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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Tom I Corrections Workshop Billings MT Part 2 of 2 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: tom-i-tom-i-corrections-workshop-billings-mt-part-2-of-2-aa-2006-archive-12402.mp3 Duration: 01:16:28
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I'm Wayne, I'm an alcoholic. Since Terry's catching her breath here, I'll slide a question in. We have a facility over where I'm living now, and years ago they were able to take meetings, and it's a county jail. And it ended up where two AA members primarily were taking the meetings, and over time what happened is, for whatever reasons, exactly what you're saying, a snowstorm, or they forgot, a couple of meetings in a row got missed, and some inmates eventually filed a lawsuit with the county, because those two meetings were missed, the county quit having them.
They quit having meetings there, because of that. And then the lawsuit was filed. I don't know exactly the details. After I moved there, there were a number of people who had shared that, and it had happened just a year or two prior to that, and I and a number of other members tried to get meetings started again. Well, the head jailer had been there during that experience, and is still there, and was absolutely opposed to even considering it. Has a whole list of reasons why, but at the core of it, I believe, comes back to that lawsuit that was filed.
And, of course, a big part of that is the experience that he had, the view he has of Alcoholics Anonymous not being accountable, showing up. We tried meeting with the sheriff, who is, in that case, where the warden would be at a state facility. And he continues to push us off to the head jailer, who it isn't going to work, basically. What do you suggest in a situation like that? Well, persistence pays. I believe in the tenacity and in that accountability to a citizen. That your public servant has no business refusing a citizen right of audience. They don't have a right to do that.
They're there to serve. That's what they're employed for, or elected for, whatever. I had a warden of, ironically, well, I don't know if it was ironic or not, but a women's prison. And she's a nice lady, good personality. And so we started to do a remake up there. That's an eleven or twelve hundred women population. And so I met with her and two or three other top managers and said, you know, we want to do something. Where do you want to start?
And she's the first one who said, over to my place. We need help bad. I said, okay, fine. Do you, number one, do this for number two. All right. Good deal. Head, shed, talk. We got ready to set it up. And so we picked a date, set it up. And I did it by mail and said, here's what we'll do. Here's who I'll have. And so we'll meet. And the number two guy called me and said, all right, we're ready for the meeting. I said, okay, fine. Are you sure the warden's loose? He said, she's got to go to court. She won't be there.
I said, well, I'm sorry about that, but we'll have to reschedule the meeting. He said, no, I'll run that. He said, I'll run it. It'll be okay. I said, no, it won't. No, no warden, no meeting. You tell her, then we'll go. That had to go three times. And finally, after three times, you talk about Middle East negotiations. This was about, she's sitting there at that prison, head of that facility. Now, she pulled it off fairly well.
She carried herself with dignity. And we conducted the meeting. I'd like to say that it was an overwhelming success. But I'll tell you one thing it did. It made anybody other than me look beautiful to negotiate with. She was very cordial. But at one point, at some point, I said, well, I think we can do that if everybody agrees. And she said, nobody understood it but me, but she said, I think if you want it to go that way, it'll go that way.
I said, okay. But anyway, it got over the hump.
[00:05:04]
But sometimes, you just kind of have to beat on people until they come in. And that's what we did with her. Now, we've got good stuff going there now. We've got good stuff. The area coordinator, like our bowman man, the area coordinator had a much easier job. But what it got achieved, I didn't want her to necessarily be a cheerleader. I wanted her to demonstrate by her actions that this was important business.
If it's not important enough to step across the hall and step in a meeting, it's not important enough to her. And so that was really important. So it took three times to do that, and I don't like to get to that point. But sometimes you just got to do it. I just got through with one. I won't go into all the detail of it, but I had a whole regional thing. We were setting up a model program in a region where I know you don't have this in Montana, but we tend to build institutions in the most god-awful places you could imagine.
And so we built 3,000 beds of facilities in a little old community that didn't have enough members to staff it if everybody in town showed up. And everybody else. And so we set up a deal where we would just take those three facilities, consider them one, and then set up a kind of a rotating span within a 50-mile radius. Realistically, it was the only way we could do it. And so everybody was buying in. That sounded like a good concept.
Got down to the nitty-gritty, and the top guy wasn't doing anything. He was passive. And so finally it just came down to it that I told him, I said, we're going to need to meet one time. Me and you. Me and you. Nobody else. We're going to need to meet one time, and then we can move on or do whatever we have to. And so we met. And I just told him, I said, I had to take the lead since I initiated the meeting.
I said, let me just tell you what the deal is here. I said, I think that at least half to two-thirds of the folk in the institutions have serious problems with alcohol. And I believe that there's a real need to do something to correct that problem. And then I said, if you don't share that belief, then we've got nothing to talk about. And it will be a short meeting. And he said, well, my God, man, I agree with that, and I think it's worse than that.
I said, all right, fine. You've got to make sounds like a leader. That's all I want you to do. I want you to just make sounds like a leader. And joke. Anyway, show him it's not enough for you to agree with me. If you don't own this, my believing it won't make anything happen. It's important that you believe this. And you invest that in the folks, the wardens that report to you. And we walked right out of that meeting.
He walked into a meeting. He already had the wardens waiting. He walked in. And this time he didn't dump it on Tom. He called their attention and said, now, fellas, I'm going to tell you something. We're supposed to be setting up a model program here. That's what we agreed to. But as of now, it's a damn poor model. And I want something done. And I'll guarantee you, you talk about an animated group of people.
They were ready to fight. Me. One guy threw one shot, and I stuck it right back in his ear because he was wrong as to left feet. And he just quieted right down. But see, that's what happens when you get the guy at the top. If he hadn't been, we could have run ourselves to death trying to make that happen, and it wouldn't have happened. So I think that's what you've just got to get to the point. And I meant what I told that woman, the warden at that women's prison.
If we had not had that meeting, we would have not done that program. Somebody else might have, but I wouldn't have. And so sometimes I think you've got to take kind of a tough stand. And it's not a war unless they want to make it a war. But when I go into a meeting like that, you can bet I'm prepared. You can bet. I've got my ducks in a row. I can tell you chapter and verse exactly what we're talking about.
He's dealing with a thousand things. At that period of time, that's all I'm dealing with. So I guarantee you I'm ready when I go in there. If we're going to fight, I'm going to win. You know about that, Rick. Yeah, Dave. I'm Dave B., and I'm an alcoholic. Tom, I heard you say on more than one occasion about getting the administrator
[00:10:00]
in these facilities on board so that you've got their shadow kind of cast over the whole thing. On the reverse side of that, what about the guy that's securing that pod for that evening? How much knowledge do they have to have about alcoholics and alcoholics? How much do they have to buy into the program, and how do we get that done? It may surprise you, but I don't think they need a heck of a lot.
I don't want to teach them about AA and about traditions and all that stuff. What I want to teach them is that we are respectable people who are there to do a service. That's what I want them to know. And whether they understand AA or endorse it or want to join, that's another matter. So basically what I want to have there is a good, respectful base of cooperation. Certainly sometimes it goes way beyond that.
But at a minimum, that's what I want, is good. All I want the guy to do is do his job. I want him to do it well. And if he does his job well and I do mine well, we're going to get along great. And then if it warms up beyond that point, fine. But at a minimum, I want him to act like a professional. And if he comes in and if he were just a chronic case that was overtly causing trouble, I would deal with that, either with him or with the next guy up the line.
I wouldn't accept it. But first, I want to be realistic. All I want him to do is do a good job of his job, and then I'll do a good job of mine, and we'll get along okay. That sounds a little simplistic, but I really like to keep it that simple. I don't want him particularly to understand what we do. I want him to respect what we do, to respect it. That what we do, you can count on us. If we tell you we're going to do something, you go to the bank on it.
We're going to do it. That's what I want him to know, that we're serious about this thing. And once you get that climate established, it's a lonely position when you're going to be the one little screwball that's over there throwing darts. You'll get it once in a while. But by and large, you're going to have a climate that really means something. I'll tell you one thing on the other side of that that you may just want to think about.
I was doing a session with some staff, prison staff one time, and kind of like this. And I just was letting folks talk, you know, whatever they wanted to say. And one guy said, I'm a correctional officer somewhere. He said, you know, there's one thing about the program that bothers me. And I said, what is that? He said, I think it's a good thing. But I watch every week, I watch these people come in here and they walk past me like I'm a piece of furniture and go hug an inmate.
See what I'm talking about? Now, we don't mean to do that, but sometimes we do act like the guy's a statue. And so I think it's real good to just greet him. Say, hey, good to see you. How's it going? Just some little casual thing. I don't want to stop him and have a long conversation unless he wants to. But look, what we can do something about is our side of the street. Right away we can do that. And just to bear in mind that that's a tough, lonely job.
And that guy's not from Mars that's wearing that uniform. He's our neighbor. He lived in the same community. He's not some foreign entity. Well, they're neighbors. Let me stop there. They're neighbors. But I think if we just keep that in mind and try to have cordial relations, then we can have pretty good professional relations. Getting another one in here. I see Terry's starting to wiggle her hand.
How about types of meetings or formats of meetings? What do you find is of most effectiveness taking into facilities? I wish I had remembered it. But there's a thing I wrote up, and I'll send somebody a copy of it. I'll send it to John since I can't get it to Scott. Send it to John. Now, this is not the Sermon on the Mount. I was getting ready to do a workshop one day with a bunch of us, AFO. And rather than sort of talking about the experience and, you know, things we've done, for some reason, I never had done this, I decided to do it on the basis of what I have learned from this work.
What have I learned? Not what have I taught, but what have I learned? And it was surprising. I came up with 20 things and quit with that. And one of them was that the program for people on the inside is exactly the same as for people on the outside.
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Absolutely no difference. The program is the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. They don't change because we're in prison. And if we devise a program peculiar to the prison environment, we're doing them a disservice. And so I think as much as possible, the program needs to look as much like what we do here as it can. And the other thing that I just repeat that thing I mentioned a while ago, I think a program has to be designed to fit the environment.
For example, if you're doing a county jail program, for example, most of the time there are exceptions. I think with the county jail you showed me, there are going to be guys down there for a while. But the average county jail is going to be a high turnover place. And in fact, the first time I ever set up that four-step process, I wrote it out by hand and went over to meet with the sheriff and spoke to set up a county jail program.
And when we got through meeting, it was clear what we were dealing with was a hot-cot situation, you know, where they were going to be in there and before they could even get to clothes change, they're back out. Well, it would have been stupid to start trying to do a big book workshop in there. I mean, my God, we'd look like the village idiots. Your program has to fit the reality. And this was about like doing a program in a bus station.
So what we decided was not to have a meeting. We had a meeting, but it was not an A meeting. It was an information meeting. And we settled on, I think, seven topics that we would spend five minutes on each. It was eight. And five minutes on it, no more. One, a little bit of just who I am. You know, I used to drink a lot, throw up. Like David, I was a puker. Yeah. But just a five-minute snapshot. What the illness is, you know, if it's screwing up any area of your life.
Just real quick, hard-hitting information. Where do you find it? You give them a directory for the local area, in case you're from there, the meeting list. We would always explain the difference that everything that flies the flag, kind of like he was talking about this morning, everything that flies the flag is not the same thing. And you'll find some that are marvelous places. And you'll find some that pure suck.
And I said, you know, I always said when I was doing a session, I just advise you to treat it like restaurants. If you go to one, you get a bad meal, you don't quit eating. You go to a different restaurant. It's the same thing with AA. If you go there and you walk into something that looks like you feel worse when you came out, and when you went in, go somewhere else, you know. That's just reality.
Just to say to a guy, talk about the family. Just for minutes, no more than five minutes. I've said God knows to how many thousands of people that I think the family is punished more than the guy that's locked up. I've never had a single person argue with that. Not one. So a little bit about that. But see what I'm talking about? The program's got to be designed to fit. If it's a long-term thing. We've got an aspiration to put a group on death row at our prison in Raleigh.
We plan to put a group on death row. Well, obviously, it's not going to be a seven-session information session. It will be a much different thing. I suspect that agenda will include not only how to live, but how to die. So I think you've got to design it. But the thing on that belief is that there is no difference in the program. When I go into a prison, I don't work with inmates. I work with alcoholics in AA meetings, not inmates in prison.
If I can't get that barrier out of the way, it's going to inhibit my work. It will inhibit the effectiveness of my work. And so I don't deal. I'm not a prison rehabilitation guy. I used to be. But I'm somebody. I'm there to deal with alcoholics in AA meetings. That's really important if you want to get to good, effective work. And so that's the kind of stuff I want to look for, is to make it fit so that it doesn't look ridiculous, that it really does fit the reality that these guys are dealing with.
How are you doing? I'm Mark, and I'm an alcoholic. Hey, Mark. I appreciate you being here today. I have a question for you. Through the Department of Corrections in Montana, through my drinking ability, I received a fourth DUI. Because of that, the Department of Corrections, I served six months in a watch program. And anyway, now I have the opportunity to go back there. I've been invited to speak before them in February.
I don't know if what you went through, because you were on one side and then on the other side there.
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But what I go through is, you know, when I wake up in the morning, my mind's pretty sharp. And, you know, I probably invented 10 or 11 different things I'd like to say there. But it's like when you talk on the phone and you leave a message and you say, send this message or erase it. I have to erase every one. You know, how do I know what I want to say to share with those men that are there today? Let me tell you what I do every time I do it.
Well, number one, I would question your description of your drinking ability. I would call that your drinking disability. Don't tell them about your drinking ability. But I know what I always want to do. It's just like this. I said I'd have to resort to the truth because I didn't have time to make up anything. That's not all in jest, you know, that sometimes it's best to just say what's on your heart and not what's on your mind.
And so the best thing, you can't go wrong. If you share your experience, if you try to teach or give advice, you'll bomb. You'll flat bomb. And so would I. You know, I'm doing a workshop with you all, you know, and I'm approaching this a lot different. I would if I'm going in to talk even to this group. I'll talk a little bit different to this group tonight because that's about experience. We're sharing a special kind of experience here.
But I'd say when you go in there, don't have a preconceived agenda. Just bear in mind that you're a guy who sat there hopeless, lost, no future. Now you're going back as a representative of what can happen. That's your message, you know, not words. The words will come. I'm choking here. I know you'll do well, Mark. Yeah, I assure you will. And at a minimum, you'll come back out. And that's a good thing.
That is a good thing. Anybody else? Right quick, we're getting ready to run out of time, I think. Probably already have. Scott, you going to give your testimony? Scott W., alcoholic. Tom, I've heard you talk in the past about court cards and the actions you took down in your part of the country regarding that. Would you share with us, please? Yeah, I will. And I guess the point of this is a lot of these problems we're talking about seem insoluble.
They really do. When you start looking at the avalanche problem, what Scott's talking about, we did a little thing and it's not rocket science. I, like many, many other people in this country, have really been in trouble for a long time about this thing of mandating people into AA and having them sign. And I'm talking about everything from drunk courts to DWIs to physicians to lawyers. It's amazing how we've set up this capturing ethic in this country where we put a leash on people and lead them around like a trained dog, you know.
And so how we deal with this stuff in terms of, I won't get afield with this stuff, but it's that whole idea of cooperation and professional community. What courts and medical associations and the bar, what they do, in all honesty, I think is they have increased their efforts to make up for our absence. For the last 25 to 30 years, we have been almost passive, if not dead in the water with stuff like CPC.
Very little aggressive work done in that, very little imaginative work. Many areas of the country, it's not even known what it means, much less have it in practice. So I think a lot of these things have come as a result of our absence. One example, and you can, I think, see it clearly, I know with a group like y'all, you know something about history. And you remember the guy that Bill called Sponsor, Abby?
Oh, it may be uneasy, Bill had a drunk for a sponsor. But he did, and he kept him for whatever purpose. But if you think about Abby and you think about where he came from, and if you remember the story that he was drummed into court again for the umpteenth time, and the judge getting ready to deal with him again in the same old way, and a guy named Roland and his wife went to the court and said, Judge, let us work with this guy, give us a chance.
And the judge, what's he got to lose? This guy's town drunk, he'll get him again next week. What's he got to lose? So he says, yeah, okay, take him. And that was part of the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous.
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It didn't look like it then. But that thing that happened with Abby and then when he called on Bill in New York, that lit the flame that became Alcoholics Anonymous. So court involvement is not new to us. It's intrinsically woven into our history. But what's happened now, when you look at what we're doing today, it's 180 degrees different. Rather than us approaching the court, what we have is the court mandating people to us.
And they didn't do that just because it was a good idea. They did it because they didn't know what to do. And we were missing in action. See what I'm talking about? That active kind of outreach stuff where we try to figure out how to help somebody to make that transition into AA, we backed off on it. And so I say that just because I don't want to demonize the courts or the medical profession or this.
They did what they well-intended efforts. The only problem is that it overextends their appropriate level of involvement. And when those things start to become obtrusive in AA, they're detrimental to recovery. And so that's what happened, like with court slips, where some poor joker comes in. And certainly we all understand it. He comes in with that slip of paper and says, would you sign this? And old John, in a bad mood, said, I don't have a pen.
Get this old boy here. He don't care. But it's not a good reception in AA. It's a lousy kind of a reception. And so that troubled me for years. In fact, I would wimp out of it. You know, people would ask me, and I'd always say, ah, well, John will take care of that. Now, that's a chicken way out. The fact was, it just bothered me to sign that paper. And I didn't know why. And then one day we were having a committee meeting, and our group has every service function that exists in AA functional in our group.
And so we had a corrections committee meeting. At the end of it, I had just a little bit of time, and I said, guys, what would you think about trying to tackle that court paper thing that we get in here? And Wallace, cynical old dude, he said, oh, hell, Tom, you can't do anything with that. They do it all over the country. I said, well, let's don't fix the whole country. I said, why don't we just tackle our little old town here?
And he said, well, we could try. So we set up a meeting. And I'm walking this through because I know that I'm not the only guy frustrated with that. And so if you got concerned there, this was simply what happened. I was sponsoring the chair of CPC in our group. He was a space cadet doc that was still trying to find the landing field. But he was getting there. And so we set up a meeting with the head of probation in our area.
And we didn't want to go to court. We didn't want to save the court in case that didn't work. We would go to the court to deal with it. But we wanted to deal with the people. They're the ones that actually manage the program. So we wanted to go with them. And I wasn't sure what we were going to do. And I was flying somewhere. I do better work when I'm flying, not on this trip, but I normally do pretty good work there because I'm free of everything and I can just sort of let my thoughts roll and I'm up close to God, you know, and all that.
So I wrote down, why does this bother me so much? And this became the cover for what we wrote up. One, it doesn't work. Now, once in a great while, somebody will survive the branding and wind up in AA. But I guarantee you we'll lose 90 for every 10 we keep and drive them away disgusted with what they've been through. And so it doesn't work. That was my opening. Then I listed reasons why somebody would like to do that.
Why would somebody do that? And I listed 10, and I swear to God, it's all I could think of. All 10 had value to the criminal justice supervisor, the probation officer. None had clear value to the client. Three, just to be generous, I put question marks by three because I said just maybe on leap year, if it happened on Tuesday, it might work. That would be valuable to somebody. But I really didn't believe it.
But I did that just to be a generous person. Then on the other side, I listed what's wrong with it. And I guarantee you could do the same thing if you started to think what's wrong. I think I wrote 28 things that was wrong with it, that it does. When somebody comes in here, they don't get the same introduction as somebody else coming in. They come in, they're a second-class member when they walk in the door.
It's like they got it branded on their forehead. And then I was writing down, and the fifth or sixth thing I wrote down, I'd never thought about.
[00:30:03]
It changes the nature of my relationship to a drunk. drunk. It makes it something other than what I want to be. All I ever want to be to an alcoholic is another alcoholic, and when I start validating some action that he's doing for an agency, I'm becoming something other than, I'm a part of the agency. It automatically establishes affiliation. There's no way around it. And I become pro-officer junior, and I don't want to be that.
And so that was troubling to me, and then we listed a whole bunch of others. When we met with the director, and I gave him that handwritten list, the airplane copy was rough, but I was in a hurry, and I got my wife to rewrite it so it would be least legible. And so I took it in, and he's like any agency type of guy, they're always defensive when you go at them because they know it's going to be a complaint, and so he's sort of sitting in his power position behind the desk, you know, saying, all right, come at me, you know.
We told him what we were doing, and he gave him a copy of that thing. So we started going through that just real quick, and we got to the one I just described, that had changed the nation. And he said, well, I'll be damned, I never thought of that. I said, me either. And from that point on, we were on the same sheet of music. Because this was not a bad guy. This is a guy that's trying to help. His officers were trying to help, but they were handicapped, and they hadn't had us there to negotiate with.
And so we made some agreements, and I think when you're going to criticize, you've got to offer suggestions for something better. I don't think you've got a right to just dump a problem on the guy's desk. And so we listed maybe half a dozen suggestions that things could be done. One of them was to put the responsibility on the client. Instead of you telling him what to do, why don't you have him tell you what he's going to do?
If it makes sense, buy it. If it doesn't, send him back to work some more. See what I'm talking about? It's putting the responsibility where it belongs. It's his problem. And then if he puts together a solution, there's a pretty good chance he might own it. And so then all the probation officer had to do was just say, yeah, that's a good plan. Go do it. And we invited them to bring two probation officers at a time to an open meeting, provided they weren't packing.
They couldn't bring no weapons, no weapons, but come in and won't have to so they wouldn't feel lonely. But they started. That's been, God knows, that's been almost ten years ago. And we've never had a piece of paper in there since. Had one from, I saw one from a treatment center, but we've never had another one from court. People ask me if we still get people from probation. You wouldn't, well, you probably wouldn't believe, I am so pleased to be able to say I don't know.
It's none of my business where somebody comes from, for God's sake. We don't check resumes here. So that's, I don't care where they come from. So if they come in, that's their problem. They can talk about that when the time's right. But I walk through that because it is a huge problem around and fairly easy to solve. Now certainly in a bigger city it gets more complex. One of the guys, I just mentioned one other, I won't give the details, but one of the guys I sponsor got interested and just wanted to do something.
And one day in Oklahoma, I'll tell you how simple it is. One day in Oklahoma, yep, we sat down, this sorry old drunk's got a big pool out behind his house now. He's got affluent, you know, but he still wants to do something for drunks. So we're sitting out there behind his house at the pool with about eight or ten other people talking about that. So we just laid out some ideas and talked about them together.
Right now in Edmonds, Oklahoma, part of Oklahoma City, they have a hundred people on a regular basis who are from the court who come and meet at a place that's adjacent to the court. So it's still on those grounds. It's still under the legal auspices, under the judicial umbrella. The AA members go in, they do six sessions.
[00:35:01]
And so the AA members go in and they conduct six well-laid out sessions. And I'll tell you what's the real key thing to it, and we borrowed this from a place in Colorado Springs, the first place they ever saw it, and it's a great idea. What they do is they have an agent of the court that sits at the door and they check them in, when they come in, when the clients come in, they come in. If they're not there, AA members will not conduct the meeting.
Very important that there be a clear, absolute line between the enforcement side and the service delivery side, what we do. Very important. Now, we've never had an absence of AA people, but if they did, the court people would say thanks for coming, there won't be a meeting tonight. See what I'm talking about? It gets away from this kind of silliness of what I think is silliness of having somebody wag a paper around and, you know, try to get somebody to sign it for them.
Because these meetings are devoted to working with the guys in the system. That was a simple thing, that the guys put together, they got full ownership, and I didn't do anything except just get them to think it about a little bit. And I tell you, there's a lot of creative energy in a bunch of alcoholics. They came up with some good stuff. Some goofy stuff, too. One guy that was going to do session on step five, Joe sent me a copy of it.
Thank God he didn't have to lick stamps and send it e-mail. It was a book. I mean, my God, it was longer than any fifth step I ever heard. You know, I just thought, why don't I shorten that just a little, you know, maybe like a page. All right, anything, well, let's quit. It's good being with you. Thank you very much. Tom is an alcoholic. And a member of the primary purpose group of Southern Fires of North Carolina, so Friday today is Groundhog Day, 1957.
I appreciate that very much. If I'd have known it was going to last this long, I'd have quit. I didn't mean to stay here this long. I didn't mean to stay here at all, but I'm delighted, I'm glad I stayed here long enough to get back here, because this is just a special place in Alcoholics Adopted, and I'm glad to be really, really honored to be on the program with my good friend, DeBraze. It's good stuff.
It's strong stuff. Y'all reminded me of something today, that your gratitude is an enigmatic quality. You know, it's a strange thing of how you get hold of it. I always experience the greatest gratitude when I go through the darkest periods of my life, and always it comes in. It's not about giddy, happy stuff. It's about that thing when the program's equal to the event. So anyway, I'm supposed to tell you about drinking whiskey?
I do have to tell you a little something. I know how the A.A. Grapevine works, and most folks here are aware that I was on the heels of emergency when I left, and my daughter-in-law had to be committed early for, well, I don't understand all those medical terms, but her baby was getting dry prematurely, I guess. It said she lost her fluid, and apparently that means that it's not supposed to be working that way.
So it went in, and I didn't know what was going to happen, so I sent a note and said, cross your fingers, I don't know what's going to happen. And so that emergency turned into a 6-pound, 14-ounce boy. Finally, finally, I tell you, man, I'm going to be on a walker before I ever got to push a stroller. I didn't think they were ever going to get it on. I was trying to encourage them one time, and they made a little trip over to Taiwan, and my daughter-in-law sent me a note real nice and all that.
I said, I just want to remind you that conception has a lot to do with delivering children, and conception can occur anywhere, in an airport, on a plane, in the car on the way. I don't care where you do it, let's get it on. So they finally did, and I don't know if it's a family tradition or not, but I mentioned in the workshop today, one of my outside issues, which is a real labor of love, is that I love
[00:40:04]
jazz, and I called back home this afternoon to find out what was happening with my grandchild, and they named the poor fellow Thomas, which would happen to be my name and my son's name, now my grandson's name. They said they wanted to keep it going, and all of us have Ivester as the last name. We all have different middle names, and I guess in deference to my little jazz inclination, his middle name is Coltrane.
I'm glad it wasn't Bix Bieberdyke or something like that. That's all right with me, Trane originated about 25 miles below me, so I guess that's appropriate. So good news, and I'm anxious to get back, I told them to name him Otto or something, it's a masculine name, but you know how kids are. I really am glad to be here, and I'm going to get on with it, and I'm not 100% sure exactly how this will go, it's none of my business, really, I'm just going to get up here and let her go.
I really want to kind of put some focus on the program and the strengthening and what's really important. I've got family on my mind, I guess for some of the obvious reasons and some of the signals that are given clearly in this recovery group, that it is a family illness, and therefore a family program of recovery, and I don't know of any place that that's more strongly demonstrated than right here, so I've got family on my mind a little bit, and that it is an important kind of a thing.
When the chips are down, and I learned this one time with no question, that when the chips are down, family is awfully high on the list, in fact it's at the top. I was on a plane a while back, I have a lot of experiences on planes, and I was coming up out of New Orleans and we were just getting up to altitude and we just got a little odor on the plane, a guy crossed the aisle from me and I smelled it about the same time, and we knew that it was not a fragrant aroma, and so it was kind of alarming, it had that sort of acid smoke smell to it, so we just accelerated, we got the attendants checking to see if there was a fire, and there was, and it's interesting to see how people react that when the fire alarm went off and the mask fell, one poor flight attendant, I think she was pretty new and was a little excited, she pulled a beverage cart out in the aisle, and everybody said, no, no, no, not now, we want to get out of that aisle if we can, so nobody knew what to do. Well, and I honest to God thought it was over, I thought it was done, because a fire on a plane when you're in the air is not good news. And so I was, I was, it was interesting, when I look back academically, it was interesting of what came to mind. When the chips are down, some people say your life flashes in front of you, your eyes, not so for me. What came to mind, number one was family, that thinking of things I wished I had done, but that was tough, that's what matters when all else is gone, family's what matters. The second thing I thought about was all the commitments that I had for the next two or three years, and I thought, jeez, I wish I could let them know that I'm not going to be there. But isn't that strange, what would come to your mind? Well, I mean, we did make it back, that's a fairly obvious point. But at the point that family does mean an awful lot. Family's the source of a lot of stuff, and I'm not a causation freak, but let me just visit that neighborhood just a little bit. About every time you see one of us get up here, whether we're Al-Nan, AA, or anybody else, and most of us in the room would say the same thing, we get up here, we describe ourselves in terms of things that make life uncomfortable, you know, that we feel different, better, worse, left-handed instead of right-handed, always something that just makes us feel a little out of whack.
And most of the time, we don't take it beyond that. I want to push that back just a little bit and show you where I think that comes from. And it's not a psychological probe, but I'm somebody who believes that causes and conditions is a very real thing.
[00:45:00]
The causes and conditions are what made me a sitting duck for problems with alcohol. so that alcohol had an exaggerated importance for me. It basically went back, and I'll just skim over this in a hurry, but when I was shaped just like everybody in this world by the environment in which I originated and grew, the experiences of life that come have effects on us, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes people have bad experiences and they respond to them and become stronger as a result.
Sometimes they react to them and become just the opposite, develop some infirmities out of that, and so it was interesting to me when I started thinking about that. My sister and I, we were the only kids in our house, and we were born obviously in the same environment, same food, same air, same poverty, same you name it, same parents, same playmates, everything exactly the same, except we reacted totally different to the experience of our life.
She took the things that happened in her life, she responded to them very nicely, developed some excellent traits, some excellent character. And so here she is now, 80 years old, the girl has never been in jail in her life, never. Something wrong with that. I mean, God, you don't have to be an alcoholic to go to jail, but she kept one job for almost as long as I'm old. I mean, she just, see, if God did have enough sense to leave, I'd show you, I'd show you, no ambition or poor thinking, but she just fit in.
She lived with my family her entire life. She loved them. Her and my mother were just like Siamese twins, even married, they wouldn't hardly move apart. And so that's the way she did. She took the same experiences that we had, she responded to them and developed strength and character and real tenacity for doing things. I went just exactly the opposite. I took the same experiences and I reacted to them and developed some peculiar ways of coping with life.
I'll give you just a couple examples of that. One, my dad deserted the family when I was four years old. I remember the day he left, I was playing in the yard, in the dirt, we didn't have grass, couldn't afford that, but I was playing in the dirt. And I saw him walk off, had no idea where he was going, but somehow, I guess I had that alcoholic intuition even then, I knew that he wasn't coming back.
Now, it was no big deal, I didn't think it through, I'm a four-year-old child. And never saw him again except twice, we ran into him on the street in my elementary school years and it might as well have been meeting a stranger, it had absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Well if you had asked me about that any time during my formative years into my adulthood, tell me about your father, what I would have done is said, well, you know, I just never really had one there, and I would have blown that off as being meaningless and insignificant.
And I would have believed that. But I would submit to you that when a father walks out on a four-year-old son, that is not without damage, that does some real damage. And so I didn't know this until I started getting inventory and started taking a look at what was it that shaped these causes and conditions that drove me in such a manner. And you know, what happened is that from something like that comes a lot of insecurity, some unexpressed anger that's just sort of there under the surface, shame, it's very difficult to engage in conversation with other kids who are talking about what they do with your father, their father, and you don't have one, it's a very awkward kind of a thing.
So an awful lot of guilt and shame, all kinds of stuff that shapes up and nobody wants to walk around wounded, and nobody wants to do that. And so what happened, I don't plan it, but what happens, I developed some coping mechanisms to deal with that. And rather than being afraid, I would try to act like the wildest, craziest guy around to prove that I wasn't afraid. And rather than telling the truth, I just became an instinctive liar.
I didn't have to make them up, I just became an instinctive liar, they happened automatically. I put it in the past tense, but it's not totally in the past tense. I still have never become an instinctive truth teller, I just, I never have, and if somebody gets me in a tight situation and I've got to think fast, I'll guarantee you it'll never be the truth. My first reflex, those defects go deep. And so that's what happened is that I developed those kinds of coping ways, they're maladjustments,
[00:50:02]
but they fit well, they help me to get through life. Now they make a kind of ugly package, and it sets up an awful lot of stuff, and so that's what made, and a bunch of other stuff, but I won't go, I'll just mention one other thing in relation to that that I hope to come back to in a little bit, talking about the family, that I grew up, you know, there never was an effective male in my life. I never had a serious conversation with a male in my life until I was a grown man.
Never went hunting, fishing, no experience with a grown man until I was a grown man. Well there's a real learning loop that's bypassed in that kind of an experience. And so I grew up essentially in a matriarchal society. My mother was a strong, powerful woman, a very loving woman, she was an overloving woman, but she was a powerful figure. And so I grew up in a home that was surrounded, where I felt smothered by women.
And I like women, I married one, well in fact I married several, I wasn't married quite as many times as Susan, I was counting, but who knows, you know, it's too late. I grew up in that kind of a situation. And so not only did it set me up to have a problem with booze, it also set me up in thinking about that family deal and how important that is and how significant it is, both in developing problems and in that resolution when we start to make things right.
I never, I never had an honest to God relationship with a woman in my life in which I made a full commitment until I met the woman that I married, excuse me, that I'm married to today. And it wasn't just devious manipulative action, it was just the inability to open up and make a commitment to another human and especially a woman. Because every time I started to make a commitment, I didn't think about this, but I would just instinctually feel that same old smothering thing.
And so a lot of stuff that comes to give that kind of awkward, clumsy feeling that makes a drink so important. And so when I was 16, I had my first significant drinking experience. I'd had a little sip and drinks and stuff like that, had a significant experience. And what I found is exactly what my buddy talked about, that something happened. Every problem of my life was resolved that evening. They were gone.
I would have had to been the biggest fool in the world to not go back. My God, man, I was miserable. And all at once, I not only am in the crowd, I'm ready to take the sucker over. I mean, I was ready to go and I just loved it. I wasn't an alcoholic. I was a troubled, complicated, confused young guy with an awful lot of inner turmoil. I found a marvelous solution that not only solved the problems, but it turned me loose, man.
That's where I got acquainted with Coltrane. He was still young and blowing hard then, and I got acquainted with a lot of that stuff. And so what happened when I found booze, I wasn't an alcoholic. I drank like one, but I wasn't. I was a guy who found that magical solution and I just flat fell in love. I loved everything about drinking, almost. Never got used to dry heaves or stuff like that, but I loved all of the other trash of it.
Loved those raunchy places. We drank. Loved those raunchy folks I drank with. I loved all those waking up in strange places with strange people. Most of the time, not always. I woke up one time with a lady that introduced herself to me as Mrs. Ivester. I had married her the night before. At one time, I wanted to go back to sleep, buddy, I tell you. So, I mean, I liked most of it. Well, anyway, I was just somebody who just fell in love, and I'll let you in on a little secret.
As ugly as that was, and I had all the problems that befall alcoholics before I became one. I went to jail, wrecked cars, lost jobs before I was alcoholic. I was just a bad drunk. But something happened to me to interrupt the party that is described vividly, but kind of subtly in our book, and Dave described it darn well, that the best definition I've ever heard of alcoholism in my life, and it's what happened to me when I was 18 years old.
We call it crossing a line. That's not written formally anywhere, but that's just kind of a way we have of referring
[00:55:02]
to that change that comes. Now, I didn't notice it when I went over that line, because I think I was very drunk at the time, and if I wasn't, I just ran out of booze. But I crossed that line, and had I not crossed that line, I would be drinking tonight. I'm not here on moral grounds. I'm not romancing drinking, but I'll guarantee you, I didn't quit because I got sick of it. I just got so that I couldn't drink, because what happened to me when I crossed that line, I lost the ability to control my drinking.
And when I took a drink, I either drank until I ran out, got locked up, or just flat hit the wall somewhere. And it was just a constant thing, where you get jails and psych wards and hospitals with stuff broken that I didn't even know was injured. And so I was just that kind of a chaotic guy. And so from that point on, I think my life was predictable to anybody that would be studying such a thing, but not to me.
There's a strange thing about the progression of alcoholism, and it's, you know, by contrast, you know, that in the popular society, and a lot in AA, we'll use a term to describe the process of not recognizing the illness as denial. Well, that's a nice thing, if you like that language, but if you want to verify it in the book, you're going to be a long time looking, because it's not in there. And I don't think it was left out because it didn't, because Bill didn't know the words.
I think it was left out because it didn't apply. You know, denial is basically intellectual battle within, sort of encroaching things that are coming in on you, it's an intellectual deal. What Bill talked about, and I think better describes the thing, he used two words that have great meaning to me. One was delusion, not denial, but delusion, an inability to differentiate the true from the false, an inability to see what's happened in my own life, and the other word he used was illusion, seeing the world, not able to see the world as it is.
And that explains a lot of what happened, as I was doing my crash and burn race downhill, I never noticed that. It was not subtle in the sense that it was dramatic stuff over and over and over, but it was happening in such a way that I didn't realize I was out of control until I was almost past the point of no return. And so I had the typical chaotic thing, with just all the clutter of it. I was a wild and crazy drunk.
I was not somebody who was a sedentary type of guy who sat around and would tiptoe down to the bar and have a drinky-poo and go home. I was the kind of guy who, when I started drinking, look out, it's on. And so it was chaos. You know, I had a great military career, started out to be an officer, 38 months later was thrown out with an undesirable discharge for alcoholism, 20 years old. Hey, you know about how much impact that had on me, none.
And so when I got out, I went out to make my mark in the world and just sort of did what a lot of drunks do, I just sort of wandered around. And I don't know where I went, just whatever seemed like the next idea that was good, I could do it. You know, whatever. And I wound up in a brilliant mind, I wound up in a place called Flint, Michigan. I mean, you have got to be drunk to get there, number one, and to stay there, you've got to be in awful bad shape.
Only good thing that ever happened to Flint that I know of, it was voted, literally voted the worst city in the United States in which to live. I was sober when it made that list. And I didn't brag about it, but I felt kind of proud, you know, I said, at least I got them some recognition, I contributed to that. But that's where I wound up, you know, just this sort of wild, crazy young guy. And I'm talking about a young fellow, and I'm just spinning madly out of control.
When I first got there, I worked in, well, that's the wrong term, I was employed by General Motors. I don't know exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I know what I was doing, but it wasn't what they had in mind. If anybody bought a 53 or 54 Buick, man, I'm sorry, that's what I was supposed to be building. And so, I mean, that obviously, that string ran out, and in a city of half a million people, I became unemployed by any industry in town because it was a General Motors town.
Then I spent the next couple of years, I used to say I live by my wits, but that's a little euphemistic for the way I live. I live by my lack of character. I was about as close to amoral as a fellow could get. I wasn't a predatory criminal. I mean, you know, if you live in a jungle like that, I'm not sure there really is a crime meter in there.
[01:00:00]
I mean, it's just, it's, it, the behavior in, you know, downtown Billings in a peaceful place like this, the behavior would be called crime. But in a place like Flint, it's the food chain. I mean, it's just the way it works. And one night if you're the friskiest, you drink. The next night, the other guy drinks. It's just whoever's the friskiest on a given day. I wasn't reared for that kind of stuff.
Man, I was, I was reared in Mayberry, North Carolina. And I, I didn't even know what street crime was until I was in it. You know, and amazing thing, that became a natural way to live. That was just as normal to me. You're not going to call the police because you had as good a chance of getting arrested as the guy you're reporting. So there ain't no reporting going on. I mean, you just had your own law.
And in that, in that setting, I wound up selling my blood, five bucks a throat. And I would have let them drain me dry if they hadn't had controls on it. But they had controls to protect people who get like me from myself. And I never intended to be that kind of a dude. I never meant to live that kind of a life. I never, and when I was in the throes of that, you talk about that delusion and the illusion, I would see people living a normal life and they would look bizarre to me.
I'd see some guy with a lunch bucket going to work, and I'd think, what's wrong with him? You know, I mean, it just didn't look right. And could beat out playing, for God's sakes. But anyway, that's just what was going on down. And I tell you, the societal things, the things that are visible is one thing. But the hell of alcoholism, the hell of alcoholism, and I think the place where we identify is not by comparing circus behavior.
I think where we compare, where we identify is about what happened on the inside. Because on the inside, it was not a wild party. It was a young fellow that was drinking himself to death. And God knows how many times I could remember those foggy mornings when I'd come to it, look at myself in the mirror, and just want to gag at what I saw. And I'm talking about a guy in his early 20s, not talking about an old wino.
Look at myself in the mirror, and all I could think of, the best thought I could come up with, was, my God, man, why don't you just end it? Everybody would be better off. And that's what my life became. There's a, again, I won't spend any time on it much, but there's a dimension in alcoholism that most of us never see. If we do, we see it as a spectator. But there's a dimension. There's another line that we cross, and it'll happen often to people with a street existence who just give up any pretense of real life.
And it becomes a way of life. And I was perilously close to that as a young man in his 20s, where I just gave up any pretense of life. A while back, I listened to, and boy, was it ever a vivid thing. I like to listen to NPR a lot, the All Things Considered program, a very thoughtful program. And I was listening, and they had gotten a fellow who was a street character who had straightened up. And because of his credibility that was associated with that, they gave him a tape recorder and employed him to go and interview people on the street and talk with them about how they felt about their situation and whether they'd be interested in help.
All but one person that they attempted to interview wouldn't even muster for the interview. He said, no, no, I'm done. That's the dimension of alcoholism that most of us never see. And when you see somebody come back from that, they don't need to announce it. You know it. I can walk up to somebody who's come back from that, the hair will stand up on the back of my neck because I'm watching somebody who's come back from the living dead.
And that's a remarkable thing. Most people never do come back from that. Anyway, I was teetering on that thing. And, you know, I was the kind of guy that I was obviously somebody who was headed for disaster. That was obvious. I knew that I was capable of doing anything. But like most people, I never intended to hurt anybody in any serious kind of a way. I mean, just those pranks and the thing of rolling each other was not really harmful kind of stuff.
It was just the way you just worked there. But I was not somebody who was insensitive to human life or anything like that. And I'd always had fears, I'm sure, like most of the people in this room, if not all. I had great fears, particularly if you're not the alcoholic. You know, when you see the person go and you know that this is high risk, run loose. And so terror is kind of a common denominator about, you know, the things that we might do.
[01:05:02]
And I think that the most panicky thing in all of alcoholism is that coming out of a blackout and that frantic clamor for where am I? What have I done? What this time? And then that sigh of relief when you look around and there's no major damage. That's the story for most alcoholics, but not for all. Because all you've got to do is look at the paper and it happens every day that somebody in the story is different.
And I was one of those. I came to one morning in jail there in Flint, and that was a common occurrence. So I woke up and just felt more normal waking up there than anywhere else. I knew I was in the right place. And so I assumed when I came to that I was the same thing as always, either drunk or scuffling on the street or some goofy stuff like that. And when I was awake for a little while, I walked up to the bar and the jailer came by.
A guy I knew well. And I said, hey, guy, when can I get out? And he just looked at me and he said, I hope never, and walked off. I had no clue what he was talking about. And then some of the other guys in there, he just kept going, and I walked back in the tank and some of the other guys in there apparently had been seeing the news or something and told me that the night before somebody, meaning me, had been driving blind drunk down the main street of the city and had run down and killed two people.
And I was not equipped to handle that kind of information. When I was greeted with that shock and disbelief would be the understatement of the year, I just couldn't accommodate it. I don't understand a lot about the brain, but I understand this. The mind will only take in what it can handle. And it explains a lot of behavior to me, and I just could not handle that information and just push it away and then gradually accept the truth.
I've done more damage than any alcoholic ever ought to be allowed to do. I've committed a crime so horrendous that there's no suitable punishment. There is no adequate punishment. You take two lives. How do you balance that out? You know, there is nothing. It's my response to that. I just sunk away in total despair and guilt and shame and remorse, ashamed to be breathing. And if it had been up to me, I would have never come out of there and not cared when I owed it.
First time I'd ever been in jail, I didn't try to get out. And for some reason there was some policeman who worked there. I've never tried to hunt him down because I think he probably wanted to be private, to learn that I had family in North Carolina. And he called my folks, my mother's sister lived there, and said you've got to get up here in a lot of trouble. And the shape he's in, he's just talking himself into more.
You know, anybody ask me, did you do that? Yeah, sure, whatever. I mean, I just was absolutely reduced to human rubble. And I had nothing. I mean, I had nothing. Just ask me, yeah, sure, whatever. And my folks did what families all too often do, came up there one more time to get their little boy out of jail. I didn't know how to tell them I didn't want to get out of jail. How do you explain that to somebody?
I mean, I couldn't even explain breathing, for God's sake. Well, I'm going to explain that. And so they're there, and they're troubled, of course. I was charged with manslaughter. They got an attorney, and the fellow worked around and negotiated my release on bond. And I was released on the 18th of July of 1956. And I knew it had nothing to do with alcoholism. People had used that term of me for years.
It had absolutely no meaning whatsoever. I didn't believe I was alcoholic. It wasn't even in the equation of what I was thinking about. But when I walked out of that jail, I knew without any question that I would never drink again. I mean, for God's sake, how could you? How could you do something that horrendous and go out and drink? Well, anybody knows that you couldn't do it unless you understand alcoholism.
The more logical question is how would you not drink? But I didn't know that. All I know is I hit the street, I walked all day, all night until about noon the next day, and then, of course, I drank. On the 18th of July, I got as drunk as any human has ever been and did my level best to stay that way. Some people say alcoholism is a form of slow suicide. I think in my case it was very direct and overt.
Now, I hear a lot of people say that the reason they didn't commit suicide was fear or something like that. That was not a factor with me. I think the only thing that kept me from just sort of making it in was that I hated to leave a family with one more burden to a life that had already been overburdened.
[01:10:03]
And I guess in my strange logic that if I was just found drunk or dead from an OD or hit by a train or whatever, that at least there would be some question. And then the 19th of November of 1956 was the day I took what I hope and pray was my last drink, has been so far. And that day I finished a bottle of gin that had about three or four inches in it, and I finished that bottle of gin and went to court to be tried.
And there was no trial in the sense of prosecution and defense. Part of the hell of blackouts is that I couldn't be a witness at my own trial. I was listening as if I were on the jury. And because I had no, and it's the same thing. I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. If you're somebody who had blackouts, you full realized, somebody could come to you and say, you know what you did August 19th of 1988?
And the best you could say is, God, I wouldn't do that. Just the way it is. And so they went through that and I, they went through the motions of a trial and I was found guilty, of course. I would have voted the same way. I was found guilty. And sentenced that day to a maximum sentence of five to 15 years sentence in the Michigan State Penitentiary. And I had been in trouble, as you gathered. I was not exactly a greenhouse orchid.
I was a real character. And so I'd been to jail, God ad nauseam, but it was always fairly lightweight stuff. Mine was nuisance level behavior. I didn't maliciously destroy something. Yeah, what I did, I'd just get in the way a lot when I was drunk. You know, I'd just create a little mess that they had to clean up and they'd just haul me off somewhere. But mine was always just local drunk tanks or county jails or stockades in the military.
It was just that kind of level of stuff. And when that judge passed that sentence, I had an instinctive reaction of fear. But at the same time, the most real sense of relief I'd ever known. And I don't mean that there was good news underneath that. I meant that I knew it was done. It was finished. There wouldn't be any more. I remember walking out of that place and thinking to myself, well, oh, boy, you won't hurt anybody else.
The next day I walked into that institution at Jackson, Michigan's maximum custody penitentiary. They normally didn't put people with that type of crime. That's what legal people call that a casual offense. That's an awfully gentle name for a horrible crime. But it's a casual offense. It's one that grows out of a condition. It's not an intended act rather than a predatory type of crime. And normally that type of crime is not punished in maximum custody.
But I think they knew that my history was so erratic that it would be high risk to put me anywhere where there was not a lot of constraints. And I think you're wrong, but it doesn't matter. It's just idle speculation. But they put me in maximum custody, and that's where I stayed. I never got out of maximum custody the entire time I was in there. And I was a good citizen. I never had any kind of infraction of any kind.
But I was truly a dead man walking. When I walked into that place, I was as isolated as any person I have ever seen. Now, I've worked with an awful lot of isolated people. That's a common characteristic with many alcoholics. But I became so severely isolated. They put me in a cell, and it wasn't that I didn't care. They just didn't exist. And I was just locked in. The amazing thing is that nobody could have ever rationally explained to me that that might be the vision of my life.
I became so severely isolated. They put me in a cell, and I didn't know who lived in the cell on either side of me. And it wasn't that I didn't care. Just an awful lot of isolated people. That's a common characteristic with many alcoholics. I became so severely isolated. They put me in a cell, and I didn't know who lived in the cell on either side of me. And it wasn't that I didn't care. They put me in a cell, and I didn't know who lived in the cell on either side of me.
And it wasn't that I didn't care, they just didn't exist. And I was just locked into that thing, and all I did was sit in that cell and do anything I could do to keep from thinking. And the amazing thing is that nobody could have ever rationally explained to me that that might be the beginning point for a whole different change in my life. And I wasn't looking if anything.
[01:15:00]
I tell you, and I guarantee you, whoever your recovery got kicked off or your al-anon function got kicked off, you'll always have a lot of loyalty. I don't care how long it is. So I believe that. I bet you I've told all the guys that I was in there with are either dead or out. Most of them dead. But I go back just to make sure I'm not there, for one, and maybe say something to the guy who is there.
So, anyway, that was as hopeless a situation as you could get. And one reason I'm so fervent about CPC, what started to make a change in my life, and I'll preface it this way, if my finding any kind of help at all had depended on one ounce of initiative from me, I would have never done it. I would never have done it. I wouldn't have requested permission to attend. I wouldn't have come to a meeting. I wouldn't have done anything.
I was so full of guilt and shame and remorse, I couldn't have asked for anything. No way. I would have sat in that cell, and my prediction would have come true. They would have carried me out of there toes up. No question in my mind. But what happened, it's amazing how simple things are that can turn a life around.