Fellowship Sustained Me Until I Found the Program and Those Are Two Very Different Things – Mike M.
About This Speaker Tape
Mike M. tells his story at his home group in Tampa, opening with his first drink at age six during a neighbor's keg party in Washington, D.C. He traces his progression through high school drinking in Cocoa Beach, a scholarship to Stanford, driving trucks in Palo Alto, a year of law school at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and working in Bill Graham's rock and roll merchandising operation — where daily drinking accelerated his decline. He made over $100,000 in cash his last year in the music business and had nothing to show for it, proving to himself that money was neither his problem nor his solution.
His bottom came in an eight-foot-wide trailer on County Line Road in Polk County, surrounded by fruit rats, drinking spring vodka from a tea glass and firing it back down when it came up. He describes dog patrol at the Fort Meade Liquor World at 7 a.m., half-pint runs between work breaks, and the morning ritual of trying to get the first drink to stick. After detox and a 28-day stint at Avon Park treatment center, he left "cured," took Antabuse for 90 days, then made a conscious decision to get drunk — rejecting the word "slip" entirely. He drank on Antabuse, turned reddish-purple, and kept going.
A 12-step call in the Bartow detox — a man who came to him unsolicited and simply said he'd found a way to be happy and sober — became the turning point. Mike describes years of white-knuckle, fellowship-only sobriety at Club Yonah before discovering the actual program in the Big Book. He married Chris after three years of friendship and two years of engagement, had a daughter who taught him unconditional love, and now faces his wife's tumor diagnosis with the faith and support system AA gave him. He closes by asking the group to preserve AA as it was written, so his daughter and future alcoholics will find it intact.
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