Broke a Sweat at the Sight of My Own Shoelaces — Sponsor Said Have You Ever Thought of Loafers 🤦 – Casey C.

About This Speaker Tape

Two speakers. Don opens with about five minutes — early sobriety after a DWI, an assisted-living facility, ten and a half months sober. Then Casey C. takes the floor as the main speaker. He frames his life as a series of impossible odds beaten badly: polio at age eight, nine months crippled in a Sister Kenny ward, learning to be a loner because the third-grade kids were told to stay away. He compensated by becoming grotesquely competitive — captain of three varsity teams, then captain of nothing because the first beer at Penn State (Schaefer's, a frat dorm bull session) showed him a way to be in the world. He quit running the four-minute mile the day a coach told him he could break it. Reverse psychology: tell him he can do it, he's done.

Then the long descent. Cutty Sark every day his first semester at Youngstown. Dean's list anyway. Marijuana as a felony, a stick of reefer that never gave him a hangover, then the whole 1960s pharmacopoeia. Business arrangements with the Italian Mafia, the Lebanese Mafia, biker gangs, the Black Panthers, the Laguna Brotherhood. A move to LA, a roach farm on North Vermont, a best friend stabbed in the heart by his hooker girlfriend with a white plastic steak knife. Living off the Sunset Strip with two party girls, fronting stolen credit cards from a thieving mailman, a fleet of overdue rent-a-cars parked outside. Selling blood for five dollars a pint at the Mission. An abandoned LaSalle Street train station in Chicago, drinking Ripple and Mad Dog and Wild Irish Rose, watching cars pass under the Dan Ryan Expressway thinking the drivers were the fools.

Fourteen detoxes, five live-in rehabs, three court cards he failed. The shift came on the way into his last detox, gulping pop-off vodka, when he knew detox would not work, that he was going to die drunk, and that nothing anybody could do — including himself — was going to stop it. He felt cut in half with a machete. That feeling stayed long enough to listen with the ears of a dying man. A Mattel planner became his sponsor (he picked the card hoping for a 'crazy Casey' doll). He couldn't read for months — eight hours one day on the LA Times sports page, training his brain. Couldn't drink coffee for a year. Hallucinated trees waving him toward Hawaii until five and a half months in, the trees stopped talking.

The last third is the rebuild. Tarring roofs. Painting 'Many are called, but few accept the charges' across an apartment hallway and getting fired. Telemarketing turned out to fit. Calling the IRS after twenty silent years and arranging a payment plan. Cleaning his mother's grave with a bucket and brush twice a year because she died with him breathing cheap vodka on her. A Sunday-evening relationship with his cantankerous father over Jeopardy questions until his father said 'you're probably my best friend in the whole world.' And a letter — the eight-inch chenille Penn State block S he never picked up at the Rathskeller — arriving in the mail thirty years late, the last letter Penn State ever gave, sent by a woman in the athletic department who asked, 'Do a lot of little miracles happen in your life?'

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Bruce opens the meeting and reads the Twelve Steps; Cheryl R. reads the Twelve Traditions
• 5:30 Don shares — first drink at 15 chugging unattended drinks at Lake Marion ballroom, eight dry years on willpower, nineteen years back out, ten and a half months sober
• 13:00 Casey C. takes the floor — polio at age eight, nine months crippled, Sister Kenny boiling-rag treatments, learning not to cry or need anyone
• 20:00 Penn State, first Schaefer's beer in a dorm bull session — knowing in that moment he would have to learn to drink to fit in
• 26:00 Quits competitive running the day a coach tells him he can break the four-minute mile — reverse psychology: tell him he can do it, he's done
• 34:00 Youngstown Ohio — Cutty Sark every day, business arrangements with Italian and Lebanese Mafias, biker gangs, the Black Panthers, the Laguna Brotherhood
• 44:00 LA roach farm on North Vermont — best friend stabbed in the heart with a white plastic steak knife; Casey pulls it out
• 55:00 Aunt's holiday party in Brentwood — sneaks warm vodka, verbally ambushes the retired FBI host; sister calls him 'black cloud' on the way out
• 63:00 Last detox — gulping pop-off vodka, the moment of knowing he will die drunk, feeling cut in half with a machete
• 82:00 Father conversation a few months before his death — 'AA is the thing that works for you... you're probably my best friend in the whole world'