I Can’t, He Can, I’ll Let Him — and the Amen Doesn’t Come Until Step 7 – Jay P.

First time I heard Dave, our speaker this evening, was at Gopher State a couple, three, four, five years ago.
I can't remember exactly what year it was.
And I remember listening to him and I remember thinking, we've got to get him for our speaker.
And so I think we got him the next year as a speaker at the St. Claude Brown.
He's so impressive that we asked him back this year.
And we went and picked him up last night at the airport.
And one of my most favorite jobs on a roundup committee is hosting a speaker
because you get to spend a lot of time with them and share all day, last night, all day today.
And we've become friends over these last couple, three, four years.
And I'm just thrilled that he said he'd come back and speak at our spring celebration again.
And there's a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous,
AA speakers speak.
And it's important.
The introducer is introduced, so I'm going to introduce J.P. to you.
I don't care if it works or not.
I'm not going to get this thing stuck in my eyes.
My name's J. Plumback.
I'm an alcoholic.
Is it working?
Yeah.
Thank you, Mary Claire.
That was one heck of a talk you made.
And I don't know about.
Anybody out there, but standing up here, it's really, it's scary.
I don't care how long you're sober.
I don't care if you're male or female, AA or Al-Anon.
I don't care who or what you are.
It's scary unless you're an egomaniac.
Most of us are, but ain't.
But the deal is, I got bad vision, so I don't know how many is out there.
I had that laser surgery, but I just try to remember.
You can't see.
It's okay.
One time they said pretend they're all naked.
Well, for me, that don't work.
I don't know.
But thank you for sharing.
Good message.
When I said I'm Jay and I'm an alcoholic, I really said all I have to say, because today
I do know who I am and what I am, and I'm comfortable with that.
But you gave me that comfort.
Like most people that get behind a podium, there are a lot of things I'd rather be doing
right now.
This is bike week in Myrtle Beach.
I ride a Harley.
I live down there.
There's 600,000 bikes.
I could be just lost in that crowd.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm trying to get killed.
We don't wear helmets.
I'm honored and privileged to be here.
Privileged.
I met a lady here that I met a number of years ago when I talked up here.
She's been sober from then until now.
She said she was eight days sober.
I remember meeting her, but she said she was eight days sober, not because she met me,
I mean, she was eight days sober and now a number of years of sobriety, continuous sobriety.
Again, it proved to me that Alcoholics Anonymous works.
I remember meeting Susie when I talked up at St. Cloud.
You know, I couldn't remember.
I remember who was on the program.
I didn't remember where I was.
I didn't remember if it was St. Cloud or whatever.
But I remember there was a girl there who had been having trouble, and we talked,
and we'd gone out to eat, a whole bunch of us from the committee.
And I remembered that and remembered telling her, get a sponsor.
Before you leave, get a sponsor.
She got one, never used her from then on.
Nobody's seen her.
But the deal was, I'm thinking, God has blessed me today.
Today I'm not thinking about, do I have any money?
Do I have any of this?
Is my health all right?
Is this going to work out?
I'm really more and more, God's allowed me to be able to try and think of somebody else.
That ain't natural for a guy like me.
You see, I'm a normal person.
I never planned on being an alcoholic.
Just planned on being normal all my life.
That's what I was, normal.
Hell, I didn't know I was mad until I was sober a year and a half.
Well, really, I mean, I came from a normal family.
My daddy was a news commentator for CBS.
He had a coast-to-coast radio hookup.
He was known all over the Midwest, really well-known in the Cleveland, Ohio area
and over towards Chicago.
But anyhow, his picture was on buses, not milk cartons, but buses, you know,
and on billboards.
Made a lot of money.
I never saw the results of any of that money, but he made a lot of money,
and he was important and let everybody know it.
My daddy was also an alcoholic.
I didn't know that.
I thought he was normal.
He always drank.
Never saw him not drinking.
He drank from the first remembrance until he just drank.
I'd see him in the morning drinking.
If he got up at 4.30 to go to work, he had vodka in his hand.
When he came home at 2.30, he was drinking vodka.
When we went to church, he had vodka.
He just always drank.
Never saw him drunk.
He just always drank.
I thought it was normal.
That was normal drinking to me.
And I was a normal kid.
I was sober a year and a half, sitting in a meeting with Alcoholics Anonymous.
And you have to picture this.
I was almost 33 years old.
I'd been sober a year and a half, active.
And I was really a poster child in Alcoholics Anonymous is what I was.
You could have seen a picture of me.
I'd done everything in that group.
You know, I joined that group.
It was the New West West Barons, a group in West Palm Beach, Florida.
My first job was greeter.
I got to say hello to people when they come in.
Then I graduated, got to wash ashtrays.
That's the next level of responsibility.
All the groups had ashtrays, glass ones.
And you washed them.
We had ceramic cups, not just styrofoam that ruins the environment,
but like I care.
But I got to wash coffee cups after the ashtray.
Well, I mixed the coffee cups and ashtrays together
because I didn't really like the group.
They didn't know it.
You take your shots when you can.
You know how it is.
I got to make coffee.
Not very good, but I got to make it.
And you got to cheer me.
I'd done everything in that group, except treasurer.
I never have been treasurer.
I'm sober since March 8, 1974.
And through God's grace and the miracle of this program,
I've had to drink from then till now.
But I've never been treasurer.
I'm always hoping my group will hear that one day
and that maybe the state treasurer would be nice.
They have a lot of money.
But I guess, well, no.
Anyhow, I've done everything in AA except work the steps.
And I was sitting there with that group.
It was a big book group.
We studied the book and talked about it.
And I can't remember what part we were on that night,
but I repeated something as though it were original and coming from me.
But it wasn't mine.
It was something I'd heard across town a day or two before
as I was taxing up for what I was going to say at that meeting.
Bye.
Bye.
I was his wisdom at the group.
And that night after the meeting, a man took me aside.
His name was John.
And John put his arm around me, and he told me that he loved me.
And he told me that I was a phony and that I was about to get drunk.
And I hated John.
And he took me home with him that night,
sat me down on the stoop of his trailer.
Pardon me, his mobile home.
Manufacturer.
I had a 4,000-square-foot house on a golf course.
And at that time, there were trailers.
Today, I live in one.
They're a manufactured home.
Something about perspective, you know.
But he set me down on the stupid-ass thing,
and he began to talk to me about Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I thought I had worked the steps in my life,
because I'd used the book as a guide, and I'd worked the steps.
And I knew what it said in that book.
The book says, long before it gets to Chapter 5,
there's a paragraph in there that the delusion that I am like everybody,
like normal people when it comes to drinking,
you must be smashed.
And then it states, this is the first step in recovery.
And I took that to heart and said, that was the first step.
I knew that my drinking was different than other people.
I knew that I had, I accepted what the doctor said in the doctor's opinion.
I had that obsession of the mind.
That thing that went on inside of me that said,
this time I can take a drink and I'll be all right.
This time I'll take a drink and I won't go to jail,
or I won't hurt her, or I won't do that, or I won't go there.
But I'd take that drink and I'd do that,
because my mind would tell me that it would be all right,
and I'd believe it, and I'd take that drink.
And that second thing that would happen, it only happens to alcoholics.
It does not happen in normal drinking.
But that allergy kicked in, that phenomena,
that thing that we can't understand what it is,
but it kicked in and I wouldn't know how much I'd drink.
And I'd been going, I knew that was there.
So I accepted that I had this thing called alcoholism.
And I thought the first step was admitting that I wasn't like normal people
when it came to drinking,
that I had this phenomena of craving, this obsession of the mind.
That wasn't the first step.
John explained to me that that was only,
the first half of the first step.
And John talked to me that night about unmanageability,
and he had me look at my life.
And let me tell you how my life was,
a year and a half sober, without alcohol, active in AA.
It was a disaster.
My wife and I had a terrible relationship.
We'd been married for over ten years at that time,
and our marriage had nothing in it, absolutely nothing.
It was so bad that I was the most active member of Sex Without Partners in South Florida.
I don't know if that's reached up there yet.
It's a self-help thing down there.
Not bad.
My kids and I didn't get along.
I was unemployed again.
You know, I couldn't work on a ship because I was in trouble with the law.
The law wanted me.
You see, I'd gone into business.
I had my own business.
A lot of alcoholics like to be in business for themselves,
and I was one of them.
I'd been on a merchant ship and been over a country called Sri Lanka,
or a salon, island country off the coast of India,
and I'd gone into business with some other AA members that were in that group.
And they had the same lack of principles working in their life that I had working in mine.
And we went into the import-export business.
We were exporting semi-precious gemstones out of Ceylon
and importing them into the United States.
Now, we'd done all that without the benefit of licenses or customs or laws.
So the government called it smuggling.
He called it business.
Again, perspective.
I was in trouble with the law, and they were after us.
I had a guy live in my house, and I hated him.
Everything in life.
He was going wrong, and John was right.
I was on the verge of drinking.
And I accepted, for the first time in my life, unmanageability.
And John took it a step further.
He said, look back through your life and see how it was.
And my whole life was that story.
It was unmanageability all through my life,
because my mind would say, you can take care of this.
You can straighten this out.
You can fix this.
You can make this.
And yet, when I tried to do it, it didn't.
He said, step one simply is, I can't.
And it made it simple for me.
That night, I took step one sitting on this stupid-ass trailer,
and said, I can't.
And he said, now let's look at step two.
And step two, come to believe that the power greater than myself
could restore me to sanity.
He made me accept sanity for what the book talks about.
He didn't talk about the fact that I wasn't doing crazy stuff.
Hell, I still do bizarre things.
I'll probably do them all my life.
But he said, we're going to talk about that strange insanity
that precedes the first drink,
that manifests itself in that thought that goes on in my mind
that says, this time I can take a drink, and it'll be all right.
This time I can take a drink, and I'll control it.
This time I can take a drink,
and I won't go there, do that, or hurt them.
He said, that's the insanity Bill talks about.
And that's what Bill stresses in the book
in three or four or five different places.
And when he talks about sanity, he says,
at the end of the promises that are read at so many meetings,
at the end of the promises, it says,
if tempted by alcohol, we react as if from a hot flame,
for sanity has returned.
So John says, simply meant sanity for me
was that I would believe that there was a power greater than I
that could restore me to that state of mind
where taking a drink would not be an acceptable,
or a reasonable alternative.
Simply put, it'd be he can.
So I had two things I was looking at.
I can't and he can.
And at that point, we looked at step three.
You see, everything was out of the way by then.
Mary Claire talked about desperation.
I believe there are levels of desperation in my life.
And as I reach these levels of desperation
that are directly parallel to those plateaus of recovery,
as I reach them, I have to do something.
That first level came after the level of desperation
that brought me to Alcoholics Anonymous.
That level that said, I knew what John said was right.
I was going to get drunk.
And I accepted then that God could restore me
to that state of being where taking a drink
would not be an acceptable alternative.
And we got on our knees and we prayed that third step prayer.
And I remember John getting on his knees and he said,
I'm going to get on my knees and you don't have to.
And you know, I believed him.
I didn't believe he was telling me to get down on my knees.
It was my choice.
But I felt comfortable getting on my knees
and praying that prayer.
He opened the book up.
And we read the prayer out of the book.
The funny thing about that third step prayer,
there's no amen at the end of it.
The amen does not come until the end of step seven.
John was telling me that from that third step prayer,
the actions through step seven
were a continuance of that prayer.
You know, I prayed that prayer on a daily basis
from then until now.
Not that I'm taking the third step every day,
but it's a reaffirmation of the decision
I made with John that night.
A decision that I do what I was doing.
What I was supposed to do to turn my will and life
over to the care of God.
For me, there was absolutely no physical work
in steps one, two, and three.
It was just getting to those points
where I could accept what they were saying.
I can't, he can, and I'll let him.
When I got off my knees, John handed me
a yellow legal tablet.
And there were three columns on one side
and the back side of it were page blank.
And as he handed it to me with a pencil,
he said, write down in the top left-hand corner, I resent.
And I said, John, I don't resent anybody.
And I didn't.
I don't resent anyone.
He said, write down.
I hate.
Well, I could do that.
Hell, I hated everybody.
Let me tell you what.
I'm an author of that.
I wrote down, I hate.
So hard, I broke the pencil.
You see, hate's a funny thing.
Maybe you ain't felt it.
Although, by the laughter, I think some of you have.
Hate was a warm feeling I could wear to bed.
I could think about what I was gonna do to you
for what you did to me.
I could do to you for what you did to me or did to them.
And as I think about what I do to you,
I just get warm all over.
It was a great feeling.
It was just fantastic.
And when I wrote down, I hate, it felt good.
He said, who to put down first?
He didn't tell me to look at my mom and dad.
He said, put down Siraj.
You see, had he told me to go to my childhood,
I couldn't have.
But he told me to start today and work backwards,
because that's what the book said.
I put it down, I hate Siraj.
And when I wrote it down, I knew I did.
I did hate him.
The son of a bitch was sleeping in the bed
and my little boy was sleeping on the floor.
He was an Indian living in my house.
I hated him.
I hated him because he got all my money.
All the money I'd saved and put together
and gone into business with him.
He had it all.
Or they did.
Them Indians did that I was in business with.
God, yes, I hated him.
I hated him because he wore a dress.
Didn't call it a dress, called it a sari.
You put a man in a dress, it's a skirt.
It's a dress.
I wrote it down.
John said it wasn't important if it made sense
or if it was real, but if I felt it, write it down.
Who you hate and why you hate him.
And he said, go back through your life.
You know, I found that I had hate and anger
run rampant in my life all the way back to my childhood.
As far back as I can remember,
I wasn't getting what I wanted from where I wanted it
or from who was supposed to give it to me.
Nobody treated me right.
Not my parents, not anyone.
And it was their fault and I wrote it down.
Anyone who hasn't taken an inventory,
don't be afraid of it.
We've been doing it all our lives.
When we're sitting in the bars,
we ain't talking about ourselves.
We're talking about them.
That's where the inventory is.
Talk about them.
Get it down there.
Of course, it's sneaky about it.
You gotta do something else a little different.
I'll tell you about that in a minute.
But there I was, back in my childhood, hating everybody
because I didn't get what I wanted.
I remember things going on in my childhood.
My sisters, they got a lot of love.
I'm one year older, one year younger,
one five years younger.
A kid brother born when I was 18.
I saw my siblings get emotional and physical love
from my parents.
And I never felt that I got, I never felt that I belonged.
I think that's a part of alcoholism.
Yet it didn't make me an alcoholic.
It just made me a mad young kid.
And as I got older, I was madder.
I was a liar as far back as I can remember.
I never took a course online.
It came natural.
And I think it's a part of alcoholism.
But it didn't make me an alcoholic.
It made me a liar.
And I like lying.
It was sort of like a gift from God.
Whatever you wanted me to be, I could tell you I wasn't.
The deal with the way I lied is that I believed it.
Whether it was in a job situation, a relationship,
whatever it was, I would tell you what I wanted to
and I believed it.
And the difference between my lies and the lies
that you told me, when you lied, I knew you were lying.
But I didn't know I was.
And if you didn't believe that I was lying,
that I was telling the truth, I would fight you over it.
That's how fiercely I believed the lies that I believed.
I was a liar and I was angry and I was a thief.
And I didn't picture myself as a thief.
I guess I was just thought of as a short fat Robin Hood.
I don't know.
I might take something from Tom, I'd turn around
and I'd give it to Mary Claire.
And I wouldn't do it so that she'd like me.
I'd do it so she'd want me around and accept me.
And if you told me that I took something
that he'd earned money and worked hard to get,
I'd have said you're crazy.
Because that never entered into my mind.
The Pope doesn't talk about that specifically.
It says something like selfishness, self-centeredness
is the root of our problem.
It doesn't say lying and stealing.
But if I look at the root cause of it,
what's the root cause of it?
Selfishness, self-centeredness.
It was all about me and I didn't know it was about me.
I thought it was about you.
So I was a liar and I was a thief
and I didn't like anybody and I hadn't even started.
Hell, I was before school started.
I went off to the first grade.
And up there in Ohio, I was born in Cleveland, Ohio,
a suburb, I went to a parochial school.
That means Catholic.
And I had a nun.
This nun, her name was Sister Lucy.
And I closed my eyes, I could picture her.
She was like the first vision of S and M.
You gotta picture her.
I picture her a lot bigger than me.
She had a black gown on,
went from her head down to her toes.
She had heels on her boots.
She had chains and leather hanging down her side.
She made noise when she walked.
I was scared to death.
I think she was old in the first grade
and scared of her and didn't like her.
Halfway through the first grade,
they called my parents in.
We'd been doing tests and all that stuff
they do in the first grade
and they called my parents in.
And I was standing outside listening to that conversation
because I knew I was in trouble
because I was always in trouble.
And I didn't know why but I was gonna hear about it.
So I'm listening to her.
She told my parents something that destroyed me.
She told my parents that it appeared
as though I was an exceptionally gifted child.
And because of my intelligence and abilities,
I'd be able to learn anything
and do anything I chose to do.
Now my ability to learn stopped right then.
And I started getting in trouble.
By the second grade,
I'm hauled in front of the class clown.
You see, because as soon as I heard I was smart,
nobody was smart enough to teach me anything.
And I was getting in trouble
because I couldn't listen to anyone.
That was gonna be the story of my life
for a good number of years.
When I got to Alcoholics Anonymous,
that's just what I thought.
I knew everything.
How could you teach me anything?
So by the second grade,
I'm hauled in front of the class.
By the third grade, more and more trouble.
By the fourth grade, I'm running away from home.
Because I wanted to be away from that.
If I could just go somewhere else,
I'd be all right.
If I could just go there,
I'd be all right.
It'd be different.
Get away from these people that are hurting me
and torturing me.
I knew it.
I couldn't talk to them about it.
They had me talking to other people,
even as a kid.
They'd say, go talk to this person,
or that psychiatrist,
or that social worker.
They didn't have labels like ADD.
They just thought, crazy as hell.
And I'd go and talk to them.
They didn't give me no medication.
They beat the hell out of me a thousand.
And then I'm hauled up in front of a juvenile referee.
And the juvenile referee,
before he sentenced me,
that very first time he labeled me,
he told me I was incorrigible.
I didn't know what that meant.
It's a multi-syllable word.
It means punk.
I was just a punk.
He sent me off to an orphanage.
I wasn't an orphan.
Why would he send me to an orphanage?
But he sent me to an orphanage.
There weren't no other orphans in there.
I wasn't one either.
They were just punks like me.
And the deal was, it wasn't punishment.
I thought it was punishment.
Their whole focus was to help put some discipline
in my life and help me become a productive human being.
I didn't know that.
I thought they were punishing me for my behavior,
or what was going on.
And they'd say things to me that were crazy.
They'd say, what's wrong?
I couldn't tell them what's wrong.
I knew they wouldn't understand.
You know, people would say, just tell me what's going on.
And I couldn't do it.
You were talking about walls and funny.
I know what they are.
You can't talk to people if you just know intuitively
they don't understand.
So I couldn't talk to anybody.
To make a long story short,
I was staying in institutions off and on
from when I was 17 and a half years,
or a little over 17 years old.
And I always wanted it to be different.
From that orphanage, I got out of it
and back down the street,
and then into a reforming institution.
I got out of that, and at 13 and a half years old,
I made a decision to drink.
Now, I might jump till 13 or so,
I hadn't had any alcohol that I remember.
I'm sure that I have, but I don't remember it.
That was social drinking.
When you don't remember anything about it,
it didn't do nothing for me or to me.
Hell, I was married to a social drinker for 35 years.
If you'd asked her at any point in her life,
when did you have your last drink, she wouldn't know.
If you asked her what it was, she wouldn't know.
Didn't do nothing to her or for her.
That was middle 13.
But I remember situations.
Mom and dad drank all the time.
At dinner, we'd get a little wine or a little beer occasionally.
They'd have family get-togethers three, four times a year.
Kegs of beer and wine and mixed drinks.
All us kids would get a little bit of what the grown-ups had.
There was no significance to any of that.
It was just a part of that social environment.
Didn't mean nothing to me.
At 13, I decided to drink.
I don't know why, until it was there, I decided to.
So I knew I wasn't old enough.
Hell, I didn't look 13.
You gotta be 21 and a half.
So I stole an eyebrow pencil from my mother's purse.
I sort of gave myself a beard and a mustache.
It was not bad, really.
It dotted it right on.
Looked like a 13-year-old with 15 million blackheads, I guess.
Thought it gave me maturity.
Glad it didn't rain.
Headed down, got some money out of her purse, too,
and headed down to the lower end of 25th Street.
That is a skid row in Cleveland, Ohio.
I knew that's where you went to drink.
You'd get something to drink there.
You don't have to be in a certain age or certain nothing on a skid row.
You go to one of them honky-tonks, they give you what you want.
And we went into a knuckle and finally got what we wanted,
me and this other guy.
We got two bottles of mixed screwdrivers and two bottles of Thunderbird wine.
I clearly remember ordering, and I can only guess at the reason for the screwdrivers.
I didn't know what it was, didn't know what was in it,
but the name promised something.
I wasn't sure, but at 13 it had some kind of...
Well, I'm not sure, but it sounded good anyhow.
And then the Thunderbird, I know why I ordered that.
Hell, I knew about it.
They had a billboard on Scranton in 25th.
It was the most beautiful billboard you've ever seen in your life.
It was huge. It was bigger than that wall.
Well, higher than that wall and as long as three or four panels.
It had this huge bottle of Thunderbird with this bird just soaring.
God, it looked beautiful.
And I'd see that every day I'd go buy that.
And I loved that billboard.
That was what I'd learned in the place I'd been locked up.
They told me, what's the word?
Thunderbird.
By God, they promised something was going to happen.
I'll defy anyone of you to go home and do that in front of a mirror with a muscatel or some of this.
It ain't going to happen, but Thunderbird has some action to it.
They were going to happen.
You know, just promised it.
And it was the price.
It was always affordable.
You know, for all my drinking, I found Thunderbird to be a very affordable drink.
It was the cheapest stuff you could get, really.
If you go in a store and find it now, they have it on the lowest shelf.
They want you to steal it.
Leave the good stuff alone.
The good stuff, they're walking.
But we got that stuff and went out behind some bushes and we started drinking.
Don't know what we started with.
Don't know what it tasted like.
But I know what happened.
We started with it.
For the first time in my life, everything became okay.
For the first time in my life, the mysteries of life were solved.
And I was at peace within myself.
It was a fantastic feeling.
And I didn't even know that it happened.
But I pursued the recapturing of it at every opportunity for the next 17 plus years.
And I never got it back that way again.
It's only in retrospect and looking back, I can see what it did to me.
Because I wanted it back so badly, I could never get it back that way again.
And I don't know what happened that night, but I woke up the next morning in a way that I was going to wake up in over and over again.
Until I got to you 17 years later.
I woke up in a mess and it was mine.
I woke up with a new fear about me.
I didn't just wake up and say, there's a new fear going on there.
But I was taking that inventory I was telling you about earlier.
Had them people down, who I hated and why I hated them.
John done something different then.
He said, now go to each one of them and write down how it affected you.
And we used the plan out of the big book.
And I put down, that guy Suraj, use him for an example.
It affected my self-esteem.
Because I knew I wasn't doing a good job as a husband or a father.
It affected my security. Hell, I was broke.
It affected my sex life. There was none.
And I put that down. He said, go through the list.
And I did with everybody on that list.
Put down how it affected me.
All the way back to my childhood.
Now he said, we're going to look at it from a different angle.
We're going to put out of our mind the wrongs others have done.
Real or imagined.
And we're going to look where you were wrong.
And you'll write that down.
And I looked at that situation with Suraj and said, what could I have done wrong?
And I really couldn't see where I did anything wrong.
And I went to John with him and said, John, I've done nothing wrong with this guy.
Can I go on and do the rest of the list?
He said, no.
He said, we go from this one and work back.
He said, ask John for help.
And I have God to help me to look at it and see if there's something I could have said different or done different.
And I'll tell you what I found.
When I went over there, I was a marine engineer.
I worked on ships. I was an officer on a merchant ship.
I was in an AA meeting.
And I found guys with no principles, like I said, that were looking to make a fast buck.
And they wanted to do some dishonest stuff.
And so did I.
Because I wanted to get rich quick.
And I had absolutely no knowledge of gems or gemology or marketing them.
And I went into business with them.
My point in going into business with them was because they had a lot of money in Germany.
And I could help get that money and I'd be able to steal it.
My whole purpose was to get something for nothing out of somebody else.
And when I looked at my partner wrong and what it had done to him, I saw what I was looking for.
I brought him out of his country because he was there on a visa staying in my house.
And the only way he was there was on a visa.
And as soon as I decided to get spiritual and work the steps, I pulled the visa.
And when the law got him, he was going back and he'd never get out of jail again.
And if he stayed here, which he wound up doing, he would never see his family again.
I had robbed him of that.
Forget his actions. What had I done?
And I wrote it down.
And as I wrote it down, a miracle happened.
My hate for him left.
And then black and white in front of me was what I was going to have to do to amend that situation.
And at a later point in the steps, I was able to do that.
And I was able to find that in each and every resentment.
I was able to find my partner wrong.
And in writing it down, know what I had to do right.
It wasn't important, we'll say, with my parents.
The fact that maybe they didn't do what I thought they should have done
or maybe what the law thought they should have done in some cases, that had no bearing on it.
When I wrote down why I hated him, then I had to write down my partner wrong.
I wasn't a very good son.
I'd stolen from him.
I'd lied to him.
I'd done a lot of things that were hurtful to him.
When I got to that part of the amends, it was not going to be that I was going to tell them I had done those things.
John said if you boil that down, the exact nature of that wrong was you were a lousy child.
What's the opposite of a lousy child?
Be a good child.
So my job for that amend was I was going to have to be a good son and do the actions necessary.
Not say things that would solve my soul, but things that would repair the relationship.
And that's what I'd have to do with that surrogate.
But then I got through that part of the inventory, and John had me write down my fears.
And I put them down.
And my fears were nuts.
I don't know if yours were.
I had one fear down there.
I was afraid she was leaving.
And I had another one down a few lines, afraid she wasn't leaving.
Oh, no, I didn't have a girlfriend and a wife.
I just had a wife who was the same woman different times a day.
You see, fears don't have to make sense to nobody.
They had to just be the fears I felt.
And I put them all down.
And they were simple fears and complicated.
I just wrote them all down.
John and I got on our knees because that's what the books said to do and ask God to take them.
We got on our knees and asked God to remove the fears.
And I got off my knees still afraid.
And I told John that.
I said, what's wrong?
I'm still afraid.
He said, what are you afraid of?
For me, it was being honest, telling him I was afraid because I couldn't tell people I was afraid.
And I told him that.
He said, what are you afraid of?
I said, I don't know.
And he just sort of chuckled.
And he opened up the book.
What a fantastic wealth of knowledge hidden in that book.
In Bill's story, Bill talks about the fear of impending calamity.
And John took those words that Bill wrote in that sort of gothic prose.
And he said, that's the fear that something bad is going to happen and you can't stop it.
It shows itself when there's a knock on the door and you don't want to answer it.
When the phone rings and you don't want to pick it up.
When an envelope comes and there's no return address.
I knew that fear.
God, I knew that fear.
He said, it's an evil and groaning threat.
Our lives are shot through with it.
That's how Bill writes about it.
I looked at my life and saw how that fear had grown in me.
That fear of impending calamity had grown in me from my early years.
It had grown in me from my early teen years until it almost killed me by the time I got here.
And we got back on our knees and I said, God, please take it.
And that fear was lifted.
It hasn't stayed away from then until now.
You see, periodically it comes back.
There'll be a night I'm not sleeping.
There'll be a night that I just can't go to sleep.
Or a time going down the road it'll just sort of come over me and it'll just attack me.
And I thank God for that.
It's a gift when I get that fear.
Because it means there's something I'm not doing that I should be doing.
Or something I am doing.
That I shouldn't be doing.
And I have to look at my life right then to see what it is and then try and give it to God.
And ask him to take it.
And I have a simple prayer that I pray.
Many, many times in many, many situations.
It's simply, God, you take it.
I can't handle it.
God, you take it.
I can't handle it.
And no matter what crisis is going on, when I pray that prayer over and over again,
all of a sudden I'm waking up.
I'll see if I'm waking up or whatever's going on has stopped.
It's just gone.
My way of giving it to God is with that prayer.
I don't know if it'll work for you or not.
But what the hell?
Try it.
Try it.
Anyhow.
Got through with that part of the inventory.
John said, now we'll go to sex.
Got to talk about sex.
All right.
I wrote down how I was.
What I was.
He said, okay.
He said, now, he said, he asked God for direction.
He said, people don't give you advice.
Avoid advice.
The book said, hysterical advice.
Avoid the ones that like no flavor.
Avoid the ones that want all pepper, fair.
He said, you got to come up with a standard that's going to be good for you and God.
And I wrote a standard down.
I was going to be the most faithful husband in the world.
And I wrote all this stuff down.
I gave it to John.
And he laughed at me.
He said, you just wrote down a standard you thought I wanted you to live by.
And the truth was, I did.
Because I was putting John in that position that he would be my judge.
John said, God alone is our judge.
He said, now write down a standard that God wants you to have, that you will be able to
live up to.
And for the first time in my life, I wrote down a standard.
It wasn't very much.
But then again, it was a standard.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
And I wrote it down.
Someone who's worked the steps the way it's laid out in the book.
I'm not telling you what to do, but I'll tell you what I did
and what I tell people who work with me.
If I tell you something that ain't in the book, don't do it.
You know, I heard that stuff when I got in AA.
He said, don't get involved for a year.
I went to my sponsor and said, can I throw the bitch out?
He said, are you crazy?
He said, where'd you get that?
He said, it ain't in the book.
I said, I heard it at a meeting.
He said, you hear anything at a meeting.
I said, oh, that just applies to single people.
He said, read the book.
Read the book.
I sponsor a lot of guys.
I don't tell them what to do.
Hell, I ain't their judge.
I ain't going to tell them what to do.
I don't want that responsibility.
I had a guy come to me the other day.
He said, I'm leaving her.
He called me four hours later, and he was crazy.
It was the same thing I had for fears.
I understood it.
I couldn't tell him to go or to stay.
It ain't my business.
My business, I tell him, don't drink and go to meetings.
That's my business.
I can tell you how not to drink and go to a meeting.
I stay out of finance.
I stay out.
Marital stuff, stay out of it.
I don't know nothing about it.
Guy comes down, I want to talk about relationships.
I said, well, who's that with, your boss, your co-worker?
Hell, I ain't want to talk about relationships.
I just want to talk about getting, never mind.
Every interaction I have is a relationship, you know.
I got to work on all of them.
Ain't one more important than another.
I am in God's time.
Am I going to make mistakes?
You're doggone right I am.
And what does it say to do when I'm having trouble in any area?
What does the book tell me to do?
Does it say peel another onion off the onion?
Go see a psychotherapist?
Hell no, it says work with a drunk.
Work with a drunk.
When all else fails, work with a drunk.
Mary Claire was saying this.
What does it do?
Work with someone else who needs help.
Get my head out of me and into you.
I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
There I was, 13, coming off that drunk.
I went back to reforming.
I'm an indefinite sentence.
Stayed there until I was a little over 17 years old and ran away from there.
Not because I was rehabilitated, but because I'd get out of there.
And I went down on a skid row and got signed into the Navy
by someone I'd never met before.
Pretended to be my father.
And I went away to boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center
just outside of Chicago, between Chicago and Milwaukee.
And I remember when I got there, I wrote my parents a letter
and told them what I was doing.
They were going to be proud of me.
You know, I was going to fight for our country in 1959.
Things were going to be different.
Things were going to be wonderful for 1960, 59 to 60.
And things were going to be altogether different.
And they wrote me back.
And they told me they were proud of me.
And they were going to come watch me graduate from boot camp.
That ain't a big deal.
It was a big deal to them.
And they came up.
They were a Greyhound bus to Chicago.
And they came up to that little train up to where boot camp was.
And they saw that ceremony.
And they took me to Chicago on a 12-hour pass.
I remember walking into a bar and restaurant with my father and mother.
And God, it felt good.
And I was going to have this relationship that I'd always wanted with Mom and Dad.
I was going to be that son that they wanted.
That stuff they wrote in the letter meant something.
What I wrote to them meant something.
And we walked into that place.
And my dad sat down.
And my dad looked at me and he said,
Son, you're not legally old enough to drink, but you're old enough to be in the service.
Would you like something to drink?
My dad was a drinker.
And that felt good.
We're going to be drinking, buddy.
I looked at him and said, Yeah, I'll have a beer.
And he ordered me one.
I remember I got that beer and I took a drink of it and looked at him.
Because he ordered himself a cup of coffee and my mother a Coca-Cola.
And I said, What's the matter?
Aren't you drinking?
I never knew him not to drink.
And my mother looked at me and she had that twinkle in her eye.
Some of these women get it done.
The guy said, No, your daddy doesn't drink anymore.
He's a member of Biopolics Anonymous.
He's been sober for three months.
Let me tell you about my dad.
My dad drank himself out of the radio profession.
The first job he got after he got sober was weighing garbage in a city garbage dump.
He drank himself out of everything.
And a guy took him by the hand and carried him to a place called Rosary Hall.
And back then, Rosary Hall was run by a nun called Sister Ignatia.
And Sister Ignatia, when they checked him in, they'd say,
Three to five.
And they'd give him five days simply to detox him.
And they'd detox him by tapering him off liquor.
They'd give him Vareldehyde and they'd take him off and taper him off.
And then they'd put him back out on the street.
Into the care of their sponsor.
You only got one shot there.
And my dad laid five days in straps and convulsions.
And they thought he would die.
And on the fifth day, he came out of convulsions.
He was discharged into the care of his sponsor.
And Sister Ignatia gave him the old thing.
The little sacred heart thing that she gave when they left.
And said, Jim, if you go with your sponsor, the Alcoholics Anonymous,
and do what those men and women tell you to do,
you will never have to come off another drunk.
And my dad, he went with his sponsor, the Alcoholics Anonymous,
and did what you told him to do.
And he didn't take a drink from then to the day of his death, March 25th, 1981.
He stayed sober in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And there he was, three months sober.
And I can only imagine how he felt.
Because I know how I felt at three months sober.
I know he must have wanted to drink.
He must have still needed to drink.
Three months sober, I knew that's what I wanted to do.
When I got that point many years later.
He put aside all that.
It was uncontrollable.
There was no additional love for him to offer me a drink.
But I didn't see that.
You know what I thought?
I looked at my watch and thought to myself,
how soon can I be away from these people, meet my friends, and drink?
You told me later that self-discipline, self-centeredness is the root of my problem.
All I have to do is look at my history to see it.
And I got away from these people, met my friends, and I drank.
And I woke up the same way I woke up the last time I drank.
Same mess, same fears, same not knowing what went on.
But I had a new set of situations.
I was in the service.
It was all a new set of disciplines.
And I went off on a ship, CBS Antietam.
It was an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Mexico, a training ship.
I was on that ship.
And I remember one night I woke up, or one morning I woke up, and I wasn't on the ship.
I was in a room maybe a third this size.
And they had windows with big thick screens.
It was a nut ward of the Naval Hospital in Pensacola, Florida.
And they called me before board of officers.
And they gave me a paper.
And they said if I signed it, they would give me an honorable discharge.
If I didn't sign it, they'd court-martial me.
No question there.
I just signed the paper.
They said what it was was a guarantee that I'd never attempt to reenlist in any of the armed forces as long as I lived.
I remember the wording of it real clearly.
That was 40-some years ago.
And I'll tell you what, I ain't never been back.
Don't think I'm going back.
But they went on to say that I had what they would term to be acute alcoholism.
They said by acute alcoholism, they mean when you drink, you get in trouble.
Well, hell, I know I got in trouble when I drank, but they didn't understand why.
And I couldn't tell them.
See, I got in trouble when I drank, not because of drinking, but because of you.
If you wouldn't talk about me, if you wouldn't pick on me, if you would leave me alone, if you'd give me a break,
you could always use them with that.
And if that had changed, I'd be all right.
They gave me that paper, and they told me if I quit, then I could have a good life.
But if I continued, it wouldn't be long, and I'd be chronic.
This is just before my 18th birthday.
I'm on the gavel.
Hell, I ain't even shaved yet.
They gave me that paper and my final money, and I got out of there.
And I went back to Ohio to see my family.
They let them know.
My wonderful son had returned.
I always had this dream of driving in in a big Cadillac or something.
Hell, I hitchhiked back up there.
I went out and bought a car that day.
I turned 18 the day I got up there, and I bought a car.
It was a Studebaker.
Some of y'all don't know what they are.
They're a good looking car.
They look like they're coming and going at the same time.
It was a sick shift I had never driven.
I got a driver's license.
All you had to do was go in there and get a license.
I got a license, got a car.
I did not bother with things like insurance registration or stuff like that.
I got the necessities.
And I went out to celebrate my 18th birthday.
And I went to a bar, and I started to celebrate.
And I woke up the next morning the way I woke up the last time I drank.
But, again, it was a different environment.
This time I was in a jail.
There were bars on it.
And they came and let me out of jail that morning.
And I'm my own recognizance.
It's not because I was a good citizen, but my mother had to be put to court in that community.
And I remember going over to her house.
As I walked in, my sister was there.
She's a year younger than I am.
She was sitting there.
She had just joined the Earthman Convent.
She was an official.
And she was sitting there.
And my mom was crying.
And she was trying to console her.
And I looked at my mother and said, what's wrong?
Why is she upset?
I'm thinking to myself.
Why is she crying?
I should be crying.
I'm the one that stinks and just got out of jail.
I'm the one that's sick.
I should be crying.
My mother looked at me, and I'll never forget what she said.
She said, you know, your father's been sober.
And I called us anonymous at that time.
It was a number of months.
And she said, we've been blessed.
My mother was in her late 40s.
She said, I'm pregnant.
I'm going to have a child.
And I'm praying that this child inside of me will be born dead,
rather than dead.
Rather than a boy like you.
I hated her.
I hated her with a hate so deep.
How could she say that to me after all I'd done?
Because that's the way I pictured it.
She tortured me all my life.
And then say that to me.
I'll never talk to that bitch again.
And I left.
They told me I was a lousy sailor, so I joined the merchant marine.
I got on my first ship, and I went over to Japan.
I went ashore.
They came and got me.
Three days later, I was in Japanese jail.
I'd fallen in love when I went to sea.
I really had.
I was with these men that knew how to drink and live and enjoy life.
And they were teaching me things that were important about that.
And I went ashore, and I'd take a drink.
And they came and got me.
They took me back.
They put me in the log book.
That means you're fired.
They put me in the official ship's log.
And I was worried about that.
And these guys explained to me.
Because they were experienced.
This is an old tramp trader.
They were experienced.
They said, we had about 300 ships under union agreement.
Each ship was a separate entity, separate corporation.
And by union rules, if they fired you from one, they could refuse you on another.
Well, 300 ships, normal voyage, three to six months.
I did the math.
I'd be an old man before I'd run out of ships to work on.
So my career would be good.
And the deal was, I made a lot of money.
Now, they didn't pay you very much back then, but they didn't give it to you.
You didn't get it until you got off.
So I'd be on there three months, four months, six months, one time a year.
And they'd give you all these $100 bills when you get off.
And that fit me just right.
I'd put it in my pocket, go on to buy a nice suit, go down on a skid row, and I'd drink.
When I run out of money, I'd go back to sea.
It's fine.
I'd sit in the hall and go back to sea.
And I'd take other jobs in between, keep going to sea.
And life kept getting worse, and I wanted it to get better.
I began going up the ladder in the merchant marine, didn't I?
And I got a license in the merchant marine because I wouldn't drink for periods of time.
But when I'd take a drink, I had no control.
And as I went up the ladder, things kept getting worse, and I kept feeling worse.
And I made a study.
I said, well, if I got married and had kids, things would be better.
Families don't have the troubles I'm having.
I'll just get married and have kids.
So I was sitting in a bar one day shopping for a wife, and she walked in.
She's a little bitty old redhead.
Some of you all met her.
Her name was Von.
She was with me when I talked at Gopher State.
And that was the last place she ever went to.
But anyway, she was with me at Gopher State.
She sat down next to me at that bar and looked over at me.
I brought love, and it turned out to be it was disgust because I said, well, can I buy you a drink?
And she said, I don't drink.
Well, that was true love.
Hell, I couldn't afford to drink her.
I knew that.
She bought her Coca-Cola.
I had me another whatever I was drinking.
And hauled out all them $100 bills, smeared them out on the bar.
And I started lying, and she started listening.
I found out why she was mad.
She was mad because she had bruises on her neck and a black eye and swole up.
She was married and had a child four years old, four and a half years old, another one that was a year old.
And she had a husband that abused her badly for a number of years, beaten her badly.
And she hated men.
She hated life.
She hated anything to do with alcohol.
Now, that's a challenge for a drunk.
As I lied, she listened, and I proposed to her.
If she were here to talk to you, she'd tell you it was about ten minutes.
I think it was a little longer.
Alcoholics take a long time to enforce decisions.
I think 20 minutes is about as far as I mean.
That's just perspective.
She told me I was crazy.
She said, I knew.
She said, I'm not even divorced.
You're crazy.
To make a long story short, that was in 1964.
On October 14, 1965, she was divorced.
And I told her.
On October 15, 1965, we got married.
And I'll tell you about that marriage.
Got married at a candlelight flower shop in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Had a little chapel there.
And I negotiated around town to get married because, you know, get the right pricing because I didn't have much money left.
I'd been off the ship for a while.
And I'd been on an enforced period of abstinence.
She had told me she wasn't going to marry me if I drank.
So I just didn't drink for a while.
For a period of my drinking career, I didn't drink for periods.
I would just not drink for a month or six weeks or two months.
Two months to accomplish what I had to accomplish.
But when I picked up a drink, I never had control.
So as my drinking progressed, those periods got shorter.
Anyhow, I hadn't been drinking.
And then I shopped.
And this woman married us.
She was a justice of peace or a notary public.
And they hummed Here Comes the Bride.
And they gave her a couple of wilted flowers.
I saved a life game.
But it wasn't.
It was just I couldn't afford a lot right then.
But I thought about marriage.
And I wanted to be this champion to this woman.
I wanted to be her knight.
I wanted to give her all that her other husband hadn't given her.
I wanted to give her security and faithfulness.
I wanted to be a daddy to these kids.
A daddy that I hadn't had when I was a child.
I remember holding Kim in my arms.
And just picturing going through life with this daughter of mine.
I hadn't made her, but she was mine.
I was going to take care of her and protect her.
Little Ricky was holding onto my leg.
I'll never forget.
He was holding onto my leg, looking up at me, crying.
Saying, please be my daddy.
I know you know how much I wanted to be his daddy.
I'd do anything to be his daddy.
Holding bonds.
God, I wanted to be your husband.
I loved that woman.
And I thought because I wanted to do it, I could do it.
I didn't know that wanting to wasn't power.
It was just a desire.
I didn't have the power.
I was powerless.
But I wanted to.
And we got married.
And they went over to her aunt's house.
And they had a little reception.
I remember walking in and they gave me a glass.
It was a glass of punch.
I took one drink and spit it out.
I hate punch.
The only way punch is fit to drink is if it's full of vodka.
I just don't like it.
But you celebrate weddings by drinking.
I've been to enough weddings.
I didn't know who got married.
I just go to them.
But you see, I find these clubs or, you know, VFW.
That's where weddings are.
Put a suit on.
Go to German or Italian.
They don't know who the hell you are.
Go in there and pretend you're with the bride or the groom.
You can drink all night until you throw a punch or puke.
Then you're out of there.
But I've been to weddings and knew there were times of celebration and drinking.
And we wasn't drinking at ours.
And I was mad.
So I grabbed this new wife.
Same thing.
Same wife.
Said, I'm going to be a good husband to you.
Grabbed her and left the reception.
Stopped at the liquor store and bought a bottle.
And I began to drink.
She wouldn't drink with me.
So I picked a guy up on the side of the road.
Just a bum.
And he sat on one side of her and I sat on the other.
And we passed the bottle back and forth.
And I woke up the next morning the same way I've been waking up when I drank.
But it was a little different once again.
Now, she was laying next to me.
And she was crying.
And there's not an alcoholic nor a spouse or friend of an alcoholic who has not either
done this crying or heard this crying.
That deep, heart-wrenching sobbing that comes from deep inside.
And as you hear it, as I heard it, my chest was exploding with wanting to stop it.
Wanting to stop that pain.
I looked over at her and said, what's wrong?
Hell, I knew what was wrong.
I'll never forget what she said.
She said, I've lived this way before and I will not live this way again.
And I took that vow.
I said, I'm sorry.
God, I meant it.
I said, I'll never behave that way again.
Please give me one more chance.
And she did it.
I told you that was in 1965 on October 16th.
My surprise is March the 8th of 1974.
It would take me nine years to tell you the hell that went on for that mixed period of time.
It got worse and worse and worse.
The child was born to our union in 1968, Jay.
What a blessing.
What a great kid.
He's mine.
He looks just like me.
At the same stage of life, we look identical.
I remember nothing about his birth.
I remember very little about his birth.
I remember the first few years of his life because I stayed drunk.
And I didn't want it to be that way.
And the rules that I'd been able to implement in my drinking for periods of time no longer worked.
And I couldn't stop.
And I began to get in more and more trouble.
And I'd stay away longer and longer.
I can only guess at how the marriage stayed together.
I would write letters every day.
They'd be long letters.
They'd be full of love and full of promises and depth.
And they were not shams.
They were real.
They weren't fairy tales.
And I meant every word that I penned.
And she'd get them in batches one day.
I'd be able to mail them off.
And I know she'd read them.
She'd be there at home.
And I got there.
And by the time the ship got back in whatever period of time in which she'd be picking me up at an airport.
And I'd be coming down to deal because back then I'd come right where the gates are.
I'd be coming off the plane.
And she'd be there with all three of them kids and that smile on her face sparkling her eyes until I got close enough where she could smell me.
And she'd smell me and see that I was drunk.
And the hope went out of her eyes.
I'd get through ice water on her.
And it got worse.
We were losing everything.
And in 1974, on March the 7th of 1974,
I found myself knocking.
I found a man's back door 1,200 miles away from where we lived.
When he answered the door, the first words out of my mouth were, I think I have a problem drinking.
I have no idea where that came from.
I had never said that to anyone.
When doctors said I was dying, when employers said they were, they blackballed me out of the emergency room for chronic alcoholism.
And I said it wasn't drinking that caused the problem.
I never admitted it.
Everyone always would say, for the first time in my life, I said, I think I have a problem drinking.
And this man laughed.
And it wasn't a cruel laugh.
It was a laugh.
Just a heart laugh.
And he said, come on in.
And he took me into his little house.
And took me back to his study.
Set me down on the couch.
Reached into his desk and gave me a copy of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous.
He said, open it up.
And I did.
And there were words written on a fly leaf and ink.
It said, if you want what we have and are willing to go to any length to get it, God will help you.
And it was signed, Love, Dad.
And that book had laid in his desk for a period of time.
Before I got there.
You see, he'd go on to meetings, I heard later.
He'd go to meetings and tell you about me.
He'd tell you how his son was killing himself, destroying his family, ruining his career.
If he told you the gory details of what was going on, you did not tell him to intervene or interfere.
You said, leave him alone.
Thank God he didn't wind up with one of these people that says interfere.
You said, leave him alone.
Because if you say anything, he'll ignore it.
He's ignored everything else you've ever told him.
Thank God he listened.
And he never said anything to me.
There'd be pamphlets laying around for different periods, but he never said anything to me.
And then that night, he did not give me the message.
Rather, he said, come with me and we'll go to a meeting.
And I wouldn't go because I was drunk.
And I told him that.
He said, I'll take anyone to their first meeting drunk.
Come on.
But I wouldn't go.
So he wrote two numbers down on a piece of paper.
He said, put them in your billfold.
He said, tomorrow morning, he said, when you wake up, if you wake up, and if you would rather be sober than be drunk,
call one of these numbers before you take a drink.
And then meet me at 7 and we'll go to a meeting.
And I put those numbers in my pocket.
And I went out that night and I drank.
And I've carried numbers in my pocket from then until now.
Now I carry them in the cell phone, but they're always there.
I've got numbers, I'll tell you that.
But I went out that night and I drank.
And I don't know where I went or what I drank or what I did.
But I know I woke up the next morning like I was always waking up by then.
You see, the last few years of my drinking are all in and out of fog.
I wasn't drunk every single day that I was drinking or thinking of drinking or coming off a drunk and wanting to drink.
Every single day of that last few years.
There were no periods of sobriety that I know of.
None.
And that morning I woke up and I physically needed a drink.
Craved it.
And it was right next to me because I never went to bed without a drink next to me because I had to have it.
And I woke up that morning as badly as I wanted it.
I didn't want it just a little bit more.
And we see the slogans around our meeting rooms.
You know, the one that has so much importance to me.
They're all important.
But one that really strikes me is that one, but for the grace of God.
And I think of that word grace.
You know, grace.
It comes from a Latin word that means God's own asked for gift.
I hadn't prayed to God.
I had not said God help me.
I told a man I think I have a problem drinking.
That's as close as I can ever get to God going through a human being.
Humans are not gods.
But they're his intermediary.
And I said I think I have a problem and God gave me that gift.
That gift that he's given every alcoholic in this room no matter how long or short you're sober.
It was a gift given to me with a responsibility.
That I do all that I can to keep it or I'll lose it.
I had to stand that spark of a desire in an all-consuming flame for sobriety.
That first day I couldn't do much.
Hell, I just didn't drink.
She took me to a hospital.
And it wasn't a hospital where they give you fancy stuff like they do now.
They used vitamin B12 back then.
You got a series of shots of it that said it would help with your nerves.
I don't know if it did or not, but I didn't drink.
I can remember them needles, though.
Left cheek, there's a spot there that twinges when I think about it.
And she got me there.
And they gave me that shot.
And then they told her, give him honey and orange juice.
That'll do the same thing that alcohol does in his system.
It'll help him.
And give him vitamins.
So we didn't get along.
She got K-Roast syrup and orange juice.
Now, I know it don't get as cold up in Cleveland as it does up here in March.
But picture March, you know, about 25 degrees.
And you put chunks of K-Roast syrup and orange juice.
It's like road tar that's frozen.
It cuts your throat when you swallow it.
They said drink it.
And I drank it.
I don't know if it helped me or not, but mostly because I didn't have to drink.
And then they told her, they said whenever he gets a little mouthy, a little ornery,
give him candy.
Candy will smooth that out.
She got the biggest sack of sour balls you've ever seen.
I'm off her when I think about it.
Just a hint to you, if you're working with a newcomer, get chocolate.
Turtles are nice.
Get them turtles.
Something nice, you know what I mean?
Love and tolerance.
That's what we do.
Not sour balls.
And I met my dad that night.
We went to a meeting.
And it was a meeting much like this.
Smaller, but just like this.
With men and women there.
It was met in a bank, I think it was there, or a hospital.
I can't remember.
We got to the back door.
And there was a guy standing there with a baseball cap on.
It was sort of a snowy night.
And he had a Levi jacket on and a baseball cap on.
And just looked like someone off the street.
And the guy stuck his hand out and grabbed mine.
And my father says, that's Jimmy.
And he's your sponsor.
And my father went in.
And I got this yo-yo hanging onto my hand.
And I pray to God I never forget it.
Jimmy gave me alcohol synonymous.
He said to me, he said, my name's Jimmy.
And I'm glad to meet you.
And I just knew that he was.
And I'll tell you what his hand felt like.
His hand was firm.
And it was warm.
And it was dry.
It was the hand of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I know what mine felt like.
And I felt some of my hand that night.
It was wet.
And it was cold.
And it was scary.
And I didn't want to be there.
Didn't know what I was or what I wasn't.
But I felt the warmth of his handshake.
And then he began to do something nobody else had ever done.
He began to talk to me about him.
Not about me.
Talk to me about him.
Talk to me about how he drank.
Well, he came from West Virginia.
He worked in a coal mine.
Then he worked in an automobile plant.
We had nothing in common.
Not work.
Not politics.
Not religion.
Nothing.
But as he talked to me about how he drank and where it took him, what happened with
his family, I knew that he'd experienced what I'd experienced and felt like I'd felt.
And then he told me something I didn't hardly believe.
He hadn't had a drink in two years.
And then the meeting started.
And some guy told his story much like I'm telling mine.
I don't know what the guy said.
All I remember is laughing.
That's all I remember of that meeting.
I can remember it.
I can remember it now.
And I've since learned laughter is the healthiest thing I can do.
I can inventory my ass off and be miserable.
If I laugh, I'm okay.
I mean, laughter is.
You can't think when you're laughing.
Try and think and laugh.
You can't do it.
You can't be mad and laugh.
And there's something about it.
There's a thing that goes on.
When we laugh, they say endorphins get loose.
I don't know what the hell they are.
I ain't educated.
But, you know, people run for miles to get them loose.
All you got to do is laugh.
I mean, it's a great thing.
People take chemicals to make them.
All you got to do is laugh and they're happening.
So I believe laughter is healthy.
And it was healthy that night.
I didn't drink.
And then they told me after the meeting.
He introduced me to guys.
They're all shaking my hand saying, keep coming, kid.
You'll be all right.
Keep coming, kid.
You'll be all right.
And he introduced me to this one old guy there.
His name was Frank.
Frank Turk.
Frank Turk was sober longer than God.
God, he was sober about 27 years, 26 years.
He was an old man.
He was 57 years old.
He was bald.
He had a gravelly voice.
He said to me, keep coming, kid.
You'll be all right.
Keep coming, kid.
He said, by the way, this is Joe.
And this gravelly voice.
You know, he said, he's sober three days or three weeks, whatever.
A real short period of time.
I looked at him.
This is the guy I wanted for 26, 27 years of life.
How do you stay sober three days or a week?
How do you do that?
I was fascinated.
Let me tell you about Frank.
You know, I've got heroes now called synonymous.
A hell of a lot of them.
You know, we were talking about them this week, Tom and Susie and I and Scott.
But my heroes are people in AA.
They're not persons.
They're people.
And this Frank's a hero.
I've seen them over the years.
I go up to visit family in Ohio.
And I was up there a couple years ago.
And I go to a meeting on the Near East side.
And there's Frank.
He's still old.
And he's still bald.
And he's still got that gravelly voice.
He shrunk a little bit, though he ain't as tall as he was.
He's pricier than his 80s.
But I remember I went up to him and I said, Frank, you remember me?
He said, hell, yeah, kid.
I remember you.
He said, keep coming.
You're going to be all right.
He said, by the way, this is Rob or Joe.
He said, I'm sponsoring them.
He's got 10 days.
I'm not sponsoring them.
He said, Frank, you're still sponsoring guys?
50-some years sober?
Ah, hell, kid, he says.
I don't want them.
I need drivers.
I can't drive no more.
Frank's a real hero.
He said, but you're going to have to stop.
.
If you want, let me have it, or I'll give it to anyone to get it.
Jimmy talked to me that night, and he told me, he said,
Jay, how do you feel?
And I told him, I told him I was sick and I was scared.
He said, and I was as honest as I could, and he was more honest than I'd ever been.
He didn't make me tell him I was an alcoholic.
He just said I was sick and I was scared.
He said, I will promise you something.
If you will do three things on a daily basis,
I will guarantee you'll never have to come off another drunk when you do them.
I said, yeah, what are they?
I'd have done anything.
He said, in the morning when you get up, say, God, help me not drink today.
If you can, go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.
He said, now, you're a seaman.
You'll probably go back to see you every time.
If you can't go, maybe a week, a month, whatever.
You won't be able to go.
But if you can go, and when you go to bed at night, every night, say, thank you, God, for a sober day.
He said, will you do it?
I said, Jimmy, I can do the business of our meetings, but I can't pray.
I know I'd lost whatever faith I'd had as a kid.
Whatever thoughts were in me about God were gone.
There might have been a God, but there was nothing I could pray to.
I had traded off all of that information.
I was dead, spiritually.
And I told him I can't pray.
And I remember he laughed.
Again, that laughter of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And he said, help, kid, you don't have to pray.
Just say the words.
You don't even have to mean them.
Just say them.
Will you do it?
And I said, yeah, I would.
And I've done that on a daily basis from then until now.
The second day in Alcoholics Anonymous, and don't get nervous.
I ain't taking you through 31 years a day at a time.
A couple points.
They're real important.
Unless you want me to stop.
On the second day, we're on our way to a meeting.
And back then, they didn't say, what are you doing tomorrow night?
He just said, I'm picking you up.
We're going to a meeting.
I'll pick you up at 7 o'clock.
I didn't know I had a choice until I was sober two weeks.
Wouldn't look like I had a pressing social calendar or anything either.
Anyway, he's taking me to a meeting that night.
We're on our way to a meeting.
He said, kid, you had a drink since last night.
And I looked at him like he was nuts.
How the hell could I have had a drink?
I'm thinking to myself.
I didn't tell him that.
But you didn't drive.
I didn't drive me off until 2 or 2.30 in the morning.
Called me at 6.
I get that damn shot.
Called me when I got back from the hospital.
Called me at noon.
Called me at 4.
Picked me up at 7.
And every time I went, there was someone I'd seen.
But, you know, I didn't say that.
So I said, no, of course not.
And he looked at me and he said, that's fantastic.
He said, you know you've just stayed sober the absolute longest period of time you'll ever have to stay sober?
I thought he was out of his mind.
He'd lost it.
He said, no.
I said, one day.
He said, that's all we got.
One day.
One day.
He didn't tell me 90 and 30 or whatever the hell they say in these places.
He said, one day.
That's all I got today is one day.
Yeah, I got a lot of time between me and my last drink.
But I'm just as close to my next one as anyone here.
And the deal is that I got one day today.
Today.
And I got that and all I have to do is concentrate on today.
And with that statement, he took away every excuse I have to drink today.
Because I had yesterday to prove that it will work today.
Anyhow, about two weeks into this program,
I was getting ready to go to the gym.
I was getting ready to go to the gym.
I was getting ready to go back to Florida.
We're on our way back to a meeting.
Or way back from a meeting.
And I looked over at Jimmy and said, Jimmy, I still don't believe in this God stuff.
And again, he sort of laughed.
And he said, Jay, you said tonight was the first night you'd done anything in AA
except drink the coffee and spit crumbs at people when you ate the donuts.
What was it?
I said, well, I read the traditions.
He said, before you read them, what did you say?
I said, I'm Jay and I'm an alcoholic.
And he asked me what I thought an alcoholic to be.
And at that point, I accepted what you told me in the book.
But the doctor said, I'm not an alcoholic.
The doctor says about the phenomenon of craving and obsession of the mind.
I knew I had that allergy.
I knew I had that allergy.
I knew I was different.
I accepted.
And I was telling him that with a lot of conviction.
And he sort of laughed.
And he said, I know you are.
He said, I want to make sure you knew you were.
He said, a lot of times, guys your age that are young,
he said, when you get sober, you start forgetting real quick.
He said, never forget the day you came off your last drunk.
And I haven't from that day to this forgotten that.
But anyhow, he said, how long has it been since you had your last drink?
And I told him.
I knew they'd do it in a minute how long.
It had been 13 days, whatever I told him.
And he said, man, that's great.
He said, you've been doing what I told you every morning and every night?
I said, yeah, I have.
And you haven't had a drink in, whatever it was, 13 days, a day at a time?
I said, yeah, he said, that's fantastic.
He said, by the way, when was the last time you've been this long
without a drink a day at a time?
I can only share this with you.
A feeling came over me.
An awareness came over me that I knew there was a power.
There was a power that was personal to me that today I call God.
That power had shown itself by allowing me not to drink when I wanted to drink
for that unbelievably long period of time of 12, 13, 14 days.
When I wanted to drink every minute of the day, I thought about it.
I'd say, thank you, God, for a sober day.
Thinking in my head, I wish I'd have been drunk.
I'd say, God, help me not drink.
Say, I'm going to drink today.
But I would say the words, and I hadn't had to drink.
And I knew in that moment when he brought that to my attention that there was a power.
That power was personal to me that allowed me not to drink.
And all I'd had to do was be wondering.
I'd say words I didn't believe to someone I didn't believe in or about.
From the time of being willing that very first day to the awareness that I saw on that night
to this moment has been a miracle that would literally take 31 years to describe.
God has become the all-important influence in my life, and my life changed.
I told you what happened a year and a half.
So I went back to sea.
I worked on ships.
I went into business.
I went broke.
All the stuff happened.
Once I started working the steps, things started happening.
I took my inventory on Wednesday.
On Thursday, I took a fifth step, went back home and worked six and seven.
On Friday, I was making amends.
And things started happening.
I called my mother on Saturday.
I hadn't talked to her in a long, long time.
I said, Mom, this is Jay.
She said, I know who you are.
I said, I've been meaning to call you.
Yeah, I told you that amend was going to be that I'd be a loving son.
I couldn't be a loving son because I hated her.
He said, I can't do it.
I said, I've been meaning to call you, but I've got to run now.
I'll call you.
And I began to call my mother every Saturday or Sunday from then until the day she died.
And I managed to build a relationship with my mother.
And I learned to love my mother.
And I learned to like my mother.
I learned to make small talk with her about crafts and about stuff that I don't care nothing about
because I wanted to build a relationship as a loving son.
My mom died in 1999.
She died in February.
She died of diabetes.
They had done a series of operations over the four years before she died
where they cut her off an inch at a time.
And there wasn't nothing left but stumps when she died.
And she knew I'd been up to see her many times.
And I got a call from her.
She said, would you come up one more time?
My sister goes, and Mom wants to see you.
And I flew back up to see her again.
But then I was living in South Carolina.
I flew up to see her.
And as I walked into the hospital room,
and it was then in a room where someone was dying,
and you know how they get that terrible music playing real creepy,
and the nurse and doctors hovering around.
I walked in there, and that room lit up like you put a searchlight in there.
Mom.
Smiling at me.
And the nurse looked over at her and said, Rita, that was Mom's name.
She said, Rita, this must be your son Jay you're telling us about.
And my mom said, yeah, that's my son Jay.
And you know he's the best son a mother could ever have.
And he gives me so much love.
And you gave me that.
You didn't let me tell her I was sorry.
You didn't let me tell her about the things I'd done.
She knew what I'd done.
You told me to be a loving son.
That's how you amended it.
That's repairing it.
My wife.
And I.
A fantastic wife.
God, she's wonderful.
Those kids are great.
You know, they're great.
I don't even think this daughter, she's suffering in her own private hell.
I don't know where she is.
She knows I love her, but she's just going through stuff that we don't know what's going on.
This oldest son.
Fantastic.
Doing great.
Works on tow boats.
Has a family.
The littlest guy, little Jay, he's in charge of, he works for Adidas.
Some big company.
All of them give me grandkids.
I mean, this is great.
Everything's wonderful.
My wife.
She's fantastic.
We have the same crap on our marriage every marriage has.
Good days and bad days.
Depends on the day.
It was a good marriage.
Normal.
Healthy.
In 1994, I had a business going in Middle Beach.
She lived in North Carolina in that big, beautiful house with all the stuff.
We had no insurance, and I get a phone call in August, 1994, to get up there.
She's in the hospital.
I get up there.
She had a massive stroke.
Caught up by a major heart attack.
They found that she had a disease inside of her that was devastating.
It wasn't cancer.
It was advanced atherosclerosis.
She was 90 years underneath her skin.
They said that she was going to die sometime in the future.
Might be a day.
Might be.
They didn't know how long.
And they said her life would go downhill.
I said, hell, I just didn't know what was going to happen.
We were very successful at that time.
And everything we had went.
Every material thing we had went.
From then until July 12, 2000.
My wife was an active member of Al-Anon.
She was a member of Al-Anon.
By the time she was a member of Al-Anon, she was a member of Al-Anon.
She was a member of Al-Anon.
She was a member of Al-Anon.
She was a member of Al-Anon.
By the time she had the stroke, we had gone to the goal that I wanted to attain in our marriage.
I was a good husband.
I was a faithful husband.
I gave her security.
And I was able to care for her.
From 1994 to 2000 was a tough time for her.
It was a wonderful time for us.
I got to be a loving husband.
She had 11 more strokes, two major heart attacks, breast cancer.
She died of renal failure in my arms.
The last conference she came to was the Gopher State in 2000.
I had to wheel her in and out of the wheelchair.
She just wanted, we wanted to be together.
But she would have let me not go because I committed to going before.
She went downhill so fast at the end.
My wife loved Al-Anon.
She loved Al-Anon.
She was active in it.
Two years before she died, she started an Al-Anon group.
80 miles from home, there was another woman that would drive her up every Tuesday.
They helped this meeting start.
She said they'd do it for a year and then they were on their own.
All they would do is, she loved what the programs do for us.
We'd pray every day.
She'd ask God to help her with this fear that was in her.
She didn't want to die.
She didn't want to die.
She knew it was coming.
She was afraid of it.
And she was just scared.
And she would talk about it.
She'd pray about it.
And I'd bring something for her to eat.
And she'd try and eat.
And we'd pray together.
You know, we'd have to thank God for what we had.
And we enjoyed life as best we could.
Our son was going to get married.
And death was coming.
And we thought it would be a little longer.
And I had to call hospice on July 11th.
And when I called hospice, I just couldn't get anything to ease her anymore.
And they came in on July 11th about noon.
And I was moving stuff out of the bedroom into the office so that people wouldn't take
souvenirs and thought there might be a couple weeks left.
And anyhow, I remember as I got everything, all the jewelry and stuff, putting it away,
just putting it up.
And there was a little box on the dresser.
And I remember shaking it.
And there was money in it.
I heard money.
There was, you know, paper in it.
And I heard there was a rattle.
You know, we all rattle once in a while, I guess.
And I just thought, well, she's got a little money hidden.
And I finally said, well, I'm going to open it and see what's in there.
And there was a little padlock on it.
And I sat on the bed and I started prizing the padlock off.
And just one piece.
There was paper in there.
And I said, it's so weird looking at it because I'd never looked in her purse or wallet in
all of our marriage.
She'd never looked in mine.
We'd had that kind of relationship.
Drunk or sober, it's just how it was.
We respected each other's privacy.
And I looked at that paper.
I'd always wondered.
My wife didn't go to church.
I tried going a number of times to a number of churches and sobriety to improve my relationship
with God.
I never really knew how she was with her God.
And I was hoping that it was right.
She taught me so much about God and about love.
So I read that paper.
Turned out that box was a God box.
And there was one prayer in there.
It said, Dear God, please take away this awful fear to help me to accept your plan for me.
It was how she signed it that really let me know where she was with her God.
She signed it with all my love.
I pray to my God daily, many times during the day.
I don't answer.
I don't end my prayers saying, with all my love, Jay.
I think of how unselfish she was in her relationship with her God.
And I knew that she'd be fine.
I went over to her and held her.
Put my arms around her and I told her that I loved her and I wish I'd done a better
husband.
And she looked up at me and said, I thank God that he gave you to me as a husband.
And she died.
And I miss her.
I got a phone call that next morning from Sterling, a very close friend of mine in
AA.
He told me, he said, Jay, he said, she's not going to be able to come home.
She's gone and you're not.
My son was getting married in Mexico and I went down there and was able to be his dad
and mom at that wedding.
I came back home and we had the funeral and I couldn't get in the room for all the
AAs now and now that we're there.
Do I miss her?
Sure I do.
But I've gone on.
A year, a year and a half after she died, too quickly it was for me.
I married again and it was a mistake.
It was a disaster for both of us.
I didn't even like the woman I married.
I don't know why the hell I married her.
It was sort of like golf.
I played golf.
It was like, God.
He gave me a mulligan and I hit it into the swamp.
I don't know.
It's not her fault.
You know, it's not her fault.
She's fine.
If it was me, you know, it's me.
My partner.
If that marriage is done, be finished up in another month or so, you know, the divorce.
Fine.
Life is fantastic.
You know why?
Because I'm sober and allowed to be a part of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I'm allowed to share with you my shortcomings.
I'm not here to take a fifth step.
I'm here to tell you what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now.
Two stories and I'm finished.
My dad and I, no relationship with him.
He was an unemotional guy.
He was not a close man.
I wanted to make amends to him.
I'd ask my sponsor.
My dad was dying in the late 70s, early 80s.
He had cancer.
He wouldn't let anyone with kids near him.
And I'd ask my sponsor, what can I do about my dad?
And my sponsor would say, do what a loving son does.
And I said, what's that?
And he said, if you're a loving son, you're a no.
I'm blessed.
I never had sponsors tell me what to do.
They said things like, you make the decision because if you burn your ass, you sit on the blitzer.
I sort of liked that.
Unless some other bones don't make a decision, I ain't got to be responsible.
So I done what I was supposed to do.
I was a loving son.
I allowed my dad to die with dignity.
And I never knew how we stood.
But I got a card in the mail on my seventh day, eighth birthday.
And this card came and I opened it up and I couldn't read it.
It was scribbled.
All I could see was love dad.
And a letter fell out, a three-page letter from my mom.
She said, it's important you know what your dad was trying to say.
He loved you.
And he wanted you to know how important it was on your eighth birthday.
And he took himself off.
I was like, what?
He took himself off medication.
He tried to write a letter to you and his hand wouldn't work with his mind.
And my father was an intellectual snob who was a very literate man.
And he couldn't make it come out.
And she said, you tell me and I'll write it and you copy.
And he tried to do it.
He couldn't do it.
At that point, he looked up and he said, Rita, I'm a sick man and I know I'm going to die soon.
At that moment, he accepted his coming death.
But my mom said, it's important you know what the words were that he wrote.
And it said, dear son.
She had in quotes, dear son, congratulations on your eighth birthday.
What a glorious.
What a glorious and wonderful day.
And how can we ever be grateful enough to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous for all that it's given us?
It's given us a loving God who's returned to lost son and rediscovered lost father.
And I hang on to that a lot of times when I'm going through different things in life.
How can I be grateful enough to this deal we call Alcoholics Anonymous?
I made some commitments to that.
One is I realized what it is.
God gave us such a great deal.
God gave us such a great deal.
God gave us such a great deal.
I made a principle to some men and women.
I put it down in a book.
Who gave it to you, who gave it to me.
All of us charged with the same responsibility.
That we do nothing to change it, nothing to alter it, nothing to tweak it and make it better.
But to leave it just the way it was when we got it.
Alcoholics Anonymous.
So if there was a place for a person like you or me to go, to find a God to give us everything.
Thank you so much for the God you gave me.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.