Honesty and Emotion Are Good Up to a Point — So I Walked Out of Bible Study and Into AA 🙃 – Jim T.
About This Speaker Tape
Jim came into the world in April 1960, the middle kid sandwiched between sisters. A 1966 move to Deerfield, Illinois made him the fat Southern kid nicknamed "Rebel Butt" after a first-grade teacher called him "Johnny Reb," and a pool-shower humiliation with a stuck polyester swimsuit taught him early to hide. He learned his father was drinking by hearing his mother scream through the bedroom wall at 2 a.m., and he only slept when headlights finally swept into the driveway. A summer business trip to St. Louis ended with him finding his father on a Holiday Inn bar stool — a scene never spoken of again.
A growth spurt and a gifted throwing arm made him a baseball star, and a Georgia Tech scholarship followed the family's 1975 return to Atlanta. Then his father died of lung cancer in six weeks, a church deacon told the 19-year-old to grow up and take care of his mother and sisters, and Jim blew out his elbow sophomore year. Two and a half pitchers of beer for lunch before baseball practice became routine. He stumbled into a paper-company sales career at Westvaco, once losing his new interview shoes at a downtown bar, and another time breaking the division vice president's wrists in a drunken bear hug at a San Diego regional meeting.
His daughter Sydney was born in 1990 — the one name he can't say without breaking. A 1992 ultimatum from his first wife got him a 30-day chip, which he used as revenge before staying drunk another fifteen years. He lost four jobs, a car, a house, and an enormous amount of high-stakes golf money. He describes a Nassau bender on Beefeater gin that turned into 48 sleepless hours at the blackjack table, a stairs fall that destroyed his shoulder and added OxyContin to the mix, and a Friday phone call from Florida where his mother lay hospitalized with a shattered hip and he was too drunk to get on a plane.
March 25, 2007 was his white chip at the 8111 noon meeting. He did 137 meetings in 90 days and eventually chose a new sponsor — the man at the 7:30 a.m. meeting whose sharing left Jim nodding like a back-window dog. The most important day of his life came at the University of Virginia, making a 50-minute amends to Sydney in the car outside her apartment; she asked "why?" and he felt his Higher Power work. Today he mixes the NAVA Club, an AA motorcycle fellowship, late CrossFit classes before 8 p.m. meetings, and a fresh divorce from the drinking buddy he married in 1997 — keeping, as he puts it, both feet in recovery instead of one in mud and one on concrete.
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