Contempt Prior to Investigation — Fourteen Months Hearing Step 2 Without Hearing It – Jack D.

I never got that kind of welcome when I go in somebody's house to fix their toilet. Some of them are pretty happy, though, when it's coming down through the ceiling and everything. Of course, I never had them all together, you know. My name's Jack Dempsey, and I'm a drunk, not a fighter. How you doing, folks? Hi. It's really amazing to me that I'm at something like this, you know. It surprises me that I'm sober. I've been sober. I noticed down here you say when you got sober, you give your date. Why, I had my last drink April the 18th, 1970. That was right after God assigned Clancy to Pittsburgh for a weekend or something to clean up the wreckage of the old-timers in Pittsburgh. Jesus. You know, I got this story about me, you know, and I felt it. And I like to say up home. You know, I lead a lot of meetings, and sometimes you get on a kick where you're leading meetings around the same area, and the same people are there all the time, you know. And I don't, you know, I'd rather not be like that. You know, I love to talk to a lot of people, and I don't think that has anything to do with lack of humility. It's just the odds that somebody out there like you is better, you know. And, you know, but I tell my people at home, I say, you know, if you heard my lead or heard one like it and don't like it, you know, just look at my position. I lead a lot, and I heard me every time, you know. So the other people that suffer with that, they've just got to suffer with it. Or if you suffer with the same kind of speaker. That's the reason I brought that up. I was talking to my wife about it. I said, Jesus, I identified so much with all these speakers. You know, this is going to be like the plumber's version of what you already heard, you know. That's worse, you know. But, you know, I was 18 or 19 years old. I was sitting on a barstool reflecting on how the hell I got so screwed up and what was the matter with me and why life wasn't even worth living at 19, you know. And I come up with the reasons then that stuck with me until Alcoholics Anonymous literally beat them out of me, you know, these ideas I had. And I thought that the reason I was such a screwball and having so much trouble with everything was that I had a rotten home life. And it seemed to me everybody else had just great home life, you know. And mine was bad. And I had a working mother and I had a father who was a professional bridegroom. He was married five times, you know. And I had a grandmother who raised me that helped me with my self-centeredness by coming out in the street with me and my friends and waddling out there and blowing her nose on her apron and all kinds of things. And I was embarrassed and I was just so full of me. When I was so young, I didn't know what that was about, you know. And one of the things that tricked me, what life was that I had such a hard time, was that I thought I could do something about everything that bothered me. You know, I couldn't just let something... You know, people would stand there and let something bother them. They'd say, this is bothering me. I couldn't stand that. I'd say, I'm leaving. Or I'm going to holler. Or I'm going to get drunk over it. Or I'm going to do something. I just couldn't say, yeah, this is bothering me too. I had this self inside me that even when I was good, I couldn't stand it. You know, I mean, I could be good. Oh. I could be so good, it'd just gag you. You know. But I can't be good too long because I'm not naturally good. And I think there's people that have just a good streak in them or something. I lean towards the bad streak, you know. And so I was self-conscious. I had a rotten time. And when I was eight or nine years old, my mother remarried. And I got me a stepfather that was like Frank, you know. And he sort of made a hobby knocking the hell out of me. You know. And I sort of made like an avocation out of deserving it. You know. And, but I didn't realize that. I didn't know. You know, it just seemed to me like Clancy said. So he's always saying something cute, you know, if you hang around him a little bit. Just makes it so good, you know. That's why he has that entourage or whatever. But he told me, I was complaining about being too fat. And he said, no problem with that. Just go on a diet where what you do is, if it tastes good, spit it out. You know. You know, along with some good advice and friendly criticism. You get good, wholesome help in how to live your life. And he's got spies up at Pittsburgh, you know. You know, you get all the notes and everything about this. And continue to research my case up there. And that's probably good. But I was just having all kinds of trouble. And I didn't do well in school. I don't know what the hell. I'm afraid to investigate to this day what the hell's the matter with me. I'm sure I got all kinds of stuff wrong with me. It makes me. I excel in some things that aren't important. And I don't know what the hell I'm doing with stuff that seems important. And I thought in school, I just hated stuff so bad. I wasn't motivated. And I didn't even know what that word meant to him. I just couldn't get it going. I just couldn't get glad about the stuff that they wanted me to. And I ended up getting in all kinds of trouble. I liked girls and stuff like that. And I hated authority. They just wanted me to do everything awful. And not do anything that was fun. I remember as a little kid in the cloakroom. You know, I said, get out of the cloakroom. There's girls in the cloakroom. I said, that's why I'm in the cloakroom. Couldn't understand why they separated girls and boys all the time when I thought girls were just so nice and soft and cuddly. You know, they were just so cute. And boy, I'll tell you what. I discovered girls when I was in third grade. That's a long haul waiting to get some action. Sometimes you go too fast and you make mistakes. Well, I'm not going to do that. But I ended up, I was like in a regular high school, whatever that was. The kind you'd picture that Ricky Nelson would have went to. You know, the show of Ricky Nelson, not the real Ricky Nelson. And I said, but I got thrown out of there for doing things. You know, I was forging library passes and selling them and selling dirty pictures. You could see the same dirty pictures on Homebox today. I was 30 years ahead of my time. And so they put me in a school in the worst section of Pittsburgh, in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a vocational school. That's a funny thing. They take all the problem students and they put them in a trade school where you really have to think. You've got to know math and everything else to be a goddamn plumber. I didn't know that. And the people go on to Notre Dame and everything and end up just promoting things or something. You talk about how AA gives people humility. I've got a friend in my group who got sober a few years ago and he was a graduate of Notre Dame. And he gets up and leads and he says he thinks of Notre Dame like Conley Vocational High School that Jack talks about. I said, Jesus. God, it was a real, I mean, it was the place, man. All the kids down there today, they were incorrigible. Like it was a, it was sort of like a place where you could go on ahead into reform school or prison. Every problem child in Allegheny County ended up down there just before they got sober. And they had teachers down there that could manage us. You know, that was mostly their job, these big gorillas. And they managed pretty good. You know, we didn't manage very good, but they did. And, but I was into all this stuff and definitely afraid of my stepfather and self-conscious and just no direction and just goofy, a goofy kid. And I ended up having, I forged my report card. The ink ran. I knew the old man was going to kill me. I'm waiting for him to come home from work. Pace in the house. And somebody else mentioned that slow gin. Slow gin in the icebox. I found the slow gin and I drank it. And when I, you know, it was like 25 years later that an expression come out, I guess in the late 60s, that I couldn't think of then. But if I could have thought of it, it's what I would have said. The slow gin went down and I would have said, all right, Jesus. Everything that was, all that crap. That self-centeredness. That inability to fit in. That feeling of fear and alienation from everybody. And that restless, irritable discontent. And that went away. And this was like medicine. This fixed that. And I told you I was the kind of guy who wanted to fix it. Whatever it is, do something about it. Don't just stand there and say, man, I feel rotten. So I decided, I don't know if I consciously decided, but I just, I was going to drink that. Because that worked. That did it. And you know, the funny thing about alcohol is, for a guy like me, you do get better about things for a while. You know, it's better when I was, you know, I was so, I was so hurting towards the tail end of my drinking. I could identify, I remember reading a book called Never Promise a Rose Garden. And I remember it talked about insanity in there. And I understood insanity, except I couldn't get the good part about insanity. You know, I could, I could identify with a person that thought they were Napoleon. You know, I would be the last good stage of it, where the pain stopped. Why, yes, I'm Napoleon. Chop your goddamn heads off if you bother me, you know. And he could believe that about himself. And you're excused from all the crap. Me, I was always me and just on the threshold of going mad. And I wasn't mad. Well, I was mad, but I wasn't insane. And the worst of it is, when I took the only thing that helped me, alcohol, I got insane. As far as everybody else concerned, I was happy as hell, drunk. As soon as I drank that stuff and realized how much I liked it and how much it did for me, I intuitively knew that they wouldn't want me to drink it. Because they didn't want me to do anything to help me, you know. You know, that chip's on your shoulder if you're a young man like me then. And I just, I just knew it. And I, you know, it's a fun, when I come in AA, and they talked about honesty so much in here, when I was new, I'd be damned if I could understand that. It's tough today because I'm telling you, if you're going to drink, if you drink, you can't be honest. Let me give you an example. I can visualize me drinking, and I've been drinking, and a cop stops me and says, have you been drinking? Oh, yeah. I've been drinking for a week now. Got something in the back seat, you know. I'm in the finance company. And they say, why do you want to borrow this money? I could tell them something like I really had problems where I had to go to them, and these problems would be, oh, yes, I went on an extensive drunk, and I spent two weeks running. I spent my whole pay. I put $150 in a stinking pinball machine. About $500, you know. Well, you tell them, you tell the guy, I'm not a finance company, so I need $500. I want to buy a new iron lung for my mother. If you're like me, when you get here, you lie. And it makes perfectly. You would sense to lie. And then you come in here, and they want to turn it all the way around, you know. They want you to tell the truth. And it's just tough. You're like, you've got momentum on this lying. That's why I don't want them to think out on us and say about our lips moving. We're lying, you know. Always doing it. It's a damn shame they get together, they talk, and they learn, you know. You know, up on the way, a lot of guys have sort of settled down and taken shots at Al-Anon, because I'll tell you what, they devise some kind of a way. They get us. I'll tell you, I don't know how they do it, but there seems like they have like a secret call or something. And I'll be making these funny little witticisms about Al-Anon, you know, and then three of them will appear. And they get it all out of context, you know. You know, I'm 17 years old. I married a girl. I got her here tonight. I'm pushing her out of her wheelchair because she's got a torn lingament in her leg, you know. And thank God that's not a real serious thing to me, because she'll be over it pretty soon and able to help back with the work again. But that just, you know, it ain't cool pushing a wheelchair all over the place, you know. It's a little fun once in a while, you run into somebody's shins or something. But she's going to be all right. I married a girl. I was 17 years old. That'll show you how bright I am. You've got a real bright fellow up here. But I married a good woman, and that's probably the worst thing that can happen to an alcoholic like me. It's really tough to be married to a good woman. And I couldn't appreciate it. And I got drunk. And I had to work over not being able to appreciate things. So I might say, you don't do right. How the hell can you sit down here and drink? And I met your wife. She's a nice woman. And that little girl of yours, my God, how could you, a person like you, sit here and drink? Well, that's another day tacked on with that. And I knew it, too. I knew it was coming. I knew that that would make me drink. And I hated that about me. And I hated you for pushing that button that got that going. And I thought that maybe. You know, I could get all these little tidbits together that was just making me nuts and find some kind of a pattern or something I could get my fingers on and stop it somehow. And I just couldn't. I just didn't know what to do. I just drank. And there was occasions I didn't drink. I mean, I didn't drink every day. I wanted to. I drank as much as I could. And I sort of, like, let go and let other outside forces control my drinking a little bit. Like, I wouldn't drink right at once. I'd drink at work right in front of the boss. And I couldn't. A lot of times I couldn't drink at home. And I would go back and forth. Like, I'd drink at lunchtime at work or drink in the morning until I'd gotten so much heat at work and so much trouble that I'd, like, quit drinking when an interfere would work. And as soon as work was over, I'd go get drunk and then I'd get trouble at home. But I, like, had to get drunk and I didn't know when to do it. Nobody would give me some kind of a schedule or something, you know. And once in a while. I just got it all going and I was just drinking all the time. And I had her hollering and the boss hollering. It was like a chorus out there going, jumping all over me. And I just, then I felt awful. And then I'd just, I'd just be so drunk and then I'd go on one of them good binges. I used to always get drunk on payday. See? Now, Reader's Digest probably would call a fellow like me a blue-collar problem drinker. And... And blue-collar... Blue-collar problem drinkers get drunk on payday or there's something wrong with their alcoholism. It's just as simple as that. And I got paid on Thursdays and I got drunk on Thursdays. And then everybody needs to get drunk Friday. You got to go out to them roadhouses where they're boogieing and have a good time. Rock and roll, you know. And I was there when rock and roll was brand new. And the fellas didn't like it. They ain't changed too damn much, neither. Now, you know, we used to come over here back on a Sunday. Some other speaker mentioned that. And you don't comb in the middle. And that's why mine fell out, I think. I don't know what the hell's going to happen to these poor Bobby Browners with the flat top or the ones with the orange thing sticking up. They'll probably grow little clumps on their hind end or something. You know, either way, don't cut it off. Soon fall off. You know what I mean? So I was trying to do something about his drinking while I was drinking. And towards, like, my late 20s, I got a real serious campaign to do something about what was wrong with me. Because I had a search. I searched for everything. I searched for a higher power. And the only one I could find was Beneficial Finance. And they let me down. And my wife was on some other kind of campaign to do something about me. And that wasn't working real good. And I started to tell you about this payday thing. And I got sidetracked. I'd get drunk on Friday, Saturday, or Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. And I'd come to on Sunday somewhere. And most of the time I was at home. And most of the time it was my wife. Getting me out of bed. My wife had a dust mop. Give you a ballast in the back. And she'd stick it in me. And grind it like, you know. And I'd wake up with this. And I wanted to kill her, but I didn't have the strength. She knew when to get me, you know. And sometimes her timing was bad. And in that case, I'd chase her and bust furniture and all kinds of crap. And make everybody crazy. And the neighbors, quiet down over there. Up go the wind. I'll kill you too. Drunk a hose through my house one time. Escorted a neighbor outside that was laying on the yard. Damn, my wife got in a fight and the hose got loose in my kitchen. All kinds of stuff like that. Set punch holes in the wall. And I got a little jigsaw somewhere. And I made all these little oak leaf things. And I put them over the holes. And we sold the house. Thank God that guy that bought the house was a drunk too. You know, he didn't. I used to get eyestuff in there, you know. Lift every one of them up. Just random. And I remember him saying, why would you put one here? You know, that's not. It's belly button level. That's one of them little short jabs. And she'd get me up out of bed. And she would say, let's go. And I can't imagine where. And my little daughter's in the corner. And I swore my wife's stage there crying to be a tear. And my daughter's eye. And I'm trying to tell myself, I didn't cause this. I've been in bed. And I was getting so cynical. I thought maybe my wife took an eyedropper and said, put a little tear on there for you. So you make that stinking father of yours shape up. And she'd tell me, we're going to the zoo. That's where we're going. I said, you've got to be kidding me. You've been drinking Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Don't know what time you got home Saturday night. But she got you up with that dust mop. And you've got to go to the zoo. Man, I'll tell you. And I had a car. My car was hopefully outside. And I didn't know. I had a blue collar problem drinker's car. I had four different sized tires on it. Windshield wipers don't work on my side. And a seat spoke. And the golf department sprung. That's so they could see them traffic tickets that are laying in there. It's like a reminder to pay them. It used to get me. When I was in my drinking. I just. Couldn't understand them. I'd overhear them talk. I was like never included. But they would talk. I mean, people with jobs and just regular people. And I would say, yes, George, I got a set of those radial tires the other day. They were brand new then, you know. I never. What the hell is radial tires? You know, I mean, I got mine with Donna Junkyard. So you got something without a bubble. I got a bubble. I didn't understand it. And that's the kind of car I had. And, you know, maybe my plates were bad. They weren't paid for. My driver's license. It was. It was suspended or I. Or I didn't pay. You know, I just didn't pay. Don't have it. Don't have a license. I didn't have two bucks or whatever the hell it was. I had sent it. I spent it. And people wouldn't understand that. And I hated to talk to people. And I'd ask you, why? Why? What do you mean you don't have a driver's? Didn't you ever take a test? I have a goddamn driver's license. It's just that I didn't send it in. That's all. Well, why wouldn't you send it in? You know, and I want to get them by the throat. Pretty soon they could tell. Your eyes are fiery red, man. And your neck's sticking out. They'll say, okay. Forget about the driver. Except cops. They push and push. And you know who's going to win that. So, you know. And so anyhow, my wife would get me down at the zoo. I had to check that car out before I, you know, before she got out to it. I don't know what's in it. I don't know who's in it. I remember being so upset. My wife was like Sherlock Holmes. I don't know what yours was like. She could find anything. My wife could tell you the color of a earring in our room from here. Look it up. Look at that. There's an earring laying over it. What the hell? I don't know what the hell happened with everything I did. And she would find them damn receipts from the finance company. They give you about 50 copies of everything when you go in there, you know. Christ, I'm throwing papers out the window and everything on the way back. And there's one under the seat. So I remember trying to stop that business. And I come home 3 o'clock in the morning one night. And I said to myself, she is not going to find anything in this car that she misunderstands this time. And I stopped that car and I went from one end to the other. I took the seats out of the back, set the seats on the sidewalk, and I tore that. And there was nothing in that car to bother that damn woman. I knew it. And I went home and I went to bed. And the next morning she woke me up and she said, I want to ask you a question. Man, I hate questions. She says, why is the back seat of our car down three houses? Oh, man. Oh, this same little darling has me up the zoo now. And she, and look at me, this is what I thought. Now, I said, I don't know whether this is what happened. But it seemed to me she would manipulate me around. And so I stood directly in front of them stinking hippopotamuses. And they would get like behind me until like the gate was pushing on my nose. And I'm standing there as if saying, waves of stench from that wretched beast. Just coming over. And I've been drinking for four days and I am real sick. I don't want to be here. And I don't like the kind of people. Everybody, you know, oh, hey, look at the giraffe over here, you know. The guys that wear them baseball hats with the peak eight on straight, god damn. You know, wear one of them stupid hats. Put the hat on straight. I'll tell you, you want to know how to put them hats on? You watch them Nazi movies. I don't want to wear them hats. And they tuck it down a little bit on the top. That's the way to wear them, not sideways, you know. But they'd all be out. Now, everybody in the family loved them kind of. Guys, that guy would be Uncle Somebody or something. And he looked to me like he acted as goofy as I do when I'm drinking. But he don't drink. You know, and everybody, hey, Uncle Charlie and all the kids with suckers and sticky stuff all come around me for some reason. And I'm sick and you touch them, you stick to these kids. And they scream behind your back. And you're standing in a zoo. And I'm just marking time. I don't want to be here. I'm here as part of the package of punishment to get it over with. And my wife is standing there snarling. And a family of them would come right up, right up beside us, like as if God sent them down and say, Now, see, Jack, now there, here's the way it ought to be. Now, this guy would have a nice sport jacket on, you know, a little gray in his temples and steel gray eyes. And he'd stand there with this lovely, attractive lady, you know, arm in arm. You know. And she'd look up into his eyes adoringly, you know. And he'd look over at her and smile knowingly and all that, you know. And they'd got a little boy or a little girl and they'd scamper off, you know. And he'd say, Johnny. And the kid would stop in his tracks, turn around and say, Yes, Dad. He'd say, Come back here, son. And when the kid would come back, he'd spar, you know, and fool around. And the mother, you know, the mother would, you'd hear it, overhear little things. She'd say, That's my men, my big man and my little man. And then I'd stand. It's the summertime. I got a flannel shirt on. It's spotting wrong. You know. I got two different kind of socks on or something. I got this snarling shrew of a wife standing every time he's looking at me. I got a little girl that's from an alcoholic home. She's a nervous wreck. She don't know whether her mommy's going to go into some kind of a raging tirade or whether her father's going to just start drinking and mother and everybody, you know. She don't know what's going to happen here. And she's like, Yes. We're supposed to be having a good time at the zoo. And only I know, I seem to be the only one in the world that knows that it would be better on a Sunday afternoon to be off job yet. We could be down there playing a jukebox. The little girl could be eating them cholesterol-filled potato chips. And we could be dancing a little bit, rubbing a little bit of belly. You know, maybe go home when the kid's asleep, you know. That's in my mind. In her mind. In her mind is another down that club with the car getting wrecked on the way home, you know, and him coming to the house and busting furniture again. And it seems like all our little terrible fantasies come true, you know. She would get her way in that I would do that. I would break the furniture up with the zoo. It didn't even help, you know. Started coming to the bar, but the rage came from the zoo. Or I would take ten minutes out of my zoo time to make sure that drinking was the reason that the fiasco would come about. You know. But my wife and I had this same argument over and over again. The same screaming and hollering. I remember telling her. It just seemed like I was so sensitive to things that even drunk I could understand what was going on here. She didn't. I said, don't you see it's like a script? I come in the house. You say, where in the hell have you been? And I turn around and I say, I don't give a damn what you think. I don't care where I've been. It don't matter all that much. She would say, well, how can you drink when... The bills ain't paid. The neighbors are mad. The police called here. Your buddy... There's a guy threatened to kill you. There's this. There's that. And I say, that? You're asking me one question. Isn't that redundant? That's why I drink. You're telling me why I shouldn't drink. And that's exactly the reason I should drink. We had misunderstandings. And it wasn't working. I started to say before the zoo story about just trying to fix myself. Here I am. I'm a budding pipe fitter plumber. And I want to read all these self-improvement books. You really want to get squirrely. Take a new direction in the way that, you know, you're... Guys with my job should read Sports Illustrated. Drink beer and shut up. You know. Not me. I'm reading Eric Fromm. He's my hero. I read all the 60s guys. All them books that A.B. Hoffman wrote. You know, steal this book and revolution for the hell of it and all that. Timothy Leary so I could justify everything. And, you know, oh, if it's fun, do it. You'll love it. You know. And it just, it made me... And Marcus decided if you really want to get tacky, he said, oh, it ain't that bad. You know. And I'd share a lot of this with my wife who would just stand there catatonic and look at me. The more I read, the more I would quote Socrates. And my friends would say, what the hell are you talking about? You goddamn jerk. You know. And they'd say things to me that would really hurt me. They'd say, oh, yeah. Son of a bitch talks about them philosophers or whatever the hell they are. He put that goddamn water heater in. It was out of level. I don't know. I tell them, you don't understand. There was no shims in the truck. And I didn't want to call back and be embarrassed. I was a nasty. I didn't pick them up before I left, you know. Ah, bullshit. You're just too goddamn mushy. And I just thought, you know, this world ain't right. You know, I mean, I just don't fit in here good. And the only one I could blame for all that would be God. Then the ministers come. I tell them, you must pray to God. You know, go worshipfully. Worship? I'm mad as hell. I ain't worshiping nothing. I want to go fight with God. How can I do that? Everybody said, he said, fight with God. Fight with God. Won't be long now. It's a rubber room for him. Next thing, he'll be sewing the American flag on his ass or something. And if I was drunk enough, I'd say, what the hell's the matter with that? You know. Oh, boy. Then I'd have all the patriots up. You know, arms and everything. Not only the matriarchs, but the patriots. Always had the matriarchs up in their arms. I'd rather come home and they'd sit on their porch. Hey, you know, I'm home. Jesus. I'm such a wreck. And I, you know, the worst of it is I knew it. Yeah, I knew all that. I knew everything was wrong with me. That wasn't the point. Nobody, nobody understood that there was nothing you could do about that. Because I took all this information about myself that I was told by other people, told by the clergy, told by respected people, told by enemies of mine, people I liked, everything else, seemed to be the same consensus about me. And I took all that information to heart and sat down and thought about it. And the end result was this squirrel cage of mental gymnastics. There was just no way out of that mess. There just was no way. And the only relief I got was drinking. And towards the end, why, the drinking. And it had absolutely no value because it didn't work. It just made it worse automatically. And that's a real point of desperation. And I ended up with the worst thing I could possibly think of at the time. I ended up in Alcoholics Anonymous. I couldn't think of nothing worse. I just, I couldn't, if I could just die, I'd have been a lot happier in the beginning. So I come into Alcoholics Anonymous in January 1969. And I didn't get sober until April 1970. So that, I have to count for 14 or 15 months there. And my home group referred to me in those days as Jack the Slipper. Now, I was so mad at people that said anything about that for a while. Because I was trying. You know, I hated to be likened with the people who said, oh, I'm going to go get drunk. You know, I didn't do that. I'd come to meetings and I read the book and I'd done everything. And then when I got drunk, people would tell me, you ain't got the first step. I had the first step drunk in a bar. The first step made me drunk. What do you think of that? Because I'm powerless over, if you're powerless over alcohol, you're going to drink, damn it. So staying sober three or four months was really good for a guy like me because I was powerless over alcohol. And I thought that sobriety was what I thought it was. My perception of sobriety was not drinking. That's all I ever knew. You don't drink. And it seems so god-awful important in Alcoholics Anonymous that you don't drink. It seemed to sidetrack my grave problems that I wanted to talk of all the time. Everybody just got real stuff, you know. And everything I said in Alcoholics Anonymous for a while was wrong. You know, just like you're a chorus of that. Wrong. But wrong. Wrong. And, you know, today, I see a lot of people celebrate old-timers. You know, it's real popular to get a guy 30 years sober or something. One for those old-timers, you know. And, hey, I love old-timers. I'd like to be one someday. But the old-timers ain't the ones that help guys like me. And the reason I want to say that is for two reasons. I want to remember it. And I want to tell those people that felt like I felt when I was sober a year or so. I used to feel every once in a while that I was of no value. That, hell, I don't really have nothing. Things ain't all that much better. And all that crap would come through my head. And I'd get crazy. But I'm going to tell you something. The people that were sober a year, 18 months, people like that are the ones that saved me. Because the old-timers, I'd say something to the old-timers. They'd hear me out. And they'd say, why, yes, easy does it. See you Monday. Those guys sober a year or something were just crazy. And they'd say, you're getting in the goddamn car. We're going down to Oakmont or something to a meeting. All right, Chris, why not go? We're going where I say to go. I'm driving, ain't I? And there'd be five or six guys in that car. Every one of them just stoned crazy. All of them sober six months, eight months, a year and a half. We had an old-timer in there sober 19 months or something. And he wasn't even driving. He had his pigeon that was sober a week driving. You're all in that car together. And I had conversations that I perceived in there. I mean, I don't know if they really went on. But it seemed to me. There would be conversations like, I'm telling you, Jim, if Margaret don't come back, goddamn it, if I can't get that woman back, I ain't going to make it. And the guy in the back said, holy shit, Jim, if I don't get rid of that bitch I'm living with. This guy said, I can't stand my job. The other guy said, if I have a job, why, too. And all that just madness. And pretty soon they have everybody in the car laughing. Because it was just crazy. By having them caught those contradictions. Predictions just bouncing around in a little old Chevy or something. You just say to yourself, the only way out of this madness is to let go. You know? A one-by-one of guys just let go. They say to you, what do you think? Is the hell going to light? I let go. But you know, that second step. I was never able to do the steps, the first few steps that people talk about. I was able to take my inventory. And I was able to go. March down. And tell somebody. Of course, I wanted to find somebody that was real old and sick. Tell them. I didn't want to tell nobody about that stuff I was ashamed of. You know? And they tell you to tell the worst thing first. Like get it over with. And then go on to the other stuff. Well, the other stuff ain't nothing. You're flying once you get rid of it. Except you're thinking, what if that son of a bitch will call the cops or something. But, two steps. Have you done the third step? How do you do the third step? That second step just confounded me. Because I didn't hear it right. You know, it says, you know, we have contempt prior to investigation. Many of us. And, uh. So, I didn't hear that second step. They said it. Meeting after meeting. They said the step. Everybody read it. I read it. I looked at it. I underlined it. I knew all about it. But I didn't. That's not what I heard. They said, we came to believe that a prior greater than self can restore us to sanity. That's not what I heard. What I heard was, do you finally believe in everything it says in the Apostles' Creed at that little Methodist church? Do you believe that God is crucial? You know, you believe that he went straight up to heaven. Or like the Catholics, he went down, then up. And those Hebrews that think he didn't even come, let alone go. And those other strange third world countries where they think he went and come back as a dog or something. Millions of people believing just crazy different stuff that was completely contradictory. And just standing there saying, I believe, I believe, I'm getting it. I believe. Just to, like, put it carefully, I believe, I believe, I believe. I am a cynical son of a bitch as well. At that age, you're saying, oh, you're starting to believe something. A willingness, you know. God, they had an answer for everything. But you know, one day, I was just sitting in some little chapel with a stained glass window with the sun shining through. I'm sitting on a toilet. And it dawned on me that by doing the things that they wanted me to do, you know, they told me, go to meetings. If you can't do anything, go to meetings. If you can't work. If you can't work in steps, if you don't know nothing about God or you don't want to know. You know, people would throw things in. Well, one guy's lecturing you, saying, if you can't do this, you can't do that. You don't want to know. You know, you get these little tidbits from the sun. And you don't really have time to attack a guy properly. You have to defend the main force here coming from. I was just such a big job, you know, going through all this. But that step, like, just got, I thought to myself, I believe, I believe that this nutty set up here is going to fix me. I don't know what it was, but I believed that it was going to work. You know, I believed that it was going to restore me to sanity. My opinion of sanity, I'm sure, insanity was right then. I knew that my insanity was drinking. Because when I drank, I got the Napoleon. You know, if I didn't drink, I wasn't him. You know, and I had a standard hunter. When I got drunk, I could be him or anybody. I don't want you to think I went around acting like Napoleon. Jesus. I didn't. I went around acting like Hitler. More like. And, but it just happened to me. And once it happened to me, I wanted to sign up for whatever you want to call it. I wanted that third step. I wanted to turn me, I wanted to turn this problem, me, this big thing that was killing me, over to something else. Over to you, to this AA program. To whatever they call it here. And it got to be so that I wasn't so sensitive about hearing God. I studied that big book and I seen things in there that happened to other alcoholics. Founders. It happened to people in the first 100. It was important to me to know that. When I talked to them in AA literature about it, we bristled with antagonism and the mere mention of organized religion. Jesus, I loved those people who wrote that so long ago. Because it was me. Chapter to the agnostics. There ain't no chapter to the sports fans in there. That book is talking right to people like you and I that have this damn problem. This living problem. That for a while alcohol seems to fix it and then alcohol gives in and then we stand at a turning point. You know, we don't know what to do. We've got to make a decision. We've got to go one way or the other. They give me these steps to work. They give me everything in this program. It took me four or five years to make amends to my family, to my satisfaction. You might ask my wife tonight, is he through with his amends? She might say, oh no. I don't know what she said. She said, I'm sure she wouldn't say that. She said, he makes the tenth step when needed. You know. And I had a hard time with that. There were speakers up here. This weekend up to now was loaded with dynamite speakers. And I just went after them saying, Jesus, I hate to go up there. I can't take it. These people were just such high powered leads. Such high powered talks. And people filled with enthusiasm. The audience. The people that came to the meeting. The other members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Their enthusiasm at this particular conference. Extraordinary. Great. Just great. Made my weekend. I know that. Made me feel better. Made me think. Some of the other speakers talked about things that I needed to hear. One of the speakers mentioned that that always happens. You know. That you go to a meeting and it seems like they're all talking about the damn thing you don't want to deal with. It's just uncanny. Makes believers out of them stinking agnostics. And if you're like me, you try to drift back to it once in a while when it interferes with making some money or something. And there's no escape for a guy like me but to do what I have to do. And it surprises me how much I kick and scream before I do it. Because I'm like, oh, I'm almost 51 years old and you'd think I'd learn. I've been in AA since 1970. But I've got to fight a little bit first. You know. Before I do anything. You know. I've got to do it. But you know. I had to make amends. And you know. One of the things I'm going to bring up and then I'm going to close. But I want to talk about it. Because I think it was the most important thing in my life. I was sitting in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and I was the kind of guy that I made some judgments about whether the speaker was good or not when I was new. I didn't go spread it around. I didn't say, he's no good. You know. I didn't do that. I'm afraid they'd say, you're the one that's no damn good. You know. And I don't want to hear that. So I just sit there and look. And I remember one speaker. I was just sitting. I was thinking about when I went home whether I was going to kill her or kill myself or start drinking again or whatever. Everything was just coming in on me. And I didn't like the speaker. Now the speaker that night was a well respected long timer around our area. And all I got out of his lead was that he got sober to improve his golf score. That's what I got. I didn't even like golfers. And this guy had a lot of money. And he was, you know. A professional man and all that. And I just. Oh, I was so full of resentments. Because, you know. I blamed everything on my stepfather. And I blamed my alcoholism on him for a while. And he had his own. You know. We got issued separate cases there. I don't know why the hell I blame him. And. But I was just so full of rage and resentment. And sitting there and hurting. And that gut still hurting. And in a while. And just. I was just crazy. And somebody come up to me. And prodded me. Not amazing. So prod you to get a job. And I said. I said. I said. I said. I said. I said. I said. I said. A-A-A. So prod you to get it out. Come on! You know. Squeezing the boil or something. You know. They said. He says. I'm sorry. So's plumbers. You know. And it. Guy said to me. How did you like the speaker? And I said. I didn't like him. You know. And man. I got. Why didn't you like him? I start telling them. Man. I got this big crowd around me. Know. And they got like chairs to sit down. I'm in the middle. And I'm finally open. And I'm almost a virgin. tears and I'm just bad. I just felt like I had a whip and a chair and these were all lions coming. And finally, like, they just overwhelmed me because it was obvious that they weren't the same as them. They weren't the way people attacked me, like when I was doing wrong when I was drinking. These people, you could see the love and the understanding in their eyes. You know, maybe that sounds a little corny, but I could, like, feel it. It was almost tangible. And they just loved me. They just loved me a bunch. And they started talking to me about themselves. And I started getting, finding out about guys that did prison time and they were sodomized in there and they're living with it and blah, blah, blah and heavy stuff. It wasn't about, I quit drinking and everything's wonderful now. It wasn't about that then. It was about sharing the deep stuff. And they told me that I had to go make amends to that stud father. You know, I wanted him to come to me. And I had to go to him. And I went away. I didn't know what to do because I like it. I had this hobby of hating him. And I didn't know what to do, but it just kept coming. You know, all this stuff creeps up on you. If you don't move on it, if you don't move on it, take the action. It just keeps starting to crowd you and crowd you. It pushes the other fun out of your life. The things that were working ain't working even now, you know. And I knew I had to do that. So I made arrangements to go out and see him. He lived in Chicago and I lived in Pittsburgh. And I went out. And I got him to sit in the kitchen table and I started talking to him. And I said, I'm going to go out and see him. And I said, I'm going to go out and see him. And I said, I'm going to go out and see him. And I said, I'm going to talk to him. Now, before I went, the AAs told me, take some of your own inventory when you go out there to talk with him. Don't go out there and get in big trouble with him. And I thought, well, shit, you know, I really could probably get up enough money to have a hit put on that son of a bitch. And maybe all that would go away. And I said, no, that won't go away. So I got out there. And I sit down at the kitchen table with him. I told him I wanted to talk to him. And I had taken this inventory of myself. And I come up. And I come up with some things. When I was a little kid, when I was eight or nine years old, I would not take his name. He wanted to change my name. He wanted to make me his son and be responsible for raising this little brat. I wouldn't let him. I wouldn't give him that. And that was such a cost to bear. Anyhow, a name like Jack Dempsey was a son of a bitch of a name back in the 50s. And guys would punch me just to say they hit Jack Dempsey. And I had to hang on to that because I wouldn't give that stepfather. I wouldn't, you know, I just wouldn't do that. And I hung on to that. And he was a proud man and a drinker. And you know how that sets with somebody like that. And Jesus, I knew I'd done wrong by him by that. And I put that number one on what I was going to talk to him about. The second thing was that I was a sliver of a little mummy's boy in order to try to woo my mother out of the circumstances. You don't need that gorilla. You know, you don't need that. Who needs a cement block with hair on it running around? Hey, them girls like them cement blocks with hair on them. And so anyhow, I sat down at the table and I told him. I told him how I bad-mouthed him sitting at bars, talked about what a rotten, creepy was. And I said I got sober in this Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm talking in leads. I'm bad-mouthing in leads. I said it's been bothering me because I know I'm wrong about a lot of things. I know you put food on the table. And I know you taught me how to do things. You made a mechanic out of me. I know that, you know, we're all shoveling cement and fixing things and working hard and that did me some good. You give me a work ethic and I'm able to put bread on the table. And I respect you for that. And I talked to him about all this stuff. And he said, hey, what are you worried about? No problem. He said, that was a long time ago. That's when you were a kid. He said, now you're in that A&A or whatever the hell you call it and you're doing fine. As a matter of fact, you're doing fine. You're doing fine. You ain't coming out here and didn't even know you'd come. You remember that? And I didn't, but I said, yeah. And he said, your wife's not writing letters or calling your mother anymore with these god-awful gloomy reports and scary stories and everything. She quit doing that since you got in that A&A or whatever it is. He says, as a matter of fact, I want to tell you, boy, he says, I'm proud of you. I thought, damn, he must have heard some of the good work, you know, I've been doing in A&A. And he said, I'm going to tell you why I'm proud of you. I said, oh, boy, here it comes. You know, he had never said that. He was proud of me. And he said, I'm proud of you because I made you what you are today. The first thing that jumped in my mind was, this ain't the way that's supposed to work. But you know what made me laugh? Just like you did, it made me laugh. Because I realized the proudness of it. And I realized that he was a different entity than what I'd conceived. He had his opinion of me. You know, God rest his soul, he thought that that worked. And I give him more by shutting up about that than I could have if I made good amends to him. He knocked the hell out of me when I was a little kid. He'd done a lot of things wrong. But I just carried that for years and years and years. And the poor guy worked hard, didn't get no credit, got hollered at, got arrested for drinking. The same thing happens to all of us. We're around, we're crapping his pants. He'd come home once in a while and try to clean up and salvage some kind of dignity. And there he had this goofy stepson that wouldn't do nothing for him. And he'd give me that. He'd give me all he could give me. He'd give me that I was probably a man like him. You know, finally got a house and a car and working every day. You're taking that overtime, ain't you? You know? And I became what he thought. And he said, and I knew that he would tell other guys, he'd say, I'm a boy who used to drink, everybody quit. So he quit. What are you doing about yours? And I walked away from then, that man, and I never had that ball of hate inside my gut about him again. If I wouldn't have took that action that they absolutely made me take in Alcoholics Anonymous, I would have never got over it. I know I would have never got over that. And eventually that resentment and that hate would have hurt too bad. And I know me, I know if I'd have got it in conjunction with something else going on in my life, that I'd have put a case together so I could go pick up a case. You know what I mean? And I'm glad that I did that, looking back on it. Looking back on every painful thing they made me do in Alcoholics Anonymous, I am glad I did it. I am glad that I stayed up all night, drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes, talking to other alcoholics about this damn disease. I'm glad that I went to these conferences. I'm glad that I was there to see my daughter graduate with honors from high school and win a scholarship at Pitt University. I was glad when she aced them down at Pitt and she got a scholarship at Pitt. I was glad that I did that. I'm glad that I did that. I'm glad that I did that. I had a fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. I was glad I was there to take her down and help her move. I was glad that she picked a house and she didn't know it. She picked an apartment that was right across the street from the biggest A.A. clubhouse in St. Louis. And you tell me there's no higher power, you know? I'm up there hanging out. You get with the two women. I got the daughter and the wife. I said, put that picture over there. Put this here. You know, and I'm going around putting these things up. And then I could, you know, say, just a minute. And I wasn't allowed to smoke in there either. My daughter don't smoke. And I said, well, I don't smoke. I don't smoke. I don't smoke. And she's just fanatical about not smoking. There's a cigarette in the world. And so I'd run over that A.A. clubhouse over there and I'd have a cigarette and a cup of coffee and sit down with one of my A's and then I'd get back restored. And you know, I have a 32-year-old daughter that got bad sick back in 84. She was the one that went through all my drinking, you know? I mean, she was right there when I, and holding onto my leg to try to keep me from going out or trying to keep me from attacking her mother. And again, I mean, God almighty, she went through so much, you know? And that little girl got sick in 1984 and she was bad sick. You know, A.A.'s come through. Man, I'll tell you, I was at that hospital and I'd just come to meetings and I just, I was like a zombie. And you know, and they come into my life. And all the sickness, and my wife had some sickness and all that stuff, you know, shit happens. And, but if it wasn't for the strength, I wouldn't have the richness of life that makes it worth going through because we're going to go through it. You know, you can't get out of this world alive. And shit happens. And I would have never been able to enjoy the rest because I had that tendency to contaminate anything that was good or healthy for me with all the other junk. Yeah, but, you know, if I hit the lottery, I'd say, yeah, but, you know. And so Alcoholics Anonymous has changed me. That's the main thing. This program, my high fire and a little help from his little helpers like my sponsor and rats. People with just sort of a nasty streak inherent in them were put in front of me to block any easier, softer way that might yet be out there. And they fixed me. Or they made a new me or something that's able, that I'm able today to just live life and not get drunk about it. Not get everything pulled down with me. Have a bad day. How about you killing yourself? You know, I don't have to do that. And I'm so grateful for it. That is such, such a big thing to me that it still has a magic for me. You know, there's that funny thing. It still has a magic because it's such a big thing. I'm grateful that I'm in a place, Alcoholics Anonymous, where I can pull that bunny out of the hat like when I need it. Seems like other people, they got to take life as like hitting them. I said, boy, that was a rough one. You know, they're just plowing through there and they don't have that. They don't have this. Can you imagine how much joy it puts in a person's heart to realize that I took a weekend, a little weekend, and I left the shop on Thursday. Everybody else said, well, I don't know what you're going to do Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. They're going bowling. They're going there, you know. Going out in a little country band down there. I'm going to check them out. And I'm going to Omaha, Nebraska. I wouldn't have no idea. If I said, I could just picture that shop. Yeah, I'm going to Omaha, Nebraska. Well, what? You know, I could have won money. So I said, I'll pay you 50 bucks if you ain't going to Omaha, Nebraska. What the hell? Palmer takes three days off work and leaves Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's the same anyhow. You know, if you pick somebody up out of the center of Omaha and stuck them down a grass street in Pittsburgh, they say, now open your eyes. Well, what happened? You know. So it's like Omaha, Nebraska with hills. I want to thank Scott for introducing me up to this committee and having me down here. And God love you people for having my wife and I down here. Have a nice day.