Honesty as Freedom from Self-Deception – Tom O.

Hi everybody, my name is Tom and I'm an alcoholic. My name is Tom, an alcoholic and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I want to thank everybody that had anything to do with getting me here. Actually I only had contact with Sam. He told me that he ran the whole thing, but I'm sure they had other people doing some things, and so whoever you are, I want to thank you. And of course, I had contact with Powell. Actually, I've been treated royally from the moment I set foot on the airport Friday afternoon up until a few minutes ago when I told them I had to be back at the airport at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning and everybody disappeared all of a sudden. And I found out that they were all on the telephone engaging third parties to pick me up early in the morning and take me back to the airport. But that's standard procedure. That happens every place you go. I mean, there's a great welcoming committee when you arise, but when it's time to go back, especially if you're leaving early in the morning, usually if somebody on the committee has got some poor devil that's only been around about 10 days and don't know any better, they appoint that person to take you out. But they must be running short of dumb bunnies. But anyway, I've had a great time and I certainly do appreciate being asked to come and I'm one of these persons that at the end of my drinking career I ran out of friends and enemies at the same time and you really aren't in such bad shape if you, you know, a lot of people think they don't have any friends, you're in bad shape, but really that's not too bad if you just don't have any friends but I mean if you don't have enemies either you're in a hell of a shape and that was the shape I was in you know a lot of people think that the opposite of love is hate but it's not the absolute love is indifference really really love and hate have got a lot in common. What they have in common is both feelings bind you to the object of your feeling. I mean, you're just as bound to somebody that you hate as you are to somebody that you love. That's the way I sponsor people. I can't get them to love me, so I get them to hate me. And that way they can't get me off their mind, you know. But anyway, because I did run out of friends and enemies at the same time at the end of my drinking career, and I wasn't invited anywhere. There had been a time towards the end when once in a while I'd get asked to come someplace because of my mama. But even that had, you know, and I just can't get over being asked to come places when people already know what I am. And I said to pal last night, we ate down at this beautiful restaurant. And when we were coming out, there's a long line of people standing there waiting to get in the restaurant. I've been back there in the private dining room as a guest now with my seat waiting for me surrounded by friends and here's all these, I suspect, influential people waiting in line out there. And I said to Powell, you know, the only thing I got going for me is I'm a drunk. And there's a bunch of people that probably, you know, been good to their families and paid their bills on time and all that kind of damn stuff. And they're waiting to get in, waiting in line to get in the restaurant. So I don't really remember exactly when I started drinking, but I know why I started drinking. I started drinking because everybody else was doing it. And you may not think that's much of a reason to start to do anything, but really I suspect that the whole designer clothes industry is built on the principle of I conformed before you did. And it's just part of being a human being, I think, who wants to do what everybody else is doing. And when I was growing up, people started doing different thing, and I wanted to be in with them. And so when they started drinking, I started drinking just because they were drinking, no other real reason to it. And I had trouble with my drinking right from the beginning, and the trouble was when I'd drink, I'd puke. And a lot of people don't like for me to use that word. I have people come to me, they say you ought not to use their words, you ought to say you got sick at the stomach. Well, Well, that wouldn't be telling it exactly the way it was, because while it's true that there were some times when I did get sick of the stomach, a lot of times I didn't. A lot of time I'd just take a drink or two or three real quick. I think I drank too fast. But the biggest thing is nobody ever taught me how to drink. I often, well, I don't often either because I don' t give this a dime's worth of thought, but once in a while I wonder if maybe somebody had taken the time to teach me how to drink, I might not have become an alcoholic. I don''t know, you know, but I'm a self-educated drunk, you know. I get so amused that these people come into Alcoholics Anonymous and they don't need a sponsor. You know, I don't need no damn body to teach me. I know nobody taught me how to drunk. I don' t need nobody to teach me to stay sober. Bullshit. Well anyway, sometimes I'd get sick at the stomach but other times I wouldn't. I'd take one, two, three drinks real quick and I'd be feeling just as good is I'm feeling right now and out of a clear blue sky I'd puke. And anything you do over and over and over, you get good at it. And I got good at puking. I did. I got so I could walk down the street and puke and never get, you know, never miss a step. And never get any of it on me either. And later on I learned something that, you know, once you ever really master a skill you never really lose it. I got a son that graduated from West Point and after he graduated from west point changed to the Air Force, and he was a navigator for a while. And one time he and his wife and infant son came around the house to visit, I don't know if it was Christmas or Thanksgiving or something like that. And Dave brought that 24-hour flu bug with him. And everybody in the house caught it. And with that stuff, you know, you get sick in all directions. It was the first time in my life I'd ever been sick sober. And we don't have but one bathroom at home. And I told my son, I was ashamed of him, you know, I told him, I said, hell, Manny, if you know better in the air than you are in the bathroom, the country's in a hell of a shape. But I was just as good as I had been 30 years ago. I could get up from that round table in my dining room and go in the bathroom and do what I had to do neatly and come back and never miss my turn to talk. And it was important for me then to learn how to drink successfully, and I did. And successful drinking to me then meant that I could go out and tie on the load, and somehow or another get home, and then when the bed passed by, I'd jump in. And then when it started whirling round and round and around, I would hang on and pass out without having to get up and go to the bathroom and chew. And that was successful drinking to me. And I didn't keep this up. As far as I'm concerned, this was punk kid drinking. I come from a dumb hick town over in northeast Louisiana, Lake Providence, Louisiana. And you really have been nice to me here and so, you know, don't try to be nicer to me by coming up after the meeting and lying to me and telling me you went through Lake Providence one time. ever goes through Lake Providence. Where in the hell would you be going? I mean, you know... You know, if you've got a reason to go there you might go there but don't come up here and tell me you went through there one time. And I wanted to leave this hick town and go off and be a success and a hero. And so I can keep up this stupid drinking and there's only one reason that I even bring it up in the first place. It illustrates a point that's important to me, may not be important to you but it is to me. And I think I should stand here and say it that in order to be an alcoholic you've got to drink. A lot of people don't catch on to this, you see, you know? Well, today, to a certain extent, the players up here weren't kidding. It's getting to be an in thing in some places to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. But everybody can't be an alcoholic. And I know that it's not fashionable today to look down on disadvantaged groups and be critical of them and say improper things about them. But there's one group of people that I have nothing but total pity for, and that's people that would like to be an alcoholic but ain't got what it takes. I know people that'll drink and puke and quit. And just everybody can't be an alcoholic. In order to be an alcoholic, you have to have certain outstanding characteristics. You have to Have determination and character and fortitude and the willingness to picture a goal and let nothing keep you from achieving that goal. And just Everybody Can't Pull It Off, by God. And so there are a lot of people, you see, that like all the good things we got here, the love and the warmth and the fellowship and the concern. All these great things we've got going for us, and they'd like to be members. But they miss out on the part about drinking. So I think it's important to say that if you're going to be an alcoholic, you've got to drink. while on that subject there's another thing that a lot of people don't understand and that is that if you're going to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous you've got to quit now there's another large group that likes all the things we've got going for us here the love and the fellowship and the deep concern and all these hugging and kissing and great stuff that's part of being part of this fellowship and they miss out on the part about not drinking. I don't think it's entirely their fault. I don'T think we tell them the whole story when they first come here. You see there's a requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous and I didn't make it up it was here when I got here. The requirement for membership in AA is a desire to stop drinking I think the trouble is that most people don't know what a desire is. Now, I didn't know what the desire was when I came to Alcoholics and Honesty, but my wife straightened me out on what a Desire is. I'm married to a good-looking woman who's a good cook. One night we had two couples over to the house for dinner before we were going to a meeting and later on the six of us were in the car driving to the meeting and they complimented her on the meal that she had prepared. And she said, yeah, that's why Tom married me because of my cooking. Well, she said it three times and I just couldn't stand it any longer. And I told her, I said, look here, I never will forget the first time I ever saw you walking down that hospital corridor on those high heels shaking from side to side and I was an alcoholic right at the stage where booze made me think I was God's gift to women and I told her if you think I married you for your cooking you're nuts and I did something that I do a lot of times later on I went home and I meditated on these strange words that had come out of my mouth and it occurred to me that no married man at any rate should ever have any trouble understanding what the requirement for membership is because it may have been so long ago you've forgotten it but that's what those gals did when we were courting them they knew by instinct that attraction was better than promotion And what they did was they led us on and led us on and put a whole lot of ideas in our head and got us all ready for action. And then one day they drew a line and said, uh-uh. And what they really said, if you ever stopped to think about it, was if you decided that you want what I've got and are willing to go to any lengths to get it, then you're ready to take certain steps. Of course, there's some of this we bought We thought we could find an easier, softer way. You see that's a desire. Desire is a screaming meaning itch. Forget the thing you desire and you do anything in God's green earth to get it. And I'll tell you another thing about a desire If you're going to have a desire You've got to have some kind of general idea Of what it is you're gonna desire in the first place I mean, you can't just go out And sit in a field and desire Anyway, I wanted to get out of this dumb hick town As I say, and be a success and a hero and it never occurred to me that maybe you couldn't take a little dumb country boy and put him in a larger social setting, and maybe he wouldn't feel comfortable. But that's exactly what happened to me. So I went off to college, and immediately I began to feel out of place. I was thrown with people who seemed to know so many more things than I knew and had so many More Things Than I Had. Not just money, including money, but not just that. I was thrown with people who could talk about things like literature and art And classical music And these were things that were hazy at best as far as I was concerned And I just felt completely out of place, you see And I began to drink again And I don't know what happened, you know Maybe my body had grown up some or whatever I'm a young man in my early 20s now and this time it was different, maybe my stomach had settled down. But this time when I drank a terrific thing took place and what happened was the people changed. Normally when I would look at a group of people like you only one of two impressions would come to me. Do you threaten me or could I use you? but with a drink or two or three in me it was entirely different I could go out amongst you and genuinely participate in the things that you did and this is something that sober I couldn't do you see sober I was just a drip but with a drink of two or three in me by God I was charming and that's no crap I was and I could just see in your eyes and I was sensitive I was aware of the fact that you were saying to me come on Tom, we love you and we need you and we want to be affectionate to you and come on and be part of us and so I found out that drinking was of tremendous value to me when I was with people, you see. And it wasn't just when Iwas with people either. Sometimes I liked to drink when I wasn't with people. I likedto drink, you know, sometimes I'd take a drink or two or three and my last name is O'Sullivan and I likedtolook at myself in the mirror and talk to myself in the mirrow. I used to callmyself Sully Baby. And I'd say things like, Sully, baby, you're going to make it, you know, and smooth my hair back. And some of this mirror talking was nude. We must have some nude mirror talkers out there. And there were other times when I was by myself where I liked to drink. You know, when I went to when I going to dental school in New Orleans I lived in an apartment building on the second floor and outside was what in the daytime was a cruddy looking scene. A couple of streetcar tracks and some crummy trees. But at night with a drink or two or three in me God it was beautiful. and I used to like to sit by the window and just have a drink or two or three and look out that window at the sheer beauty of the night and sometimes I used like to sit by that window and have a drinking or two or three and I'd get sweet music on the radio and I would cry and I loved to cry I don't mean bawl I mean just fill up right to here with real honest-to-God feelings and have real hot, wet tears flow over the rims of my lids and course down my cheeks. And I always did think that there was something beautiful about having a drink or two or three and feeling good and being sad. And I cultivated this as a way of life. and I've often said that for me it was just as though I'd been walking down the street and turned a corner and got lost because all of a sudden this beautiful life that I had wanted to build up for myself this successful life that I wanted to grow up I had it I had all right in the palm of my hand when Mary Jo was born I had I was 32. I had finished dental school, completed an internship, postgraduate training. I was in the regular army. I was overseas on a sensitive diplomatic mission on the general staff and people started talking ugly about me. They said I smelled bad. Well, I'll admit there was a time in my drinking when I quit bathing. I didn't taper off, I just quit. but there was a reason for that I had a traumatic experience with the bath and this woman I'm married to you know, I don't care what the hell is wrong with you, what your problem is her first answer is to take a good hot bath now I lack about two weeks what's the date a tenth maybe three weeks of being sober for 24 years in AA and I believe that after you've been sober in AA for a while you have to set up a scale of values and priorities that you're going to give to your life not goals, I'm against goals You know, what the hell are you going to do when you achieve a goal? Then you're up the creek, you know. But you have to set up priorities and values that you're going to live by. And I want to tell you, you Know, that today, after 24 years, I will take a bath. I mean, no, no. But it's way down on my list of priorities. I mean, I can think about 13 things I'd rather do than take a good hot bath, you see, but not my wife. And this dime, it was a Saturday afternoon and I was living in San Antonio, Texas and the Texas liquor store was closed at 10 o'clock and she convinced me to take a Good Hot Bath and it was about 9.30 when it dawned on me that I didn't have enough booze left for the weekend and I jumped out of the tub and she had hid my britches. Now, I got another side message here for some of you tough macho guys. You leather jacket fellas and the message is this. I don't care how the hell tough you think you are you ain't nothing without your britchies. And I didn't know nothing about praying in those days because I didn' have nobody to pray to, but I found somebody right quick. I got out on my knees in front of that woman and I prayed to her to give me back my britches. And she'd give them back to me at the last possible minute. And I threw on nothing but the pants and run barefooted and bare chested two blocks down the street to the Texas liquor store and walked in the door trying to look cool. and bought my weekend supply and they say we alcoholics can't learn from experience, and I guess that's true but I learned from that experience. I ain't had nothing to do with baths anymore. Fortunately when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous this spray stuff was just coming out you know and I could go around speeding it around under my arms just before I went to the meetings and all. But even then, you know, when I first come to AHA, I didn't have the same experience that a lot of y'all got. I mean, I hear all you people talking about when you came in, they were standing with their arms open and saying, we've been waiting for you, you know, and we love you. Well, they didn't do that to me. They held meetings in my group to see if it was a legitimate way to keep me out. And you never had any trouble getting the seat of the meeting that I was at back in those days. Well, for one thing, when I come to AA, something was crawling on me. And I spent a lot of time in the meetings hunting for it. And towards the end of my drinking, I had developed some muscle spasms. I'd be standing up talking, and all of a sudden my arm would go out like that. Or just as bad, I'd be walking down the street and whoop, I had to grow a leg. It didn't bother me, as a matter of fact, I missed it when it went away. But I'd been sitting in the group, you know, looking for whatever it was crawling on me and I'd have one of these spasms, and everybody thought I'd found it, you know. And then they said my hands were shaking. Well, I'll grant you, if you've got a dentist coming at you with one of them long needles and his hand is steady it ain't too good but if he's weaseling at you well you see I knew my hands were shaking and I had taken steps to do something about it now I never did like to get up early in the morning but like I told you about this woman of mine she's a good cook and she believes that if you're going to be well you have to eat well and she always wanted me to go off to work with a hearty breakfast under my belt. Well, in those days I couldn't just get up and eat. I had to get ready to eat. So as much as I hated to get up early in the morning I had enough to get drunk up enough to eat breakfast and then breakfast would sober me up And then I had to get drunk up enough to go to work, but not so drunk that I couldn't go to work. And that's work. See, that's what I'm talking about, that just anybody can be an alcoholic and it takes character and determination and fortitude. You see, every night, this ain't no 40-hour week I'm talking about. this is seven days a week 365 days a year every night when i go to bed go to sleep or pass out whatever the hell it is every night i know exactly how i'm gonna feel when i get up in the morning sick but I had it worked out the way I was in real good shape up to 10 o'clock and if you'd have come to me by 10 o´clock you know you'd got the real best treatment you could have got and just before I used to go to work I'd put a drop of Shalimar perfume on my tongue and later on they had some proceedings against me in the army and they asked the major that had an office next door to me how I smelled when I came to work in the morning and he said, you smell like a drunken French whore. I mean... And I can remember times where I'd have people cut on the inside from here to here and it would come time to sew them back up again and the clock would strike ten. and I'd have to go off, you know, stuff a lot of cotton in their mouth and go off in the corner and take a drink or two and they were narrow-minded. Well, see, I knew when I first stood up here I was going to have trouble with you. You're just like the colonel, you see. I'm going to Have to explain it to you. I spent all my time explaining to the colonels and I'm Going to Have To Explain It To You. You see, if I was a jack-legged dentist I'd have let him go with the damn gums flapping in the breeze But I never have been that sort of a fellow I have always been a professional man with the highest ethical and moral standard And I wouldn't dream of letting anybody go out of my office without being properly sewed up and the only way I could do it was take a drink and I was the only dentist within 1,500 miles and then one time somebody told me he said well if you're having trouble with your hands shaking why don't you take a goofball and so one day I took a goof ball or two or three and I went to sleep in a lady's lap and when I came back to the United States I knew I was in trouble and I went to an army doctor that was well thought of and I told him that I believed I might have been an alcoholic I have no idea where I got that word from I was a captain in the dental corps at the time and he said to me he said I'm glad you came to me said, just last week I cured a major general. So they put me in a hospital and stuck a lot of needles in me and out me and up me and the cure didn't take. And for a long time I thought it was because I was just a captain. I'm not trying to be funny. I really did. You know, I can remember walking down the street and saying to myself, man, if I was just somebody else, all this wouldn't be happening to me. And then I got all the same help that you got. They said to me, why don't you drink like Bill? Bill is a bald-headed brother-in-law of mine. Like I said, I've been sober in AA for nearly 24 years and tonight I feel about Bill exactly as I did 35 years ago. I don't ever want to do nothing like Bill. And besides, how do you drink like Bill? And then they said to me, they said, get right with God. Well, I got the same question tonight that I had 30, 35 years ago. How do you do it? How do you do it? Now look, I'm going to stand here and tell you that I don't believe that Alcoholics Anonymous has got the answer to your problem. And the reason I say that is there's no chapter in the book titled There's an Answer. The title of the chapter is, There's a Solution. And that's what we've got. We've got a time-tested, experienced, proved solution, and you've got to put you in the solution and come up with your own answer. And I sometimes think that that may be the single glory of our fellowship because not just in the field of alcoholism, but surely including it. But in all areas in the whole stupid world that we live in every Tom, Dick and Harry that you run into has got an answer to your problem and they don't even know what your dumb problem is. And we in Alcoholics Anonymous present a time-tested experience-proof solution and you have to put you in the solution and come up with your own answer and of course that's a complicated way of saying it anybody that ever got through fifth grade arithmetic knew that looking in the back of the book for the answers wouldn't get you any place you had to learn how to solve the problem and then they tried to scare me into stopping drinking and I don't think you can scare an alcoholic into not drinking and that reminded me of a story I have absolutely no business telling but I'm going to tell it anyway and it's about a little boy that his mama caught him playing with himself and she gave him a doomsday lecture and she said that'll make you go blind and he said well could I keep on doing it just till I have to wear glasses And you see, that's almost the definition of being an alcoholic If it ever gets really bad I quit You know, if you took a hundred people and put them in the hospital and routinely administered heroin to them all hundred of them would become addicted to heroin and everybody knows that and nobody questions it and they would accept it right off with no argument. You take another hundred people and put them in a confined area and give them alcohol over a long period of time only six of them will become alcoholic. But you know what? Each one of the six will be totally convinced that he's one of the 94. That's what it is to be an alcoholic, you know. We talk about honesty in AA. You've got to be honest and I think some of us confuse honesty with telling truth. It ain't got anything in the world to do with telling the truth. Telling the truth is just saying what I sincerely believe to be so and And that could be so far off from reality that it ain't even funny. Honesty is freedom from self-deception. That's what it means to me. That's why it means to me when it says those who do not recover are people who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. Constitutionally incapable of being freed from self deception. What is it that makes an alcoholic who's been sober for a period of time able to walk into a bar and to convince himself, in the spite of years of disaster, that I can take one drink and it won't matter? Self-deception. Of course, everybody is subject to self-deceptions. All human beings, it's a characteristic of the human race, but we alcoholics happen to be masters at it. And so, you know, I went on down. I was one of these people that had to go all the way down to the bottom and I did. There's no need of telling you about all that kind of stuff, you already know it. I lost everything I had. I hear people who didn't lose everything. That's great, you just keep on drinking, you will. I go so many places where I hear people say, you know, but I don't like it. And you know what I want to say? I want to say, who the hell cares whether you like it or not? Who's talking about liking it? Who was he? Keith went looking for the answer. I guess it was Sandy that gave you that brilliant piece of information. If your ass falls off, don't drink. That's what it's all about. I mean, liking ain't got nothing to do with it. Anyway, I went all the way down and I finally came to the end of my rope. You know, really what happened to me was one night I fell out of bed. It's just that simple and by this time I had lost you know, I'd lost my job, my money, car, home, children, wife and all this kind of stuff. I got this same wife back because I have to say that she gets mad issues. I don't say that because later on I get to talking about my wife and she, you know, thinks it may sound like I'm talking about somebody else. I do not know why she says that, but anyway. But I lost her good and I lost everything else I had because there was no place else left to go. I had to go back to this dumb hick town of Lake Providence that I had left years before to be a success and hero. And I hitchhiked into Lake Providence one Labor Day weekend on a tasty bird poultry truck. And a great professional man went back to this little town of 7,500 people and became the town drunk. But that ain't no big deal. It used to be but it's not now. We don't have town drunks now. What have now is shopping mall drunks and supermarket drunks, and condominium drunks. Just as the social picture has changed, the drunks change. And we're just like... I don't know. We're strange people. I never have met in my whole life an anonymous alcoholic. If a drunk sees a cop coming, the drunk will go hide. Not an alcoholic. If a cop is walking towards an alcoholic and a cop is looking this way, an alcoholic will walk around get in front of the cop so you won't miss it and we think nothing are falling down in parking lots in supermarkets and condominiums and movies and all these other places and passing out cold stone drunk don't faze us one damn bit and then one day we decide to cut all this crap out and come to alcoholics anonymous and start living decent lives and the very first thing we say is shh Don't tell nobody. I don't want nobody to know, you know. So I fell out of bed one night, at least I guess it was night. I don'T really know. It could have been, you KNOW, back in those days and there was no black and white. Everything was gray. And I had a spiritual experience while I was laying on the floor. You know, it was nothing. It didn't make any difference to me whether I woke up in the bed or on the floor. I don't ever remember waking up in between, but I don' t think that would have made any difference either. But this night laying on the floor something different happened and it was like a light had been turned on and I saw really who and what I was. And I recognized that my life just consisted of getting in bed and falling out. You know that's I wasn't doing anything else but getting in bed and falling down and I couldn't see any real point in getting back in bed and while I was laying on the floor you know I'd like to tell you that I prayed but I wouldn't you know I didn't have anybody to pray to except I don't really think that prayer is a matter of words spoken or unspoken. I think of it largely as a matter of total inner attitudes and feelings that may or may not be manifested by spoken or unspokened words. And as I lay there on that floor, I know one thing. I had gone as far in this world as I ever wanted to go. I was totally willing for my life to be changed, and I cared not one whit the direction in which change took. I never asked for sobriety, and I'll tell you why it never occurred to me that I might need it. If it had ever dawned on me that sobriete was what I needed, I might have asked for it. And I got up off that floor, and you know I did something that night that I didn't know I was doing, but I've never forgotten this and it's become such a part of my life. I was in this big house that I was born in, that we live in now, that I have my office in, but of course it was just me in the house and it was all dirty and filthy and cobwebby and mud tracks and all the crap that an alcoholic living by himself was able to generate. And I remember walking around that house. That's all I remember. but I do know just you know my common sense tells me that as I walked around that house not one single thing had changed all the dirt was there all the filth was there all the ugliness was there everything that I had brought in the filTH that constituted my life into that house and had dumped it in there in the months that I lived there by myself it was all still there but the greatest event in all creation had already taken place in my life and I didn't know it I had already taken my last drink and you see this is the experience that repeats itself over and over and again in my mind I find so often that the things that I think I'm praying for have already taken place in me in my heart and I'm too coarse I lack the sensitivity the awareness to recognize that they have taken place. And I say many, many, many times that it would be well for me indeed if I were to learn to tiptoe through life, lest the noise that I make in stumbling along my way distract me from the beauty of the reality in which my total being is immersed and in which I possess my existence. and it's a glorious thing and that's why I say I don't set goals for myself at all. I've learned someplace in Alcoholics Anonymous to live one day at a time, to live this precious moment, you see. And in this precious movement I am at the point where any future can take me anywhere and I have no more idea where it will take me than a man on the moon nor do I give a hoon. And a guy came by and asked me to come to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I went. This guy was kind of stupid. I mean, he wasn't educated like I was. He didn't speak good English. In fact, he didn't have anything going for him except that he wasn' t drinking. and he asked me if I'd go to Alcoholics Anonymous and I did because I said I'd run out of friends and enemies and I'd have gone any place and it wouldn't have made any difference to me and I didn't come to AA like everybody else said they came especially with these old timers you know they say when you come in the door you gotta tell the truth well I couldn't do that because I didn' t know what the truth was and I had to come here and stay here a while to find out what the truth was in the first place and then a little bit longer to find whether or not I wanted to tell it and I hear people griping about writing an inventory well for one thing back when I was in the inventory business we didn't have all these damn guides you know so my inventory had to be my inventory not somebody else's and if you don't see anything wrong with sleeping with your brother's wife I came to save my life see why you're going to use the Ten Commandments as a guide for a four step inventory but that's your business not mine and I had to write out an inventory of my major faults and the story of my life because in the big book in the fifth step it says that we don't get all these things until we've told someone else all in italics our life story. And I caught on to that pretty quick, that things that are in italic mean you should pay attention to them, you know? But the point is, I didn't know what was real and what was unreal, and I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. In World War II, I got shot down out of my airplane over Vienna, Austria, in, I got back with the Russians and in my own outfit. And that's a good story in itself. And when I came back from overseas everybody said that the veterans didn't want to talk. Well, I did. And I talked every chance I got but the story, the way that it happened wasn't good enough and I had to add on to it. So what I finally ended up with was that I got captured by the Germans. And I want to tell you how I escaped from the German. Late one afternoon, walking at the end of a column under the pretense of having to relieve myself, I drifted off through a shallow ditch onto a grassy plain, picked out a tree, relieved myself, noticed that the rest of the group had gone on and I wasn't missed. I driftied got through the forest, made contact with the Russians, got back into Romania, went back to Italy and rejoined my outfit. Now the German part and the escaping from them never happened at all. But I can see just as clearly as I can say I can send you right now that shallow ditch and that grassy plain and the tree that I picked out. You see, when I lied, I made mental pictures to go with my lie. As a result, when i got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I literally did not know what was real and what was unreal. And so I had to get it down on paper in order to get some kind of handle on my life. And that particular thing I had so screwed up, I just gave up on it. And I'll tell you what I did with that. I made up a story and memorized it you know, a story that's consistent inside itself and if you want to hear that after the meeting I'll be glad to tell it to you except it ain't true and then I hear people fussing about the fifth step and they say well I don't mind admitting to myself and to God but not the other human being well that wasn't my experience at all and I'll tell you how part of that came about. When I was about eight years old, I was an altar boy in the Catholic Church and one Sunday I stole a buck off the collection plate. Now I got caught and punished but somehow or another I couldn't accept the punishment. I don't know why. And I carried that thing with me all my life I was a career army man, and I literally lived all around the earth. And many a night in Rome or Paris or Cairo or Tokyo or Taiwan, Taipei, wherever it may have been, just as I was about to doze off into a peaceful night's sleep, up would pop that book. And I'm not saying it contributed to my drinking, but I am saying that it didn't contribute to any kind of serenity. And I had made up my mind that nobody, but nobody would ever know about that. Only three people knew, my mother, the priest and me. And you can't imagine how good I felt when I found out that the priest was dead. And then I watched my mother die, and it wasn't the only thought that went through my mind as I watched her die. But it was one of them because now that she was dead, you see, nobody knew. Nobody knew about me stealing at all except me. And I wasn't going to ever tell. Then I came to Alcoholics Anonymous and I met a bunch of you loose-mouthed people. Well, that's fact. Some of you people sit around in casual conversation tell each other things that no human being in his sane mind would tell his attorney or his priest. And I got infected by this attitude and I decided I was going to tell somebody about stealing that dollar. And that's when I learned something else about Alcoholics Anonymous that these Earth people don't know. Now, a lot of people see four AAs at a table talking, and they think there's a lot communication going on. Uh-uh. There's four monologues taking place. everybody's just sitting there in neutral waiting for somebody to take a deep breath so they can dive in and take over the conversation and it's almost impossible in Alcoholics Anonymous to tell somebody what a rat you are do you go up to somebody and say hey I want to tell you with a rat eye and say, wait a minute, let me tell you what a rat eye is. I used to do that about that dollar. You know, I'd say, well, tonight I'm going down and I'm gonna tell somebody about stealing the dollar. And I'd go down to the meeting and after the meeting I'd said, hey, I want to tell you about they'd say let me tell you abut, you know, and I'd get so damn mad and I remember saying to myself, you know, come back to Alcoholics Anonymous until I'm an Oh, man, but by God, I'm going to tell somebody about stealing that dollar. And so I was delighted when I could find somebody that would sit down and shut up. And let me tell him all these things I've been wanting to tell somebody about myself all my life. and he did just that he sat there and he didn't try to break in and counsel me or advise me he said just enough uh-huhs to make me think he was listening and he let me put the whole pile of crap on his desk and I knew I was taking a tremendous risk when I was doing it because I was very much aware that when it was halfway through, he might have interrupted me and said, Well, O'Sullivan, we deal in the dregs of humanity, but we really don't have people like you in mind. But, of course, you know as well as I know that he didn't do that, and when it Was all over, he kind of smiled and he said to me, Well, you Know We Love You. and for the first time in my whole life I had been unconditionally accepted there's a four letter word for being unconditionally accepted and that's love no questions no ifs, no ands, no buts, no do better, no this, why, whatever just unconditional acceptance and I had some tremendous benefits out of that fifth step. And I don't want to get hung up on that, but I had benefits that sometimes I wonder, you know, because I don' t hear other people talk about it. I had always felt as though I were out of the mainstream of the human race and not all at once, not right away, but in due course. I came to recognize that I am a member of the ongoing flow of humanity back from the recesses of its beginnings wherever it began and on to its destination wherever the destination might be. And I'm part of it. I belong to it. Somebody said today about the many mansions in the Father's house and why can't this be one of the mansions? Sometimes, I think to myself of all the sperm that was ejaculated and all the eggs that were ovulated just to get on to me. And I damn near blew it. And then there's six and the seventh step, and we get all tangled up about that, you know, entirely ready to have God remove all our defects of character and humbly ask him to remove our shortcomings. I never really have done anything about those two steps. I don't know what to say about them. Except let me ask you what I think is a fair question. Doesn't there come a time someplace in your AA life when you grasp however faintly it might be who it is that you're meant to be? Who it is that you are destined to become? I say that it's something like flying in a light airplane on a night when the clouds are low and you have seen the lights of the airport in the distance and the clouds float in between and you're in the dark and you don't see it but you see you've seen it and you know it's out there and so you keep on going you have glimpsed the lights of the airport and surely anytime that you've been an alcoholic you must have some beginnings of an inkling of who it is that you're meant to become and I never heard it put more beautifully than when I heard a beautiful lady tell a story about another lady who had asked the sculptor who made beautiful statues, if it wasn't a big deal making beautiful statues. And he said, no, not really. All you do is buy a hunk of marble and just chip away what you don't want. And that's about all there to the six and seven steps. You see, we just chip away what we don't want. That's all. We'll let God chip it away. Then we come up to the amend steps, you know, and this is what gets us back in the stream for good. You have to learn what harm is before you them. I did, I did. Excuse me for talking like that. It's a professional disability that I have. Talking authoritatively. Doctors tend to do this. Basically doctors don't know their ass from a hole in the ground but you never get one of them to admit it. I had to learn what harm was and what amends are. Essentially, I learned that I harm another person when I introduce error into their life. And to make an amend is simply to remove from their lives the error that I had introduced into their lives. That's all. I was thinking about that again. I swore I wouldn't comment on anybody else's talk, but it's been buzzing in the back of my head ever since Keith talked I think he ought to go back and make amends to that orangutan you know he drove the poor guy back up into the cave for God's sake and I tried to take a nap this afternoon and I couldn't sleep wondering if the orangutan ever came back out and was sociable to anybody again. But I remember one time I went to a guy and I told him, I said, you know, I sure am sorry I owe you those $200. And he said, damn, I am too. That's not an amend, you know. And another time I went through a guy and I said I sure I'm sorry, mister. And he says, You sure are. He said, you're the sorriest bastard I ever saw in my life. And then there was a guy in my group, you know, that got up one night and we used to have these ten minutes talking. I don't like this guy anyway. I never have liked him and I never will like him. He's another one of these guys that ain't got a damn thing going for him except he's a good egg. And he got up this night and said he never had made any direct amends, but he'd made a lot of indirect amends. And I said to him, I said, well, hell, you must be in BB. He said, BB? What's BB? I said Well, I don't know, but it sure as hell ain't AA. Because the AA program specifies that we make direct amending. Maybe the biggest problem, I'm not going through all the steps. You know, I know what you're thinking out there, it's late and he's wandering through the steps here regularly and we've got about nine more to go, you know, and we never would get out of here. Well, you may never get out of here, but it'll be for a different reason. But one of the problems we have most in trouble with, it seems, is the third step, making the decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God. And we seem to think that you have to know something about God to take this step, and you don't. You see, I must have taken this step a long time ago or I wouldn't be here tonight. and in the interval my life has changed my will has changed and my understanding of God has changed and if we were here together a year from tonight I'd have to look back on that interval and say again that in the integral my will had changed my life had changed and my misunderstanding of God had changed you see everything in the third step is a variable that changes with the passage of time except one thing and that's a decision that we make and the decision is simple you see if the object is to take the book from here and move it over to here just walking over here with the book ain't enough you got to put it down and then turn your back on it and walk off and do something else that's what the decision is and I never made a decision but one time in my life now look after I got sober I opened up this dental office that's 25, 24 years ago and I made a decision to open up the dental office do you think it's been smooth all these years hell no it hasn't it's being up and down and rocky and glorious and painful and beautiful and all these things but I never went back on a decision and I put the whole ball of wax in the hands of God as I understood him and I've walked off and done other things I've done the things in the program that I needed to do and now I go out and live amongst my fellow men and the problems are back there with him you see and it's a lot like planting a seed my God if you plant a seed you put the seed in the ground and you don't go out the next day and dig it up to see how it's coming along so you can plant it again you made the decision I made the decision it's there it's God's problem it's not mine and you know I hear people saying well I feel good my stomach sucks I'm all a bundle of nerves everything is going wrong I must not be on the program I think that's a crock of stuff I don't care what your financial status is, your marital status, your inner status or whatever other status you've got. An alcoholic who don't drink a day at a time is sane no matter what the hell else is wrong with him. And an alcoholic who's on this program a day at a times don't think a day of the time and it's just that simple. And to me, taking the third step is a lot like getting married. My wife's first name is Zida. And over 30 years ago I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of Zida as I understood it. And ain't I glad I didn't wait until I understood her? I made the commitment based on what I could do at the time that I could do it. And as the years have gone by, we have grown into a relationship which could well be described as one of conscious contact. That is the awareness of the presence of the other as an other. And so help me in heaven. I may be 600 miles away from her right now. There's a very real sense in which I feel that I'm in her presence. And this is the thing that's happened to me in Alcoholics Anonymous, you see. I've come... It's just happened, that's all. I've become to be aware that I live and exist and possess my moments in the presence of a power greater than myself. It's either on page 596 or 569. I never can get it right. and whichever one I say it's always wrong I said one of them one time and a guy called me up from Chicago to tell me I was wrong about a week later but anyway you know he was paying attention and it's at the bottom of spiritual appendix two the last nine is the bottom of the page with few exceptions our members discover that they have tapped an unsuspected inner resource which they presently come to identify with their own concept of a power greater than themselves. Many of us think that the awareness of this power is the essence of a spiritual experience. Our more religious members call it God consciousness. Just listen to what he's saying. With few exceptions, our members discovered that they had tapped an uns suspected inner resource which they've presently come to identify with their own concept of the power greater than themselves. That's what's happened to me. I have tapped an unsuspected inner resource. And ain't I glad I've done that? Look here, I'm here in Montgomery on Saturday night. I got a couple bucks in my pocket. I'm almost through. Why man, this would be heaven sent for a return to the old days except I'm walking around with the built-in protection, something that was there all the time and I didn't know that it was there. I just want to tell you one more little thing that won't take up too much time. It's about, and I really will sit down and knock it off, it's about the first guy that I ever carried a message to and sponsored at the same time. And I told you I had lost my wife and I had just got her back when this happened. And it wasn't easy getting her back. But I got to think about that woman and as soon as I got sober, that's the first thing I wanted to do. And I had JUST got her black and I was going out to the prison farm talking on Sundays and I were sober about 18 months at the time and there was a guy out there who later on said that some of the things I said made sense and that's an indication of how sick he was and after he got off the prison for him he tried to drink some wine and it made him sick and he came over to the house and asked first my wife and she's not an alcoholic she's an alumna and then me because he encountered us in that order if we'd help him learn how to stay sober and of course we said we would Now, I live right on the Mississippi River. I live two blocks from where the levee is on the Mississippi River, and in its normal times, the bed of the Mississippi river is about a mile and a quarter back of the leve. And back in those days before the EPA got on us, we used to use that for garbage dump and then when high water would come, it would take all the garbage and float it down or New Orleans, and we didn't have any landfill problems. And we used to have drifters who would take pieces of corrugated tin and build lean-tos over in that garbage dump area across the levee. And that's where this guy Eddie's daddy lived. And Eddie lived with his daddy, and what he used to do was he would come over to the house every day and my wife of course would feed him three good meals you could have guessed that and then in between patients which was a long time in those days I'd give him gems of wisdom and then at night he'd go back to his father's house in the garbage dump and we did this every day as a routine thing And like I say, I had just gotten my wife back. And one night I was over on my side of the house playing a hi-fi and she came over and said it was too loud. And I said it wasn't, she said it is, it ain't, it is or it ain' one of those intellectual conversations. And she kept saying, it is, and I told her, I said, get away from here, you're making me nervous. And she said, I don't care. I said look, get out of here, just get out and leave and get the hell out of here! You're making me nervous! She said for God's sake, you don't mean to go back to San Antonio do you? I said that's exactly what I mean. Get out of there and go back San Antonio. She said well I'm not going unless you give me some money. I said, I'll give you $20 a week if you just get the hell out of here. You could tell I'm one of the last big spenders. She said, that's not enough. And I went to $40, not enough, $80, not enough, 160, 326, 40, 12, 80, not enough. I sat there and let that woman bid me up to $3,650 a week. If she'd just get the hell out of there. And she said, that's not enough. And I started trembling and shaking all over and my stomach started getting upset. And I start cracking my voice like I do when I get nervous. And I jumped up out of that chair and I shook my finger in her face. And I said, looking out, I'm an alcoholic and you're making me nervous. And you know you ain't supposed to make alcoholics nervous. Not me, because I wouldn't talk that way. But my wife said, bullshit! And I tore out that side door out into the side yard and I tell you I have never been so upset in my whole life. Honest to God, I thought I was going to burst apart and have little pebbles shoot out of me. And I looked up, and there in the gathering twilight come old Eddie. He'd been back to his father's home in the garbage dump and had forgotten one of those gems of wisdom I had given and had come back to find out what it was. And I put him in the car and got him straightened out. And then I went back and got straightened out with her. And I like to remember that night because I believe that that night even God himself was in trouble because he needed somebody to send to me and as he looked over all his vast creation the only person he could find who would go was a tall skinny drunk with a scratchy voice that lived in a garbage dump you see what we do here is help each other let's never forget that it's awfully important to remember it because just the simple act of helping each other for my money is the most fundamental bedrock bare bones description you could ever have of a fellowship of love. Thank you. applause