Every Time I Help Him, He Helps Me, the Twelfth Step Loop – Betty L.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength, and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking. There are no dues or fees for AA membership. We are self-supporting through our own contributions. AA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization, or institution. It does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. I'm an alcoholic. My name is Jack Byers. My sobriete date is July 16, 1971. By the grace of a loving God, I have not seen it necessary to have anything to drink since that date. And I owe all of that to people like you. a few announcements before i forget it one is definitely growing in grace because that's the way we were saved into this program and in knowledge this helps us to give knowledge and i'm glad that we can be a little part of carrying the message of alcoholics anonymous and on behalf of the board of directors i give to you a sincere welcome to this hour or yours and ours, spring conference, our 11th one. Thank God I haven't missed one yet. How many in this audience are here for the first time? Would you please stand? Let us give you a warm welcome. How many would you please stay? That's great. Keep coming back. Keep coming by. I know we were introduced to this 14 years ago before they had a spring conference and I found something here I have found nowhere else under the heavens so I'm glad that we're here I gave you my sobriety date which was 13 years ago last July you know God in his infinite wisdom so need then to start preparing somebody to maybe welcome me at a time when I need it most and so at gso they ask a lovely lady to come to work in gso she's been serving us well since that day i heard her first at an assembly in 1976 then later at our southeastern the one thing i have learned from this lady she loves to serve and do for others she has proved conclusively that a works works in any phase of her activities. She served us well in GSO, and I found and learned that she was a better parliamentarian than any person I've ever known. And I learned a lot from Betty. And Betty, I'm so glad you came to visit with us again here in these beautiful mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Thanks for coming. I give you Betty. Thank you very much, Jack. I was looking around behind me to see who you were talking about there for a minute. My name is Betty Little, and I'm an alcoholic. And I'm a member of the Brooklyn Heights group of Alcoholics Anonymous. And for me, that's a very important thing because as long as I'm not an alcoholic, as long time a member of a group of Alcoholic Anonymous, I'm going to be all right. I want to thank the committee for asking me and for asking other people at pso to come here to the blue ridge mountains and share with you i i got a lot of good advice not advice but a lot of good sharing about what a wonderful weekend this is and what a wonderful time i was going to have and i can see that it was all very authentic because it's a beautiful place and uh i've had a good time already I'd like to tell you some tonight about how it was, what happened, and how I got here. I was born in 1928 into an Irish Catholic family in the Bronx, New York. And when I came to AA in 1963, they told me that I didn't have to be an Irish Catholic to join this club but that it would help there's another one in the crowd there were a lot of us there in Northport and at any rate my grandfather my paternal grandfather died of alcoholism in Bellevue Hospital before I was born and that was before there was any such thing as Alcoholics Anonymous and I always say unfortunately he was the one with the money because he had he was a very successful contractor in the city of New York and when we were very small my father took us and showed his building with the little name in them carved into the stone because he was a stonecutter but he died a pauper in the DTs in Bellevue Hospital my mother's father was I guess I suppose a heavy drinker but my mother because of that was terrified of alcohol and he worked for the newspapers he was a stationary engineer and he work nights and when he came home in the morning when I was a child he would go into the closet literally and have a couple of shots of Parking Tilted and I know that when he came out of the closet he his personality changed and my mother told the stories about when she was young and the engineers involved came and how they all got drunk and how terrified she was and when i was nine years old my mother forbade me to drink now i i hadn't thought of it yet but i can tell you that it made me very interested in the idea and uh when iwas 14 i went to a christmas party and somebody's mother gave us a drink and I loved everything about it when I was 14 years old I was equally as large as I am now and a little bit taller we were talking about osteoporosis at the table I was a little taller than I am and I took this drink and I'm here to tell you that life changed instantly I got shorter I got prettier you know and all my awkwardness with myself seemed to change almost immediately and I really loved it I lived at home I didn't drink a great deal in my teens but I certainly drank whenever I got the opportunity and I found early on that I had a large capacity for alcohol ours was a matriarchal home I came from I remember the first time I heard Bill Wilson he said we are all a result of a parental relationship gone wrong either too much attention or too little attention but the psychological name for the disease of alcoholism is one of dependency and my life was uh in a home where there was too much attachment i think that we had a babysitter when we were kids twice you know and i can remember who it was because my mother rarely let us out of her sight and especially me because somehow or another they became very aware that i was rebellious and so the control uh was even stronger with me uh however i did drink in my teens and i did just sufficiently to discover that i had a very large capacity and as i grew up and got out of high school uh and i went to work in new york city we lived in a and they moved from the bronx when I was an infant to a little town outside New York in the suburbs called Floral Park and um but I commuted to the city to go to work and I quickly found out about lunchtime cocktails and I found out about bars which were also forbidden and I loved bars they were forbidden after all that made them marvelous to start with and uh and I liked bartenders and I like the mirrors and I like the whole thing um at any rate uh in in through the teen years in my early adulthood there was the control and i didn't get into a great deal of trouble when i was about 22 years old i was working for chemical companies and there was a strike and as a result we did a huge amount of overtime and i collected a good amount of money and finally i got my vacation and I took this money and went off to the Pocono Mountains, and that's where young secretaries would go for vacation in the Northeast. And he did something known at that time as operating. And I went to thePoconoMountains, and I met someone at the table. There was another young woman around my age at thetable the first night I was there, and she was from the Bronx. And we went downstairs, and we met some other guys, eyes, and off we went to a speakeasy in Pennsylvania. We had a marvelous time, and I drank my way through that vacation with no ill effects because I was young and healthy. And when we returned to New York, this friend who worked in Rockefeller Center as I did said, I know a bar on 44th Street that you might like, and maybe we could get together one time and go there. And so about a week or two after we returned to new york i met this newfound friend and we went to the bar on 44th street and i liked it so much that seven years later i was getting mail there telephone calls there when i'm for a long long time my drinking in that bar um i was working for an ad i guess i left the the chemical company i went to work for an advertising agency along the way i was already introduced to the bar and there were a lot of people in publishing and by the time i left the advertising agency it was now three four five years later to go to work for a news magazine uh when i went for the interview with the news magazine i had to have a vodka gimlet in order to go on the interview now a lot things happened along the way any relationship that i started fell apart because my primary relationship more and more and more had to do with alcohol any anxiety that I had and I had a great deal of it from the time I was very young I suffered from anxiety and I found as soon as I started to drink that all of my anxiety was soluble in alcohol what I didn't understand when I was suffering from the anxiety was something I came to understand when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and that's that what the name of my fear was self-centered fear and the alcohol of course only made that worse it made me crawl further and further and further into myself and the more of course that I did this the worse the anxiety became and the I needed to drink and it is like a square page and it went on and on and the the job with the news magazine was a very very good job and I had not had a college education and I was doing very well I was supervising the secretaries of all the salesmen and I believe there was something like 14 of them and they all had expense accounts and they were all very heavy drinkers and whenever they wanted to solve a problem about the secretarial support system that they had. They knew what to do, they invited me out for drinks. I also had charge of the box in Yankee Stadium and which the salesmen used to entertain customers and the salesman knew how to get the box in Yankees Stadium on the good days. They took me out for drink and my drinking during that period really accelerated in that two years and I can remember that I I would close up the desk, and one night in particular, I can remember it as if it was yesterday, and I slammed the desk door shut and I stuffed all the papers in and I said, I'll do this tomorrow and that tomorrow, you know. And a little voice inside of me said, You know very well you don't know whether you're going to get here tomorrow or not. Because by this time, alcohol had total control of my life and it decided whether I went to work in the morning, it decided whether I got there on time or whether I got there late. It decided who I was with it decided where I was with whom and I shrugged that thought off like it was a cobweb in my mind and locked the desk door and walked out of that office and walked up the street and turned left and turned right and went right into that bar and I didn't get there the next day because I had absolutely no control over what happened to me when I picked up the first drink. I didn't understand that then, I wasn't able to relate that, you know, the two events. I didn' t know that when I took the first drinks there was absolutely no choice for me about the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc., etc., etc. I was fired from the job at Newsweek. It was a very good job, and they told me the day they fired me that I had been considered for Secretary to the Chairman of the Board. And it really would have been making it for me considering my educational background, but instead I was on the street and I was something like 31, 32 years old, and I went on a one-week bender and my friends most of whom by now were friends from the bar room uh friends who drank because if you didn't drink i just didn't make friends with you and they were passing me from one to the other they were concerned about me because i seemed to have lost all control over my emotions but what did they do they kept buying me drinks because of these people where there's so many of them that have died since from alcohol and from alcoholism uh but i remember that week and it just went on and on and finally i just had to stay home for several days and taper down and um get control of myself which i was able to do when i was drinking but i had to literally close out the world and stay home and eat a little and sleep a little and drink a little until i was able to stop the drinking for a while and settle my stomach down and get some kind of water into my life and i did this and got uh yet another job and it was one job after another job after another job they were lesser and lesser and less i became totally incapable of maintaining painting relationships with men or women uh because i was like i had a friend who was an artist and i remember she said to me if i were to paint you i would paint a great big crying child uh and because literally alcohol was reducing me uh to a vegetable i was uh gradually less and less able to look after my appearance. I gained weight upon weight upon weight. My clothing was always in a state of disorder. There were either cigarette burns or split seams or whatever, and I used to joke about putting the stockings on to get the runs on straight. It was it was a perfectly food legislative affairs and I think it's one that every alcoholic in this room understand if you understand it I don't have to explain it to you and if you don't I can't it's literally one of those things someplace along the line I left home at age 27 I ran away from home speaking of the parental relationship and literally I had to climb over the screaming body needless to say uh when i left home the drinking accelerated uh there was no control over me now and needless say when the drinking accelerated totally out of control the anxiety got worse someplace along the line there i decided that i needed to go to a therapist i entered psychotherapy and I remember that at that time it's got to have been um in the 1950s uh I was paying something like 25 dollars an hour and I was going to this guy two or three times a week and I remember somebody telling me a joke in the bar about a guy who went to a psychiatrist and when asked what his problem was he told the psychiatrist that he lived in Greenwich connecticut with his wife and two kids and then he traveled on business once in a while to chicago uh and he had a girlfriend there and he her in an apartment on the lake and um the psychiatrist finally said well what is the problem this all sounds very nice to me and he said well you see i only make 85 dollars a week now i laughed at this but i was going to the psychiatrist a couple of times a week and i was only making 85 a week you know and And I was drinking in the bar every day, and it didn't add up. I got a second job with someone who, various people I'd meet in the block, and I would do second jobs. One of them I remember that I researched the subject matter for John Nagy, who did learn how to draw television shows. And I would, in order to do it very quickly and get the money, because you had to get very condensed information, it was a 15-minute show, So I used to go into the children's library in the New York Public Library and sit with my knees under my nose on the little chairs, you know, and get pertinent information on the various subjects. But John Nagy also bought me drinks. I did not get involved with anybody unless there was drinking involved. And all of the second job money that I would get went to the bartender, and it went on the drinking and it went on all the expenses dependent to drinking um finally i went home uh i used to go home on weekends and uh i treated my parents home at that time like a filling cake you know i ate good and i slept a lot and i got caught up on everything so i could come back into the city and start the whole merry-go-round again but at any rate my mother became very ill and this was in the early 1960s and um uh i went home this friday after the operation and my sister told me that uh my mother had terminal cancer and i remember that my sister and i drank a fist of gin in a couple of hours that night and i remembered my brother-in-law having to bring me back to the to the apartment and help me get up these stairs and that's just not a normal way for her two women in their 30s to respond to the fact that their mother is dying. But it seemed like a perfectly normal state of affairs for me. By this time, I don't know how many jobs I had lost. The psychiatrist, of course, had long since gone down the drain because I didn't pay him. The telephone had gone down and drained because I hadn't paid it. And I remember I very heroically offered to come home and take care of my mother. I know today that I wanted to come to be taken care of, but I was much too proud to admit that. So here is my opportunity now to say I will come home and take good money." And they said yes, they wanted me to do that, and so I closed up the apartment. The gas and electric was turned off a week ahead and it was not a misunderstanding about when i was moving it too was turned off because of non-payment of work so you can see how capable i was of just taking care of myself and looking after my affairs at any rate i went home and i did for a period of uh i don't remember six months or so i took care of my mother until she died and my drinking really decreased I drank little or not at all while I was doing it simply because it was not permitted in my mother's house once in a while we had a drink before dinner but my sister would come every other week or so and I would go into the city overnight and I would get very drunk and then I would return until the task was over and my mother did die. And I stayed on out in Long Island, and kept house for my father for a period of about 18 months. When my mother was sick he was terrified that I would leave. He was a very dependent man and I did stay and keep house for him but the bottle that was under the sink that we didn't want my mother to know was there came out on top of the sink after she died, and I suggested to my father that we have a cocktail before dinner because now I was in charge of his household. And he agreed very readily. By the time my father was put in a nursing home, he was drinking almost a fifth a day because he joined me in my drinking, literally. For years, I suffered some guilt about that until I entered psychotherapy myself and over a period of time when we talked about it he pointed out to me that my father had the psychological disease of alcoholism and when my mother died the lid was ripped off you know it was always there and and that indeed it probably would have blossomed with or without my help but at any rate this is the only time I hid bottles and I hid them from my father so that he wouldn't drinking and i suspect he hit a few from me for the same reason um and uh i got jobs on long island now and i was driving while drinking and I got into automobile accidents which one in particular both cars were demolished and the other one was parked I was pulled out of that wreckage and they put stitches in my knee and in my lip in the firehouse and I can still remember the face of the fireman who held my hand and ah and because they couldn't anesthetize me I was too drunk and they knew I was to drunk and it would have been too dangerous to give me any anesthetic I really didn't need any anesthetics but I was kind of sober by the time they got finished with that and uh i went back to the doctor over a period of time and when he discharged me after taking all the stitches out he said to me i you're all patched up now until the next time and i said uh there isn't going to be a next time and he said very arrogantly and he says well young lady i hope so but he said i can tell tell you that when I arrived at the scene at that accident, I thought they had called the wrong person. I thought that they should have called Tom Dalton. And Tom Dalto in that town was the undertaker. He said, you are a very fortunate woman and if you miss drinking and driving again, you're really playing Russian roulette. it. This incident interfered with my driving for a short period of time. And it goes on and on, and it got worse and worse. And I came further and further and further into myself. And there were arguments with my brother and my sister. My sister was drinking it was clear with running a second to mine my brother finally didn't want me in his house at all um and i was i built resentments that it took me years to unload uh because i felt like i was such a heroine for taking care of my father uh my father had many strokes over period this period of time and the doctor came with one of them and i had been called at work and I jumped in the car. And I got the call right after lunch, and I had a couple of Manhattans. And I drove home the 30 miles, and the doctor looked at me when I got home, and within a few days he talked with my brother and suggested that my father be put in a rest home. I did this. I remember drinking in the morning in order to do it. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life and I remember taking ten days to break up the apartment I remember when the Salvation Army people came I had about seven drinks now usually I felt desperately awful and I was in another state of despair but you know when you've had about 67 things start to look better and you know that the ship is going to come in this year and it's that little space in there where you float. And the Salvation Army arrived just about that time, and I had a couple of winter coats, and they were very old and tattered. I hadn't worn anything new in a long time. But I knew when these guys came that I was going to be well off by next winter, so I gave them the winter coats. I said, give them to the poor, you know. And And they took the pieces of furniture and so on. And it was a 10-day drunk, and I finally moved into this furnished room in Massapequa where I did my last mile of drinking. And it were very, very desperate state of affairs. There were very few, if any, friends. And I remember on one occasion, I've just returned from a lovely vacation in Florida, And that year, a friend of mine in Florida Park, who I'd gone to school with, had been widowed. It was fairly early widowhood. And she wanted to go out to Greenport, which is a lovely beach community on Long Island, for a week. And she want me to come with her. And she said, I know you're kind of broke, but I'll pay for it. And I didn't have enough money to buy a bathing suit to go. And so I said no, and I stayed there in the furnace room and drank. Finally I was reduced to temporary jobs, and would get, you know, $15 or $20. And I'd get some food, some cheap food, and – and I'd a bottle, and I was still into the pills that I had started taking in my late 20s for anxiety. And now it's balancing the pills and the booze. The first thing I got into was Desutol. I was still living home, I remember. And after an anxiety attack on a Fifth Avenue bus, I went home and was taken to the doctor and I was very shaky and he prescribed this Desutal. Desutel has dexedrine in it and butyl in it. And so it pets you up and it calms you down simultaneously. And the result was you could cross Fifth Avenue with 42nd Street in Manhattan against the light and not worry, you know. It was incredible. Also, the dexedrine I found out, I took the stuff compulsively to get through a work day after staying out until 4 in the morning drinking. And the results was you shook and you didn't care. I mean, normally, you know, if I had the shakes, I'd be talking to you and I'd be holding my hands behind my back. But, you know, I've been changing typewriter ribbons and my hands are slapping all over the place. And you just didn't care. I call them green happiness pills. And over the years I went from them to almost anything, to Miltown, to somebody I knew took Thorazine, and we used to swap pills at the bar. I mean it was just Well, it was just insanity when I learned what I'd learned about what happens when we cross medication and alcohol, medication at that time. But there I was now in the furnished room, and I'd get a few dollars, and I wouldn't know whether to buy the pills or the bottle, and I'd a half of pints and prescription. I had – in those days you could keep a prescription operating operating in more than one drugstore at one time, and I knew how to do that. And that was going on. But I was in a truly desperate state of affairs by now. And I got up out of the convertible sofa I slept in in that furnished room one morning in October of 1962, and I said out loud what I really believe today is the first honest prayer that I ever said in my life and it was simply my god my god get me out of here uh and i i meant get me out myself get me on the top of this life i'm living uh i felt that there were only two kinds of days there are anxiety days and depression days and i preferred depression days um i picked up the paper and there was an ad for a job uh in huntington and uh the The agency was in Hicksville, and I drove over to the agency. And the only way I could deal with being interviewed at an agency was to work up a good mad at agency people before I got there, you know, and say to myself, don't be afraid of these people. They're all too stupid to get a good job themselves anyhow. And if I could work up that attitude, you now, then I wasn't afraid of them. And I got through that interview, and they made an appointment for the afternoon for me in Huntington. and I went home and the people who owned the house in which the furnished room was lovely people they were not wealthy people but they needed the money from the furnish room but they had a lovely family and they asked me to have lunch with them and I couldn't have lunch with them because I had to have there was a half a pint of vodka in there and some milk down and a half can of tuna fish and that's where I had the money and I had two drinks of vodka in order to go on the interview. I had two dresses left, a brown one with a cigarette hole and a black one with its foot seam, and I opted for the brown one. I had a cashmere coat that I had worn in a women's ad club ball. It was October. I put that over the cigarette hole, you know, and I had it on my shirt. I had an e-car that was in the same state of disrepair that I was. He sprayed ether on the carburetor of this car that started in the summer. And I sprayed the ether on the carburetor and jumped in the car, and away I went. I got there, and there was a woman in the reception room, and I signed in. And she said, I'm terribly sorry, but the man who was to interview me was in a meeting, and I had to wait an hour for the interview. And I couldn't take the cashmere coat off because of the cigarette hole. and the sun was coming through the glass as it does in late october as it sets and the sweat was starting to pour out of me from the vodka and in the hour that i waited many times i thought that i would vote uh and in this woman whose name was dorothy observed me she smelled my breath when i signed the register what i did not know was that dorothy was two months sober an alcoholic I got the job. I'm convinced the only reason I got the job was because the man kept me waiting for an hour and he's embarrassed. The company was owned by the patients who at that time owned the New York Mets who were losing you know beyond anything so you can see the company got me and this woman didn't have anything going for uh and uh this receptionist became my friend now i thought she was going to drink with me i just i smelled her out as a drinker you know and i said she's going to know everybody goes to drink you know and she's going to know what bars these people go to and so on but we'd a bunch of us would go to lunch together and she wouldn't hurt me, you know, and I couldn't take it. But she was friendly with me. And sometimes she'd say to me, my father was in the nursing home, and she'd say, here why don't you take five dollars, go up to Howard Johnson's Heavy Supper and get your father some of that candy and go in and see him. And she did a lot of nice things for me. Like I would call in to say I wasn't coming in and I might still be drunk from the night before. And he'd get me off the phone and wait until my boss had a phone call and hung up and she'd ring in and say oh Betty called while you were on the phone you know she ran interference for me she covered for me and finally one day she suggested that I needed my hair needed attention and why didn't I go for a permanent she was getting one the next morning that my hair needed a tension with the understatement of the year and but anyhow I agreed I said I don't have any money she said I'll lend you some money come on meet me tomorrow morning eight o'clock she made the call well in those days they hooked you up to those wired things for permanence you know eight o´clock in the morning and the sweat coming out and i almost died i mean with the frizzed hair and the beet red face and uh she invited me home to her house for lunch and she started to tell me his story and uh someone had had taken me to a meeting about nine months before. A friend of mine that I grew up with, the one who wanted to go to the beach, ended up in AA. And I passed it off. But I asked her, I said, tell me, do you – how did she stay sober? And she, of course, then told me she was in AA, she and I was there. And she told me this story. And I started to shake. I literally started to shaky-pore it. And she went downstairs and got a bottle. She said, Bill doesn't know this is still down here and she gave me a couple of drinks, and she gave me the bottle to take home. And she said, you think about it, and if you want to go with us next Thursday night or Monday night it was, next Monday night, whichever. She said, you come with us. And the day came and I decided to go. It was a Thursday night. And I remember that we went for supper in the diner, and I ordered a beer because I had a grade B hangover it really wasn't the worst one I ever had and there was an insurance salesman who came with us he paid the bill I remember that he had nothing to do with the story but but somewheres along the line it was said you want another cup of coffee and I said no but I'd like another beer And Dorothy said, why don't you try going to this meeting sober? And I said, this is ridiculous. Two beers and not sober. But I didn't have it and had never had it, and that was April 25th, 1963. And for that, I'm eternally grateful. They took me to the meeting. It was in Manhasset, and Manhassett is on the north shore of Long Island, and there there were Cadillacs in the parking lot, and the women had alligator shoes and pocketbooks that matched, and their hair was done. And someone came up to me and said, my dear, are you a new member? And I was not going to sign anything because I hadn't made up my mind yet, so I stood my full height and I said to her, I'm considering. So she said, darling, darling, step right up front. We have a special robe for considerate. And by some miracle, there were speakers from New York City that night. The man later, many years later when I moved back into New York city, I saw the man around a little and he was a very attractive man, tall Irishman, gray haired Irishman. And there was a woman who was probably in her late 40s uh who had my story literally she told my story uh and she uh she talked about going into a liquor store and walking up and down in front of the wine rack and computing in her head the bottle that had the highest alcohol content for the least money and then taking it up to the counter and saying to the man is this the right wine is chicken him and i had done the same thing you know like the week before uh also she talked about the fact that this man whose name was jim hewitt but this man had uh called her up at three o'clock in the afternoon and asked her uh to go to this meeting with him and to have dinner with him on the way and that didn't seem like a bad gig for me at all you know and i thought how could she look like that when she only knew that she was going to go out at three o'clock in the afternoon you know her hair was done her clothes looked perfect she just looked wonderful and literally it was a little bit of i'd like a life like that you know and she had had business success now and she lost jobs and so on they took me home and dorothy said are you going to drink tonight well i didn't have any money because it was thursday i said no but i thought i'll drink tomorrow night night and I'll think it over uh Friday came and there was a bill collector he called and he had a judgment and I knew that if I didn't send him almost my whole salary on Friday that I was going to be out of work because he could affect the judgment and i'd already been told that I wasn't the boss would fire me if that happened and so I said I think I'll try it and I went home stayed Stayed home for the entire weekend, realized I had to go into work without boots Monday morning without having had any boots. And I called New York City in a group Sunday night and the people from Huntington came and took me to a meeting. Now that began for me what has been an entirely new and wonderful life because literally the way i felt when i came to aaa was i i was 34 about to be 35 years old and uh i didn't know how to do life i mean i just couldn't figure it out i couldn't figured out how people got a salary and put money aside and had any fun i just didn't understand any of this and uh and i and i was paying my rent here now by the week you know and uh that was uh it was ninety dollars a month and And I could not put $90 together. I had to give the man $19.20 a week because I got paid by the week and what was left I drank and bought some food. I went to the meeting and I met a great group of women. It seemed to me that most of them were four foot nine, but that was all right. I had a sponsor who was about that big and she gave orders like a whack-arm sergeant, you know. They would say there aren't any musts in AA AA, but there are a lot of you better, or you've got it. And they said a meeting every night. At first I didn't want to do it and then I couldn't wait for meeting time. And they came around and they honked the horn and I jumped in the car with some new AAs. And I firmly convinced if there's anybody here who's just beginning their AA life, this is going to be the greatest year of your life. It certainly was the greatest of my life because new ideas were coming into my head all the time I couldn't go to sleep when I got home I was just high on the idea maybe this will work for me maybe it'll work for media and as that feeling grew and grew inside of me just from going to meetings and hearing stories and beginning to identify I started to believe as it says in the second step maybe it can work for them And if it works for them, maybe it can work for me. And I think that's the most important thing that happens in AA. I've seen it over and over again in Northport, there on Long Island. Later I moved back to New York City, seen it there. Most recently I was in Florida on vacation. I went to a women's meeting at 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning. There were 13 women around the table, and two of them, it was their first meeting. meeting. And I saw the tears coming down this woman's face, but you could see the hope. The fire was lit and I know that Ron is done making it because they kept telling, each person kept telling how they came to AA and they thought maybe it would work for them. This sponsor came around and they literally, they taught me things my mother who needed to keep me a child never taught me. I mean, I learned how to cook from women in AA. I I learned how to decorate an apartment for women in AA. I learned to reestablish credit, open a bank account, take care of budget, my money. I learned all this stuff. Now they didn't have to teach me but they did. And it seems that at the time that I came in, they hadn't had anyone come around that got sober in a long time. And they decided that I looked serious. And I'm telling you that I couldn't do anything and get away with it. i used to go back to manhattan on monday nights and the reason i went back was there's a little money around there in manhatta and the men took all the women out for ice cream sodas after the meeting and this was heaven for me so every monday night i'd go back and i would tell them that here back in huntington and northport where i was going they wanted me to give up those pills they said that those pills were no good the manhattan people were very smart they said well are you drinking and i said no and then he said well don't drink and go to meetings and finally one day uh having listened long enough and gotten sober enough i let go of the pills and turned them over and i believe today that i wouldn't be standing here sober had i not been able to do that for me that was where it was at because the pills were the same thing as the alcohol for me i had become my own doctor and i probably would have killed But it was when I did that, that I was fully able to take the second step. And I remember the day without a pill or a drink that I was able to serve coffee in a conference room. It was very exciting. After I was sober about three or four weeks, the people on the job came to me and they had given me an envelope when I went to work there that had a couple hundred dollars in it. And they said, we have a raffle every payday, which was – every other payday I guess it was. Whatever it was. And then somebody won so much money and the rest of the money went in this envelope, which I was supposed to keep. And then when somebody had a baby or they got married or they left, I bought the present. Well this committee, the employee committee decided that money should be in a bank account. And you see, I didn't have it all because I had dipped into the pill a little. You know, I had to have a tooth out once and the dentist and the bottle, and you know how it goes. I stayed home to figure out how much I owed them. It was $100. I couldn't have gotten $100 from anybody then any more than I could get $100,000 tonight. I took two days off, three days. I drove out to Jones Beach. I remember it was in May. It was this time of year, and I prayed. All I knew was I sat and watched the water, and I said, God, please show me how to get out of it. I know I don't want to do it. And something happened inside of me, and I turned around, and we drove home, and I went upstairs. Now, about two hours later, there was a knock on the door, and there was this woman I had met at a meeting. I didn't have a phone, see, that had been taken out. And she came up and said, I thought you'd like to go to Manhattan with me tonight, and maybe we can stop and go to dinner at Howard Johnson's. And we talked a while, and she said to me, You know, I got a raise today, and I'm going to make-believe I didn' get it till next month, and I am going to give you my raise, and want you to do whatever you need. Well, I knew if I went back to work on Friday that I could take $50 in my pay and survive on the remainder. And in the envelope was $40. And I have never looked back. I mean, I asked Garth to show me the way, and he did. My higher power was smart enough not to give me $45 because $45 would help her with the real 30s meeting. And I was able to bring, following that meeting, which in itself was a heart with people from all over the world. I was to go to Ireland, to the home of my grandparents and see the things I'd heard about at my grandmother's grave. And this is a lifetime dream come true that I never ever believed would happen. And I had a rude experience there. The Irish delegate invited me to his home with his mother and his Aunt Eileen and his And I went into that house and sat down at the table, and I felt as if I'd come home. And I had a wonderful time, a wonderful, wonderful experience. More recently, I was able to buy an apartment six years ago in Brooklyn Heights and own my own home and go through the business when I was over 50 years old of signing a mortgage, you know? terrified as I was. And I found that all the help I needed was there for me. Other people were doing this in Manhattan. You almost have to do it now in Manhattan in order to have an appointment. But it treated me very well financially, and I have to not get too involved in that. But not a night goes by that I put out the lights. My apartment looks out on the south harbor uh new york south harbor and i see the chicks coming in at night the lights of magic and every single night when i sit there i said i thank god for uh the life that i live and what's been given to me uh difficult things have happened to me in society my father died right after i got saved but the support i got through that in a way was incredible more recently in in the early right after the international convention in new orleans I became aware that there was something terribly wrong with my legs and my feet. And I knew that I wasn't going to be – it was getting worse and worse. And, I was going to New York doctors who were saying weird things like you had five feet and then they charged me $150. I knew I had five when I went to kindergarten, you know. And finally one doctor diagnosed But he wanted me to choose which operation, because the New York doctors are very afraid of malpractice. And the right person was there, the podiatrist in Wilson Heights, who said, don't have enough in you. Wait, wait, wait. And he helped me with orthotics to walk until through an AA friend in Minneapolis. I got a phone call from an orthopedic surgeon in AA. He said, I have heard a lecture by a man in the Mayo Clinic who's got the most experience. What's wrong with you? I want you to come out. And I went. And this man, who was a past delegate from Minneapolis, came, drove 85 miles. And after I'd had all the tests and everything, they said make up my mind that if I stay, they'd operate on Monday. And I made up my mine, and this man took me to his home, shared his family, his group, is I was in the arms of AA, and there's six round trips to the mayoral clinic. And I'm walking today, and I'm well, and able to walk a long distance. My experience with the higher power has been long and varied, my experience with the 11 Steps. I came through AA with a resentment against the faculty. I tried to go back in early sobriety out of fear, and it lasted very briefly. And, I went, Emmett Cox helped me with the 11 steps tremendously because the concept of uh of the indwelling christ was one i could understand because god's love came to me through you and i believe sincerely that god exists within each of us and it's our permitting god to his person his love through us to one another is how this works what i did in the last year when i was recovering from the second operation a young man came into our group young man about 40 but that's young to me and he uh he needed money and he would rent his car to people and he would work as a dispatcher for a guy who had a business and do different things so finally i said so i'm taking a cab to work in the cast why don't you and we we've developed a friendship uh where uh he would drive me to work and i would keep his spirits up all the way to work giving him programs you're going to find the right job and you're doing the right thing so and of course by the time I got to work my spirits were up because dragging this cat around for six months was no day at the beach you know so uh but that's how I kept my spirits up and my friendship with Bill has gone on to be uh one where every time I help him he helps me and every time he helps it's really a very spiritual relationship and a year ago each year he took me to the church where he returned which is the Catholic of searching a community. And I'm backed now by food, and I'm back now with my own understanding of the higher power in a Catholic community that does many things. We shelter the homeless and we do a lot of things that I believe in. And we had a wedding there last Saturday, and Claude had been said, we're pilgrims in this town. And so I think his community is And so here again, Bill has given me – and this is why I believe that I have to do the 12th step. I have keep on going to AA meetings and being involved one day at a time. A lot of – you know, when you're 22 years sober, you can get pretty lonely at AA meetings in New York, insofar as people who are sober the same length of time. and I have to work hard at not inviting them to put me on a pedestal because I have learned that the guy sitting next to me with seven months of variety can tell me something about the seven steps that I never thought of and that I must keep an open mind in this way and I must permit myself to be present at the miracles that go on in AA day after day night after night we are going to be 40 000 strong in montreal uh the last registration figure is 32 000 uh so that tells you the kind of miracles that have gone on in the last five years and there are more and more chairs filled in brooklyn heights and i know there are far more chairs built in north carolina because this god-given program works for all of And I thank you all very, very much for letting me share with you tonight. Thank you.