Contentment as the Foundation of Recovery — Wes H.

Welcome back, my friends, to the AA Recovery Interviews podcast.
I'm your host, Howard L., and I'm an alcoholic, sober since January 1st, 1988, one day at a time.
I'm grateful you've joined us.
AA Recovery Interviews is the podcast where AA members share their extraordinary stories of experience, strength, and hope.
I'm pleased to welcome to the show today, Wes H., a man I met on a California Zoom meeting in early 2020.
Sober for 30 years, Wes is one of those members of the fellowship whom I feel like I've known forever.
Perhaps it's because of our similarities growing up in physically and verbally abusive families.
Or maybe it's the language of the heart we share on the road of happy destiny.
Whatever it is, it's a fascinating tale of sobriety,
which I'm sure you've all heard of.
Wes' love of writing songs as a kid grew into a hectic life and career in the music business.
Whether it was writing, performing, or producing, daily drinking became an essential part of the gig.
Though it had often served his creative endeavors, by the time alcohol turned on him,
its debilitating effects on his body and psyche had pushed him to the brink.
Short periods of abstinence without recovery, sobriety, Wes calls it,
became miserable intervals in his life.
With all hope seemingly lost, Wes found himself staring down the barrel of a cock derringer,
looking for a way out.
But a moment of clarity moved his finger off the trigger and finally gave him the desire to get some help.
With the help of his wife and the man who later became his sponsor,
he found Alcoholics Anonymous and a sincere commitment to a new way of life.
Wes' story of recovery will resonate deeply with listeners,
as will his inspiring way of working.
His deep dive into a sponsor-driven and spiritually-based approach for working all 12 steps on a daily basis
drew him to the very center of the program.
From there, he has imparted the collective wisdom of AA to the men he sponsors and other AA members he helps.
For anyone who is new to sobriety or is struggling to stay sober,
Wes' hard-earned experience provides an extraordinary blueprint for working the program with maximum results.
I think you'll find Wes' story to be both captivating and enlightening.
It's as easy to listen to as a well-written song and as memorable as a melody from a humble heart.
So I invite you to relax for the next hour or so
and enjoy this episode of AA Recovery Interviews with my friend and AA brother, Wes H.
My name is Wes and I am an alcoholic.
Hi, Wes. I am so glad you could join me here today on AA Recovery Interviews.
This is a really special day for me because you and I have gotten to know each other in a relatively short period of time
over the last year via a Zoom meeting that we go to on Saturdays.
And I don't know what it is about that meeting, but I felt like I've known you the entirety of your sobriety
and I guess mine too because you just celebrated 30 years.
I kind of feel like I've known you for much, much longer.
Do you ever get that feeling? What do you attribute that?
You know, I do get that feeling and I felt the same way about you.
And when I hear people that share, they clearly have done work in the book, right?
You know, they can quote chapter and verse and things like that.
But what I'm hearing is not them reciting things they've read.
I'm hearing how the work they've done in that book resonates kind of through their heart and the way they live.
Then I feel like I'm just like this is somebody I've known forever.
You know?
Like I connect on that level because there's sort of, I guess the best way for me to say it is
I sense an emotional and a spiritual context past just sort of the practical nuts and bolts of we read this, we do that, you know.
And I love that. I get really thirsty for that.
Yeah, I do too.
And what's interesting about it is that if somebody had told me prior to the pandemic
and prior to this extensive use of Zoom that I could feel that way about people
without seeing them physically and eyeball to eyeball, knee to knee, sitting next to them in meetings for a year,
I never would have believed it.
But it's astounding how much of the feeling does come over the Zoom.
Yeah, it's for me that the reason that's a little less surprising is the pathway into recovery to me came through musicians and music.
And in fact, the music business, when I listen to a piece of music, it can be by somebody that's long dead.
And I'm listening.
I'm listening to this amazing piece of music and I'm not in the room with that guy.
And yet I'm so emotionally and music spiritual for me.
So I feel a spiritual connection to that music.
And I'm getting that sense of connection.
A lot of people who may not come from that world that I've lived in so long are getting that same kind of experience with a Zoom meeting.
It's like hearing a beautifully recorded piece of music that touches my heart.
I don't have to be in the room with it when it's performed.
It can still it can still hit me.
Yeah, I get that.
Yeah.
I can see how that would be the case in the meetings that you and I have attended thus far.
Did you notice when people first started doing Zoom here in Houston, some of my closest friends in the program, old timers and even some younger people, were very resistant to doing Zoom almost to the extent that they didn't do it at all.
Yeah.
Just said that's not real AA to me.
And I'm thinking, well, then that means you're not going to any meetings at all.
Did you encounter any of that with your groups?
I did.
And I even encountered it with some people I sponsor.
And I believe that it is the legacy of Alcoholics Anonymous in some ways to leverage whatever technology is available.
Yes, there's a magic to an in-person thing, of course.
But to exclude the possibility of that magic of Alcoholics Anonymous happening, you know, to me, it's the language of the heart.
It's going to happen.
It'll hit us however, through whatever door it has to walk through.
But then I have guys I sponsor some of that.
That you and I share that Saturday morning meeting with that have never been to an in-person meeting.
Do you think someone could get along with thinking that this is the only way as opposed to actually coming in and being face to face with people?
So I don't know the mystery of their relationship between them and their higher power.
So maybe their journey would work well that way.
So I never kind of say, well, you know, you can't stay sober if you do that.
But I do think they would be denying themselves based on my experience.
It's a real amazing opportunity.
You know, my experience when I was newly sober, I was, I can get, just the world can get a little overwhelming.
And it can be easy to isolate past the point of, you know, the isolation that leads to good self-reflection and inventory and all that stuff.
That's one thing.
But isolating to hide from life is a defect I can engage in.
And most of the people I've sponsored have that same thing.
So I encourage them to look at that.
Yeah, I get that.
Let's take a look at your journey.
You've been sober now 30 years.
Your sobriety date is?
11-20-1991.
So you just celebrated your 30th.
Yes.
Were you able to get an actual chip?
I do have an actual chip.
And then my sponsor and I have this, we get each other chips each year.
I always get him a chip for his birthday and he gets me one for mine.
And I think the one he's given me since I'm basically one year behind him.
I just get his chip.
Yeah, which is great.
I love that.
That's a great way to recycle them too, actually.
Yeah, exactly.
When you look back over your life, can you define a particular point when you were younger that predicted that you might become an alcoholic?
What was your home life like growing up?
You know, I'm a native Texan.
I grew up in a household of Texas Germans.
And so what that means is it's very sort of empirical, stern.
We didn't not only did we not talk about feelings, I don't think we even knew how to access a lot of them, you know, and the predominant feeling around my household, it was sort of the rule of law had the foundation of fear.
So I kind of grew up scared.
It wasn't that there wasn't love or concern.
It's the culture they were raised in and therefore and their life had turned out pretty good.
And although my father, later on, my father got sentenced to AA when I was about four or five years sober and I got a phone call from him.
And I remember talking to him and him complaining about meetings and all this.
And I'm thinking, oh, my God, my dad is a newcomer, you know.
But anyway, so I grew up in this sort of emotionally volatile environment and fear was sort of like the governing.
You didn't do.
Things so much because they were the things you wanted to do or you were driven towards the positive.
I'm going to do this because this is going to be great for me.
I'm going to avoid doing whatever this other thing is so I don't get hit or yelled at or whatever.
Right.
Were the rules set up ahead of time or did you find them out by breaking them without knowing what they were?
That is a fantastic question.
And some of the rules were well documented, but many of them you kind of found out as a friend of mine says.
You know, Wes, life is trial and error.
And I found out through the error side of that equation without knowing.
And also that depended on how much alcohol or pill consumption was going on in my household at the time.
You know, you never knew.
So that was an occurrence going on.
And do you have siblings?
I do.
I have a sister and a brother as well.
I'm the oldest.
OK, so you're the one that all the things get tried out on, right?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
OK.
The one that had to work.
The hardest for the privileges, you know, and then and then your your siblings like, well, now that it didn't kill the old one, well, let's just let the new the younger ones do it.
Yeah.
Things get a little bit more slack as you go.
Of course.
Yeah, exactly.
In the pecking order.
Sure.
So you mentioned that there was pills and alcohol.
What was going on with those in your home?
Well, my father was a he drank all the way up until he didn't.
He drank, you know, his whole life.
My mother would also drink.
But she was my mother had a lot of health problems.
And so there was a lot of pills around and she ended up, you know, they were always prescribed.
I can't address the degree of whether she was abusing them or not.
But certainly there was alcohol consumed to excess in my house.
And it formed my first relationship with alcohol.
I mean, my father, I was my father's.
Beer valet.
So he's watching a ball game and he's not going to get out of the recliner.
That's what the oldest son is for, you know, and so go get the beer.
And I grew up around the saying that in Texas, you know, my dad used to say, well, you know, water is a perfectly acceptable substance for washing your car.
But if you're going to drink something, avoid that.
Drink a beer.
And that's a cultural thing in the in the in the German nationality, isn't it?
Beer is just it's it's just another another beverage, right?
Oh, sure.
And, you know, the rationalization was, well, you know, back in the Middle Ages, when the plague was going around, the water wasn't safe to drink.
So that's why we drank these other kind of beverages.
The fact that it had been centuries since the plague in the Middle Ages really didn't enter the conversation.
That's still validated.
Don't drink the water.
And, you know, drink the beer.
Your dad was he was a beer drinker.
Did he get drunk at home?
Oh, yes.
So what was that like for you when you were a kid?
Did you have to stay out of the way or what?
What were the repercussions?
Yeah, especially emotionally.
I mean, he could get physical, but but generally it wasn't my father.
I learned a lot of fantastic, wonderful things from my father.
And because because of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was able to go visit him on his death.
And tell him, not ask him if I was a good son, but thank him for everything that he given me and talk to him about dying because somebody had to add the conversation.
But in my childhood growing up, it was more fear of being hurt psychologically or emotionally because my father was brilliant.
He designed the fire extinguishers that went up on every Apollo mission after they figured out that, you know, they had the Apollo pad fire that killed those astronauts.
Right.
And NASA went, oh, my God, we've never thought about how to fight fires in space.
And my father actually figured that out, built the devices to do that.
He was an organic chemist and a German man.
I mean, he was just like he was laser quick with his mind.
But what that meant is if he got to drinking, then any kind of interaction that interrupted that, there was no patience for it.
Right.
So when you're a kid, you got to fail your way to success.
And so.
There was no patience for me to make, you know, 12 year old mistakes.
It would be like, hey, man, this is taking too much time.
I'm time to sit around and watch you learn.
You kind of got this whole thing of where you just wanted to stay quiet and out of the way and navigate the environment and deliver the beer.
And back when I was a kid, Monday Night Football.
Right.
And it was Howard Cosell and Don Meredith and Frank Gifford and all that.
When Monday Night Football was on in the household.
It was safe because all I had to do was deliver the beer and watch the game.
I could be in the room with my dad.
We could watch the game together and there was going to be no harm came to anybody as long as the beer got delivered.
And to this day, when Monday Night Football comes on, I feel a sense of peace.
It's like Pavlovian, you know, it's psychological.
Like if I want to take a nap, if I'm stressed out, I can put on Monday Night Football and go.
All is safe.
Nothing bad will happen.
Oh, that's a great story.
So for me, it's not Monday Night Football, but it's the Three Stooges.
OK, yeah.
So you have your version.
The only time I ever heard my dad laugh with me in the same room in a warm way and me wishing he was like that more of the time was when the Three Stooges were on.
He would just crack up.
And to this very day, it always takes me back.
Yeah.
And it's a warm feeling.
Like you said, it's amazing.
Yeah.
It just triggers that.
And, you know, I do have my it's interesting that I have the sponsor I have.
And, you know, my sponsor is Paul, you know.
And so when I became interested in music, it's not unlike Diane's story where she would talk about in her story where people said, don't sing, but, you know, enjoy music.
I used to get that same speech.
But when I got interested in songwriting, my father would call me every time Paul was on Johnny Carson.
I would walk in and he would say, son.
If you want to know how to write songs, you need to watch this guy.
He goes, he can't sing, but he writes brilliant songs.
This is who you need to study.
I started writing songs when I was like 12 or 13 as a form of emotional therapy.
It's where I would hide in my room with my guitar and I would write the things that I was I couldn't tell anybody, but I could put them in songs.
And I and I would put them in songs in a way that you could hear that and you wouldn't necessarily know I was disclosing me.
It's amazing that my journey led from that living room to ending up having the relationship I've had with Paul now for literally 30 years.
The songs that you wrote when you were 12 or 13, you said that they would allow your feelings to be expressed, but not in a way that people would get to know you through that expression.
Did you have another group of songs that you wrote for yourself that would do that?
Not so much.
There would be songs I would write that would be intensely.
Disclosure oriented, and I would keep those to myself.
So I guess, yes, in that respect, but the ratio of those two to the songs that were still I mean, they were every bit as full of disclosure, but it wasn't necessarily like a first person use of language.
Right. Yeah.
And I think some of that is because, you know, one of the fond memories of childhood is we had this big console stereo that was like this huge piece of.
Furniture, right?
You know, we did, too.
OK, it's one of those things.
It's like owning a piano.
And then and then it had a reel to reel tape deck in it.
And it was very, very fancy.
And my father put all his favorite music on these reel to reel tapes.
And he would his solace would be he would lay in the living room floor at like 11 to like one in the morning and just listen to these reel to reel tapes with Simon and Garfunkel and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.
A lot of a lot of that folk stuff and a lot of the things that that.
Thoughtful music, music that just wasn't boy meets girl and they break each other's heart and stuff like that.
And I would lay there with him for hours.
We wouldn't exchange a single word between us and we would just listen to this music.
And because of that music, I think that pushed me towards a certain style of writing, you know, because that's how you learn.
You emulate, you emulate till you start to find your own voice.
What a beautiful expression of closeness.
Yes.
Created by something outside of your dad or outside of you.
I can see this now.
I didn't know it then, but it was the one.
It was our language of being able to connect emotionally.
That that's what that was.
We couldn't say I feel this way.
Well, son, I feel that way, too.
And this is how I've learned to deal with things like that.
It was we're in a room together and people are saying articulate, intelligent, you know, thought provoking things that we were.
Both relating to.
And so we would stand at that intersection together, you know, and that's how we knew we felt some of the same things, even though it was never discussed.
Yeah.
So you had that shared common experience that kind of took the form of a relationship outside of an intimate relationship, but a relationship, I guess, nonetheless.
So you're 12.
You're writing songs.
At what point did you start drinking?
Well, I can safely say I was a full blown alcoholic by the time I was probably 18.
And a half years old.
But Texas in those days, you could drink legally at 18.
And it was full strength alcohol.
Yeah.
And so I was living in San Antonio and I was going to high school and my birthday fell while I turned 18 my senior year.
So prior to that, my father had this theory.
It may be a brilliant theory, but not so much for alcoholics.
I've learned was that if if I could go to the refrigerator at any time and take a beer and drink it, even if I was 14.
Right.
Then I would develop this relationship with alcohol where I wouldn't have to sneak off and get it.
And it would be somehow this thing of respect about alcohol.
And I wouldn't become an alcoholic.
OK.
Yeah.
And he had completely different theories about drugs because he was a chemist.
And he would give me these lectures about, you know, now, son, you've been to my job and you see how we deal with chemicals.
And it's very controlled and pristine laboratory conditions and don't ever do drugs.
Because when they.
Make that stuff in the kitchen sink and that it probably has dog hair in it.
So it wasn't he never lectured me about don't do drugs because they could kill you.
It's the quality control issue, apparently.
So.
So I I would end up grabbing a beer from time to time or or when I would work summers with him.
We'd buy a couple of beers and drink them together because you drank and drive.
That was just sort of.
That's what you do.
Yeah.
So we drink beer on the way home.
But when I was 18.
I started drinking because I could legally drink and remember that environment I grew up in.
You know, I was so conditioned not to take risks because even the the tiniest little risk could get you the emotional and physical fallout from that.
And my household was just not worth the pain.
I get it.
But when I was 18, my dad took me to dinner for the family.
And my rite of passage was I was to order everybody in the family's drink.
That was my rite of passage to adulthood.
I went.
I went to the bar and submitted the drink order.
And I was a man at that point.
So what was your first drink at that restaurant?
Do you remember?
Yeah, it was a scotch.
Plain scotch.
Plain scotch.
Because I was taught that proper that you did not dilute a good glass of scotch with even an ice cube.
Like you do not harm the beauty of that substance.
You know, this is what my father taught me.
Right.
It was very strict rules.
Had you ever had scotch prior to that?
I've had a few sips.
Yeah.
But, you know, with my dad, I knew what it was like.
But, you know, that was the grown up man drink.
When my dad wanted to drink, beer wasn't drinking.
That wasn't drinking.
That was just, you know.
Quenching your thirst.
Yeah.
It's just what you do, you know.
But if you're going to have a drink, then you get a really good, you know, a black label scotch or something.
And you don't diminish the effect of just this beautiful thing.
So that's what I ordered.
And from that point on, I was off and running.
My family essentially threw me out of the house.
And a very passive.
Aggressive away when I graduated high school.
So I was just 18 and some months.
Was it just expected that you leave at 18 or were there circumstances going on that you had to leave?
It was sort of expected that I would leave.
The way they did it was this.
They wanted to sell their house and move to a different house because that was going to help save the marriage or whatever it was going to do.
And so they moved into an apartment that had a bedroom for my parents and a bedroom that my brother and sister.
And I was graduating high school and they said, well, there's a walk-in closet if you want to sleep in that.
Literally, this is what they said.
Or you might want to consider getting your own apartment.
So I did.
Wow, that was subtle.
Wasn't it?
Yes, it was very, very subtle.
So I got my first apartment and I went out and bought four cases of Long Neck Lone Star.
And I took all the bottles out and filled my refrigerator.
And those big heavy cardboard beer cases I sat the wooden boards on to be my book because I had the alcoholic decor down like from my very first apartment.
And there's no doubt about it when people came in, what was ahead for them?
It was like, you want a beer?
Because really, that's your only choice, you know?
What did you ramp up first?
Was it the hard alcohol or the beer?
I drank like my dad drank, you know, I just drank.
I drank a six pack a day from like 18 on.
That wasn't drinking.
You didn't start getting.
You didn't start getting into drinking until you were you passed the 12 pack phase and then I buy alcohol for when friends or if it was a date or something, but I met my wife, Victoria, who's also sober coming up on 30 years.
We met in 77 and we've been together ever since she was a couple of years older than me and and yet hard liquor was for for drinking drink, you know, when we were drinking that was called drinking and beer was, I mean, again, beer wasn't drinking beer was just like what you did because you had to get up and go to work.
Yeah.
Get up and go through a day.
So six beers wouldn't make you a little bit sloppy or slurry or.
Oh, yeah.
No, sure it would.
But, you know, but I would either be drinking by myself if it was just, you know, a regular work day or I would be in the company of people who were right there with me.
So so we just kind of we normalized it.
Right.
It was just the environment and you weren't really drunk until the behavior became something that kind of got out of bounds.
For the, you know, the gathering.
Right.
So if you got belligerent or you got, you know, that sort of expansive, boisterous, big storytelling was OK up to a point unless you strictly monopolize the conversation, then you might get called out about it.
Obnoxious is a word that probably could be used.
Yes.
Obnoxious.
Yes.
You know, that's sort of the narcissistic festival of all about me.
And.
And so so that that was when it kind of got out of bounds.
But then, you know, I was starting to play my first professional gigs around that age and clubs, especially in central Texas.
You might make 50 bucks for playing if it was a really good paying gig, but you usually got an unlimited bar tab.
Yeah.
It was called drinks and beer.
So you always made sure you got paid, so to speak.
Yeah.
You drank heavily and you drank as much as you could because that's.
Part of your payment for your gig.
So what happens after you've gathered as many shots or beers in and you're getting to the halfway part of your set or maybe you're taking the break and you're pretty drunk?
How do you go back on after that?
You just got, you know, well, one of the advantages I had is I played a lot of songs I'd written, so nobody knew if I was screwing them up.
And, you know, that's that's an added plus.
Being a songwriter.
Right.
Right.
And then and the other thing is I used to do this thing.
I got this idea from a singer songwriter from Lubbock watching his TV show.
And what that would be is I would tell the bar whatever they were drinking.
I would bet the entire bar if there were 100 people in there, I bet all 100 people at the same time that I could make up a song on the spot for anything they threw at me.
And I would improvise a song and I'd usually do like a little 12 bar blues thing.
And then I just.
I just riff and I'd storytell over these little things they'd write on cocktail napkins and send up and I'd string a story together.
And it was a way to keep the crowd engaged in what we were doing when I wasn't playing a lot of songs they already knew.
And I never bought around.
And all the years I did this, I never bought around.
I always came up with something.
But what would end up happening as a result of that is they would like 100 people would be buying Victoria and I drinks.
So so we would literally sometimes finish our show.
And sit around and the bartenders would close the place and we just sit around and drink till two or three in the morning because we just had this stack of alcohol covering all these tabletops and we'd share them with the bartenders and, you know, and so so it was just a currency.
It was the currency and he didn't matter if I got drunk and sloppy because, you know, generally the crowd was right there with me and we had all this engagement.
Howard, we played some of those places with the chicken wire.
I mean, no kidding.
And.
It was it was rough stuff down in Texas.
You know, how long did you keep this up?
How long did the gigging and drinking combination go on for you?
It really took full flower at 18 and it went till probably two and a half weeks before my 33rd birthday.
So for almost 15 years.
And I had I'd been in San Antonio.
I had gotten a day job.
That day job took me to Austin.
When that ended, I opened a record.
Studio and I made my living producing acts and performing all over central Texas and playing with people.
And I did not get sober in Texas.
But the journey started there.
I had a bass player who literally ended up in the hospital because he ran out of alcohol and he went into the DTs and he had seizures.
And he to me, that's what an alcoholic looked like.
You know, even though I drank shot for shot with this guy.
Right.
We ended up in a situation where we were in a recording studio.
And I had started what I called I refer to now as sobriety binges.
OK.
And what I mean by this is I began to suspect this alcohol thing.
There might be a problem there, but I didn't know anything about AA.
And if you ask me what an alcoholic was, it was this other guy.
So, I mean, easily find somebody who's worse than me and point at them.
Right.
Sure.
What I ended up doing was I quit drinking for a little while and I go, see, I cannot drink.
How long was the wine?
I think the longest while I ever got was maybe six months.
Usually it was a couple of weeks, maybe a month.
So with the volume that you were drinking at that time, quitting for six months, did you not notice any any repercussions, withdrawal and that kind of thing?
I did.
What did you attribute that to?
Well, I had a sense that it was going to be a problem for my little shorter sobriety binges.
And so I waited till I got deathly sick with one of those Texas flus.
I was very smart.
See?
I knew I was going to feel lousy for at least two weeks because I was so sick with the flu and I went great time to try stop and drinking for longer.
Just don't start again.
Right.
By the time I had come out of all the horrible flu symptoms and the high fevers and the shakes and all that, I was kind of past the first main stage of the alcoholic detox.
OK.
And of course, my sugar consumption went through the roof.
I started living on nine pound bags of M&M's because, you know, my body craves.
I started that what all that sugar that the alcohol was being converted into.
So and I didn't know this until looking back after I'd gotten sober, but it was always to prove that I could manage the drink.
And I was always thinking about the drink when I wasn't having it.
And I did not understand that that had anything to do with alcoholism at that time in my life.
So I ended up we lost the studio.
They found asbestos in our recording studio and they condemned the building.
And I could not find another place that I could afford to lease.
In Austin.
So I had a friend who lived in L.A. and Victoria and I.
And then we moved to L.A. and I spent the first year in L.A. basically just drinking myself the rest of the way to the bottom.
I mean, I couldn't get out of my own apartment.
This is leading up to your last year prior to A.A.?
Yes.
1990, we moved to L.A.
What was that like once you got there?
Well, I was infatuated.
You know, I mean, this was a place.
All my favorite music came from L.A.
Right.
You know, I was far more a West Coast sensibility kind of guy.
I love that sort of folk rock, Crosby, Stills, Nash.
All of that was my thing.
And so I just kind of felt like I had landed in the promised land.
OK.
And I was recording songs in my little apartment.
Yeah, but I wasn't getting out of the house.
And I was just my world was getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
And I started going to music business things and everybody was drinking.
And then all of that.
Now I learned that you'd have conversations and then the next day you'd follow up on them.
Nobody could remember the conversations they had.
So from a business standpoint, it didn't work very well.
Not a great idea.
It seemed very glamorous at the time.
Was Victoria keeping up with you at that point in terms of the drinking?
Oh, a drink for a drink.
OK.
So you didn't have anybody around that was encouraging you to maybe cut back or taper back or quit entirely?
No.
No, we were drinking buddies.
You think that made it harder to do?
You think if she had told you to quit, you would have?
Probably not.
You know, I'm a defined alcoholic.
I would have used all those skills that I learned from my father.
I will call it conversational jujitsu.
OK.
So somebody comes at you with something and you use the leverage of that argument and flip it back at against them.
And before it's all over, they're wondering how they could have been so wrong to ever bring this up to you.
You know?
Yeah.
That old gaslighting people.
Calling it.
Totally.
Yes.
I was trained in that early on by my father because that's how he dealt with everything.
Right?
But it was her confronting me that led to my first meeting.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
Victoria got a job as a dental assistant.
So she had met Paul.
Uh-huh.
He had come in as a patient and he was wearing a circle and triangle earring, which is a very ancient symbol.
Oh, yeah.
And she's gotten a conversation with him about that symbol.
And I wear an earring, the same earring.
You know, it's kind of part of our little...
Family thing that we do.
And he said, well, you know, it's this fellowship I belong to and we don't drink or use one day at a time.
And he asked her if she had trouble drinking.
So what happened is Paul had called me and he'd listened to this song I'd written.
And Victoria told me she'd played in this cassette of this song.
And Paul calls me up and he opens the conversation by singing my own song over the phone to me.
Victoria had told me that she had played this song for him.
And I know the only other person on the planet that had heard it was her.
And so because I knew he'd heard the song, I knew it was him.
And he's singing.
He goes, you know, I think you've got some talent.
And then he wasted no time.
I hear you're trying to stop drinking.
And I answered, I have stopped, which was true.
Because by this time in my life, I was going on another sobriety binge, you know.
And my term for not drinking but having no recovery is...
Sodriety.
All the abstinence and none of the recovery.
Okay, so I was in this little sobriety phase.
And he was out of town and we were going to meet.
And after talking to him, I was not going to drink so that when I met him, I could tell him,
see, I haven't been drinking.
So I was in this sobriety white knuckle thing.
Just pure trying to deal with the willpower of it all.
Was this during a time where you might have been going through detox?
Was it close enough to your last drink for that to happen?
Yes, it was.
I had gotten really, really, really trashed.
And my alcoholism had progressed to the point where, you know, I was 6'1", about 192 pounds.
And I had red rashes from like my Adam's apple to almost my groin from alcohol poisoning.
Okay, because my liver was starting to lose its ability to process the alcohol.
And if I didn't drink alcohol, if I didn't have alcohol by my bedside where I could drink
at like 2 or 3 in the morning.
At least a few sips, I would start having like little minor convulsions in the night.
I had no idea how bad I was.
I had no clue.
Okay.
So I was kind of going through this with no idea of what was going on or that it was the alcohol.
But I didn't want to drink because I wanted to, because I didn't know anything about alcoholism.
I just thought there was something wrong with my will.
You know, that text is upbringing.
You just pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
I was a bad person and that's why I had these problems.
Okay.
And I needed to be a good person.
So I was working on being a good person.
And what had happened is I had sat on the edge of my bed that day in my little apartment
and I had hit the stage of complete pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.
And I had a .38 caliber Derringer that I had moved away, moved to California with.
I'm sitting there and I take this thing out and I load it and I cock it and I point it
at my forehead about 10 inches away.
And I'm staring down the barrel of it.
And I am so lost in self-pity and I am so morose.
I am so dark because I got really, I quit being a joyful thing, alcohol.
And when I drank, I just got darker and darker.
I wanted to kill myself and there was a sense that alcohol might be the way to get it done.
Okay.
Because I just, that's who I, that's what I felt I deserved out of life is to not have it basically.
And so I'm staring at this pistol and I'm being, oh God, I still remember the cynicism in my brain.
It was like, well, they say, if you stare down the barrel of a gun right before you
pull the trigger, the barrels look huge.
Like you're staring down a 55 gallon drum.
And I'm like, this doesn't look so big and all of this stuff.
And I was just, I was right there.
My finger was on the trigger.
And then I swear, and I did not know this until looking back.
And recovery, but I swear to God, my higher power saved me the only way I could have possibly been saved.
And, and, and I have come to believe in my recovery that my higher power will communicate with me through whatever language I can understand in that moment.
Now, if somebody had come to me and said 12 steps and one day at a time, I'd have pulled the fricking trigger, man.
I'm like, not interested.
But what happened?
And a thought comes into my brain and thought that comes into my brain is your wife's going to come home and find you splattered all over your bedroom.
She's going to have to clean that up.
She's going to have to talk to your family.
They're going to wonder about their son who this came out of the blue for them.
Like, you know, who always puts on the happy face when he talks to her and she's going to have to bear that burden.
And that's what pulled my finger off the trigger.
And the hammer was cocked.
You were ready to go.
I was, I was, I was out.
And my higher power reached through that self-pity and that darkness and used my relationship, essentially codependency.
I mean, if I had been a black belt codependent, I'd have just pulled the trigger.
I'm like, you know, not my problem.
Right.
You know, but, but no.
So that saved me.
And Victoria came home three hours later and I'm sitting in this little living room of this apartment.
And she walks.
She walks in the door.
She takes one step inside the door and she closes the door.
And she says, she doesn't come any closer.
And I'm just sitting there.
I'm just, it just, it must have felt like a foggy day in London in that room, you know?
And she looks at me and she said, you scare me.
That's all she said.
You had said nothing yet.
I had said nothing.
She just looked at me and she said, you scare me.
This is after you've come on.
You came off the bed from pointing the gun at your own forehead.
Correct.
So the energy in that room was so intense and I'm in the living room.
I'm not even in the bedroom now.
I'm sitting out in the living room and she walks in the door and I had, there's so much self-loathing and so much hatred.
And there's just so much feeling.
I am so incredibly broken and I have no idea what's wrong.
Then there's just this silence.
There was nothing.
I did not attempt to defend it.
And she said, why don't you?
Why don't you go to one of those meetings Paul has told us about?
And I answered, this was a perfect, brilliant spiritual response.
I said to my dear, beloved wife, if it will get you off my ass, I'll do it.
You know?
So from one codependent response to the next.
To the next, totally.
My codependency totally saved my life.
Great.
That is a, that's a great story.
Were you inebriated?
I was.
Full-blown sobriety.
We'll be right back.
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And we're back.
You were in sobriety when you're sitting there with that pistol.
Absolutely.
This is why I've come to understand the power in that statement in our text of recovery,
which is alcohol is cunning, baffling, and powerful.
And that I can experience all these things.
And that I can experience all these things without that substance.
And that is why actual recovery is critical.
It's like I joke with the guys I sponsor.
I'm like, okay, yes, I've celebrated 30 years of sobriety.
But if I had to reset my sobriety date every time I went through alcoholic emotionalism
or thinking or even occasionally behavior, I sure wouldn't have.
I'd be lucky sometimes to have 30 days, let alone 30 years, because my, you know,
I have to do it.
I have to work this thing every day to deal with those things that will cause me to behave
alcoholically without using my treatment for alcoholism was alcohol.
And of course, the disease of alcoholism can just as easily lead you down the road to that
kind of behavior.
For me, it was not only the alcoholism, but concurrently, I had clinical depression.
So did I.
You know, for me, if the alcoholism wasn't going to do it, the clinical depression would.
It was my first treatment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so.
You know, I can envision you sitting on the edge of that bed, feeding those thoughts.
You had no alcohol in there to do it.
If you're a clinically depressed person or suffered from other mental health issues,
it seems like a perfectly reasonable approach.
That's right.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I am one of those alcoholics about whom an entire chapter could be written.
Uh-huh.
Right.
You know, in the doctor's opinion.
And in my opinion, people that are willing to make a statement such as you made or that
I'm willing to acknowledge about my journey and recovery, we are in real time right now
through our how we live our sobriety.
We are writing that chapter.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think it is a paramount and it's like a holy mission in terms of recovery that that
those of us who know how to live sober with this stuff can convey and share our experience,
strength and hope because because it's scary.
And a lot of people do.
I know I started drinking today.
I know I had to deal with this other issue that I had.
I started self-medicating, but then my solution became this full-blown, you know, death-inducing
problem underneath unto itself.
You got through this.
You went into AA within days of this happening or the next day?
Yes.
The very next day I went to the meeting.
My first meeting, I literally got the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous in my first meeting
without knowing it.
I show up and my plan was to drive by the meeting, not go in and then tell Victoria
I'd gone to the meeting.
Right?
Yeah.
Stretching the truth.
Yeah.
So I go and I park and I walk up to the steps of this thing.
I decided to get out of my car for some unknown reason that was really my higher power.
And I'm walking over to the steps and there was this scrawny, like you could, if he turned
sideways, you could like, you wouldn't know he was there.
So then guy standing on the steps named Malik and Malik reached down the steps and he said,
put his hand out and he said, welcome.
And he grabbed my hand.
And it felt literally like he pulled me up the five or six steps and now I'm standing
in the doorway and I'm seeing all these people and I have no money and they've got coffee
and I have to ascertain if you're having to buy the coffee because I don't want to be
embarrassed by going over to get the coffee and not being able to pay for it.
So once I figure out I can get a cup of coffee and I go sit down against the wall, I heard
a man, his name was Tony M.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He was a three inch tall African-American gentleman that had been a Vietnam combat veteran
and he spoke and I heard my story and he looked nothing like me.
He came from a world completely different.
He came from inner city LA, but when he talked about that fear of living in the world and
not knowing how to deal with his feelings and never being enough and then having to
overcompensate for it and how alcohol and drugs helped him with all that, I'm just like,
yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
And it was like something inside me that wanted to stay alive latched onto that.
And I grabbed a big book because they told me if I didn't have the money, they give me
one.
And they said the recovery was in the first 164 pages.
So in typical good German, don't ask anybody for health fashion, I went home day one and
I read the first 164 pages.
That's great.
And I did it so I could go back day two and go, yeah, I read that stuff.
I got it.
I got it.
got it. I'm good. I got it. I read it. Yeah, we're good. It's all good. Don't worry about it.
Was your thinking at that time when you were reading, were you thinking that that was how
the program was worked by just reading? Or did you get the connection between the reading and
the meetings and the fellowship and the service? No, I didn't get any of that. I was able to soak
up that there were people in that environment. I heard the language of the heart. And the language
of the hearts is what saved me. It fired me up because I felt like there are people here like
me. At least this one guy who was way too scary, actually, for me to actually talk to. But I knew
that he was there and there were probably more like him based on the responses that people had
to him in the meeting. And so I knew there was something I didn't know what, didn't know sponsors,
didn't know steps, didn't know any of that stuff. So you were befuddled early on. So how long did
it take you to finally get a sponsor and work all 12 steps? I asked for a sponsor within the first
probably 10 years. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this.
10 days of being in that meeting. I went home from that first meeting. And I think I probably
talked to Victoria for three hours about a one hour meeting. I was like, my soul was on fire.
Okay. The very next night, Paul was speaking at a meeting. He told Victoria about it. And I took
her to her first meeting where she ended up identifying. And then we ended up on this
journey together, which led us into the 12 traditions. And I'm just a huge proponent of
12 traditions in your marriage. And I've done workshops on them and the whole bit. So what
happened is I called Paul and I said, I was hemming and hawing about asking him to be my sponsor. And
he wouldn't let me off the hook. And he's like, sounds like you're trying to ask me. I said,
I am. And he goes, and then I thought I could just say, well, yeah, I am trying to ask you.
And I thought that was good. That was asking. And he's like, well, I'm like, well, what? He goes,
well, ask. Right. So I had to.
Actually say, will you be my sponsor? And then he wouldn't answer. And he asked me to meet him at
this restaurant. And I meet him. And that's when he told me that if I wanted his help working the
12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, that he would be happy to help me. And that would be the basis
of our relationship. That would be what our relationship is about. And so I said, I accepted
those terms instantly. You know him well enough to know, and I've known him for 30 years now, that
he's very down to earth. We ended up being, it was hilarious. Our first five years of my sobriety,
I became sort of like his, like his accessory, you know, and I, and I worked the steps as he
directed, you know, and, and I remember when I, I remember when I did my fifth step, I really felt
like I'd kind of crossed the Rubicon. Like I was no longer in the bleachers of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Like I was fully in the game. You know, I was looking around in the meetings at people whose
recovery I respected and going, yeah, I, they did a fifth step.
I've done a fifth step now, you know, I was, I was, I was a 15 year old inside, you know? And,
and so something really, really profound that has changed my sobriety, like from in my second year
to this day occurred to me as in, I experienced it. It's a foundation of my recovery. Paul and
I had gone to speak for this guy named Jim and I can't, he's probably not alive anymore. He had
like 34 years, 28 years ago. Right. So anyway, he kind of talked like he,
you know, he had that Tetris kind of thing going on. So I kind of felt like home, you know? And he
comes to this meeting and he sits at the front of the meeting and he says, my name's Jim. I'm an
alcoholic. He goes, if you want what we have, and he stops and he goes, what do we have? And the
whole meeting just like is dumbstruck. Like it's a pop quiz and nobody is ready for it. Right.
Okay. So he smiles, you know, and we're all,
hanging on every word because he's already announced he's got 34 years of sobriety. So
there's must be Yoda like wisdom and all this. And, and so he points at the banner on the wall
and he reads the 12th step and he says, having had, he goes, you'll notice that word had his
past tense. He said, having had a spiritual awakening, he said, now this next word, he goes,
you hear this misquoted all the time. He said, as the result of these steps, he goes, now I'm 34
years sober. I can promise you I've had a lot more results.
Then that spiritual awakening. But that is what my program promises me. I will have,
I may or may not get all these other results, but if I do this, I am going to get that result. And
by the time I get to the 12th step, that's past tense for a reason. It's going to happen. So
your, your challenge is to recognize it. And I'm like, okay, okay. So he's got me like I'm locked
in. Right. I'm really interested because this kind of appeals to how I was raised. You know,
and this thinking about all this stuff. And then he goes, all right. So now that you know what we
have, he smiles. He goes, if you believe that sobriety is one day at a time, and if you are
willing to go to any lengths to get it, and we're all like nodding along, like little AA sheep at
this point, because we're not going to get suckered twice by this guy. He says, if you believe those
two things, then my challenge to you, everybody in this room is to work all 12 steps every day.
And I felt like,
I had been hit by a lightning bolt because the logic was like, just, I could not argue my way
intellectually or on any level around the logic of what he was saying. And he goes, look, I know
some of you, your sponsors are going to say, that's all taken care of in 10 and 11, living in
10 and 11 and 12. And he goes, I'm not here to argue with anybody's sponsor or anybody's recovery.
He said, but he goes, if you want to talk to me afterwards, he goes, I work all 12 steps every
day.
And so I talked to him after the meeting and he gave me a few pointers on that. From two years of
sobriety to like literally this morning, I have, upon awakening, I have a routine where I start on
step one every morning and I work through an inventory. I do things that I'll send to my
sponsor, you know, as part of a fifth step. And then by the time I'm kind of rolling into my day,
I have a sense,
of who the amended sober version of Wes needs to be for Monday, since we're talking on a Monday.
So when I got my day going today, I knew that, oh, I've been a little agitated lately and I've
been a little this. And these are the amended behaviors that if I'm living in my recovery,
I'll embrace for today. That's my amends list for today. And I'm going to go be that guy today.
And then if I quit being that guy today, I'll do it. I'll try to catch it right then. That's my
10th step. I will turn to my higher power and I will be of love and service.
You know, and this transformed my recovery in such a profound way early on that I began to really,
I think, I think Howard, what that did for me is it really brought home the statement in the big
book that it's a design for living. And prior to that, it had been a design for penance, maybe for
having screwed up my life with alcoholic alcohol. It had been a design for getting myself out of
trouble when I felt miserable.
You know, it had been it had been foxhole recovery designed for everything but living, living.
Exactly. And that was the pivot point where I really started down the road of, you know,
if you just make this how you live, it's going to become the habit of how you respond more than
your disease is going to become the habit of how you respond. And that that was it. This huge
moment from two. And then my journey throughout sobriety and it's taken me some amazing place
has all hinged. Really, it turned.
That moment. And it's it's affected me to this day. And I share it with sponsees. And I even
made up a little like Excel thing that goes, all right, look, if you don't know how to do this,
I would prefer not to do this is way too formal. But just kind of here's a way to ask. Walk
yourself through 12 steps. And I send it to them. It's all straight out of the big book.
It's all straight out of the big book.
To have that framework to be able to use on a daily basis is such a beautiful expression of your,
your gratitude. I mean, it amazes me because to be able to do that on a daily basis for the better
part of 30 years is amazing. And being able to pass that on to others is also quite astounding.
And I'm I'm I really love that idea. I'm thinking of ways that I might be able to incorporate some
of those things. You know, there are no new ideas under the sun, but now, you know, you can't go
wrong working the steps and on a daily basis.
So we've been talking for a while now. I wanted to kind of just get your feedback a little bit,
Wes, on some of the challenges, let's say, that have really taken you a little bit away from the
center of the herd. Oh, yeah. Frankly, they've involved on a couple of occasions being in
business situations with people who were sober because, you know, I have naively on occasion
and there's a saying in AA and we all hear it. And I hate this. I mean, hate's a strong word,
but I have a strong word.
Severe distaste for the saying that, you know, you sober up a horse thief, you got a sober horse
thief. Right. And and the reason I find that distasteful is, OK, fine, if you're early in
recovery, I get the point that this is helping you realize that just getting sober did not wash
cleanse you of your character defects. Right. You've got work to do. But man, when you're sober
a while, if you're still stealing horses, there's a problem. Yeah. Right. A sober horse thief is
still a horse thief. Right. Exactly.
And I'm like, not attraction rather than promotion to me. You know, you pitch in the
and I recognize it as a judgment on my part, but I kind of differentiate between judgment
and condemnation, you know, because don't you love it? A newcomer comes in. We say,
don't judge anybody. But hey, by the way, stick with the winners. OK, so that's like, well,
which is it? That's like the old hang on, let go, hang on, let go.
So I've carried my origin story well into my recovery, you know, and a lot of my
coping skills that that have served me well in the world have also served me not so well.
And so as a result, I have picked relationships at times, especially in the business world,
where I was going to be gaslighted and exploited. And what I was doing was I was picking what I knew.
I was picking the relationships that I'd grown up in,
and had modeled for me. And I know this kind of is a little therapy oriented.
But the point is, by doing inventories, I began to discover these patterns. Right. And I have done,
you can imagine how many inventories I've done doing 12 steps every day. I mean, it's just like
inventories like breathing to me. You just do inventory. That's just what you do.
Sure. So what would happen is I would get in these compromised situations by people that
I would think because they're sober, they weren't going to behave this way. When in fact,
all I had to do was look at their behavior. Yeah. Okay. They were busy showing me who they were.
And I was busy playing denial about it. You know, because I guess I was trying to heal
a wound from earlier in life. Right. So why that separated me from the herd is part of me that
wants to go to darkness and disease would go see those people. And it quit being that one,
that choice that I made. You know, I had to do the inventory. Wes, you chose this. Yeah. You know,
until I got to that point, I found myself, I would be isolated a little bit because I felt like I'd
been hurt by the very thing that was saving me. And that was not in fact true. Yeah. But I had to
do the inventory and see how I had placed myself in a position to be harmed by others. Yeah. And
why I was continuing to do that. Yeah. Those have been the points where I felt I would get
separated. And then the other challenge was when I moved from Los Angeles to Colorado, I moved to a
very small town. Yeah. And I had to do the inventory. Yeah. And I had to do the inventory. Yeah. And
it was a small mountain town. And like, it was like the same eight guys, you know, with the
tobacco stains on the t-shirt telling the same stories every meeting. That was it. And I really
had a hard time. I ended up solving that problem by driving like an hour and a half to get to
Denver to go to meetings because I needed a broader sense of perspective. I needed,
I needed more people in my recovery mix.
You know what you were saying just a minute ago about the, the business relationships. I don't
think anybody who has been sober for a length of time has not experienced the situation in a
business setting, whether it's hiring a contractor or doing business in any way whatsoever with
another member of the fellowship that I just naturally, and some of the things that have
gone wrong, and I've had an awful lot of business relationships that have gone right as a result of
those people being in the fellowship. Yeah, so have I.
But the very first thing I want to do whenever it is I start doing business with those people
is ascribe to them certain attributes because they're sober. I'm thinking, well, that means
that they're pretty responsive and that means they're pretty accountable. And boy, when I called
this guy in the program about a problem that I was having in the program, he called me right back.
Why won't he call me back now when he's halfway done fixing my roof? You know, that kind of thing.
Like you, I've had to kind of backtrack and say, wait a second, I'm still dealing with people here.
The fact that they're sober doesn't change every particular aspect of their personality,
but it's real easy to think, well, he's a horse thief. He's gotten sober. He's probably not a
horse thief anymore, right? Until you look in his backyard and find all these horses with
somebody else's brand on them. That's a clue. That's always a little bit disappointing.
Yeah. That's something that can create a disappointment and being pulled away
because of meetings that are monotonous or because of the times I've been most impatient in AA have
been those times when I've felt, especially around service commit, geez, why won't more of these
people volunteer to chair the meeting? It seems like I'm always the guy, the last guy, because
nobody will do it. I'm always the guy to do it. What's up with these people and wanting to go
elsewhere? And in a place like Houston,
it's got 2000 meetings a week. That is very easy to do. But my sponsor came back to me and said,
why don't you look at what's going on and why you're feeling that way and what your part is?
And like you, I was led to do another fourth step and I got to it. And now I don't take it
personally. Now I just don't take it personally. Nobody shows up to do it. Well, okay. So I get
what you're talking about. Yeah. You know, it always ends up coming back to me doing
the work of looking at my part. And I will say this,
those times I have felt truly separated. I mean, the biggest separation was when I moved to
Colorado because I left my community, you know, wherever you get sober always feels like, you
know, sacred ground. And I missed the cultural aspects of Los Angeles and just, I missed all of
it. And, you know, I came to Colorado because of a business that I'd helped start that wanted me
here. And, and I,
I didn't really want to leave LA, but I wanted to make a living. So, you know, people would say
those AA bromides of you all, you got to grow your planet. And I would say, plant a pine tree
and Joshua tree and see how it does. Okay. You know, I would always have some sort of smart ass
comeback for it, you know, but over the years, the list of times that Alcoholics Anonymous has
lifted me up and gotten me through, it's like a 50 to one ratio. Isn't that amazing.
But we ought to take a look at that one thing,
of course, let's fixate on it. That one thing surely I could have controlled and managed that
somehow. It's like God's track record is a hundred percent. He's pulled me through every situation
that life could possibly throw at me. God's got a flawless track record. Why is it? I go into the
next thing expecting that he's going to fail. It doesn't make sense. I know, I know, I know,
but it, it doesn't make sense. You know, this has been such a beautiful opportunity for us
to get to know each other and to hear you talk about some of the challenges that you faced and
some of the gifts and the way that you sponsor and the way that you're sponsored. I mean, it is,
it's a blueprint of contented sobriety. You have hit on one of my, this is like one of my
foundational perspectives right there. What you just said. And that is this, when in my disease,
I believed if I could be comfortable enough, long enough,
I would be content. I had it backwards. And what Alcoholics Anonymous has done is I can be
miserable. I can be stressed. I can be worried about any number of life pressures that are not
unreasonable to worry about and still look in the mirror today and be content with who I see.
And so I really realized how that desperate chasing of comfort was sort of the heart of
my addiction, that the contentment,
with who I continue to grow into, because it's an ongoing deal,
is, it's the foundation. I can deal with all manner of discomfort. It's going to come and
it's going to go. But I believe in who Alcoholics Anonymous has enabled me to become. That and my
higher power. I believe in that. And it never, it just always, no matter what level comfort or
discomfort I'm in, I know that this thing is going to resolve.
In a positive fashion, even if I don't recognize the positive nature of it at the time,
you know, a lot of times it's looking back and my vision gets better looking back sometimes
than it does looking forward.
That's such an inspiring frame of mind, such an inspiring spirit to have in general,
just about the program. I so appreciate you doing this today. This has just been,
it's been a beautiful opportunity to get to know you. You and I share a lot of those innate,
God-given things.
So if God's the great equalizer, you and I are on the exact same plane together.
To me, that thought kind of blows my mind. But I like thinking about that.
I like thinking that God had me do this today with you.
I do too.
You've been terrific. I love you. And I want to really thank you for doing this today, Wes.
My pleasure. It's been a privilege. And you know, Victoria and I have
great love and respect for all that you do. And I just feel honored to be able to have done that.
Thanks very much.
Thanks for doing this.
See you later.
Well, my friends, that's a wrap for this episode of AA Recovery Interviews.
I want to thank my guest, Wes H., for sharing his story. And thank you for tuning in.
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