Building an Arch a Free Man Walks Through — I’d Been Mixing Mortar Out of Sand – Whit W.
About This Speaker Tape
Whit is an old-timer from Birmingham with a sobriety date of August 17, 2003. Born in 1944, he grew up in Griffin, Georgia with what he calls a silver spoon in his mouth — a dairy-farm best friend, the first private swimming pool in town, and family trips to the old Atlantic Beach Hotel where, as a toddler, he'd shuffle around the patio sipping whatever was on the tables. By his early teens he was pulling Country Club malt liquors out of the family refrigerator three or four times a week in front of his parents. Alcoholism ran through the bloodline: his paternal grandmother was a known hopeless alcoholic, and he held his father's hand as he died of alcoholic cirrhosis in 1987.
He drank through Sewanee Military Academy, Auburn (fifteen quarters, Jack Daniels, a pilot's license), and a banking career in Birmingham that took him into construction lending, then commercial lending, then a doomed run at the S&L crisis buying up failed thrifts for FSLIC. Along the way he married a divorced woman, adopted her three children, had a son, and lived the consultant's life — a four-month stay in a Helmsley Palace suite on the 53rd floor, a cup on the car seat and a bottle under it while he looked at his houses. A real-estate deal with a man in Flowery Branch collapsed into a federal bank-fraud case. He took an Alford plea, landed on the front page of the Birmingham News, and every move he made after that was about getting his name back. White whiskey in the light, dark whiskey at night.
He forged his wife's name on a mortgage against the one house he'd helped free and clear. She didn't press charges but she threw him out. He drifted to Columbus, Georgia, to a woman known around town as his drunk girlfriend, and finally blacked out driving the Lake Bottom area scribbling phone numbers for rooms to rent — waking up on her kitchen floor the next morning. His sister, a trained addiction counselor, put him on the phone with MARR in Atlanta.
He checked into MARR planning to do ninety days and leave; he stayed thirteen and a half months. The turn came on his fourth step, when his sponsor penciled in a fifth-step date he couldn't push. Reading ahead in the Big Book to page 75 — the arch a free man walks through — he realized he had skimped on the cement. He had never picked up a white chip because he had never intended to stop drinking. He had admitted his life was unmanageable but never that he was powerless. He finally did. He frames the first three steps as three A's — acceptance, attitude, action — mapped to honesty, hope, and faith, with faith defined as a transfer of trust. He went back to MARR as a volunteer the week after he checked out, served as Alumni Association president, sat on the MARR board, and is now treasurer of MACIA. His closing line: if you give yourself to the program, the program will give it all back to you.
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