I’m a Gang of One — There’s No Gangs in Palos Verdes 🤣 — Bill C.

About This Speaker Tape

Bill delivers a step 4-5 talk over Zoom during COVID lockdown — he's 35 years sober, got sober at 37, and has been reflecting at length while locked down. He opens by pushing back on the standard alcoholic story that we were always "separate and strange" before we drank. He argues the ego creates separation in every human at about two and a half years old; the difference with alcoholics is that we found a chemical that dissolved it, and then we stopped growing. We walked into AA emotionally stuck where alcohol first hit.

He stacks evidence that his own stuckness outlived his sobriety date by decades — the badass teenager from Palos Verdes who was in jail at 17 and a locked mental institution at 22; the seven-years-sober father getting thrown off a field of eight-year-olds for going after the referee; the middle-school Harley burnout after benching a team of nine-year-olds at halftime, followed by the dignity of running out of gas and walking home in his leather jacket; the fourteen-years-sober roadside screaming match with a cop who put his hand on his gun when Bill finally turned around to apologize. The apology, he says, unnerved the cop more than the epithets did.

The frame of the talk is five pillars of spiritual condition, each mapped to steps. Powerlessness — not just over alcohol but over everything outside his own being. Stop blaming — the real work of the fourth column is not "my part" but my faults and mistakes, the places where I was the author of my own resentments (his wife cheated with his friend while he was shooting dope, running with bikers, and leaving the family on welfare). Nothing is personal — his amends to his father pulled the rage out of him in the truck on the drive home; he discovered his father had never been doing anything to him, and the two of them went on to share fifteen years of sobriety-birthday cakes at the Hermosa Beach Men's Day as "the Gordon and Bill show."

The last two pillars are self-awareness — the watcher that develops in steps 10 and 11, which frees him from having to keep working on himself — and compassion, which he says is what he was missing his whole life. He traces his second surrender between eight and twelve years (the collapse of the alibi system), his liver transplant three and a half years ago from Hep C that almost killed him at thirty years sober and showed him how hard it was to accept love, and the slow discovery that somewhere in sponsoring people for self-centered reasons he fell in love with them. He closes by flipping the cliché: "You don't give it away to keep it. You have to give it away to even get it."

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Meeting chair opens the step series — Carl M did step one, Pete did two and three, Bill is on four; set-aside prayer
• 2:15 Bill introduces his thesis: the sense of separation isn't unique to alcoholics — the ego creates it in every human at about two and a half years old
• 8:30 Palos Verdes 'gang of one' teenager — big jacket, slouch, sneer, carried a gun, in jail for the first time at 17
• 13:45 AYSO soccer meltdown coaching nine-year-olds — Harley burnout through the middle-school basketball courts, then runs out of gas walking home
• 18:20 Roadside rage at a cop at 14 years sober while speaking all over as an AA guru — cop puts his hand on his gun when Bill circles back to apologize
• 24:00 Liver transplant three and a half years ago from Hep C — told doctors to write 'death by alcoholism' on his death certificate if he didn't make it
• 33:10 Fourth column teaching — wife cheated with his friend while Bill was shooting dope, running with bikers, family on welfare; forgiveness for childhood abuse survivors as 'more art than science'
• 39:30 Amends to his father (Gordon) pulls the rage out of him on the drive home — they went on to share fifteen years of sobriety-birthday cakes at the Hermosa Beach Men's Day as 'the Gordon and Bill show'
• 46:50 Second surrender between eight and twelve years — 'the collapse of the alibi system' — emotional and mental breakdown from carrying his personality around
• 52:00 Closing — compassion as the fifth pillar; 'you don't give it away to keep it, you have to give it away to even get it'