First Step at Fifty — I Kept Changing Liquors Instead of Admitting I Was Powerless — David K.

About This Speaker Tape

David celebrates his third sobriety birthday at the NABA Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting and, visibly nervous at his first lead, traces 35 years of drinking and using from age 15 to 50. He remembers being a New Jersey kid who preferred to isolate, his first hangover at 10 from temple wine, and a New Year's Eve blackout at 15 in Florida where friends dumped him at his parents' front door white as a ghost. University of Florida, fraternity initiation, wild turkey — another blackout — and he simply changed liquors instead of changing direction.

His drinking went underground as he built a sales career with 800 miles between him and the home office, married in 1995, moved to Atlanta, had two sons, but couldn't stop the hard drugs, the all-night benders before flights to Memphis, the drenched shirts in client meetings. Riding MARTA to the airport in 2001, he heard himself say he was out of control — and kept going. Divorce came in 2003 and he moved through ten apartment complexes in ten years between Dunwoody and Brookhaven, isolating, losing his kids, burning through relationships he tried to control.

The end came on a Friday in October 2013. He had played golf with clients, locked his door expecting 48 hours of drugs and alcohol, and when the knock came he opened it — two Dunwoody officers who had watched his transactions and could smell the apartment from outside. He spent Columbus Day weekend in the DeKalb County jail writing letters to himself, to his Higher Power, to his children and family. His attorney told him to start going to AA, and when he called from St. Louis three meetings in, the attorney said, 'Don't call me back again. You're a friggin' alcoholic.'

Today David has a healthy relationship with his sister, a normal romantic relationship for the first time in his life, parents who no longer wait for the phone not to ring, and a job he no longer cheats on expense reports. He mentors kids at an Eastlake elementary school, goes to five to seven meetings a week, and his 14-year-old son comes with him sometimes — worried enough one afternoon to ask whether a vape on the counter meant dad was slipping. It was the torch for a cigar. That conversation, David says, is the kind of parenting he could not have imagined during the years he tried to escape his own children.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Cecilia opens the NABA Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting and reads the Big Book p. 29 preamble
• 2:00 Tim introduces David — Paul McCartney fan, just turned three years sober, first time telling his story
• 4:00 Born 1963 in New Jersey, middle-class Jewish family, remembers hiding upstairs when company came — the isolation that would later define him
• 6:30 Age 10, drinks too much wine at temple on a Saturday morning, first hangover, first sign
• 9:00 Moved to Florida at 15, New Year's Eve blackout dumped in front of parents' house 'white as a ghost' — parents thought he was dead
• 14:00 Post-college Naples job — woke from blackout in Bonita Springs at 3 a.m., half-naked, got fired, moved back home at 24
• 19:00 1995 met future wife, 1996 moved to Atlanta, hard drugs enter, shifts from management to sales so nobody sees him daily
• 24:00 2001 on MARTA — 'I'm out of control' — but 12 more years of bottom follow; divorce 2003, 10 apartments in 10 years
• 31:00 October 2013 Friday arrest — two Dunwoody officers at the door, Columbus Day weekend in DeKalb County jail writing letters to his Higher Power, his children, his family
• 38:00 Life today — mentoring kids at Eastlake elementary, son Adam mistaking the cigar torch for a vape, and the honest conversation that followed