If I Ever Locate My Inner Child I Will Choke Him Unconscious 🤣 – Frank J.
About This Speaker Tape
Frank J. tells his story with raw honesty and dark humor at a San Jose speaker meeting, describing a childhood in Danville, Illinois where he was a liar, cheat, and thief despite having loving parents who were married fifty years. He recounts his first drink at a high school party — nearly a gallon of sloe gin and 7-Up — which ended in a blackout, a fight, and three days of hangovers. He joined the Marine Corps at 17 to prove he was macho, but was consumed by fear he could never admit to anyone.
In Okinawa he became a daily drinker, hitting a Marine with a pool cue, setting a woman's house on fire, and nearly killing a cab driver — spending almost a year in the brig. Two tours in Vietnam as a sniper at Khe Sanh, where 151-proof rum in his canteens kept the fear and guilt at bay. Back stateside he terrorized his first wife and children, accidentally discharged a gun between his daughter's legs in a drunken rage, and lost his family to divorce. He became a violent police officer until his female partner shot him in the head.
After a brief run of real estate money — Cadillacs, gold chains, a house with a pool — he lost everything and ended up homeless, sleeping in a stolen car with his possessions in a cardboard box. A doctor told him he would die from cirrhosis and internal hemorrhaging. His parents had him committed. After thirteen months sober but with no AA program, he put a gun in a stranger's face on a freeway, choked a coworker, and had a nervous breakdown in a grocery store over a woman with too many items in the express lane.
A counselor told him his problem was not drinking but living, and sent him to AA. At the Pacific Group he learned to call his sponsor Monday through Friday, take commitments, and work the steps outside the rooms. He describes telling his wife and kids he loved them on direction from old-timers — not believing it until one day he did. With over twenty-one years sober, he has buried his father, brother, and mother, weathered two and a half years of unemployment, and watched his daughters become an attorney, a teacher, and a veterinary student. His son, sober nearly two years after thirteen years in prison, now has a relationship with him. Frank insists he is not a good man but a committed member of AA, and that the program saved his sanity and his life.
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