I Chose Not to Drink Every Morning and Drank Every Night – Bart R.
About This Speaker Tape
Bart R. from Stewart, Florida shares at the 2017 Upper Midwest Founders Day in Minnesota with 22 years of sobriety. He grew up in Queens watching the older guys pass the bottle from his fifth-floor apartment window, started drinking and smoking weed in fifth grade, and spent most of his youth cycling through juvenile detention centers, youth correctional facilities, and shelters he would sneak out of to drink Night Train with bums on Brooklyn street corners. He tried every method he could think of to stop — including marrying a detox nurse — and none of it worked because his number one priority was not drinking, and he could not will himself into not doing it.
He first walked into AA in January 1987 after his friend Warren from the garage crew got sober, but he spent nearly seven years in the fellowship without working the program — refusing commitments because he "really can't stand people," joining a sober motorcycle club only on the condition he never had to attend a regular meeting, and white-knuckling through dry stretches that always ended the same way. The relapse that broke him came when a buddy called asking for a ride to detox, stopped to cop one bag of heroin on the way, and Bart reached into his pocket and said "Get me a bundle." He woke up the next morning stunned that he had thrown away his marriage, his daughter, and his house in one evening — and still didn't throw away the other nine bags.
His turning point came at the Utopia Young People's Group, where a speaker named Eric described alcoholism in a way Bart had never heard and called himself a "recovered alcoholic" — which made Bart so furious he told Eric's sponsee "I am going to kill him." He drove to Eric's store the next morning ready for a fight, but after two hours of war stories and recognition, he asked what he had to do. Eric said: read the first 164 pages and the Doctor's Opinion as a way of life. When Bart protested he had never read a book, Eric grabbed his shoulder and said "We will read that book together." They did, and Bart found Higher Power in the ninth step — hearing that strange sound at people's doors when he showed up to say he was wrong. He closes with the story of sponsoring Gene, a 6'4" shaved-head man full of rage at a beginner meeting, visiting him every Sunday at the Creedmoor Rehab with a sandwich and a Big Book until Gene got his son back from foster care — living proof that one man with the book in his hand has tapped into a power greater than himself.
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