Chained to the Hydrant. – Jerry J.

Hi, I'm Jerry Jones, and I'm an alcoholic. I don't own the Dallas Cowboys. I don't have any football players at all. I am not only an alcoholic, but I'm a recovering lawyer. I've been able to refrain from practicing since January the 1st of 1998. I've been married to your Al-Anon speaker tomorrow almost, almost 46 years. My wife, Billie, that entitles me to tell you that I am the adult spouse of an Al-Anon. I want to thank the committee and everyone for having me here. Billie and I have been treated like royalty. We've got baskets of fruit. We've got fruit and goodies of all kinds in our room. We've been squired down here by Taylor, who drove us down in his car. And we've just had a wonderful time thus far, and I expect to continue. I think I'll enjoy this program in about an hour. And the rest of it will be pretty good, I think. People ask me frequently, how are you? And my response has, for many years since January, January 1st, 1973, been better than I deserve. And a lot of you could echo that, I'm sure. We are entirely, we're blessed beyond measure to be members of Alcoholics Anonymous, to have this program, to live in the country we live in, to associate with the people we have around us going on a similar way. I want to thank each one of you for being here, because your being here is a celebration of the fact that AA works. And gosh, I don't know how many of you are here, but there's a bunch of you. And I hope I get to meet a lot of you, and to celebrate with you the miracle of recovery. I don't know what happened to me, or why I turned out to be alcoholic. I know I did my part in trying to be an alcoholic. I drank every time I had a chance. I, uh... Came to Alcoholics Anonymous totally out of reality. You know, the steps of AA are designed, I believe, to cause you and I to get in touch with reality, to find the great reality deep within ourselves, so that we can live a life that allows us to be happy, joyous, and free without any kind of chemical altering our minds. That's worked for millions of people since 1935. And to be a part of that is probably one of the biggest miracles of the 20th century. When I got here, I didn't particularly like the label alcoholic. There were a lot of things I didn't like. I didn't like the fact that that book that everybody talked about all the time, said that I was bodily and mentally different from my fellows. I did not want to be bodily and mentally different from my fellows. I couldn't understand why I was. And I still don't know why I was, but today I can very readily assure you that I am. Our book says that you can tell whether you're one or not by asking yourself a couple of questions, you know. It says that alcoholics have a bodily reaction to ethyl alcohol that has a phenomena of craving attached to it. Now, I tried to think that craving was like I craved a cigarette. It was a little different from that. What happened to me was when I take a drink of whiskey or beer or aqua velvet or whatever the hell it was, you know, it would go down. It would go down and hit the bottom, and you get that, you know the feeling, that whomp when it gets there, spread warmly over your body, and some kind of signal was sent to my brain. And the signal was, I think we'll have another one of those. And another one and another one until we've had way too many. The other thing it says is that we have an obsession of the mind, that alcoholism centers in our mind. I don't know what you know about obsessions. I didn't know much about them, but I've come to believe they're pretty simple. They are a great big thought. It's so big it pushes all the other thoughts out of your mind. Memory goes, plans for the future go, everything goes except the thought, and my thought was a drink would improve this situation. Whatever the situation was, a drink would make it a little better. So when you hook those two together, you have a very powerful enemy. So powerful that most of us were imprisoned by it. We were not free. Our theme this weekend is freedom through action. Well, first you have to recognize that you are imprisoned before you can really do anything about it. And I had to find that I was imprisoned. Looking back on my life today, I can't imagine. How I missed it. But the cunning nature of alcoholism is that the victim is the last person to know he's got it. And I'm sure a lot of you can identify with that. I didn't know it. I thought I was drinking what I wanted to drink. Sometimes I wondered why I drank as much as I did, but I thought I was doing what I wanted to do. And I didn't realize how powerless I was over that commodity for a long time. The next thing you've got to recognize is that recovery has nothing to do with alcohol. Recovery from this condition, this disease, whatever you want to call it, is a spiritual recovery. You have to have a spiritual awakening and bring a power greater than yourself into recovery. If you're really going to get the full benefit of this program. I can illustrate this story. I was told I had to tell about this. I was raised on a farm out in West Texas. My grandparents on both sides were homesteaders out in eastern New Mexico and West Texas. And I was raised out on that farm and grew up there. And I had a dog. My dog's name was Patches. Patches had an experience. One day that that illustrates the disease of alcoholism about as good as I can do it. Patches was laying in our front yard. He didn't have a problem in the world. In fact, he was right at the peak of his powers. He was popular and well-known in the community because a few days before that, he had whipped a badger. Now, badgers are bad news for dogs. And the badger weighed one pound more than Patches. We know because we weighed them both after Patches killed the badger. So people were dropping by to see this dog that could kill badgers. He was well-received in the community. He was popular. He had no competition. He was well-fed, loved. Everything was going good for Patches. He had no reason to do anything like he did. He was laying there with no problem. He was quiet and peaceful in the barnyard. And a neighbor's hog came strolling down the road and turned into our place. Big, ugly hog. Long, yellow tusk on either side. And Patches made a bulldog-like decision to get hold of the hog. And he went out and he got hold of the hog. And it made quite a bit of noise when he did it because he was growling and barking. The hog was squealing. And bulldogs. I don't know if you know this or not. But when they get hold of something, they're not likely to turn it loose very easily. They just lock on. Well, he got hold and he had locked on. And he was a dog of great conviction. For example, with the badger. After it killed him every day for a week, he went up there in the field and picked up the carcass and shook hell out of it just to let it know that if you want to come back through reincarnation or whatever, he was there and ready to play. So this is the same dog that's got hold of the hog. And he is... He's going to hang on to that. My dad comes running out of the barn to see what this commotion is. And he gets in the middle of that right-of-way, kicking hogs and dogs and trying to get them to turn loose, getting Patches to turn loose. Everybody knew the solution. Patches, turn loose the damn hog. Turn him loose. You got hold of something you can't handle. Turn him loose. Well, the hog drug him alongside the barn until he came loose. And then he wheeled around and cut him across the shoulder and neck with one of those tusks. And dad was able to get hold of Patches. And he drug him out of that fight and sent me to the barn to get some pine tar to stop the bleeding. And we patched him up and things settled down. And thank God that was over, you know. We could get back to our lives. Mom had come out. She had seen me trying to get in the fight. And she was trying to take care of her kid. And I was trying to protect my dog. You know, everybody was involved. Everybody was involved in this thing. And we turned him loose in a little bit. And he went right back and got hold of that damn hog again. And it was the same deal. It was barking and squealing and kicking and cussing. And mother was wringing her hands and trying to get me out of it. And dad, matter in hell, fighting the dog and the hog. And finally he came off again. Everybody knew the solution. Hog knew it. We knew it. Everybody knew it. Turn loose of that damn hog, Patches. Turn him loose. Well, when he came off again, dad recognized that Patches was not himself. I mean, I think the psychiatrist among us would say that his emotions were in charge of his intellect. That means you're crazy as hell. That's what that means. He was hooking up with something that was a lot tougher and bigger than he was. And he wasn't winning. So dad decided when you get people that are crazy as hell, what you do is you... Some of you know this. You get committed. And we're not talking about making decisions here. We're talking about locking people up. And we took a chain and we tied Patches to the water hydrant. And we ran water on him to cool him off and stop the blood. And dad got in the pickup and drove the hog off to remove temptation. You know, they've always been trying to do that. And I was given the job of being... Patches' first counselor, I guess. I sat with him and asked him deep and penetrating questions like, you know, does your family enjoy it when you get a hold of hogs? Have you ever had a good day getting a hold of hogs? And in about two hours, I had him cured. You could tell he was cured. He was laying on the ground. He wasn't tugging at the chain anymore. His tongue was lulled out and he had that little bulldog. Smile on his face. And he was wagging his little stub of a tail. You know, it's back and forth. So I went to see my father, the warden, and told him that Patches was well. Well, dad didn't take my word for it. He'd had a little bad luck with Patches that day. So he came walking around him and looked at him and scratched his ears. And, you know, he said, I think you're right. Turn him loose. So I turned him loose. He had to go two miles to find that hog that time. Now, can anybody out there identify with that dog? I, of course, can identify with... I was one of the first hog-anons in West Texas. I couldn't understand what in the hell was wrong with my dog. Why was he getting hold of this thing he obviously couldn't handle? Turned out it wasn't hogs at all. A little bit later, he got hold of a cattle truck. Just one. Just one. A lot of people who have our disease get hold of cattle trucks. A lot of people don't have anyone to back them off or tie them up and confine them. Lots of people die from this condition. And it seems like the solution is so obvious. Turn loose of the hog. Turn loose and stop doing that thing which is destroying you. But we can't see it. That old dog, that seemed to be the answer to his problem. But he had a deeper problem, you see. It was whatever sent him out there to get that hog in the first place. And what sent him back again and again and again in the face of overwhelming evidence that he could not handle that hog. He was powerless over the hog. Alcoholics Anonymous makes no claim that it can stop that urge to keep you, fixing you permanently so you can get hold of hogs. It doesn't make you any better able to handle whiskey than you ever were. As a matter of fact, all the evidence that we see is that if you have this condition, it's going to stay with you the rest of your life. Not only going to stay with you, but it's going to make you more susceptible, as time goes on, to the effects of alcohol. We used to have a deal in my group at home that if anybody ever found a way to drink successfully, they had to promise to come back and post a notice on the bulletin board about how they did it. We had a lot of people leave, but we never got any notes back. No one ever successfully drank again that I knew of. We have to find a way to live comfortably and happily without chemically altering reality. Isn't that what booze does for us? Don't we kind of chemically alter reality? Boy, it seems like we do. I used to like to, I used to take a drink and let the problems of the day kind of slide off my shoulders and fuzzy up the world a little bit and make it a little nicer place to live. And I'd get me where I didn't give a damn, which is what really helped a lot. Because I could have a few drinks and I didn't give a damn whether the school kept or not. I was no longer responsible. I was irresponsible. And I like to practice irresponsibility when I'm drunk. I love drinking. I was manned from the first time. I like the way I felt. And it wasn't long before I could get positively excited about the idea that we're going to get drunk a week from tonight. Man, we're going to buy some booze and some gasoline for somebody's car and we're going to get in the car with the booze and there's no telling where we'll be tomorrow morning. No telling. And there wasn't. Our first question most often was, where are we? Followed closely by, what did we do? And nobody had the complete answer. We had to piece things together. And I was the guy who always was looking for half a can of beer or whatever I could find and said, let's do it again. Let's do that again. That was good. Let's do that again. And I wasn't ever going to give that up. I had no plans at all to ever give up drinking. I right away had problems with it. I was in the dean's office at college. I had problems. Those people that drove those cars with those funny little lights on the top. And I was, you know, I lost friends. I remember two of my friends from high school came up to me and told me, after I'd been drinking six months, Jerry, folks back home would not like what you're doing. You're out of control. You're not living the kind of life that we're supposed to be living. And I told those guys they just have to mind their own damn business. That I was doing what I needed to do and what I liked to do. And as they walked away from me, I wondered why in the world wouldn't people want to do what I'm doing? Why wouldn't they want to do this? This is fun. I liked it. And I kept on liking it. And I was raised on that farm. Taught a lot of responsibility. Was always a very responsible person. Except when I drank. And that took the pressure off of me. It was my way of taking a little vacation from responsibility. And the vacations, ran together until I was almost in perpetual vacation for a long time. Then I got in the service and I got married and I had a kid and I went to law school and the responsibility of raising families and trying to make a living for my wife and children kind of took over for a while. But I always drank some. Always took a little vacation from time to time. And when I took a vacation, when I started drinking, I didn't stop until I was, all until I was drunk. That continued for a long time. And I'm one of the, a lot of people, I guess can't say this, but I'm evidence of the fact that success does not, does not enter into this equation of whether or not you're an alcoholic or not. I had good success. I advanced in my law firm. I got good clients. I had a wife, a couple of kids, nice, house, good cars, money in the bank. And my life went to hell. My life was not worth living. I had everything I had ever thought would make you happy. And I'd gone for a long time chasing what I call more, better, and different. I kept thinking if I had just a little more money or cars or whatever or a little different kind, a little better one, or a little different kind, I would be happy. And I would get those things. And the happiness would last maybe 15 minutes sometimes. And then I'd know again that I needed more, better, or different. And so I'm off chasing it again. And I made more money every year I drank. I can't say I practiced law as well as I did when I got sober, but I kept moving along. And everything just quit meaning anything to me. I was out of control. Did not, did not know I was out of control. Doctors talked to me. Doctors showed me tests that showed my liver function was shot to hell. Doctors showed me tests the next year that showed it was even worse than it was the year before. The doctor told me stop drinking for 10 days and come back in here and let us check this again to see what alcohol does to your liver. Well, I'm smart enough to know that if my liver is off the chart and I stop drinking and it stays off the chart, he's not going to tell me to start drinking again. So I never went back. I just didn't go back. Can you imagine that? Goofy as hell. Probably you all understand that better than most people would. The civilians out there don't understand this. Anyway, things rocked along there and my wife messed up pretty bad about this time. She'd had a lot of problems through the years. She had sort of an unreasonable sensitivity to drinking. It got so bad I finally sent her to a psychiatrist because she just, you know, she just didn't approach this rationally at all. She wouldn't drink. She didn't want me to drink. She didn't even want me to hang around people who drank. So we sent her to the psychiatrist and he kind of agreed with me for a while, but then he asked to see me and, you know, everything kind of went to hell there. And then she did another really, really, really, really, terrible thing. She went to Al-Anon. She went to Al-Anon and didn't tell me she was going. I had to find this out almost by accident. I asked my daughter one time, where's your mother? And she said, I don't know, Daddy. She may be at one of those meetings. And I said, what kind of meeting is that, Karen? She said, oh, Daddy, I don't know. It's some kind of a family meeting. Well, that doesn't sound like much, but at that point in time, we were, we'd made a decision that if our marriage didn't improve in the next six months, we'd terminate it. And it occurred to me as a lawyer that if she was going to family meetings under those circumstances, I probably needed a representative present at those meetings. So I decided I would find out about the meeting. And she came in and my wife, my wife is, I practiced trial law for almost 40 years. She is the most difficult witness I've ever cross-examined. When she doesn't want to answer your question or give you information, she'll never lie to you. But it's like hitting a snake with an ice pick, you know, it's really difficult to do to get her to tell you what you want. She came in and I said, where have you been? She said, out. Out? Where? To a shopping center. Which one? Preston. What did you do there? Met some friends. Who were they? You wouldn't know them. What did you and your friends do? Oh, we just shared our experience, strength and hope. So I recognized I'm dealing with a, I'm going to have to dig this information out of her, so I just bore in, close the door and narrow the field, close the door and narrow the field. Finally, I get this word out of her. A word I had never heard in my life. And it was Al-Anon. Now, things were pretty heated about this time. And I, I didn't want to appear ignorant. So I had to guess at what would be an Al-Anon. So I, I made a guess and as near as I could guess it was probably an aluminum kitchen utensil of some kind. I'd been trying to get her to go to work for a long time and I thought maybe she's by God's going to sell a kitchen utensil. It was all right with me. So, she told me it wasn't that. And now, while she'd been real closed mouth, not willing to tell me anything at all, suddenly she, man, I just opened the floodgate. She began to tell me about Al-Anon, what a wonderful program it was, how it saved lives and families, how everyone was welcome there, how, God, it was just marvelous. People would pay $500 for a seat in that place if they just knew how good, how good it was. And I heard her say that it was a public meeting. Anybody was welcome. And I sobered up almost instantly because I had just made senior partner in my law firm. And I knew they didn't want any more alcoholics. They had two already and I knew they were talking about getting rid of them just as soon as they could. I'm just getting started and when they find out I'm an alcoholic, I'm an alcoholic. I'm out. So I sat her down and I said, Billy, listen closely to this. Do you understand that I'm the only one who makes money at this house? She said, I understand. I said, do you know that if I lose my job with that law firm, the money stops? That sounded reasonable to her. I said, there won't be any more money coming. And if we don't have money, do you know what we'll have to do? What will happen? No. What will happen? Well, we're talking about foreclosure on the house. We're talking about taking back all the stuff we've got loaned out here. I said, we're not talking about college education for our kids now. We're talking about financial crisis. We're talking about standing naked in the streets of Dallas in the middle of the winter with our children. That's what we're talking about. This is a major damn problem. You can't go to any more of those meetings. And she looked at me with those steely blue Al-Anon eyes and said, I think I need to go. And I said, Billy, please do not go to any more of those meetings. She said, Jerry, I think I'm going to keep going. Then I said something loving like, you know, if you go to another one, I'll kill you as sure as hell. She said, she said, I'm going to go. And I didn't kill her. But she drove me crazy. Every day I went to work, I expected them to knock on my office door and come in and tell me, we hear that your wife is going to public meetings because you're a drunk. We don't need you here. Out. It wouldn't happen that day and I'd go home and I'd try another tactic of some kind to get the woman out of Al-Anon. We fought incessantly about this one subject. I tried everything. I tried frontal attacks. I tried sneaking around the back. I tried to woo her out of it. I blew in her ear. I did everything I could think of to get her out of it. One night, I was going to start an argument. I knew I was going to start an argument on this subject. But I needed to get her to agree to certain facts before I got into the thing real heavy, you know. I was kind of sneaking up on her. And so I went in the kitchen and I put my arm around her and I said, you have a nice day. And she said she did. And I said, dinner smells good. And thank you, she said. I said, are the children all right? Oh, yeah, children are good. How are the dogs? Oh, the dogs are good. It's been a wonderful day for the dogs. I said, Billy, I've been thinking. You think I'm an alcoholic? And she said, I don't know whether you are or not. I said, well, that's damn funny. You've called me an alcoholic for months and years. She said, yes, but I was wrong. It doesn't, she said, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what the doctor thinks. It doesn't matter what your partners think. It doesn't matter what your parents think. It just doesn't matter. There's only one person in the world who can make use of the information of whether or not you have a drinking problem or are an alcoholic. And that's you. Because if you don't think you got one, you will never do anything about it. It's real hard to get a fight going when they're acting like this. I'll just tell you that. And I'm totally off balance here. I don't know how to deal with this thing and I make a mistake. A good trial lawyer never, ever in the middle of a cross-examination asks a question when he doesn't know the answer. But I did. I said, well, if I wanted to find out if I was an alcoholic, how would I do it? And the jaws of the Al-Anon trap closed just like that. She said, well, well, Jerry, they tell me that there's a number of ways you can find out. One, you could just stop drinking. But I don't think you want to do that. I said, you're right. I don't want to do that. She said, the other thing you can do is try some controlled drinking. And I said, what is controlled drinking? She said, well, it's like they suggest that you take two drinks a day. No more, no less. Every day. And if you can do that without expecting two drinks for six months, you're not an alcoholic. I said, that's the dumbest damn test I ever heard of in my life. Are you telling me you've been trying to get me to quit drinking forever and now you're trying to tell me that you want me to drink for another six months? And she said, yes. And I realized I was being a pretty sick woman and I better get the hell out of there. This conversation wasn't going my way at all. So I went and sat in my green chair and drank whiskey for about, two weeks and thought about this thing. I had to get her out of that damn Al-Anon. I mean, it was serious to get her out of there. Just, I'm on borrowed time. They're going to find out soon. Somebody's going to call in and say, we saw your partner's wife at an Al-Anon meeting. What's an Al-Anon meeting? Oh, that's for drunks. You know, that's for families who've got a drunk in there. And I'm the key to Al-Anon for Billy Jones. That's what I am. So I decided somebody's got to make a sacrifice. I'd been mean to cut back. Actually, I was drinking a little over a quarter day and I didn't know anybody else that was drinking that way. And I was going to work every day, but I had to leave early sometimes because I couldn't wait to go home at five o'clock and drink then. And I drank my bottle of whiskey in the evening and she'd put me to bed and we'd go on from there. We had, so I decided to do this and I had to change that test a little bit. And I wasn't going to tell anybody I'm taking the damn test because she's watching me. She knows how much I drink. She counts them. And I'm just going to drink three drinks a day. I got a pretty big glass and I'm going to have two martinis before dinner, which is just Beefeater's gin, sometimes with ice, sometimes not. Just, and I'm going to have a big brandy and a little bit of soda after dinner. I'm going to switch to coffee and nobody, nobody except a prohibitionist could fault me for drinking that way. And they couldn't. And then I, I got my first dose of reality about my disease. I, I would drink that first drink and begin to loosen up a little bit in my shoulders, neck, you know. And then I'd get about through with the second one. And the thought would come to me, alcoholism centers in the mind, you know, the thought would come to me, well, it's about all the martinis today. And then another thought would drift in out of center field and it would be, what are you doing? What are you doing? Are you over 21? Are you a man? Who supports all these things? Who supports all these damn people around here? Who has to go down and fight all those other judges and jurors and lawyers? Are you going to let a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes tell you how to drink whiskey for God's sake? The answer was no. No, I'm not going to do that. I'd go to the bottle and drink the damn bottle. Or, or, when I walked in from work, I'd walk up to the bar and I'd think, you had a bad day today. A bad day. Ain't going to be no damn test today. I'll tell you for damn sure. And I'd drink the bottle. Or, some days I could forget it. It's called conscious forgetfulness. I'd forget to take the damn test. Those days I drank the bottle too. So whether I took it, didn't take it, forgot it, I drank the bottle. But I'd always wake up and I'd always remember I was supposed to take it and it was illogical to assume I had a lot of willpower. I had a lot of willpower in my life. Why couldn't a man with a lot of willpower decide he's going to drink three drinks and just drink three drinks? What's wrong with me? Oh, that's a good question. What's wrong with me? Because see, nobody knew I'm taking this damn test. I'm the only one that knows it. I'm the only one that knows I'm plunking it. I gave it a fair chance. I ran it a year and a half. I never passed it one time. Not once did I ever pass it. And at the end of that time, nobody knew what was going on in my head, but all I thought about was drinking or not drinking or wishing I had a drink. I even began to sneak it in the house. Hell, I just carried it in before by the crate because I'm just by God going to drink what I'm going to drink and I'd just defy anybody to talk to me about drinking, particularly my wife. But now I've got to, I don't know, I began to sneak it in and try to get to you. I was drinking so much. She got upset with me one time. Somebody told her that you could make iced tea glasses out of brandy bottles. And she said, well, Jerry drinks some brandy. I'll just save up a few of them and you'll show me how to cut them off and I'll make them. Well, she had about six bottles in about six days. And I know, she was kind of disappointed in the amount I drank with that. And she said, she talked about it some. In any event, I wound up on December 31st, 1972 at a real low point in my life. I had worn out 1972 completely. I needed a new year, man. And all I had to do to bring in the new year and make things better was to go out to dinner with our friends and to come back to our house and spend the night and spend the rest of the evening and bring in the new year. That's all I had to do that day. I wasn't mad at anybody. I didn't have any great pressures on me. All I had to do was just that simple thing. And I knew why we were doing it that way. It was unspoken, but I had gone out a few days earlier to a party and it had been very difficult to get me back home after I had been out for a while. So we're going to go out early and have dinner and kind of bring me home and, you know, they all expected me to get drunk and I just needed to be on my feet and functioning a little at midnight. That's all I had to do. So I started off the day and I was pacing myself carefully and Billy warned me about us going out to dinner and I knew, I know, I know. And then I woke up and I looked out the window. I was in my green chair and it was pitch dark outside. And I looked over, I looked over to my wife's chair and she was there in her robe reading a little book. They read lots of little books. And I said, Billy, shouldn't we be getting dressed to go to dinner? And she said, Oh, Jerry, don't you know what time it is? It was 10 o'clock at night, 10.15. I'd passed out at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. And I had no one to blame for that. Not a soul in the world. And I was sick of me. I was sick of me. I knew that she had had to call those people and tell them we are not going to dinner. I knew she had told those same people you can't come to our house tonight. And she, being a good Al-Anon, had probably told them because Jerry's drunker and Cootie Brown in his chair. And I didn't like that. I didn't like me or what I had become or what I was. It was just another day. Another defeat at the hands of alcohol that was inexplicable, irrational, it just made no sense at all. And I went to the bar and got a big drink because I wanted oblivion. And I knocked myself out with that drink. I pray to God that that's the last drink I'll ever have. That ended a 21-year drinking career. I got up the next morning to the sorriest looking world I'd ever seen. And I had no solutions. I sat there. I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about that night and thought about what I could say to those people and my wife. And I couldn't think of anything to say. I didn't have any excuses. There was no... I deserved whatever they thought. And I considered my options. And I thought about what I'd tried to do, the test I'd tried to take. Nobody knew I took the test, but I knew I'd taken the test. And so I got to the end of my thoughts. And the only thing I could think of that I hadn't tried was to stop drinking. Something I promised I'd never do. But that day, that didn't seem like such a bad-eye day. So I got up and I went in the kitchen and I told Billy that I was sorry about the night before. She wasn't impressed with my apology. I said, I think I'm going to try to quit drinking. And she was impressed. She ran over to the bookcase and happened to have a copy of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. A copy of the little book, 24-hour-a-day meditation book. She came running back to me with those two books and thrust them into my hands and said, would you like for me to call somebody from Alcoholics Anonymous? And I threw the books against the wall, pretty close to where she was standing, and told her, hell no. I got myself in this deal and I'm going to get myself out. And she said something loving like, you got it and walked off. And I had my problem. It was no solution. And I started trying to not drink. It should be easy. If it's bad for you and you stop doing it, it should get better, shouldn't it? Well, it surprised you to know it didn't get any better. I couldn't sleep. All night long, I rolled and tossed and sweated. I sweated on the inside, on the outside. I shook. I had the yippies. You know, I moved around like... I looked at people and I saw that they weren't doing that. And all, all I could think about was having a drink. And my stomach was helping out. It was sending a signal to my brain on a very regular basis. Hey, Clyde, you forgot something. Get it down here. We're in an emergency situation down here, you know. We're cramping. We don't feel good at all. Bad things are going to happen if you don't get this down here. Well, I lasted two days. And I was not doing well. So I caught Billy out of the kitchen and I, decided I'd run in there and find those books. I knew she'd leave them laying there somewhere. And do a little sneak reading to see what the A.A. and A's did about this damn drinking problem. Now, I wish I'd had time to read the big book, but I didn't. I did not want to be caught in that kitchen reading that stuff that she told me I ought to read. So I just grabbed that little 24-hour day book and I opened that thing up to January. It had dates up in the corner. And that keen alcoholic mind, I knew I ought to read January 2nd. So I read January 2nd and it said, alcohol has ruined your life. And I said, yes, by God, you got it. And then it said, well, this year we're going to give our drinking problem to God and leave it there. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was in that. I've been looking for God all my life. How are you going to give somebody something when you can't find Him? And I couldn't find Him. I'd look for Him in all kinds of churches and I'd read books. I'd talk to preachers and rabbis and priests. Always looking and always demanding that God prove Himself to me. And then I would do what He told me to do. But I did not want to be conned. I did not want to, you know, sign up for something that I didn't know was working. Well, I'd actually even gone down and been sprinkled and I'd been down and dunked. And I'd been, you know, I did all them things several times just to see if they worked. And people came up to me afterwards and hugged my neck and said, isn't it wonderful, Jerry? Don't you feel better? Don't you feel different? And I'd say, yeah, yeah, I do. I felt worse than ever because nothing happened. God didn't show up and the bushes didn't talk to me and catch on fire and I couldn't walk on water. And, you know, I'm not critical of the conversion experience. I think a lot of people have one. And I wanted one. But I didn't know how to have one. I hadn't reached the stage of surrender. Unconditional surrender. My surrender was conditional. I will if you show me yourself. And you're playing by the rules of the Creator of the universe and He's not going to make any exceptions for me. I'm going to have to do it His way or it's not going to happen at all. And I didn't know that. But that day I read that little book and I don't actually know why I did what I did, but I threw that little book out in the middle of the table. And I said, God, if you're there, I'm going to give you this drinking problem. And if you take it, I may do some more business with you. Real sincere prayer. I meant every word of it. And I still wanted to drink. I still had the heebie-jeebies and all those good things. And I went to bed and I got up the next morning. And something had changed. I knew something I had never known before. I knew that I was going to drink that day unless I got some help from somebody who had skin on them. And I called Alcoholics Anonymous. Couldn't call my wife the bunch that my wife was associated with because she'd poisoned the well over there. You know, I told them all those. She had told them the truth about me and I did not want to face the truth. And so I got a lady to help me. I called central office and I reached a very unsophisticated, uncooperative lady. I told her that I was a big-time lawyer and that I was having a little problem with drinking and I needed to know what to do. And she said, well, you need to go to a meeting every day. And I said, that's obviously impossible. I'm very busy. I couldn't possibly go. I couldn't go every day to anything. And she said, well, what have you been doing in the evening? And I said, well, I've been drinking in the evening. She said, well, we're going to stop that so you're going to have a lot of free time, aren't you? Well, I didn't have answers for that. So we began talking about where I might go. And she said, what kind of group would you like? And I said, well, I'd like a group of, you know, I'd prefer college graduates. I'd like to go to someplace near a country club so, you know, I wouldn't have to leave my neighborhood or anything. And she said, we ain't got none of them. And it just went that way. And I finally selected a little home group called the Town and Country Group. It sounded kind of woodsy. And I thought I could drive a station wagon or something over there and look pretty normal. And so I went to that little group. And they were nice people. But they had so much sobriety. I mean, I'm hanging on here. A baby's got a year and a half. And then the next guy's got five. And then they get serious about it. It's 15 and 20 and 25. About eight or 10 of them. And they just didn't like to do the busy groups and had a little home group. Met once a week whether you needed it or not. And I didn't really think they had much of a drinking problem. You couldn't feel like I was feeling and stayed sober for a year and a half, let alone 20 years or whatever the hell it was. And then one night, a guy came in to Dallas. From Hartview, South Dakota. He'd been kept there for quite a long time. Been chained to the hydrant because he wouldn't do a fourth step. Finally, he had done one and he came in. He had literature in every pocket. And he knew more about alcoholics and Alcoholics Anonymous than anybody I had ever heard in my life. And I followed him. And he just had six months sobriety. He was still quick. He was still quick. And I was quick. And I was quick. And we sat there in that meeting and looked at each other and we knew that we were dealing with real alcoholics. And I followed him outside and I said, David, what do you think about this AA thing? He said, you mean this little group? I said, that's not for us. He said, we are going to have to change the way we think and react to life. We're going to have to get in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous. I said, this is fine for them, I guess. But you and I are going to have to go to meetings every night. Now, that sounded better this time. We're going to have to sponsor people. We're going to have to have sponsors. We're going to have to work the steps. We're going to have to make coffee for whatever good that does. I don't have any idea, but clean ashtrays and make coffee. Anyway, and I said, where are we going to go? And he said, well, I heard a little bit about a place way out north, which is a good thing because I don't know anybody who lives out there. And he said, will you meet me there tomorrow night? And I said, I'll give it serious consideration because, you see, I just couldn't go out there and make a commitment to be there. I needed to look the place over. So I cased it just like I was going to rob it. I drove down the street in front of it. It was over the top of a 7-Eleven store. And the first time I drove by, I went down the street about 55, 60 miles an hour and just glanced at it, you know. Did not want to appear overly interested. I made a U-turn and came back down and pulled into the 7-Eleven and went in. As I went in, I looked up the second story to see if they had surveillance cameras or anything like that up there. They didn't. Nobody was standing at the window. I went inside, got me a Slurpee or whatever else I could think of to buy, and I walked back out, checked the cameras again. There was nobody up there again. Got in the car and noticed that there was a driveway over here. So I drove around behind the 7-Eleven store. And there it was. Six parking places in the alley. I could park in the alley and climb the fire escape and go to Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's the way you got me. And in a little while, I began to experience the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous. The program of attraction rather than persuasion. I met people that did things I didn't like at all. I thought they were just as corny as a person could be. I'd stand up and say, My name is Jerry. And everybody would say, Hi, Jerry. Oh. Just sounded like some kind of high school fraternity or something like that, you know. They said the slowest Lord's Prayer I'd ever heard in my life. And you won't believe this, but they held hands while they did it. They told terrible stories about themselves. Just terrible damn stories. And the worse the story was, the more they laughed. And I, you know, I'm competitive if I'm nothing else. And I got to thinking, you know, I did a couple of things that are kind of cute. I think I'll tell them. So I told them. And you know what they did. They laughed with me. They put their arms around me and told me that it was all right to be myself. That they were glad to see me being who I was. Without pretense, without a facade of any kind. Just Jerry Jones. And they said, if I lived inside my own values and was myself, it would be the greatest freedom that I could ever experience. And I found that to be true. I found that I had to make contact with a power greater than myself. And to do that, our book says, I got to find what was blocking me. Our book also promises that every man, woman, no matter what his race, color, or creed, can form a meaningful relationship with his creator. If he has the willingness and the honesty to try. And I began to try. And the way I had to try was the third step. To make a commitment to turn my will, what I wanted in my life, what was happening to me, over to God as I understand Him. And to search for this thing called self-centeredness. Which was said to block me from the power. They told me that I did not need to do anything except get rid of self-centeredness and then I would have an experience with the power. I said, I don't know what I believe. I don't have faith. I've tried to have faith before. And I've sat in chairs and decided I'm going to have faith. I'm going to have faith. Well, I didn't have any faith. They said, we don't care whether you've got any faith or not. We don't care whether you like what we tell you to do or not. We don't care whether you believe it works or not. Just do it. Take the action and we promise you a given result. And that's a form of proof which is irrefutable. When you tell somebody that there is something that's going to work if you do A, B, and C and they do it, the proof is in the pudding. What happened? This power we seek can't be seen. Not directly. But it's like gravity. If you jump off of this tower here, gravity will deliver your can right down here at exactly the same speed every time you jump. You can't see it, but you begin to suspect there might be something there. You didn't float a single time. And they told me to find this thing called self-centeredness. Well, when I read the book, which I read so that people wouldn't think I was dumb, they were trying to tell me what was in the book and I didn't want them to tell me. I'd find out for myself. And so I did. But they told me that this self-centered thing was prevalent in all alcoholics. It doesn't cause alcoholism. Most of the world is self-centeredness. It's full of self-centeredness. Any day you want to, look around all your neighbors and you'll find self-centeredness. But it is an attribute of our ego which blocks us from God. And if we need God as bad as we do, because without it, we haven't got a heck of a lot of chance, then we need to see if we've got it. I skipped all about self-centeredness the first time I read it because it was your problem. I didn't have it. And then I began to find out I might have it after all. I don't know about you, but I have a lane of traffic on the freeway. It's called my lane. And you don't care. You can easily pull in front of me in my lane because I know you did that to me. And I feel some obligation to punish those who do that sort of thing. And I can change my lane anytime I want to. I just pop over in the next lane and that's my lane. And you pull up beside them and you run them off the road. And then you get back and forth whichever lane you want. That's not self-centeredness. That's just, you know, common sense. I felt a little superior. When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. They talked about unmanageability and my life wasn't unmanageable, of course, except for drinking, a little bit of problem there. But really, I'd managed pretty well. And they talked about this thing, self-centeredness, a lot. And I kind of felt sorry for people. And one night I was sitting there and something drifted into my head. It was about my fishbowl. I got tired when I was taking the test. I got tired of watching television. And one day I was, you know, in a shop that sold fish. And I saw, thought how much I'd like to watch those fish. So I bought myself an aquarium. Got the size I wanted. Colored gravel I wanted in the bottom. Selected the kind of plants that I liked. Pretty leafy plants that reached up to the surface. And I bought the kind of fish I wanted. I wanted pretty slow-swimming fish. And they sold me those kind of fish. And I put them in my bowl. And I had light on top of it. I could make it daylight or I could make it dark. Just as I chose. And I fed my fish. I put the aquarium between my chair and the wall. And I fed my fish if they were to be fed. Sometimes it was a land of plenty. And sometimes there was a famine upon the land. As I chose. And as I was sitting there that night thinking about the fish and the topic, it was about unmanageability and self-centeredness. I remembered there was always, always one damn fish. A rogue fish. A fish. A fish who would not comply with the slow-swimming rule. Who would go up and nip another fish on the tail. And that fish would begin to swim fast. And he would encounter other fish. And they'd begin to dodge him. And the first thing you know, the whole damn bowl was just going back and forth like that. And it just drove me crazy. And I'd reach out and slap the side of that bowl and let them know that there's a power greater than they are that is unhappy with this deal. I gave them three chances. I knew if I gave them three claps of thunder and they didn't catch on, they needed a hand-on experience. With the power. So I bought a little dip net. And I would catch the bad fish and I'd hold him in my lap until he got real still. Have a drink and think about those folks out there that I needed to get my dip net on, you know. And then I would flop them back in the tank. Timing's pretty important here. If they float, you kept them out too long. Most of the time I got them back in time and they would, I'd give them three hands-on experiences with the power. And then you would know that there are some unfortunates. They seem to have been born that way. And I'd catch them the seventh time or the dip net the fourth time and I'd take them in the commode and in the toilet and flush them down the commode. Buy new, better-trained fish. No one knew I was taking that test or was doing that. No one knew that. And it occurred to me that night that maybe there weren't too many 40-year-old men that got offended by what their fish did in the fishbowl. That may be some form of self-centeredness. I'm not sure just what kind it was. And then right behind that came the thought, well, hell, you can't even manage a fishbowl. What do you mean your life is not in the manager? And a little at a time, my life turned around. A little at a time, things began to happen to me that let me see the power of God. I didn't know I was going to be able to do that. I didn't know I was going to be able to do that. I saw people get well that no one thought would get well. I saw families reunited when there was no hope at all that they would be reunited. Those things came to me. I had, my mother was one of my great little Irish moms. She and my dad and I worked on that farm hard during the World War II. or two and for years after that and she was always on my side i always knew there's one place i could go by god now it's home and they'd have to take me they would take me she didn't like what i did she told me many times that i was ruining my family and she wanted me to stop drinking she died with 75 years of continuous sobriety she never had a drink and she didn't see much reason for me to have one either but i had to tell her to mind her own business and my dad as well she got cancer while i was still drinking and i went up to see her on one of her operations and she wanted me to come up there and be with her and i decided i would