Fellowship Sustained Me Until I Found the Program and Those Are Two Very Different Things – Mike M.

Thanks, Julian. Thanks, Jimmy, I think. My name's Mike McConnell. I'm an alcoholic.
Because I'm a member of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, because of the grace
and the power of a loving God, I found through the 12-step program Alcoholics Anonymous,
I've been sober since April 1st, 1982, one day at a time. This is my home group,
Pharmacia Group. I'm proud to be a member here. I think it's the best group in Tampa.
If you don't think your group's the best group, just stay there. Don't go mess up somebody else's
group. Jimmy left an announcement up here from the church. It says, in the event of fire,
would the Alano's remain seated until the alcoholics are clear of the building?
I'm going to tell you a story tonight about alcoholism, about my life and how alcoholism
affected my life. I'm not going to tell you about a lot of psychobabble. We're not going to talk
about the dysfunctional inner child or any of that kind of stuff. My problem is I have an inner
adult that's been trying to get out for 43 years now. I haven't had a real happy childhood,
but it's been a long one.
I started at an early age in Washington, D.C., and that was to begin my first six years of
continuous sobriety. I think something that makes a lot of us special is that we can remember the
first time we ever took a drink. I think if you ask normal people that are not alcoholics when
they took their first drink, they couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you when I took my first
drink of Coca-Cola. I couldn't tell you when I ate my first candy bar, but I remember like it
was yesterday, the first time I ever drank liquor.
My next door neighbor was having a keg party for the block, and he put that keg in an old number two
wash tub, and he gave all us kids ice picks to break up those big cakes of ice like they used to have.
And when he tapped the keg, he ran the foam off into some cups and gave it to like three or four of us kids
that had helped him bust up the ice around the keg. I can't remember any physical sensations from
drinking beer that first time, but I remember it made me feel different because drinking beer
was something that the big people did, the grown-ups did, and I was just a little squirt then.
You know, I was going to be a grown-up someday, I hope, but it made me feel important. It made me
feel beyond my station in life. It made me feel special. I didn't really drink much as a six-year
old. That was probably the only time, and it was into my teenage years before I started to dabble
around and drinking liquor again. We didn't really have much love.
I didn't really drink a lot of liquor around the house. I didn't know at the time that my father was an
alcoholic. I can say that. He's dead now. I can say that. The whole time I was growing up, see, he never
drank. He never did. He had an ulcer. He never drank around the house. I found out, I was finding out
later that I come from a long line of drunks on his side of the family. I don't believe that made me an
alcoholic. I believe the one thing I had to do to become an alcoholic was to drink alcohol. Now, there's a
lot of other things that I had to do to become an alcoholic. I had to drink alcohol. I had to drink a lot of
things that go along with alcoholism. I don't believe there's an alcoholic on the face of the earth that just has one
problem. We all got a lot of problems. But one requirement to be an alcoholic is to drink alcohol. You can't get
alcoholism from eating Twinkies. I just don't believe it. I believe you've got to drink alcohol to become an
alcoholic. Anyway, when I became a teenager, I got into high school. I started to drink by the time I was 15. I
could go into, I grew up over in Cocoa Beach. I went to high school over there.
And I could go into all the bars and the liquor stores in town by the time I was like 15 or 16. And that made me feel kind of
special because I'd go in and buy beer and liquor for the guys that were older than me in school because they couldn't get
served. You know, the alcohol had an effect on me. I had an unnatural reaction to alcohol. The unnatural reaction I had to
alcohol was after one or two drinks.
Almost immediately, a sense of ease and comfort would come over me. And I'd get that feeling. It's almost like, ah......
everything's gonna be OK now. No matter what was going on, just a couple of drinks and, boy, I just . It was like flipping the
switch. I could feel on the outside, everything was fine. I did well in school, I played sports. On the outside,
everything looked great. On the inside, I felt like I was about a half bubble off a plum. I feel like I didn't quite fit in.
You know, I was a little embarrassed to be with the girls.
And I was proud of myself. And I was a little monotonous because I knew myself a little too. So then I found out
that me and my wife had a lot of alcoholism issues that were likely to be an Jordani issue that we're not or that we're getting
And I just felt a little out of place.
But after a couple of drinks, I had arrived.
I mean, it was great.
It just transformed me.
It transformed my mind.
It transformed my thinking.
It was wonderful.
It was wonderful.
I can't stand here and tell you that every drink I ever took was awful.
You know, I hear some people stand up here and say,
alcohol, it was awful.
I can't say that because I had some good times early on drinking alcohol.
And I can still remember some of those.
But what I have to remember is I have to kind of fast forward
and not only remember what alcohol did for me,
but I have to remember what alcohol did to me later on.
It's like my first sponsor told me.
He said, if you ever think about taking a drink, think it all the way through.
He said, don't think about how that cold beer is going to taste,
how good it's going to taste, that first sip of that cold beer on a hot day.
He said, think about maybe three weeks from then,
crawling around on the floor and puking
and puking and puking and puking.
And I can still remember some of those.
And waking up in DTs or in convulsions or in a hospital or in jail.
He said, think it all the way through.
Think that drunk all the way through.
Don't just stop there.
He said, you'd be surprised, but if you think it all the way through,
you probably won't take that first drink.
Anyway, I got out of high school,
and I got a scholarship to go out to the West Coast,
go to school at Stanford University in California.
And this was the late 60s, and most of the kids I knew in Florida
wanted to be in California in the late 60s.
Because that's where it was all happening.
Stanford's just down from San Francisco out there.
And I was just staying around the San Francisco area for about 11 years.
And there was a lot of stuff going on out there,
and I participated in all of it.
And that's all I got to say about that.
Going to school, I drank a lot.
It didn't seem to interfere with my schoolwork.
I managed to pass my courses,
and graduate from college.
My drinking was getting worse, though.
I was drinking more and more and more.
I was getting drunk by then about three or four nights a week, probably.
I graduated from school.
I wanted to go to law school.
So I took a job driving a truck for a couple of years.
And that was a good job.
I could drink just damn near every night.
And as long as I could drag my sorry self out of bed in the morning
and get to work, everything was okay.
I did that.
I roomed.
I did that.
I did that.
A friend of mine and I had a house in Palo Alto.
We both drove a truck for the same company.
We never had less than three or four quarts of liquor
and maybe ten cases of beer in the house at any time,
you know, just in case there was an emergency.
So after that, after driving a truck for a couple of years,
I saved my money.
I went to law school.
I went through the first year of law school.
And I passed with a B average.
School was always easy for me.
I believe it was a God-given talent.
It had nothing to do with the amount of effort I put into it.
I was going to Golden Gate University Law School in San Francisco.
And it's right downtown, about two blocks from the East Bay Terminal.
And it's right around the corner from Doc Holliday's Saloon in San Francisco,
where they had cheap drinks and one of the largest collection
of pinball machines in San Francisco.
And these are the old-fashioned pinball machines.
They're not the kind that got flippers on them.
They just got a bunch of holes there.
And you just, and you bump the machine and get the balls to drop in the hole,
the old drop ball.
Pinballs.
Anyway, after, I tried to start a second year in law school.
And I learned that you couldn't work full-time and go to school full-time.
So I kind of put that on the back burner.
And I went to work for a friend of mine in San Francisco who was working
for a guy named Bill Graham out there in the rock and roll business.
Now, Bill Graham had a couple little places in the country, the Fillmore East
and the Fillmore West and Winterland Arena in San Francisco.
And we also had a merchandising company.
So we ran out of that.
We were doing merchandising for some of the biggest rock bands in the country.
It was a wonderful job for a person like me because by this time,
my drinking had progressed.
I was a daily drinker.
I had to drink, I had to maintain a certain level of alcohol in my system just to kind
of function, see?
I hear about people talking about hangovers.
I didn't, very seldom did I ever have a hangover because I never sobered
up far enough to really get that bad.
I mean, if it gets bad, you know.
If it got that bad, I'd take a drink.
You know, when the going gets tough, I'd take a drink.
I mean, there's no two ways about that.
But that was a great job for me and I'm grateful that I had that job because I believe that
that lifestyle really accelerated my demise because there's a possibility if I hadn't
done that, I might have been able to drink for maybe another nine or ten years before
it killed me.
I don't know.
That's a scary thought.
I can remember sitting in a bar when I was 30 years old.
And knowing the end was approaching, knowing I just couldn't do it anymore.
And I'd look down at the end of the bar and there'd be some guy there sitting there 65
years old or something and he's still hooking them down.
And I used to resent that guy because I knew I would never live if I drank the way I was
drinking.
I would never live that long to drink that long and I just didn't think it was fair.
I just didn't think it was fair that he could make it for that long and I just knew I couldn't.
Anyway.
We.
I'm one of those guys.
I never lost a job because of alcohol.
A lot of people lose jobs because they're drunk.
I never lost a job because I was drunk.
Now that's the truth.
But that's not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that some alcoholics have, we have those kind of intuitive ideas and
I would have an intuitive idea when it was time to move on because I, right before the
ax fell, you know, I'm sure nobody in this crowd ever had to do that.
But some of us.
Some of us, you know, it's time to get out of Dodge and so I would get out of Dodge right
before the hatchet man came in.
And the last year I was in the rock and roll business, I made over $100,000 in cash.
I made another about $20,000 on the payroll.
I didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out up.
And I'm grateful for that because I found out after that, I went to Atlanta and tried
to start another company and we didn't make it and I ended up back down in Florida working
part time.
I was in the green rooms.
That year I made enough money so I didn't even have to file a tax return.
I think I made like $1,500 or something that year.
So one thing I know for certain is money ain't my problem and money ain't my solution.
The only thing money did for me was I could drink in maybe classier joints.
You know, if I was, if I had money, I could drink at the Hilton.
If I didn't have any money, I was drinking down at the Gator Lounge or at the Twilight
Place like that, one of those fine Emporias.
So and I used to drink good whiskey.
You know, I used to drink like Jack Daniels and stuff and Heineken beer and stuff like
that.
I'd get down to drinking, you know, Relska or Popoff vodka or Three Feathers or Mad Dog,
you know, whatever it was.
It didn't matter.
It's just I didn't drink much.
When I got real bad, I couldn't drink much beer because it's just too much to hold on
my stomach.
It's just my stomach wouldn't hold that much.
Anyway.
I went from working part-time putting in screen rooms to I got a job out in the phosphate
mines working as a laborer.
Now here, a few years ago, I was in San Francisco going to law school.
Now I'm working out in Polk County in the phosphate mines where the most complicated
thing I use on a daily basis is a shovel and a wheelbarrow and I was marginally over-employed
at that point.
I, sometimes they have to tell you, you know, put that wheelbarrow down.
You know, you don't know nothing about machinery.
I don't.
But it was wonderful because there's a lot of drunks working construction and if you
come to work and sit sick and didn't have a chance to get well, somebody would have
a jug in the car and you could sneak out and get healthy, get so you felt better.
I moved into an eight-foot-wide trailer out by County Line Road and there was 80 acres
of woods next to it and there was nothing but me and the fruit rats living in the trailer.
There were some holes in the floor.
And sometimes I'd be not relaxing on the couch and a fruit rat would come up to the floor,
run between my feet down the hall and shoot off in one of the rooms and sneak in there
or something.
And that was kind of startling but it wasn't really a problem.
I had a .44.
But a moving fruit rat is a difficult target when you're drunk with a .44 pistol, let me
assure you that.
I didn't hit one of those suckers.
But anyway, I started, I got to where I was laying out from work because I was drinking
real bad.
At this point, I'm way past the morning drink.
I mean, some people get to the morning drink and that's some kind of trauma.
You know, if you stay till closing time, at least for me, about four hours later, my eyes
would pop open and I needed a drink.
I was a poor planter.
I usually drank up everything in the house or drank till I passed out and I'd get up
the next morning and the tears would be on me because I didn't have anything to back
it up.
So I was a poor planter for a while.
It's funny.
I lived alone.
I was goofy.
I lived alone and I used to hide bottles, you know, just in case I had visitors, you
know.
The lady I rented from had a little trailer that set out back and that's what we put the
trash in.
You know, she'd burn the trash and the bottles and the cans you put out in that trailer and
they hauled it to the dump once in a while.
God, I can remember after I quit drinking, one day I saw that trailer going out of there
and there was just half pint and pint vodka bottles just falling off that thing going
out the yard.
It was incredible.
But anyway, I was working this job down in Fort Meade and it was a good construction
job.
It lasted over a year.
And there was a Liquor World in Fort Meade that opened at 7 o'clock in the morning.
And my job started at 7 o'clock in the morning.
So I'd be on dog patrol at the Liquor World.
You know what dog patrol is, right?
You know, you're there for the hair of the dog the next morning, all the guys standing
out there shaking, waiting for the liquor store or the bar to open.
And so I'd get a half pint.
I'd get a half pint and then run down to the job.
And then we'd get a break in the morning about 9.30.
I'd run up there, get another half pint and run back to the job.
And then at noon, we'd go uptown for dinner.
I'd get a half pint and maybe a few beers just to be social and run back to the job.
And by 3.30 when we got off, I was headed for County Line for a liquor store so I could
get a job.
And the problem I had was in the morning, I was drinking what I like to call spring
vodka.
You know, it's that old cheap vodka that kind of hits bottom and sprinkles.
And I'd get a half pint and then run back to the job.
And I know that if I can get the first one to stick then I'm gonna make it.
If I can't get the first one to stick, I'm gonna die.
So what I would do is I'd use a big tea glass and pour about a half a pint in there and
fire that thing down.
And then when it came back up, I could catch it in that big glass and just fire it right
back down.
Usually you can get it to stick before it got warm.
You know, it may take two or three tries.
But, you know...
It's funny, isn't it?
People say alcoholics don't have any willpower.
What do they have in their life that they'll pursue to the gates of insanity or death, huh?
Nothing.
Nothing.
They're a bunch of candy asses.
Willpower?
It takes willpower to keep drinking that liquor when you know it's killing you.
I had plenty of willpower.
You know, I never had a problem with drinking until I tried to quit.
That's when my problems with drinking started.
So I started laying out from work, and one of the pushers on the job came out with my brother.
He's a friend of my brother's, and they came out to my trailer, and I was in my usual state of repose, whatever that was.
And they kind of scraped me off and threw me in the shower, and they took me over here to Tampa and Sly, Nebraska to detox.
And while I was in there for five days, they told me that there was a place called Avon Park.
It's a treatment center.
I didn't know a treatment center from anything.
But I said, you know what?
I don't have any money.
They said, that's okay.
It's run by the state.
If you don't have any money, they don't charge you anything.
Huh, sign me up.
You know, because that way I could chill out for 28 days and demonstrate to all those that were concerned, and there weren't many at that point,
that I was trying to do something about my drinking.
Then I could come back.
I'd be cured.
I could return to social drinking.
No problem.
Well, it didn't quite work that way.
I went down there with the attitude.
I went down there with the attitude that they couldn't teach me anything, and that's exactly what they taught me, nothing.
I didn't want to play the little touchy-feely games in the groups and all that stuff.
And so, you know, I walked out of there.
Twenty-eight days later, I was cured.
A miracle had transformed my life.
You know, the miracle of residential treatment, the 28-day program.
Huh.
You know, I thought they laid the hands on it.
They did lay the hands on it.
They also taught me to go on anabuse while I was in there.
I remember we went to AA meetings when I was there at Avon Park, and we went to speaker meetings.
And this is something I'll never say in my talk, but this is something I heard every,
the only thing I remember about what all those guys said is every one of them got drunk and lost their car.
Got drunk and lost their car.
And I used to think, Jesus, if I was that bad, I'd quit.
You know, I lost a lot of stuff, but I never lost a car.
You know, I thought, God, these guys have problems.
No wonder.
It must have been rough for them.
You know, and the funny thing is, probably 95% of what they said, I could relate to perfectly.
But I was still comparing me to them.
And as long as I could find that one thing that I didn't do that they did, I'm not as bad as them.
You know, I don't want to be the last guy.
I don't want to be the last guy.
You know, if I get as bad as him, I'll quit.
You know, if he gets as bad as him, he'll quit.
I don't want to be the last guy in the end there.
When I look around, there's nobody to get worse than, you know.
So as long as I could find one thing where I could differentiate them from me, I never did that.
I'm not that bad yet.
So I could bullshit myself once again.
I used to feed myself a line.
You know, that's part of the program, Alcoholics Anonymous, why we have to be rigorously honest.
Because it got to the point where I could feed myself a line.
That if somebody else had told me, you know, I'm not that bad, I'm not that bad.
If somebody else had told me that story, I wouldn't have believed it for a second.
Right?
But I would still believe it for me only because I had to, because I didn't have any other way to go at that time.
Anyway, I got out of there at Avon Park, and I took Antabuse.
I was cured for 90 days.
Then I decided to get drunk.
Now, I didn't have a slip.
I decided to get drunk.
I hear people talking about having a slip.
I don't know what that is.
I've never walked down the street and got struck drunk yet.
Every time I got drunk, it was because I made a conscious decision to go out and buy liquor.
I picked it up, took the top off of it, put it in my mouth, and drank it.
I don't know what a slip is.
I mean, it's almost like mana from heaven or bing, you're drunk.
I don't know.
Alcoholics Anonymous told me that I had to take responsibility for my actions at some point.
Because as long as I could blame others, I could justify every drink I took until the day I died.
I don't want to do that today.
Anyway, I made a decision to get drunk.
And I didn't take Antabuse for a couple of days.
They say if you drink on Antabuse, it'll kill you.
And it might.
It didn't kill me.
But I made a decision to take drunk.
And so I got the jug, and I took a big drink, and waited, waited, waited.
Must have waited a minute or two.
Nothing happened.
I'm used to things happening.
So I took another drink.
And I waited and waited.
Nothing happened.
Nothing happened.
Another drink.
And I noticed that there was kind of a rushing noise in my ear.
Kind of a pounding noise in my ear.
And I noticed that I got kind of a tingly feeling in my extremities.
Kind of like when your foot goes to sleep or your hand goes to sleep and the blood starts going back in.
It tingles.
And I looked in the mirror and I noticed that my face was a reddish-purple color.
And I thought, oh, that's enough drinks for tonight.
But I went to bed that night.
With the certainty that it would be better the next day.
Because, see, it hadn't killed me that day.
And they told me it didn't kill me.
So I knew they were lying to me once again.
You know them.
You have them in your life.
If only they wouldn't do it to me, I'd be all right.
If it wasn't for them, I'd be all right.
No, really.
If it wasn't for me, I'd have been fine.
Anyway, over the course of about the next six or eight months, I went back to detoxing.
And I spent five days in detoxing.
Well, I got drunk before I got home.
My last trip over to detox was in Bartow.
I didn't come back to Nebraska and Sly.
I went over to the one in Bartow.
And how I found it, I'll never know.
All I know is I drank up everything in the house.
And I went over there.
I can't say that I honestly went over there to get sober.
I think I was just, you know, one more time.
Who knows?
But...
After I'd been there for a couple of days, I went over there.
After a couple of days, about the third day I was in there, I had grand mal seizures.
And I'd never had them before, as far as I know.
And a grand mal seizure is kind of like a blackout, only with kind of disco moves.
Because I wasn't aware of it.
And, you know, a blackout is like your body's there and your brain goes on vacation.
And when your brain comes back, it doesn't know where your body's been and there's no communication.
So I came to.
I became aware laying on the floor.
And it's hard to be...
It's hard to be slick when you're laying on the floor.
And I tried to casually glance around.
There was no blood, so I knew there wasn't a fight.
And I looked down.
I hadn't pissed my pants.
But everybody was looking at me.
You know that look that's reserved mainly for the alcoholic when you screw up?
You know that look that they always give you?
You know?
So I knew something was up, but I didn't know what the hell it was.
And they said, you don't remember.
I said, no.
They said, you had a seizure.
Okay.
Didn't mean anything to me.
I didn't know anything about it.
Later that night, there was a guy.
He was probably about five feet tall, maybe weighed 140 pounds.
I watched him go through seizures.
And it took four guys my size to hold him down so they could get something in him to make him stop.
Maybe that was my wake-up call from God.
I don't know.
I remember when I was in there, this man came to me.
He came over to talk to me.
And remember this word.
He came to me.
He came to me unsolicited.
I didn't ask for him to come talk to me.
He came over and talked to me.
He didn't come talk to me because I'm an alcoholic.
He came to talk to me because he was an alcoholic.
And that's how he stayed sober, by carrying a message.
And I don't remember everything he said, but I do remember what I remember.
It was a classic 12-step call.
He talked to me about what had happened to him, what it was like for him, and how things had changed for him.
And really what I remember.
What I remember about what that man said to me is, he said, to boil it all down, he said,
I used to be a miserable drunk, much like yourself.
He said, I found a way to live where I can be happy and sober and I don't have to drink like that anymore.
That's all I can remember.
He was to become my first sponsor.
But I remember a meeting in there right before I got out.
And after the meeting, an elderly, distinguished-looking, white-haired gentleman came up.
And he said to me after the meeting, he said, hi, my name's Lonnie, I'm an alcoholic, and it's great to have you here.
He said, if you're serious about getting sober, I'll do anything in the world to help you.
But if you're not, don't waste my time.
And I thought, you sanctimonious old fart.
That resentment kept me sober probably for the first 30 days.
I'll show him, you know.
So I didn't pick a sponsor.
I mean, he was my sponsor.
He's the one that talked to me when I was over there.
He was my sponsor.
That's the way they used to do it.
They used to just assign sponsors.
I hear goofy things now.
People pick their sponsors, and then they decide if they're going to agree with their sponsor or disagree with their sponsor.
And their sponsor says, do this.
Well, I don't know if I'm going to do that, you know.
And I have to remember that my best thinking got me where I had to crawl into Alcoholics Anonymous.
That was a product of my best thinking.
My lifestyle, when I'm crawling around drunk in an eight-foot-wide trailer with the rats,
was a product of my best thinking.
So whoever my sponsor would be, if they'd been sober longer than about 15 minutes,
would probably have more sense than I did, you know.
I mean, come on.
I mean, a gerbil would have more sense than I did, for Christ's sake.
It's the truth.
Anyway, I can remember that I'd go to meetings.
My first sponsor wasn't real big on the steps.
And I'm living proof that you can do the steps wrong
as long as you come back and do them right and get that stuff cleaned up.
It won't kill you.
I did a lot of stuff wrong.
I can tell you I took a mental inventory.
I took my fifth step from a podium when I was a year sober.
They say that'll get you drunk.
That's not necessarily so.
There's a great freedom in telling a whole roomful of people,
what you did, because you can never take it back.
You can't really say you were misquoted.
You know, I had the pleasure of asking Bud Ennis over here to talk one time.
And he was over here talking.
He was one of the guys.
He was over there in Polk County when I first got sober.
And Bud was gracious enough to tell people that when they saw me come in,
I was one of the ones when they saw me come in, they shook their head and said,
You'll never make it.
And you know what?
They were probably right.
They were probably right.
I don't know what happened to me.
But the Fellowship Alcoholics Anonymous is what sustained me until I could learn about the program.
You know, there's two parts of Alcoholics Anonymous.
There's the fellowship, and then there's the program.
And the fellowship is what we do.
One drunk talking to another drunk about our lives and what's going on.
And that's the fellowship, and that's wonderful.
But the program Alcoholics Anonymous is the 12 steps.
The program Alcoholics Anonymous is contained in this book.
If you don't have one, it's called Alcoholics Anonymous.
They tell me it's going to catch on someday.
All the instructions are in there.
From like step three or step four on, all the steps are in italics.
You know, like this is step four, just in case you're looking for the hidden meanings.
They give us instructions on when to take the step, how to take the step.
And what will happen when we take the step.
This book is written at approximately an eighth grade English level.
Well, it was eighth grade back in the 30s when they wrote it.
It might be graduate college now, I don't know.
But they use words in there like precisely and specifically and things like that.
Words that are not open to a lot of interpretation.
See, because Bill, when he wrote the book, Bill wasn't a real alcoholic.
And so he knew that alcoholics like to play fast and loose with the truth and with what's going on.
That's why he wrote it in very specific terms.
And it's amazing.
I mean, this is one of the great miracles of Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know, because Bill would write a chapter.
He'd send it to Akron and send it to New York.
And all the members would chop it up.
And they'd send it back to Bill.
He'd rewrite it.
He'd send it out again.
They'd chop it up.
He'd send it back to him.
He'd rewrite it.
You know, there was like 40 alcoholics that were involved in writing this book.
Through chapter 5.
Can you believe that?
Think back to your last business meeting.
Could your group, hey, could your group, our group couldn't write a letter to the landlord.
Much less a book like this.
But anyway, I want to focus on this.
I want to fast forward a little.
I moved over here to Tampa.
And I was staying sober, mostly on the fellowship.
You know, like I said, I had taken a quick run through the steps.
And I wouldn't recommend that for anybody.
What I do today, I've been fortunate enough, I sponsor people.
We go back and we start on the forward to the first edition.
Where it said, we of Alcoholics Anonymous are more than 100 men and women who have recovered
from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body.
To show others precisely how we have recovered is the exact purpose of this book.
And that's where we start.
And we go through there.
And when it says pray, we pray.
When it says write, we write.
It's a novel concept.
I know, but the instructions are all there.
All the directions are there.
But anyway, I got over here to Tampa.
And I thought the AA over here was lousy.
Because it was different.
Any place you go in the country, it's different.
It's the same, but it's different.
They do things a little different.
Some places they read how it works.
Some places they read the first part of chapter 3.
Some places they read something out of the doctor's opinion.
Some places they don't read anything.
They just start the meeting.
You know, some places they close with a serenity prayer.
Some places they close with a Lord's prayer.
It's up to the individual groups.
But anyway, it was over here I met Jimmy.
And some other people, it's amazing.
There was a bunch of us that were just losers down at Club Yonah.
They came in anywhere from 10 to 15 years ago.
And I mean, we were a sorry bunch.
There was no, I mean, it was just the fellowship.
It wasn't, nobody was working the steps.
Swear to God, you go to a step meeting.
This week they're on step 3.
Next week they jump to step 9.
Then back to step 1.
It was miserable.
I'm telling you.
It was that old dry sobriety.
That old good old fashioned white knuckling.
Knuckle sobriety, you know.
You know, my name's Mike and I'm happy, joyous, and free.
You know, it was terrible.
It was terrible.
Fortunately, most of the ones that made it all got involved with the program of recovery
and with the big book and with the steps and with sponsoring people and with the traditions.
And what a difference.
What a difference it made.
What a difference it made.
I don't have to live like that.
I didn't sober up to be miserable.
I don't know about anybody else, but I did not get sober to be miserable.
I was already miserable.
Hell, I didn't have to sober up to do that.
And it wasn't, you know, it just didn't make sense to me.
Because I saw a few people that were happy.
It looked like they were having a good time.
And there was a lot of them that didn't.
You know, there were a lot of them that had that old mud face on.
But I decided I wanted to be happy.
I couldn't stand being miserable anymore.
And what I found out is, you know, a lot of things, a lot of people seem to think that
the only requirement to be a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous
is to have your rear end in a chair in an AA meeting.
That you can get it by asmosis.
I don't believe that.
If you believe you can become a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous through asmosis like that,
just by sitting in a chair in an AA meeting,
I would suggest when you get home tonight, take a chair out in a garage
and sit out there and see how long it takes you to become a car.
It's not going to happen.
You know, you could go to PTA meetings for the rest of your life,
and that's not going to make you a parent.
If you want to become a parent, you have to take certain other actions.
And if you want to be a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous,
we have to take certain other actions.
At least I did. That's my experience.
Anyway, my first sponsor told me, he said,
no relationships with women for the first year.
Some people say that's not in the book.
I found it in the book. It's on page 164.
Where they say, we admit we know but a little.
More will be revealed to you and to us in time.
That was revealed to me in time.
I made it through the first year, and my sponsor said,
you're doing fine.
You need to stay out of relationships.
Stay away from the women for another year.
And he was right. He was right.
God, I'd shudder to think anybody that's sick enough
that would want anything to do with me then.
I mean, I can't believe anybody would be sick enough
to want anything to do with a newcomer right now.
Are you kidding?
I mean, I have enough problems. I'm married.
But if I was single, I would have enough problems in my own life
without begging problems.
I have guys that ask me to sponsor them because I'm married
and seem to be happy.
I've been married for almost six years now.
Almost seven years. Hell, I don't know.
It's over five. I know that.
I'll get correct in my wife's hair tonight.
But anyway, they said, you and Chris seem to have a good relationship.
What happened? How do you do it?
I said, well, we were both, she was maybe a year sober,
close to a year sober.
And I was about two years sober.
When we met, we were friends for three years before we started dating.
We were engaged for two years before we got married.
We had had all the discussions.
We knew that we were on a similar spiritual path.
We knew we agreed on almost everything.
We still have some minor disagreements.
But, you know, as far as financially and spiritually,
and emotionally, and all this other stuff,
we had some kind of meeting of the minds.
Okay?
And they said, yeah, but you don't understand.
I saw her coming out of detox and I know it's God's will for me.
Well, you know, go for it.
You know, whatever floats your boat.
Um, and I see, you know, I see some guys,
and women, getting involved with newcomers.
And my personal opinion, based on my experience,
is a 13-stepper is the lowest kind of low life there is.
Because what you're doing is you're putting your sexual gratification
ahead of someone else's light.
And to me, that's the epitome of selfishness and self-centeredness.
I can think of no lower form of animal in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I've watched it happen.
I've watched people go out and die or get drunk from it.
And it's not nice.
It's not pretty.
And if we claim to be living a spiritual life,
I don't know what's spiritual about killing somebody.
I just don't know.
Anyway, I, uh, my wife's here.
You probably all know her, Chris.
If you don't, she's the one up here in the yellow.
We, uh, we got married.
We had, uh, we've got a little girl.
She's three and a half.
And she's just the, she's just the apple of her daddy's eye.
I used to carry her around everywhere I went.
And, uh, I had her in a little backpack.
And she'd go to meetings with me.
And, uh, she's probably taught me more about unconditional love
than I've learned from anybody else.
Um, because I'd come home after maybe I'd had a bad day at work or something.
And I'd walk in the door and I'd just,
I want to kick the dogs and yell at Chris.
And she comes up,
Daddy! Daddy!
And it's not because I did anything.
It's just because it's me.
Because she loves her daddy.
You know?
Um, one thing I would like to talk about.
You know, this, the program Alcoholics Anonymous
works through good times and bad times.
Um, and it has to.
It has to.
Because that's where my sanity comes from God.
And I met God through the program Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I can apply the steps in the program Alcoholics Anonymous
in every area of my life.
If I can't, then something's going to come up
that I can't deal with in and of myself
because I don't have any more power today
than I did the first day I stopped drinking.
The power I have today comes from a God of my understanding.
And that, I found that God within me.
But that God was in me the whole time I was drinking, too.
But Alcoholics Anonymous taught me that.
But Alcoholics Anonymous taught me how to tap into that power.
Um, it's kind of a coincidental thing.
There's been a series of events that came up recently in my life
and Chris's life.
Um, Chris had seen something in the paper
about a new insurance company.
So she applied for health insurance.
And she got turned down.
So she was ,
because we had some health insurance,
but it wasn't that great.
And she got turned down.
She was kind of grumbling.
So I said, well,
I know somebody in Alcoholics Anonymous.
I'll call her and see what she can do.
Well, it turned out she did a great job.
And they got us some health insurance with an HMO.
It was wonderful.
So we've been trying to have another child
and haven't been having,
look, Chris was being,
we were being treated for infertility.
And we went to this infertility specialist
and he was going to do some procedures
to find out what the problem was.
He said, you know, before we start on this,
is there any problem?
And Chris said, well,
you know, I got a little lump under my arm.
So he sent her for a mammogram.
Nothing there.
They took x-rays.
Nothing there.
They took more x-rays.
You know, there's a lump there.
Took a CAT scan.
There's a lump there.
We don't know what it is,
but it's a tumor.
So she's got a tumor.
Now, the radiologist said
it was like nine centimeters
by five centimeters
by four centimeters.
The surgeon said,
that sucker's eight and a half inches long.
The radiologist says it's a 50-50 shot.
Whether it's cancer or benign.
The surgeon said in his estimation,
there's about an 80% chance that it's cancer.
Well, that's the bad news.
Really, the good news is that at this point,
it seems that it's a kind of cancer
that's kind of a lower grade cancer
and won't require chemotherapy.
Because Chris and I are both getting long in the tooth.
And if she had to go through chemotherapy,
that would be the end of it
and we wouldn't be able to have any more children.
But even though she's got this tumor
and she's going to get a biopsy next week on it,
it looks like everything has just kind of fallen
a set of coincidences,
and I believe a coincidence is just a miracle
where God chooses to remain anonymous,
have fallen into place.
And it looks like even though she's got this,
what appears to be cancer,
it's not going to affect her ability
to have another child,
which is something
we both want very much.
And we haven't gone crazy over this thing.
It's one of those things.
You know, just because you get sober
doesn't mean you stop living life.
Life is something that happens to everybody.
There's good stuff that happens
and there's bad stuff that happens.
But there's nothing you can't get through.
There's nothing you can't get through.
There's nothing that can happen in my life today
that I can't get through
with the help of my sponsor,
with Alcoholics Anonymous,
and with the God of my understanding.
And that's just how simple it is for me today.
You know, and I believe that
to the very depths of my soul.
And if it wasn't for Alcoholics Anonymous,
I would never have gotten in touch
with the God of my understanding.
Not to the level I have today.
I just, you know, I would pray that my daughter
never has to go through what I had to go through.
But if she has to go through
it to get the kind of deep
and abiding faith in God
that I have today,
then I have to remember
that I believe I'm one of God's kids
and I know that she's got to be
one of God's kids too.
You know? Sometimes we lose sight of that.
I know I do.
And I went, oh,
I'm praying and saying, God,
you know, take care of my wife.
And I went, whoa, wait a second.
You know, I was never in charge to start with.
You know, when you talk about
the feeling of powerlessness
when your wife calls you and says she has a tumor,
and that's not something I can put a wrench on.
And that's not something I can push
or mold or shape or change.
You know?
Well, what option do I have?
I can go nuts and run around in circles
and scream.
Or I can ask that God
have His will in my wife's life too.
Just like I ask Him every day
to have His will in my life
and to grant me the strength
for me today.
What's really been wonderful
is since this came about,
oh yeah, my car died too.
You know, along the same lines.
I think my wife's gonna be okay, but my car's dead.
So,
we have been open
about it. We've told people in Alcoholics Anonymous
about what was going on with us,
because we don't believe, you know, you're only sick
is your secrets, and if you keep stuff like that in,
then you have to worry about it.
It's a big burden to other people.
And
the strength we have gotten
from the prayers of others has been incredible.
Has been incredible.
It's been extremely uplifting
and I just, I can feel it.
I can feel it.
A friend of mine called me from Arkansas
the other night.
Charlie P.
And I told him what was going on
and he said, well, I'll pray for you and Chris.
He says, you need the prayers
and she needs the prayers, and I need the prayers.
And he says, well, I don't know.
I'm just going to practice.
And it's just wonderful.
I mean, the people in Alcoholics Anonymous
have been great to us.
People have offered to do things.
You know, it's a funny deal.
When I got to AA,
it was the first time I ever met people
who were willing to go out of their way
to do something for me and didn't expect anything in return.
I was just, I didn't believe it at first.
I really didn't, because it was alien
to any way of life I'd ever lived.
Any place I'd ever been,
if somebody did something for you,
they were always looking for your wallet
or for something.
And here was a group of people
that was willing to help out.
They were willing to be of service to others.
Boy, it took me a long time
to believe that, but it's true.
It's true.
We have a lot of friends in Alcoholics Anonymous
that have helped us out a lot.
You know,
I wish I had a flashy ending for you.
I don't.
All I can tell you
is if a sorry drunk like me
can crawl out of that trailer
and get up behind this podium,
I believe today
that I'm recovered from a hopeless state of mind and body.
Now,
you know,
being a recovered alcoholic,
and the big book uses the word recovered.
Being a recovered alcoholic
is kind of like being a recovered gunshot victim.
It don't make you bullet proof.
And being a recovered alcoholic
don't make you drink proof.
Okay?
I really wouldn't trade this way of life for anything.
I wouldn't trade this way of life for anything.
My life's better than it's ever been.
Like I said,
things happen,
but life is grand.
And the last thing
I would like to leave you with
is that,
like I said,
I have a three and a half year old daughter.
And her mom is an alcoholic
and her daddy's an alcoholic.
Maybe there's a chance
that in ten or fifteen years,
fifteen years,
twenty years,
she may need the program Alcoholics Anonymous.
And if I was so selfish and self-centered
And if I was so selfish and self-centered
that I wouldn't care whether your children
would need Alcoholics Anonymous,
would need Alcoholics Anonymous,
I do care,
at least for my own daughter,
that when she gets here,
she finds the doors to Alcoholics Anonymous open.
And the program Alcoholics Anonymous
delivered to her
the same way it was delivered to me,
the same way it was written in this book.
It's been working for what?
Sixty years now?
It's been working for sixty years now.
They've only changed two words in the book.
I hope that you will join me
in trying to
keep Alcoholics Anonymous
as it is
and as it has been
so that the next generation of alcoholics
or as Bill called them,
the future fellows of Alcoholics Anonymous
find AA
delivered to them in the same fashion
that it was delivered to us.
Thank you very much.