From Step 1 Doom to Step 2 Hope: Fr. Tom W. – Tom W.

It's the 12th step to carry the message.
Members of the fellowship should bear in mind
AA's 11th tradition regarding anonymity
at the level of press, radio, TV, and films
in the use of this tape.
Anonymity to this extent is actually
the practice of genuine humility.
We assure that humility expressed by anonymity
is the greatest safeguard that AA could ever have.
My name is Bud, and I'm an alcoholic.
And I'm real grateful to be able to
lead this meeting this morning.
I know when Dick asked me to chair this meeting,
I said I'd be honored.
And throughout the last week or so,
I've had offers of $100 to give up this meeting
so that they could introduce our speaker.
And I said, no way.
Without further ado,
I would like us to please welcome Tom W.
Thank you.
My name is Tom, and I am an alcoholic.
And I'm real glad to be here.
I want to thank you for asking me
and making it possible to show up.
To participate in your experience, strength, and hope.
It has just been a good thing to be here for me.
And I'm glad to be here talking on a Sunday morning sober.
There may be some folks who are visiting,
and there might be some folks who are pretty brand new.
And it takes a while to figure out how AA works.
I don't know if you know that, but it really does,
because we're in August.
And it's been a really odd bunch.
And you might think that we operate
like most normal organizations,
but that's just not true.
When we turned 50 a couple years ago,
it was very exciting,
and New York Times wrote about us,
and all of the major news organizations
had little stories about AA.
On the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour,
they spent 20 minutes on us.
And I figured that's the champagne of information.
And it was pretty exciting.
And they contacted our public servants in New York,
and they said,
how many members do you have in AA?
And they said,
hmm.
In January, maybe two million.
In August, maybe a million.
We don't know.
And that really surprised the news organization,
and they said, well, we hear that you
have some pretty famous people who've
gotten sober in Alcoholics Anonymous,
celebrities and big shots and capitalist swine.
Do you have any names?
And the New York said, well, we've
heard that, too, that some pretty famous people have got.
But we don't keep lists.
We don't know who any of these people are.
And they were shocked to find out that anonymity
was taken seriously.
And it's kind of funny.
In most organizations,
at conventions, they get the really well-wrapped to speak.
AA doesn't do that.
The tradition in Alcoholics Anonymous
is we usually get people who are pretty scary
to share with others,
so that others can feel so much better about their program.
That's really how it works.
So I want you to know that, you know,
with Earl last night, it was obvious,
but with Earl and Scott,
and Paula and myself and the others
who've had an opportunity to share,
we are not up here as role models.
We are up here as warnings.
I went to meetings for a while,
and I know I'm different than others in so many ways.
And I have the tiniest problem with authority.
And if you use certain tones of voice with me,
I would just as soon,
die than cooperate with you.
It just doesn't work.
Even if you're right, especially if you're right,
I just kind of stiffen and will hold my breath
until I pass out just to show you that I can do that.
And I was going to a couple of meetings,
and the theme I heard a lot was,
as soon as they heard there were newcomers
in the room like myself, they said,
take what you need and leave the rest.
Take what you need and leave the rest.
Take what you need and leave the rest.
And I needed to hear that,
because of just the way I'm wired.
I could then take stuff that was useful
and ignore stuff that didn't seem useful.
And that changes from time to time,
but I needed to know I had that freedom,
or I would have found it very difficult to stay here.
I was sober a little bit.
I got sober, if you're in Texas,
they always give sobriety dates,
and they say things like,
if you don't give your sobriety date,
you don't have a sobriety date.
That's their theory, and who knows?
Anyway, I haven't had to have a drink
since Gerald Ford was president of the United States.
And that really did happen, and it's in the papers
if you want to look it up.
My first day without a drink was the day
that he was nominated for the Republican nomination
for president in August of 1976.
And several years after that,
I had to go through the papers to find the date,
because all I know is Mr. Ford was talking at the convention.
And I mean, it was my first sober memory.
I think Betty had had a couple of social drinks that evening,
but I was sober and watching, you know?
And then it was August 18th, and so that was my first day.
And I started going to meetings.
A lot of things happened.
I'll talk about that a little bit, I hope, this morning.
But I started going to meetings, and I said,
I'm going to meetings.
And I got sober.
I was going to school.
I was studying theology at the Jesuit School of Theology
in Berkeley, California.
So I got sober in the People's Republic of Berkeley in 1976.
And I don't know about predestination
or where you're supposed to be.
All those things confuse me.
But I don't know if I could have gotten sober
in many other places.
The kind of folks that hung out at meetings in Berkeley,
were the kind of folks I could identify with.
And there weren't a lot of other places
that I felt safe or I could listen to people.
And also in my experience, where you get sober
is where they do it right.
And a lot of us have the experience of getting sober
in one place and moving somewhere else.
And for almost every person I know who's had that experience,
it's been a huge crisis.
Because you go to the next place,
and they do it wrong.
And you can't imagine how they stay sober.
And I know people who have changed residences
and changed parts of town or parts of the country
or parts of the world and have not
been able to go to meetings again
because they did it so differently.
Some of us are known for rigidity.
And we can't imagine people getting sober any other way.
Where I got sober in the East Bay, in the Bay Area,
we had a lot of discussion meetings.
And things were low key.
And there was a meeting every night.
And you could get to meetings.
And it was always kind of vaguely disorganized.
And the most important thing for me was we never clapped.
Being cool was a very important part of our recovery program.
And cool people didn't clap.
Yahoo's clapped.
And we thought they were culturally inferior
and couldn't read.
But I was sober for over a year.
And it was time to go back to work.
And I went back to teach in Southern California,
where they clap for everything enthusiastically.
And I went into a cultural shock that took me over a year
to get out of.
Whenever they would clap, I would just say, oh, God,
I hate this.
Why do they do this?
Don't they know how stupid they look?
And I was just full of bitterness and judgment.
And I was just full of bitterness and judgment.
I kept going to meetings because I had no place else to go.
And I didn't like it.
And I thought they were jerks.
The first meeting I went to, I called a former teacher.
I'm sober now a year, so I'm well into my recovery.
One of my teachers from a couple of years
before was sober on the program.
And you know how you kind of hear that through the grapevine?
Well, I heard it through the grapevine.
And I called him.
And I was coming down to get interviewed for it.
To see if I could get a job sober at the school
that I had been drinking at a few years before.
And I called him.
And I said, listen, I hear you're a friend of Bill Wilson's.
And there was a moment's pause.
And he said, yeah.
And I said, listen, I'm coming into town.
I'm going to get a job interview.
And I don't know anything about Southern California sober.
Could you take me to a meeting?
And he said, oh, I'd love to take you to a meeting.
So he picked me up.
And you know, I don't even think I'm quite a year sober, so I'm
real flexible and open-minded.
And he takes me to this meeting.
And it was like south of Manhattan Beach somewhere.
And between Manhattan Beach and Long Beach somewhere.
And they had people with cowboy hats.
And they had greeters at the door.
Hi, glad to see you.
And they had, we never did that.
And they had, they clapped.
And they screamed.
And they talked about the book.
And they laughed out loud.
And it was a riotous, extroverted, verbal,
celebration of sobriety.
I had never seen anything like that before in my life.
And what I did was withdrew.
I didn't join them.
And I remember shaking a few hands,
figuring this is embarrassing.
And I, on the road back, we left the meeting.
And I didn't run up and hug everybody
and become best friends and exchange phone numbers
and glad to be there.
I remember driving back to the school.
And I was real quiet.
And I. But what I did was I went to the school.
I heard at meetings, I heard people talk about feelings.
And I heard people tell the truth out loud.
And I, to the best of my ability,
I was going to try to do it.
And Dick, my teacher friend, said, so how you doing?
And I said, I'm scared to death.
I'm just scared to death.
And I didn't know I was scared until I heard me say it.
I just thought they were jerks.
But the reason I thought they were jerks
was because I was scared.
And I found that when I'm scared, I think like that.
I will blame you for my fear at the drop of a hat.
You better change, you know?
So I knew that it was going to be a time of real transition.
And the only way to transist is to transist.
And so I moved to LA.
And I just started going to meetings
to find out how they did it down there.
And I got to LA on a Friday.
I went to this huge enthusiastic roaring meeting Friday night
and one Saturday afternoon and another one Saturday night.
It was even more of a celebration.
People were so glad to be there and be sober and high.
And do we have any newcomers?
This meeting I went to was a real well-lit room, which
we didn't allow in Alameda County.
It was a well-lit room.
And they were all smoking Marlboro cigarettes
and being glad.
And they asked, do we have any newcomers with us tonight?
I was a year sober.
I was not a newcomer.
And people raised their hands.
There were eight or 10 or 15 hands that went up.
And then they said, would you like to stand up?
And give us your name so we could get to know you better.
And the answer is no.
Listen, I'm surprised I'm here at all.
And you want me to stand up and talk.
I just figured, oh, I could never have gotten sober here.
I just would have left the room.
How do these people do it?
So I went to a meeting Sunday afternoon
and a meeting Sunday night.
And Monday, I called this guy whose name I had.
I was in the seminary up in Berkeley.
And I knew I was going back to LA.
And so I wrote the cardinal archbishop.
And I said, I'm going to be in your territory.
And I'm sober.
And are there any sober priests in Southern California?
I don't know any.
And if you could just get me the name of somebody,
I'd really appreciate it.
So he writes me back.
What else does he have to do all day?
He writes me back.
And he said, when you get to Southern California,
call Terry R. So I had Terry R's phone number.
So I went to all those meetings.
And Monday morning, I called him.
And I said, I'm Tom.
I'm an alcoholic.
I just had my first year's birthday.
I'd been in LA since Friday.
And I need a sponsor.
Will you be my sponsor?
Now, I didn't know what he looked like.
I didn't know who he voted for.
Very important question.
I didn't know how he spent his time.
I didn't know how he recreated.
I didn't know what his sense of humor was.
All I knew is, this is a sober guy.
We're in the same profession.
And I'd like to find.
I need a sponsor.
Sponsor, real bad.
My sponsor in Berkeley was a guy younger than I.
He was a Vietnam vet covered with tattoos.
And what we did for sponsors, sponsees,
we went to meetings together.
And he was safe for me.
And I've always had a little trouble with the peer group.
And I was always kind of anxious around other males.
But I found the reason I asked James W. to be my first sponsor
was he didn't scare me.
He was just a good guy.
And on one occasion, we had an intense philosophical,
theological conversation.
We were on the way to a meeting.
And he said, do you think only Catholics can talk to God?
And I said, of course not.
And he said, good.
That was our conversation.
And other than that, what he gave me was his presence.
I remember calling him one night.
You know?
I was nuts, and I was upset, and I was in crises.
The reason I was is because I was starting to thaw out.
And I was starting to come to.
And what I was having was emotions.
And I hadn't had those in a long time, thank you.
And I was having emotions.
And I called James late at night, I guess, one night, 10,
11, 12, 1 o'clock in the morning.
And I said, I'm feeling all these crazy things.
What's real?
And he said, what step are you on?
What step are you on?
What step are you on?
What step are you on?
What step are you on?
What step am I on?
What are you talking about?
I'm having feelings.
So I blathered a little bit.
And years later, we went out for lunch again.
And we remembered those good old days.
And I said, yeah, I'd call you, and you'd say,
what step are you on?
And he said, do you know why I asked you that?
And I said, no, he said, because when I called my sponsor,
he would say, what step are you on?
And you can kind of begin the conversation.
And what I was on was.
Step one.
But we'll talk about that more later.
So I called Terry R. And I said, will you be my sponsor?
And he said, when did you get to LA?
I said, Friday.
This was Monday.
He said, have you been to a meeting?
He said, I've been to five.
And he said, I'll be your sponsor.
He likes sponsoring people who are as desperate as he is.
It just helps a lot.
And I found that over the last few years,
it's just a real good experience to have someone.
To kind of keep in touch with.
I find there's a lot of theories on sponsorship.
There's even a pamphlet on it published by New York.
I kind of use my sponsor as a lucky rabbit's foot.
I just feel safer when he's sober.
And I guess I've also used him as a midwife.
And he's helped me give birth to me.
He's helped me walk through some pretty scary things.
And I guess I've used him.
I've used him as an uncle or an older brother.
Someone to run stuff by pretty regularly.
And I'm just glad he's there.
So what it was like and what happened.
What it's like now.
I was giving a talk a while ago at a hospital.
I was a sober priest.
And a pal of mine was the sober physician.
They thought that a sober priest and a sober physician
would have some credibility at a Catholic hospital.
So we were talking to.
Nurses and people on the staff.
They were going to be opening up an alcoholism drug addiction
getting better ward at the hospital.
And we were talking to the staff about the disease
and about the recovery.
And we talked about the 12 steps.
And we talked about steps four and five
and how it was real important to get people to do this.
And da, da, da, da, da, da, da, the basic stuff.
Opened up for questions.
And this lady present said, doctor.
I noticed she didn't want to talk to me.
And I resented her.
She said, doctor, alcoholism is a disease?
And he said, oh, yeah, it's a disease.
Sure.
Disease.
Symptoms.
American Medical Association.
World Health Organization.
American Psychiatric Association.
Everybody knows this.
Not everyone believes it.
But everyone knows this.
She said, well, if it's a disease,
are there really symptoms?
And we had been talking about symptoms.
But she had.
She had a question.
And so she couldn't hear that.
And he said, yeah, symptoms like blackouts.
That's not passing out.
That's blacking out.
You're still operating, but you don't remember much.
Most normal drinkers do not have blackouts.
And blackouts were a real part of my drinking story.
The first blackout I can remember,
and that's kind of tricky, you know, because if it's not
on film, you won't remember.
I was in the seventh or eighth grade.
Both my folks worked.
And I went to a school not far from where we lived.
And again, I've always had a little trouble
with the peer group.
And at lunchtime, things would be very athletic.
And I was not.
And they would throw things and do whatever
it is they do on the yard.
And I always found that kind of intimidating.
I was one of the bright kids.
And I read and memorized irregular German verbs.
I didn't throw baseballs.
And I kind of knew that if I did try to throw a baseball,
I'd throw it like a girl.
And I was perceptive enough to see
what happened to boys who threw baseballs like girls.
So the way I avoided that crisis is I didn't play.
And when lunchtime came, I got permission
to go home for lunch, avoid the crisis.
And I would get on my bike and ride home.
And I would be.
I would watch TV, and my favorite show was Life with Elizabeth with Betty White.
And then I would have something to eat, and perhaps a drink, and then I'd go back to school.
I experimented with alcohol in the 7th or 8th grade.
I'd been drinking earlier than that.
I started drinking when I was young enough to think that mixing bourbon and Hershey's syrup was a good idea.
And that's pretty young, you know, that really is.
But I would take a hit out of the bourbon bottle and brisk, you know, and refreshing,
and then I would go and take a hit out of the Hershey's syrup can, brisk and refreshing, and I liked it.
I graduated from that to creme de menthe, that green stuff,
and I can remember my folks kept the creme de menthe and whatever, sweet syrupy stuff, above the washing machine.
And I can remember having to get up on a chair to get.
So I'm not real old.
7th or 8th grade, I remember experimenting with tequila milkshakes, vanilla ice cream tequila.
You would not, of course, put chocolate syrup in that.
And I remember taking a little drink of the tequila and vanilla ice cream, and my response was,
this is disgusting.
And I drank the whole thing.
Which is not.
That's a good sign.
But I rarely poured alcohol out.
I mean, I can, you know, cigarette butt in beer just add to the integrity as far as I'm concerned.
And so there.
7th or 8th grade, I'm home for lunch.
I had a couple of drinks.
I do not remember getting on the bike.
I do not remember heading back to school.
I do not remember the telephone pole.
I do not remember the cops or the ambulance or anything else.
I come to the next day and everybody is a Twitter.
Was I hit by a car?
Was there something wrong with the bike?
Was there oil on the road?
Did the telephone pole move?
What could have gone wrong?
What could have gone wrong?
No one said, let's test his blood and urine.
Because when General Eisenhower was president,
it didn't occur to anybody that a 12-year-old boy would have been drinking.
And if you don't look for it, you don't see it.
But I could have gone into treatment then, but I didn't.
And I guess it was just one of those mysterious things.
Let's see, but that's the first blackout I can remember.
Had lots of them, had lots of them.
Then the doctor, Dr. Gill from Marin County, Dr. Gill said, so blackouts are a big symptom.
Changes of personality are a big symptom, too.
You know, if you have a couple of drinks and have these rapid dramatic mood shifts,
it's not a good sign.
We call that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the program.
And if you're looking for something to read that is not conference approved,
may I recommend Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
It is all about us.
And if you don't want to read the whole book, just read the last chapter.
I think it's the 15th chapter.
It's a terrifying book.
Dr. Jekyll is the good guy.
He drinks this stuff.
He turns into a bad guy named Mr. Hyde.
And there's a tremendous battle which one is the real person.
And there is no recovery in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Mr. Hyde wins.
And I read it when I was 15 years sober.
And I found it terrifying.
Absolutely terrifying.
And I not only had a case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
I also had a pretty good dose of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
And I would drink and I could become dopey or grumpy or sleepy or happy.
Occasionally I would turn into Snow White,
which was as confusing for me as for everybody else.
I just didn't understand it, you know.
The crazier I got with the drinking,
because I never knew what would happen,
I isolated more and more and more.
And I just kept pretty much to myself.
One of the spiritual books I've read in the last few years
is by an English writer named Charles Dickens.
And it's called A Christmas Carol.
And it's all about this guy that needs the program real badly
named Ebenezer Scrooge who has defects of character galore.
And he has these series of spiritual experiences
and he changes his heart and becomes a different person at the end.
It's quite powerful.
But early in the book, like about page one and a half,
Scrooge is being described, wonderful adjectives,
wrenching, clutching, greedy, awful, hateful, mean as a snake,
Ebenezer Scrooge.
And they talk about his relationships.
And the image that Dickens uses is he was secret,
self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
And at the end of my drinking, that was me.
Secret, lots of secrets, lots of secrets.
Self-contained, leave me alone, I'm fine.
I don't want to interact with you.
You don't want to interact with me.
I can remember smoking dope on the roof of the school I taught in Los Angeles.
That was the safe place to smoke dope.
We would kind of get on the roof and smoke dope and look out over Watts,
where I taught.
And, you know, be philosophical and think about things.
And say, wow, a lot.
And one of my drinking, doping buddies turned to me and he said,
Tom, you're really hard to get to know.
And I can remember looking at him, kind of focusing.
He said, it's as if there was inside of you this great secret,
which you just refuse to share with everybody.
And I remember the scene vividly.
And I remember smiling at him, kind of knowingly,
but that's all I was able to do at the time.
I was in my mid-twenties.
If I could go back to that scene with what I know now,
I would have told him, listen, I don't know what the secret is either.
I'm as baffled by my insides as you are.
It's not like I have a secret and I'm not telling you.
It's not that I have a secret.
I don't have a clue.
I don't know what's going on.
Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.
Dr. Gill also mentioned that another sign of alcoholism
was having a huge capacity to drink.
And then the body chemistry changes and you have no capacity to drink.
And I sure did that.
By the time I was in high school, I was a drinker.
And I was known for a drinker.
And my voice changed late and I was kind of slight of build
and I tried competing with some athletic stuff and it was a disaster,
which is no surprise to us, but I really tried.
But I found out that by the time I was 17 years old,
I could drink guys three times my size under the table.
These were big, burly, soccer-playing fellows who began shaving in the third grade.
And I found they would be out cold and I'd still be functioning just fine.
This is not a good sign.
But I thought it meant that my testosterone level was real high.
And that if you could drink like I drank, you were clearly manly.
And a number of people in our culture associate those two.
You know, either you are the artist who is brilliant and drunk,
or you are a manly man, brilliant and drunk.
And they're both false. They're both false.
My capacity to drink changed rapidly.
It was high in my teens. In my mid-twenties, I had no capacity at all to drink.
And I was pretty much of a disaster.
And I needed to be secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.
And I did not drink with you.
I drank by myself because that was the safest place
for me to drink.
I was at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in the last year.
And the speaker was talking about how alcoholism is a lot like dancing with a gorilla.
You're not done dancing until the gorilla is done dancing.
This takes a little bit of reflection.
Because early in the evening, you don't know you're in trouble.
You think you're doing just fine.
You asked the gorilla out.
You think the gorilla's cute.
You're getting along real well.
After you've been there for a while, you want to sit the next dance out.
And you explain it to the gorilla.
And the gorilla doesn't care.
And you do not sit the next one out.
You stay busy.
And then later in the evening, the gorilla wants to tango.
And you explain you don't know how.
And again, the gorilla doesn't care.
You find you are tangoing.
People who love us notice that we're dancing with the gorilla.
And they get very concerned.
And they break into the cage and try to get between us and the gorilla.
And they get their arms and legs ripped off.
Which is why they have a program.
And an awful lot of the Al-Anon people
The Al-Anon program, I think, is summarized,
Stay out of the cage and let them dance.
Stay out of the cage.
And you have to talk about all your feelings of fear and anger and upset
because you know what's happening and there's nothing you can do about it.
You know, you just get to .
Stay out of the cage.
If you're sober today, this morning, and clean,
and wearing your own clothes,
bathed recently, these are all good signs.
And it's a pretty good sign that the gorilla has let go of you.
If the gorilla has let go of you, get out of the cage.
And don't go back into the cage even when the gorilla starts humming your song.
Because it always does.
And you suddenly feel suddenly attracted.
One more time.
I've learned some new steps.
Surely I can do it this time.
No, no, no, no, no.
One day, the gorilla let go and I was able to walk out of the cage.
And I want to talk about that a little bit.
A lot of people don't get out of the cage.
And a lot of people die of this disease.
And the gorilla kills a lot of folks.
And I find that the longer I'm sober,
the more I regularly have to deal with feelings of anger
and sadness and loss and anger and sadness and loss and powerlessness.
And the fact that just for today, I don't have to drink or use,
I consider it to be a major miracle.
When I know people who've been on the program and they start drinking again,
I remember this is a disease, you know.
And it's as if they were to call me and to tell me the cancer is back.
Or to call me and tell me you've had another stroke, you know.
I mean, there's sadness and anger and upset.
And I...
It's not that they're drinking because they're bad and I'm sober because I'm good.
It's just, it's very mysterious to me.
And I find that I have to talk about that a lot with people I trust.
And it's one of the reasons I started going to Al-Anon when I was around three years sober.
I, well, isn't AA enough?
Well, I had to start going to Al-Anon because I did not want to be a sober person who was shooting people.
And...
I was so angry and so hostile because of my intense relationships with other alcoholics
that I needed to go somewhere on a regular basis and learn how to do some detaching so I could be present.
You know, and it's still true.
I still regularly need a good dose of Al-Anon because I am susceptible to a lot of bad attitudes.
Day at a time.
So, Gil at the hospital talked about...
the symptoms and so forth.
And this person asking the question said,
Well, doctor, if somebody's showing early signs of alcoholism,
can't you just sit them down and explain?
You're showing early signs of alcoholism, you're in grave danger.
Knock it off.
Can't you get them to just say no?
You know, which, if you're not an alcoholic, seems perfectly reasonable.
Scare them.
That'll do it.
Well, Gil said the problem with that is it doesn't work.
And the reason it doesn't work is because alcoholism is a disease that has three distinct phases.
Phase one is the fun phase.
This is when it's really fun.
This is a surprise to non-alcoholics.
Non-alcoholics don't think that drinking or using alcohol
is sensational.
They don't have the same cosmic experience that a lot of us do.
I know a lady in Northern California and she didn't drink.
And I asked her, Well, have you ever had alcohol?
And she said, I did once and it gave me a headache.
And I said, And you stopped?
I remember trying to turn an older friend of mine on to marijuana and I said,
Oh, this is really great stuff.
He smoked out of the pipe and he threw up and he never wanted to have marijuana again.
And I tried to explain to him that you have to get beyond the throwing up.
And then you have a great time and they're not interested.
They're not interested.
I find that baffling.
But phase one is the fun phase.
This is followed by phase two.
And phase two is called fun plus problems.
I mean, it's still fun, but we start to have problems.
Problems at work, problems at home, problems with health.
We start having to lie and cover up and do a lot of stuff.
A lot of us get married a lot and tattooed, you know.
I am personally grateful that I got sober before we started piercing everything.
I know that's a controversial issue, but again, personally, I'm just grateful, Hyde.
Fun, fun plus problems.
Stage three, according to Gill, is problems.
You know, the good times are gone.
Never again could we recapture the great moments of the past.
They were but memories.
There was an insistent yearning to try it once more and have a good time.
And we just couldn't get there.
And a lot of us end up.
We end up in the problem stage.
So Gill said, listen, you know, if you're with someone in the early stages of alcoholism
and you see that they're having blackouts and they're having drunk driving
and they're dating the gorilla, you know, and you're saying, oh, I'm so concerned.
If you sit them down and say, I'm so concerned, the response is going to be this.
Listen, I'm having fun.
If there's anybody with the problem, it's you.
When I no longer have fun, I'll stop.
The premise being, of course, that as soon as the gorilla sees you're unhappy, they will let you go.
Which doesn't happen.
Gorilla likes unhappy.
Holds you tighter.
I think step one asks a real basic question.
And the question of step one is this.
Are you still having any fun?
And if the answer is yes, you're not going to stick around.
You're not going to stick around.
People, this is not a program for people who need it.
This is a program for people who want it.
In my experience, the best friend I've had is pain.
Because when I hurt enough, I really drop most of the bullshit.
And I'm willing to follow directions for a very short window of opportunity.
And I want to be able to cooperate.
And that's not always possible.
But pain.
Pain is the thing that breaks through all the razzmatazz for me.
Step one.
Step one says, Noah, it's still raining.
You know?
Step one says, General Custer, more are coming.
Step one is not a fun step.
I don't know a lot of people.
They look great and they're positive and happy.
And you say, what step are you working?
Step one.
And I'm grateful for it.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Step one says, you're bleeding and on fire.
And it's worse than you know.
And if you know how bad it was, you'd be too scared to leave your room and come to a meeting.
But you're in very serious trouble.
Some alcoholics make rules.
That probably doesn't happen in Honolulu or Hawaii.
But it sure does in some places I go.
And there's a million rules for each meeting.
We do it this way.
We do it that way.
We do it that way.
And they get nuts.
If you change something.
And there's one meeting where I live.
And their rule is, if there is a newcomer present, you must talk about step one and only step one.
And I suspect that's because they don't want to give the newcomer any hope.
You know?
How's your life?
Miserable.
Good.
Next.
You know, let's share.
Ah, bad.
I knew a lot about step one.
I'm a little bit inclined to depression anyway.
And I've always had a good sense of doom.
Genetically, the DNA for me is we're half Irish Catholic Democrat and half Swedish Lutheran Republican.
So neither one of those groups is known for whimsy.
And I would just kind of get into these periods of depression.
And I know a lot of it was.
You know, multiplied by my drinking.
But it's just kind of there in the DNA.
And when I got really depressed, I thought I was really understanding.
I really understand now.
I was in college drinking a lot.
And read a lot.
And there's a French existentialist writer, novelist, philosopher named Albert Camus.
I loved his stuff.
I read everything he wrote, even his diaries.
I just thought he was so intense.
Insightful.
And one of his essays, he said, you know, the only serious philosophical question of the 20th century is why not kill yourself?
And I just figured he understands.
He gets it.
This is real conversation.
He has another essay called The Myth of Sisyphus.
And Sisyphus is this Greek mythological character.
And he screws up somehow.
And gets punished by the gods.
And his punishment is to take this huge boulder and push it up the hill.
And the hill's very steep and far.
And he pushes.
What he has to do is push it over the top.
And it's effort.
And it's effort.
And it's huge.
And he's just doing this and doing this.
And he gets right to the top of the hill.
And he's just about ready to push it over.
And he trips.
And the boulder rolls back down to the beginning.
And he has to do it all over again.
And Camus says,
That's life.
And again, I figured, at last, I'm hearing someone tell the truth.
I understand this.
And add alcohol to that.
When we're talking about being doomed, I resonate.
I say, oh, yes.
I mean, even as a kid, I found Disney optimism to be, you know, oh, give me a break, Snow White.
You know, doom.
Let's get there.
Let's talk.
So step one was not the hard step for me.
It is for some.
I mean, some of it, I knew when they said powerless, unmanageable.
I didn't know those words.
And those words added some context that were new to my way of thinking.
And I found it fresh.
But it means doomed.
When I got sober, I would bump into people who called themselves two-steppers.
They did one in twelve.
I'm not making this up.
This is true.
One in twelve.
We're miserable.
Join us.
No?
No?
So for me, the real difficulty was getting to step two.
Because step two is all about hope.
You know, step two says there's a way out.
Step two says restored to sanity.
Step two says it's.
It's different now.
Even a little bit, it's different now.
And I had barriers to this that were in my brain and in my heart and in my emotions.
Another guy I wrote.
I read all the time.
Another guy I read was a fellow named Franz Kafka.
And Jewish, Central European, 1930.
Life was a little bleak.
And one of his essays, he writes,
There is infinite hope, but not for us.
Well, I couldn't have said it better myself.
And I remember coming to meetings knowing that you guys had a chance, but I didn't.
That God could deal with you.
Higher power could deal with you.
It would all sort out with you.
You could have some kind of normal life again.
I was different.
I was unique.
I was doomed.
There is no hope.
There is no hope.
There is no hope for me.
I am worse than you.
My wiring is different than yours.
I am more cynical than you are.
I am more twisted than you are.
By the time the magic, powerful, miraculous energy of God gets to me,
there's not enough of it there to make a difference in my life,
because it's all been used on you.
So I'm just going to be there doomed.
How do you get from step one to step two?
Well, I didn't march from step one to step two.
I didn't crawl from step one to step two.
I didn't figure it out and intellectually jump from step one to step two.
My first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous was in Oakland, California.
I was living in Berkeley, but I was willing to go into Oakland for recovery.
It's about four miles if you're looking at a map.
And this enthusiastic, non-climactic,
clapping group of people gave me something to do.
They said, go to lots of meetings, don't drink in between meetings,
and don't use no dope.
Go to lots of meetings, don't drink in between meetings,
don't use no dope.
And that became my program for at least a year, if not two years.
I mean, steps and...
I needed to do something.
I was going to meetings, I wasn't drinking, I wasn't using.
And looking back, here's what I think happened.
And I, by going to a lot of meetings,
drinking and not using,
I surrounded myself with people like you.
And the way I got carried,
the way I got from step one to step two,
is I got carried from step one to step two
by people like you.
The higher power present in the group
moved me from a place of no hope
to a place with a little bit of hope.
Not a lot.
And I find, in all honesty,
I don't need a lot.
A lot of hope.
I just need some.
I need to know that the door doesn't have to be open
as long as it's unlocked and I'm able to do something.
I mean, I just kind of perk up enough
to do the left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot,
breathe stuff of the program.
Participate, cooperate, show up,
surround myself with women and men who should be dead.
I found that your hope was contagious.
And I started having a little bit of hope.
One night in Berkeley, it occurred to me,
I was at a Wednesday night meeting called the Wild Bunch.
It was all people in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties.
It still exists, and they're still mid-twenties to mid-thirties.
And I went about two years ago,
and they were all mid-twenties to mid-thirties.
And they were all dating, you know,
and that's kind of interesting all by itself
as a little subspecies in AA.
And they horrified me, and I just said,
how can anyone stay?
But I needed to be there.
I wanted to be there when I was mid-twenties to mid-thirties.
But when I went there at the age of 47,
they thought I was someone's grandfather, you know,
so I never went back, showed them.
My sponsor says,
oh, I've never been to a bad AA meeting, he'll say,
and I'll tell him, you should travel with me.
I'll take you to some bad AA meetings.
Oh, Gads.
Anyway, all of a sudden,
I started having a little,
a bit of hope.
I was at that Wednesday night meeting,
and what occurred to me,
not just head-wise,
a lot of stuff occurs to me in my head.
And most of it doesn't last for long,
which is a relief.
But a lot of stuff goes on in my head.
But this also occurred in my heart,
and maybe even in my gut.
It said, you know, Tom,
God's grace, whatever that is,
who knows, the energy,
God's grace is available to anybody in this room.
You're in the room.
I'm part of the process.
I'm part of the group.
Not necessarily 100%, but a little bit.
My foot's in the door.
The door's open.
Hooray!
Maybe there's a chance.
Step two, came to believe
that a power greater than ourselves
could restore us to sanity.
And when I saw that,
the way I thought it should work for me,
and you,
is first I have,
to sort out all the God stuff.
Then I'll be restored to sanity.
Now, I know a lot of God stuff.
I really do.
In a couple of languages
and a couple of traditions.
None of that keeps me sober.
I knew that drinking.
And a lot of the stuff I knew
was really good stuff,
but it was all theory.
The experience of hope
is a real different thing.
Here's what started happening for me.
It's not that I figured it out
and then got restored to sanity.
I started,
I started being restored to sanity.
And then I came to believe
in a power greater than myself.
What does sanity look like?
That's always a good topic at a meeting.
I saw this shrink.
I've had some wonderful experience with shrinks.
And this one man was,
he listened well and he spoke well
and he asked some good questions.
And I needed him very badly
for a period of time.
And I said to him,
Leonard, do you think I'm normal?
There's evidence that I'm not.
And he looked at me
with these wise Jewish eyes
and he said,
normal is 98.6.
And I said,
what am I trying to say?
He said,
you're trying to ask,
are you healthy?
I said, okay,
how do you know?
Am I okay?
Am I normal?
Am I all right?
I mean,
some of us are so self-obsessed.
No one here, of course.
But,
the only question we have is,
how am I doing?
Am I okay?
Am I all right?
Am I getting along to people like me?
I mean, me, me, me.
How do you know?
Well, Leonard said,
you can spot healthy people
by the way they behave.
Ooh.
How do healthy people behave?
He said,
healthy people are able
to do three kinds of things.
Number one,
healthy people can work.
Number two,
healthy people can love.
Number three,
healthy people can play.
If you know someone
who can work,
love,
and play,
you know a pretty healthy person.
And I said,
go on.
I was hoping he'd use more words
that I could identify with.
We spent some time
talking about those things,
like the work stuff.
A lot of people in our culture
are identified by work.
And I knew at the bleakest part
of my drinking,
and the awful part of my drinking,
I should just say it out loud,
it was the depression.
It was just the sense of hopeless,
doomed, no-way-out depression.
I've never had a drunk driving ticket.
I mean, there's a lot of the external stuff.
It's just, I mean, jails.
I've never done any of that stuff.
I just lived in the world of
beyond depression, you know.
And I just thought that was real.
And I loved smoking dope.
And I just thought that was real. And I loved smoking dope.
And having a couple of glasses of wine.
And listening to Ray Charles
being born to lose one more night.
And I would go,
And I would go,
Yes, Ray!
You know, and I...
My favorite, my favorite album
was Isaac Hayes'
Hot Buttered Soul, Side 2.
And on Side 2, old Isaac Hayes,
he talks about this woman
who broke his heart seven times.
And he talks about each one of those times.
And then he tries to get to finish it.
And then he tries to get to finish it.
And then he tries to get to finish it.
And then he tries to get to finish it for the rest of the side of the album.
And I would play that over and over and over again.
And I thought I had a social life.
And I thought I had a social life.
And I thought I had a social life.
Because I identified so closely with Isaac Hayes.
Because I identified so closely with Isaac Hayes.
I mean this is just insanity.
A little depressed.
So, what's the point?
Work! Ah!
A lot of us identify
With the work stuff.
And during the Depression, the only time I felt alive was in front of the classroom.
And I prided myself with the fact that I was an effective teacher.
I taught history, European history, to high school kids in central Los Angeles.
And I did that five times a day, five times a week.
Or five times a day, five days a week.
That's right.
And I did that for three long years.
And then I left that and went to Berkeley to continue my studies.
And the Depression multiplied by the power of five.
Because as long as I could stay busy working, I kept the demons at the door.
And then I went into graduate school, which is kind of sleep late and, you know, drink cappuccino.
So, my sponsor pointed out to me the difference between working and being busy.
When you work, you actually get things done.
Busy is just busy.
And I was busy a lot.
He had to explain this to me.
You're able to work, he said.
And I got sober a year.
I went back to teach.
My first year back in the classroom sober was the hardest year of my sobriety.
I knew nothing.
I knew nothing.
I had no idea.
I had no boundaries.
I had no skin on.
I was a raw nerve.
And the only tool I had to use with the stresses and strains of the high school environment was sarcasm.
And I used it a lot.
And, I mean, angry, funny, but angry.
And I would go to a billion meetings because I didn't know what else to do and where they clapped, you know.
And I'd go to more meetings.
I remember asking my sponsor.
I was there for six months.
I didn't want to.
I didn't want to ask him too many questions.
I said, are there any small meetings in Southern California?
And he said, go to a big book study.
They're always small.
So I started doing that.
I went to a Friday night big book study on Olympic Boulevard.
And there was a group of folks there.
Now, I was 30 years old by this time.
The women and men at this meeting, and there were maybe 15 or 20 of them, were all in their 50s and 60s and 70s.
And I went to that meeting every Friday night.
And these became my first friends.
These became my first friends in Southern California in recovery because I was finally able to start being a friend.
But more on that later.
The work stuff.
Terry told me that work means you show up on time.
Once you're there, you do what you've agreed to do.
You finish on time.
You clean up.
He said, if you can do that, you can hold down a job.
In fact, people will even consider.
They consider you to be reliable and trustworthy.
I had to write all those parts down.
Really.
Because I'm great at showing up on time.
I can do that.
I can start any number of projects.
Then I get bored.
The phone rings.
Something else happens.
And I put the project down.
And it might be months before I notice something's wrong.
That's a real pattern for me.
And it's something I have to watch regularly.
I do a lot of YouTube.
I do a lot of yard work.
It's where I regularly connect with the higher power at my house.
And out in the yard, digging things, planting things, working with living things.
And it's real easy to cut stuff down.
And I have to force myself to pick it up, take it away, get the dump truck, haul it away.
Well, I'll do it next week.
No, you won't.
No.
It's hard.
Loving.
Loving is a big part.
It's a big part of being alive.
And just to say out loud, because I need to hear this, there is a lot more to loving than getting laid.
Some of us have been sexual with people we would not have coffee with, you know?
And what I had to learn was this whole world of relationships, being friends, it has to do an awful lot.
Not with feelings.
Not with relationships.
But with my behavior.
How do I interact with other persons?
How do I treat other persons, even if I'll never see them again?
The people at Lucky Market.
How do I interact with people?
I found, and this is my own, again, way of proceeding, if I'll never see you again, I can be pretty good to you.
If I'm related to you, I can be a real jerk.
And I didn't know that pattern until it was pointed out to me by one of the guys I met today.
to me by one of the guys I live with.
He said, Tom, you're great with strangers.
I hate hearing you talk about your family.
Really?
See, I thought I was just being funny.
No, no, no, no, no.
There's some work to do there.
And I had to do some work there.
I had years of resentments and hostilities
and bitterness and sarcasm to work out.
And I'm just glad that I've had the time to do this.
I didn't speak to my father for years
for any number of good reasons.
And he is not a chatty guy.
I mean, it's not like he was initiating the conversation
and I wasn't answering the phone.
I mean, we just didn't talk.
And last year, he was diagnosed very ill.
And he was 91.
And over the last 10 years, I've done some amends.
And I've done some repair work there.
And when he was as sick as he was,
I spent the nights with him.
And I was able to be there pretty.
And I found I could do simple things like feed him.
And the first day I got there in the hospital,
I was really agitated.
I was in crisis.
And in crisis, I kind of go back to more primitive forms.
And I didn't know what to do.
He's there.
And my mom's there.
And my brother's there, who's nuts.
I mean, he was nuts that day.
He's usually the rock of Gibraltar.
But it was a new thing going on.
And no one was being terribly grounded, we might say.
And I found myself highly agitated.
I was not helping anything.
I was adding to the confusion.
And you know why?
It's because what I was saying is, my father is dying.
My father is dying.
And I was running that tape.
And I finally, it took me two days, but I finally said, wait a minute.
Don't think my father's dying.
That's not helping.
Instead, think there's this old sick guy who's dying.
Tom, you've been with sick people a lot.
Treat him like you'd treat an old sick guy.
And I could be with him.
And all of a sudden, all the tension went out of the room.
And I could spend time with him.
The day he was diagnosed as terminal, my mom has a couple of control issues.
And lunch was served.
And he wanted to eat his ice cream first.
And she wouldn't let him.
Because you eat soup first, you know, in America.
And I wanted to scream at the top of my voice,
He's dying.
Give him the ice cream.
But I go to Al-Anon.
And I realized that I was highly uncomfortable.
And I knew what I wanted to do.
And instead, I said, I'll be back in a few minutes.
And I got up and I went out and I started walking down the hall.
It took 25 minutes of calm walking.
But then it occurred to me, they worked this deal out years ago.
You know?
They have their own rhythm.
And I'm not here to interfere or make it better.
They're cooperating.
And I went back in.
But when we were alone, I'd get him ice cream.
He died.
And I presided at the funeral.
And it was a way of paying respect, which I could not have done 10 years ago.
Which I know I couldn't have done 20 years ago.
So I'm real grateful that there's been some stuff that's gone on there.
But the loving.
The loving is an important thing.
Can I act in a loving way even when I'm not having a good day is my question.
If I'm well-rested and I've eaten intelligently and I've exercised some,
I can love unconditionally.
If I'm a little cranky, I don't love unconditionally.
I think that you need to improve.
Work, love, play.
Play!
I didn't know anything about play other than recreational drugs and recreational vehicles, you know.
And to learn how to have some lightness of heart and some enjoyment in life
has been an important part of recovery for me.
And I did not value that.
The value I've always had, and again, it's kind of genetic.
Good people work.
Better people work harder.
And whenever I felt guilty or stupid or insecure or inadequate,
I just worked harder.
Or rather, I got busier.
That's what I would do.
And that would kind of mitigate the feelings.
And I found out that I was talking to the Leonard, you know, the shrink.
And I said, he said, what do you do for fun?
And I felt my moral superiority rise.
And I said, I don't do things for fun.
I'm a serious person.
The world's burning down, you know, and some of us have to make a difference.
And he said, well, where do you find any enjoyment?
I said, I like meetings very much.
Meetings are good for me.
In fact, lots of times we laugh very hard at meetings.
And he said, Tom, if you don't learn how to play and lighten up, you'll never get well.
And I said, how do you even start to learn something like that?
Are there books to read on the subject?
My first choice, I'll read all those books.
His suggestion was that.
But I look around to see what people do for fun and then try it.
Try it a lot.
Not once.
Oh, I didn't like it.
Try it at once.
No, no, no.
Most of us don't like anything the first time, except alcohol and drugs.
He said, try it half a dozen or ten times and then you'll know if you like it or not.
And I started having to learn how to lighten up and participate in being alive, working, loving, playing.
Step two.
Over time, and I'm not a quick person in recovery.
I'm real slow.
Over time, within a year or two or three, I noticed that I was back at work.
It was very difficult and stressful, but I was back at work.
I was learning how to do it.
I was making friends.
And I was learning how to lighten up a little bit.
And that's when I came to believe that there was a power greater than myself in my life.
And if that power is present, can I trust that power to...
help me walk through the craziness of the next years?
Step three.
I don't do a lot of intense...
I mean, I keep step three real simple.
Turn it over, turn it over, turn it over.
I was reading an 18th century fellow talking about turning it over, a French guy.
And he said, if you have trouble turning over everything, just turn over now.
No.
I can do that, and I do.
I regularly turn over now, and I do that throughout the day.
I try to take moments like sunrise, which I don't regularly see, or sunset, which I frequently see,
and take just a couple of moments, and while I'm there, turn it over.
Turn over now.
Turn over all of it now.
But I turn it over and take it back, and I turn it over.
That's right.
And when I notice I've taken it back, I turn it over.
It's kind of a statement of policy, you know?
I try to cooperate.
I try to cooperate.
I try to cooperate.
I try to cooperate.
I try to cooperate.
I try to cooperate with this stuff.
I don't think, and this is a personal opinion, and you can sure disagree with me,
but I don't think that the program works when we work it.
There's just too much, I'm doing it all, in my mind, with those words.
Instead, I find the program works if I let it.
And a huge amount of recovery for me is learning how to cooperate with the program.
Not fixing it, not running it, not marching it, not doing it,
but just cooperating with it.
Sometimes I'm at a meeting, and the way I hear people talk about recovery,
it's as if they're at gold's gym, you know, lifting things, pulling things, yanking things,
becoming strong like ox.
And I, it's not my experience.
When I relax enough to cooperate, things change remarkably well.
The Chinese talk about the Tao, and the Tao is basically the flow of things.
And to learn how to move with the flow of things makes all the difference,
and that's what's in the world for me.
So I find when I'm going to meetings, and when I'm cooperating,
and returning phone calls, and turning it over,
and have some kind of ongoing prayer and meditation in my life, it flows.
And when I don't do that, it doesn't flow, and I can become a little testy.
What else do I know, and then we can all go home.
I started this earlier in my talk this morning,
but I was,
I was newly sober, and I went to the El Cerrito Fellowship,
which has meetings all day long.
And I asked this old-timer, I think he had six months.
I said, actually he didn't, he had about 30 years.
I said, how do you know you're alcoholic?
I mean, maybe I'm not alcoholic, maybe I'm just crazy.
And he looked at me, and it's not what he said that helped, which did,
but the way he said it helped.
He didn't tell me how I would know I was an alcoholic.
Tom, here's what you'll know.
He didn't use that tone of voice.
Instead, he told me how he knew he was an alcoholic.
See, instead of telling me what my experience should be, which doesn't work,
he told me what his experience was,
which meant I could identify.
And he said he knew he was an alcoholic because he had no way
of guaranteeing his behavior after his first drink.
I said, what do you mean?
He said, well, there are times I could drink a lot,
and nothing would happen.
Nothing would happen.
You know, simple evening at home, you know.
I had a lot of those.
I would drink a lot.
I'd get back to my own room, get to bed, wake up in the morning,
no vomit, no pee, success, you know.
Other times, he said, he would just drink a little bit,
and anything could happen.
Now, that's my story, too.
I never knew which one it would be.
Is it going to be a smooth evening, or are we in for a bumpy ride?
I never knew.
There were times I would drink and I was charming.
There were times I would drink and I was scary.
A lot of times, I did lots of drunk driving,
for which I was never stopped.
That was, as one of the speakers from past generations said,
that was a matter of seconds and inches.
I could have been a statistic,
and I could have caused a lot of other people to be a statistic
five days a week for 20 years.
So, I came to the conclusion that I was an alcoholic,
and what I needed to do was surround myself with women and men
who could give me the gift of hope
so that a day at a time, I could have a life.
There's been lots of changes.
There have been lots of things going on.
Some of it's been fine.
Some of it's been just awful.
One of the women in the East Bay, her name's Bobette,
she says, when you get sober, you feel better.
You feel everything better.
And that's true.
I find that it's real hard to be here,
that I really need something besides physical sobriety
to give me the tools to use to have a life.
And let me just mention a couple of the tools I use,
and then we can end it all.
But I go to meetings.
I find sometimes I cut way back on meetings
because I get busy and crazy and lazy
and suddenly love boat's on.
I get interested, you know.
And I find when I cut way back on meetings,
it's not that I'm so much in the danger of drinking,
but the quality of my life changes.
I am less sensitive.
I am more reactive.
And I'm regularly more hostile.
And I have to watch that.
But going to meetings.
Returning phone calls.
I don't always like to do that.
But I phone people and I return the phone call.
I also screen calls when I'm there
because I don't always think it's God on the other end.
And I'll go out maybe to something at night,
to a meeting or something,
and I'll come back at 11 o'clock
and the machine will be blinking, you know,
and there will be 5 or 8 or 12 or 75 telephone messages.
I give myself permission to not listen to those
at 11 o'clock at night.
Because right now, usually by 11 o'clock, I'm done.
I don't have any energy
and I don't have any hope to give anybody.
I need to get to bed with the cats, you know.
And tomorrow we'll try something else
and I can return the phone calls tomorrow.
Because I'm real aware, having turned 50,
that there are limitations that are real
and I've got to respect them.
And so a lot of times I turn all of the names
on the machine over to God's care
and I go to bed.
And there are some people who are angry at me the next day
but they've been angry at me
for years.
So I just figure, good for you, you know.
I tell them you're dealing with someone
with severe limitations, you know.
So let's not pretend.
The fact is we're talking now.
I use the phone.
I sponsor some people
and I don't know what they should do with their lives.
I don't know if they should move in or move out
or do this or do that.
I sponsored a guy for a while named Charlie
and Charlie ran the garage that I always brought
my car to.
And this is even when he was drinking.
I asked around the fellowship,
is there an honest garage?
And they said, oh, Charlie's garage.
So I brought my car there.
A lot of other sober people did.
Then one day Charlie showed up at a meeting
with about 19 minutes of sobriety
and Charlie found that half the room were his clients
and it really threw him
and he was all concerned about what will we say
and we were just glad to see him.
And he asked me to be his sponsor
and I was so happy bringing my car to him
and it felt so good.
And then two or three or four years later
he told me that he hated running a garage.
He started doing garage work when he was a kid
in the backyard, you know,
and it kind of grew into Charlie's garage
and he wanted to sell the garage
and do something else
and he wanted to go to computer school
and wear a tie
and do a different job for the next years.
And my only thinking of others, you know,
my first thought was where will I take my car?
So I told him not to do anything rash, you know,
and pray about this
and let's see what God is telling you
and he sold his garage
and has stayed sober
and done a lot of different things
and God got another mechanic sober
which is a miracle as you know
and now we take our car to David
and David believes that if he cheats a customer
he'll get drunk
and I don't do anything to tell him that.
I don't do anything to tell him different.
I also have a sponsor.
My sponsor is more in need of meetings
than anybody I know.
Last year he jumped out of a perfectly good plane.
He was 25 years sober
and almost 60 years old
and Monsignor
and he decided that he needed to jump out of a plane
and he didn't tell us about it until he did it
but then he made us all watch this film.
So clearly he's not dealing with a lot of personal mental health
but he's familiar with the theory
and we can talk about it.
I find that he shares his experience
and his strength and his hope
and I keep in regular contact by phone
and when I'm in Los Angeles
I always go see him
and give him another chance to buy me lunch
which he hasn't done yet
but I always give him another chance to buy me lunch.
And it's a day at a time.
And it's a day at a time.
And it's a day at a time.
I think of drinking.
You need to know this.
I know people who got sober
and haven't had the thought of a drink in 50 years
and I'm very happy for them.
I think of drinking all the time.
Well, what do you do?
I don't drink today.
I give myself permission to drink tomorrow.
I give myself permission to run away from home tomorrow.
I give myself permission to rob banks tomorrow.
I give myself permission
I give myself permission to even scores tomorrow.
Today, I don't do it.
I try to be very present today
and cooperate with the gift of sobriety and recovery
as it's given to me just for today.
And I find that gives me a real full plate.
I have drinking dreams.
I wish I didn't.
They come.
I don't know what to do with them.
I was having them for a while
and I thought this means I'm a bad member.
This means I should be working on a step or something.
You know?
Spiritual exercises.
And I finally ran it by my sponsor
The Hopeless Alcoholic in Los Angeles
and I said
I didn't want to tell them that I was having drinking dreams
but I said,
what happens if you know someone
who may be having drinking dreams?
And he said,
have you had the one yet?
Notice he shared experience with me.
He didn't get theoretical.
And he talked about
in the dream you know you've been going to meetings.
For years.
But in the dream you are sitting alone in your room.
Secret.
Self-contained.
Solitary as an oyster.
Drinking all by yourself.
And you've been doing that for years too.
Have you had that dream yet?
And I hadn't.
And I thought it was a dream full of perversion and mendacity.
You know this is a sick man who has a dream like that.
And six months later I had that dream of course.
So I said,
what does it mean these drinking dreams?
And he says,
well,
drinking dreams mean a couple of things.
Number one,
for many of us it means
that our drinking had become a nightmare.
Number two,
people who have drinking dreams don't get drunk.
He said,
do you know any drinking people who have drinking dreams?
No.
Only sober people get them.
It's very bizarre.
So it's kind of cold comfort.
But when I have them I wake up.
I was ten years sober.
I woke up from an incredibly vivid dream.
And I knew I had blown ten years.
And it was not until my second cup of coffee before I realized
I didn't go out last night.
And I was real grateful that I hadn't gone out last night.
Anyway,
I'm also real grateful that I'm here.
And I'm glad that there are rooms like these all over the world
where people like us can gather safely.
I was in,
last story,
I was in,
those of you who have bathroom needs,
I want you to know that soon you can meet your needs.
I was in Bangkok a couple of years ago doing some stuff.
And there's a little board over by the AA bulletin board
at the Ilano Club in Bangkok.
And it just says,
when you're in Cambodia,
in Cambodia the sober people stop at Burt's Books.
Well,
I figured that was my higher power speaking to me.
So I needed to find Cambodia.
And I needed to find Burt's Books.
And I did that.
And Burt's been sober for a while.
And great big bear shaped guy.
And his wife's Cambodian.
And Burt's been in there for about five years.
And he runs a book shop and guest house.
For $5 a night you get a bed and a fan and a mosquito net,
which is real nice.
You're real glad for it.
And you get to hang out with sober people who are doing things there.
And I went and found here I am as far as you can be.
From where I was when I got sober in Berkeley.
I'm no longer secret.
I know I'm not self-contained.
And I'm rarely as solitary as an oyster.
I can even meet a man like Burt.
And we're from very different backgrounds.
We make a connection.
A group of us can gather around the table in Phnom Penh
and talk about recovery and life and gratitude and service.
And know that we are where we're supposed to be.
And I've learned those things and had those experiences here.
And for that I'm real grateful.
Thanks.