Arrested at a Naked Hedgehopping Contest and the CO Asked Why — I Thought He Meant Why I Got Caught 🤦 – Dick G.

Hi, I'm going to take one of these chips. My name is Dick... I was out of work. My name is Dick Grant and I'm an alcoholic. And it is good to be back in my spiritual home, which is Texas. And I mean that very sincerely. This is really my spiritual home. I have had a lot more invitations than sanity warrant to speak down here, but I never fail to come because I really have had so many blessed moments at Texas conferences and I really appreciate being asked that. Of course, an alcoholic in my variety is as nice to be asked back anywhere. They used to take their number out of the phone book after I went to their party. Unless they wanted to get their couch dried out. Anyway, it really is good to be here. It's good to see Blanche again. Particularly to go second and be able to clear up the confusion. Yeah, I was particularly glad to see Blanche. The committee is trying to cut expenses and Blanche and I are sharing a room. You know, and I heard that she was... I heard she was teaching a sex education class and I thought it was a lab. But she teaches it at night. Anyway, I was wondering if it was helping her and I can tell you that it has because when she came into the room she was unpacking and I said, just for curiosity, I thought this would be a good question to ask her. I said, what kind of a nightgown did you bring? And she brought out a box of saran wrap. Y'all may wonder why Blanche is still single. That's because she goes to so many Al-Anon meetings. And to explain that, you see, all she meets are men in Al-Anon and it's absolutely impossible for two Al-Anons to marry. Did you know that? The reason is if one Al-Anon married another Al-Anon, later on... Things got rough. They wouldn't have a drunk to blame for it. All right, I'll get off the Al-Anon stories. I'm married to a black-veiled Al-Anon and the grapevine always tells on me when I do these things. Anyway, I want to thank the committee for asking me down. It just always comes at the right time. You know, there's no coincidences anymore. And the day I started noticing that was the day that I really started to enjoy my sobriety in AA. But, you know, I'd like to talk tonight. I'd like to talk tonight about groups, because this is a celebration of a group. And I thought I'd just talk about my life, my alcoholism, and my sobriety as it regards to groups of people. But I'd like to give you all a little test tonight, if I could, just to see if you belong here. You see, I'm going to give you this test and I want you to listen real close and then afterwards we're going to see which one of you qualifies. Now here's my premise. Listen closely, see if you identify with it. I've decided that I'm going to start a new organization. Okay? Now, the public relations policy for my organization is going to be that in order to join you have to admit you're a failure. And what you do after you admit you're a failure is you go to where a bunch of people are who have been failures longer than you. Now when you go there, what you have to do is exactly the opposite of what you think you ought to do. All your life you've figured out how things ought to go and this bunch of failures now are going to tell you that you're going to have to do everything backwards from the way you want to do it. All right? And let me give you a couple of examples of that. You're going to come in and they're going to say, grab on and let go. And then they're going to say, easy does it, but do something. And of course, right away I asked, what if I make a mistake? They said, we've got to step for that. And what they want you to do is they want you to stand up in front of a bunch of people whom you don't know, whose last names you don't even know, so you can't track them down later in case they do something. Right? You ever figured it that way? Huh? You're not going to know their last names, so in case they pull something, you'll never be able to find them. What you're going to have to do is stand up in front of a bunch of failures and admit what a great failure you've been. And that given your very best thinking, your highest education, and all the willpower you could muster, that you probably couldn't find your own rear end with a flashlight. Then after that is that in front of all these strangers who may report it to God knows who, you've got to tell them you're crazy. And then that's going to feel good. . And then they say that something that you've been denying all these years is going to fix it. And that will make sense, and so then what you have to do is you then have to sit down and have a conversation with something you can't see or hear. Now, you're well into this now, so the next thing you get to do is you're going to write down all the things you've been trying to hide all your life. And then you're going to go tell somebody who's been a failure longer than you have. And then the two of you are going to talk that over and then you're going to start talking about all the things that you do that are bad and wrong. . And then you're going to sit down and you're going to talk to that thing again and you can't see, touch, taste, or feel and you're going to ask him to take them away. Even though you don't mean it. Now that we're launched into this now and this new way of life, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to make a list of everybody we've ever sprued over in our whole life. And go tell them. And now having achieved the pinnacle of self-revelation, having graduated, we're going to sit down every day and figure out how we're screwing up again. And we're going to sit down and we're going to talk it over with whoever it is you can't see, touch, taste, or feel. And then because this is working so well in your life, we want you to go find some more failures and share this with them without smiling. Anybody here identify with the guy who joined my group? See? You're in the right place. You see, because that's what I was hearing when I came here. I thought, my God, these people are crazy. And they kept saying, yeah, but you are too. And that irritated me. Because by this time, I thought I had everybody pretty well convinced that I was the pinnacle of human intellectual development. And I find myself in this place. I couldn't go anywhere else. I'd run out. The only place I could go was they thought I was stupid. And they told me that. And they said, if you're so smart, why are you here? I said, yes, but. Well, I've never been good in groups. The first group that I failed at was the one I was born into. Some of us have the touch and we do it right from the start. I will characterize my lack of success with this first group of people with whom I had to interact on a meaningful basis by telling you a day in the life of the Grant family. I would come home from school and I would stop at the corner and look around to see if there was an ambulance or a police car in front of the house. You see, because I was blessed with two alcoholic parents. Never dull when you have two alcoholic parents. It's not all that bad either. No. Because one or more of them were usually drunk so I'd always be able to steal money from them and I was doing well. Fear of financial insecurity was not my problem at that time. And then if it was quiet so far and it was one of those times when they were just going to have a couple of drinks. Well, usually by dinner, that's burning on the stove. Somebody's passed out and somebody is either breaking a whiskey bottle over somebody else's head or my sister and I are chasing our parents with knives. I would pause from time to time and reflect upon the nature of our relationship and I found it distressing. So I began to look around. So the next thing was I thought I would join my peers. You know, peers became very important at that time in life. So I sidled on up to a group of them only to discover a couple of terrifying truths. One, they had read a chapter in How to Do Your Life that I had missed. And secondly, that there was a pane of glass that separated me from them and I could never really get close to it. So given the emotional nurturing that I'd had as a child, I immediately decided that meant I was superior to them. I changed peer groups. Fortunately, I had traveling drunks for a family. We'd move around a lot. And so I got to change new groups all the time, you know. And I think that's why I got so good a feeling with people is I had so many chances to start over. But I would go from group to group and I would have that same experience. You know, I'd say, this time it's going to be different. And I'd walk into the group and immediately I'd sense like the seat of my pants was ripped out. My fly was open. And they were all whispering behind my back. But every time I turned around, they'd quit. And I knew that whenever I left the room, they immediately, they immediately huddled. And they would discuss how I didn't do it right. So I would walk back in with bravado. Fortunately, I found that there was a substance which gave me more of that. And I began to use that substance as frequently as I could. Because the more times I failed at getting along with people and groups of people, the more I needed to feel different than the way I felt. So I used booze. Next group I belonged to was a fraternity in college. My relationship with my fraternity brothers went like this. I was the social chairman for four years. I seemed to have a talent for getting liquor cheaper than anybody in the house. And could make arrangements with bars and hotels for social events better than anyone else. I was the first social chairman they ever had while I was still a pledge. At least they could recognize talent when they found it. What's funny about my relationship with those guys, one time I got to know them. I got particularly drunk in the house and came home back to the fraternity house. And I wrote poetry on the walls of the basement. And it was the most morose, suicidal, dark poetry you could ever imagine. If you remember a guy named Ferlin Getty in the Beat Generation about that time it was that kind of poetry. I was into Ferlin Getty and Jack Kerouac and all that kind of thing. Do you remember that? And I wrote that kind of poetry on him way thicker than anything those guys ever thought of him. And I wrote it on the walls of the fraternity house. And it just stayed there and nobody ever mentioned it. You know, there's a great ad for alcoholism. I don't know if they run it down here. But it shows a typical American family with an elephant walking around in the house and nobody notices the elephant. That's the way my relationship was with my fraternity brothers. I had some sort of bizarre appeal and power within that group. But yet nobody wanted to be close to me. And I knew that. And I knew that. But fortunately the unrecognized humanitarian of all time Adolph Coors had his plant 15 miles down the road. So I was never without. I went to college in Colorado and I remember distinctly asking some of my friends and my acquaintances in high school where they'd gone to school and they asked me where I was going and I said, well, Colorado because you can drink when you're 18. That was the reason I went to the University of Colorado because you only had to be 18 to drink. I was also accepted to Mexico City College but my father thought it over and decided that wasn't a real good idea. He even had his prayer moments. Well, after this warm meaningful relationship that I had with these fellows in this college fraternity and I might mention along the way that I had some rather symbiotic relationships with ladies. I remember one gal I'm sure she married an alcoholic later because she kept coming back for more. You know, for four years we met at a rush party right after rush week. We met at some mixer you know, in our freshman year and over and over and over she would show up again about every two or three months just to see, you know maybe she was feeling good I don't know and wanted to get over it. But, um... I remember one time when we were seniors just before we graduated she came back for one more time and I remember we went out for coffee and we were sitting in a drive-in eating hamburgers and drinking coffee out in the parking of some trees and I remember her turning to me and she said you know, I've known you for four years and we've tried over and over again to make a go of it. We have an attraction for each other but we can't seem to make a go of it. And she looked at me and she said, what is the matter with you? And I did that most uncharacteristic thing of an alcoholic I told her and I started to cry. So I could never see her again because I'd cried. She called me not long ago they were having a reunion at school and she called me and that woman just, you know and she asked me one more time how are you? And I just said better. I went off from there United States Navy I went off from there and they offered me a romantic career sailing through the sky at supersonic speed and just, you know, being wonderful. So I went to pre-flight training and didn't get along with anybody in my class because I used to get drunk and morose on the weekends in pre-flight. I once went out and sat in a Dempsey dumpster and drank by myself just so I could enjoy it. I used to go down Pensacola Beach and drink by myself in the sand dune because nobody understood. I remember a fellow once going through there, he and I had an affinity just as he was a great guy and he happened to play quarterbacking in college and he and I were playing on an intramural team and we were just a natural fit. He happened to be an extremely talented quarterback and I happened to have some athletic ability and we were noticed by some scouts and offered a four year career playing football for the Navy. And he said he would if I would and I thought it over and what that meant was making a commitment to another man for three years to maintain that kind of an intimate relationship so naturally I walked away. That was too close. That was just too close. And when it got to hurt too much I'd go drink. I was a periodic alcoholic. That's the hard way to go. That's the hard way to go. Maintenance drinkers never sober up. The worst part of drinking is sobering up. The next group was the squadron and that's where I came in with all the potential in the world. Potential. That last refuge of conversation for the alcoholic. When they got you cornered talk about your potential. They talk about performance and we talk about potential. One of the things I liked about pre-flight was that you had to go to church in those days and the Catholics got out earlier so I started going there. I figured that was because they'd been at it longer. But the nice thing about that was you had to go through kind of a little ceremony where you're supposed to get out and kneel when you enter the aisle and you could sit there and pray. And I used to pray to the God that didn't exist just in case. And I realized that was in big trouble because I got through high school and college with no math. Now I am now taking calculus, trigonometry, chemistry, aerodynamics, and physics. And I never had any math. And I used to go there and I could, you know, and I pretended like I wasn't praying but I was because you've got to look good. You know, it's real important to know how to pray. You've got to look good. And I used to pray but pretend I wasn't. And I used to pray to the God that didn't exist just in case. And I graduated third in my class. And I remember thinking as I was standing out there at the graduation ceremonies, I didn't do this. I didn't do this. So I thought, how nice. Maybe there is something that you can call on if you really need them. But I didn't need them anymore. So I forgot about it. Went on to the squadron, told how much potential I had, what a good job I was doing. But every once in a while I'd have to have one of those negative discussions with the current authority figure in my life that was typical of my drinking career. And I remember the commanding officer of the squadron standing there one day saying, you know, Dick, you're one of the most capable officers I have. You're my intelligence officer, which really worries me. And here you stand before me having been arrested while participating in the next Naked Hedgehopping Contest. And he said, why is that? And I said, because I slept. I missed the point. See, alcoholics don't listen real well. I thought he was asking me why did I get caught. He said, the only thing wrong to me in my alcoholism was if you got caught. That was the only thing. Doing wrong was getting caught. That was it. That was my morality. I was also the social chairman of the squadron. Ranged all the way to all the parties. Put together all the things. Because I wanted it to look okay. I was trying to take sick, bizarre behavior and wrap it in a mantle of social, carefree, high-spirited, bright, clever, and interesting. So I found how to do that for a while. But once again, I found myself walking into rooms where people quieted down when I walked in. Because I'd gotten drunk one too many times. And I began to experience that thing called behavior change when you're drunk. And I would go to the officer's club meaning to be hail fellow well-met and one of the guys. And then I'd black out. And apparently I'd sit at the end of the bar. And I would become sarcastic and abusive and argumentative. And then I'd go to the squadron the next morning and everybody would be quiet when I walked into the room. And I felt alone. I felt like I didn't belong. Because I didn't. I have a sponsor who in the early days when I would tell him that I felt like a misfit, he said, it's because you're a misfit. Practicing alcoholics just don't integrate well. And I said, I feel guilty about all this stuff. And he said, it's because you're guilty. He said, if you do to people what you did to people, I would hope you would feel guilty. If you don't, there's no hope for you at all. Well, the next group I decided to join was a group of two. I decided that I need to clean my act up. And I looked around. I looked around for various solutions. And I struck on what I found to have been a very common one for alcoholics. I'll get married. So fortunately, I landed from being in nine months in Vietnam and walked into a cocktail lounge one evening. And there she was. Miss Right. She was emotionally frozen, looking for a daddy. Or she said later, I was looking for a knight on a white horse. She rode up and fell off the horse. And your armor was wet. Anyway, it was a match made in heaven. As we've said so often, you know, we deserved each other. The fact that Jay and I are still together is the proof that there's a loving God because by keeping us together, he spared two other people. Somewhere out there tonight, there are two people who don't know God loves them. Well, our relationship was terrific. Just terrific. I got drunk the night we were married. She came down with agoraphobia. You know what that is. She came down with it. She manifested it. She kept it hidden through most of our courtship. And it came into full flower. And three days after we were married, she was locked in a hospital with tachycardia and I was drunk down at the bar. And that's how our marriage started. We honeymooned in the cottage where the Jack and Jackie Kennedy honeymooned. And three days later, she's in the hospital and I'm drunk in a bar. It went downhill from there. So we hung in there. If there's nothing else that Jay and I bring to life, if it's a job, if it's a job, if it's a tolerance for pain. Four years into this wonderfulness that we had together. Now see, I'm an alcoholic. I figured she had somebody call that thing so she could get out of here. Why would I think of that, Bob? But I'm not sensitive. One morning on February 16th, 1969, I got up and went downstairs after what I unwittingly realize now was my last drink. I walked down there and our group wasn't doing anything. We weren't doing well that morning. She had the thousand mile look and I was filled with self-revulsion, a sense of impending doom and I had a bad attitude. It was so bad that I started to talk to her about my drinking. And once we were into that subject, it seems like we couldn't stop. So to get her off my back, I asked her to call IEA. And in her sickness, she did. She knows now that's what she should have done was tell me to call IEA. But we were both ill enough that it worked. She did and here I am. It just goes to show the power of this thing is you can start it wrong and still get it right. I just love IEA. I'm crazy about IEA. I don't think there's anything on earth quite like what I say IEA. I mean, IEA, Al-Anon, Alateen, Alatox, the whole deal. I don't think there's anything on earth quite like this program. It is more fun. It's more exciting. It's more humorous. It's more back-to-back. It's more backwards. It's more unusual. It's more exotic than anything I know in life. I mean, you take your new group, for an example. AA, the Al-Anon program, are the only place on earth where something good can come out of a resentment. You ever thought about that? You know what it takes to start a new group? A resentment and a dozen donuts. And we're growing. I went to my first AA meeting and I found out a couple of things about you all. Number one, you didn't look right. You looked too good. Couldn't be alcoholics like me. You looked too good. You look like you do tonight. You're just beautiful tonight. I sat and listened to a guy tell my story and figured out that Jay had called him in the afternoon and given him the details. But I tolerated her good intentions. I only chewed her out for about ten minutes. But I looked around there and I realized that those people had a cohesiveness that I'd never experienced in my life. And I was attracted to that but I couldn't let you know that. I couldn't let you know that. I couldn't tell you that I was attracted by it. So I hung around the edge of AA for three months. Finally went to a meeting where you had to go around and introduce yourself. Everybody had to introduce themselves. And they came around to me and I said, my name's Dick and I don't even know him. I wasn't into deep commitments at that time. And they came up afterwards and they said, we're so glad to hear you're here about your drinking. We thought you were a college student doing a paper. Stay cool. Stay cool. Well, I didn't have anybody's phone number and they didn't have mine and I didn't know anybody's phone number. I didn't know anybody's name and after six months of this good program I moved to Los Angeles from Santa Barbara which meant now I could really get lost. This was a small group there. This would be a small group where I was going. There was like two or three hundred people and all running around kissing and hugging and pretending like they're happy. Thought I. So I would come late and leave early hang out in the men's room during the coffee break and think to myself, you know, they all act like they belong here. Why don't I? Why don't I? That group later turned out to be my first home group. That's a stag group in Beverly Hills that meets on Wednesday night. If you're ever out in L.A. you've got to go there. It's a colorful event. You get a real slice of life in Beverly Hills at a stag meeting, I'll tell you. We had movie stars and con men and drivers for the mafia and defrocked priests and every known kind of salesman in the world. Well, after a year of working this great program and not belonging to A.A., I ran away from home because she was dragging me into the depths of her illness, said I, and I became a part of this group because one night I made a mistake and I got in front of the group and they call you up at my random up to talk for up to five minutes and I made the mistake of getting up there unprepared and without my look good on and I slipped and told them the truth. Nobody's perfect. And I started to cry and I said, I think I'm flunking A.A. And afterwards, a guy came up to me and appointed himself as my sponsor. I was later to point out many times that I didn't ask him and he would say things like, well, if I'd known what I was getting into, I wouldn't have done it either. But you see, the first group that I could belong to was a group of two of them, my sponsor and I. I finally found a man who seemed to genuinely care about me and who had asked me questions about me. And acted like he wanted to hear the answers. But we would go to a meeting every night. He was a bachelor, an actor, always out of work. I don't know how those actors make it, they never work. And we'd go to dinner every night and then we would go to a meeting and then we'd go out for coffee and we'd walk up and down Wilshire Boulevard and talk. Weekends, we would drive around and just talk. Go to meetings, drive out to the beach or drive out to the desert and just talk. We talked about all the things that I'd always wanted to talk about with my own family and I never had a chance to. Because they just weren't there. I'm sure they would have liked to, but there was just nobody home. Nobody home. As Marcy says, they didn't have the blessing. They couldn't give it to me. Well, I finally became, for the first time in my life, I became a part of a group and it was the two of us. But you see, for me, for this alcoholic, that was the wrong group to belong to. There's a group of two that I have to belong to before I can belong anywhere else. And the other person isn't my sponsor. So the other member of the group that I now belong to saw fit to have me transferred. I moved out of town and my sponsor got drunk. And I was all alone again. Except along the way I had picked up a couple of things. Even though I didn't agree with it, I didn't understand how it would happen and I couldn't tell how it would turn out, I'd begun talking to the guy that didn't exist. Simply because everybody else did. And I wanted to be one of the guys. And I also noticed that things were changing in my life. And I hung on as long as I could trying to attribute it to coincidence. But I finally couldn't attribute it to coincidence any longer. I had so many God stories in 19 years it would be intellectually dishonest of me to attribute to anything other than the fact that there is a loving Heavenly Father who loves Dick Grant very much. And seems to want to show that as often as he possibly can. He possibly can. He seems fascinated with the business of delivering his grace to me. On a moment-to-moment basis. I don't know why. I guess that's what makes him God. That must be why he's God. Because he's the only one that can do it that way in the world. So I found the right member of my group of two. A group of two. And I was transferred and I was made the branch manager of an operation for a big corporation in Seattle. And I was the bright young rising star of the corporation. You know, promoted over people. You know, it was a lot more years. And everything was going great. And I'd get out of bed in the morning and I'd be in stark terror and I couldn't go to work. Two years sober. Just promoted. And every morning I'd wake up in stark terror and I'd go walk around downtown. I couldn't go to my own office. And I couldn't have screwed that deal up for a year if I tried. But I got up and prayed to go to work. And I went to a lunch meeting one day with a bunch of men. And a guy named James Patrick O'Leary sat down next to me. Sixteen years of training by the Jesuits was just right for me. He began to use Jesuitical training on me. On me in a way that has been profound in my life. And he began to say things to me that I needed to hear and I didn't want to hear them and that's why I needed to hear them. And he finally said one night the words that I think saved my life. And that was that I was complaining about something one day. I was complaining about something in my life and he said, do you want to know what your problem is? And I said, no, but I'm going to hear it. He said, your problem is that the hum of your self-awareness is so loud in your ears you can't hear what we're trying to tell you. The hum of your self-awareness is so loud in your ears that you can't hear what we're trying to tell you. And I said, could you say that another way? And he said, certainly. He said, you're so busy thinking about yourself that you're missing the message. I said, because we have to look good. I said, well, what am I supposed to think about? I don't care, but not you. I remember driving home that night and thinking about that. And I said, how could he say that? And then I later thought, I wonder how he knew. You see, because I would go to discussion meetings and all I would think about was what I was going to say and after I said it then I would think about how well it was received. And I would go home. And a lady would point out to me that the only thing you remember from the meeting is what she said, you're in big trouble. I got transferred from there, sent to Ohio for a year, walked into a group where there was an awful lot of groups, where there was an awful lot of consciousness brought in from the community. In other words, people tended to keep their social status even within the program. Have you ever been to meetings like that? Now, I'm not saying they're wrong, they're bad, they're staying sober in Ohio and that's terrific. I just didn't identify with it. And so I spent a year there realizing that if I was going to go to meetings to be fixed, I was in trouble. I realized after a year that going to meetings and not feeling, just not clicking with it, which again, I'm not criticizing Ohio, I'm criticizing my reaction to the way they did it. I've always had a problem with reactions. I don't react appropriately. Or, you know, or intelligently. But something good came out of that because I realized that I was going to have to start going to meetings for a different reason. So I started going to meetings to see if I could help them. But I wasn't going to tell them that I was doing it. You see, because when you move to a new town, the first thing you have to do is straighten out the AA, right? And they don't listen well. Alcoholics don't like to be told they're not doing it well. So I began going to meetings for the reason I said, I'm going to go there and I'm going to find one person that I'm going to reach out to tonight. And I don't care what they say in the meetings, I don't care what they say. I don't care whether I agree with the meetings, I don't care if I like the meetings, I'm going to find one person in that meeting and I'm going to try to do something that will make their day better. And I spent a year doing that. And although I had a little sense of loneliness through all that, every once in a while, when I was really down in the pits, funny things would happen. One time, my wife and I are sitting in our home in Columbus, a very lovely home that God and the program of AA has provided us because we wouldn't have anything if it weren't for this program. So it must be, it is. And we're bitching and moaning about being in Ohio and really down in the pits and the doorbell rings and she turned to me and said, it's Jim. And I said, I think you're right and walked to the door and there was my sponsor from Seattle. And he was attending a sales meeting that had been canceled. He didn't even know it had been canceled. And it was in Cleveland so he came to Columbus and didn't tell us and walked in. And things like that began to happen. And one day, I was sitting at work and they called me and they said, we're going to try an experiment. We'd like to put you in charge at the end of the business. About which you know nothing. Let's say corporations got a little drinking going on too, I'll tell you. And they had no absolute logic to me and I said, where is it? And they said, Denver, Colorado. It's happens to be where I grew up. I said, the sound you hear is me hanging up going to the airport. He said, does that mean yes? You see, I was sent to Ohio for a very logical reason by that company. Guess who had been running the operation before me? A flaming alcoholic. And they huddled in home office and said, who could we send that could sort this out? And I said, who could we send that could sort this mess out? Ah. The alcoholic we have in Seattle. And I went there and we were in the pits and one of my clients told me he was going to put a hit contract on my life and things were not good. But I kept going to meetings trying to find one person at the meeting that I could try to add to their day. That's all I wanted. I got so desperate and I was in so much emotional pain that I said, all I can do is go to one, go to a meeting and find one person and I'm going to and I can help them, maybe I can help their day be a little bit better. As soon as I hung up from the phone call about the job change, the phone rang again and my wife announced that our second child was on the way. And so I got moved back to Denver. Spent four years being trained in my own home and then went on my own. Got to Denver and had to straighten out the AA there too. They didn't listen any better. One day I was sitting in a meeting and I just started talking about the steps at the meeting and how hungry I was. To learn how to work the steps better. And some guys came up to me afterwards and they said, we've got this experiment that we're trying. We just started out and we'd like you to join us. And this turned out to be there were about 12 or 14 of us that met together every Wednesday night for six to seven years. And that was the second time I ever belonged to an AA group. And we met for six to seven years every Wednesday night and about every six months we would reconfirm our commitment that either we had to be out of town or we had to go to work. Or our wife had to be dying before midnight or we were going to be there. And we could bring newcomers in and teach them how to work the steps by working the steps together. We didn't talk about why you work the steps. We didn't talk about how wonderful it was to work the steps. We didn't talk about how you ought to work the steps. You see, because alcoholics have a terrible time admitting, and it gets worse the longer you're in, admitting that they don't know how to work the steps. And yet, I don't know about you, but I never picked up any hints on it out there drinking. I don't recall the subject coming up. But I found a group of guys who wanted to teach each other and share with each other on how to work the steps. And I'll tell you how that worked. One of the greatest times I ever had was we had a guy come in who just couldn't write his fourth step. He wanted to. We explained to him the four columns on the resentments and the fear, and the fearless and the sex inventory who you put on there. You know, all that stuff. But he just somehow emotionally couldn't do it. And because he had learned the principle that you work steps together, you don't just beat up on somebody telling them that it was a step. I walked over to him that night in a moment of inspiration which I have every three years. And I said, I'll pick you up at eight o'clock in the morning and you're going to go out and live with me tomorrow. I'm in sales and so I was one of the days where I was out making sales calls. So, you know, he was crazy too and he showed up. And I said, I'll let you out of the pencil piece turkey. So what we did was we talked about working the steps and we stopped the car and I'd go in on my sales call and he'd write. And I'd come back out and we'd go over what he wrote. And we'd talk about the next thing he had to write and I'd go in the next sales call and he'd write and come back out. And that way he got to work his fourth step. Because I didn't point my finger at him and I didn't I didn't tell him how wonderful I was because I had. I sat down with him and I wrote his first letter. And I thanked God for that group that taught me that. Then a little over a year ago I shut and jived for five years trying to make business go my way. And the other member of my group didn't seem to agree. So one day in January of 87 I had to put stuff in the car and kiss my wife and show her goodbye and drive to California. And I think we had one of our most meaningful meetings driving to San Francisco over two days period. Because I screamed Adam's Hill to bail and I cried to Grand Junction and then I said started to jib I turned off the radio I remember distinctly outside Grand Junction in eastern Utah I turned off the radio and I said I am going to drive until I either run out of gas or I hear a god. And suddenly somewhere in eastern Utah something started coming into my mind. And it was a line from something that I'd heard years ago. And it was a line from an old hymn that says it is well with my soul. You see and I realized throughout it all the moves the marital problems the job problems it has always been well with my soul because I'm an AA member. So he and I had a heck of a great time. And I was able to walk across Nevada. I might add there's nothing else to do. You might as well have a spiritual experience because there's nothing else to do. Well there are a couple of things but I didn't choose to participate. No. Northern California I don't like California particularly it's crowded and expensive and the pace of life is just nuts. I mean they invented Atlantic out there. And I got there and I said I'm going to go to California and I said I'm going to go to California and I said I'm going to go to California and I got there and I checked in to the hotel and it was a Friday night and I was supposed to start work Monday and I'm 48 years old and I'm afraid I'm going to fail and what do you do if you fail when you're 48? Seems awfully old at the time. I sit in that hotel room and I thought I really had to go to a meeting tonight and I thought no I don't want to have to start all over again. I don't want to have to go through all the conversations and all the coffee and all the late nights. I don't want to have to do anything fair. I've done it. It's been 18 years. I don't know I don't want to have to do it again. But I sat there in a hotel room 5 o'clock in the evening and I asked myself where do I belong? I picked up the phone and called alcoholics in the room and it was my first AA meeting that night and they don't do it really great in Irvingtown but they're getting better. My home group is now a a a a a a a a Saturday morning meeting. We meet at 8.15 on Saturday morning. Everybody said the group would never make it. They'd never get people to get up at 8.15 or 30 more in the morning. Well we've been meeting for over a year now. We study the steps one at a time and around about 9 months the group had gotten to average around 20 to 30 people studying the steps talking how to work the steps not why you ought to work the steps and we decided that we would study the traditions one at a time and there were predictions of doom and disaster we averaged 50 during the time we studied the traditions one at a time and being you know off the wall as I am I would walk over to some of these newer people and I would say why the hell are you here? And they'd say I've been in AA for years and nobody ever told me how to use the traditions and I realized that we do the same thing with the traditions that we do with the steps we talk about why we ought to use the traditions and we talk about how great it is to use the traditions but nobody ever tells you how to use the traditions I had my first glimmer at that back when O'Leary got a hold of me one day and I was complaining about my wife and she said he said he said to me uh have you ever noticed the other scroll hanging on the wall next to the steps yeah there were traditions he said do you understand what the traditions are? and I realized I was in trouble of course when you're a good alcoholic if you ever get really pinned to the corner you just say oh he said those are spiritual principles which are designed to help you get along with other people so I said oh and he said I have news for you your wife is a people is a member of that group I mean where else do you meet people like this you know who my family doctor is now he's currently treating me for something called pleurisy I've had it for six weeks I'm not coughing up here for some reason isn't that funny it's coincidence I wouldn't cough up here and uh it's to the point now where he asked me not to sit next to him at meetings because it makes him look bad my doctor currently was the team doctor for the who watch group called the who he's a family physician now why does that make sense so I go in to see him once a week and insult him and then he tells me that I still have it and we part friends but you know this program's given me I'm probably one of the few guys in the world who's ever gone to a family physician and you know we quickly get the medical stuff out of the way because we want to talk about the good stuff you know about the program and we were talking about something once and he got sharing with me something very personal with him and I told him something that I'd learned that was just apparently what he needed to know that a family physician with tears streaming down his face and told that told that he loved him you know you know that not many people get that from a family physician Billing has a great bed segment another guy in our group is a fellow with 24 years of sobriety who is just a good AA 24 years sponsors 4 or 5 people at a time close to 5 or 6 AA meetings found AA in prison back in New York he's a salesman like me and he and I hang out together and every time I ask him a question he tells me a story same thing old Larry does every time I call Larry with a problem he tells me a story I never get a straight answer he tells me a story about a guy who went through something and learned something you know he never gives me answers good AA I find usually don't try to give advice they tell you stories true stories what happened to them or somebody else there's a young lady in our group who's been sober for 10 years and she says she was out and I met her one night right after I got there and she and I happened to have this kind of quick you know she got up she was speaking she had just moved back to Washington DC and she's a step thumper like I am so I went up to her in the bathroom she spoke and told her how much I enjoyed it went out with a bunch of people and had coffee that night next time I saw her she called up Jay and I and came over to our house and said that her mother with the day she announced that she was getting married and she asked me if I would stand up for her. So those are the kinds of relationships that I have built. And you have to understand that I am a sick, egocentric, selfish, lazy alcoholic by nature. I'm shy, sensitive, and I don't take rejection well. Here I am in a place I didn't want to be walking into meetings and some Saturday mornings I sit in the back of that meeting and I look at them and I see the vigor and I see the spark jumping from person to person, the magic going on in there. And I just sit there and cry because I love them so much. And that's not like me. That's not like me. I just took over as, I don't even know what my title is, but I'm leading a, you know, they give you a responsibility because you don't get any titles. I'm leading a beginner's group and I haven't done that for years. And there are about 20 of these crazy people that are new sobriety that show up every Tuesday. Every Tuesday night and sit and listen to me. And I've learned that they can get well without my talking, but all I do, that I'm just a catalyst to start the conversation. And we have a beginner's group now where beginners raise their hand and say, how do you work steps? Next Tuesday, because one asked, he said, how do you pick a sponsor? God, where did he get that? I couldn't ask that when I was new. I had to look good. How do you pick a sponsor? I never knew how. I never had. They picked me. I'm doing it on time. Are we out of time? How much? No, we're out. Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't realize we were running this long. I'd like to just close by talking about this group thing a little bit further. I was taking a newcomer to a meeting the other night and he turned to me in the car and he said, why do you go to meetings? He said, you've been sober for 19 years. He said, why do you go to meetings? That's funny. I hadn't thought about it for a while. And you see, the problem is, that because anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all these traditions, I couldn't tell him. The reason I go to meetings is I try to help somebody. But if I told him that, then it wouldn't be anonymity and it wouldn't count anymore. I gave him some answer like, I guess it's a bang out of AA. I wouldn't want to give it up. But that's not true. That's not true. The other member of my group and I talk every morning. And I remember once hearing somebody say, in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, that God didn't mean for us to understand him because how can a finite mind understand the infinite? That didn't make sense to me. I thought, that's a lot of crap. It seems to me the book of Alcoholics Anonymous talks a lot about coming to understand God. It seems to me in those stories, those people have come to understand God. That maybe God really means for me to understand him. And at about five years sobriety, that started the greatest thing I've ever done in my life. The most exciting, most rewarding, most humorous thing I've ever done in my life. And that was to get to know the other member of my group. And I do that a lot of ways and how I do that isn't important. It's just that I do it. That's what matters. And I found out that I could be religious and spiritual. I am religious. But I am spiritually religious. And that makes all the difference. Our pastor the other day asked me why I picked the church and I couldn't tell him. The reason I picked the church was they needed me. And isn't that funny? I'm a flaky, self-centered, pseudo-intellectual, hip-slip and cool alcoholic. And yet I walked into this congregation of people and after a few weeks I realized that I had something to bring there that they were missing and that it was real and it was valid and had nothing to do with my wonderfulness. So I couldn't tell my pastor why. I'm trying to ease the program on this poor guy gently. But he's a good guy. He talked about being a adult child of an alcoholic. And of course he wants me to start an AA meeting in the group, in the church. He wants me to have a church AA meeting, right? I've spent two mornings explaining to him why that doesn't work. And he hasn't heard me yet. But we're getting there. We're getting there. And every once in a while on a beautiful Sunday morning I'll be walking into that Sunday school class. And, you know, the sun shines a lot where I live and the birds sing on Sunday mornings. And I'll feel right. Like I felt tonight when I walked outside before the meeting. Just to check in with my group. And I'll feel right. And I'll know that I am competent to do that which I've been given to do that day. And all my life I felt I was a misfit. I felt that I had some perversion or some flaw that would never be cured, would never be healed. But you see, because I belonged to a group in Denver for six or seven years, met together once a week and we were committed to each other's life. We were committed to each other's well-being to the expense of our own. I found out that all the other guys in that group thought they had the same thing. You see, that's why we need home groups. That's why we need to make a commitment to a group and stay there and be transparent and you don't have to look good. You don't have to be hip, slick, and cool. It's the only place on earth where we're so desperate that our life is going down the drain and we go to the last place we want to go and immediately try to prove to them that we don't need to be there. You see, what I do isn't important. Please don't take exception to my sharing of what I do in my spiritual and religious life. You see, that doesn't matter. That isn't the point. The point is that I am a hopeless alcoholic that to my own devices I would be insane and locked up or dead and yet I can walk on airplanes to go to some city or I can walk into that class on Sunday morning and I can walk and know that I'm not great I'm not terrific I'm not wonderful but I'm confident by the grace of God. Only by the grace of God. You see, because it has to be in spite of me. I'm confident today to be who I am to fail at business to have teenagers who don't do it right but I'm confident today to be who I'm supposed to be and it's because I got in front of God in front of an AA group and started a process of saying I'm scared to death that I think I'm plumping an AA and that's where it began. That's where it began to lose the group just like it began for me with God. The night that I was drinking port wine all by myself while my wife was at a sensitivity group I looked up in the sky and I said oh God I didn't mean to turn out like this. And that's when it began. Because I see in essence I've said the three words. The three words that you have to say some form or another before you can be part of the group and that is God help me. God help me. God help me. God help me. And I appreciate you very much.