Four Years Sober and Face-Down on a Dark Living Room Floor — That Was My Real Bottom – Dick G.
About This Speaker Tape
Dick G. shares his story at the Bellevue Groups 10th Anniversary in Nebraska, drawing from nearly 13 years of sobriety. He grew up with two alcoholic parents, remembering the smell of paraldehyde, rotten Chinese food in white cartons, and the dread of walking home from school not knowing if a cop car or ambulance would be parked outside. His first drink made the pieces of life fit together for the first time, but by his early twenties he was laying on a bed with a butcher knife pointed at his heart and turning on the gas in a second suicide attempt. He arrived at AA at age 30 not to stop drinking but simply to reduce the grief in his life, describing himself as a not-yet drunk who still had his job, marriage, and material possessions.
His early sobriety was marked by what he calls one of the world's great dry drunks. After more than a year without drinking, he was angrier and more resentful than ever. A Jack Lemmon movie in Pasadena became his unlikely moment of clarity for Step Two, leading him to announce he was leaving his wife, only to have her calmly ask if he wanted the color TV. He moved into a swinging singles complex in West LA, went to one or two meetings a day, and grew worse until a terrifying walk across a dark park in Beverly Hills drove him back into a meeting where he prayed the alcoholic prayer for the first time: Higher Power help me.
Dick describes the hard work of the steps with characteristic humor. His sponsor made him wait through the entire Academy Awards ceremony before hearing his Fifth Step. His inventory sponsor told him he brought nothing worth having and that the hum of his self-awareness was so loud he could not hear what was going on around him. Around four or five years sober, driving home from a meeting, his car filled with an interior light and a flood of warmth. He went home, lay face-down on his dark living room floor, and cried out that he was sick of being who he was. He considers that night his true bottom.
The talk closes with a moving story about a man he met at the Cornhusker Roundup who was in deep emotional pain. Over years of midnight phone calls, this man found complete peace despite financial hardship, a struggling marriage, and a troubled child who eventually thrived simply because love came into the home. Dick asks for prayers for his own eldest son, born from an earlier marriage, who feels rightfully cheated of a proper childhood and is angry. Dick says his deepest reason for staying sober is the hope that one day that young man will want something from his father, and he prays to still be in the program with something worth sharing when that day comes.
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