Emotional Sobriety Is Standing Up Into My Adult AA Mind – Randall B.
About This Speaker Tape
Randall B., speaking in Atlanta after traveling from Athens, Georgia, opens reluctantly — he loves going to speaker meetings but hates speaking. He traces his origin to a small South Georgia town, Southern Baptist parents he describes as loving but quiet and probably depressed, and the self-appointed role of the golden boy who had to be the best at everything or quit. The first glass of red wine in junior high landed him: relaxed, grown-up, right. By college at UNC Chapel Hill he discovered pot and speed, drank alone at movies, and finally gave up chemistry for religion and psychology because anything he couldn't dominate he dropped. When the 1970 draft lottery handed him a high number, he ditched a Harvard Divinity acceptance and fled to Athens to party and play music.
That party ran until he was 35. He nearly died in his 20s from reds and liquor in an Atlanta hotel. He collected three DUIs, including one doing a U-turn in front of Allen's Hamburgers and another hauling from Savannah thirty days later. He started a not-drinking diary that ended with one entry — 'had a couple beers last night, seems okay' — and silence. He ran to New Orleans for 24/7 bars and a fresh start, met the woman he's now been married to 27 years, and her two-year-old son Isaac. On an interstate in DTs, paranoid and carrying guns, he recited the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm and heard a calm voice: you have to stop, not cut back. Pink cloud lasted two days.
His wife's therapist helped her draw the line: get sober or leave. A counselor in New Orleans told him 'I'm a recovering alcoholic' — words Randall had never heard paired — and sent him to a Tulane AA meeting. He did 90 in 90, watered plants in New Orleans oil buildings for three years, and let his music career go because booze and coke had been welded to it. A security guard at a Florida marina pool said 'I know how to pray' at exactly the moment he was about to drink over a bad gig. A stranger on the Amtrak through Birmingham stopped him from going to the club car. He finally got a sponsor — a wild French Quarter character whose father had committed suicide — and worked a fourth step that unearthed rage at his own father. The sponsor put the kitchen knives away, walked him around the block, and taught him the lesson he calls the biggest of his sobriety: walk through the feeling, with a witness, without acting out.
He went to social work school at UGA, then got the call from an English rock star's people and toured the world as the sober sideman for 16 years — the only one kept on. Today he writes and records his own songs, still makes meetings, and names his current edge honestly: when his wife criticizes him he drops back into adolescent defiance, silent punishment, 'to hell with y'all.' AA is teaching him to stand up into an adult mind, listen, take it in, decide if it's true, talk to someone — instead of going to his room.
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