to October, I did that every day.
It was getting, you know, I would, you know, I would I would try to I would buy books on how to stop drinking, which were, you know, I would I would buy books on how to stop drinking, which were, you know, which was a waste of time for me because I was never sober long enough to drink to read a book and things like that. And I always you know, it was going to be, you know, my dream to stop drinking on my own, you know, just because in the back of my mind was like, because when I want to drink, I want to I want to be able to take, you know, so over 16, 98, 90, 1998 was just like all those other days before I went to work and went out to lunch, didn't come back, got my car after work, you know, at the place and I was driving home and I started to cry and I started to realize that I couldn't do this anymore, that, you know, I couldn't go another sleepless night worrying about what was going to happen to me.
I couldn't continue to drink because I was I was, you know, when I would come home, you know, my my family would see me and they'd kind of make a wide berth and kind of walk around me, you know, so I wasn't really part of it. I was in my house, but I wasn't part of the family and I would get my bottle and I would go downstairs and drink and it got to the point where I was throwing up blood in the slop sink in the basement and and I was I would stand there with the glass of scotch with the ice cubes rattling in my hand, shaking and wait till it settled down.
My stomach settled down so I could take another drink. So, you know, I had a feeling I was going to either, you know, bleed out in my sleep or, you know, or, you know, have a heart attack or, you know, crash the car or something. But that night, that night driving home, it was. And I composed myself, and I went in the house, and I sat down at the kitchen table,
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and I started to cry again. And my wife said, what's up with you? And she said, and I said to her, you know, I need help. I'm an alcoholic. I need help. And I always say, pardon me for saying this, but I always say, she should have said, yeah, no shit. Everybody knows this. You know, everybody knows it but you. But she didn't. She said, okay, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? Because people have tried to help you, and you've turned them away, or you've ignored them. What are you going to do about it?
So I said, I'm going to call my friend Steve, and I'm going to try AA. She said, okay, you know, whatever you need, whatever you need. So I called Steve. He came over to see me. He said, how about we go to a meeting? Do you want to go to a meeting tomorrow? But he said, before you answer, just know I can't take you. I'm heading out to an accountant. I'm heading out to an accountant's convention in Las Vegas, and I won't be around. I won't be back till Monday. So you can do two things. I can get somebody to take you to a meeting tomorrow, or you can try to stay sober over the weekend, and I'll take you to a meeting on Monday. I said, I didn't want to go with anybody I didn't know. I trusted him too much. So I said, I'll wait till Monday. He said, okay, do me a favor. Lock yourself in the bedroom. Try not to drink. If you have to drink, drink, but don't go out. Stay home, okay? And he says, and I'll arrange with you to scoop you up on Monday, and we'll go to the meeting. I said, okay, great. So Saturday, Sunday, I stay home. I do exactly as he said. I don't have anything to drink. I get up Monday morning. I got two days of sobriety.
I'm feeling pretty good now. Hey, we need to say hey meeting, right? So I go to work, and he had said to me, I'll call you at three o'clock on Monday. Okay. So it's coming on three o'clock, and I'm saying, man, I hope he doesn't call. I hope he doesn't call. And sure enough, he calls. And he says, you still want to go to that meeting tonight? And everything in my existence said, say no. Thank God the word yes came out. And I hooked up with him. I went back to Westchester where I lived and hooked up with him, and he took me to my first meeting in Tarrytown, which is where I've been ever since. And a side story that I like to tell, just because I believe AA sometimes is a minute or a second or an hour, but my friend drank when he went to Las Vegas.
And he was coming back when he took me to my first meeting. And he never told me. He never told me that night. He didn't share. I didn't share. We just sat at the meeting. One thing he did tell me though was, well, actually, I'll finish that story just because it's a side story. He was five years sober before he actually told me that he had drank that night. And he said, I didn't want to ruin it for you. I didn't want you to think it didn't work. So I just kept my mouth shut. He didn't tell you. He said, you know, it was on my sixth anniversary.
And he said, you actually have more time than I do. And he said, I'm real. No, it was my fifth anniversary. He had four years. That's what it was because he was coming to my fifth anniversary. And he said, I just want to let you know that I drank that when I was in Las Vegas and I had to start over. And so we had for a while the same sobriety. He went out again, but he's back again. But at that meeting, he says to me, if you hear somebody say something that resonates with you, you might want to ask that guy to be your sponsor. And I know he meant over time as you go to meetings. But I thought he meant that meeting, at the first meeting. So I hear this guy talking about how he's from the Bronx. Well, that's good enough for me. I'll go right after after after the meeting and I say, would you be my sponsor? This guy, Charles, will you be my sponsor? And he said, sure. He said, are you willing to go to any lengths to get sober? Absolutely. So he said, great. I need you to do 90 meetings in 90 days.
Well, wait a minute. Hold on a second. I said, I'm a busy guy. You know, my life consisted of getting up every day, cursing myself out and trying to hang on at work to a job I should have been fired from long ago, going home drunk every day. But I was too busy to go to 90 meetings in 90 days. And I can testify here to all of you that the only person I hurt by doing that was me, you know, because everybody else who came in with me seemed to be getting the program a whole lot quicker than I did. But I did go. I did promise him that I would go to a regular group of meetings.
And I went to three and sometimes four meetings a week, you know, under his under his sponsorship. And he took me to the steps and he worked me hard. You know, I think he had this sense. He's probably right that once I got cleaned up, I was going to take off. And and there was a sense of that because right away, you know, I got to step two and I went, you know, I saw the shades and I went, God, oh, my gosh, this is religion. I tried religion. I've been praying to God for forever to stop drinking. Are you kidding me? This is not going to work. You know, so I had this real attitude towards, you know, a higher power, you know, and he said, well, you know, he says, you have you had a God, you know, he was your God. We're talking about a higher power.
He said it could be anything. He said, well, you can borrow my higher power if you like,
[00:35:00]
you know, but you have to find a higher power, you know. And, you know, I gave it some hard thought. And I and I said, you know, I'm familiar with the God of my of my childhood, but I kind of feel like he abandoned me. And he said, OK, well, work with it. Work with that. Work with that. You have a resentment against God. But he's your God, right? Yeah. He's your higher power. Absolutely. OK, let's do it. That's what we did. And a little by slowly, I started to to recognize that that this higher power in my life had not abandoned me, that he had actually guided me and he had actually taken care of me throughout much of my life. You know, it took me a long time to see that. But my you know, here's my sponsor, like racing me through the steps. You know, where are you? Every day you take me. What step are we on? You know, you're almost done. You're finished. You got what you got to do. You know, you get it. You understand it. Yeah. Yeah. So yes or no. And sometimes, you know, most times, no, because I was lazy. But, you know, sometimes I say, yeah, I think I'm ready to move on. You know, so did the fourth step, did the fifth step, you know, six, seven. I put the brakes on a little bit for six and seven because I kind of looked at my character defects and I said, shoot, if I'm not my character defects, what the who the hell am I? You know, it was this whole rebirth of myself that that happened through the six and seven step by removing the things that I swung on to for dear life, thinking that that's who I was. And I started to become the man I wanted to really be to the six and seven step.
And, you know, eight step, I put together the list. No problems here. You know, he crossed up all the old girlfriends. You know, he said, except for this one, if you happen to run into her, you owe her an apology. So, OK. Or, you know, you're in a bigger mess. And and then, you know, and I went to the list, you know, and again, you know, the God in my life, I am away on a family weekend with all of my sisters, all of my family, you know, basically. And I got to do my amends.
I had already done my amends to my wife and my two boys when I got it. I got to do all the amends to my sisters in that one weekend. The the last two people on the list with a girlfriend and the and my ex-boss, who obviously, you know, knew I had a drinking problem, knew I got sober. I told her I was in AA and, you know, I got sober. And her parting comment or her parting issue was that, you know, I don't know that you're made to do my job, but I can recommend you. You have the skill.
I hope you can do it. You know, and that kind of stung a little bit, but that was the truth. And after she left, she and I didn't talk, you know, because of that conversation. And I had to make that amend. And something happened with some paperwork we had on a car that we had leased and had bought out at some point. And I needed to go up and get her signature on something, an affidavit or something. So I had to go see her. And I knew that that was God in my life saying, this is the time to do that last amend or that makes the last amend.
So I went up and I did the amends. And she gave me more shit, you know, she gave me more grief, you know, and I sat through the whole thing saying, it's just your side of the street. It's just your side of the street. It's just your side of the street. You're here to make amends for what you did. What she has to say, as important or unimportant as it may seem, is not your concern, you know. And I took to heart some of the things she said. I mean, some of the things she said were right, but some of them were a little bit harsh. But I let it all go when I left there because I was happy to get the amends done. The final amends didn't happen until like 30 years later, not 30 years later, only 20 years later. 20 years later, I am at a funeral and I run into this girlfriend. And this was like the oddest amends I ever made. I said, can I get your phone number? I just had to call you about something. I promise to be quick. I'm not looking to hook up or anything like that. She said sure. She gave me a number. I gave her a call and I said, listen, I need to make this amends and I don't know how to do this. I can do it over the phone. I'd rather not. I'd rather do it face to face. She said, do it over the phone. I don't want my husband to find out. I knew her husband and she said, I don't want my husband to find out that I met you somewhere.
So I do the amends over the phone. And she says to me, like really seriously, if you had married me, you would have stopped drinking. I'm like, yeah, right. And the other thing she says to me is, you were the best thing that ever happened to me. She said, because after I left you, I realized I needed to make changes. So I didn't run into another guy like you. I'm so happy to help you out in that care. So that was all my amends. And then I did my parents at their graveside. I wrote them a letter. And 10 step is a daily thing I do. I bring it up in my prayer in the morning and at night to make sure that I keep myself in check. 11 step is all about
[00:40:00]
prayer. And I do pray and meditate every single day. Every single day I get up early. I'm retired now. I used to get up at 530 to go to work. I still get up 530 every day just so I can block out an hour of time to pray and meditate and to pray for people that need prayers. And that God that I thought had abandoned me had never really left me. I look back on all of my time in that company, and he put me in a position where I couldn't be fired so I could get my alcohol to get to the person that needed to get me to Alcoholics Anonymous. And my stubbornness and my ego kept me there longer than I should have been, struggling longer than I should have been. But I got a master's degree because they told me you're never going to get another job in this agency unless you get a master's degree. So I went back to Hunter College and I got a master's degree. I walk in to talk to them about it. I told you I have a degree in industrial psychology, but they were starting a program for people who do administration in group homes.
So I walk in the door and they start telling me about this program. I'm like, this is exactly what I need. And then they tell me the price and I fell off my chair. I'm like, I can't afford that. So she said, well, we'd really like to get this program going. Can you bring us three more students? I said, sure. I can get three guys from the job, but who would want to come? As long as they can all come from the same agency. She's basically, yeah. So I brought them three more students and they gave us four scholarships. And so I got a free ride for my master's.
And back then I was patting myself on the back about what a lucky, lucky guy. And it wasn't until I got sober that I realized that that was God in my life, giving me the one thing I needed to move up the ladder to the job that I had after my boss retired. The job I kept for 39 years total. I was at the agency and I retired in 2021. And that God in my life still does miracles for me. He still does things for me that I still have to get past them to look back and go, that wasn't me. Oh my God, that was God. That was God. And I've had so many God moments in my life. I always talk to spontees. We don't have a lot of, I guess, because of rehabs and stuff, we don't have a lot of 12-step calls anymore. When I first came in the program, we did a lot of 12-step calls and we'd go to people's houses and it would always be two of us that would go and sometimes more and talk people into the program if we could, or talk them into getting some kind of help because a family member had called or they had been in AA and had dropped out and we knew them or somebody knew them and they needed us to go.
The other thing I like to do is I like to go to speaking engagements in the local rehab in Tarry Town. Phelps Hospital has a rehab and I take the commitment sometimes, but mostly I ask people to take on the commitment if they could let me come and speak. For a couple of reasons, I feel like it's given back in a major way, what was freely given to me. I always say to the person I'm with, regardless of whether I'm leading the meeting or speaking at the meeting, I stop at the door on the way out and I say, listen, and you hear the door click. It's an electronic lock and a very loud click. I said, see, we're free people. The door doesn't lock behind us anymore. We're free people.
And that's the power of a higher power in my life. God has saved me from being in rehab and all of the other, the liver stuff and all the other stuff. I'll tell you just a quick story, side story again, that I went to the doctor. My sponsor said to me, you should get yourself checked out. You're talking about throwing up blood, man. You don't want to get sober and then die. Do something. Go to the doctor. When's the last time you went to the dentist? So I did all those things. I went to the doctor and found out I had a bleeding ulcer and I needed to take care of that. And I had to change the way I not only that I couldn't drink, but I had to change the way I ate. I went to the dentist, got my teeth fixed. I started getting involved in my son's lives. My oldest son was moved along too quick. He was 14 going into high school, but I went to every one of his football games and lacrosse games sober. And I coached my younger boy in basketball and baseball. A wonderful gift of the program.
You know, a wonderful gift of the program for me. You know, I always feel like I wish there was more I could give back to them, you know,
[00:45:00]
and I know that God heard that prayer because because I now have two wonderful grandsons, you know, one is five and one is 18 months, and they're both their parents' work. So, you know, my wife and I take care of these kids a lot. And this is God saying, here, let's try this again. Sober, let's see how you do this time. You know, and I and I don't take it lightly. You know, I am, you know, if they call me, can you?
I can. Whatever it is, I come. I'll come for the kids. Whatever it is, whatever you need, I'm there, you know. And and that's God again in my life just saying, hey, you know, I heard you. I heard you want to do it again. So here's a chance to do it again. And we have another one coming on the way. Everybody says it's a girl. We'll see. I don't know. It'll be a different routine for me, but it'll be fun anyway.
Just the same, you know. I'll be there for them for that. I'll be there for my sons, for their kids, you know. And that's the way I can I can pay that back. You know, I go to I go to three meetings a week, you know, and and I and I'm the first one there, usually in the last one out at my own group. The two meetings that I meet in person, you know, and everybody tells me I do too much, you know, whenever they need anything done, they turn to me and say, how do we do this?
You know, so I said, well, you can't tell me I do too much if you guys don't want to learn how to do this stuff. Somebody's got to do it. Somebody has to know the tricks. But it's, you know, but it's it is it is, as they told me, it would be a life beyond my wildest dreams. And, you know, and it's it's I see it time and time again, you know, that that God in my life helping me through something, you know, I'm a you know, I'm the kind of person that, you know, sometimes forgets to bring God into a situation, you know, and then I get out of the situation and I look back and say, I didn't even do that.
How did that happen? You know, it was God. I mean, it was God, you know, and so so I'm constantly being reminded I have little pieces of index cards in my pocket with, you know, God is with me, you know, remember God, you know, that kind of stuff. So I can I can never forget, you know, if I put my hand in my pocket for anything, it's my coin is in there and my and these little notes to myself about remembering to to thank God for the day and thank God for what's happening in my life.
You know, you know, I think, you know, that that sponsor that I had, you know, we parted ways. He moved to Florida eventually, and we had a little we had a little difference before he left. But, you know, it was it was time for me to move on. It was time for me to get somebody else. I needed I needed a little a little less a little less direction, I think, not direction in the sense of of of his advice, but direction in the sense of these are the meetings you should go to and you should only go to those meetings.
You know, I can pick my own meetings. I get I get out of the program, you know, I have six sponsors now. And I and they're all they're all part of my life. And, you know, they all check in with me. Some not as much as others. You know, some something they've some something they've somehow graduated and can call me once a month. And I make it clear when they call me that you can't do this once a month because I don't want to I don't have to give you an hour of my time when we can do this 10 minutes, you know, three times a week.
We can hit the problem when it happens rather than after it's over, you know. So, you know, I lean on them a little bit, but I but, you know, I they have their own journey. They have their own have their own lives. And, you know, I can help. I'll help you as much as I can. But let's do it. Let's do it a more normal way. Let's do it on a regular basis. Not a let's sit down for an hour after a month.
And I'm not doing it that way. So, you know, that's being tough. It's being tough. But I think that's for me that that that that assures me that I'm getting all the information and I'm not getting some watered down version that it took them a month to come up with, you know, so it's so it's always been good. And, you know, I enjoy having sponsors and people in the program. I'm always willing to, you know, take on another guy if I have to.
I hope not. But it's like it becomes a becomes a lot to keep track of. But but, you know, give back to what was given to me freely is really a big thing for me. And that's that's why I go to I go early. I stay late. And that's why I sponsor people. And that's why, you know, the God in my life is is is the most important thing. You know, God first and then God and then my family and the days I get up and live my life that way are the best the best days always, you know, and I'm grateful for the life that I have now.
So I know I got six minutes left, but I think I'm all talked out. So I'm going to I'm going to leave it there. And I just want to thank you again for this opportunity. You know, I never get an opportunity to talk for an hour. I usually, you know, I take people out on an outspeak meetings and I say to them, forget the drunk a lot, get to the solution, you know, because they tend to rabble on and on.
[00:50:01]
And then you got two minutes left. You can tell us how you get. So you got to do better than that. So so, you know, so I wanted to be sure this is a place where you can do that. You can let it all hang out for what you drunk a lot was. But you can also get to the solution. So thank you again very much for this opportunity to speak to you tonight. 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. And we surely hope to see you next Thursday when our special guest is there best. And I think she was on here. And Kevin, I think she left you a message in the chat. So if you like 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 the special meeting. Everyone is invited to hang out with us afterwards in the meeting after the on the porch.
Kevin, do you have any closing comments? And would you please close us out with a prayer or reading of your choice? You know, just no. Thanks again for having me. It's a it's a real it's a real blessing in my life to be able to sit here and think back about my life as I as I share it with all of you. So thank you again. It's been wonderful. And Mona, I'm glad you made it. So we'll have a moment of silence for those who are still outside the program, sick and suffering, followed by the we version of the serenity prayer.
God, grant us the serenity to accept the things I cannot, we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Fantastic. So thank you. Ah, hey, Kevin. Yeah. The sponsor, Charles.