Higher Power Goes On Before the Pants — Step 11 in My Boxers — David C.
About This Speaker Tape
Mike, an Atlanta native with a December 13, 2010 sobriety date, tells his five-year story at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speaker Meeting. Born in 1964, he was yanked from Atlanta to a Griffin, Georgia dairy farm at six years old by a rageaholic father. Football, straight S's on report cards (he was mad he didn't get S-plus), and a habit of praying to dodge the bus driver's paddlings were early signs the alcoholic mentality was already installed. First drink at 14 — pony beers, fighting in the shrubs, waking up with candle wax in his mouth, thinking he needed to quit smoking candles. Pill alcohol, herbal alcohol, it was all alcohol, chasing the ease and comfort of that first night.
He escaped the farm for the University of Georgia, did a Spanish 103 presentation with a briefcase of tequila and three shots in two minutes for an A, and went to work for Vanity Fair — he called the Victoria's Secret people the Nazis making panties. Geographical cures via transfers every 18 months hid the disease through multiple wives. A botched 2000 back surgery opened the door to chronic pain management; a 2004 epidural that punctured his spinal cord opened it wider. By December 2010 he had two warrants in two counties, four lawyers, a head wound from seizing into his keyboard on benzo withdrawal, burns from making what he calls blackened dope fiend instead of blackened chicken, and a choice one night in camouflage in his own yard between the ambulance on the left and the cop car on the right.
He took the ambulance. Peachford detox, residential rehab, PHP, a sponsor half his age who told him call guys, read at meetings, set up chairs. Honesty from 4:00 to 4:15 every day, building from there. A 90-day chip didn't impress the probation officer who had two deputies waiting; Mike did his fourth step in Merriweather County Jail out of a big book pulled from a little net bag of donated paperbacks. One white chip cost more than his UGA education. A pro-twelve-step judge in Cobb County cut a year sentence to ten days because of what he'd already done in recovery.
The rehab owner hired him. At 14 months he went to Sweetwater 420, clean, and found the energy ten times better than anything drunk or high. At two years Peachford handed him a key — a dope fiend with a key, he says — and two or three times a week he sits on the unit carrying the message. A three-year back surgery installed a spinal cord stimulator; he took the narcotics exactly as prescribed with his sponsor holding the pills, threw away the last dozen, and went right back in. He puts on his God before his pants. He made step 10 amends to Chauncey for six weeks about the wake-up noise — Chauncey never changed, Mike did.
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Timestamps
Full Transcript
Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight, and listening later on
a bluechipspeakers.org, desperately in need, will hear our speaker, and we believe that
it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of...
a bluechipspeakers.org, desperately in need, will hear our speaker, and we believe that
it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of...
Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight, and listening later on
a bluechipspeakers.org, desperately in need, will hear our speaker, and we believe that
it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded
to say, yes, I am one of them, too, I must have this thing.
I have the privilege of introducing our speaker tonight, and I don't know if you've heard
Mike's story or not, but one of the things that impresses me most about Mike is how incredibly
humble he is, and centered in this program, and I know that it probably stems from his
work with alcoholics, which is incredible, the amount of work he does with other alcoholics.
So this is a very humble and dedicated man to this program, and he also plays a mean
guitar.
So with that, I give you Mike.
I'm just bringing this up in case some fruit starts to fly.
Everybody, my name is Mike, and I'm an alcoholic.
Wow.
I'm even more nervous than I thought.
Five years ago, when I first started coming into this room, there just really was nothing
left, and this room right here was the first room where people looked me in the eye.
They looked me in the eye a little bit and shook my hand and asked me how I was doing
and remembered my name, and that just meant so much.
My sobriety date is December 13, 2010.
My home group is the Monday Night Blue Chip Speaker Meeting.
It's a meeting right here.
I have a sponsor, and I sponsor a few guys, not a whole lot.
I was born in 1964.
I'm an Atlanta native.
There's not that many of us really running around.
My father got an urge when I was six years old to be a farmer, and we left Atlanta and
moved to Griffin, Georgia, and he bought a farm and started working on the farm.
And that was kind of a, that was a harsh blow.
I used to hang out in the kitchen with my mom here in Atlanta and listen to Peter Paul
and Mary Records and bake cookies.
Then I'm seven years old.
I'm snagged.
I'm snagged to this environment where one of the happiest days of my early times there
at the farm, I remember, was the day that I learned to shoot the automatic shotgun well
enough to hit a milk jug, because that meant that I could walk around in the pastures and
not be worried, you know, about possibly being attacked by the bulls, because you had bulls
that ran with the cows, and they were pretty scary.
So I kind of, you know, fear was kind of with me from the start.
My dad had a bad temper, was, you know, real, he definitely, if you looked at the symptoms
of a rageaholic, he would be there.
And so early on, I've been blessed with being fairly athletic and started playing football
kind of as a reason, as a way to kind of reduce the stress and, you know, to get patted on
the back and everything.
And the alcoholic mentality was with me early at these.
The school that I went to from second to sixth grade, you got a report card in.
On the report card, you had five categories, and you got S's or N's from each teacher for
each quarter.
I went for the entire five years, and all I ever got was S's.
I got straight S's for five years.
And I was really pissed off that they didn't give me an S+.
I felt like I deserved a little bit more.
And, you know, that would come back to bite me later.
And I also, early, I developed a relationship with God.
I would pray.
I would pray every night when I went to bed to please God, don't let Mr. Jackson, the
bus driver, don't let Mr. Jackson turn me into the office in the morning.
Me and a bunch of my football player buddies, we all had assigned seats right behind the
bus driver.
And I prayed every night to not go to the office.
And it worked usually for about two or three months.
And then we'd go to the office and take our little paddling, and then we'd be free on
the bus, and we'd be back in the assigned seats before the bus left the school parking
lot.
And it just never crossed my mind.
Maybe you should behave on the bus.
You know, that just, that didn't, never made any sense.
I had my first drink at age 14.
I was at a party, and somebody had a bunch of those little pony beers.
And from the first one I turned up, it would run straight down my throat.
I've always just had that ability to open my throat and bam.
And I drank a lot of them that night.
And the promises definitely came true.
For me, I intuitively knew how to handle all these situations which had me beaten down.
I was smaller.
I mean, I got taller.
My shoulders got bigger.
I got smarter.
You know, it just, it was just a wonderful thing.
And the next morning I woke up, and at the party I was, we were doing something where
I was smoking candles, pulling wicks on the candles through and having some flame going.
And I woke up the next morning, and I was kind of cut up and bruised and dirty.
We'd all been fighting in the shrubs, you know, with a bunch of other football players.
We were at the party, and my mouth was all full of this, this dried wax and everything.
I just woke up, oh, God.
And my first thought was, God, I've got to quit smoking candles, you know, the thought
that maybe I shouldn't drink, nah.
And that mentality kind of stayed with me for about the next 30 years, on and off.
I discovered alcohol in a lot of forms.
Pill alcohol.
That was very convenient.
You could have a large supply with you.
In your pocket, nobody could smell it.
I was a better football player on pill alcohol.
I was meaner and faster.
All other sorts.
Herbal alcohol.
But it was all alcohol.
It was all chasing that feeling of ease and comfort that I first felt at 14.
I fled the dairy farm at 18 and went to the University of Georgia.
You know, I just, I was not a farmer.
Just not me.
And, you know, had a lot of fun.
At the University of Georgia, there was a symptom that came up that now is pretty obvious.
I'd always kind of wanted to be a veterinarian.
I kind of liked on the farm being able to doctor all the cows and everything and, you
know, diagnose and give them shots.
I delivered a bunch of calves, you know, as we went through.
And, you know, I thought that would be a cool thing.
I had read all these books by this author, James Herriot, on creatures great and small,
about his experiences as a vet.
And I'd also thought about being a veterinarian.
You know, I thought that would be a cool thing.
You know, I thought about being an airline pilot.
I'd been to the airport a few times and I loved watching the planes land and everything.
I got to the University of Georgia and it was just so much fun to be had.
And those vet school guys, they were working their butts off.
You know, they were studying all the damn time.
And the Air Force guys that were doing the pilot thing, they weren't having any fun.
You know, they were running around in these little suits and just, phew.
So I kind of said, well, you know, maybe I'll just study economics and music and maybe
I'll get a job.
And, you know, I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And that was a real important sign.
I kind of changed my goal to let me keep doing what I was doing, and I've heard other people
doing that.
of fun at the University of Georgia. Widespread Panic played a pool party for me, 1986. I
played music in Athens. I had a real good time. It just seems like it was so different
then than it is now. I remember I took a Spanish class, and it was a 10 o'clock class, Spanish
103, and the teacher liked me. She liked to come hear my band play, and I did a presentation
on tequila, and I borrowed a briefcase from a guy. I walked into the classroom with the
briefcase with tequila and limes and everything. When it was my time to get up, I got up, opened
the briefcase, blasted a shot, spoke for about a minute, blasted another shot, finished up
another minute, blasted another shot. So I did three shots in about two minutes, and
I got an A. I don't know what would happen if somebody did that at UGA now. But I got
out of UGA and went to work in business. I really was kind of sick of the whole music
thing. You ladies probably know the company.
Vanity Fair, VF Corporation, made a lot of Victoria's Secret. We made Lee jeans, Wrangler
jeans. I tell everybody that I know way too much about bras and panties, just more than
any man should. I called them, that group, I called them the Nazis making panties. That
was kind of what it was like. They were dead serious about that underwear. I did pretty
well with that kind of thing.
Atlanta in 96. Through the 90s, I was starting to have some problems. Back problems from
football, other little injuries. Problems getting along with people a little bit, getting
along with wives, that kind of stuff. Yes, plural. Luckily, the job I had, I got to move
a lot. I got to move every year, 18 months or so. So we kind of had a perfect geographical
thing worked in.
I made it back to Atlanta in 96.
Kind of getting a little bit worse here and there. Started back into the music. In 2000,
I had my first back surgery. That didn't go real well. They told me that you're going
to be under for three hours. You're going to walk that afternoon and you'll leave in
three days. That was in the morning. I woke up, came out of the surgery and it was dark.
It was already night and everybody's sobbing and crying around the bed. They told me that
I could not move for three days. I ended up being in the hospital for a week and a half.
The surgery was real bad. I had a lot of back trauma from the football. Compression, fractures,
discs had grown into my spinal cord. It was just a messy mess.
I kind of continued on and in 2004, I had an epidural for back pain. Some of you guys
probably had them. That doesn't really make s lot of sense. They take a big needle and
they jam it into your back. They fill it right into your chest and they fill it in on your
back. It's a little bit more painful than it is. I wasn't able to move for three days. Yeah,
. . And from there, I had a little shock. I wasn't able to move for three days. I ended up being
They flood you with a bunch of chemicals, and that's supposedly to help the pain.
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
But I liked epidurals because if you worked an epidural right,
you could stay in the heavy stuff for three or four months around it.
You just limp in afterwards and tell the doctor you're still hurting,
flop around on the table a little bit,
and then you go to the next doctor and do the same thing, that kind of stuff.
And one thing I was real big on,
if you started giving me a lot of problems about pill alcohol,
I would back way off on that and just start drinking more.
I'd have beer for breakfast, beer for dinner.
And if you started giving me a lot of grief about that,
I'd kind of switch back around.
So it was kind of a moving target effect.
But the last epidural I had in 2004 punctured my spinal cord by mistake.
And you sign a piece of paper saying they could kill you.
I looked into it.
But pain got a little bit worse after that,
and I got introduced to even heavier stuff.
And I had to go on disability in 2006 for the spinal cord injuries.
Had plenty of money, had a big house up in Kennesaw.
Wife that loved me and put up with way more than she should.
And I should have been set.
I had taken care.
Financially got a place to live, all this other stuff.
And you guys probably know how it comes out.
If it had come out well, I wouldn't be up here now.
I just kind of did what we do.
I'm seeing lots of doctors just wallowing around in my own misery.
There's a story in the big book that's dead on it about the guy that retired,
comes out with his carpet slippers, and in four years he's dead.
In four years I was in Peachford Hospital.
And Peachford was not my first time.
In that kind of place.
Went to Ridgeview, South Cobb, Anchor.
If you can have a good discussion about the relative merits of the treatment centers in the area,
you may have a problem.
Ridgeview, they got great food, but you got to walk outside to get it.
It's kind of a balancing thing.
So in December 2010, I ended up in Peachford.
Wasn't my first time in a place like this.
And kind of the way it always worked was,
I'd go into a place like Peachford, you know, to detox.
Get it out of your system, you know.
Get clean.
And then, you know, you go back to the job, the wife, the house.
You know, go back to whatever family members are putting up with you at the time.
And, you know, you're kind of supposed to be okay, and it just never worked like that with me.
It was always between about 30 and 60 days,
whoever was putting up with me at the time would look at me and go,
my God, man, you are worse without it.
We know we want to be better.
We wanted you to quit.
But now that we've seen you without it, you know, we prefer you with it.
Just go back and see the doctor, would you?
And that's really kind of how alcoholism showed up in me.
All the stuff that I was trying to medicate and run away from and everything,
if you took all that away and you didn't give me some kind of real solution,
then you really got deceived.
And, you know, it's getting worse and worse over time.
By the time I got to Peachford, I came into Peachford on December 13th.
And I had been at the emergency room at Kenistone the night before.
And I will tell you, I didn't have a problem at Kenistone or at Peachford.
I was at Peachford voluntarily because I had decided the night before about 11 o'clock
to get in the ambulance on the left side of my yard
instead of getting in the cop car on the right side of my yard at 11 o'clock December 12th.
And it just never, ever crossed my mind that normal, sane, well-adjusted people
just aren't faced with that choice.
You don't have to decide ambulance or cop car
when you're out dressed in camouflage in your front yard.
But I will tell you, I didn't have a problem.
And this is embarrassing.
But when I got to the emergency room at Kenistone,
they made sure I wasn't going to die right away.
Let me check out real quick.
And then they made me take a bath.
Just how bad do you have to be
for them to want you to bathe in the emergency room?
You know?
It was bad.
I had two warrants out for my arrest by that time in two different counties.
I had four lawyers working for me.
I loved lawyers.
Just keep writing the checks and keep moving.
And I was in some deep, deep trouble.
You know, my wife was gone, divorced, nobody in my family talking to me.
And it was pretty bad.
The second day I was at Peachford,
I had a big open head wound here on the side of my head
that couldn't be stitched
where I'd had a seizure into my computer keyboard from benzo withdrawal.
I had a concussion.
I had double vision.
I had second degree burns on my hands
because I was trying to make blackened chicken
several days before I got in
and I ended up making blackened dope fiend instead.
I grabbed, you know, burned both my hands.
I just, you know, wasn't really paying attention.
And the second day I was in Peachford,
you know, people come up to you,
hey man, what are you?
What are you looking for?
What did you do?
And I looked at this guy and I said,
man, I think I got hit by a truck.
And I was kind of trying to be funny, you know,
laugh a little bit.
And he kind of looked me up and down.
He said, yeah, I think you're right.
But you get a lot of good information from folks with no shoelaces.
You know, there are intellectuals left and right
in that kind of environment.
And I was counseled by somebody,
some of those folks that you can't get arrested
if you go to rehab.
I was like, hmm, okay.
That's interesting.
And I was talking to my lawyers while I was in there
and they said the only chance you have
is that you've got to do everything
your doctors are telling you to do.
You've got to fully follow medical care
and we might be able to help you
if you do everything your doctors are telling you to do.
So I said, okay, sure.
It sounds fine.
I found a residential rehab to go to.
And the doctors also wanted me to sign up
for the PHP program at Peachford.
That's typically when they give you your keys
and shoelaces back,
they tell you to go to PHP.
And every place has aftercare like that.
I just never was really interested in it before.
Just give me my stuff.
I'll be fine.
So I signed up for that too.
I got out of Peachford New Year's Eve.
And this just tells you how bad it was.
I had a little dog, a little pug.
And my dad and stepmom and her family
had picked up my dog at the house
and they had her.
They picked me up at Peachford
and spent the drive out to Conyers
where they lived
telling me about how much trouble I was in.
Trying to beg me to do a will.
That was about all they would say.
Just please do a will
so we don't have to sort through all this mess.
They took my dog
and my dog stayed in the family's house
there in Conyers.
And they put me in...
in the days in
on the side of the interstate
at the Conyers exit on I-20.
My dog got to stay with my family.
But I didn't.
They just didn't want me around.
They didn't want me going through the stuff.
Stealing, scamming.
They came and got me each day
for a couple hours
to hang out with the family.
But they didn't want me around.
So I got done with Christmas.
I came to my residential rehab.
Started up in the PHP.
Man.
God, I hated that.
And with the rehab
they had schedules
from the time you had to get up in the morning
to the time you went to bed.
You know, what you're supposed to be doing.
They wanted me to clean toilets.
I'm like, look man, just call this number.
She'll come over here and clean the whole place.
And I'll pay her.
But they wanted me to do it myself.
And I just kind of had to.
I went to a book study
that very first day.
And I asked them, you know,
I'm just kind of standing there
clueless in the thing.
And I said, what book are you guys studying?
And one guy said, the big book.
And I just went, oh my God,
these freaks can't even call it the Bible.
What have I done, Lord?
What have I done?
And as soon as I found out
about the big book,
I went trying to find cliff notes for it.
Some of you guys probably,
I'm like, 164 pages?
Please, man, I'll ace this tomorrow.
You know, just let me.
There are no cliff notes
that I was able to find.
And it was rough.
I was going to PHP.
The counseling thing at Peaceford.
And they were telling me
I had to get honest.
You know?
Get honest, it'll save your life.
I'm like, no, no, no.
The last thing I need to do
is get honest.
I need to come up with some better scams.
You know?
Because these people,
everybody around me kind of knows
all the stuff I've been running on.
They're getting tired of me.
Honesty was the last thing.
And what I started doing
was being honest from 4 o'clock to 4.15
every day.
And I would say one honest thing
from 4 o'clock to 4.15.
You know?
And I kind of built from that.
I was very open-minded
as far as I would have done
anything they told me to do
to get out of trouble.
And I was very willing
to do anything that they told me to do.
And I didn't think any of this stuff
would work, really.
I was just trying to, you know,
just to get out of all this trouble.
And they told me to get a sponsor.
Somebody introduced me to this young guy.
He'd been through the rehab.
He was half my age.
But he knew the guy that ran the place.
So I was kind of screwed a little bit there.
And he didn't really tell me so much what to do.
He just kind of told me what he did.
You know, he told me about getting guys' phone numbers
and calling them up
and reading at meetings.
You know, being of service at meetings.
Setting up chairs.
Get there a little early.
Stay there a little late.
Meet some people.
Do all this stuff.
And I'm like, dude, you know,
I'll give you some honesty.
I don't care how these guys are doing, man.
What about that chick over there with the tab?
Can I get her phone number?
We all love romance and early sobriety.
I had a plan there with a girl
that was also in PHP with me.
And she was at the same rehab
and we were going to run away
in the middle of the night
and commandeer my bankrupt house
in Kennesaw and start anew.
You know, it made sense at the time.
And I'm going to all these 12-step meetings.
And, you know, I didn't really like that either.
There were people out there, guys hugging guys.
I kind of thought it was a cult.
They're chanting.
It just was really weird.
But the strange thing was,
once out of every five or ten meetings,
man, I would hear somebody say something
that was just, oh my God,
exactly what I had done, you know,
or exactly what I had thought.
And I really, I didn't think anybody else
thought like me, kind of,
or had done all the crazy stuff I had done.
And it was kind of a good feeling,
you know, to start between what my sponsor
had me doing and going to these meetings.
I was starting to get the idea, you know,
that maybe I wasn't a bad, evil person,
but that I was very sick, you know,
and that I had a fatal disease
and I had one foot in the grave
and one foot on a banana peel.
And that was about where I was.
I started seeing a couple of doctors.
I had to be honest with the doctors.
I had to tell them I was an addict.
I had to tell my family I was an addict.
And, uh,
I couldn't just do that right.
I'd be like,
I'm an alcoholic, you know.
I'm an addict.
And everybody that knew me,
their response was all the same.
They were like, well, no joke, man.
You know, we've known it for 30 years.
Welcome to our party.
I was the only one that was surprised.
And, uh, the doctors, you know,
for the first time,
I had to take all these meds
the doctors were giving me, you know,
legitimate chronic pain and some other stuff.
I had to take this stuff exactly as prescribed.
I'm like, I'll show you a suggestion.
Man, that crap that's written on the bottle,
flip it around.
Do the six in the first hour.
You know?
And see, but, you know,
the staff supervised.
I had no choice.
I had to follow all these directions.
And in 30 days, I was just, oh, miserable.
I called my sponsor up.
I'm like, man, I am sick and tired of this place.
I'm sick and tired of all you grinning, smiling people.
You know, this is just driving me nuts.
I want to, you know,
I want to go out and just get wasted right now.
And he said, well,
if that doesn't prove to you
that you're an addict, an alcoholic,
I don't know what will.
All the trouble you've gotten into,
all the stuff you've done,
and you just want to go do more?
Click.
Oh, man.
And I stayed up that whole night
just about just flopping around on the bed.
And I was out early the next morning
on the back porch of the rehab,
and it was cold,
and I was just, you know,
in turmoil, just miserable.
And 6.30 or 7 in the morning,
right around that time
as the sun was coming up,
I kind of was just overcome with this feeling.
It wasn't like a voice.
It wasn't like, you know,
somebody speaking to me.
It was just more like that, you know,
I started to really feel that I was powerless
and I really wasn't in charge of all this stuff
and that maybe I had done some of this stuff.
And, you know, I had told my sponsor,
you know, I said,
I've always believed in God.
I just don't think,
you know, I've always believed in God.
I just don't think He believes in me.
You know, poor me.
And he said, well, why would He?
You know, look at how you've been acting.
You know, why don't you do something,
give Him something to believe in,
and maybe He'll believe in you.
Click.
See all you guys I sponsor,
you think I'm a hard ass
and you're hearing all this stuff.
So, I was just doing everything I was told to do.
And at about 60 days,
I started to feel a little better, you know.
And a lot of the times I was just miserable inside.
I was coming to the realization
I had done all this stuff.
And you'd see me at meetings
and it'd look good.
I'd be up there setting up chairs
and passing out chips
and doing the donuts.
But I'm thinking under my breath,
yeah, she's going to come in here
and eat two damn dozen of those donuts.
I know she is.
You know, what was going on in my head
didn't mirror my body.
You know, my body was kind of doing the right thing,
but my head was still kind of squirreling.
But I'd have an hour or two
where I'd feel good.
I'd be relaxed and calm and serene.
So, in 90 days,
I had to go face the first warrant.
And I was kind of doing my step work
with my sponsor.
And I was doing this.
I know nobody else does this,
but I was kind of dodging the fourth step.
No, you guys don't do that.
And my sponsor told me, he said,
if you just pray for the time and the will
to get it done,
you'll get it done.
It'll be okay.
Okay, cool.
I can do that.
So, in 90 days,
I went to face the first warrant.
I went taking my 90-day chip
to the probation officer.
I'm thinking, he's going to hug me on the neck
and pat me and tell me good
like all these other guys have been doing
and tell me, don't worry about this.
You're going back to Atlanta
and keep doing all this stuff.
Man, I whipped out the chip
and he looked at it and said,
what, have you been playing poker?
You know, he was not impressed.
And he knew I was coming.
He had two sheriff's deputies there
and they drug me away.
For 45 days,
I had to make that amends to society.
You know,
I had driven my truck
through my neighbor's fence
while intoxicated
and already on a suspended license
with some other entanglements.
But the thing was,
the second day I was in there,
it was 30, 40 guys in the pot.
It was down way south of Atlanta,
just a little head country jail.
This guy comes by
with one of those little net bags
and he says,
hey man, I got a few books here
if you want to read,
take a look.
I had six, nine books
in there, something like that.
And one of them was a big book.
You know, that was one of the few
that he had in that jail.
So I took the big book
and I did my four steps
sitting there in the Merriweather County Jail.
I walked out of it 45 days later
with a huge pocket full of papers
and I felt better.
I got back and immediately dove in
on my amends.
And I kind of say this too,
just kind of more out of a sense of shame
than anything.
I only have one white chip.
And you guys that are in here young
and you're trying
and you're working on it,
man, you're a lot smarter than me.
Because I absolutely, positively
would not consider this
until all other options were gone.
I've had people for years
tell me you need to go to AA.
You don't really tell me twice.
Find a new job,
find a new wife, whatever.
My one white chip
in financial amends
and everything else
cost me more than my
University of Georgia education did.
I wrote checks for more
my first nine months sober
than I graduated student loan debt with
in 1987.
That's what my one white chip cost me.
And at six months
when I finally cleared away
the legal entanglements,
I was facing a year in Cobb County,
by the way.
And my lawyer got a real pro-12-step judge
and rehab went with me
and took a letter and all that stuff.
And because of what I'd done
in the previous six months,
the judge cut my year down to two weeks
and I only did like 10 days.
And that's a direct result
of having gotten in recovery
and kind of changed
the way my life was going.
At that point,
the guy that ran the rehab
offered me a job.
Why don't you live here,
work here,
keep an eye on everybody.
We'll send you to a bunch of training.
We'll work out some stuff.
It was helpful for me
to be able to do my amends.
And I got to go through
a whole lot of training
while I was there.
And I got to,
a lot of times,
I was the only staff guy there
with 25, 30 newly recovering alcoholics
to be trusted
with that level of responsibility
compared to where I was before.
That was pretty amazing.
One of the trainings I went to,
this just kind of sticks in my mind,
there was a doctor,
his name was Philip Flores.
And he had written this big, thick book
about addiction is an attachment disorder.
Alcoholism addiction
is an attachment disorder.
It comes from childhood trauma.
Because of childhood trauma,
a lot of times people can't
form good, healthy relationships.
And that's part of the whole addiction cycle.
But his whole postulate was
that the 12-step programs
that worked effectively
were very helpful
in overcoming that type stuff
because it taught you to have
helpful,
you know,
respectful,
two-way relationships,
relationships with boundaries,
you know,
normal adult relationships.
Because I just didn't do those
when I first got sober.
It was either,
what am I going to get out of you?
Or, you know,
what are you going to get out of me
so I can get something out of you later?
Type stuff.
And that was just real interesting
that the 12-step thing
was working like that.
And I saw evidence of it.
Another big thing,
at 14 months,
I went to my first rock concert.
A friend of mine was playing at it.
It was down at,
at the Sweetwater 420 Festival,
Candler Park.
No need to do something halfway.
If you're going to go,
go have a good time.
I talked to my sponsor about it.
I had a plan.
I went with some other people
who were sober.
And we just said,
if we start feeling sporty,
we'll leave.
We're just going to go down
and have a good time
and see what it's like.
And, man,
the feeling,
the energy,
you know,
from the stage to the crowd
and back and forth,
it was ten times better
than anything
I had ever been around.
You know,
drunk or high.
The energy and everything
was just so much more pure.
I just had a fabulous time.
And my now sponsor,
what my sponsor then,
but it was in my network,
he said,
well, what can you take from that?
You know,
what can you,
can you learn from that?
And I thought about it for a minute.
I said,
well, what about
do the work,
have no fear?
You know,
if you do the stuff
and just keep doing the stuff,
maybe you don't have to be afraid.
You know,
maybe you can,
you can live
if you just keep doing it.
At 14 months,
I was starting to sponsor guys,
some,
you know,
was helping guys out a lot
at the rehab.
At two years,
I left the rehab,
got my own place over in Dunwoody,
still have the same place now.
I had back surgery
a little over three years.
Some of you guys have seen it.
I got this computer
in my back.
It's about that big around.
It's really like
the six million dollar man.
It's a computer
and battery pack
and there are a couple of electrodes
sewn in on my spinal cord
to kind of show you
short circuit
the whole pain response
and it charges
and programs
through my skin.
So it's a pretty,
pretty slick thing.
But that was a pretty
major surgery.
And,
I was a little worried.
I went in,
you know,
my first method of surgery.
I said,
look man,
I'm an alcoholic addict.
You know,
I'm three years in recovery
but this,
you know,
he's like,
fine man,
we'll handle it.
Don't even worry about it.
We'll take care of you.
And he did.
You know,
I stayed in the hospital
overnight
and when I left,
based on,
this is an important point,
based on what I had heard
in my sober network
from other people
who had had surgeries
and gone through
the whole thing,
I came up with a solution.
I had one guy
that had gone through,
he'd had a car crash
and messed his elbow up
and folded it up
underneath him
one night
when he was asleep
and woke up
a quarter to two
just in agony
and he'd taken
his last dose
at ten o'clock.
And he said,
I waited until two o'clock
to take that next dose
because it said
once every four hours.
And he had his wife
holding the pills for him.
So that's what I did.
I had my sponsor
and another guy
grab the little stuff
when I left,
put it in my med tray.
I took it exactly
as prescribed
and it ended up
I threw away
the last dozen or so.
I just didn't need them.
You know,
it was okay.
Just, you know,
back on the other
non-narcotic stuff.
And, you know,
it just really,
it didn't bother me.
I didn't think about it.
I didn't obsess on it.
I just kind of got back
into doing what
I'd already been doing.
Some of you guys
know probably
some of you guys
have met me in Peachford.
Peachford Hospital.
I won't ask you
to identify yourself.
We call us
the shoelace mob.
The no shoelace mob.
At two years,
I was given
an opportunity
to go into
Peachford Hospital.
They gave me
a key
to Peachford.
You know?
I tell everybody
I'm a dope thing
with a key.
I get to go
into Peachford
and sit down
with a group of folks
talking about
two or three times
a week on the unit
and talk about
solution.
You know,
talk about
I was here.
I was just like you.
You know,
now this is the way
I am.
This is what I did.
And I get to do that
two or three times
a week.
And,
man,
I'm telling you,
it's straight out
of the big book.
I walk out of Peachford,
I am amazingly
uplifted.
I walk out of,
if I have a show
to do Friday night,
I go to Peachford
before I go to Peachford.
I go do that show.
You know,
when I had the back surgery,
I didn't go to meetings
for a few weeks.
You know,
what a big of a deal
I had people coming to see me.
But I went to Peachford
when I had 30 staples
in my back.
You know,
a week after the surgery
he says,
okay,
you're off the stuff.
You can drive.
I got in my car
and drove over to Peachford
and sat down
with those folks again.
Because that's really
what does it.
You know?
It's no real coincidence.
You know,
when you go through
the big book,
there's one chapter
that's devoted
to just the first part
of step 12.
Working with others.
You know?
And it says,
we tried
to carry this message
to other alcoholics.
It doesn't say
we saved anybody.
It doesn't say
we successfully carried it.
It just says
that we tried.
And from all
that I've been able to see,
if I just try
and do my best
to pass it along,
I get the benefit
from that.
You know,
I may not be
the best sponsor.
I have no expectations
of my sponsees.
I tell them what I did.
I tell them,
you know,
the more you call me,
the more solution you'll get,
the better you'll feel.
All that kind of stuff.
But they're either
going to do it
or they won't.
That's kind of
between them and God.
I'm just kind of
trying to make
the introduction.
On the whole
God thing,
step 11,
you know,
man,
I put on my God
every morning
before I put on my pants.
I have the pants
beside the bed,
you know,
when I'm out of the bed
on my knees
in my boxers,
you know,
talking to God
and getting ready
for the day
before I start going.
I prayed tonight
before I got in here.
You know,
I prayed before
I go into Peachford.
It just seems
to have made
such a profound
difference.
Step 10,
this is kind of
a funny step 10 story
and then I'll hush.
When I was working
at the rehab,
there was a guy
that worked there.
I don't guess
it's really
breaking his anonymity
because he worked there.
His name is Chauncey.
Some of you guys
know him.
And once I started
working there,
I worked during the week
and I was off
on the weekend.
So I kind of liked
to sleep on the weekends
and some of you folks
that have been around me,
you know,
it's not a wise thing
to wake me up
and I'm just not
real happy
when I first wake up.
And he would come
and wake the whole house up
and he would,
he'd make a lot of noise.
He'd wake me up.
I had the master suite
but he'd still
wake me up
and make a bunch of noise.
And when I first
got there,
and started doing that,
I'd be chasing down
the steps,
you know.
I'd throw stuff at him.
I'd just, you know,
ah, ah,
come up here.
And after a few months,
I kind of quit doing that.
I'm like,
well, you know,
it's not that big of a deal.
And then I'd still
kind of, you know,
have some words with him.
I went and made
step 10 amends to him.
Probably for about
six weeks in a row there.
I went, you know,
sometime between
10 and 11 in the morning
and I'd say,
Chauncey, I'm sorry
I said that about your mom.
You know.
I really didn't mean it.
And after that,
I kind of didn't have
to do it anymore.
And the point is,
he never changed
at all.
I changed
just kind of
through doing the stuff
in his program.
My acceptance
and tolerance
and understanding
kind of grew to the point
I knew he was just
kind of doing what he did.
He was doing his job
and there was no need
to get Ben out of shape
and I just let it
roll off my back
and went back to sleep.
But anyway,
I,
uh,
that's about it.
I really thank you guys
for having me.
It's an excellent
five years.
No doubt.
Wow, Mike,
thank you for that.
I told you guys,
he does the deal.
He really does.
And he,
see what that
kind of deal
that gives you.
Strong,
strong program.
And a strong message.
Hey, family,
my name is Alonzo
and the evidence
is very,
very,
very clear
that I'm an alcoholic.
It gives me
great pleasure.
This man,
Mike,
asked me
to sponsor him
a few years ago.
He had already
done the deal.
We had a book study
at his country club
called
Breakthrough.
And that's how
we kind of
got together.
And we worked
through the book
yet again.
At some point,
the line between
sponsor
and sponsee
can be a little hazy.
Who's sponsoring who?
Right?
Who's showing who
what?
And that's how
Mike and I are.
Mike,
Mike has been there
for me
during a very difficult
time in my
sobriety.
Just because I have
a few 24 hours
doesn't mean I always get it.
And I'm very proud of him
and the work he does.
And I find it most ironic
that they gave me
a key impeachment.
But that's what he does.
And anybody here
wants what you heard
him talk about,
come see Mike
after the meeting.
Again, everybody,
I'm Mike.
I'm an alcoholic.
This is Five.
Really, you've heard
probably about all you need
to hear out of me tonight.
I have a memory
that just popped into my head
that I wanted to share
during my story,
but I didn't.
The first week
that I met Alonzo,
he was doing the book study.
And there was an old guy
in the book study
that he remembers.
He knows what I'm talking about.
And the guy was an Alabama fan
and was really kind of obnoxious
to me being a journalist.
Georgia fan
and, you know,
an ex-Georgia player
and all that stuff.
He was kind of giving me
a hard time.
He was probably 70 years old,
but he was a decent sized guy.
And after the book study,
he squared up on me
like, come on, you know.
I was fresh and raw
and everything.
I came in and hit him.
I didn't hit him
nearly as hard as I could,
but it knocked him
through the air
and he hit the wall
about three feet away
and slid down the wall
and literally pooped his pants.
And, you know,
Alonzo's running around going,
wait, we got a form.
I got a form I got to fill out.
I think I got a checkbox.
I said, man,
you got a checkbox
for somebody pooping their pants?
What the hell kind of place is this?
You know?
And that was kind of how it started.
But anyway,
thanks everybody.
Do you have any other birthdays?
Alright, thank God
for the checks you hold.
I think we should be giving Mike
another 30 minutes
because he's got some good stuff.
Thank you one and all
for joining the Blue Chip Speakers
meeting tonight.
Thank you.
We'll see you next time.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
I'm stuck in my head
There's no other demons
Angels to me
Hiding in my head
The voice that's lost around me
Shines green
I can hear it right
I'm falling down
My soul and pieces
Now rescue me
I'm falling down
My soul and pieces
Now
I'm falling down
My soul and pieces
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
You are myulf
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
You are myulf
Rescue me
Crossroads, I pray to find my way
But it chews right away
So many reasons I've been in this way
Time's taken my hands
There's limbs of demons and angels too
Hiding in my head
The voice that's all surrounding shudders deep
I can't hear the way
I can't hear the way
I can't hear the way
I'm falling down
My fallen people
Now, rescue me
I'm falling down
My fallen people
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, I'm falling down
Falling down
I don't know best
I don't know best
how much faith
I don't know best
how much faith
I don't know best
how much faith
I don't know best
I don't know best
Thank you.
Thank you.
a bluechipspeakers.org, desperately in need, will hear our speaker, and we believe that
it is only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded
to say, yes, I am one of them, too, I must have this thing.
I have the privilege of introducing our speaker tonight, and I don't know if you've heard
Mike's story or not, but one of the things that impresses me most about Mike is how incredibly
humble he is, and centered in this program, and I know that it probably stems from his
work with alcoholics, which is incredible, the amount of work he does with other alcoholics.
So this is a very humble and dedicated man to this program, and he also plays a mean
guitar.
So with that, I give you Mike.
I'm just bringing this up in case some fruit starts to fly.
Everybody, my name is Mike, and I'm an alcoholic.
Wow.
I'm even more nervous than I thought.
Five years ago, when I first started coming into this room, there just really was nothing
left, and this room right here was the first room where people looked me in the eye.
They looked me in the eye a little bit and shook my hand and asked me how I was doing
and remembered my name, and that just meant so much.
My sobriety date is December 13, 2010.
My home group is the Monday Night Blue Chip Speaker Meeting.
It's a meeting right here.
I have a sponsor, and I sponsor a few guys, not a whole lot.
I was born in 1964.
I'm an Atlanta native.
There's not that many of us really running around.
My father got an urge when I was six years old to be a farmer, and we left Atlanta and
moved to Griffin, Georgia, and he bought a farm and started working on the farm.
And that was kind of a, that was a harsh blow.
I used to hang out in the kitchen with my mom here in Atlanta and listen to Peter Paul
and Mary Records and bake cookies.
Then I'm seven years old.
I'm snagged.
I'm snagged to this environment where one of the happiest days of my early times there
at the farm, I remember, was the day that I learned to shoot the automatic shotgun well
enough to hit a milk jug, because that meant that I could walk around in the pastures and
not be worried, you know, about possibly being attacked by the bulls, because you had bulls
that ran with the cows, and they were pretty scary.
So I kind of, you know, fear was kind of with me from the start.
My dad had a bad temper, was, you know, real, he definitely, if you looked at the symptoms
of a rageaholic, he would be there.
And so early on, I've been blessed with being fairly athletic and started playing football
kind of as a reason, as a way to kind of reduce the stress and, you know, to get patted on
the back and everything.
And the alcoholic mentality was with me early at these.
The school that I went to from second to sixth grade, you got a report card in.
On the report card, you had five categories, and you got S's or N's from each teacher for
each quarter.
I went for the entire five years, and all I ever got was S's.
I got straight S's for five years.
And I was really pissed off that they didn't give me an S+.
I felt like I deserved a little bit more.
And, you know, that would come back to bite me later.
And I also, early, I developed a relationship with God.
I would pray.
I would pray every night when I went to bed to please God, don't let Mr. Jackson, the
bus driver, don't let Mr. Jackson turn me into the office in the morning.
Me and a bunch of my football player buddies, we all had assigned seats right behind the
bus driver.
And I prayed every night to not go to the office.
And it worked usually for about two or three months.
And then we'd go to the office and take our little paddling, and then we'd be free on
the bus, and we'd be back in the assigned seats before the bus left the school parking
lot.
And it just never crossed my mind.
Maybe you should behave on the bus.
You know, that just, that didn't, never made any sense.
I had my first drink at age 14.
I was at a party, and somebody had a bunch of those little pony beers.
And from the first one I turned up, it would run straight down my throat.
I've always just had that ability to open my throat and bam.
And I drank a lot of them that night.
And the promises definitely came true.
For me, I intuitively knew how to handle all these situations which had me beaten down.
I was smaller.
I mean, I got taller.
My shoulders got bigger.
I got smarter.
You know, it just, it was just a wonderful thing.
And the next morning I woke up, and at the party I was, we were doing something where
I was smoking candles, pulling wicks on the candles through and having some flame going.
And I woke up the next morning, and I was kind of cut up and bruised and dirty.
We'd all been fighting in the shrubs, you know, with a bunch of other football players.
We were at the party, and my mouth was all full of this, this dried wax and everything.
I just woke up, oh, God.
And my first thought was, God, I've got to quit smoking candles, you know, the thought
that maybe I shouldn't drink, nah.
And that mentality kind of stayed with me for about the next 30 years, on and off.
I discovered alcohol in a lot of forms.
Pill alcohol.
That was very convenient.
You could have a large supply with you.
In your pocket, nobody could smell it.
I was a better football player on pill alcohol.
I was meaner and faster.
All other sorts.
Herbal alcohol.
But it was all alcohol.
It was all chasing that feeling of ease and comfort that I first felt at 14.
I fled the dairy farm at 18 and went to the University of Georgia.
You know, I just, I was not a farmer.
Just not me.
And, you know, had a lot of fun.
At the University of Georgia, there was a symptom that came up that now is pretty obvious.
I'd always kind of wanted to be a veterinarian.
I kind of liked on the farm being able to doctor all the cows and everything and, you
know, diagnose and give them shots.
I delivered a bunch of calves, you know, as we went through.
And, you know, I thought that would be a cool thing.
I had read all these books by this author, James Herriot, on creatures great and small,
about his experiences as a vet.
And I'd also thought about being a veterinarian.
You know, I thought that would be a cool thing.
You know, I thought about being an airline pilot.
I'd been to the airport a few times and I loved watching the planes land and everything.
I got to the University of Georgia and it was just so much fun to be had.
And those vet school guys, they were working their butts off.
You know, they were studying all the damn time.
And the Air Force guys that were doing the pilot thing, they weren't having any fun.
You know, they were running around in these little suits and just, phew.
So I kind of said, well, you know, maybe I'll just study economics and music and maybe
I'll get a job.
And, you know, I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And I got a job.
And that was a real important sign.
I kind of changed my goal to let me keep doing what I was doing, and I've heard other people
doing that.
of fun at the University of Georgia. Widespread Panic played a pool party for me, 1986. I
played music in Athens. I had a real good time. It just seems like it was so different
then than it is now. I remember I took a Spanish class, and it was a 10 o'clock class, Spanish
103, and the teacher liked me. She liked to come hear my band play, and I did a presentation
on tequila, and I borrowed a briefcase from a guy. I walked into the classroom with the
briefcase with tequila and limes and everything. When it was my time to get up, I got up, opened
the briefcase, blasted a shot, spoke for about a minute, blasted another shot, finished up
another minute, blasted another shot. So I did three shots in about two minutes, and
I got an A. I don't know what would happen if somebody did that at UGA now. But I got
out of UGA and went to work in business. I really was kind of sick of the whole music
thing. You ladies probably know the company.
Vanity Fair, VF Corporation, made a lot of Victoria's Secret. We made Lee jeans, Wrangler
jeans. I tell everybody that I know way too much about bras and panties, just more than
any man should. I called them, that group, I called them the Nazis making panties. That
was kind of what it was like. They were dead serious about that underwear. I did pretty
well with that kind of thing.
Atlanta in 96. Through the 90s, I was starting to have some problems. Back problems from
football, other little injuries. Problems getting along with people a little bit, getting
along with wives, that kind of stuff. Yes, plural. Luckily, the job I had, I got to move
a lot. I got to move every year, 18 months or so. So we kind of had a perfect geographical
thing worked in.
I made it back to Atlanta in 96.
Kind of getting a little bit worse here and there. Started back into the music. In 2000,
I had my first back surgery. That didn't go real well. They told me that you're going
to be under for three hours. You're going to walk that afternoon and you'll leave in
three days. That was in the morning. I woke up, came out of the surgery and it was dark.
It was already night and everybody's sobbing and crying around the bed. They told me that
I could not move for three days. I ended up being in the hospital for a week and a half.
The surgery was real bad. I had a lot of back trauma from the football. Compression, fractures,
discs had grown into my spinal cord. It was just a messy mess.
I kind of continued on and in 2004, I had an epidural for back pain. Some of you guys
probably had them. That doesn't really make s lot of sense. They take a big needle and
they jam it into your back. They fill it right into your chest and they fill it in on your
back. It's a little bit more painful than it is. I wasn't able to move for three days. Yeah,
. . And from there, I had a little shock. I wasn't able to move for three days. I ended up being
They flood you with a bunch of chemicals, and that's supposedly to help the pain.
It doesn't make a lot of sense.
But I liked epidurals because if you worked an epidural right,
you could stay in the heavy stuff for three or four months around it.
You just limp in afterwards and tell the doctor you're still hurting,
flop around on the table a little bit,
and then you go to the next doctor and do the same thing, that kind of stuff.
And one thing I was real big on,
if you started giving me a lot of problems about pill alcohol,
I would back way off on that and just start drinking more.
I'd have beer for breakfast, beer for dinner.
And if you started giving me a lot of grief about that,
I'd kind of switch back around.
So it was kind of a moving target effect.
But the last epidural I had in 2004 punctured my spinal cord by mistake.
And you sign a piece of paper saying they could kill you.
I looked into it.
But pain got a little bit worse after that,
and I got introduced to even heavier stuff.
And I had to go on disability in 2006 for the spinal cord injuries.
Had plenty of money, had a big house up in Kennesaw.
Wife that loved me and put up with way more than she should.
And I should have been set.
I had taken care.
Financially got a place to live, all this other stuff.
And you guys probably know how it comes out.
If it had come out well, I wouldn't be up here now.
I just kind of did what we do.
I'm seeing lots of doctors just wallowing around in my own misery.
There's a story in the big book that's dead on it about the guy that retired,
comes out with his carpet slippers, and in four years he's dead.
In four years I was in Peachford Hospital.
And Peachford was not my first time.
In that kind of place.
Went to Ridgeview, South Cobb, Anchor.
If you can have a good discussion about the relative merits of the treatment centers in the area,
you may have a problem.
Ridgeview, they got great food, but you got to walk outside to get it.
It's kind of a balancing thing.
So in December 2010, I ended up in Peachford.
Wasn't my first time in a place like this.
And kind of the way it always worked was,
I'd go into a place like Peachford, you know, to detox.
Get it out of your system, you know.
Get clean.
And then, you know, you go back to the job, the wife, the house.
You know, go back to whatever family members are putting up with you at the time.
And, you know, you're kind of supposed to be okay, and it just never worked like that with me.
It was always between about 30 and 60 days,
whoever was putting up with me at the time would look at me and go,
my God, man, you are worse without it.
We know we want to be better.
We wanted you to quit.
But now that we've seen you without it, you know, we prefer you with it.
Just go back and see the doctor, would you?
And that's really kind of how alcoholism showed up in me.
All the stuff that I was trying to medicate and run away from and everything,
if you took all that away and you didn't give me some kind of real solution,
then you really got deceived.
And, you know, it's getting worse and worse over time.
By the time I got to Peachford, I came into Peachford on December 13th.
And I had been at the emergency room at Kenistone the night before.
And I will tell you, I didn't have a problem at Kenistone or at Peachford.
I was at Peachford voluntarily because I had decided the night before about 11 o'clock
to get in the ambulance on the left side of my yard
instead of getting in the cop car on the right side of my yard at 11 o'clock December 12th.
And it just never, ever crossed my mind that normal, sane, well-adjusted people
just aren't faced with that choice.
You don't have to decide ambulance or cop car
when you're out dressed in camouflage in your front yard.
But I will tell you, I didn't have a problem.
And this is embarrassing.
But when I got to the emergency room at Kenistone,
they made sure I wasn't going to die right away.
Let me check out real quick.
And then they made me take a bath.
Just how bad do you have to be
for them to want you to bathe in the emergency room?
You know?
It was bad.
I had two warrants out for my arrest by that time in two different counties.
I had four lawyers working for me.
I loved lawyers.
Just keep writing the checks and keep moving.
And I was in some deep, deep trouble.
You know, my wife was gone, divorced, nobody in my family talking to me.
And it was pretty bad.
The second day I was at Peachford,
I had a big open head wound here on the side of my head
that couldn't be stitched
where I'd had a seizure into my computer keyboard from benzo withdrawal.
I had a concussion.
I had double vision.
I had second degree burns on my hands
because I was trying to make blackened chicken
several days before I got in
and I ended up making blackened dope fiend instead.
I grabbed, you know, burned both my hands.
I just, you know, wasn't really paying attention.
And the second day I was in Peachford,
you know, people come up to you,
hey man, what are you?
What are you looking for?
What did you do?
And I looked at this guy and I said,
man, I think I got hit by a truck.
And I was kind of trying to be funny, you know,
laugh a little bit.
And he kind of looked me up and down.
He said, yeah, I think you're right.
But you get a lot of good information from folks with no shoelaces.
You know, there are intellectuals left and right
in that kind of environment.
And I was counseled by somebody,
some of those folks that you can't get arrested
if you go to rehab.
I was like, hmm, okay.
That's interesting.
And I was talking to my lawyers while I was in there
and they said the only chance you have
is that you've got to do everything
your doctors are telling you to do.
You've got to fully follow medical care
and we might be able to help you
if you do everything your doctors are telling you to do.
So I said, okay, sure.
It sounds fine.
I found a residential rehab to go to.
And the doctors also wanted me to sign up
for the PHP program at Peachford.
That's typically when they give you your keys
and shoelaces back,
they tell you to go to PHP.
And every place has aftercare like that.
I just never was really interested in it before.
Just give me my stuff.
I'll be fine.
So I signed up for that too.
I got out of Peachford New Year's Eve.
And this just tells you how bad it was.
I had a little dog, a little pug.
And my dad and stepmom and her family
had picked up my dog at the house
and they had her.
They picked me up at Peachford
and spent the drive out to Conyers
where they lived
telling me about how much trouble I was in.
Trying to beg me to do a will.
That was about all they would say.
Just please do a will
so we don't have to sort through all this mess.
They took my dog
and my dog stayed in the family's house
there in Conyers.
And they put me in...
in the days in
on the side of the interstate
at the Conyers exit on I-20.
My dog got to stay with my family.
But I didn't.
They just didn't want me around.
They didn't want me going through the stuff.
Stealing, scamming.
They came and got me each day
for a couple hours
to hang out with the family.
But they didn't want me around.
So I got done with Christmas.
I came to my residential rehab.
Started up in the PHP.
Man.
God, I hated that.
And with the rehab
they had schedules
from the time you had to get up in the morning
to the time you went to bed.
You know, what you're supposed to be doing.
They wanted me to clean toilets.
I'm like, look man, just call this number.
She'll come over here and clean the whole place.
And I'll pay her.
But they wanted me to do it myself.
And I just kind of had to.
I went to a book study
that very first day.
And I asked them, you know,
I'm just kind of standing there
clueless in the thing.
And I said, what book are you guys studying?
And one guy said, the big book.
And I just went, oh my God,
these freaks can't even call it the Bible.
What have I done, Lord?
What have I done?
And as soon as I found out
about the big book,
I went trying to find cliff notes for it.
Some of you guys probably,
I'm like, 164 pages?
Please, man, I'll ace this tomorrow.
You know, just let me.
There are no cliff notes
that I was able to find.
And it was rough.
I was going to PHP.
The counseling thing at Peaceford.
And they were telling me
I had to get honest.
You know?
Get honest, it'll save your life.
I'm like, no, no, no.
The last thing I need to do
is get honest.
I need to come up with some better scams.
You know?
Because these people,
everybody around me kind of knows
all the stuff I've been running on.
They're getting tired of me.
Honesty was the last thing.
And what I started doing
was being honest from 4 o'clock to 4.15
every day.
And I would say one honest thing
from 4 o'clock to 4.15.
You know?
And I kind of built from that.
I was very open-minded
as far as I would have done
anything they told me to do
to get out of trouble.
And I was very willing
to do anything that they told me to do.
And I didn't think any of this stuff
would work, really.
I was just trying to, you know,
just to get out of all this trouble.
And they told me to get a sponsor.
Somebody introduced me to this young guy.
He'd been through the rehab.
He was half my age.
But he knew the guy that ran the place.
So I was kind of screwed a little bit there.
And he didn't really tell me so much what to do.
He just kind of told me what he did.
You know, he told me about getting guys' phone numbers
and calling them up
and reading at meetings.
You know, being of service at meetings.
Setting up chairs.
Get there a little early.
Stay there a little late.
Meet some people.
Do all this stuff.
And I'm like, dude, you know,
I'll give you some honesty.
I don't care how these guys are doing, man.
What about that chick over there with the tab?
Can I get her phone number?
We all love romance and early sobriety.
I had a plan there with a girl
that was also in PHP with me.
And she was at the same rehab
and we were going to run away
in the middle of the night
and commandeer my bankrupt house
in Kennesaw and start anew.
You know, it made sense at the time.
And I'm going to all these 12-step meetings.
And, you know, I didn't really like that either.
There were people out there, guys hugging guys.
I kind of thought it was a cult.
They're chanting.
It just was really weird.
But the strange thing was,
once out of every five or ten meetings,
man, I would hear somebody say something
that was just, oh my God,
exactly what I had done, you know,
or exactly what I had thought.
And I really, I didn't think anybody else
thought like me, kind of,
or had done all the crazy stuff I had done.
And it was kind of a good feeling,
you know, to start between what my sponsor
had me doing and going to these meetings.
I was starting to get the idea, you know,
that maybe I wasn't a bad, evil person,
but that I was very sick, you know,
and that I had a fatal disease
and I had one foot in the grave
and one foot on a banana peel.
And that was about where I was.
I started seeing a couple of doctors.
I had to be honest with the doctors.
I had to tell them I was an addict.
I had to tell my family I was an addict.
And, uh,
I couldn't just do that right.
I'd be like,
I'm an alcoholic, you know.
I'm an addict.
And everybody that knew me,
their response was all the same.
They were like, well, no joke, man.
You know, we've known it for 30 years.
Welcome to our party.
I was the only one that was surprised.
And, uh, the doctors, you know,
for the first time,
I had to take all these meds
the doctors were giving me, you know,
legitimate chronic pain and some other stuff.
I had to take this stuff exactly as prescribed.
I'm like, I'll show you a suggestion.
Man, that crap that's written on the bottle,
flip it around.
Do the six in the first hour.
You know?
And see, but, you know,
the staff supervised.
I had no choice.
I had to follow all these directions.
And in 30 days, I was just, oh, miserable.
I called my sponsor up.
I'm like, man, I am sick and tired of this place.
I'm sick and tired of all you grinning, smiling people.
You know, this is just driving me nuts.
I want to, you know,
I want to go out and just get wasted right now.
And he said, well,
if that doesn't prove to you
that you're an addict, an alcoholic,
I don't know what will.
All the trouble you've gotten into,
all the stuff you've done,
and you just want to go do more?
Click.
Oh, man.
And I stayed up that whole night
just about just flopping around on the bed.
And I was out early the next morning
on the back porch of the rehab,
and it was cold,
and I was just, you know,
in turmoil, just miserable.
And 6.30 or 7 in the morning,
right around that time
as the sun was coming up,
I kind of was just overcome with this feeling.
It wasn't like a voice.
It wasn't like, you know,
somebody speaking to me.
It was just more like that, you know,
I started to really feel that I was powerless
and I really wasn't in charge of all this stuff
and that maybe I had done some of this stuff.
And, you know, I had told my sponsor,
you know, I said,
I've always believed in God.
I just don't think,
you know, I've always believed in God.
I just don't think He believes in me.
You know, poor me.
And he said, well, why would He?
You know, look at how you've been acting.
You know, why don't you do something,
give Him something to believe in,
and maybe He'll believe in you.
Click.
See all you guys I sponsor,
you think I'm a hard ass
and you're hearing all this stuff.
So, I was just doing everything I was told to do.
And at about 60 days,
I started to feel a little better, you know.
And a lot of the times I was just miserable inside.
I was coming to the realization
I had done all this stuff.
And you'd see me at meetings
and it'd look good.
I'd be up there setting up chairs
and passing out chips
and doing the donuts.
But I'm thinking under my breath,
yeah, she's going to come in here
and eat two damn dozen of those donuts.
I know she is.
You know, what was going on in my head
didn't mirror my body.
You know, my body was kind of doing the right thing,
but my head was still kind of squirreling.
But I'd have an hour or two
where I'd feel good.
I'd be relaxed and calm and serene.
So, in 90 days,
I had to go face the first warrant.
And I was kind of doing my step work
with my sponsor.
And I was doing this.
I know nobody else does this,
but I was kind of dodging the fourth step.
No, you guys don't do that.
And my sponsor told me, he said,
if you just pray for the time and the will
to get it done,
you'll get it done.
It'll be okay.
Okay, cool.
I can do that.
So, in 90 days,
I went to face the first warrant.
I went taking my 90-day chip
to the probation officer.
I'm thinking, he's going to hug me on the neck
and pat me and tell me good
like all these other guys have been doing
and tell me, don't worry about this.
You're going back to Atlanta
and keep doing all this stuff.
Man, I whipped out the chip
and he looked at it and said,
what, have you been playing poker?
You know, he was not impressed.
And he knew I was coming.
He had two sheriff's deputies there
and they drug me away.
For 45 days,
I had to make that amends to society.
You know,
I had driven my truck
through my neighbor's fence
while intoxicated
and already on a suspended license
with some other entanglements.
But the thing was,
the second day I was in there,
it was 30, 40 guys in the pot.
It was down way south of Atlanta,
just a little head country jail.
This guy comes by
with one of those little net bags
and he says,
hey man, I got a few books here
if you want to read,
take a look.
I had six, nine books
in there, something like that.
And one of them was a big book.
You know, that was one of the few
that he had in that jail.
So I took the big book
and I did my four steps
sitting there in the Merriweather County Jail.
I walked out of it 45 days later
with a huge pocket full of papers
and I felt better.
I got back and immediately dove in
on my amends.
And I kind of say this too,
just kind of more out of a sense of shame
than anything.
I only have one white chip.
And you guys that are in here young
and you're trying
and you're working on it,
man, you're a lot smarter than me.
Because I absolutely, positively
would not consider this
until all other options were gone.
I've had people for years
tell me you need to go to AA.
You don't really tell me twice.
Find a new job,
find a new wife, whatever.
My one white chip
in financial amends
and everything else
cost me more than my
University of Georgia education did.
I wrote checks for more
my first nine months sober
than I graduated student loan debt with
in 1987.
That's what my one white chip cost me.
And at six months
when I finally cleared away
the legal entanglements,
I was facing a year in Cobb County,
by the way.
And my lawyer got a real pro-12-step judge
and rehab went with me
and took a letter and all that stuff.
And because of what I'd done
in the previous six months,
the judge cut my year down to two weeks
and I only did like 10 days.
And that's a direct result
of having gotten in recovery
and kind of changed
the way my life was going.
At that point,
the guy that ran the rehab
offered me a job.
Why don't you live here,
work here,
keep an eye on everybody.
We'll send you to a bunch of training.
We'll work out some stuff.
It was helpful for me
to be able to do my amends.
And I got to go through
a whole lot of training
while I was there.
And I got to,
a lot of times,
I was the only staff guy there
with 25, 30 newly recovering alcoholics
to be trusted
with that level of responsibility
compared to where I was before.
That was pretty amazing.
One of the trainings I went to,
this just kind of sticks in my mind,
there was a doctor,
his name was Philip Flores.
And he had written this big, thick book
about addiction is an attachment disorder.
Alcoholism addiction
is an attachment disorder.
It comes from childhood trauma.
Because of childhood trauma,
a lot of times people can't
form good, healthy relationships.
And that's part of the whole addiction cycle.
But his whole postulate was
that the 12-step programs
that worked effectively
were very helpful
in overcoming that type stuff
because it taught you to have
helpful,
you know,
respectful,
two-way relationships,
relationships with boundaries,
you know,
normal adult relationships.
Because I just didn't do those
when I first got sober.
It was either,
what am I going to get out of you?
Or, you know,
what are you going to get out of me
so I can get something out of you later?
Type stuff.
And that was just real interesting
that the 12-step thing
was working like that.
And I saw evidence of it.
Another big thing,
at 14 months,
I went to my first rock concert.
A friend of mine was playing at it.
It was down at,
at the Sweetwater 420 Festival,
Candler Park.
No need to do something halfway.
If you're going to go,
go have a good time.
I talked to my sponsor about it.
I had a plan.
I went with some other people
who were sober.
And we just said,
if we start feeling sporty,
we'll leave.
We're just going to go down
and have a good time
and see what it's like.
And, man,
the feeling,
the energy,
you know,
from the stage to the crowd
and back and forth,
it was ten times better
than anything
I had ever been around.
You know,
drunk or high.
The energy and everything
was just so much more pure.
I just had a fabulous time.
And my now sponsor,
what my sponsor then,
but it was in my network,
he said,
well, what can you take from that?
You know,
what can you,
can you learn from that?
And I thought about it for a minute.
I said,
well, what about
do the work,
have no fear?
You know,
if you do the stuff
and just keep doing the stuff,
maybe you don't have to be afraid.
You know,
maybe you can,
you can live
if you just keep doing it.
At 14 months,
I was starting to sponsor guys,
some,
you know,
was helping guys out a lot
at the rehab.
At two years,
I left the rehab,
got my own place over in Dunwoody,
still have the same place now.
I had back surgery
a little over three years.
Some of you guys have seen it.
I got this computer
in my back.
It's about that big around.
It's really like
the six million dollar man.
It's a computer
and battery pack
and there are a couple of electrodes
sewn in on my spinal cord
to kind of show you
short circuit
the whole pain response
and it charges
and programs
through my skin.
So it's a pretty,
pretty slick thing.
But that was a pretty
major surgery.
And,
I was a little worried.
I went in,
you know,
my first method of surgery.
I said,
look man,
I'm an alcoholic addict.
You know,
I'm three years in recovery
but this,
you know,
he's like,
fine man,
we'll handle it.
Don't even worry about it.
We'll take care of you.
And he did.
You know,
I stayed in the hospital
overnight
and when I left,
based on,
this is an important point,
based on what I had heard
in my sober network
from other people
who had had surgeries
and gone through
the whole thing,
I came up with a solution.
I had one guy
that had gone through,
he'd had a car crash
and messed his elbow up
and folded it up
underneath him
one night
when he was asleep
and woke up
a quarter to two
just in agony
and he'd taken
his last dose
at ten o'clock.
And he said,
I waited until two o'clock
to take that next dose
because it said
once every four hours.
And he had his wife
holding the pills for him.
So that's what I did.
I had my sponsor
and another guy
grab the little stuff
when I left,
put it in my med tray.
I took it exactly
as prescribed
and it ended up
I threw away
the last dozen or so.
I just didn't need them.
You know,
it was okay.
Just, you know,
back on the other
non-narcotic stuff.
And, you know,
it just really,
it didn't bother me.
I didn't think about it.
I didn't obsess on it.
I just kind of got back
into doing what
I'd already been doing.
Some of you guys
know probably
some of you guys
have met me in Peachford.
Peachford Hospital.
I won't ask you
to identify yourself.
We call us
the shoelace mob.
The no shoelace mob.
At two years,
I was given
an opportunity
to go into
Peachford Hospital.
They gave me
a key
to Peachford.
You know?
I tell everybody
I'm a dope thing
with a key.
I get to go
into Peachford
and sit down
with a group of folks
talking about
two or three times
a week on the unit
and talk about
solution.
You know,
talk about
I was here.
I was just like you.
You know,
now this is the way
I am.
This is what I did.
And I get to do that
two or three times
a week.
And,
man,
I'm telling you,
it's straight out
of the big book.
I walk out of Peachford,
I am amazingly
uplifted.
I walk out of,
if I have a show
to do Friday night,
I go to Peachford
before I go to Peachford.
I go do that show.
You know,
when I had the back surgery,
I didn't go to meetings
for a few weeks.
You know,
what a big of a deal
I had people coming to see me.
But I went to Peachford
when I had 30 staples
in my back.
You know,
a week after the surgery
he says,
okay,
you're off the stuff.
You can drive.
I got in my car
and drove over to Peachford
and sat down
with those folks again.
Because that's really
what does it.
You know?
It's no real coincidence.
You know,
when you go through
the big book,
there's one chapter
that's devoted
to just the first part
of step 12.
Working with others.
You know?
And it says,
we tried
to carry this message
to other alcoholics.
It doesn't say
we saved anybody.
It doesn't say
we successfully carried it.
It just says
that we tried.
And from all
that I've been able to see,
if I just try
and do my best
to pass it along,
I get the benefit
from that.
You know,
I may not be
the best sponsor.
I have no expectations
of my sponsees.
I tell them what I did.
I tell them,
you know,
the more you call me,
the more solution you'll get,
the better you'll feel.
All that kind of stuff.
But they're either
going to do it
or they won't.
That's kind of
between them and God.
I'm just kind of
trying to make
the introduction.
On the whole
God thing,
step 11,
you know,
man,
I put on my God
every morning
before I put on my pants.
I have the pants
beside the bed,
you know,
when I'm out of the bed
on my knees
in my boxers,
you know,
talking to God
and getting ready
for the day
before I start going.
I prayed tonight
before I got in here.
You know,
I prayed before
I go into Peachford.
It just seems
to have made
such a profound
difference.
Step 10,
this is kind of
a funny step 10 story
and then I'll hush.
When I was working
at the rehab,
there was a guy
that worked there.
I don't guess
it's really
breaking his anonymity
because he worked there.
His name is Chauncey.
Some of you guys
know him.
And once I started
working there,
I worked during the week
and I was off
on the weekend.
So I kind of liked
to sleep on the weekends
and some of you folks
that have been around me,
you know,
it's not a wise thing
to wake me up
and I'm just not
real happy
when I first wake up.
And he would come
and wake the whole house up
and he would,
he'd make a lot of noise.
He'd wake me up.
I had the master suite
but he'd still
wake me up
and make a bunch of noise.
And when I first
got there,
and started doing that,
I'd be chasing down
the steps,
you know.
I'd throw stuff at him.
I'd just, you know,
ah, ah,
come up here.
And after a few months,
I kind of quit doing that.
I'm like,
well, you know,
it's not that big of a deal.
And then I'd still
kind of, you know,
have some words with him.
I went and made
step 10 amends to him.
Probably for about
six weeks in a row there.
I went, you know,
sometime between
10 and 11 in the morning
and I'd say,
Chauncey, I'm sorry
I said that about your mom.
You know.
I really didn't mean it.
And after that,
I kind of didn't have
to do it anymore.
And the point is,
he never changed
at all.
I changed
just kind of
through doing the stuff
in his program.
My acceptance
and tolerance
and understanding
kind of grew to the point
I knew he was just
kind of doing what he did.
He was doing his job
and there was no need
to get Ben out of shape
and I just let it
roll off my back
and went back to sleep.
But anyway,
I,
uh,
that's about it.
I really thank you guys
for having me.
It's an excellent
five years.
No doubt.
Wow, Mike,
thank you for that.
I told you guys,
he does the deal.
He really does.
And he,
see what that
kind of deal
that gives you.
Strong,
strong program.
And a strong message.
Hey, family,
my name is Alonzo
and the evidence
is very,
very,
very clear
that I'm an alcoholic.
It gives me
great pleasure.
This man,
Mike,
asked me
to sponsor him
a few years ago.
He had already
done the deal.
We had a book study
at his country club
called
Breakthrough.
And that's how
we kind of
got together.
And we worked
through the book
yet again.
At some point,
the line between
sponsor
and sponsee
can be a little hazy.
Who's sponsoring who?
Right?
Who's showing who
what?
And that's how
Mike and I are.
Mike,
Mike has been there
for me
during a very difficult
time in my
sobriety.
Just because I have
a few 24 hours
doesn't mean I always get it.
And I'm very proud of him
and the work he does.
And I find it most ironic
that they gave me
a key impeachment.
But that's what he does.
And anybody here
wants what you heard
him talk about,
come see Mike
after the meeting.
Again, everybody,
I'm Mike.
I'm an alcoholic.
This is Five.
Really, you've heard
probably about all you need
to hear out of me tonight.
I have a memory
that just popped into my head
that I wanted to share
during my story,
but I didn't.
The first week
that I met Alonzo,
he was doing the book study.
And there was an old guy
in the book study
that he remembers.
He knows what I'm talking about.
And the guy was an Alabama fan
and was really kind of obnoxious
to me being a journalist.
Georgia fan
and, you know,
an ex-Georgia player
and all that stuff.
He was kind of giving me
a hard time.
He was probably 70 years old,
but he was a decent sized guy.
And after the book study,
he squared up on me
like, come on, you know.
I was fresh and raw
and everything.
I came in and hit him.
I didn't hit him
nearly as hard as I could,
but it knocked him
through the air
and he hit the wall
about three feet away
and slid down the wall
and literally pooped his pants.
And, you know,
Alonzo's running around going,
wait, we got a form.
I got a form I got to fill out.
I think I got a checkbox.
I said, man,
you got a checkbox
for somebody pooping their pants?
What the hell kind of place is this?
You know?
And that was kind of how it started.
But anyway,
thanks everybody.
Do you have any other birthdays?
Alright, thank God
for the checks you hold.
I think we should be giving Mike
another 30 minutes
because he's got some good stuff.
Thank you one and all
for joining the Blue Chip Speakers
meeting tonight.
Thank you.
We'll see you next time.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
I'm stuck in my head
There's no other demons
Angels to me
Hiding in my head
The voice that's lost around me
Shines green
I can hear it right
I'm falling down
My soul and pieces
Now rescue me
I'm falling down
My soul and pieces
Now
I'm falling down
My soul and pieces
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
You are myulf
Rescue me
Rescue me
Rescue me
You are myulf
Rescue me
Crossroads, I pray to find my way
But it chews right away
So many reasons I've been in this way
Time's taken my hands
There's limbs of demons and angels too
Hiding in my head
The voice that's all surrounding shudders deep
I can't hear the way
I can't hear the way
I can't hear the way
I'm falling down
My fallen people
Now, rescue me
I'm falling down
My fallen people
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, rescue me
Now, I'm falling down
Falling down
I don't know best
I don't know best
how much faith
I don't know best
how much faith
I don't know best
how much faith
I don't know best
I don't know best
Thank you.
Thank you.
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