Art Cole Told Me It Sounds Like You Have a Problem With Living Matt – Matt J.
About This Speaker Tape
Matt Johnson tells his story from a Los Angeles childhood as a sickly, asthmatic kid who never fit in school, couldn't read or write, and got expelled in seventh grade for a pornographic essay. Both his parents were alcoholics — his father a fifth-of-vodka-a-day drinker who'd sneeze through spaghetti, his mother a blackout drinker who'd turn into Linda Blair and smash record collections in the backyard. Matt found his crowd in a Redondo Beach Pier restaurant kitchen at 16, took a pay cut to be a dishwasher with the drug addicts, and passed out in the men's room at his first Christmas party.
Through high school he drank Ripple, Bush beer, and Akadama, took amphetamines to feel spontaneous, smoked pot to appreciate the arts, and slept in his mother's car in the alley after disabling his father's car so the old man couldn't drive. He graduated in 1969 having never read a book, fled to Corpus Christi and Hawaii on the ganja diet, and finally landed back in Hermosa working at Sears tire department where he sniffed glue and stole a Bomar Brain calculator and a stereo deck he never installed.
His parents got sober in 1969 and 1970. Matt finally met Art Cole at a Tuesday night Ohio Street meeting, who told him 'if you change your actions, your attitude will change' and gave him daily assignments over the phone. After a three-day slip, he came back and got sober May 27, 1973, at 21 years old. Clancy sponsored him his first ten years; later John Ackerlin. He learned to read in his twenties starting with Tarzan books, made the long-deferred amends to Sears for $600, and built a 23-year career selling Volkswagen parts.
At twenty years sober his wife dropped Al-Anon and the marriage collapsed — she asked why he couldn't just sit in the hot tub at Bob's house and drink wine. He stayed bitter through the divorce, pulled her in front of imaginary bullets in his head, then met Stephanie at a sobriety birthday party, waited for her to get her ten years, and married her five months ago. His son was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADD, the same answer to Matt's lifelong 'lots of potential, doesn't apply himself.' A doctor offered him dexedrine; a sponsee who'd been chewed up by the same prescription tapped him on the shoulder at his Friday meeting and saved him from it.
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