John L. — Speaker Meeting

Thank you.

Good night.

My name is John L., and I am an alcoholic and a drug addict.

Yes, that sounds good.

I had, um– for the first time in my sobriety, I, um …

I thought about not using my last name when I came up here.

I’m not sure why that is, so that’s why I decided to use my last name.

I guess because of this camera and because of, um, other, um, recording devices.

But fuck it.

Um- Everybody

knew I was loaded.

They might as well know I’m sober, you know?

Um- Palm

Springs, huh?

What the hell?

I stopped my car today to call a friend who lives here.

When I got back in the car, the little thermometer in my car read 122 degrees.

Where I’m from, there are Creole dishes we cook at about that temperature.

Wow.

This is great.

I have never been in front of these many people without being able to, uh, be paid to lie to you.

Um- So this should be interesting.

But fortunately, it’s real easy for me up here because, um, I, number one, get to talk about the thing I like best, me.

And I get to tell you what happened to me, and I don’t have to make that up, you know?

Nobody else wrote that.

I don’t have to memorize it.

As Mark Twain said, “When you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything,” you know?

And I was looking at the– it just struck me funny, giving away these golf awards tonight, you know.

It’s really something that a lot of us are familiar with, huh?

Putting a round, white thing in a hole.

Um …

Now, as I think of it, that was a drug joke, not a sex joke.

But I guess it could- I guess it could be taken either way, couldn’t it?

Well, to some of us in the room.

All right.

So let me identify here so you know that I, I do belong here and I’m not just, like, a ringer they, uh, called in because the people knew who I was.

Um- Real quickly, um, what it was like.

I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh, it was a great town to, uh, go to boot camp in for this disease.

I don’t blame New Orleans, obviously.

It has nothing to do– I could have been, you know, in a monastery in Tunisia, and I would’ve found the monk making the wine, I’m sure, at an early age.

But New Orleans gave me the opportunity just to, uh, really relish in the, uh, the possibility of this landscape that I decided to create for myself.

It’s the only town in the world that has signs on bars that say, “Happy hour, any waking moment.” You know, I was listening.

It’s very strange.

I must, I must admit that I’d never heard, uh, who was an addict before.

Uh, when I got sober, there was no Cocaine Anonymous.

Uh, and if anybody’s counting, f-for what it’s worth, I’m in my, my tenth year of sobriety, so when I got sober, it was- No, no, no.

Jesus Christ.

Let me tell you something.

Let me tell you something.

An old man once told me that congratulating a drunk for not drinking is like giving a trophy to a cowboy with hemorrhoids for not riding his horse, okay?

Um, I’ll show you pictures of my kids, then

you can applaud later, okay?

So anyway, I was an only child raised in a very Catholic family.

Uh, very Catholic family.

And, um, my father, as far as I know, was an alcoholic.

He left when I was two, so he had some other work to do somewhere else.

Um, he quickly got remarried, pumped about three kids out of somebody else, and eventually died of this disease, alcoholism, drug addiction.

To me, it’s all the same thing, you know?

It really is.

It doesn’t matter what I put in my body.

It’s why I put it there and what it does to me once it is there.

Um, I used to think when I first got sober that I was not a cocaine addict, that I was not an addict.

I was an alcoholic.

It was a more romantic sound to it.

Addicts gave me images of little apartments in New York somewhere, you know, with dirty needles and, uh, bad takeout food, and- And

alcoholism was William Faulkner, you know?

Much more appealing image to me, anyway.

Um, you know, the first, the first emotion I remember-

Having– can you hear me if I stand up like this?

I hate bending over.

Is this all right?

Is it not good enough?

Okay.

Now that’s better.

All right.

Um, the first emotion I really remember having as a child, and it’s the one that was, uh, primarily throughout my life that

still today is a frequent visitor, was a great deal of fear.

Now, being a Catholic helped.

Um- I don’t say that jokingly, you know?

I mean, you know, I’ve done about twelve inventories on the Catholic Church, but- Being Catholic, I have very heavy atheistic tendencies.

Um- But being reared in a religion that sort of told you that you were zero from the get-go only

helps support those, um, innate feelings of complete worthlessness that I took upon as, uh, my, uh, my mentor as a, as a young boy.

Uh, all around my house were pictures of saints who were in some form of phenomenal pain or another.

Um…

As another, another great writer once said, “I would never trust a religion whose logo is a dead boy on a stick.” You know?

Um, but let’s move away from that for the moment.

Sorry.

It’s, uh…

But what it, what it filled me with, what it filled me with was something that

I probably would have had, uh, otherwise, was this feeling that nothing I ever did could be good enough.

Nothing I could ever become would be worthy enough.

Now, whose criteria I was using, I have no idea.

You know, I guess we could, uh, you know, if we could go to John Bradshaw’s house, he’d probably tell us, but, um- To me,

it, um, you know, my dad left, right?

So if, if I’d have been okay, he probably would’ve stayed around.

You know, it made sense to me at five or six years old that if I was worthwhile, he would’ve not wanted to go away from me.

And having no brothers or sisters, I had no other reality base to check in on.

So all I had was a very loving mother, who unfortunately had to, uh, work, and so we didn’t spend a lot of time together.

The Catholic Church, which provided me with a great education and, and also my appreciation for art and literature.

It was where I was first exposed to it.

But there was al– I was alone.

I was constantly alone and a phenomenal coward from the earliest age, you know?

I don’t know why that happened, but I was always afraid of life, you know, very afraid.

This is fine.

I don’t mind, I don’t mind handholding if, if I’m not deafening anyone, no.

Um, so in order to compensate for that, and unfortunately, I, you know, I didn’t discover alcohol or drugs until much later in life.

For the first ten or fifteen years, I had to use something else to hide, and what I used was fantasy and, uh, lies to myself and, uh, made you believe

that I was someone other than who I really was.

Since I had no idea about that, it was easy to make up, uh, somebody.

Who would you like me to be?

You know?

Um, there are women in this world who had entire relationships with me under a, you know, a completely false identity from, uh–

It’s amazing the lengths I would go to because of my fear of exposing myself to you.

Perchance, it came from the, the thought that if I was any good, uh, I would’ve had a happy family.

So if I tell you who I really am, you’re gonna run away.

But around sixteen years old, um, I discovered, um, a wonderful,

uh, medicine called Southern Comfort, I think was my first, uh- In front of a country and western bar in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Um, and, uh, I got very drunk for the first time, and drunk, drunk to the point where the, uh, as Tennessee Williams said, “The click happened.” And

all of that pressure I put on myself to be somebody else was totally lifted from me.

Um, it was like ripping off your clothes and finding this big S on your chest underneath.

You know?

I was so happy, incredibly confident, uh, marvelously witty, and phenomenally attractive.

Um, and after I threw up, it was even better.

You know?

But my younger life was that way, you know?

Uh, even now sometimes when I think about my childhood, the overwhelming emotion that I have is, is sadness.

But, um, I don’t make decisions based on that anymore.

I can tell you that truthfully.

It’s still there.

It’s a poignant story, one that hopefully I’ll make a lot of-

off of one day.

Um.

.

So growing up I found booze and, uh, at 17 years old found, uh, marijuana and, um, not ’til much later in life, at about, uh, 25 years

old, found cocaine when I actually moved to Hollywood, uh, to pursue acting as a career.

I would go, you know, I actually paid people not to beat me up when I was a kid.

Uh, I, I, I just could not– Let me tell you something.

This is a horrible story, but it just shows you the lengths we will go to.

When I was 10 years old, I had lost a religion book, and I had to go to religion class next, and whoever the, you know, Sister Mary Ryno or whoever I had to go to next- I

knew that if I showed up in that classroom without that book she would beat the crap out of me.

She had done it before.

So I knew that she would do it again.

So I ran away.

I told a friend that I had to go to the convent for a music lesson, and I left the schoolyard and just kept going.

This is 10 o’clock in the morning, and I roamed around the city of New Orleans until about four o’clock in the afternoon and realized, you know, I gotta work.

You know, 10 years old, I can’t exactly like go get a job and live by myself yet.

So I decided I had to go back, and I ripped my clothes, and I scraped my knuckles on the, uh, sidewalk, cut myself with a Coke bottle, and

went back to the school.

And about, uh, half a block from the school took on this sort of Quasimodo profile.

Lumbered back and told them the truth, that I had been kidnapped off the schoolyard.

A big man in a blue trench coat came and took me away and put me in the back of a shed somewhere along the Mississippi

River.

And boy, I tell you, I, I was very convincing.

Uh, so they let me go home.

Phew.

Got out of that missing religion book, didn’t I?

Then the, uh, police showed up- …

to my house for, um, a report, and I gave a very, um, you know, tearful– I expounded the story with great pathos

and drama.

I gave a description, and I thought I was home free, and they left.

And about two days later, they called to say they caught him.

So now comes a tough

decision.

Do I fess up about that religion book, or do I let this guy fry?

And like the old story about Jack Benny when the guy asked for his money or his life and Benny said, “I’m thinking.”

I, I actually thought for a moment, “Well, you know, I really don’t have that religion book.

I, if I…” But, you know, fortunately, something inside of me said, “I can’t let a guy hang just because I lost this book,” and I told them the truth.

And she beat the crap out of me.

Now that’s a, that’s a, that’s quite a length it seems to me to go to avoid the responsibility

of my own life.

And that’s before alcohol and drugs.

For– You can imagine what we got into when you had that invigorating accomplice to accompany you along these voyages.

Man.

Um, I got out of high school barely.

I discovered acting in my senior year of high school, so that helped a little.

Um, had to join the Navy.

Lied my way out of that.

Got married at 20 years old.

Lied my way out of that.

The guy that turned me on to LSD got a job in Colorado as a bartender, so I just went and lived with him for a while.

Seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

‘Cause you know, it can go bad in the mail.

It’s better to be right at the source.

Matter of fact, a member of this fellowship gave me a nickname about two years before I stopped drinking.

Um, I was known as The Beast around town.

Uh, toward the end I was rather surly.

You wouldn’t think of it looking at me now.

But I was this large hulk of just absolute pain, disgust, anger, frustration, and disease.

So– But we’re jumping ahead.

I got out of high school, lying anytime I could.

It was more preferable than telling the truth, certainly.

Always feeling that, uh, there was something missing in my makeup, you know?

That there was a part of my brain that, that I didn’t own.

You know, that I could not click into life.

You know, that, that, that feeling we’ve all had of being on the outside, of being unique.

I mean, I-

Really thought that it was true, you know?

And I thought it until the day that I got sober, that somehow I was absolutely fundamentally different than any of you.

And I went about my life treating you that way because I was special, you know?

Just you being in my company was payment enough for you, so whatever I took from you in the process was, as we say in the South, land yap for me, you know?

Little something extra.

Your life, your money, your wife, your cars.

Hmm.

I, um, I came to Hollywood in 1973, or went to Hollywood, I guess we’re not there.

Close to it, though.

And, uh, decided to be an actor ’cause I had discovered that there was a place where you could go and be somebody else, and they paid you for it.

Seemed appropriate for me.

And I was definitely an alcoholic from the get-go, just to let you know that.

I mean, I always drank alcoholically.

I always used whatever drug I had until there was nothing left.

I once wrote in a play, a guy looks at a fellow at a bar and says, “Haven’t you had enough?” And the man is, “Really, enough?

I’m not familiar with that word, enough.” “I know there’s none.” “And

I know there’s some.” “Oh yeah, and there’s more.” “But enough, not really familiar with that term.” And

that’s how I used and drank, you know?

So I came to Hollywood and, um, and I suppose, you know, considering it was the ’60s, everything seemed like it was pretty much under control.

I went from job to job and place to place and car to car, leaving them when they broke down and walking away from them.

Doing the same with relationships, but it seemed like that was the appropriate behavior for the Aquarian Age, that everybody was doing it, searching deeply for the true meaning.

All of this other peripheral stuff of, like, responsibility and honesty and integrity were passe mores of the Eisenhower generation.

Certainly didn’t apply to the hip, cool guys like us.

The Tim Leary School of Life.

So I came here and, um, and then things really got shitty.

Uh, in some ways I guess I was fortunate.

In another way I don’t know if it’s, is or not, but I got successful fairly soon in my chosen, um, obsession of acting.

I got on a series relatively early.

Had money to burn, and did.

And it was about this time where I dis- when I discovered, um, discovered cocaine.

You know, I mean, Cole Porter wrote about it in a song, so it couldn’t have been that bad, you know?

It used to be in soda pop, you know?

It’s …

I only did it to help stay up longer so I could drink more.

I mean, it wasn’t- It, it wasn’t, it wasn’t the cocaine.

And the fact that I would go to Musso & Frank’s at noon- …

just to have a, just a cold Becks, just to settle the brainwaves down.

And maybe just a shot of Wild Turkey to cut the taste of the beer, ’cause I didn’t like the beer that much.

And that was all I was, that’s all I was gonna do that day, ’cause I had a lot of writing to do.

I had an appointment to get ready for the next day, and well, you know, I, I’m hungry.

Maybe I should, you know what?

Maybe I should just have another beer before I eat.

I can’t really decide what I want.

Uh, and then it would be 4:00 in the morning, and I’d be in some fat guy’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

Him grinding away Italian baby laxative and charging me $120 for- And

then about 6:30 in the morning, crawling home, uh, and going to sleep in the garage so that I wouldn’t wake up my wife or children, and wait until they got

up and went to work and school.

And then pick myself up out of the oil stain on the floor of the garage and go inside and sleep till noon.

And go to Musso & Frank’s just for one Becks, just to get the brainwaves settled.

Boy, like deja vu all over again, you know?

And I thought that was fine.

I really thought that was fine, God damn it.

You know, I work hard when I work.

Sitting around the set all day smoking dope, that’s tough.

You know, trying to memorize those lines.

Jeez.

Boy.

Going 90 miles an hour down the freeway on the San Diego freeway, passing joints to the car next to me, you know?

That was fun.

Yeah, sure, I had to send my family-

way to England to live because I didn’t have any money, but the separation artistically was good for me, yeah.

Moving on to the sailboat that a friend of mine offered me was good for my spiritual growth as an actor.

Lying horizontal for three months, snorting heroin and pissing in an orange juice bottle was good for the actor part of me, you know?

Not getting up for days at a time was good for the actor.

Unfortunately, nobody wanted to use the actor by this point.

And I was just sitting on that sailboat, you know, wondering, “What the hell?

I’m too tall, that’s the problem.” Tall guys always get the short end when it comes to acting, because, you know, the- everybody’s small and

…

I must have the wrong agent.

That’s the problem.

Wrong agent.

Better job would help.

Oh, man.

Makes me sweat thinking about it.

My family came back because I got a job that was gonna pay for a new apartment and pay for their airfare

back, and I, I kind of forgot to get the apartment and- So they had to move onto the sailboat with me.

My wife didn’t like that.

So she went out and found a place herself, and I, I thought, “Well, you know, once again, I’m taken care of.” But we can pick women,

can’t we?

Or men, vice versa.

I found somebody who, um, really loved me and had her own agenda to have to deal with, and it was a perfect match.

I sat with a gun at a, on a table about four months before I got sober, thinking that it

was time just to get out of here.

Um, but I was afraid that the gun wasn’t large enough caliber to kill me.

So I went outside and blew a couple of rounds off into a garage door.

Just to, just to check the size of the hole.

See if it went all the way through the door.

And then decided that it probably could permeate my brain case.

And went inside and sat down to write the note.

Didn’t have videotape then.

That’d been nice.

Anyway.

After about 45 minutes of trying to write the perfect suicide note.

Gotta end on a great joke, you know?

Your whole life, it’s just gotta end on, “I came, I saw, I went.” Wasn’t good enough.

“I’m sick this time.

I really am.” So after about 45 minutes, I realized that I couldn’t think of the perfect exit line, and couldn’t kill myself because of that.

But now I know, now I know the real reason I didn’t do it that night.

I mean, forgetting the nights that accidentally you forgot how many Quaaludes and how much bourbon and how much cocaine and how much LSD you had taken that day.

Forgetting all of those times, there was something inside of me at that last moment that said, “You know, this might

change.

Could, couldn’t it?

I mean, it could change.” I had no idea what that meant at the time.

I didn’t have any faith, certainly, that it could, but I realized after I got sober that what had happened to me was that I had had this small moment of

clarity that wasn’t, didn’t click yet, but I had not lost all hope.

And that came, um, a while later.

I lost my train of thought completely.

I can’t look at my watch and talk at the same time, I realize.

I’m, I’m g- I’m, I’m getting better.

So all right, let’s get sober.

One night I was sitting at a friend’s house with a large line, a kind of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar line of cocaine in front of me.

And a fifth of Johnnie Walker Scotch.

Black, of course.

And, you know, boom, I was standing on the other side of the room looking at this

pathetic, fat, swollen hulk sitting at this table, you know?

This sort of John F. Noonan apparition as a large, ugly kind of troll-looking individual.

And I thought, “Jesus, look at that poor bastard.” “What a loser.” And

I was spouting off about when I ran the business and oh, how much better it was gonna be.

These assholes in Hollywood didn’t know what they were doing.

And in that flash, I realized it was me, and then I was back at that table.

Now, I didn’t know the word surrender.

You know, except for maybe the, um, Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin album.

But I looked down at that cocaine and I looked at that, um, scotch and, um, I was sitting with about five people and I said, “I’m, uh, be right back.

I’m gonna go to the bathroom.” And I got up out of the t- off the table and walked out of the door and got into my car and went home, and that was it.

I, I, you know, i- in that flash, I did what I think each of us finally has to do in order to get on with life.

I totally gave up any pretense that I had anything whatsoever to do with this stuff and it controlling me.

Absolutely rock bottom, definite, I’m totally lost here.

I am over.

I have no other alibis.

I have no other bullshit.

I’ve got nothing to pull out of my pocket to prove to you that I’m okay, that it isn’t the problem, you are.

That I’m not the problem, they are.

It was gone.

The next morning I woke up, and I’d been exposed to Alcoholics Anonymous prior to that, which is a whole nother story, which is very funny, but another

time.

So I went back to this meeting, and I’ve been sober ever since.

Now, my first sponsor said to me that I had been insane, and he defined insanity as the definition as this: repetition

of the same action expecting different results.

And all of my life I had repeated the same actions expecting different results.

And secondly, that I had to fire my mind.

That my best thinking had almost killed me, you know?

And it was absolutely true.

And that everything I knew was wrong.

So here I am at, uh, what?

30, I don’t know, 31 years old, I guess, thinking I had, uh, an intellectual superiority over most of the people on this planet.

Certainly a, certainly an artistic superiority over anybody that I knew.

And I had to admit that I was just like you.

Jesus.

I mean, you don’t mean like, you don’t, you don’t mean like all of them.

I mean, you mean like, like Laurence Olivier, I’m like him or- You know, John D.

Rockefeller, I’m like him.

I, I’m not like that guy shitting his pants at the bus stop.

Yeah.

Matter of fact, you’re worse than him .

So here was this alcoholic who had his medicine taken away from him, and what he was left with was his disease.

So I had to find a place to go to to get help with my disease.

And that was, for me, Alcoholics Anonymous, since that was all there was.

Unless I wanted to go to Narconon or something.

Have to pray to L.

Ron Hubbard or somebody.

Boy, I wanna tell you something though, you know, uh, and if you’re new

and you’re having a hard time, you know, this– not everything I say applies to anybody else except me.

Once I accepted the fact that this was the place I had to be, and the reason I accepted it was because I could look at guys who had been sober 20 years, or 15 years, or two years, or

nine months, and realize that they had an ability to deal with things in life that I had absolutely no idea on

how to handle.

So– and, and I wanted to be able to handle that.

If I couldn’t do that, there was no reason to stay sober for me.

You know?

I wanted to be sober in the most exuberant and exhilarating definition of that word.

I did not wanna sit on my thumbs for 10 years not drinking.

No, I don’t drink or use.

I’ve killed 12 people, but- I

wanted to be j- happy, joyous, and free.

You know?

I wanted the whole sweepstakes.

So I became a zealot.

I wasn’t working very much then as an actor, so I had a lot of time, and I got active immediately.

I mean, active like taking that guy that was crapping his pants on the bus bench, taking him home and giving him a shower.

You know?

And I don’t say that for any self-gratification.

I’m just telling you that I think you have to go to any length if you wanna get here, stay here, and be happy here.

And that’s part of it.

It was for me.

Meetings every day.

And that book.

I mean, I love that book, but boy did I hate it for a long time.

What the, what are they talking about?

You know, these guys were three years sober when they wrote this goddamn thing.

How could they know how to live beyond that?

I thought, “Jesus, does that mean if they’re three years sober, I can’t use this book anymore?” Where’s the book written by the guys five and 10 years sober, you know?

That’s the one I needed after that.

And forget all the cliches about how badly it’s written.

It’s, it’s horribly written.

It’s sexist, you know?

It’s not in present time.

But I’ll tell you what, everything I ever did, really did, that that book told me to do, helped me live a more successful life.

And as much as I wanted to refute that, I could not.

My first sponsor told me the only way to disprove a belief system is to adopt it.

So the only way I could hold this book up and say it’s bogus was to live it, and therein lies the trap.

Because if I, if I live it, it’s going to work.

And I mean really live it.

It was very, very interesting and tough, my first year of sobriety.

Fourth step was devastatingly difficult for me because, I mean, I don’t know about anybody in this room, I’m sure nobody else is, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist.

And I figure if you can’t do something absolutely right, you shouldn’t do it at all.

So I hesitated for a long time, you know?

I, I literally went and got books on writing style.

Strunk and White, you know?

Now, should it be third person or should it be, like, from a, an imperial viewpoint?

It might be fun if I, like, wrote it in retrospect, like a flashback.

I mean, literally reams of paper.

I’m talking about reams of paper.

Hundreds of pages that I tore up.

No, no, no, no, that’s not, that’s not, that doesn’t have the, the punch that it needs.

Finally, it got too painful and I just had to sit down and say, “I’m an asshole, a liar, and sick, and this is what’s happened

to me in my life, and these are the people who screwed me.” And did I have anything to do with it?

I mean, some of it, sure.

But there was a lot of it that I, that I was just a victim, you know?

Slowly but surely, I cleansed a lot of the damage and the, um, the pain that I had created

in my own life.

You know, the 12th step says, “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these

steps.” You know, I didn’t hear that for a long time, you know?

It just meant something else to me.

But I realized what it was telling me, that, you know, there were 11 things before this that I had to truly accept in my life and

change the way that I dealt with myself.

Six months after getting sober, I was in New Orleans, Louisiana, visiting an old girlfriend, my first love, the, you know, the one that, that’s the best, like the first hit.

And she had just broken up with her husband, and she wanted to get drunk.

So I took her out, and I got her drunk.

And we were sitting in the bar in which at 17 years old I asked her to go steady with me.

Big, big, big glass of brandy in front of her.

This little glass of Coca-Cola in front of me.

And she left the room to go to the, the, to the head, and I saw, uh, the brandy, which was cognac, my favorite, and there was a mirror

behind the chair, and I looked up and I saw me.

And for the first time in my lonely life, I thought I

had actually started to have a relationship with myself, and if I took that cognac, I was doing to

me what I had done to many people in my lifetime: let them down, lie to them, screw their expectations,

compromise a trust that had been built.

And never in my life had I thought that much about myself, that I was willing to nurture that relationship.

I took her home and screwed her brains out, but I didn’t drink.

No.

It’s not true, Elizabeth.

I have been married to the same woman for, uh, nearly 17 years.

And– all right, that one’s okay.

I’ll accept congratulations, but she should get the applause.

She should definitely get the applause.

She told me- She once looked at me and said, “I know you wanna

kill yourself.

Would you just go do it somewhere away from the children?” Um…

Oh, man, you know, I was very nervous when I came up here.

I am, I am just so enthralled with, with this organization, with the whole– the entire fellowship of, of any program out there.

I don’t give a shit if it’s Propane Anonymous, you know?

People who like to suck on Coleman lanterns, you know?

And I was watching, I was watching security when I came in here tonight, and watching all these guys

with, with walkie-talkies and, and not an ego amongst them, you know?

But

how remarkable that– I mean, look around us, that this group of people could be in any way organized for anything- …

unless it was one minute to two in the morning and you had no gas.

Then it would be like, you know, the mother of all searches, um.

But I’m absolutely, absolutely enthralled with what you have, what you have given me in my life, you know?

I didn’t have…

And that sounds cliché, you know, all the little bullshit things that you hear in these rooms sometimes, especially when you don’t– when you know they’re true, and you don’t want to hear them.

They sound like these little, you know, little bump– “My kid’s an honor student at Valley High,” you know?

I mean, they’re just mundane.

But I am absolutely in love with the ability that I have found to treat you well, with

love, compassion, and more than that, to treat myself the same way.

Because I’m alone, you know?

I came here alone.

I’m gonna die alone.

But I don’t have to do it lonely.

And it’s because of Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous…

Hello, Johnny S., by the way.

I told him I would do that.

Son of a bitch.

No ego there, huh?

Nooo.

Those of you who know who I’m speaking of know who I’m speaking of.

He tried to get me sober, and he’s failed.

Um- Just wanna let him…

And I’m sober longer than he is, I think.

Um, I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this, but it’s, um, it’s late, I think.

This clock, is it ten after ten?

Yeah.

An old man once told me that nobody gets saved after ten o’clock, so I, I’m gonna wrap this up.

But I just, I– you know, I– unfortunately, a lot of my glibness comes from, um, hysteria and fear, and I apologize for anyone who I may have set off by being–

trying to be humorous about this.

Uh, the sincerity of my belief and love for this way of life is boundless, and I, I hope that anyone who is in here thinking that maybe it’s not where

they belong, it may not be.

But I, I, I truly pray that you stay around long enough to make sure of that.

And if you wanna prove that we’re full of shit, adopt the way we live.

And if you really adopt the way we live, and then you can look at us and tell us that, then fine, maybe you don’t belong here.

But if you belong here, like I certainly belong here, I’m, I’m– words fail me, you know?

I am in love with each of you, and I don’t know hardly any of you.

And in my life, I try to do what I can to prove to others that our way of life is not filled with stress and boredom and

frustration because we can’t…

You know, they’re fine, but they just can’t do those really good things anymore.

This is amazing, you know?

And I would like to thank, uh, David for asking me to, uh, be here tonight.

I would like to thank all of you very much for 12-stepping me.

And, um, it’s been a great convention from what I hear.

I just came today.

But, uh, look at us.

Look at yourselves and love yourselves.

And, um, may God be with every one of you.

Thank you.

Good night.