He Tried to Be His Own Lawyer Fifty-Seven Times – Mike L.

About This Speaker Tape

Baltimore, December. A heart in a flutter, a slip into the gutter, and a pig for company. Mike L. doesn't call himself a talker; he's a speaker, a truck driver who drank anything too thin to chew and spent his years as a "zombie" walking into poles. He was the kind of jerk who knew everyone's business but his own, acting as his own lawyer in fifty-seven criminal court cases and losing every single one. He lived in a world of make-believe, a professional panhandler in a dirty sweatshirt, until he hit the bottom of a Baltimore City Jail cell.

He describes the wreckage of a man who left his children to be mocked at school and his wife to lie for him. But the shift came through a Higher Power and the hands of people who pulled him out of the muck. Now, he trades the "clown suit" for a life of reality, finding the dividends of sobriety in the eyes of a daughter he finally got to give away in marriage.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opening joke about the mind absorbing only what the feet can endure.
• 2:15 Laughter: Story about the 'habitual drunken discharge' from the Air Corps.
• 6:40 Description of the 'zombie type' alcoholic on Skid Row.
• 10:15 The 'scientific' method of panhandling and the plainclothes detective.
• 14:30 Discussion of the Higher Power and the role of prayer and meditation in the program.
• 18:10 The 'smart chicken' story about taking his case 'uptown' to the criminal court.
• 22:45 Emotional account of his sister's final words in an oxygen tent.
• 26:20 The moment his daughter tells him it's good to have him at her graduation.
• 31:10 Laughter: The 'false teeth' meeting that led to the creation of two new groups.
• 36:40 The story of Christopher C. as a fellow alcoholic.
• 42:15 The joke about Maggie and Pat's 'warm' body.
• 48:50 Closing thoughts on the grace of a Higher Power and the 'clown suit' of sobriety.