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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Tom I Source Review 11004 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: tom-i-recovery-story-at-the-first-quarter-state-assembly-aa-2000-archive-11004.mp3 Duration: 01:27:33
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Tom, you're an alcoholic, and I'm delighted to see you. I don't mind that two-hour talk, but I think that last hour is going to be a little tough while you're all dancing. It is great to see a crowded meeting room. I tell you, that just looks beautiful. I know it's not beautiful if you're the one that's standing, but it's beautiful to see from here. Are there any seats anywhere that anybody can let somebody know about?
Yeah, there, grab some of these things, my gracious. We don't want any real bad cases against the wall now, so come on up close to it. All right, and there's plenty of room on the floor up here, too, if anybody wants to come up here and sit down. If anybody wants to come up here and talk, there's a lot of room up here. Well, I'm delighted to be here. I'm going to go in a hurry because it says we're going to finish at 9.30, and I have a hunch you're all going to quit by then, so I want to quit about the same time you do.
I'm a member of the primary purpose group of AA and Southern Pines, North Carolina, and I'm delighted to be here. I agree with what John said, that this has been an extremely well-run assembly, a lot of work, a lot of business. I don't even know what play means in Knoxville, Tennessee. I had never seen anybody start sunrise services for service work, eat on the fly, if you eat at all. That is something.
It's a hard-working bunch. There's been some good workshops, a lot of good sharing, and I have just thoroughly appreciated it. I appreciate the opportunity to share the solution that we have with anybody anywhere. There's some places I like more than others, and in the middle of this kind of gathering, and I'm not just saying this to be nice, in the middle of this kind of gathering is one of my favorite places because this is where the heart of Alcoholics Anonymous beats strongest, right in the middle of folks who are trying to find a way to do it better and be more effective in what we do.
And so I'm delighted to be here. I think about the fact that if it weren't for service, I wouldn't be here tonight, nor I suspect would you. You think about the key vital nature of service for every one of us, whether it was a 12-step call, sponsorship, meetings, telephone, literature, every one of us here has benefited from service in some way. And so I'm delighted to be here. I'm honored to be in your company, and look forward to sharing with you.
I've about gotten used to remarkable things happening in Alcoholics Anonymous. Over the years, it just almost becomes commonplace, you know, for unbelievable things to happen. Today, I was out—it's remarkable for me to be doing this at my ripe old age—I was out taking a walk, a little nippy in Knoxville, Tennessee, in January, so I was walking rather quickly. And, by the way, somebody, before I get out of Knoxville tomorrow, somebody tell me about that half a boat down—I know there's a message there, but I swear it missed me.
So somebody clear that thing up for me. I won't even ask you to explain the sculpture right behind it. I wouldn't even try that. That boat's got to have a story to it. And so I was out walking around. Now there weren't many hearty souls out walking in Knoxville, Tennessee today. Most of them were in a—what are you doing? My God, I've never been rolled during an A.A. meeting. Most everybody was either in the assembly or gone or in some warm place somewhere, so I'm out walking all over town trying to figure out where I was, walking across the Church Street Bridge over the beautiful Tennessee River, a nice little warm breeze coming off the river, shaking like a dog, I think.
One other hearty soul walking across the bridge, and in the middle of the Church Street Bridge in Knoxville, Tennessee, a fellow said hi, and I said hi, and we started to talk, and we talked about a lot of stuff, said I was staying at the Radisson, and he said, well, I'm coming over there tonight. He said, there's an A.A. thing going on, and I'm in that. And I said, me too. And we had a great meeting out there, his name's Mike, and I think it's in, probably
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in just recognition, me being from Carolina, he's the guy in the Carolina blue shirt. He's like, Mike, stand up just a second, would you? This is Mike. And he made it, and Mike, I wrote that address down, my phone number. He said he wanted to send me a bill, so I've got it written down for you. By the way, I'll mention this, I won't go in too much of disclosing about him, let him tell his own story.
He's working on a job I'd have to be awfully drunk to do. He calls it hanging iron, you know what that meant until he told me. Hanging iron's what they're doing to that stadium over there at UT. And he's working about 200 feet in the air, walking on a six-inch wide steel beam. Now I want to ask you to, Mike's fairly new with us, so I want to ask you, when you're going across that bridge, just kind of wave to him, and send him a kind of spiritual message.
Don't blow your horn now, that's high risk, but what a delight, you know, that was one of those serendipitous things that happens here, and I'm really glad you made it tonight, buddy. Well, let me tell you about this. I want to tell you a lot about the thrilling days of yesteryear. I'd like to spend a little time talking about service, and I might do that indirectly, but let me just sort of share with you what we do, what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now, or what recovery's like now.
Let me share that with you. And if I lay emphasis on service, it's only because it's such an integral part of everything that's happened to me and continues to happen to me. I'm a guy who, if I make it for about three more weeks, I'll celebrate 43 years of continuous sobriety. Thank you very much. I say that to make a point, I don't mind recognition, but I don't say it for that purpose. It's a remarkable thing to me that in my 43rd year of recovery, I'm as excited, as enthused, as dynamically involved in alcoholics and novices as I've ever been in my life.
And what makes that so is not the thrill of not drinking. The only thing I ever got from not drinking was brain dead, until I found a program of recovery. And what I found in that was a brand new way to live. As new and different than anything I ever knew, and some people say that the pink cloud stage is a transitory thing, it lasts about nine months. Don't believe that lie. It lasts as long as I do the things that make it happen.
And when I quit, it quits. And I'm on the pink cloud right now, almost every day of my life, and having a ball. And if you aren't, I tell you I'm fully convinced that service is what lights up the engine of the rocket to the fourth dimension. And that's why I'm glad to be here. I was a guy who, yeah, I came to my senses, I guess you could say. You know how you kind of, the fog lifts and you realize what's going on around you?
I came to my senses, to awareness, when I was 24 years old, sitting in a maximum custody penitentiary up in the state of Michigan, serving 15 years for a crime that I had absolutely no recollection of committing then, now, or ever. Mine was one of those stories that I know was potentially the story of every alcoholic in this room, in this world, I know that. Thank God for most, it doesn't happen. For most, those kinds of things are just sort of bad dreams.
But sometimes, some of us stay there too long and those dreams become very real nightmares. And so I came to my senses, sitting in a penitentiary, looking at a life that was already over and should have been just starting. I'm 24 years old. I'm sitting in a place that I never think I'll ever leave again. I'm sitting in a thing called Alcoholics Anonymous, dealing with a problem I didn't even believe I had.
So of course, I did what any of us would do. I reflected back to what on earth happened? Man, this wasn't what I had in mind. What on earth happened that I wind up in this kind of a situation at this point in life? And when I look back on it, I'm not going to dwell on it much, but, you know, my story is much like, other than the ending, my story is very much like every other alcoholic I've
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ever heard. You know, I was somebody who grew up in that kind of awkward posture of not being able to comfortably fit in and be at one with the world. And when I was 16 years old, I discovered the magic of booze, and what I found in that stuff was a magical solution for the problems of my life. It never quit being a solution. I was talking with Tracy today, and she was talking about the staying power of the solution.
She said it that way, but that's what I heard, about the staying power of the solution. My booze never quit being a solution, it just became a lousy solution. In the beginning, it worked for me, it freed me from the, you know, we talk about the bondage of the self, it freed me from the bondage of the self, from the prison that I lived in in my own skin. And it set me free as a bird. I took off, loved everything about booze, loved the people who drank it, loved the trashy behavior that went with it.
I mean, I loved that whole scene, and I'll let you in on a little secret, I'd be doing it tonight if I had not developed alcoholism, I guarantee you. And as I walk today, every jazz club I pass, I took a look at, because that's still kind of a homing instinct to go back to those kinds of places, and I would be doing that, except that something happened on the way to the jazz club. I developed alcoholism, and I didn't know it at the time.
I started that wild, crazy, just unfurled alcoholism, I guess you could say, and I was so busy doing it that I never realized I was getting in trouble until it was way too late. It was over before I even knew it was started. And so when I look back and started examining, that's what I saw was a guy that just sort of took off in a wild and crazy kind of a way when I was 18. I had that experience that some of us who are alcoholic experience, some quickly, some slowly, but all of us come to a point where we, the way the book says it, that I like best, it says we are folks who lost the ability to control our drinking.
And that's what happened. When I look back over time, I could recognize that in my 18th year, I crossed that line. I don't know exactly what that means, but I know what it was like in terms of the evidence it produced. I was somebody who, if I took a drink from that point forward, couldn't predict my behavior. I'd always been a wild and crazy drunk, but I started to get on extended drunks, I started to do bizarre stuff, I started to wake up in strange places with strange people with no recollection of how I got there.
Started to wake up with all kinds of baggage attached, jails, rubber rooms and cycle wards, wrong state, burning cars, sleeping on a railroad in the middle of a highway. Only time I ever had a fortuitous passing out, I don't know if I blacked out or not, I woke up… Yeah, I used to get awfully slick. I don't mean slick like cool, but I used to get kind of greasy slick when I was drunk, I guess. I had a policeman tell me one time I was the slickest drunk he ever tried to pick up.
It was like picking up a ferret, you know, I'd just sort of slide out. And apparently I got pretty drunk slick one night in a bar, and I didn't want to be drinking in a booth. I don't know why I was doing over there. And I got so limber and loose, I just slid under the table and nobody saw me. About three o'clock in the morning I woke up, came to, and you know how you do it with that sort of panicky reaction?
Oh, I guess maybe two or three seconds I had a feeling of panic. And then, you know how that light bulb comes on? That light bulb comes on, I thought, my God. Take a look at this. You know, you always wonder what drunks think about when they're sitting at the bar looking, staring off over there somewhere. Yeah, I used to sit there and kind of fantasize about what it might be like to drink my way down that bar.
I don't know how far I got. But the next morning they found me on a shuffleboard, you know, some old… I was up there in a fetal position, been waddling around in that yellow stuff. It rarely had that… Well, that didn't seem so good at the time, but looking, you know, it did it. Well, anyway, while I was in the middle of it, it wasn't bad, I'll tell you that. I woke up married, for God's sake. How bad could it get?
The lady I didn't even know. I mean, I didn't even know her name. I'd like to tell you that's a product of drunk, but it ain't. You ever heard the saying that you can get an alcoholic by the pride and lead him around
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the world? Yeah, I came to with that lady and she was the happiest soul you've ever seen about us being engaged. I didn't know nothing about that. But I had too much pride to say that, so I just got drunk, woke up next time we were married. Anyway, it started to be that kind of just bizarre stuff. And my life became a sort of unpredictable pattern of those kinds of things. And what it came down to me was simply this.
Those things had a commonality. Now, certainly they would happen in different places. You know, I'd come to in different states and different jails and lose different jobs and, you know, all that. The circumstances were different, but there was a commonality to it. Now, I didn't realize this until I was looking back and examining it. But every time I would wake up, there would be almost a rerun of the same scene.
Typically, it would be that I would wake up with that sort of frantic, panicky feeling. I tell you, there's nothing more terrifying than blackouts. They don't become funny for at least ten years. There ain't nothing funny about that. Wake up with that panicky feeling, where am I? What have I done? You know, I got so I could wake, I instinctively would wake up and never open my eyes. Because sometimes you open your eyes and there'll be somebody standing right over you asking you impertinent questions.
Immediate. Like, who are you, you know? You don't want to have to look at your billfolder to answer the question. What are you doing here? You hate to say, where? That's a terrible feeling. And you develop an instinct. And that kind of thing became routine. And then the reaction to it became routine. Almost invariably would precede the moral whipping. You've done it again. You've done it again. You're no good.
You're worthless. You've got no discipline. You have no responsibility. And I honest to God believed that was the issue. I never knew until a long time after I was sober in Alcoholics Anonymous that if I took one drink, that was guaranteed. I had not a clue. Not a clue. Never even considered it until I was sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. Worthless. And then would proceed usually way in the options. What do you do?
And always very early on would be, why don't you just end it all? Everybody would have been better off, and I knew it. Or if not that, why don't you just quit pretending? And just go away. Just disappear. Get out of everybody's life. Or do you suck it up one more time and tell one more lie and ask for one more break and ask for forgiveness one more time and go through that humiliation of that? Our book describes that in a way that I didn't buy for a while because I didn't quite understand it until I saw clearly what that behavior looked like.
And in the chapter on alcoholism, it refers to what I'm describing as pitiful, incomprehensible demoralization. We have another word for it. We call it bottom. My God, I don't know how many times I hit bottom. Bottom's not a fixed point. I don't know how many times I hit bottom. But every time I hit bottom and took a look around at the most recent wreckage of the past, I reached out to the only solution I knew, and that was to drink again.
I didn't understand that. I'm an 18, 19, 20-year-old boy. I didn't understand what was happening. But I was so caught up in it. You know, we call that squirrel cage drinking at that point. And, you know, ultimately I wound up just in all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, when I look at the pattern of my drinking, there's one thing that stands out. My life was essentially an experience of failures and new starts.
And every time I would fail somewhere and start over, what I didn't recognize is I always settled for a little less and a little less and a little less. And it sounds like a long term. My drinking lasted a sum total, serious drinking, a sum total of eight years. And in those eight years, a complete devastation of this life and others was the result. But it was so fast in one way, but it was so subtle.
I read a definition one time that, not a definition, a statement that said the chains of habit go on so gently that we don't feel them until they're too strong to break.
[00:20:08]
And we're not talking about a habit, but the chains of this illness, this bondage goes on so subtly that I was hopelessly trapped before I even knew I was in trouble. And so I finally wound up, the last couple of years of my drinking, I wound up just falling a herd of drunks up into the state of Michigan. And I wound up a 24-year-old guy, unemployed, unemployable in a city of a half million people.
I used to say that the last year of my drinking was one in which I lived by my wits, but that's not exactly the case. I lived by my lack of character. And I'm not a gangster. I'm not a member of the mafia, and I'm not a predatory criminal. Now, I'm an alcoholic, but I know what survival is about. And when you live on the street, it's like living in a jungle. You live by the laws of the jungle or you don't live.
And so I did a lot of things that violated the law. It was not criminal intent. It was just the food chain of survival in the places where I lived. And when I was on the street, I did many, many things of which I'm deeply ashamed. Some of them I will mince for. Some of them were just the way it worked. It was just the way it worked. I'll tell you this, just to sum it up in a word. I know of very little that a man can do that I haven't done.
Very little. I'm not proud of that. You can hardly believe it. That's no macho junk. I am deeply ashamed. I'm deeply ashamed of hustling from friends and cribbing drinks and playing the idiot so somebody would buy me a drink, rolling other drunks, taking from people, hurting people. Deeply ashamed of that. That's no mark of courage. It's a mark of just the desperation of alcoholism. I'm not proud of any of that stuff.
I'm not proud of hustling. I'm not proud of selling my blood five bucks a throw. That's what my kind did. That's what I did. Not proud of that. But I never want to forget for one second exactly how that way of life worked, and I never want to forget how I felt about it. I don't want to forget that feeling of total loss of self-respect, of living a life that was filled with nothing but an omnipresent sense of fear, not fright, fear, just a fearful existence that was constantly there either at the level of anxiety or total panic, but always there.
Peculiar kind of loneliness that had nothing to do with the proximity of other people. I've known excruciating loneliness in the circle of friends, in my own family, in a noisy bar on New Year's Eve, and felt totally alone. Well, I don't want to forget that. When I think about why is it after my last drink actually was 43 years ago last November, what is it that makes me pray, God, that I never go back?
It isn't the fear of the consequences in terms of going to jail or hospital or that kind of stuff. It's the fear of recapturing that lost, desperate feeling of a human being unable to function. Well, ultimately wound up, like I said, I woke up in jail, greeted with the fact that in a drunken blackout, driving somebody's car, I don't even know whose car, but driving somebody's car down the main street of the city, had run down and killed two people, and I had absolutely no recollection then, now, or ever.
And then was sentenced into that penitentiary. It's a significant thing to me that I'd been in jail God knows how many times. God knows, I guess, because I don't. I don't have a clue how many times I've been to jail. I'm not like a guy I met down in New Orleans one time. I was speaking at a jail program they had down in New Orleans. This fellow came over to me, pretty battle-marked guy. Came over and he introduced himself.
He said, do you know who I am? I said, well, yeah, you just told me. He said, no, no, I don't mean that. He said, do you know who I am? I said, no, I don't have a clue, I'm sorry. And he said, I happen to hold the national record for times in jail. I said, well, congratulations. Now, I don't think I tied his record, but I don't know. Don't care. It's a relative thing, eh? It's a relative thing. What's important to me is I'm the kind of guy who had to be contained quite often.
And every one of them was exactly alike. I like to think that I've been in jail exactly the right number of times.
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Maybe one less wouldn't have been enough. Maybe one more would have been too many. So far, it's been adequate. So I'll settle for it. But I've been in jail a bunch of times. But a penitentiary was a different thing. Even though I knew that when I went to trial on the 19th of November, finished the last drink I've had to this day, bottle of gin, had about that much in the bottle, and I finished that, went down to be tried.
And I knew that I wasn't coming back. Carried my toothbrush with me, and I knew it was a one-way trip. I was sentenced that day to a max of 5 to 15 was my sentence. You know, when my sentence was passed, I had an instinctive reaction of fear as any human would, unless you're just a seasoned veteran. And I knew where I was going. I wasn't going to an overnight drunk take. I knew that. I knew that I was going away, showing up.
And I'd been on the street with a lot of guys that had been in and out of that joint, so I had a pretty clear visual image of what it would be. And I had that instinctive reaction of fear but the most real sense of relief I'd ever known, because I knew it was over. I knew it was over. And not optimism or hope, but total resignation. I just knew it was done, and there'd be no more harm. Next day I walked into that place, resigned to my fate, never believed I would ever come out alive, and truly didn't care.
And I'm not talking about bitterness or callousness or any of that. Yeah, I just wanted to disappear. I just wanted to be gone. Little did I know that rather than the end, that was to be the place of beginning again. And what happened to start turning around the process is just a phenomenal thing to me. I'd had a lot of people talk to me about my drinking over the years, had a lot of shrinks and docs of various kinds and judges and ministers and friends and employers and all that who had talked to me about my drinking, and it had always gone something like, my God, you sure drink a lot, or you're an alcoholic.
And then it would go off into something like, why don't you quit, or don't be so stupid when you drink. You know, well-intended but meaningless advice. And then when I went into that institution, I was a truly isolated guy. I mean, they put me in a cell. I stayed there. I didn't speak to a human unless they asked me a direct question the first month I was there. I just sat there almost like a guy in a catatonic state.
And one day a guy called me out for an interview, a rookie social worker by the name of Martin. And he talked with me like many others had about my drinking. Nothing new there. But then when he got through, he said something I'd never heard before. He said, we have an AA group here at the institution. I think you ought to go. That was exactly the way he put it. It wasn't an order. I didn't have to go.
And it certainly wasn't an invitation. It was just an observation. You know, you had a lot of trouble with booze. You ought to go over there. I'd never heard of AA in my life. I'm sure it was well known. We had about 125,000 members then. It wasn't a deep, dark secret, but nobody ever talked about it where I drank. I'd never heard of it. I'd never heard anybody helping a drunk. That was the most awkward concept for me.
When I first heard of somebody helping a drunk, I thought, what do you do? I've been helped a lot of times, upside the head with a blackjack, locked up. Yeah, I've been helped a lot of ways. They all got me sober. But they didn't have much to do with staying in power. And then this guy said there was an AA group. And I don't remember if we had any more conversation or not, but he sent me a note a few days later and said that I was cleared to go February 2nd of 57 was the day I could start in Alcoholics and Drugs.
And I went. I didn't want to join AA. I'm 24 years old. I'm a fledgling rocket scientist. I really didn't believe. I didn't really believe I was an alcoholic. I thought I was a world-beater who just never got off on the right foot. And I thought, man, if I could ever get going to look out world. That's truly what I believed. And I went. I really believed the only real… Have you ever been so beat that you just didn't have any fight left?
You know what I mean? I mean, I'm just dead. I'm just a noodle. And I really think the only reason I went was the guy said, go. And I said, go. He probably said, go join the Russian Army. I'd have just marched on over and said, let's get it. But I walked in. It was about that much life to it. I walked into a group, it was about the size of this, it was about 300 members in that group. On Saturday afternoon, I walked in, one guy spoke to me, he had an officer on his door, I., yes sir, sit down.
And I sat down in the middle of 300, thank God nobody hugged me, I always marvel at that.
[00:30:24]
When Ed sat down, the meeting ran very similarly to this one, that they did the same, prayed, I knew they were going to do that, I mean, I knew praying had to be part of this sucker. We did, same one we used here. And then they read the same stuff that Joe and Betty read, absolutely, and they read that little bootleg book that, then they introduced the speaker. And I want to tell you about this guy just right quick, like, because, you know, there are a lot of things that turn the key.
I mean, it's not just that guy said, hey, there's a group over there, you know, obviously that's not it. I'll tell you what is interesting, though. I was thinking about it today when we were in the PI workshop and we were talking a bit about CPC, but what a vital thing that is, and in all honesty, what a near-dead thing that is in Alcoholics Anonymous, near-dead. In the 1960 convention in Long Beach, the theme of that convention was, let's be friendly with our friends.
And that's a slogan that has never caught on with the zing that, and then over the years it's almost gone into obscurity. But what a vital thing it is, because the guy who talked with me was a product, I don't know if somebody did a CPC job on him, but he demonstrated what CPC is about. It's getting people who work with us to be equipped to work with us. Now, he didn't do much, didn't do much, but isn't it interesting that a total rookie who knew nothing about alcoholism except how to see no one when he read his record, pointed away and I've never looked back.
Isn't that interesting? Now, obviously there was more to it, but let me take it one step further. A friend of mine led a meeting in Sanford, North Carolina one night, I'd never, I was in the meeting and I'd never heard this done in a meeting before or since. He asked everybody in the room, 22 people, to think back to the key thing, the key person who started the wheels in motion that led to their recovery.
Out of 22 people, there were only two for whom it was a recovered alcoholic. The other 20 were exactly who you would expect, a social worker, an employer, a wife, a judge, a policeman, on and on. I tell you, I don't get off on that too much, but I think it's such a key thing because if you think about it for a minute, if you go to church, the pastor of your church, I don't care what denomination, will probably see more alcoholic families in crisis during the next month than you will see in the next year.
Your physician, if he's a general, you know, has a general clientele, will absolutely see more and they'll either be well informed about how to deal with them or they'll be abysmally ignorant. We are the folk who can make a difference and the workshops that we were in here today, throughout this weekend, are the things that can energize and sharpen those skills. That's going to be increasingly important as treatment centers go into decline and the urgency comes again to our front door to start to deal with and the urgency starts to show up in the workplace when there's no place to send the fellow off to.
CPC, what a critical thing it was for me, but certainly there was more to it than that. And when I look back to the things that were truly significant in my recovery shaping up, taking hold, that group I walked into, the recovery group at Jackson Prison, maximum custody penitentiary, was without question in my mind one of the finest groups I've ever attended in my life. I've been to meetings all over this continent.
I've never been to one that was a more powerfully effective group than that one. And what I'm talking about is a well-ordered, purposeful group that did a great job of helping
[00:35:04]
guys like me understand this design for living that we call Alcoholics Anonymous. Powerful thing. And I wasn't taught by Bill Wilson in those meetings. I was taught by other guys in the joint just like me. The only difference was they were in front of me a ways and said, hey, here's what we did. Powerful stuff. Some of the most powerful meetings I've ever been to in my life were when a few of us guys in that joint after I got into it would go out on the yard and just bunch up under a tree or something and sit down and share like men seldom do.
Powerful stuff. I guarantee you there ain't no shucking and jiving there because there ain't no place to hide. And if you phony, it'll show up before nightfall. You got warts, they're coming out. Powerful stuff. Not cruel stuff, but earnest, intensive sharing that has served me well. Very important for me to go into a group. An influential thing to me, I certainly wasn't aware at the time, but I'm a great believer that the solidity of a group is a part of kicking off the recovery process.
A group is a place for a guy like me where trust is born. I was the kind of guy that I didn't believe words, mine or anybody else's. I didn't believe words. What I believed was what I saw. One of the places where trust was born for me in Alcoholics Anonymous was in the conduct of the group. This was a group of people who did what they said they were going to do when they said they were going to do it.
The first belief in any power of any description I ever had in my life was that group in a maximum custody penitentiary because that's the first place that I felt and sensed the power that was to be the transforming energy in my life, and it was the product of a good solid group doing good solid work. I've always been committed to that ever since. I'm a group man, not a meeting junkie. I'm a group man.
The guy who spoke at my first meeting, became my first sponsor, his name wasn't Shywalker, but that's all anybody ever called him was CHI. He loves Chicago for some reason. He used to do a lot of robberies down there for some reason. And he was a wild man. He was a wild man. The day that he spoke at that meeting, he was the delegate at that time for the state of Michigan, and he told his story. And I sat there and listened to that.
It was amazing to me. I couldn't imagine why on earth a nice looking guy in a blue preaching suit would be in there talking to 300 crazy convicts, telling stuff I wouldn't have told nobody. And I just couldn't believe it. I mean, it was shocking to me. This guy, the last time that he had gotten busted for robbery, you ain't going to believe this. He robbed a superior court judge. I mean, come on, man, you don't have to be a criminologist to know that's dumb.
You don't rob no judge. And I said, what's wrong with this turkey? And he told about he had served some time in that prison himself, and he'd been out 50 years. I was in 50 years. He had been out 50 years. And he told about a job he had when he was in there. He worked in those old prisons, like a lot of buildings, they have that rotunda, you know, where everything sort of goes out from a rotunda. They had a rotunda in there, and the warden's office was on the second floor.
And Shia had a job sort of helping clean that, and he ran the elevator. Well, you know how that keen alcoholic mind is. That keen alcoholic mind will hatch a scheme in a heartbeat. And he set up a plan. He put in a homebrew stand on top of the warden's elevator. He's telling this right in the penitentiary. He's telling this. Put, set the stand up, and he said, you know, it sounds stupid, but it really makes sense, because the fumes go right up out of the shaft, and every time the warden goes to work, he stirs it up for him.
And I'm sitting there saying, they're going to come put iron on this guy any minute. It was shocking to me that a guy would go into that kind of stuff, but I'll tell you, it wasn't shocking to me, but let me tell you what was truly important about that. Now, I didn't identify with him. He was as different from me as anybody I ever met in my life.
[00:40:02]
He became my first sponsor. Loved him better than Peter loved the Lord. But it wasn't because of our commonality of experience. What just galvanized me about Shia over a little bit of time, that it was the magical gift of enthusiasm that he had. I don't know if it was a gift to him, but it was one that he freely gave everywhere that he went. He was one of those people, you know how you meet people that they can walk in a room and it changes the minute they walk in?
Some people can walk in and they brighten up the room. The minute, they don't have to do a thing, except just walk in. And simply being there, there's something radiates about the spirit. And that's exactly the way this guy was. Thank God for that man. Because I didn't identify with the story, I didn't identify with the philosophy, but the next week I was right back in there again. And if anybody had asked me to explain why I was there, I couldn't have done it.
It was simply that intangible sense that I had, that maybe, just maybe. And I couldn't have said that, but that had to be what it was. I was reacting to that spirit that I felt in this man. He demonstrated, without any question, that there was life in recovery. Thank God for that man. I value enthusiastic people. I don't value critics. Critics don't build much. I value enthusiastic people who get excited about something and will really give it something that people can build around.
Thank God for that man, because that's what happened in my life. And I kept going back. Now I'll tell you this, I didn't like Alcoholics Anonymous particularly. I didn't fit in, didn't believe I was an alcoholic. I said I was because I hated to be the only one out of 300 that wasn't. Back then, we only had 12 publications, I think. We got more than that now on one subject. I read all that stuff pretty quick.
But I was sort of doing defensive reading. I wasn't really a seeker. I was somebody trying to find a way out, I think, to find something that fits everybody except this dude over here, and I wanted to be him. I really wasn't a seeker. I'd go to meetings, and I'll tell you something, Alcoholics Anonymous can be a miserable place. For the first eight or nine months that I was an Alcoholics Anonymous, I've never been any more miserable, any more alone, any more isolated in my life than I was sitting inside the group of Alcoholics Anonymous.
It's tough to be around a group of people like you who aren't like you anymore and see something happening with them that isn't happening with you. And that's exactly what I experienced going through that. I just kept going back, dutifully, didn't know why, but I just kept going back, trying to understand intellectually what was going on, but some stuff was happening. I got caught up with the guys in that group.
Nobody ever explained to me how stuff worked and all that kind of stuff, but I got pushed in to the activities of the group long before I was ready to do so. And I'll tell you what the defining point was for me, the defining point, the really decisive turning point was for me. Well, there were a lot of them. There were a lot of them. You know, certainly Shy and the guys like him who came into that institution.
Oh, my God, what a lifeline. What a lifeline. Let me just characterize that for you just a minute. And those that particularly, I know that there are a lot of you who do institutional work here. I won't go into a whole bunch of stuff about it, but the place I was in was not a nice place. I mean, I'm somewhat educated about them. I would say that it's probably, in my judgment, the second or third worst penitentiary in the United States.
There were 6,000 people in there the day I walked in, to use the term loosely. There were some very fine people in there. Some of them are my dear friends to this day. But some of the sorriest excuses for human beings that ever drew breath. And a generous sprinkle of both. Not a nice place. And so as a result, there's some things that are done that are understandable but reprehensible if you happen to be in the middle of it.
For example, you know, that place was built with the big old blocks and flat roofs and then 40-foot wall and the rest of it going around 54 acres of ground. When tour groups came in there, the people who wanted to come in and see the people in there, the sales or whatever, they wanted to see something, I don't know what. And I understand this, they wouldn't let them come down where the people were, where the guys were.
Walk them along the top of the buildings and they'd look down.
[00:45:03]
Yeah, I don't know if you've ever seen this, if you've noticed it, or you might have done it. I have. They have things, particularly driving down to Florida, where Denny's going there pretty quick. You drive down there, they call them serpitoriums or something. You know, it's just a pit, and they put a bunch of old goofy-looking snakes in there, and they charge Yankees a buck a head to go look at them.
And I've done it too, and I'm not even a Yankee. I don't like snakes. I'll go over there and look at those suckers and just shudder. I say, God! Go to the next one and do it again. I don't know what it is, but that's sort of the way that worked. You know, it'd be just like a serpitorium. You'd come by and peep in at the animals. Now, I understood it. I understood that very well. But I'll guarantee you that understanding it doesn't change the way it feels.
Let me tell you the one remarkable difference from that. Those are guys from Alcoholics Anonymous. Hey, the guys from Alcoholics—there weren't any gals coming in back then. The guys from Alcoholics Anonymous didn't come on and talk down from the building. Walked right in the middle of the crowd. I don't know if they knew it, but I knew it. They couldn't have been safer—couldn't have been safer in their mother's arms than they were there.
But that's hard to convince somebody. You have to learn that. You have to learn it. Well, then, there's some exceptions. There was one guy—one guy. I swear to God, I think they conned him into coming. And thank God they did, because I was in AA for almost two years before I ever heard one alcoholic with whom I identified. Now, granted, I was the youngest guy in the group. I was the youngest guy anywhere I went for a long, long time.
And so I had a hard time comparing stories with people who had drunk more years than I was years old. And so I always came up a little short in the comparison. And one day—I swear I don't believe this fellow knew where he was going. His name was Louie. He worked in a furniture store in Detroit. And I think they told him they were going on a picnic or something. And they loaded the poor guy up, brought him into the penitentiary, and he couldn't get out.
And then they put him up in front of the group to speak. And I've seen some scared people. I've been one of them. They scared slam to death. But that guy was so scared, he spoke in a falsetto. I mean, he just squeaked when he came out. And all the time he's speaking, he's looking around to see if somebody's coming up behind him. He never came back. I don't believe it was as scary as he was. But thank God he came one time.
I wouldn't identify with John Dillinger or some bank robber or something like that. My problem was not that I was in prison or that I'd been to jail, that I'd lost jobs, that I'd had all kinds of disruption in my life, that I'd killed people. Certainly those were horrendous things. But that's not what defined my problem. My problem was alcoholism, and those things happened as a direct result. Lou was a guy that I identified with because he talked about his alcoholism, and he was so scared he had to just let it come out.
First guy I ever identified with. So all of those things helped. All of those people who came in and stuck out an unquestioning hand. It meant a great deal to me. It meant a great deal to me that no one that ever came into that institution ever did anything to me less than treat me like a gentleman, long before I ever even approached being one. I never had a single member of Alcoholics Anonymous ask me an inappropriate question.
Never had a single one question my motives, or my heritage, or lineage, or intentions. Never. I had folks not accept me at face value. I had people accept me at the level of what I could become. Thank God for that. I'll just tell you this. I appreciated everybody who ever walked into that institution. The closest I came to not appreciating was you get once in a while some people who like to glory in the power of the position of coming in and talking to the convicts.
And you get some people mistakenly caught up in the notion that what you got to do is, quote, talk their language. Gutter talk.
[00:50:00]
What an insult. What an insult. You know, I speak the same language everybody else speaks. And that always told me what I looked like in the eyes of that person. Other than that, everybody treated me with utmost respect. And I reciprocated, and I appreciated every single one that walked in there. Tremendous turning point. Giving me something to hang on to. But what turned the really substantial turning point for me and made it start to become solid and real.
Didn't mean to do. Now, I understood a little bit about the program from what I'd been told by others and what I'd read. But I never had really done any of it at depth. And I went to a meeting one day. Didn't mean to do anything life changing. Guy spoke for one solid hour about nothing but the four steps. All he talked about. And when he got through, I said, well, I knew what he was talking about. I said, well, I'm going to do that.
Went to my cell when I left the meeting. Got out the old trusty legal pad. Sat down. Meant to write a little story about how cruel life had been. That's what I meant to do. I wanted to tell all what a victim of circumstances I was. What a decent guy I meant to be and all that. The founders were wise when they said to write the inventory. Because if you can write yourself a fantasy like I was getting ready to do, man, you really got trouble.
I wrote two lines of what I had in mind. And then for some reason, I don't know why, maybe the futility of the whole thing just became clear. All at once it was as if I hit a wall. And I stopped dead. And with no intent whatsoever, I switched right around and started to open up for the first time in my entire life. Hemingway called that a moment of truth, I guess, where a person comes face to face with himself.
And that's exactly what happened. I didn't plan to take an inventory. I didn't chart it out. I didn't do it in columns and all that stuff the way we have it in the book. What I did was open up the life of a tortured young guy and just poured it out. It was a torrent. It was just like a dam broke. It was a torrent. And my hand flew trying to keep up with that race of thoughts, race of things that I unloaded.
Stuff I'd never even dared think about. When I got through, I had three pages of scribble at best, barely legible, but it wasn't written for publication. I'll tell you this, it was without question the most important day's work I've ever done in my entire life, bar none. Most important day's work I've ever done. Because when I got through with that experience, I knew two things, one very clearly, that has served me awfully well.
I knew that I was alcoholic, period, period. Not the young case or the tragic case or the whiz kid, none of that. I knew that I was alcoholic, period. I have never doubted that one second since. What a powerful foundation. You know, our program isn't based on achievement or attainment. It's based on a thing called surrender, and that's what I'm talking about. I knew that day at a cellular level that I was powerless over alcohol.
If I took one drink, I was dead meat. I knew that, and I've never questioned it once. I've come close to drinking a few times, but not with that old delusion, well, maybe you're not like that. No, I have absolutely no doubt. But I understand at the core of my being that the issue for me is not that I've wised up and decided that sober is better than drunk. Doesn't even enter the picture. That this is better than that.
What I acknowledge to the depth of my being is I'm a guy who simply can't drink. The fight's over. It's over. That day I became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't sign a pledge, but I became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous that day. I've never gone to a meeting since then, including this one, that I haven't known exactly why I was there. I'm a guy with a purpose. A guy with a purpose. I know what Alcoholics Anonymous constitutes for me, and I use it for that.
It comes out in a lot of different flavors, but I know bottom line. What I'm doing in every meeting that I attend, I became a real member of Alcoholics Anonymous that day. Never wavered in that. That powerful stuff that takes all the nonsense out and gets down to a disciplined, committed way of life that we call Alcoholics Anonymous. And a program of recovery. I'm not going to talk a whole lot about that other than that, you know,
[00:55:04]
once that process started, it was amazing to watch. The thing, this probably doesn't sound like it would make a lot of sense, but it probably won't, but I don't want to discourage anybody, but in almost 43 years, I have never, to my knowledge, solved one single problem in Alcoholics Anonymous. Not one. Not one time have I sat in a meeting and said, that's it, that's it, I got it. It just hadn't happened.
Somehow it doesn't seem to work that way. That you hear that old saying that sobriety is a journey, not a destination. What happened to me was I gave my life to this simple program laid out in its 12 steps. And amazing stuff started to happen. Not only have I never solved a problem, I'll let you in on a little secret. I ain't working on none. I may have some, but I ain't working on none. And it's not because I'm lazy or unconcerned about it, it's just that I've learned that every problem I work on gets worse.
I have never seen one get better by my effort. Doesn't happen. What I do is give my broken and wasted life to this simple program and let it take me where it'll take me. And amazing stuff happens. Amazing stuff. I got enormously active in that group and every promise in our book came true for me in a maximum custody penitentiary. And more so. I became a free man. A free man. In every way except physically.
Locked up like King Kong. With nothing that most humans consider critical. Became free. The first day of unadulterated joy I ever had in my life was in a maximum custody penitentiary. The first feeling of unexplainable happiness that I ever had was right there. It's the product of what we do. And so it happened there. I got turned on to living. Somebody had invented television while I was busy drinking.
And woke up, there it was. And Michigan State University learned about it and they didn't put literally a campus there but they sent a campus to Jackson on television. All you had to do was buy books and pay tuition and I became a freshman at Michigan State. You know, it's a funny thing about alcoholics. Now there are remarkable exceptions to this. But by and large, we are folks to whom you don't have to say giddy up.
Most of us have got enough nervous energy and compulsive drive that the dilemma for us is how to keep us from getting three jobs. Trying to make up for all that lost time. I've had some. I swear to God, man, they wouldn't say giddy up unless a mule was sitting on him or something. But I got turned on to living. And I finished two years of my college education in a maximum custody joint. I'll tell you what, you hear some marvelous stuff in here.
Marvelous stuff. It makes you sick when you first hear it. But it's true. I was in a meeting one day and a guy said real profound stuff. You may want to write this down. He said, if you can't sleep, stay awake. Well, is that dumb or what? I don't want to do any real deep confession up here or not. But I dabble with a few things other than booze. I took everything I knew anything about except heroin.
I thought that was the most boring thing I ever saw anybody do. Selling it wasn't bad. But buying it was a turkey. I never did take that stuff. I was a speed guy. Yeah, that was the forefather of cocaine, I guess. I was a speed guy. And I just got, I swear to God, I got so wired on that stuff. Man, I'd get on some running thing for three or four days and I'd get through. I'd look like a raccoon. I mean, you talk about, and it fried my head bad, it did something.
And so, you're the product of that, I couldn't sleep. And I tell you, when you're trying to be a manly convict, I'm the youngest guy in the joint, you know, so I don't want to do anything wimpy looking because somebody would make a wife out of me if I didn't watch it.
[01:00:01]
So I wanted to be kind of manly. it's kind of, it's not, it's less than manly to say I'm afraid of the dark. But I couldn't sleep. And I heard that guy say that. And at first it was sort of a stupid sounding, but then it made sense. My God, what else am I going to do? And I, I literally finished two years of my college education when I couldn't sleep. Great stuff. Yeah. And you know, eventually I went to sleep. It'll happen if you get tired enough. Goodbye. You go. I didn't have to take any stuff to make it happen. Yeah. No, practical stuff, you know, good stuff. Yeah.
And you know, and I finally got out of there. It doesn't take a real genius to get out of prison. It just takes a lot of time. And it ultimately happens. They told me I could go if I would agree to go to North Carolina. And I said, well, let me consider that. Yeah, you know, I did. They did. They, they, they, they told me I was, I was paroled in North Carolina and, and I got immediately active in alcoholics and alcoholics. I had a contact.
Somebody told me when I first went in that place, if I wanted to get out, I had to have my plans in order. I had a job waiting three years before I was eligible for any consideration. I knew if there's anybody holding up the process, I didn't want it to be me. And when I got in this AA thing and really fell in love with it, I knew this was my life. I knew this was the only ticket to freedom I would ever have in my life. And, uh, yeah, about a year before I was getting out, I tell you this, I just passed it on. I heard somebody talking about this, some of the contact programs today in, in, in the corrections program. The, um, somebody told me to get in touch and I, and I got hold of a directory. They had two groups listed in my town. One of them, I, you know, had 25 members. The other one had 15, according to the directory. So I, of course, wrote to the one with 25. And, uh, I, I know our mail service is a little slow, but that's been something like 40 years or so, and I'm still hadn't got an answer to that one. And, uh, you know, I mean, that, that really rattled old boy up because I thought, yeah, sure, these guys that come in here are good guys, but there's a bunch of turkeys out there that don't want a guy like me. And when I'd written that letter, all I said was, hey, I'm coming back to North Carolina. Will it be okay if I come to your group? That's all I asked. Well, I, and it rattled me pretty deeply.
And as I talked with, with my sponsor, talked with some other guys, and then I came to understand something that just because something has AA on it doesn't mean that it is. Unfortunately, some things quit being groups. Unfortunately, they don't quit meeting. Or, or, or if they go away, you know, they just, they, uh, they're still there, you know. And that group was, when I got, I 12-stepped everybody in that first group that I wrote to because they were all drunk. Well, it was a matter of who was drunk which week. And, and, uh, then I wrote to the other one, the other group, and guys told me about stuff like that and sort of helped me see that, you know, that we're human beings. We're in various stages of repair.
And, uh, so I wrote to the other group. This time I got a letter quicker than the mail could run, and it told me everything I could ever hope to know. It told, it answered me being kind. A guy, a guy came, became my second sponsor, which I died, that wrote the letter. And, uh, all he said was, you know, you, you, you'd certainly be welcome, welcome. I agree with you. Describe the activities. Describe what they did. Describe their eating meals. I never heard of what eating, beating, but he described those. It's about the fellowship, excuse me, that generates around it. And, uh, put one line in there that was probably a throwaway to him. He said, you'll be welcome, you'll be welcome in our group. We want you, we need you. What a deal. Well, that one, that one of course had some value. I still got it. It's a little yellow, but I still got it. Powerful thing. And, and so I hit the street running. I got immediately active in, uh, in, uh, in, in the program. Made a meeting the first night, every night for a long, long time. Just absolutely, I lost 25 pounds the first year I was out. Just, I went like a young goat. I didn't know what I was
[01:05:02]
doing, but I was just running in all directions and just having a ball. And I'll tell you some miraculous things happened. It is as a course of, yeah, I said I'd never solved any problems in Alcoholics Anonymous that, you know, I never have learned to solve hate. I don't know the remedy for hate. I just know that over time by practicing these principles, one day I look around for it and it ain't there. Yeah. I never learned to solve hate.
What I do is learn how to love. And hate goes away. It can't live in the same house. And I've never really aspired to anything much. When I got out of, out of, out of the institution, I had one rock solid commitment that I would never go through that degradation again. And that was an absolute commitment. Many years later, I still feel that just as strongly. And I knew this, knew this was my ticket. Otherwise, I just wanted to be an average guy in an average town, be a citizen for the first time in my life. And I had all those things to happen. You know, I, I, I got immediately active. I started, I didn't even know I'd ever be able to do anything like this. Second week is out. Guy said, go over to the prison with, had a little small prison near my house. And I said, man, I can't go there. They won't let me in. They may not let me out. They said, I called, it's okay. So I went over. It was a simpler day. And so I went in. Two months after I was out, I was outside sponsor of that group. What a powerful affirmation, eh? To be able to go back and be a trusted servant in a place like I'd just been subject to. About the same period of time, I want to tell you some things that happened. And I promise you, I had absolutely nothing to do with them.
They're the same product that what gets rid of the problems, replaces it with other things. And it's an interesting thing to me that more than interesting, it's unbelievable that most of the truly important things that have happened to me in my life, I had little, if anything, to do with. They just happened. Now, two months after I was out, about the same time I came outside sponsor, my parole supervisor came to me one day and he said, Tom, are you really able to say anything? I said, yes, sir. And I thought he was going to tell me to slow down. I knew I wouldn't do that. He said, wouldn't it help you if you could drive? And I said, yes, sir, but I can't, as if he didn't know. And when I'd left the state of Michigan, in letters that big, this man would never drive a motor vehicle, this man would never drink alcoholic beverages, I accepted that as literal facts of life, had no quarrel with it. He said, well, let me check that out. A little while later, he called me, asked me to meet him at the Sears store uptown, in the town I lived in. And I went up there, my sister drove me up there. Story is absolutely true. I walked up to the front of that store, I could see all the way to the back of it, it was just a one-room long store, and I could see all the way back. My guy was standing there, parole guy was standing there, talking to a fellow I didn't know, went back there, he introduced me, we talked for a few minutes, the guy handed me a driver's license. He didn't even ask me if I could drive. No test of any kind whatsoever. Didn't even pay for it. Can't do that, can you? I mean, it just doesn't work that way. I've had people tell me, well, you must have been connected well politically.
I really was. The sheriff and I were intimate acquaintances. I will tell you what I truly believe, that when God's got work for us to do, the walls come down. And I don't care what the walls are. I've seen walls come down that are unbelievable. If I had been trying to con and manipulate that into happening, I honestly believe I would be walking today. Amazing things happen. Five months after I was out, I was elected DCM in my district, for my first of, been DCM four and a half times in my sobriety, and I was elected then.
I couldn't even spell DCM, they didn't teach that at Michigan State. But I gave it everything I could. And then two years after that, I sit in my house one day and got a phone call from the state capitol. Guy I'd met one time who came to visit the prison where I sponsored the AA group, and it's the only time I ever met him. He introduced himself and we chatted and he said, Mr. I., we're expanding the rehabilitation program in our prison system and we were wondering if you would consider accepting a position. And I said to him, do you know who you're talking to? And he said, yeah, we've checked you, we probably know you better than you know yourself, and surely they did. And I said to him up here, what I really felt, I said, my God, man, I would love to do anything I could imagine. I'd never considered that in my life, nobody else had ever considered it, never been an ex-con hired anything like that. And I knew they weren't going to start with me, but they did. And
[01:10:00]
I went to work, I'm still working in corrections, I haven't, I'll say this in Tennessee, because I haven't met anybody from North Carolina, I'm ten years past retirement. I just haven't found a good time to quit. And I still haven't, but I've got a way to be a volunteer, so I have targeted my retirement, finally. I've had people say, Jesus, what are you going to do, die on the job? But I've been there for a long, long time and it's been a marvelous career, as you can imagine. About eight or nine years into that career, something like seven or eight, something like that. One day the head of our system asked me to come by his office and I said, yes sir, I was a rehab supervisor and I was doing a lot of stuff all over the state. And he said he had a little assignment he wanted me to do. Normally when he said that, he wanted me to pinch hit for him somewhere, speaking to a civic club or something. And I said, yes sir, what? And he said, I'd like for you to take over an institution as warden. And I swear to God, now even though I was in the system, that was shocking to me. And when I got up off the floor, I said, boss, I don't know if I want to do that or not, man. I don't want to be the man. I want to mud-wrestle with the guys. I don't want to be that turnkey. And then I said, give me some time to think about it. He said, okay, you've got five minutes. And I took the five minutes, but I paced up down the hall, went to the john like I always do, prayed like a dog, went back in and said, all right, I'll do it. And for the next 20 years, that's what I did. It was an unbelievable thing. You just can't get there. I'll assure you of all the things a guy fantasizes about in a maximum custody joint. You don't find yourself saying, well, one of these days I'm going to get out of here and run with these suckers. Yeah, sure. They got a place for people who think like that, I guess. It was, but that was my profession. And I'm enormously grateful for that experience. I'm grateful for the fact that I've been able to hire many hundreds of other people into that kind of thing. Not hundreds of ex-con, but I've hired a lot of ex-cons in that business. And I tell you, it's an interesting thing. Some people think that's a high risk activity. Not everybody agrees that hiring ex-convicts is a good idea. I have had more trouble, and there's no reflection on anything, but I've had, I was thinking about it when I got a little criticism in a newspaper about that one time. I have literally had more trouble with PhDs I've hired than I have ex-convicts.
Now I don't know if education ruins people. But anyway, the guys have served well. I've never had a serious problem with any of them. I've hired a ton of them. So I'm very grateful for that. I tell you where I want to wind up is, according to my watch, it is now 922. Now don't look at your watch, because yours is probably wrong. But I want to get to it. I didn't start right on time, so I'm going to go just a little bit here and just share a little something that's on my heart to share. I'm going to quit here in just a minute because it's warm in Tennessee now. My pros are done. That was certainly, I always tell that because people choose me out if I don't. And I also know that everybody here is not just reaping in the golden sheaves right now. It's a long, dark tunnel sometimes in early sobriety. And I like to share that unbelievable story to me just for anybody that's wavering in the hope department. I don't care what your situation is. I guarantee you this program will make a transforming difference in your life. You may not have your dreams all come true, but I guarantee you there is no obstacle too great. At least that's been my experience.
And so take the message as one of hope. It would be my request. And realize that there ain't no doors locked that can't come down, whatever they are. I'm sponsoring a young anesthesiologist right now. He's a fine young man. And he got a little confused about who he was supposed to medicate. And so as a result, he's working in the emergency room right now. And his heart and soul is in anesthesiology for some reason. And every once in a while he'll get a little down in the dumps and he'll say, you know I'm never going to get back in my profession. And I'll sit there and look at him for a minute and I'll say, do you know who you're talking to? He says, oh yeah, okay, we'll get you. And
[01:15:02]
I think he will, you know, if he'll just do what he's doing. we're talking about. You know, I'll tell you who I am, you know, I'm a guy that, you know, I've been truly blessed with an unbelievable gift of sobriety and gift of recovery and experiences beyond my wildest dreams. My God, it's unbelievable where this trail has taken me, and the only reason the trail has taken me there was because I've been a guy who says yes.
I hope you can understand what I'm going to say. One thing that's made that happen. I'm somebody who in 40, almost, it'll be 43 years next month, I have never one time said no to a request for service on the basis of personal comfort and convenience, not once. I've said no hundreds of times because I've already got commitments or something, but never once on the basis of personal comfort or convenience.
Now, that doesn't make me a hero, but it tells me about how I need to live this life. If I'm going to live this with selective avoidance of things that are uncomfortable for me, I'm not going anywhere. I've never done a thing in alcoholics and almost take that another step. Not only have I not said no, I've never said yes comfortably. Never once have I said yes with a deep feeling of confidence and comfort that yeah, I'm ready for that.
Every time I've ever said yes, I've had to walk through a little curtain of fear. But every time I've walked through the curtain of fear, it's gotten a little thinner, a little thinner. To me, that's where the growth comes. If I'm going to try to find a comfort zone and stay there, I'm in trouble. I've got to keep being willing to grow and to do the things that are difficult for me to do. Because those are the things that I need to do.
And when you've got that frame of mind, you're going to get lots of opportunities to serve because they're there to be had. I'll just tell you one other thing in that connection, and I swear I'm really not a mystic about stuff like this, but I've been doing what we're doing here tonight for almost 38 years. Almost 38 years. I may have to cancel the next thing I've got coming up, but in 38 years, I do this an awful, awful lot.
I have never had to cancel one single commitment, nor have I ever had to miss one. Now I don't know what the message is of that. I fly the same airlines everybody else flies. I used to crash my airline just like they do others. I get sick just like anybody else. But for some marvelous reason, I've never had to cancel a commitment. Now that string may run out. If it does, I'll deal with it. But that's just phenomenal to me that such a thing would be the case.
I'm an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's who I am. You know, I'm somebody who, like it or not, I'm becoming an alcoholic. I'm a long-term member. I don't like to say old-timer, but I'm becoming a long-term member. I'm about the oldest one in my state. It ain't going to get much older than that. And I don't have a choice, well, I've got a choice about that, but I don't have a choice about becoming an older member of the program if I'm going to stay in the program.
I do have a choice about what kind of an old-timer I want to be. And I'll tell you, I've got some real high premiums on what kind of an old-timer I want to be. Yeah, I don't want to see somebody who lapses into obscurity. I want to be somebody who, as long as I'm physically and mentally capable, gives his very best to this thing. You know, there's a lot that I've got concerns about, many things in Alcoholics Anonymous.
God knows I've got deep concerns about some of it. There are global problems. There are huge problems that we have that I won't enumerate. You've got your own. And when I think about those global problems, what can I do? I'm one guy. But by God, I'm one. I'm one. And there's some things I can do, and I'll just tell you this, and then we'll kiss goodnight. One, I can be the best member I know how to be.
Now, I'm a pretty doggone good member. I'm a conscientious member. I can be the best. I can be the best informed member that I know how to be. I can learn about the issues, and I can understand the problems of Alcoholics Anonymous. I can make good judgments about trusted servants like us.
[01:20:01]
I can avoid voting for a GSR just because they don't know how to say no. The tragic thing is that we get many people who opt out of service and write it off as, oh, that's the business. That's the politics. I don't want to be there. But I'm somebody who can become aware of the problems and be conscientious in what I do. I can do that. I can be somebody who contributes to a strong home group. My personal belief is that the home group is the most powerful building block in our fellowship.
And just like I said a little earlier, I'm not a meeting freak. I'm somebody who is strongly committed to purposeful, well-put-together groups that have a design for carrying this message. My group is called the Primary Purpose Group. That's exactly what we do, is the primary purpose. That's what we're about. And we are so organized to do that to the best of our ability. I can do that. I can contribute to a good, strong group.
And I'm somebody who is committed to that. I'm a good home group member. There's a lot of things that I do in AA. I'm a busy guy in AA. But I differentiate between the things that I do in AA and the things to which I'm solidly committed. I know that you guys, I know y'all have to deal with some of the same issues I do. People who get actively into service sometimes run into friction about how they use their time.
And I'm no different. What I've found is this simple thing, is that when I tell somebody that AA has to come before anything else in my life, that's a lousy way to put it. And it ain't quite right. Because what that does, if I say to my wife that AA comes first, therefore I can't carry out this responsibility, that's like waving a red flag in front of a bull. If you ever had to fight my wife, you wouldn't do that.
But it's not right. It's a lot different to say that my recovery comes first. Of course it does. But there's a lot of difference in characterizing it that way. What we understand at my house is that I have some things that are absolute commitments. They're not under the heading of nice to do. My home group is a commitment. That's not an affiliation. That's a commitment. And every Monday and Thursday night, I'm going to be there unless there's something drastically pulling me away from that.
That's a commitment. See, the way I look at it, I can be as good a member as I know how to be. I can be cute and witty and wise and all that, but I'm not one ounce better than the group that delivers on what I promise. My group is where, if I'm going to dazzle somebody by saying, come on, let's get well, I've got to have a place to do that. My home group's that place. That's where I do my most important work.
I go down there on Monday and Thursday, and I do the work of the group, and I kind of troll for drunks. That's my most important work. This ain't chopped liver, but my home group is the place where it's at. And I can try to be a good example, the best I can possibly be. If I'm going to tell somebody that I've been enjoying the benefits of this program for 43 years, I take the responsibility to try to reflect that in how I live.
I don't want to be some angry, bitter old guy that's going to talk to somebody and never look at them. I never want to be somebody that can't even hear a newcomer. I want to be somebody that when I meet a new member, I want them to, my commitment is, I want to assure that they get as good as was given me. My God, how could I do less? And so that's what I want to be as I become an older member. I want to be an example of what recovery is about, and that's a commitment to me.
I'll tell you this quick story, and we're done. Sometimes I want to solicit you to think about this in our image and what we convey to people, because we don't always convey a great image. Like John mentioned, somebody mentioned that we, Pat, that we, the hotel here sees us as people who drink a lot of coffee, clean up after ourselves. That's great. I know places in this country where hotels have asked Alcoholics Anonymous not to come back because they don't do that, because they come in and trash it like a bunch of drunks.
That's not a good way to communicate what our program's about, and so we do that sometimes. I know restaurants that have asked AA members not to come back because we sit there and suck up coffee for three hours on one dollar and don't leave a tip.
[01:25:05]
Yeah, great, great public information about us. And I'll tell you this story, this one little story. I was doing a district meeting, putting on a panel at a district meeting, had a bunch of guys, and we were meeting in the lobby of the Hampton Inn. And some of them were staying there, so we were meeting there around the table, and we were just planning a meeting, and I was the facilitator, so I was leading the meeting.
And we were going at it, trying to get ready, so we were a piece of dung when we got there. And I saw an older couple sitting next to us. They went over, checked out, came back, and they stopped, and they were a nice-looking couple. And a lady spoke up, and she said, excuse me, she said, we didn't mean to eavesdrop on what you folks are doing, but we were just intrigued by it, and what are you doing?
And so I said, well, we're planning a meeting for this afternoon that we're going to be doing. She said, oh, what kind of a meeting is it? And I said, well, it's Alcoholics Anonymous. And this is, explain just very briefly, I said, it's a service function, and what we're trying to do is put together this panel so we can effectively talk about service. Well, she thanked me for the information, and then she said something.
Now, these are people that are just probably in their 70s. And she said, and her husband spoke up, too, and said, in all of our lives, we have never seen a group so intently focused on their work. Think about that. I'll guarantee you that if one of their children, grandchildren, the Pope, anybody was in trouble with booze, you think that couple would hesitate to say, I know a place? Yeah, I think that's our challenge, so that as we let people know we're in this program, we carry a message in what we do, and not just what we say.
Thanks very, very much.