Fifty Years Sober and the Alcohol Groove Is Still Burned Into My Brain – Duke D.
About This Speaker Tape
Duke D. shares his experience at the 2000 AA International Convention on the topic of "Came to Believe." A long-timer with over 50 years of continuous sobriety, Duke is a member of the Way of Life group in Daytona Beach, Florida. He opens with infectious gratitude, describing a "huge attack of the gratitudes" that hit him that morning, and marvels at being in a dome with 50,000 sober drunks, quoting Jack Alexander's famous follow-up article about drunks being impressive whether "roaring drunk or roaring sober."
Duke candidly describes his deep chemical affinity for alcohol — he still catches himself reading Walgreens liquor ads and gets irritated when they raise the price of Jim Beam, despite not buying a bottle in half a century. He shares a touching and funny scene of watching his late wife, a social drinker, nurse a single weak drink while the ice melted, fighting the urge to shake her and say "drink the goddamn thing." He briefly touches on the devastating loss of his wife to Alzheimer's, crediting his home group with keeping him alive through that period.
He recounts a critical warning story from 17 years sober, when he stopped going to meetings for six months while living in San Juan and woke up with a physical craving. Only his promise to his sponsor Marvin — and a long-distance phone call that lasted until daylight — saved him from drinking. The centerpiece of his talk is a vivid merchant-marine story from his drinking days: falling overboard drunk in the deep waters of Guantanamo Bay at night, swimming exhausted toward Kaimanera, bargaining with Higher Power, giving up completely — and then his feet hitting bottom in shallow water. He stood up belly-button deep in the moonlight, rescued, and asked for a drink. The story perfectly illustrates the alcoholic's journey from self-will to surrender, and the discovery that Higher Power's help sometimes arrives in forms we don't expect.
Topics
Timestamps
Full Transcript
I want to thank Valerie and the committee for inviting me to this wonderful event.
Great events shall come to pass, page 164, and it sure grew.
And this is one of the really great events of my life, but they keep happening.
Well, my first sponsor...
Great events shall come to pass, page 164, and it sure grew.
And this is one of the really great events of my life, but they keep happening.
Well, my first sponsor...
I want to thank Valerie and the committee for inviting me to this wonderful event.
Great events shall come to pass, page 164, and it sure grew.
And this is one of the really great events of my life, but they keep happening.
Well, my first sponsor said that when you... I was going to make my first speaker's meeting.
My name is Duke Darnell. I'm a grateful, recovered, but not cured alcoholic.
Now I'm ready.
And by the way, I'm enjoying this convention more than any event in my whole life.
You know, we are not a glum lot, and I always knew that.
But when I went into the Dome last night, and I was there with 50,000 happy drunks,
sober drunks, by the way, I remembered Jack Alexander's follow-up article.
You know, the famous article that got us kicked off and got the big book sales going and everything.
But he wrote a follow-up article, and this is the truth.
And in it, he said, a bunch of drunks roaring drunk,
or Roaring Sober are very impressive.
Well, everybody out there was Roaring Sober.
Now, I want to know, is this group Roaring Sober?
Yeah, I guess.
You qualify.
I guarantee you, you qualify.
I'm so happy today.
My support systems here, my home group came up
to crawl away from Daytona Beach.
There they are.
It's not all of them, but it's a bunch of the best-looking ones,
beautiful women and good-looking men.
I cover the ugly category in our home group, see,
and I cover it well.
Also, my dear sister, who fell down on the Platte River
the other day in Colorado, and she came all the way
from Denver to hear me, and I don't see her out here,
but there's a lot of people out there.
There's a lot of people out there.
There's only 2,500 other people, so maybe she's in here somewhere.
There she is.
God bless you.
You always support me in all of my efforts.
I tell you, and I'm up here rooming with a sponsee of mine
who's one of the most wonderful guys.
I taught him everything he knows.
And he, by the way, is down the street speaking at another meeting.
And I'm just sorry he can't be, and I'm sorry I can't be at his,
but...
You know, there's so much going on up here
that we would have to clone ourselves
to cover even a tenth of it, you know, and we can't.
So we just have to...
And I woke up this morning with a huge attack of the gratitudes.
You ever get that?
Just a big wave coming in.
Man, it was just overwhelming.
And I hit my knees, and I asked for my day's sobriety,
and I asked for the opportunity to help another alcoholic this day
and to do something for AA this day.
And I will get...
All three things will come through.
I know I'll get my day's sobriety.
I don't know about tomorrow,
but I sure enough got it in the bag today
if I stay in this program.
Well, I'm going to try to be brief.
Usually when I give a talk, I've done so many.
And by the way, my first sponsor said,
when you give a speaker meeting,
I was going to have my first speaker meeting.
I had three months sobriety.
And my sponsor, Marvin, said,
now always give the name of your home group
and tell them how long you've been sober.
So I will do that now.
Give your name, home group, and how long you're sober.
I said, well,
my name is Duke Darnell.
I'm a member of the Way of Life group
in Daytona Beach, Florida.
And I've been sober for as long as I can remember.
And that's the truth.
That's the truth.
But that's quite a while.
I can remember pretty far back pretty good, yeah.
I'm not going to get too much into my drunk-a-log.
It's not a typical drunk-a-log.
It's different because I was going to see the first...
I went to see for 17 years.
And the first half, I was drunk.
And the second half, I was sober.
And both halves are quite interesting.
The second half, I was in AA International,
one of the early members of AA International.
I'm going to speak to that this afternoon
in the Lutheran Church.
Plug, plug.
But I had some interesting, interesting things
happen during my drunk period.
Now, I'm not going to lead you through the whole drunk-a-log,
although I really believe I was born an alcoholic.
I have a chemical affinity for alcohol.
I love the color, the taste, the smell, the look, the feel,
and the effect, part of the effect, of alcohol.
But I...
I...
To this day, I catch myself...
That alcohol groove is burned deeply in my brain.
I catch myself reading the liquor ads from Walgreens.
Yeah.
And I get irate if I see they raised the price of Jim Beam again.
By God!
And I haven't bought a bottle of Jim Beam
for over 50 years.
But it bothers me that they do that, you know.
My dear wife...
My wife died a few years ago of Alzheimer's
and it was the most difficult period of my whole life.
And thanks to my group, I survived.
Thanks to my group, I survived.
God bless all of you.
Because they saw me when I was near death
by taking care of her, you know.
But when she was healthy, she could drink socially.
And so, we had a little in the house.
I don't know.
I don't recommend it, but we did in our case.
I don't anymore now that I live alone.
But she would about once a month, you know,
mix a drink.
And I would watch her in fascination.
She'd get a 10-ounce...
She'd get a 10-ounce glass,
pour about a stimple full of Jack in it, you know,
then a whole lot of ice,
and then some yucky thing like 7-Up
or something on top of it,
fill it up to the brim,
stir it up,
take it over with a little napkin, you know,
and sit in a chair and...
Look at it for a while.
And all the time, the ice was melting,
diluting that good booze, you know.
And I'd look at it.
I'd say, honey, aren't you going to have a...
No, no, don't bother me now.
And she'd look on the TV or reading a book
or darning one of my socks, you know.
And if it would go on about halfway down,
she'd ignore it.
Many's the time I wanted to grab her by the shoulders
and say, drink the goddamn thing!
So these things prove to me
that I am a true alcoholic.
As Bill Wilson said, a real alcoholic.
The alcohol groove has burned deeply into my brain.
But since I came to believe,
since I came to believe,
I haven't had any trouble.
Well, once, after 17 years, I wanted a drink.
And it's because I stopped going to meetings.
I was living in San Juan at the time.
I was a big drinker.
I was a big shot.
I was a very important person.
Who are you, you know?
And I got mad at about my position at a banquet table.
And I was going to get drunk at them.
I hadn't been to a meeting in six months.
And I cut off all contact with everybody, you know.
And I'm going to tell you this in the yarn.
And I woke up in the middle of the night
with the physical need for a drink.
But by the grace of God,
I kept my promise to Marvin, my sponsor,
and called on the overseas cable
and talked and talked and talked till daylight.
And got it all out of my system.
And I did not take the drink,
but I was privileged to have a second honeymoon in AA.
You know the honeymoon period
when we love everybody and everything
and nothing is wrong?
Well, I went back to AA post-haste,
and I've never allowed myself to get split from it since then.
I'll tell you just one little story from my drunk period,
and then I got to get it,
get it that came to believe
because it's an assigned subject.
And I've been studying and timing,
and so I got to talk about that after a while.
But I like this.
It's a little story,
and it just shows you the kind of a drunk I was.
I was a very young man in a ship,
very early 20s.
And we were loading as a merchant ship.
We were loading sugar in a little sugar dock
in the northern end of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And our ship was docked at a little place
called Shorty's Beach,
which was a little island run, strangely enough,
by a guy named Shorty.
Go figure that one out.
And Shorty had a generator there
for electricity for the jukebox,
and for ice, you know.
And he had little thatched huts for purposes
that remain on the table here.
And a nice, lovely beach,
and a dock for his little boat, you know.
Well, you put a bunch of sailors over on a beach like that,
and rum was a dollar a bottle if it was metuselan,
and a buck and a quarter was añejo, the good stuff, you know.
And my goodness, that was paradise.
It was paradise.
But you know,
drunks have two other diseases.
One is more,
and the other is right now.
So those two diseases go with alcoholism.
So I got hit by the second period of those diseases.
In the middle of the night, we're all loaded,
including Shorty,
and we decided to get in his little boat
and chug, chug, chug across this big, big bay
over to Caimanera,
where the nightclubs were and the louder jukeboxes,
and more girls.
And my God almighty,
let's go to Caimanera and have a good time.
You know, we were already in paradise.
We want to jump over the wall and get it better and more.
And right now.
So we all got in Shorty's boat,
and we start chug, chug, chugging across the bay.
Now, this is a lot of you guys, with 2,500 people here,
a lot of you guys from the Navy, you know all about Gitmo.
You've been around there fishing and everything.
Probably been up to Shorty's when you shouldn't have been there.
I mean, it's still there.
And it's a deep bay.
They take aircraft carriers in there, battleships,
deep draft freighters like my ship.
And it's a deep, deep bay.
Well, Shorty put about 20 people,
girls and guys and everything.
We're passing it, chug, back and forth,
and singing songs and happy.
We get spang in the middle of this deep, deep bay.
The boat was so crowded, I was sitting on the gunwale.
Everybody's drunk, including Shorty.
And something hit me.
Funny, and I laughed, and leaned back, and I fell overboard.
And it's night.
And I'm fully clothed.
And so, well, I used to be a powerful swimmer when I was a kid.
So I'm swimming, but they're all bombed, you know.
Hey, Duke's overboard.
And Shorty's saying,
You know, and somebody said, I had a big cowboy hat, and that floated free.
And I heard him say, there's his hat.
He must be already drowned.
Anyway, I thought, my only hope,
my only, only hope is to swim to Kaimanera.
Swim to Kaimanera, about three more miles, you know.
And I, thank God, I didn't try to swim back to my ship
three miles the other way, you know.
And they get farther and farther away,
looking for me in the wrong places.
And they're going around, chug, chug, chug, and holler.
And I'm trying to holler, and I'm a good hollerer.
But when your lungs are filling,
and there's water, and there's the roar of a motor, of a motorboat,
and you, and you, you know, and they're far, and they didn't hear me.
Well, I swam, so I prayed.
What, how many times have we prayed this?
God, I'm going to let you fill in the blanks.
You get me out of this one, and I'll never.
Right.
Right.
Well, that was my prayer.
That was my prayer.
I said, I mean it, God.
I wasn't serious those other times.
Believe me.
Listen, God, I really mean it.
I don't want to die down here.
Nothing.
No ladder came down from heaven.
No speedboat came out of the Navy base.
Trotty didn't turn around.
And I'm getting tired, man.
Ah.
And my legs burned, and my arms were tired, and I didn't have, I was too drunk to take my shoes off, and, you know,
I was just swimming, and then I got on the pity pot.
Oh, man.
I'm going to die in this bay.
I'm going to drown, and the sharks and the barracudas will eat me up,
and my family will come down from Denver and throw a reef on the water and say he was a,
he was a good guy, you know.
Man, I, I had.
I had the pity pot.
Well, finally, because God had abandoned me, see, but he hadn't really.
Finally, I absolutely did give up, and I was totally exhausted, and I knew he was, I was going to drown that night in Guantanamo Bay.
And I started to sink, and my feet, heavy, shoes on, waterlogged.
They went down first and stomped.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
There I was.
There I was, belly button deep, sticking up in the midlife.
I kind of, I kind of felt cheated, you know.
Kind of felt cheated.
And, of course, sticking up in the moonlight like that, they could see me.
And they said, oh, there he is.
Go get him.
So, the boat came back and got me, put me in the boat, in the middle this time, you know.
And I said, give me a drink.
Can't you see I'm wet?
Damn, you guys.
Give me a drink.
So, that's, that's me in my drunk period.
And thank God I don't have to.
God has grieved me.
Great events shall come to pass, page 164, and it sure grew.
And this is one of the really great events of my life, but they keep happening.
Well, my first sponsor said that when you... I was going to make my first speaker's meeting.
My name is Duke Darnell. I'm a grateful, recovered, but not cured alcoholic.
Now I'm ready.
And by the way, I'm enjoying this convention more than any event in my whole life.
You know, we are not a glum lot, and I always knew that.
But when I went into the Dome last night, and I was there with 50,000 happy drunks,
sober drunks, by the way, I remembered Jack Alexander's follow-up article.
You know, the famous article that got us kicked off and got the big book sales going and everything.
But he wrote a follow-up article, and this is the truth.
And in it, he said, a bunch of drunks roaring drunk,
or Roaring Sober are very impressive.
Well, everybody out there was Roaring Sober.
Now, I want to know, is this group Roaring Sober?
Yeah, I guess.
You qualify.
I guarantee you, you qualify.
I'm so happy today.
My support systems here, my home group came up
to crawl away from Daytona Beach.
There they are.
It's not all of them, but it's a bunch of the best-looking ones,
beautiful women and good-looking men.
I cover the ugly category in our home group, see,
and I cover it well.
Also, my dear sister, who fell down on the Platte River
the other day in Colorado, and she came all the way
from Denver to hear me, and I don't see her out here,
but there's a lot of people out there.
There's a lot of people out there.
There's only 2,500 other people, so maybe she's in here somewhere.
There she is.
God bless you.
You always support me in all of my efforts.
I tell you, and I'm up here rooming with a sponsee of mine
who's one of the most wonderful guys.
I taught him everything he knows.
And he, by the way, is down the street speaking at another meeting.
And I'm just sorry he can't be, and I'm sorry I can't be at his,
but...
You know, there's so much going on up here
that we would have to clone ourselves
to cover even a tenth of it, you know, and we can't.
So we just have to...
And I woke up this morning with a huge attack of the gratitudes.
You ever get that?
Just a big wave coming in.
Man, it was just overwhelming.
And I hit my knees, and I asked for my day's sobriety,
and I asked for the opportunity to help another alcoholic this day
and to do something for AA this day.
And I will get...
All three things will come through.
I know I'll get my day's sobriety.
I don't know about tomorrow,
but I sure enough got it in the bag today
if I stay in this program.
Well, I'm going to try to be brief.
Usually when I give a talk, I've done so many.
And by the way, my first sponsor said,
when you give a speaker meeting,
I was going to have my first speaker meeting.
I had three months sobriety.
And my sponsor, Marvin, said,
now always give the name of your home group
and tell them how long you've been sober.
So I will do that now.
Give your name, home group, and how long you're sober.
I said, well,
my name is Duke Darnell.
I'm a member of the Way of Life group
in Daytona Beach, Florida.
And I've been sober for as long as I can remember.
And that's the truth.
That's the truth.
But that's quite a while.
I can remember pretty far back pretty good, yeah.
I'm not going to get too much into my drunk-a-log.
It's not a typical drunk-a-log.
It's different because I was going to see the first...
I went to see for 17 years.
And the first half, I was drunk.
And the second half, I was sober.
And both halves are quite interesting.
The second half, I was in AA International,
one of the early members of AA International.
I'm going to speak to that this afternoon
in the Lutheran Church.
Plug, plug.
But I had some interesting, interesting things
happen during my drunk period.
Now, I'm not going to lead you through the whole drunk-a-log,
although I really believe I was born an alcoholic.
I have a chemical affinity for alcohol.
I love the color, the taste, the smell, the look, the feel,
and the effect, part of the effect, of alcohol.
But I...
I...
To this day, I catch myself...
That alcohol groove is burned deeply in my brain.
I catch myself reading the liquor ads from Walgreens.
Yeah.
And I get irate if I see they raised the price of Jim Beam again.
By God!
And I haven't bought a bottle of Jim Beam
for over 50 years.
But it bothers me that they do that, you know.
My dear wife...
My wife died a few years ago of Alzheimer's
and it was the most difficult period of my whole life.
And thanks to my group, I survived.
Thanks to my group, I survived.
God bless all of you.
Because they saw me when I was near death
by taking care of her, you know.
But when she was healthy, she could drink socially.
And so, we had a little in the house.
I don't know.
I don't recommend it, but we did in our case.
I don't anymore now that I live alone.
But she would about once a month, you know,
mix a drink.
And I would watch her in fascination.
She'd get a 10-ounce...
She'd get a 10-ounce glass,
pour about a stimple full of Jack in it, you know,
then a whole lot of ice,
and then some yucky thing like 7-Up
or something on top of it,
fill it up to the brim,
stir it up,
take it over with a little napkin, you know,
and sit in a chair and...
Look at it for a while.
And all the time, the ice was melting,
diluting that good booze, you know.
And I'd look at it.
I'd say, honey, aren't you going to have a...
No, no, don't bother me now.
And she'd look on the TV or reading a book
or darning one of my socks, you know.
And if it would go on about halfway down,
she'd ignore it.
Many's the time I wanted to grab her by the shoulders
and say, drink the goddamn thing!
So these things prove to me
that I am a true alcoholic.
As Bill Wilson said, a real alcoholic.
The alcohol groove has burned deeply into my brain.
But since I came to believe,
since I came to believe,
I haven't had any trouble.
Well, once, after 17 years, I wanted a drink.
And it's because I stopped going to meetings.
I was living in San Juan at the time.
I was a big drinker.
I was a big shot.
I was a very important person.
Who are you, you know?
And I got mad at about my position at a banquet table.
And I was going to get drunk at them.
I hadn't been to a meeting in six months.
And I cut off all contact with everybody, you know.
And I'm going to tell you this in the yarn.
And I woke up in the middle of the night
with the physical need for a drink.
But by the grace of God,
I kept my promise to Marvin, my sponsor,
and called on the overseas cable
and talked and talked and talked till daylight.
And got it all out of my system.
And I did not take the drink,
but I was privileged to have a second honeymoon in AA.
You know the honeymoon period
when we love everybody and everything
and nothing is wrong?
Well, I went back to AA post-haste,
and I've never allowed myself to get split from it since then.
I'll tell you just one little story from my drunk period,
and then I got to get it,
get it that came to believe
because it's an assigned subject.
And I've been studying and timing,
and so I got to talk about that after a while.
But I like this.
It's a little story,
and it just shows you the kind of a drunk I was.
I was a very young man in a ship,
very early 20s.
And we were loading as a merchant ship.
We were loading sugar in a little sugar dock
in the northern end of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And our ship was docked at a little place
called Shorty's Beach,
which was a little island run, strangely enough,
by a guy named Shorty.
Go figure that one out.
And Shorty had a generator there
for electricity for the jukebox,
and for ice, you know.
And he had little thatched huts for purposes
that remain on the table here.
And a nice, lovely beach,
and a dock for his little boat, you know.
Well, you put a bunch of sailors over on a beach like that,
and rum was a dollar a bottle if it was metuselan,
and a buck and a quarter was añejo, the good stuff, you know.
And my goodness, that was paradise.
It was paradise.
But you know,
drunks have two other diseases.
One is more,
and the other is right now.
So those two diseases go with alcoholism.
So I got hit by the second period of those diseases.
In the middle of the night, we're all loaded,
including Shorty,
and we decided to get in his little boat
and chug, chug, chug across this big, big bay
over to Caimanera,
where the nightclubs were and the louder jukeboxes,
and more girls.
And my God almighty,
let's go to Caimanera and have a good time.
You know, we were already in paradise.
We want to jump over the wall and get it better and more.
And right now.
So we all got in Shorty's boat,
and we start chug, chug, chugging across the bay.
Now, this is a lot of you guys, with 2,500 people here,
a lot of you guys from the Navy, you know all about Gitmo.
You've been around there fishing and everything.
Probably been up to Shorty's when you shouldn't have been there.
I mean, it's still there.
And it's a deep bay.
They take aircraft carriers in there, battleships,
deep draft freighters like my ship.
And it's a deep, deep bay.
Well, Shorty put about 20 people,
girls and guys and everything.
We're passing it, chug, back and forth,
and singing songs and happy.
We get spang in the middle of this deep, deep bay.
The boat was so crowded, I was sitting on the gunwale.
Everybody's drunk, including Shorty.
And something hit me.
Funny, and I laughed, and leaned back, and I fell overboard.
And it's night.
And I'm fully clothed.
And so, well, I used to be a powerful swimmer when I was a kid.
So I'm swimming, but they're all bombed, you know.
Hey, Duke's overboard.
And Shorty's saying,
You know, and somebody said, I had a big cowboy hat, and that floated free.
And I heard him say, there's his hat.
He must be already drowned.
Anyway, I thought, my only hope,
my only, only hope is to swim to Kaimanera.
Swim to Kaimanera, about three more miles, you know.
And I, thank God, I didn't try to swim back to my ship
three miles the other way, you know.
And they get farther and farther away,
looking for me in the wrong places.
And they're going around, chug, chug, chug, and holler.
And I'm trying to holler, and I'm a good hollerer.
But when your lungs are filling,
and there's water, and there's the roar of a motor, of a motorboat,
and you, and you, you know, and they're far, and they didn't hear me.
Well, I swam, so I prayed.
What, how many times have we prayed this?
God, I'm going to let you fill in the blanks.
You get me out of this one, and I'll never.
Right.
Right.
Well, that was my prayer.
That was my prayer.
I said, I mean it, God.
I wasn't serious those other times.
Believe me.
Listen, God, I really mean it.
I don't want to die down here.
Nothing.
No ladder came down from heaven.
No speedboat came out of the Navy base.
Trotty didn't turn around.
And I'm getting tired, man.
Ah.
And my legs burned, and my arms were tired, and I didn't have, I was too drunk to take my shoes off, and, you know,
I was just swimming, and then I got on the pity pot.
Oh, man.
I'm going to die in this bay.
I'm going to drown, and the sharks and the barracudas will eat me up,
and my family will come down from Denver and throw a reef on the water and say he was a,
he was a good guy, you know.
Man, I, I had.
I had the pity pot.
Well, finally, because God had abandoned me, see, but he hadn't really.
Finally, I absolutely did give up, and I was totally exhausted, and I knew he was, I was going to drown that night in Guantanamo Bay.
And I started to sink, and my feet, heavy, shoes on, waterlogged.
They went down first and stomped.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right.
There I was.
There I was, belly button deep, sticking up in the midlife.
I kind of, I kind of felt cheated, you know.
Kind of felt cheated.
And, of course, sticking up in the moonlight like that, they could see me.
And they said, oh, there he is.
Go get him.
So, the boat came back and got me, put me in the boat, in the middle this time, you know.
And I said, give me a drink.
Can't you see I'm wet?
Damn, you guys.
Give me a drink.
So, that's, that's me in my drunk period.
And thank God I don't have to.
God has grieved me.
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