Didn’t Cross Any Invisible Line — I Leaped Right Into Alcoholism at Fifteen – John H.
About This Speaker Tape
John H. from Atlanta tells the story of leaping straight into alcoholism at 15 — blacking out on his first drink, shifting friend groups overnight, and coming home drunk one snowy night to find his father waiting with a cup of tea and the question that broke him: 'Where have I failed you?' To get out of the Pennsylvania coal town, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, went to Parris Island at 141 pounds and came out 175 pounds of spring steel, then saw Korea, Japan (where he drove a staff car for a major and regularly passed out in the back seat), and Southern California. He went shopping in Los Angeles for a wife, had children who ran and hid when he came through the door, and held on to a sales job at the Los Angeles Times until he couldn't.
Whiskey quit working, beer quit working, and he turned to Ernest and Julio Gallo — a red-faced Irishman drinking sweet wine. He got fired, came home to find a moving van and his wife taking the kids back to her parents, and ended up living in a Renault Dauphine in an orange grove off Valley Boulevard with a puke streak on the inside of the back window. One morning he fell out of the car onto his knees throwing up blood and cried out to Higher Power for the first time in ten years. A message came through crystal clear: call Alcoholics Anonymous. A phone operator connected him to Sybil; he drove to the Southwest Alano Club on a street he had worked a thousand times without ever seeing the place, and Joe Motes met him at the door. Sobriety date: April 9, 1959.
His sponsor Howdy Don't took him out of the car and into his basement, sent him back to the LA Times to make amends (they gave him his old job back), and made him pay child support before rent. The Big Book at the Alano Club was chained to the wall; he bought his own from a woman with biceps the size of his thighs, and he read it. Career success followed — Wisconsin, Atlanta, more money than he'd imagined — but so did wreckage in sobriety: a selfish second marriage built around a job offer, a horrible divorce inside the fellowship, and a business partner who committed suicide. He went back to California for a month and worked the steps all over again.
The man who once cared only what other people thought of him came home caring what he thought of himself, with sobriety at the dead center of his life and everything else arranged around it. In 1980 Higher Power brought Mary into his life; they married in 1982 after he courted her for two and a half years because he was terrified of repeating the past. Nineteen years later he stands at the Great Plains Roundup grateful — and grateful, he says, is an action, not a word.
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Full Transcript
I feel like I'm running for office.
I first of all want to thank the committee for inviting us.
Thanks. My wife and I were able to come, and I'm delighted to be here tonight with you.
And I hope that, you know, 350 people for a warm-up act...
I first of all want to thank the committee for inviting us.
Thanks. My wife and I were able to come, and I'm delighted to be here tonight with you.
And I hope that, you know, 350 people for a warm-up act...
I feel like I'm running for office.
I first of all want to thank the committee for inviting us.
Thanks. My wife and I were able to come, and I'm delighted to be here tonight with you.
And I hope that, you know, 350 people for a warm-up act is not too bad,
because the big act comes tomorrow night.
I wanted to get a chance to thank some of the people and their hospitality that they've shown us since we arrived.
We arrived yesterday.
And when we got in, Dan picked us up at the airport exactly on time, had his little sign, made us feel really wonderful,
took us to a beautiful hotel, got us checked in.
And one of the nicest things that's ever happened to my wife and I.
Here we are in Omaha on Thanksgiving.
They said, we've arranged for you to have Thanksgiving dinner with a family.
A family who's a member of the Fellowship.
Now, that's a very considerate, kind, and loving thing to do to a couple of strange people from Atlanta.
And I want to tell you that that impressed my wife and I deeply.
Terry and David and his family, and they had three generations there having Thanksgiving dinner, and it was wonderful.
You know, it was like being at home.
And that's typical of the Midwest.
That's typical of Midwestern hospitality.
And I want you to know that we appreciate it from the bottom of our heart.
Thank you.
You know, when I got ready to come to this roundup, I got a telephone call from my brother, Bob.
My brother, Bob, is not a member of this Fellowship.
But he supports my attendance.
Because he watches.
He watched me go through some of my shenanigans.
And he said to me, I want you to ask the audience, when you get to Omaha,
is there anybody in the audience whose last name is Brennan?
I'm safe.
I'm safe.
Because I want to tell you this story.
It's a story that the genealogy brother of mine tells me about Omaha.
See, my family comes from the coal mining community in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Anthracite coal miners.
And in the late 1880s, it was filled with Irish immigrants coming to this country because they could get work in the coal mines in Pennsylvania.
But some of those guys were troublemakers.
And they were referred to as the Molly Maguires.
And some of you may have seen that movie that they did on the Molly Maguires.
Well, my mother's name was Burke.
My grandmother, her mother's name was Brennan.
And she had two brothers that were kind of troublemakers.
And they were members of the Molly Maguires.
And both of those boys were dynamiters.
And you see, they had a little conflict going on with the owners of the mines about how the workers were being treated from a safety standard and a pay standard.
So they decided that they were going to blow up a few coal mines.
Well, of course, that was a crime.
It was a criminal act.
And that meant they had to get out of town.
So the Irish group took them to the railroad.
And most of the conductors on the railroad were Irish.
And they got them on the trains.
And they ended up in Chicago.
And they put them on another train.
And the other train was going to Omaha.
So that's where they got off, was in Omaha.
And he got off.
And he got off.
And he got off.
And he said, be sure to check to see if any of our relatives are in the audience.
But that's my story about the Brennets.
And you know that the area that I grew up in and the family that I came from,
I have to tell you that, you know, nowadays it's commonplace in Alcoholics Anonymous
when we kind of victimize ourselves in this disease of alcoholism.
I have to tell you that we have...
I have a lot of talk at times about the dysfunctional family.
I want to tell you folks tonight,
I came from as close a functional family as anybody seated in this audience.
Is that I came from a mother and father who dearly loved each other.
They didn't even drink.
And I have three brothers who all drink.
And four boys growing up, we had a very...
a very happy and a wonderful, really close family.
And really cared about each other.
And it shows up in our family today.
Because when I tell people about the relationship that I have with my brothers,
sometimes they're rather shocked.
But that came from my mother and father.
The influence of my mother and dad.
The four brothers in my family live in different parts of the country.
We talk to each other maybe two or three times a week.
By telephone.
I think that's kind of unusual in today's age.
But that was instituted because we were a very close family growing up.
And we've continued that tradition.
As a matter of fact, about once a year we get together for a week
and we go to our place in Hilton Head and spend the week together.
Just the brothers.
And it's a nice family.
But this is the kind of a family that I came from.
And you know,
when I was growing up I felt pretty secure in this little group.
We didn't have a lot, but we had more than some.
And I was born during the Depression.
So, and I had two older brothers who preceded me.
And one younger brother who came after me.
And we didn't have a lot, as I said.
But we had a lot of love in our family.
And we were very close.
And I really didn't feel like I was deprived.
Of course, we didn't have enough money.
But, you know, I didn't like it.
I didn't like that idea too much.
But I don't know any kid that likes that idea.
And, you know, I was a member of the, we were a member of the Catholic faith.
And I felt pretty secure as far as church and God and country is concerned.
And everybody in the family had little jobs that they worked at.
And even as a young child, I can remember that I had a kind of a childlike,
pretty,
straightforward kind of relationship with God.
I mean, I was taught about God in the church.
And I had good images in my mother and dad.
So, therefore, what I did is I felt I really had kind of had a place in society.
And I felt pretty secure.
And as I proceeded in life, one of the things that happened to me,
which happens, I think, to a lot of young men,
is that I had my first drink of booze when I was 15 years old.
And I know by today's standards and alcoholics,
that's a little late in life to be having your first drink.
But it was the best that I could do at the time.
But, you know, I don't know if it made the same kind of impression
on the rest of the group that I was with when we had this drink as it did with me.
You know, here I was growing up and I was a tall, skinny kid at 15 years of age.
And I was.
In this awkward stage.
And I really wasn't quite sure about these things called girls.
And I'd like to get closer, but didn't know how.
And I got kind of tongue-tied around them.
And that night, these other four fellows and myself had our,
I had my first drink.
And it was powerful.
I mean, I can remember the time.
I can remember the people who were there.
I can remember whose car we were in.
I can remember what we drank because it made a big difference in my life.
Now, I don't know if it did for those other four, but it sure did for me.
And I understood the moment I had that drink the reason adults tried to keep it to themselves.
Because this was great stuff.
And I thought that what I was going to do is I was going to pursue this.
And I want to tell you what happened that night at 15 years of age.
I got drunk, and I blacked out.
And you see, I thought that that was part of drinking.
I thought everybody did that.
I didn't realize that other people didn't have blackouts.
I did right out of the box.
And that's the reason I want to tell you tonight that I know that there's a lot of people here tonight
who were going through life, and they came to a period,
and they crossed what they referred to in Alcoholics Anonymous as that invisible line.
I don't believe that that's what happened with me.
I believe that I just leaped right into alcoholism at 15 years of age.
And the reason that I say that is that I was a very good student up to that time.
I mean, I was a bright kid in school, and I got good grades in school, and things came to me very easily.
And after I had that first drink, I shifted a whole group of friends for a whole new group of friends.
And I drank with the people who drank like I did in high school.
You know, we talk in AA about birds of a feather.
I did that just naturally.
You know, when people wanted to talk to me about my drinking, about what I did the night before,
I just eliminated them from my group because I didn't want to listen.
I didn't want to listen to that stuff.
Anybody who wanted to separate me from my drinking, even then, I wouldn't have anything to do with them.
And I had an incident that happened when I was 16 years old, which stands out in my life,
because I really think it was a turning point for me.
In this town, drinking was an accepted way of life.
In this town, alcoholism was accepted.
Lots of taverns, lots of places to drink, a lot of hard drinking going on.
I was 16 years old, and I had gotten drunk down in the little taverns in the area that I was raised in.
And I came home in one of those snowstorms, the first storm of the year, and it's kind of that dry, crunchy snow.
And I remember coming home, and I was staggering, and I was trying to make it to the house,
and I got as far as the back steps, and there was an entrance to the kitchen, which is in the back of our house.
And I made it to the back steps, and I think I must have passed out on the back steps.
Now, my relationship with my father was of the highest level.
I loved him dearly and loved my mom, but my relationship with my father was outstanding.
I could talk to my dad about anything.
And he came out on the back steps, he was in the kitchen,
and picked up his 16-year-old son, drunk, and took him into the kitchen.
And he said, we're going to fix a cup of tea, and we're going to need to talk.
And the Irish, you know, they think tea solves all the problems of the world.
So he fixed a cup of tea, and he sat across me.
This is a man that I adored, I loved and adored.
And I had the greatest respect for him.
And he looked at me with tears in his eyes, and he said to me, where have I failed you?
And you know, that just absolutely, it was like somebody reached inside me and just took a hold of my insides.
Because, you know, I knew that it wasn't what he did in my life.
It was what I did in my life.
And I knew that if I stayed around that town, that I would just break their hearts.
So what I was going to do is I was going to get out of there.
And this wonderful, bright, young man with great grades just barely got out of that high school.
I mean, just barely got out of it.
And as I look back today, of course, I could not see it then.
I was in big trouble with booze before I grew up.
I graduated from high school.
I know that today.
So I made one of my great decisions at that time.
And what it was is that everybody in the school that I went to school with, they were going off to college.
And I made this great decision that I had a choice whether I was going to go to work in a shoe factory
or whether I was going to go in the service.
So I decided, you know, if you're a tall, skinny kid and you have great questions
about your manhood, what you should do is you should enlist
in the United States Marine Corps, which is exactly what I did.
And I went to a godforsaken place called
Parris Island, South Carolina. And I wasn't
in Parris Island, South Carolina 24 hours, and I realized I made
a horrible mistake.
I should have taken that job in a shoe factory.
The year was
1952. It wasn't great timing
on my part. They had a thing going on
called a police action in Korea.
And of course, what happened with me is I just kind of, after
the 13 weeks, I'll tell you a little story about 13 weeks, because this is amazing.
I don't know how they took me in the Marine Corps. I was about the height I am
now, and I weighed 141 pounds.
So I went to Parris Island at 141 pounds. I was there for
13 weeks. And I graduated
out of Parris Island. I weighed 175 pounds.
And I was like a piece of spring steel.
I mean, I was in the best physical condition I was ever in in my life.
And they gave us a 10-day leave because I was going out to a place
called Camp Pendleton. And I was going to go across the water.
Of course, I didn't know all this at that time, but I should have.
But you know that I spent this 10-day
leave just drunk. I just smashed up everybody's car and the family until they
just finally put me on an airplane and got rid of me.
And you know, I want to tell you,
this year is 1952. It's in the
early fall of the year.
I landed in
Burbank in those days because LAX was not there.
And I got on a Greyhound bus.
And the Greyhound bus in Los Angeles, the first stop we made was in
Santa Ana. And in Santa Ana, the bus ride
continued. And we were across this long prairie past El Toro,
which was there at the time. And we wound down into
a little place called San Juan Capistrano.
Lemon groves, you know, very romantic.
I mean, folks, if you grow up in the coal mines
in Pennsylvania, and the great
trip that you make is to Parris Island, South Carolina,
and then you go to a place like California, you think you have
died and gone to heaven. Because it was absolutely
you know, 1952, Southern California was paradise. It was just
beautiful. And I thought, you know, if I ever get done
in the Marine Corps, what I want to do is I want to stay in the Marine Corps.
Southern California. That was my great idea. But of course, what
I was about to do was to go on a venture as a
replacement. I don't know anybody sitting in the audience tonight
to know what replacements are. When people either rotate or get
killed, they get replaced with other people. That's what a replacement
is. So I joined the 1st Marine Division.
And I spent a period of time in
Korea and ended up
in Japan.
And I had an opportunity to
participate in a new division that they were forming in Japan called the 3rd Marine Division.
And I got a job.
I got a job. Alcoholic con artist.
Job. I got a job driving a staff car
for a major.
You know, Sergeant Holmes. I was a sergeant by then.
Was going to drive this staff car for this major.
And of course, I had done my share of drinking. And in Japan,
there were a lot of other attractions in Japan besides drinking.
Some of you have been there.
So one of the things that I did is I could, you know, I spent
about 16 months driving this staff car for the major.
He was the greatest guy in the world.
And he was smoking his beer in fact.
And he was just like a huge演技 guy.
He acted like
real, career 좋은 person right there.
But what he was the greatest guy to drive for.
And I could go into all kinds of tales about driving a staff car for the major.
But I think I could really describe it more to you
in a little capsule.
And that is,
on Friday night
that green Chevy sedan
would be leaving the base.
and the major would be driving.
And Sergeant Holmes was passed out in the back.
And why he ever put up with this stuff, I don't have the slightest idea, except he did.
And finally it came time for me to come back to the United States.
And, you know, I thought that what I was going to do is I was going to just come back to the States
and I was going to do as so many other people, you know, I was going to come back
and continue my education and go on to all these great things and I was going to make all this money
and I was going to become somebody in Southern California.
Well, I got back to the United States and had a short time to do.
And I went shopping in Los Angeles for a wife.
You know, I was no more ready to get married.
I was no more ready to get married than the man in the moon.
But I thought that that was the thing that was going to be the cure-all.
I was really looking for a keeper, is what I was looking for.
And you know what?
She didn't have the slightest idea what she was getting into.
She didn't have the slightest idea.
I finally found one that was willing.
And you know what?
I was going to take that girl to places that she had never planned on going to.
She didn't have the slightest idea what she was getting.
Because what I was is I was an alcoholic in training.
And she didn't know that.
You know, I was in my early 20s.
I mean, I was bulletproof.
I was invincible.
You know, I was smarter than everybody else.
And what I was going to do is I was going to look the part.
And let me tell you what it was like.
I got a job working for the Los Angeles,
and folks, I want to tell you,
I don't know how the hell I got that job working for the Times.
I mean, I have a picture someplace in my things.
But when I first went to work for them,
and I think they were desperate for employees.
I think they just hired a whole bunch of people,
and I just kind of hunkered down in the middle of the crowd that they hired.
Because, you know, drunks in the newspaper business,
if any of you have ever,
been around the newspaper,
it's riddled with drunks.
But this is a drunk that always kind of stood out for some reason.
Because in that picture that I have when I first went to work for them,
you know, here's this bloated face with these little slits for eyes,
and my nose is getting like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer about that time.
I'm in my early 20s.
And I can still drink pretty good in those days.
And, you know,
the thing that happened was that I married this girl,
and immediately we started to have kids.
But you know what?
I'm never home.
What I wanted to do is this.
I wanted to have the fancy clothes and the fancy car and look like a big shot.
That's what I wanted to do.
I wanted people to think I was somebody.
But I want to tell you what it really was.
It was a person who was all dressed up that looked good on the outside.
And I had absolutely nothing on the inside.
There was no substance to me.
I didn't know what it was to have a friend.
I didn't know what it was to be a husband.
I didn't know what it was to be a father.
I didn't know any of these things.
All I cared about was me
and what I wanted to be.
And I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And, you know,
in the description that I just gave you
was not that kid that came out of that family
in northeastern Pennsylvania.
See, I believe for me what happened to me,
and I don't know if it's the same for you,
with that drink at 15 years of age,
is that spiritually I began to distance myself
from any kind of spiritual values,
from any kind of values,
and I got, the more I drank,
the further away I got.
God was of very little importance
because I was so self-important.
And I became separated
from any kind of relationship with God.
And, you know, by the time our second child came along,
those kids used to run and hide from me
when I came home.
And I used to,
I used to wonder about this,
about what she was doing with these children
to turn them against me.
She didn't do anything to turn them against me.
They were terrified of me
because they never knew
what was going to come through the door next.
They didn't know whether he was going to be smiling
or knocking down the door.
They didn't know whether he'd be laughing
or in a rage.
And it was not a very pleasant time
in our family.
And I was trying desperately to hang on to this job.
Because it was a good job, folks.
It was a really good job working for this newspaper.
But, you know, it's hard to be a salesman
when you're sitting in these beer and wine bars
in California.
You know, it's really,
it's hard to call any customers from in there.
It's hard to make any sales in there.
But for some reason or other,
they kept me around.
And I'll tell you something else
that was happening at that time.
I was losing the ability
to be able to stay on my feet
while drinking.
You know, I was one of those guys
who used to drink around the clock.
I used to tell people I drank for energy
because it kept me moving.
And you know what started to happen?
The most mystifying thing of all
started to happen.
The guy who used to drive everybody home
became a fallen-down,
mumbling drunk.
And I couldn't understand it.
I didn't know what happened to that guy
that could carry that booze.
I didn't know what was happening.
But I'll tell you, I found out.
I'm sure some of you in this audience tonight
know what it's like to watch somebody
who can't drink
continue to try to drink.
And that's what I was.
I was a booze fighter
trying to do something
that was gone for me.
And you know, we had this little meeting.
My in-laws...
I don't know if any of you
have ever been at the in-laws' meetings.
Saturday morning when you're dying
and they want to have that meeting
in the morning.
And the meeting is about you.
And I didn't welcome this.
I was looking to see
if they brought anything to drink.
And I remember
what was being told to me.
They said,
John, if you keep this up,
you're going to lose this family.
You're going to lose these kids.
You're going to lose that job.
You're going to lose everything that you have.
I remember this like it was yesterday.
When I thought that, God,
they were finally done talking.
I got up and pushed the chair back
and I said,
you can all kiss my ass
because I'm going to do exactly what I want to do.
And I went on my merry way.
Now, I was trying to find some way
to be able to drink
without crawling on the ground.
And I was looking for something,
you know, as we're switching from one thing to another.
Drinking whiskey was killing me.
I mean, that was just out of the question.
And I tried beer,
but, you know,
I could only hold so much beer.
And then I discovered
two struggling young men
in Southern California
by the name of Ernest and Julio Gallup.
I tell you, folks,
I was convinced that they had my answer.
And I did my very best
to support those people
to the best that I could.
For the next couple of years of my drinking.
And, you know, I thought
that I had had difficulty up until then.
The worst was yet to come.
Can you imagine
a red-faced Irishman
drinking sweet wine?
I'll tell you what,
it does strange things to them.
You know, first of all,
they get bloodshot eyes that never go away.
And they get a red beezer and red face
that look like they're going to die.
And they're going to die.
And they're going to explode.
And their eyes get like little slits
because they never really can get opened.
And they get very sick.
And that's what I became.
And, you know, I struggled with this job
and I could go on for hours
telling you about what was happening
during this period of time.
But, you know what, folks?
I was getting ready to come here
and didn't even know it.
Didn't even know it.
And, you know, I worked that newspaper job
until they finally got to the point
where they said,
out of here.
You're all done.
Here's your check.
Get out of here.
Don't come back.
Put it in my pocket
and I got in my little drunk's car,
which I'll tell you a little bit about later.
And I drove out to
that little Skid Row house
that we had in La Puente, California.
And my in-laws bought
and paid for half the time.
And as I was driving up in the street,
I noticed the moving van in my driveway
and I thought that someone had made a mistake
that they put a moving van there by mistake.
Well, it was no mistake.
You see, she was standing out there
with those two little kids
and she said she was going back home.
And, you know, the little sticks of furniture
of the outhouse, you know,
the alcoholic they were putting in this moving van
wasn't even worth moving,
but she was taking them with her anyhow.
And I just said good riddance.
You know, I figured now
I could just live my life
and not be around that person.
I'll call her person, right?
So when they drove off,
some people came up
and started putting boards up over the windows.
I thought I would, you know,
live in the vacant house for a while.
Well, it seems that it was not getting paid for,
the house,
and they were not going to let anybody live in it
until they sold it to someone else.
I thought that was quite unfriendly of them.
But anyhow, I had no place to live.
I was not the same as some of us,
and that is that I had Charlie to go and stay with
or Jack or Bill.
See, I was a user of people.
If you use up enough people,
you don't have any place to go to stay.
And I had none.
I had no friends.
If you let me get close to you
and you had something I wanted,
I would take it.
That's how I treated people.
So it was me
and that little car
and Ernest and Julio.
And I was trying to figure out what I was going to do
and I finally came up with a brilliant,
this is,
alcoholics come up with brilliant ideas.
Ideas about where to live.
I was going to live in that car.
Ernest and Julio and I were going to take up housekeeping
in that Renault Dolphine.
Now I'm six foot one.
You have to be a genius to sleep
in that Renault Dolphine.
So what I did is I
was trying to find some place to park this thing.
And you know,
I wanted to round off Valley Boulevard
and it was a nice,
there were nice orange groves around there
and there was a place off the road there.
So I just pulled in off the road
into the orange grove.
And I,
the sheriffs would come by
but as long as you were off the road,
you know, they'd shine their light in there.
If, you know,
I wasn't around doing a lot of moving around,
I don't know how long I stayed there.
I've been trying to put that together
ever since I've been sober.
I don't know how long I was there.
But I was reaching the end, folks.
You see,
I was to the point
where I couldn't really get drunk
and I could not get sober.
And I was off,
I was at the jumping off place
and I didn't even know it.
And you know,
one morning
I came to
in that little car
and I opened it,
I opened the door
and just kind of fell out
of the door.
And I was on my knees,
I was on my knees
throwing up blood.
But I had been doing that for a long time
and I thought it was because of
Ernest and Julia
was the reason I was throwing up blood.
And I was sick
and I was tired
and I was all done.
I was all finished.
And as I
was on my knees that morning,
for the first time
and
ten years,
I cried out to God,
God,
please help me.
And as I
was in that state,
I got a message
and it was crystal clear to me.
And the message was this.
It was that I should call
Alcoholics Anonymous.
And,
you know,
I don't know where that came from
except one place.
See, I believe for me,
and you can draw any conclusions you wish,
this is my story,
is that I believe that the spiritual awakening
for John Holmes
took place that morning
before I came to you.
I don't remember ever reading,
seeing,
or hearing anything about Alcoholics Anonymous.
But I had no question
that what I was going to do
is I was so desperate,
I was going to follow that message.
And I got in the car
and I drove into Los Angeles
and I found a drug store
and I went back and went to the pay phone.
And I called the operator
for information.
And I asked her for the,
the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And you know what?
She must have recognized something in my voice
because she didn't give me the number.
She just connected me with it.
And a lady answered.
And her name was Sybil.
And she said,
yes, I know where there's some place
that you can get some help.
And it was early in the morning.
And she said,
there's a place called, well,
Southwestern Alano Club.
And in those days,
it used to be on Southwestern Avenue.
And she said, she gave me the address.
And she said, can you get yourself there?
And I said, yes, I have a car.
Big shot.
And she said, if you'll get there,
there'll be somebody there to talk to you
when you get there.
So I got my little drunk's car
and I drove down to this place,
to the Southwest Alano Club.
And you know what, folks?
I was a very sick guy when I got out,
but I could recognize the neighborhood.
That Southwest Alano Club
was right in the middle of the territory
I had been fired from,
from the Los Angeles Times.
I've been by that place a thousand times.
Never knew it was there.
I got out of the car and I walked up to the door
and I went to open the door
and somebody opened it from the inside.
And there was a little guy standing there.
He looked like he was about this tall.
He was about this tall.
He had thinning hair
and he had hexagon-shaped glasses on.
Little old man.
And he looked at me
and he stuck out his hand and he said,
my name is Joe.
He said, what's yours?
Now, I hadn't had many people shaking my hand
in quite a while.
And I was kind of suspicious of this,
but I stuck mine out and I said,
mine's John.
And he said to me,
you asked me two questions.
And I said, what did I ask you?
He told me this later.
He said, the two questions you ask is,
how do I become a member
and how much are the dues?
He said, Sonny,
as far as membership is concerned,
he said, you walk across that threshold.
He said, you could become a member.
But he said,
Sonny,
as far as the dues are concerned,
it's apparent that you've already paid yours.
And that was my entrance into Alcoholics Anonymous.
And that guy was a guy by the name of Joe Motes,
who's been dead for a lot of years.
And he welcomed me into this fellowship
of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I was a very, very sick guy.
The date of my sobriety
is April the 9th of 1959.
By the grace of God
and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous,
there's nothing necessary for me to take another drink
or any other thing.
From that day until this.
And I am grateful.
You know, I say to the people in this program,
I said, when people talk about being grateful,
see, I don't believe that grateful is a word.
I believe that grateful is an action.
That if you're really grateful, show me.
Don't talk about it.
Show me.
And I had wonderful teachers
in this program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And you know, this little car that I told you about,
I'm going to describe it to you now.
I believe there's a better class of cars
coming to Alcoholics Anonymous today
than there used to be.
Now, some of you who are old enough to remember,
a 1957 Dolphine
is kind of a tiny little car
that looks like a box.
They're kind of square.
Little engine in the back.
Well, I had a round Renault Dolphine.
And it used to come down the street
kind of sideways at you like this.
And it had a puke streak
on the inside of the back window.
If you've ever thrown up on the freeway,
you know how it gets on the inside of the back window.
And it smelled just like Ernest and Julio.
And that's how I came to this program.
I didn't have much good news.
I didn't have much good news going for me
when I came here.
In my age,
if anybody wants to do math,
I was 24 when I got sober
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And folks, I was all done.
I was all finished.
I didn't have any experimenting left to do.
And you know this,
Joe Motz was the kind of a guy
who used to run people around with him.
And he had an old Chevy in those days.
Smelled just like my old car.
Because he would have newcomers.
In Los Angeles in those days, folks,
I want to tell you,
they used to have what they called
newcomers row.
You know, you would go to a meeting
and they would have a row of seats
along the side
and they would say,
do we have any newcomers?
And you'd raise your hand.
They didn't want to hear a word from you.
Newcomers did not speak.
Not a bad idea.
And you know what?
30 days,
you rode around in that car.
He was our temporary sponsor.
I have to say this.
He is the meanest son of a bitch
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I drew him for my temporary sponsor.
But I can remember that,
you know, as the newcomer,
the rookie in the Chevy,
you sat over the hump
in the back seat.
In the center, you know.
And as other people had to leave,
you'd gradually work your way up.
And when you really got ready to go,
you'd be right at the door
ready to be kicked out.
And I remember coming back
from a meeting one night
and I said to him,
Joe, when am I going to get a chance
to talk in Alcoholics Anonymous?
And he looked at me
with those little beady eyes of his
and he said,
what the hell would you have
of value to anybody
in Alcoholics Anonymous?
Really hurt me
because I was a very sensitive guy.
And you know what?
After 30 days,
now I want you to understand, folks,
I'm still living in that car.
In that orange grove.
I'm still parking in the same place.
I've got pamphlets all over that car.
I'm even reading the one
to the alcoholic woman,
you know,
because I'm hungry.
I'm hungry.
I'm hungry for anything.
You know,
they give away a lot of big books these days.
Everybody gets a big book.
They hand them out like,
you know,
not the Southwest Alano Club.
Let me tell you what a class place it was.
They had a big book
at the Southwest Alano Club
you could read anytime you wanted to.
They had it chained to the wall.
I was sold my big book.
There was a gal in that meeting.
She had biceps the size of my thighs.
She had big tattoos.
She sold me my big book.
And I want to tell you, folks,
I paid for that big book.
I was afraid not to pay for that big book.
35 cents a week was my charge
and she looked for me
when I would come into the meeting.
But, you know,
I think for me it was important
that I pay for that big book.
Because you know what I did?
I read it.
I read that book.
You know, it's strange today
in Alcoholics Anonymous
I meet a lot of people
who don't read that book.
That book's got some good stuff in it.
And you know,
the stuff that's in that book
is as good today as the day it was written.
They may change some of the stories in it.
But that first 164 pages
is what saves a guy's life like mine.
Because you see,
what...
Thanks, I feel the same way.
What happened was after 30 days,
he said,
I want to introduce you to this guy.
And he brought him over and he said,
this guy's name is Howdy
and he's going to be your sponsor.
And, you know,
I didn't know that you could say,
well, maybe I want to look around,
find somebody I can identify with.
I just said, okay.
Because I didn't know
you could do anything other than that.
And this guy worked for the railroad.
And he gave me a look and he said,
where do you live?
Well, you know,
if you're 30 days sober
and you're a big shot,
how are you going to tell him
that you're still living in your car?
I mean, that's a little embarrassing.
But he then asked me directly,
where do you live?
I said, I live in my car.
Finally, he got the idea.
He said, well,
he said, you're not going to live there any longer.
He said, you're going to come home with me.
And I'm going to let you live in my basement.
And I was really blown away.
Because he took me to his house.
And down in that basement
was a little bed.
And there was one of those metal showers.
And if you remember those,
hard to turn around in those babies.
But you know what?
The hot water and cold water worked.
And there was a sink and a commode
and a radio.
I mean, that,
I could have stayed there forever.
I probably would have.
I mean, it was good living.
He had a swimming pool in his backyard.
And I became
the pool cleaner
and took care of the yard
while he worked during the day.
And somebody asked me a question
a couple weeks ago. They said,
hey, John, when you got sober,
did they talk about 90 and 90?
I said, no.
We just went to a meeting every night.
I didn't have a lot of other things to do, folks.
But you know what?
He was a very basic
member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
His name was Howdy Don't.
One of the best people
that ever existed in this program.
He was a very simple guy
and a guy very easy to love.
And he thought
that the greatest job in Alcoholics Anonymous
was making coffee.
And he was a doer.
He was not a talker.
He was a doer.
And he took me around to meetings
and I stayed in his home
for almost three months.
And then he came to me
with the magic word
and he said,
I want you to go and make amends
to those people at the Los Angeles Times.
I said, do you have anything else
you want me to do?
He said, no, you're going to have to
go and make amends to them.
Folks, I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to do it at all.
But I did as he asked.
And I went to
back down to the Los Angeles Times
and the man that I went to see
was a non-alcoholic.
And I told him what I was trying to do.
And he said to me,
how would you like your old job back?
And I about fell off the chair.
And he said, wait a minute now,
before you get all uptight over this.
He said, we tried about six other people
on that territory
and you had it so screwed up
nobody else could make a living there.
So I went back to work
for the Los Angeles Times.
And folks, I want to tell you,
it was good.
And you know, I would like
to stand up here tonight
and tell you the wonderful story
about getting the family back together
and getting those kids
and the little house
and the white picket fence.
And that's not the way it happened.
There was too much damage done.
And that was not going to be possible
for me to do.
But I went to work
and I went to work in this fellowship.
And I'd like to tell you
that what I did is I just got busy
in these steps
and I just did everything
possible.
And that would be a lie.
As you see, I was so busy
trying to make money
that I went to lots of AA meetings.
But I was busy doing other things too.
I worked five days a week
and I sold real estate on Sunday
and I was accumulating material things
because I thought that was important.
And I thought I was way behind.
I'll tell you what my sponsor said to me.
I brought my list
about
my people I had harmed.
And I brought it to him
because I was no longer living in this house.
I had my own place.
But I brought it to him
and he said,
what about your kids?
Where are they on this list?
I said, what do you mean?
I know I'm about to hurt
some people's feelings when I say this.
He said, where is this thing
about your child support
for those kids?
I said, well, if I pay that child support,
there's not going to be anything left
for me to live on.
He said, too bad.
But you are
going to pay that child support.
Because you see,
they're innocent bystanders.
They had nothing to do with this.
Your responsibility
is to support those kids.
My sponsor told me that.
And you know what?
I listened.
He said, you pay the child support
and figure out how to live on the road.
And I said, I'm going to live on the rest of it.
And you know, God takes care of those things.
I have never had difficulty
making a living,
a good living,
ever since I've been sober in this program.
And you see, it works this way, folks.
I've got to be sober
in order to involve myself
in other things.
I have to be sober
to have some of the wonderful things
that are to come in my life.
I have to be sober first.
I have to work those steps
to change me,
not other people.
And you know, it has not always been easy
doing that, because I'm the kind of a guy
that liked to blame other people,
places, and circumstances
for my problems.
I stayed in this newspaper business
for five years.
And I left there to go to work
for a company in the Midwest.
Folks, my next job
that I had was the best one
that I ever had in my life.
If you can just
imagine this.
I was a sales manager
for a company in Wisconsin.
And I was stationed in California.
My territory
was the 11 western states
and Hawaii.
I was sober, and I was single.
And they paid all the expenses.
I went to more meetings
and more places than you could possibly imagine.
And got to know a lot of
really wonderful people.
And I had a chance to really enjoy myself
for the next two years.
And after two years,
they came to me, the people who own this company,
came to me and said to me,
we'd like to have a talk with you.
They owned a place out in Palm Springs
and they asked me to come out there.
I hardly knew these people.
And they were pretty hard drinking people.
But they knew that I did not drink.
And you know what happened is that I came out to meet them
at, in Palm Springs.
And they said, we would like you to come back
and live in Wisconsin.
And we would like you to be our national sales manager
for our company.
Whew.
You know, I was,
I was 31 years old.
Seven years sober, Alcoholics Anonymous,
when they laid this on me.
And you know what?
I didn't know what to do.
You know, it came so fast.
And finally, what happened is I decided
that what I was going to do,
and I had been dating a young lady in the pro,
a lady in the program at that time,
who had a couple of children.
And what I was going to do is I was going to convince that,
that, that lady that we would get married
and take that family back to Wisconsin.
And I'd like to tell you it was the best of intentions
that I had in my little scheme.
But I'm going to preface that by saying,
I never ever once mentioned it to my sponsor.
Does that tell you anything about John's intentions?
I'd like to tell you it's because I loved her and I wanted,
and I wanted to, to be the, the great hero in their life.
But what the fact was, is that I felt that if I was going
to take this prestigious job for this company,
is that I should have a ready-made family.
And that's what my, that's what my intention was.
So, that's what I was going to do.
So, that's what I was going to do.
So, that's what I was going to do.
So, that's what my intention was.
And you know what?
Is that my business career over the next five-year contract
that I had with these people blossomed.
My personal life and the family of that,
that I brought back there suffered
for my selfish, self-centered decision.
You know, just because we happen to be sober in this program
does not mean, folks, that we don't make mistakes.
We make mistakes in this program.
And I was told, you know,
that we're going to have to pay heavily for these mistakes.
And this is the period of my life that I'm not particularly proud of
and I did not take a drink.
Because there was a lot of things going on in my life
that I didn't feel good about.
And what happened was, is we moved,
after five years in Wisconsin, we moved to Atlanta
for me to start a new business enterprise with another partner.
And it blossomed.
And it blossomed.
And I was still involved in Alcoholics Anonymous.
But I can describe to you how I was during this period of time.
I made a great deal of money,
more than I had ever imagined that I would in my life.
And that's somewhat intoxicating in itself.
And what you can do is you can get all so wrapped up in it
that you think you're very important.
And what my answer to that was, after being in this business
in Atlanta for a long time, I said, you know, I don't know.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
And what I've done together for seven years
is that I was to go through a horrible, terrible divorce
in this program.
And I want to tell you, folks,
this lady also was in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And if anybody out there has gone through a divorce
in this program, you'll know that it is very difficult.
Because you know what?
People take sides.
And there's a lot of hurt that takes place.
And what I was going to do is I was going to stay here
in this fellowship, and I was going to do the very best
that I could.
But there was some changes that were going to have to take place.
At the same time that this divorce was taking place,
my partner in this business of seven years committed suicide.
And it was like I had been knocked down as a person.
And I was just getting ready to get up,
and I got up and I said, you know what?
I got knocked down again.
And you see, the thing that happened was is that I was going
to have to come to the conclusion about some things
and some changes that I was going to have to make in my life.
I really had to take a look at me and my sobriety
and at what kind of work I had done in this program
and what I was going to do from here on.
And I took a month out of my life,
and I went back to California and spent some time there.
And I spent some time with a very dear friend of mine.
And I sat down, and I did the steps all over again
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I finished the job that I started so many years before
because I still had a lot of cleaning up in my life.
It's what I refer to as the wreckage of my sobriety.
And I don't think I'm alone there.
I think there's others, too, that know what I'm talking about.
And the reason that I'm alone is because I'm not alone.
And the reason that I'm going to tell you that I know that there was a change in my life
is because the change took place in here.
You know, I told you about this guy before that was so interested
in what I looked like on the outside.
And it was very important to me what other people thought of me
because I wanted to be a big shot, and I wanted to be respected,
and I wanted to be looked up to.
I'll tell you what took place after this 30 days in California.
And I came back to Atlanta.
And I said to him,
it was much more important.
It was much more important what I thought about me
than what you thought about me.
It was much more important to me what was going to go on in the inside in my life
from that time on.
And I know that there was a change in my life
because the guy in 1978 is not the same guy that stands before you today.
It's that my consideration for my fellow man is first place in my life.
It's that my sobriety is at the very center of my life.
All the rest of the things take place in my life.
They take place around it.
My sobriety is in the very center.
My sobriety is the most precious thing that I have in my life.
More precious than anything else.
You know, I thought that what I was going to have to do is I was going to have
to live the rest of my life by myself in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Because I didn't feel worthy enough to have a wife or a partner because of my past.
And I thought that what I would do is
that this would be perfectly okay if this is the way it was going to be.
In 1980, God thought differently because into my life came this little blonde lady
that is absolutely the light of my life.
And I want to make sure that everybody here knows who she is and I'm going to ask her,
to stand, Mary, I'm a, my wife.
You know, she and I have a, have a life together today.
We were married in, in 1982.
And I want you to know, we did it right, folks.
We did it right.
I courted her for two and a half years before she,
we got married.
And I was scared to death.
I was terrified that I would repeat some of the things in my life,
married to this precious lady, as I had before.
That's what I was afraid of.
But you see, God brought about a change in my life
so that I didn't have to live like I used to live.
The way I feel about it today is, with the lady that I'm married to,
is I can take her to meet anybody,
that I have ever known in my life.
I can take her to any place that I have ever lived,
and have her meet anybody that I have ever known.
And I don't have to hide any secrets from her at all.
Is that she knows all about me.
She knows all the nooks and crannies and all the dark places.
And it has been a wonderful, wonderful 19 years in October that we've been married.
And you see, I think that I am truly blessed.
Because we have the best that's offered in this program.
And we have a great life together.
And that's all been possible because of that day on April the 9th of 1959.
You know, I had no idea the journey that it was going to take me on.
And I am so grateful.
I am so grateful for that today.
And so grateful to have a chance to share that with you tonight.
That I can't begin to explain how I really feel.
But I want to tell you tonight in closing,
that I hope that God blesses your life as much as he has blessed ours.
Thank you very kindly and God bless you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I first of all want to thank the committee for inviting us.
Thanks. My wife and I were able to come, and I'm delighted to be here tonight with you.
And I hope that, you know, 350 people for a warm-up act is not too bad,
because the big act comes tomorrow night.
I wanted to get a chance to thank some of the people and their hospitality that they've shown us since we arrived.
We arrived yesterday.
And when we got in, Dan picked us up at the airport exactly on time, had his little sign, made us feel really wonderful,
took us to a beautiful hotel, got us checked in.
And one of the nicest things that's ever happened to my wife and I.
Here we are in Omaha on Thanksgiving.
They said, we've arranged for you to have Thanksgiving dinner with a family.
A family who's a member of the Fellowship.
Now, that's a very considerate, kind, and loving thing to do to a couple of strange people from Atlanta.
And I want to tell you that that impressed my wife and I deeply.
Terry and David and his family, and they had three generations there having Thanksgiving dinner, and it was wonderful.
You know, it was like being at home.
And that's typical of the Midwest.
That's typical of Midwestern hospitality.
And I want you to know that we appreciate it from the bottom of our heart.
Thank you.
You know, when I got ready to come to this roundup, I got a telephone call from my brother, Bob.
My brother, Bob, is not a member of this Fellowship.
But he supports my attendance.
Because he watches.
He watched me go through some of my shenanigans.
And he said to me, I want you to ask the audience, when you get to Omaha,
is there anybody in the audience whose last name is Brennan?
I'm safe.
I'm safe.
Because I want to tell you this story.
It's a story that the genealogy brother of mine tells me about Omaha.
See, my family comes from the coal mining community in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Anthracite coal miners.
And in the late 1880s, it was filled with Irish immigrants coming to this country because they could get work in the coal mines in Pennsylvania.
But some of those guys were troublemakers.
And they were referred to as the Molly Maguires.
And some of you may have seen that movie that they did on the Molly Maguires.
Well, my mother's name was Burke.
My grandmother, her mother's name was Brennan.
And she had two brothers that were kind of troublemakers.
And they were members of the Molly Maguires.
And both of those boys were dynamiters.
And you see, they had a little conflict going on with the owners of the mines about how the workers were being treated from a safety standard and a pay standard.
So they decided that they were going to blow up a few coal mines.
Well, of course, that was a crime.
It was a criminal act.
And that meant they had to get out of town.
So the Irish group took them to the railroad.
And most of the conductors on the railroad were Irish.
And they got them on the trains.
And they ended up in Chicago.
And they put them on another train.
And the other train was going to Omaha.
So that's where they got off, was in Omaha.
And he got off.
And he got off.
And he got off.
And he said, be sure to check to see if any of our relatives are in the audience.
But that's my story about the Brennets.
And you know that the area that I grew up in and the family that I came from,
I have to tell you that, you know, nowadays it's commonplace in Alcoholics Anonymous
when we kind of victimize ourselves in this disease of alcoholism.
I have to tell you that we have...
I have a lot of talk at times about the dysfunctional family.
I want to tell you folks tonight,
I came from as close a functional family as anybody seated in this audience.
Is that I came from a mother and father who dearly loved each other.
They didn't even drink.
And I have three brothers who all drink.
And four boys growing up, we had a very...
a very happy and a wonderful, really close family.
And really cared about each other.
And it shows up in our family today.
Because when I tell people about the relationship that I have with my brothers,
sometimes they're rather shocked.
But that came from my mother and father.
The influence of my mother and dad.
The four brothers in my family live in different parts of the country.
We talk to each other maybe two or three times a week.
By telephone.
I think that's kind of unusual in today's age.
But that was instituted because we were a very close family growing up.
And we've continued that tradition.
As a matter of fact, about once a year we get together for a week
and we go to our place in Hilton Head and spend the week together.
Just the brothers.
And it's a nice family.
But this is the kind of a family that I came from.
And you know,
when I was growing up I felt pretty secure in this little group.
We didn't have a lot, but we had more than some.
And I was born during the Depression.
So, and I had two older brothers who preceded me.
And one younger brother who came after me.
And we didn't have a lot, as I said.
But we had a lot of love in our family.
And we were very close.
And I really didn't feel like I was deprived.
Of course, we didn't have enough money.
But, you know, I didn't like it.
I didn't like that idea too much.
But I don't know any kid that likes that idea.
And, you know, I was a member of the, we were a member of the Catholic faith.
And I felt pretty secure as far as church and God and country is concerned.
And everybody in the family had little jobs that they worked at.
And even as a young child, I can remember that I had a kind of a childlike,
pretty,
straightforward kind of relationship with God.
I mean, I was taught about God in the church.
And I had good images in my mother and dad.
So, therefore, what I did is I felt I really had kind of had a place in society.
And I felt pretty secure.
And as I proceeded in life, one of the things that happened to me,
which happens, I think, to a lot of young men,
is that I had my first drink of booze when I was 15 years old.
And I know by today's standards and alcoholics,
that's a little late in life to be having your first drink.
But it was the best that I could do at the time.
But, you know, I don't know if it made the same kind of impression
on the rest of the group that I was with when we had this drink as it did with me.
You know, here I was growing up and I was a tall, skinny kid at 15 years of age.
And I was.
In this awkward stage.
And I really wasn't quite sure about these things called girls.
And I'd like to get closer, but didn't know how.
And I got kind of tongue-tied around them.
And that night, these other four fellows and myself had our,
I had my first drink.
And it was powerful.
I mean, I can remember the time.
I can remember the people who were there.
I can remember whose car we were in.
I can remember what we drank because it made a big difference in my life.
Now, I don't know if it did for those other four, but it sure did for me.
And I understood the moment I had that drink the reason adults tried to keep it to themselves.
Because this was great stuff.
And I thought that what I was going to do is I was going to pursue this.
And I want to tell you what happened that night at 15 years of age.
I got drunk, and I blacked out.
And you see, I thought that that was part of drinking.
I thought everybody did that.
I didn't realize that other people didn't have blackouts.
I did right out of the box.
And that's the reason I want to tell you tonight that I know that there's a lot of people here tonight
who were going through life, and they came to a period,
and they crossed what they referred to in Alcoholics Anonymous as that invisible line.
I don't believe that that's what happened with me.
I believe that I just leaped right into alcoholism at 15 years of age.
And the reason that I say that is that I was a very good student up to that time.
I mean, I was a bright kid in school, and I got good grades in school, and things came to me very easily.
And after I had that first drink, I shifted a whole group of friends for a whole new group of friends.
And I drank with the people who drank like I did in high school.
You know, we talk in AA about birds of a feather.
I did that just naturally.
You know, when people wanted to talk to me about my drinking, about what I did the night before,
I just eliminated them from my group because I didn't want to listen.
I didn't want to listen to that stuff.
Anybody who wanted to separate me from my drinking, even then, I wouldn't have anything to do with them.
And I had an incident that happened when I was 16 years old, which stands out in my life,
because I really think it was a turning point for me.
In this town, drinking was an accepted way of life.
In this town, alcoholism was accepted.
Lots of taverns, lots of places to drink, a lot of hard drinking going on.
I was 16 years old, and I had gotten drunk down in the little taverns in the area that I was raised in.
And I came home in one of those snowstorms, the first storm of the year, and it's kind of that dry, crunchy snow.
And I remember coming home, and I was staggering, and I was trying to make it to the house,
and I got as far as the back steps, and there was an entrance to the kitchen, which is in the back of our house.
And I made it to the back steps, and I think I must have passed out on the back steps.
Now, my relationship with my father was of the highest level.
I loved him dearly and loved my mom, but my relationship with my father was outstanding.
I could talk to my dad about anything.
And he came out on the back steps, he was in the kitchen,
and picked up his 16-year-old son, drunk, and took him into the kitchen.
And he said, we're going to fix a cup of tea, and we're going to need to talk.
And the Irish, you know, they think tea solves all the problems of the world.
So he fixed a cup of tea, and he sat across me.
This is a man that I adored, I loved and adored.
And I had the greatest respect for him.
And he looked at me with tears in his eyes, and he said to me, where have I failed you?
And you know, that just absolutely, it was like somebody reached inside me and just took a hold of my insides.
Because, you know, I knew that it wasn't what he did in my life.
It was what I did in my life.
And I knew that if I stayed around that town, that I would just break their hearts.
So what I was going to do is I was going to get out of there.
And this wonderful, bright, young man with great grades just barely got out of that high school.
I mean, just barely got out of it.
And as I look back today, of course, I could not see it then.
I was in big trouble with booze before I grew up.
I graduated from high school.
I know that today.
So I made one of my great decisions at that time.
And what it was is that everybody in the school that I went to school with, they were going off to college.
And I made this great decision that I had a choice whether I was going to go to work in a shoe factory
or whether I was going to go in the service.
So I decided, you know, if you're a tall, skinny kid and you have great questions
about your manhood, what you should do is you should enlist
in the United States Marine Corps, which is exactly what I did.
And I went to a godforsaken place called
Parris Island, South Carolina. And I wasn't
in Parris Island, South Carolina 24 hours, and I realized I made
a horrible mistake.
I should have taken that job in a shoe factory.
The year was
1952. It wasn't great timing
on my part. They had a thing going on
called a police action in Korea.
And of course, what happened with me is I just kind of, after
the 13 weeks, I'll tell you a little story about 13 weeks, because this is amazing.
I don't know how they took me in the Marine Corps. I was about the height I am
now, and I weighed 141 pounds.
So I went to Parris Island at 141 pounds. I was there for
13 weeks. And I graduated
out of Parris Island. I weighed 175 pounds.
And I was like a piece of spring steel.
I mean, I was in the best physical condition I was ever in in my life.
And they gave us a 10-day leave because I was going out to a place
called Camp Pendleton. And I was going to go across the water.
Of course, I didn't know all this at that time, but I should have.
But you know that I spent this 10-day
leave just drunk. I just smashed up everybody's car and the family until they
just finally put me on an airplane and got rid of me.
And you know, I want to tell you,
this year is 1952. It's in the
early fall of the year.
I landed in
Burbank in those days because LAX was not there.
And I got on a Greyhound bus.
And the Greyhound bus in Los Angeles, the first stop we made was in
Santa Ana. And in Santa Ana, the bus ride
continued. And we were across this long prairie past El Toro,
which was there at the time. And we wound down into
a little place called San Juan Capistrano.
Lemon groves, you know, very romantic.
I mean, folks, if you grow up in the coal mines
in Pennsylvania, and the great
trip that you make is to Parris Island, South Carolina,
and then you go to a place like California, you think you have
died and gone to heaven. Because it was absolutely
you know, 1952, Southern California was paradise. It was just
beautiful. And I thought, you know, if I ever get done
in the Marine Corps, what I want to do is I want to stay in the Marine Corps.
Southern California. That was my great idea. But of course, what
I was about to do was to go on a venture as a
replacement. I don't know anybody sitting in the audience tonight
to know what replacements are. When people either rotate or get
killed, they get replaced with other people. That's what a replacement
is. So I joined the 1st Marine Division.
And I spent a period of time in
Korea and ended up
in Japan.
And I had an opportunity to
participate in a new division that they were forming in Japan called the 3rd Marine Division.
And I got a job.
I got a job. Alcoholic con artist.
Job. I got a job driving a staff car
for a major.
You know, Sergeant Holmes. I was a sergeant by then.
Was going to drive this staff car for this major.
And of course, I had done my share of drinking. And in Japan,
there were a lot of other attractions in Japan besides drinking.
Some of you have been there.
So one of the things that I did is I could, you know, I spent
about 16 months driving this staff car for the major.
He was the greatest guy in the world.
And he was smoking his beer in fact.
And he was just like a huge演技 guy.
He acted like
real, career 좋은 person right there.
But what he was the greatest guy to drive for.
And I could go into all kinds of tales about driving a staff car for the major.
But I think I could really describe it more to you
in a little capsule.
And that is,
on Friday night
that green Chevy sedan
would be leaving the base.
and the major would be driving.
And Sergeant Holmes was passed out in the back.
And why he ever put up with this stuff, I don't have the slightest idea, except he did.
And finally it came time for me to come back to the United States.
And, you know, I thought that what I was going to do is I was going to just come back to the States
and I was going to do as so many other people, you know, I was going to come back
and continue my education and go on to all these great things and I was going to make all this money
and I was going to become somebody in Southern California.
Well, I got back to the United States and had a short time to do.
And I went shopping in Los Angeles for a wife.
You know, I was no more ready to get married.
I was no more ready to get married than the man in the moon.
But I thought that that was the thing that was going to be the cure-all.
I was really looking for a keeper, is what I was looking for.
And you know what?
She didn't have the slightest idea what she was getting into.
She didn't have the slightest idea.
I finally found one that was willing.
And you know what?
I was going to take that girl to places that she had never planned on going to.
She didn't have the slightest idea what she was getting.
Because what I was is I was an alcoholic in training.
And she didn't know that.
You know, I was in my early 20s.
I mean, I was bulletproof.
I was invincible.
You know, I was smarter than everybody else.
And what I was going to do is I was going to look the part.
And let me tell you what it was like.
I got a job working for the Los Angeles,
and folks, I want to tell you,
I don't know how the hell I got that job working for the Times.
I mean, I have a picture someplace in my things.
But when I first went to work for them,
and I think they were desperate for employees.
I think they just hired a whole bunch of people,
and I just kind of hunkered down in the middle of the crowd that they hired.
Because, you know, drunks in the newspaper business,
if any of you have ever,
been around the newspaper,
it's riddled with drunks.
But this is a drunk that always kind of stood out for some reason.
Because in that picture that I have when I first went to work for them,
you know, here's this bloated face with these little slits for eyes,
and my nose is getting like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer about that time.
I'm in my early 20s.
And I can still drink pretty good in those days.
And, you know,
the thing that happened was that I married this girl,
and immediately we started to have kids.
But you know what?
I'm never home.
What I wanted to do is this.
I wanted to have the fancy clothes and the fancy car and look like a big shot.
That's what I wanted to do.
I wanted people to think I was somebody.
But I want to tell you what it really was.
It was a person who was all dressed up that looked good on the outside.
And I had absolutely nothing on the inside.
There was no substance to me.
I didn't know what it was to have a friend.
I didn't know what it was to be a husband.
I didn't know what it was to be a father.
I didn't know any of these things.
All I cared about was me
and what I wanted to be.
And I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And, you know,
in the description that I just gave you
was not that kid that came out of that family
in northeastern Pennsylvania.
See, I believe for me what happened to me,
and I don't know if it's the same for you,
with that drink at 15 years of age,
is that spiritually I began to distance myself
from any kind of spiritual values,
from any kind of values,
and I got, the more I drank,
the further away I got.
God was of very little importance
because I was so self-important.
And I became separated
from any kind of relationship with God.
And, you know, by the time our second child came along,
those kids used to run and hide from me
when I came home.
And I used to,
I used to wonder about this,
about what she was doing with these children
to turn them against me.
She didn't do anything to turn them against me.
They were terrified of me
because they never knew
what was going to come through the door next.
They didn't know whether he was going to be smiling
or knocking down the door.
They didn't know whether he'd be laughing
or in a rage.
And it was not a very pleasant time
in our family.
And I was trying desperately to hang on to this job.
Because it was a good job, folks.
It was a really good job working for this newspaper.
But, you know, it's hard to be a salesman
when you're sitting in these beer and wine bars
in California.
You know, it's really,
it's hard to call any customers from in there.
It's hard to make any sales in there.
But for some reason or other,
they kept me around.
And I'll tell you something else
that was happening at that time.
I was losing the ability
to be able to stay on my feet
while drinking.
You know, I was one of those guys
who used to drink around the clock.
I used to tell people I drank for energy
because it kept me moving.
And you know what started to happen?
The most mystifying thing of all
started to happen.
The guy who used to drive everybody home
became a fallen-down,
mumbling drunk.
And I couldn't understand it.
I didn't know what happened to that guy
that could carry that booze.
I didn't know what was happening.
But I'll tell you, I found out.
I'm sure some of you in this audience tonight
know what it's like to watch somebody
who can't drink
continue to try to drink.
And that's what I was.
I was a booze fighter
trying to do something
that was gone for me.
And you know, we had this little meeting.
My in-laws...
I don't know if any of you
have ever been at the in-laws' meetings.
Saturday morning when you're dying
and they want to have that meeting
in the morning.
And the meeting is about you.
And I didn't welcome this.
I was looking to see
if they brought anything to drink.
And I remember
what was being told to me.
They said,
John, if you keep this up,
you're going to lose this family.
You're going to lose these kids.
You're going to lose that job.
You're going to lose everything that you have.
I remember this like it was yesterday.
When I thought that, God,
they were finally done talking.
I got up and pushed the chair back
and I said,
you can all kiss my ass
because I'm going to do exactly what I want to do.
And I went on my merry way.
Now, I was trying to find some way
to be able to drink
without crawling on the ground.
And I was looking for something,
you know, as we're switching from one thing to another.
Drinking whiskey was killing me.
I mean, that was just out of the question.
And I tried beer,
but, you know,
I could only hold so much beer.
And then I discovered
two struggling young men
in Southern California
by the name of Ernest and Julio Gallup.
I tell you, folks,
I was convinced that they had my answer.
And I did my very best
to support those people
to the best that I could.
For the next couple of years of my drinking.
And, you know, I thought
that I had had difficulty up until then.
The worst was yet to come.
Can you imagine
a red-faced Irishman
drinking sweet wine?
I'll tell you what,
it does strange things to them.
You know, first of all,
they get bloodshot eyes that never go away.
And they get a red beezer and red face
that look like they're going to die.
And they're going to die.
And they're going to explode.
And their eyes get like little slits
because they never really can get opened.
And they get very sick.
And that's what I became.
And, you know, I struggled with this job
and I could go on for hours
telling you about what was happening
during this period of time.
But, you know what, folks?
I was getting ready to come here
and didn't even know it.
Didn't even know it.
And, you know, I worked that newspaper job
until they finally got to the point
where they said,
out of here.
You're all done.
Here's your check.
Get out of here.
Don't come back.
Put it in my pocket
and I got in my little drunk's car,
which I'll tell you a little bit about later.
And I drove out to
that little Skid Row house
that we had in La Puente, California.
And my in-laws bought
and paid for half the time.
And as I was driving up in the street,
I noticed the moving van in my driveway
and I thought that someone had made a mistake
that they put a moving van there by mistake.
Well, it was no mistake.
You see, she was standing out there
with those two little kids
and she said she was going back home.
And, you know, the little sticks of furniture
of the outhouse, you know,
the alcoholic they were putting in this moving van
wasn't even worth moving,
but she was taking them with her anyhow.
And I just said good riddance.
You know, I figured now
I could just live my life
and not be around that person.
I'll call her person, right?
So when they drove off,
some people came up
and started putting boards up over the windows.
I thought I would, you know,
live in the vacant house for a while.
Well, it seems that it was not getting paid for,
the house,
and they were not going to let anybody live in it
until they sold it to someone else.
I thought that was quite unfriendly of them.
But anyhow, I had no place to live.
I was not the same as some of us,
and that is that I had Charlie to go and stay with
or Jack or Bill.
See, I was a user of people.
If you use up enough people,
you don't have any place to go to stay.
And I had none.
I had no friends.
If you let me get close to you
and you had something I wanted,
I would take it.
That's how I treated people.
So it was me
and that little car
and Ernest and Julio.
And I was trying to figure out what I was going to do
and I finally came up with a brilliant,
this is,
alcoholics come up with brilliant ideas.
Ideas about where to live.
I was going to live in that car.
Ernest and Julio and I were going to take up housekeeping
in that Renault Dolphine.
Now I'm six foot one.
You have to be a genius to sleep
in that Renault Dolphine.
So what I did is I
was trying to find some place to park this thing.
And you know,
I wanted to round off Valley Boulevard
and it was a nice,
there were nice orange groves around there
and there was a place off the road there.
So I just pulled in off the road
into the orange grove.
And I,
the sheriffs would come by
but as long as you were off the road,
you know, they'd shine their light in there.
If, you know,
I wasn't around doing a lot of moving around,
I don't know how long I stayed there.
I've been trying to put that together
ever since I've been sober.
I don't know how long I was there.
But I was reaching the end, folks.
You see,
I was to the point
where I couldn't really get drunk
and I could not get sober.
And I was off,
I was at the jumping off place
and I didn't even know it.
And you know,
one morning
I came to
in that little car
and I opened it,
I opened the door
and just kind of fell out
of the door.
And I was on my knees,
I was on my knees
throwing up blood.
But I had been doing that for a long time
and I thought it was because of
Ernest and Julia
was the reason I was throwing up blood.
And I was sick
and I was tired
and I was all done.
I was all finished.
And as I
was on my knees that morning,
for the first time
and
ten years,
I cried out to God,
God,
please help me.
And as I
was in that state,
I got a message
and it was crystal clear to me.
And the message was this.
It was that I should call
Alcoholics Anonymous.
And,
you know,
I don't know where that came from
except one place.
See, I believe for me,
and you can draw any conclusions you wish,
this is my story,
is that I believe that the spiritual awakening
for John Holmes
took place that morning
before I came to you.
I don't remember ever reading,
seeing,
or hearing anything about Alcoholics Anonymous.
But I had no question
that what I was going to do
is I was so desperate,
I was going to follow that message.
And I got in the car
and I drove into Los Angeles
and I found a drug store
and I went back and went to the pay phone.
And I called the operator
for information.
And I asked her for the,
the telephone number of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And you know what?
She must have recognized something in my voice
because she didn't give me the number.
She just connected me with it.
And a lady answered.
And her name was Sybil.
And she said,
yes, I know where there's some place
that you can get some help.
And it was early in the morning.
And she said,
there's a place called, well,
Southwestern Alano Club.
And in those days,
it used to be on Southwestern Avenue.
And she said, she gave me the address.
And she said, can you get yourself there?
And I said, yes, I have a car.
Big shot.
And she said, if you'll get there,
there'll be somebody there to talk to you
when you get there.
So I got my little drunk's car
and I drove down to this place,
to the Southwest Alano Club.
And you know what, folks?
I was a very sick guy when I got out,
but I could recognize the neighborhood.
That Southwest Alano Club
was right in the middle of the territory
I had been fired from,
from the Los Angeles Times.
I've been by that place a thousand times.
Never knew it was there.
I got out of the car and I walked up to the door
and I went to open the door
and somebody opened it from the inside.
And there was a little guy standing there.
He looked like he was about this tall.
He was about this tall.
He had thinning hair
and he had hexagon-shaped glasses on.
Little old man.
And he looked at me
and he stuck out his hand and he said,
my name is Joe.
He said, what's yours?
Now, I hadn't had many people shaking my hand
in quite a while.
And I was kind of suspicious of this,
but I stuck mine out and I said,
mine's John.
And he said to me,
you asked me two questions.
And I said, what did I ask you?
He told me this later.
He said, the two questions you ask is,
how do I become a member
and how much are the dues?
He said, Sonny,
as far as membership is concerned,
he said, you walk across that threshold.
He said, you could become a member.
But he said,
Sonny,
as far as the dues are concerned,
it's apparent that you've already paid yours.
And that was my entrance into Alcoholics Anonymous.
And that guy was a guy by the name of Joe Motes,
who's been dead for a lot of years.
And he welcomed me into this fellowship
of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I was a very, very sick guy.
The date of my sobriety
is April the 9th of 1959.
By the grace of God
and the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous,
there's nothing necessary for me to take another drink
or any other thing.
From that day until this.
And I am grateful.
You know, I say to the people in this program,
I said, when people talk about being grateful,
see, I don't believe that grateful is a word.
I believe that grateful is an action.
That if you're really grateful, show me.
Don't talk about it.
Show me.
And I had wonderful teachers
in this program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And you know, this little car that I told you about,
I'm going to describe it to you now.
I believe there's a better class of cars
coming to Alcoholics Anonymous today
than there used to be.
Now, some of you who are old enough to remember,
a 1957 Dolphine
is kind of a tiny little car
that looks like a box.
They're kind of square.
Little engine in the back.
Well, I had a round Renault Dolphine.
And it used to come down the street
kind of sideways at you like this.
And it had a puke streak
on the inside of the back window.
If you've ever thrown up on the freeway,
you know how it gets on the inside of the back window.
And it smelled just like Ernest and Julio.
And that's how I came to this program.
I didn't have much good news.
I didn't have much good news going for me
when I came here.
In my age,
if anybody wants to do math,
I was 24 when I got sober
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And folks, I was all done.
I was all finished.
I didn't have any experimenting left to do.
And you know this,
Joe Motz was the kind of a guy
who used to run people around with him.
And he had an old Chevy in those days.
Smelled just like my old car.
Because he would have newcomers.
In Los Angeles in those days, folks,
I want to tell you,
they used to have what they called
newcomers row.
You know, you would go to a meeting
and they would have a row of seats
along the side
and they would say,
do we have any newcomers?
And you'd raise your hand.
They didn't want to hear a word from you.
Newcomers did not speak.
Not a bad idea.
And you know what?
30 days,
you rode around in that car.
He was our temporary sponsor.
I have to say this.
He is the meanest son of a bitch
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I drew him for my temporary sponsor.
But I can remember that,
you know, as the newcomer,
the rookie in the Chevy,
you sat over the hump
in the back seat.
In the center, you know.
And as other people had to leave,
you'd gradually work your way up.
And when you really got ready to go,
you'd be right at the door
ready to be kicked out.
And I remember coming back
from a meeting one night
and I said to him,
Joe, when am I going to get a chance
to talk in Alcoholics Anonymous?
And he looked at me
with those little beady eyes of his
and he said,
what the hell would you have
of value to anybody
in Alcoholics Anonymous?
Really hurt me
because I was a very sensitive guy.
And you know what?
After 30 days,
now I want you to understand, folks,
I'm still living in that car.
In that orange grove.
I'm still parking in the same place.
I've got pamphlets all over that car.
I'm even reading the one
to the alcoholic woman,
you know,
because I'm hungry.
I'm hungry.
I'm hungry for anything.
You know,
they give away a lot of big books these days.
Everybody gets a big book.
They hand them out like,
you know,
not the Southwest Alano Club.
Let me tell you what a class place it was.
They had a big book
at the Southwest Alano Club
you could read anytime you wanted to.
They had it chained to the wall.
I was sold my big book.
There was a gal in that meeting.
She had biceps the size of my thighs.
She had big tattoos.
She sold me my big book.
And I want to tell you, folks,
I paid for that big book.
I was afraid not to pay for that big book.
35 cents a week was my charge
and she looked for me
when I would come into the meeting.
But, you know,
I think for me it was important
that I pay for that big book.
Because you know what I did?
I read it.
I read that book.
You know, it's strange today
in Alcoholics Anonymous
I meet a lot of people
who don't read that book.
That book's got some good stuff in it.
And you know,
the stuff that's in that book
is as good today as the day it was written.
They may change some of the stories in it.
But that first 164 pages
is what saves a guy's life like mine.
Because you see,
what...
Thanks, I feel the same way.
What happened was after 30 days,
he said,
I want to introduce you to this guy.
And he brought him over and he said,
this guy's name is Howdy
and he's going to be your sponsor.
And, you know,
I didn't know that you could say,
well, maybe I want to look around,
find somebody I can identify with.
I just said, okay.
Because I didn't know
you could do anything other than that.
And this guy worked for the railroad.
And he gave me a look and he said,
where do you live?
Well, you know,
if you're 30 days sober
and you're a big shot,
how are you going to tell him
that you're still living in your car?
I mean, that's a little embarrassing.
But he then asked me directly,
where do you live?
I said, I live in my car.
Finally, he got the idea.
He said, well,
he said, you're not going to live there any longer.
He said, you're going to come home with me.
And I'm going to let you live in my basement.
And I was really blown away.
Because he took me to his house.
And down in that basement
was a little bed.
And there was one of those metal showers.
And if you remember those,
hard to turn around in those babies.
But you know what?
The hot water and cold water worked.
And there was a sink and a commode
and a radio.
I mean, that,
I could have stayed there forever.
I probably would have.
I mean, it was good living.
He had a swimming pool in his backyard.
And I became
the pool cleaner
and took care of the yard
while he worked during the day.
And somebody asked me a question
a couple weeks ago. They said,
hey, John, when you got sober,
did they talk about 90 and 90?
I said, no.
We just went to a meeting every night.
I didn't have a lot of other things to do, folks.
But you know what?
He was a very basic
member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
His name was Howdy Don't.
One of the best people
that ever existed in this program.
He was a very simple guy
and a guy very easy to love.
And he thought
that the greatest job in Alcoholics Anonymous
was making coffee.
And he was a doer.
He was not a talker.
He was a doer.
And he took me around to meetings
and I stayed in his home
for almost three months.
And then he came to me
with the magic word
and he said,
I want you to go and make amends
to those people at the Los Angeles Times.
I said, do you have anything else
you want me to do?
He said, no, you're going to have to
go and make amends to them.
Folks, I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to do it at all.
But I did as he asked.
And I went to
back down to the Los Angeles Times
and the man that I went to see
was a non-alcoholic.
And I told him what I was trying to do.
And he said to me,
how would you like your old job back?
And I about fell off the chair.
And he said, wait a minute now,
before you get all uptight over this.
He said, we tried about six other people
on that territory
and you had it so screwed up
nobody else could make a living there.
So I went back to work
for the Los Angeles Times.
And folks, I want to tell you,
it was good.
And you know, I would like
to stand up here tonight
and tell you the wonderful story
about getting the family back together
and getting those kids
and the little house
and the white picket fence.
And that's not the way it happened.
There was too much damage done.
And that was not going to be possible
for me to do.
But I went to work
and I went to work in this fellowship.
And I'd like to tell you
that what I did is I just got busy
in these steps
and I just did everything
possible.
And that would be a lie.
As you see, I was so busy
trying to make money
that I went to lots of AA meetings.
But I was busy doing other things too.
I worked five days a week
and I sold real estate on Sunday
and I was accumulating material things
because I thought that was important.
And I thought I was way behind.
I'll tell you what my sponsor said to me.
I brought my list
about
my people I had harmed.
And I brought it to him
because I was no longer living in this house.
I had my own place.
But I brought it to him
and he said,
what about your kids?
Where are they on this list?
I said, what do you mean?
I know I'm about to hurt
some people's feelings when I say this.
He said, where is this thing
about your child support
for those kids?
I said, well, if I pay that child support,
there's not going to be anything left
for me to live on.
He said, too bad.
But you are
going to pay that child support.
Because you see,
they're innocent bystanders.
They had nothing to do with this.
Your responsibility
is to support those kids.
My sponsor told me that.
And you know what?
I listened.
He said, you pay the child support
and figure out how to live on the road.
And I said, I'm going to live on the rest of it.
And you know, God takes care of those things.
I have never had difficulty
making a living,
a good living,
ever since I've been sober in this program.
And you see, it works this way, folks.
I've got to be sober
in order to involve myself
in other things.
I have to be sober
to have some of the wonderful things
that are to come in my life.
I have to be sober first.
I have to work those steps
to change me,
not other people.
And you know, it has not always been easy
doing that, because I'm the kind of a guy
that liked to blame other people,
places, and circumstances
for my problems.
I stayed in this newspaper business
for five years.
And I left there to go to work
for a company in the Midwest.
Folks, my next job
that I had was the best one
that I ever had in my life.
If you can just
imagine this.
I was a sales manager
for a company in Wisconsin.
And I was stationed in California.
My territory
was the 11 western states
and Hawaii.
I was sober, and I was single.
And they paid all the expenses.
I went to more meetings
and more places than you could possibly imagine.
And got to know a lot of
really wonderful people.
And I had a chance to really enjoy myself
for the next two years.
And after two years,
they came to me, the people who own this company,
came to me and said to me,
we'd like to have a talk with you.
They owned a place out in Palm Springs
and they asked me to come out there.
I hardly knew these people.
And they were pretty hard drinking people.
But they knew that I did not drink.
And you know what happened is that I came out to meet them
at, in Palm Springs.
And they said, we would like you to come back
and live in Wisconsin.
And we would like you to be our national sales manager
for our company.
Whew.
You know, I was,
I was 31 years old.
Seven years sober, Alcoholics Anonymous,
when they laid this on me.
And you know what?
I didn't know what to do.
You know, it came so fast.
And finally, what happened is I decided
that what I was going to do,
and I had been dating a young lady in the pro,
a lady in the program at that time,
who had a couple of children.
And what I was going to do is I was going to convince that,
that, that lady that we would get married
and take that family back to Wisconsin.
And I'd like to tell you it was the best of intentions
that I had in my little scheme.
But I'm going to preface that by saying,
I never ever once mentioned it to my sponsor.
Does that tell you anything about John's intentions?
I'd like to tell you it's because I loved her and I wanted,
and I wanted to, to be the, the great hero in their life.
But what the fact was, is that I felt that if I was going
to take this prestigious job for this company,
is that I should have a ready-made family.
And that's what my, that's what my intention was.
So, that's what I was going to do.
So, that's what I was going to do.
So, that's what I was going to do.
So, that's what my intention was.
And you know what?
Is that my business career over the next five-year contract
that I had with these people blossomed.
My personal life and the family of that,
that I brought back there suffered
for my selfish, self-centered decision.
You know, just because we happen to be sober in this program
does not mean, folks, that we don't make mistakes.
We make mistakes in this program.
And I was told, you know,
that we're going to have to pay heavily for these mistakes.
And this is the period of my life that I'm not particularly proud of
and I did not take a drink.
Because there was a lot of things going on in my life
that I didn't feel good about.
And what happened was, is we moved,
after five years in Wisconsin, we moved to Atlanta
for me to start a new business enterprise with another partner.
And it blossomed.
And it blossomed.
And I was still involved in Alcoholics Anonymous.
But I can describe to you how I was during this period of time.
I made a great deal of money,
more than I had ever imagined that I would in my life.
And that's somewhat intoxicating in itself.
And what you can do is you can get all so wrapped up in it
that you think you're very important.
And what my answer to that was, after being in this business
in Atlanta for a long time, I said, you know, I don't know.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I don't know what I'm doing.
And what I've done together for seven years
is that I was to go through a horrible, terrible divorce
in this program.
And I want to tell you, folks,
this lady also was in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And if anybody out there has gone through a divorce
in this program, you'll know that it is very difficult.
Because you know what?
People take sides.
And there's a lot of hurt that takes place.
And what I was going to do is I was going to stay here
in this fellowship, and I was going to do the very best
that I could.
But there was some changes that were going to have to take place.
At the same time that this divorce was taking place,
my partner in this business of seven years committed suicide.
And it was like I had been knocked down as a person.
And I was just getting ready to get up,
and I got up and I said, you know what?
I got knocked down again.
And you see, the thing that happened was is that I was going
to have to come to the conclusion about some things
and some changes that I was going to have to make in my life.
I really had to take a look at me and my sobriety
and at what kind of work I had done in this program
and what I was going to do from here on.
And I took a month out of my life,
and I went back to California and spent some time there.
And I spent some time with a very dear friend of mine.
And I sat down, and I did the steps all over again
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I finished the job that I started so many years before
because I still had a lot of cleaning up in my life.
It's what I refer to as the wreckage of my sobriety.
And I don't think I'm alone there.
I think there's others, too, that know what I'm talking about.
And the reason that I'm alone is because I'm not alone.
And the reason that I'm going to tell you that I know that there was a change in my life
is because the change took place in here.
You know, I told you about this guy before that was so interested
in what I looked like on the outside.
And it was very important to me what other people thought of me
because I wanted to be a big shot, and I wanted to be respected,
and I wanted to be looked up to.
I'll tell you what took place after this 30 days in California.
And I came back to Atlanta.
And I said to him,
it was much more important.
It was much more important what I thought about me
than what you thought about me.
It was much more important to me what was going to go on in the inside in my life
from that time on.
And I know that there was a change in my life
because the guy in 1978 is not the same guy that stands before you today.
It's that my consideration for my fellow man is first place in my life.
It's that my sobriety is at the very center of my life.
All the rest of the things take place in my life.
They take place around it.
My sobriety is in the very center.
My sobriety is the most precious thing that I have in my life.
More precious than anything else.
You know, I thought that what I was going to have to do is I was going to have
to live the rest of my life by myself in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Because I didn't feel worthy enough to have a wife or a partner because of my past.
And I thought that what I would do is
that this would be perfectly okay if this is the way it was going to be.
In 1980, God thought differently because into my life came this little blonde lady
that is absolutely the light of my life.
And I want to make sure that everybody here knows who she is and I'm going to ask her,
to stand, Mary, I'm a, my wife.
You know, she and I have a, have a life together today.
We were married in, in 1982.
And I want you to know, we did it right, folks.
We did it right.
I courted her for two and a half years before she,
we got married.
And I was scared to death.
I was terrified that I would repeat some of the things in my life,
married to this precious lady, as I had before.
That's what I was afraid of.
But you see, God brought about a change in my life
so that I didn't have to live like I used to live.
The way I feel about it today is, with the lady that I'm married to,
is I can take her to meet anybody,
that I have ever known in my life.
I can take her to any place that I have ever lived,
and have her meet anybody that I have ever known.
And I don't have to hide any secrets from her at all.
Is that she knows all about me.
She knows all the nooks and crannies and all the dark places.
And it has been a wonderful, wonderful 19 years in October that we've been married.
And you see, I think that I am truly blessed.
Because we have the best that's offered in this program.
And we have a great life together.
And that's all been possible because of that day on April the 9th of 1959.
You know, I had no idea the journey that it was going to take me on.
And I am so grateful.
I am so grateful for that today.
And so grateful to have a chance to share that with you tonight.
That I can't begin to explain how I really feel.
But I want to tell you tonight in closing,
that I hope that God blesses your life as much as he has blessed ours.
Thank you very kindly and God bless you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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