A Spiritual Experience Doesn’t Always Show Up on Time — Mine Came Months After the Tenth Step – Mike B.
About This Speaker Tape
Mike B. tells his story from the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting on NABA Zoom, with a sobriety date of December 8, 2003 and nearly 18 years sober. Born in Atlanta on June 10, 1952 — AA's birthday — he traces an unease that started in Catholic school, where he learned to manipulate, fake it, and believe he had untapped potential he could pull out of his pocket. His mother died when he was 13, and he milked the sympathy. By 12 he was picking his dad's liquor cabinet, pouring shots from every bottle into a jar, and refilling them with water so his dad's friends unknowingly drank watered-down booze for years.
At 16 he bought a car, stopped coming home, and wrestled his dad for the keys in the front yard — his dad walked inside, came back with a hammer, smashed the distributor cap, and had the car towed. Mike never saw it again. He dropped out, lived on the streets, and he and his band buddies faked a gas station robbery inspired by Easy Rider so they could buy motorcycles. The epileptic assistant manager broke down under police questioning and they all got arrested. His dad came to the jail, looked at him through the bars, and said, "It doesn't look very nice in there, Mike." Mike got a 4F draft deferment from the record. He went on to respiratory therapy school, then a master's from Emory, and did cardiac anesthesia for 39 years while his weekend drinking bled into daily binge drinking — 10 to 20 shots a night, chugged against a self-imposed 12-hour pilot's rule, catching vomit and swallowing it back down.
In 2001 he drank himself into heart failure and needed a double valve replacement. He underestimated his intake to his surgeon friend, and they never dealt with it. Two years later, after a 36-hour call shift where he slammed drinks in the parking lot and could not get drunk, he came home to an intervention by his wife and son. His wife, already in Al-Anon, told him AA or get out. He snuck to meetings at Triangle and NABA, saw the sign "one drink, one drunk," and latched onto one day at a time and avoiding the first drink.
Years later, drifting into sleep after a 10th step, the entire intervention flashed back and he felt a presence in that room that was not human — a delayed spiritual experience he now calls his Higher Power. He served five years on the NABA board, sponsors men, and describes sobriety as the balance triangle of unity, recovery, and service. He closes with the psychic change: he quit thinking only about himself, learned to feel again, got his family back, and has a son who now asks his advice.
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