Jack C. on Al-Anon, Family Secrets, and the Shame of Not Drinking

My name is Jack Carpenter and I am not an alcoholic. Wanted to clear that up right away. I want to thank Doug asked me to come out, my wife to come out and speak and the flyers came out and some correspondence came out. Didn't pay much attention to it, kind of dropped it in a drawer keep a little file there and clip them all together. And Mary Pearl sent me a letter, an email, and she says she was really excited to hear that I would actually be doing my AA talk at this conference. Unfortunately, I'd have to pick up my drinking frequency a little bit. I haven't had drinks since 1992. Not that I'm an alcoholic, I just don't care to drink because it didn't do for me what it did for everybody else. And I am the black mark on my family that I didn't measure up as an alcoholic. It was the shame of my family, and I share that with you openly. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as it used to bother me and them. Really excited to be here. I do have one further favor to ask of the committee. I went over to the board over there and looked at all your past flyers from all the previous years, and I really am following in the footsteps of some giants in Al-Anon Alcoholics Anonymous that you guys have had here to speak. And I know you couldn't change those flyers that said I was the AA speaker and she was the Al-Anon speaker, but could you print just one for the archives so that in the years to come when my friends come here they don't go, aha, I knew it, and I get the phone call. I know that Dick and Bill, Dick, the first time I did a talk that Dick, Peggy's husband Dick, was around, he walked up to me and he looked at me for a long time and he just shook his head and he said, why didn't you just drink? It would have been so much easier. and uh i may have to mention this again midway through my talk you guys are very privileged this weekend i very seldom get to go to the same place that mary pearl is at they very seldom require that they have the two sickest alanons in the country in one spot at the one time but we have so much in common my favorite part of mary parole story is not where she drowned jd in the tub that's a nice little color commentary my favorite point is that she drug him out and dried his hair so he wouldn't catch a cold. She gets me. I may want her dead, but I don't want her to suffer. I'm going to tell you, I woke up this morning and looked over at the pillow next to mine, and the sight of my wife there in the bed took my breath away again, and it does that most of the time. I need to tell You that it wasn't that long ago that I would wake up thinking far more philosophical things, like I wonder how the coroner would really know if she died in her sleep or had a pillow over her face because certainly no jury in the world would convict me. We heard that already today. Oh God, I'm so glad to be here and you guys have treated me so kind. And Nicole and Clint took us out to coffee. We flew into Nebraska to visit my mother-in-law, my beautiful mother- in-law and came over here kind of on our own power suit. Nobody had to pick us up at the airport, but we got to go spend some time at coffee and talk about family and kids and stuff. How many of you were here when my beautiful wife did her talk at the last meeting? Oh good, I can leave out what it was like. Did that mean nasty bitch make you cry too? I was the one who was here. I was the one in front row crying and blowing snot bubbles. My wife is my hero today, you know. I get the privilege of doing a lot of this stuff when I get to travel around the country and meet a lot fantastic people. Bob and I have been a lot places together and Mary Pearl and I have had the privilege of hanging out together a little bit and I've heard Danny speak a couple of times and would like to get to know him better. It's really a privilege. But the one who I know at the end of the day who stands at the podium and tells us stuff that goes home and lives it better and anybody I know is my beautiful wife. I see her do that every day. She lives most of her day on the phone, as I do. We sponsor a lot of guys and a lot of women in Al-Anon and AA. And most of our conversations are just nods and winks over the telephone. Yeah, that'll be fine for dinner, and I'll be ready in a few minutes. And we're always on the throne. She's on the phoen more than I am. I decided that if anything ever happens to her, I'm burying her with her cell phone, putting the number on her headstone so you guys can call her, because nothing else is going to work. And I see her go home and live this program every single day. And she brought recovery into our home before I did. You know, Merp talked about J.D. got sober and it took a little bit longer. She was more attracted to AA than Al-Anon. That is also my story. I will tell you a littlebit about what it was like before I got here. I come from a family that is deeply affected by alcoholism. And it wasn't in the classic sense. It wasn't my parents. My parents did not, to my knowledge, ever drink very much. They occasionally got, they did drink and got drunk. There were a lot of activities that happened in our house around drinking. Our house was a hub of activity for our family, and our friends would come over every weekend something was going on. If it wasn't a party, it was just sitting around, people sitting around drinking, waiting for fun to break out, because if they didn't come to our house, they knew they would miss something. And it might involve gunfights, gangfights,, car chases, horse races, you name it. It was, there was always something going on, and if you weren't there the next week, you had to be just regaled with the stories of the stuff that went on but my parents didn't drink i came down and i heard you guys talking about what it was like to grow up in a home that was affected by alcoholism about the secrets and the violence and the people that couldn't get to work and being thrown out of houses we had different name every other month to turn the power back on or to get somebody to rent us another place somewhere and we never knew if we'd have food on the table and one of my earliest recollections was having my mom and my my dad who fought quite a lot, crying and asking her what was wrong. She said, we've got no money to eat. And I'm five or six years old, and I went out in the street and I'm crying. I went down the street to Bobby's house, and Bobby's mom, Sally, said, Jack, what's the matter? And I said, we don't have any food for, we don'T have any money to EAT food tonight. And this woman who's probably one of us in training at the time marched her kids down the front door and knocked on the door and said, Mrs. Carpenter, I understand that you don't have any MONEY to feed your family, andI'd be glad to help you guys eat some, get some food for tonight. And my mom said, we're fine, thank you very much, and pulled me through the door and beat the crap out of me for telling somebody what was going on. You know, that was the way the house was. It might be going on, it might be obvious to everybody, but we don't talk about it. We never talk about it, it was like the secrets in the family stayed in the family, this real sick dynamic that happened there. But there was a lot of madness, and my dad and my mom had their times, and my dad was, I hated my father most of my adult life because he was a womanizer and he cheated on my mom and cheated on his other wives and cheated upon his other wife and girlfriends with my mom after they were divorced, and it was just madness. And you know, I came out in the world with the tools that I got there, tools for communication and conflict resolution. You know, communication was Mom trying to leave the house because they're having a fight and Dad's getting a little out of hand and she's going down the driveway in the car. Dad thinks they're not done talking. So he pulls up in the hood of the car and jumps in while she's backing down the driveway, turning about five grand, pulling the spark plug wires out. It was at night, so it was a real light show. He was lit up, the hood was lit off, lightnings going everywhere. He finally got it to a stop, and they continued their negotiation at the end of the driveway. And then he was married to another woman, one of my stepmother. There's only one that he was actually married to after my mom, and they were having a disagreement. And she went in the other room and got the pistol. Usually it was my dad that had the pistol for one reason or another, but he had this nickel-chrome .45 military pistol. And she walked in the kitchen, and when they would fight, we'd make ourselves scarce because they're mad as hell at each other, but God help you if one of them draws a bead on you because they'RE not making any progress with the other one, but you do something to get their attention, and you're next in line, so we would just get the hell out of the way. And stepmom went and got the pistol. She walked right in the kitchens without saying a word and pulled the hammer back and pulled it off, and it didn't go off. And she says, This thing's broke. My dad says, Let me see that. Takes it, snaps the safety off, fires around through the wall into the neighbor's house. He goes, seems to be working fine. Turns around and hands it back to her. I have conflict resolution skills too. A lot of madness went on in that house. I got out when I was 16 to go create my own, I guess. When I was 15 years old, I moved out and moved in with my girlfriend and her drunk mom. And I worked two jobs to pay the bills over there because I was racing motorcycles to pay for that. And really thought that I'd gotten out of the house, it was going to be okay. But the problem is that you've heard already here a couple of times a day is I took me with me. And there was a lot of craziness that happened with that. Went out in the world. I went in the Marine Corps, Vietnam era. I didn't have to go to Nam, thank you very much. But got married soon after I was in the Corps and had a couple OF kids. but my role in my family was defined by the fact that I couldn't wait to be old enough to drink like they did and somebody here this morning said they heard that Mary Pearl said it, they heard the fun going on in the other room around the drinking and couldn't waiting to go out and join them and I couldn' wait to go and join the adults and do what they did and they all drank and everything happened around drinking and I found out before I was even old enough to take a drink legally that alcohol did not do for me what it did for them people out there. I couldn't wait for it to fill that hole in me that Bob so eloquently described when he makes that hand gesture about it being on him. It was on me from the time I was a kid. I needed something to get it off and alcohol didn't do it. It stayed on me a long time. I created a lot of wreckage with that hole on my gut that was on мне and I couldnít get out from under it. I had to find a place that I fit in life and my place was I need to take care of you. I can't manage my life. I can' t make any decisions that seem to be worth a damn for me. But if you bring your problems to me, I have this one defective character I'm willing to share with you. I am cursed with vision. I can very clearly see the problem and the solution on a straight line between the two. If you just listen to me I can fix it for you. And I'm the go-to guy if you're in trouble. In my circle of friends and my family and the guys I ran with, I was the phone call. They didn't call mom. They didn't call the lawyer on their one call from jail. They called Super Al-Anon or whatever the hell I was, and I would go and get them. That was my job. And I fit in that role. I didn't fit in the other one, but I fit into that one. When I drank, I got stupid. I got tired. I went to sleep. I remembered everything that I did. I couldn't wait to get old enough to have a blackout. I loved the idea of a blackouts. My brothers would drink and get drunk, get in a fight, get the girl, win the fight, get beat up, didn't care. And in the morning we'd tell them all about it, and they'd get to live it all again. And I could never get to that point. Dick said that I missed it by one beer. You missed it by a sixer? I missed it by 1 beer. He said I didn't properly apply myself. I get a phone call in the middle of the night from the stepmom with the pistol you all remember her and it was my brother had gone to the bar and gotten in a fight and some guys had tried to drag his girlfriend out of the van and rape her or something and they'd crash windows out of his van and he'd gone home and got the shotgun and went back And so stepmom, the mom with the pistol, called me. She thought that him having a weapon was ill-advised. I had trouble doing that math. But she says, you need to go find him. He's got the gun and he's gone looking for him. And I said, okay. And I jumped in my little car and went hunting for him and I have tracking skills. They are so good I don't have to find them. They can find me if they need arise. And the first water and hole I checked there, it says, brother, he's sitting in the parking lot. It's 2.30 in the morning. He's Got that shotgun parked propped up on the A pillar of his car. None of the windows were in. All gone. There was a big pile of glass in the parking lot. I pull up and look around. Ain't nobody here but him and the shotgun. I said, what's going on? He said, I'm waiting for him to come back. I'm sure it made perfect sense to him, but I figured it was going to be an easy night in hero business. I said give me the gun. He gave me the gum. I broke it in half and took the shells out and dropped them in the trunk of my little Mustang and mission accomplished heading home. And he says, well, I'm going to find them. And I said, well you go with God. And I got in my car to leave and I was almost out the parking lot when my CB radio piped up and it said I found them there around the back. So I turned that little car around and I'm starting to think it's a long ways to the shotgun in the trunk because there was about seven or eight of them by his description of the fight which may or may not have been accurate. So I go back and I go around the right side of this place and I knew he'd gone around the left-hand side and we came out the back and there was a big mall and there's a big parking lot back there. I don't think it's there anymore. I think it is all condos now but there was one light stand in the middle of the parking lot and there are three cars there parked as close together as you can park three cars and there were seven or eight young men having a 3 o'clock in the morning after the bars closed beer just minding their own business. My radio comes on again and it says, I'm going in. If you are new to Al-Anon I'll translate that for you. That means we're going in There's two exits to the parking lot One at his end, one at my end We've got those covered There will be no escape tonight For these eight guys I am not the alcoholic Gets better So now I'm coming up with a plan Gotta have a plan I'm a planner I'm gonna die tonight There are seven or eight guys there. Brother's pretty drunk. I'm studying math at the university, and I'm going, okay, how am I going to deal with my seven doing the math? And I came up with a plan not to die tonight. That plan was I was going to get going in there pretty hard in that little Mustang, get it turned sideways, and slide in there and hit one of them cars. My hope was that I would get two or three of them caught between the chassis and give me a chance to get out the door before the fun started. And I put that plan into action. I started across that parking lot with that little Mustang. I've been racing cars since I was four years old, motorcycles since I was eight, and boats and anything else I get my hands on ever since. I'm pretty good with a steering wheel. I was coming across that parking lot, got up about 70, and I grabbed the emergency brake and started to back end around when my radio piped up one more time and said, I don't think that's them. I'm pretty good with a car but I believe I did some of the best driving I've ever done that night because I went by those guys without hitting anybody at a very high I was so fast that they didn't have time to throw a beer bottle at me I went buy so fast and I headed right out the driveway at Brothers End of the parking lot because I thought it would be less than advisable to discuss my poor behavior with them at that time. And I headed on home. Brother never did find him. I don't know what happened with that, but I went on home, and the reason I tell that story is just one of the stories. There were a lot of them like that one. That one was particularly exciting, but it has another little aspect to it, and that is that an accident had happened with my younger daughter. She was 1 year old, and that wife and I were working at the time to make ends meet. I was fresh out of the service, and I was trying to go to school on a GI bill, and we really struggled to make ends meet. And in the care of a babysitter, my one-year-old drowned in a foot-and-a-half deep plastic pool in my backyard. And she did not die. She didn't get CPR for a while. She was clinically dead for about 20 minutes until the police got there and did CPR and called an ambulance and took her to the hospital, and she was in a full arrest coma. And when they came to us after six weeks at Children's Hospital and said that she needed to move, they needed the space, and they wanted to put her in a state institution, And that wife said to her, said to the nurse, no, we'll be taking her home and we'll take care of her. And we went out and acquired all of the equipment that we needed, medical equipment, heart monitors and tubes. She had a trach tube and fed her through a tube in her stomach and breathing monitors and stuff and brought that child home. I sponsored a lot of guys. One of the guys I sponsored recently called me up because him and his brother were faced with a decision about whether to put a feeding tube in his mom that was very ill and was suffering with severe dementia. and he was struggling with what to do, what the right thing was to do in recovery and I sponsored him for a while now and I said, well, I have some experience with the feeding tube thing and he said, how did you make the decision to do the feeding tub? And I said I did not. I was not asked my opinion and I did feel worthy of giving one because I'm not enough in here that my opinion doesn't mean enough to anybody. I just went along. She said we were going to do it and we did but we didn't. That wife did that child's care for a year while she lay in a coma because I couldn't be in the same room with my daughter. You know, I've described to you a guy who you don't want to be on the other side of in a fight. I've prescribed you a guide that put my life at risk to race motorcycles on the weekends and cars and boats and everything else. It sounds like a pretty tough guy. I'm terrified. I can't be In The Room With My Daughter because if the feelings get up here just a little past the bottom of my eyelids, I'm done. The world ends as I know it, and I can, and I panic and I run from the room. I couldn' t be there to take care of that child. That wife did all of that care for a year, And that night when I got that call, it is more than likely, because the time frame's a little fuzzy, more than unlikely I got out of bed and walked around the crib where my daughter lay plugged into all those machines. For whom I was the sole breadwinner, walked past my son's room, for whom I Was the Sole Breadwinner and Father, and left that wife and those two children to go take that action, they probably would have wound me up in prison if I'd have done what I intended to do. And one of them tripped or fell, or even if they didn't, they locked me up for a long time. And I was going to do that because I didn't have a better answer. The only reason I got in scrapes like that is because I was terrified. That doesn't sound like somebody who's afraid. I'm afraid of dying. I'm scared to get hurt in a fight. I haven't had enough to drink to do what my brother is going to do. He's not going to remember any of this in the morning. He's going to go, how did I get all marked up? And I'm going to member all of it. I'm terrified of that, but there's one thing I'm more afraid of. I'm most afraid of that you'll know I'm not. I'm just afraid. So I'll take that action instead. And I're here to tell you from my experience on both sides of it that there's nobody you want to be in a fight with is more dangerous than somebody who's truly afraid. And I was somebody who you needed to be afraid of because my fear would cause me to do things like that. That daughter died after a year. I stayed gone for the year, and I stayed gone after. I know today, because of you guys and people that shared their experience with me in the program, that most marriages don't survive the loss of a child. I don't know why that is, but that marriage didn't survive probably because I didn't participate in it and I didn' t come home. And I work in the movie business. I stayed going. I chose to stay gone, and i could. It was available to me. Six to nine months of the year, I'm gone on the road. What I did while I was out there was I acted exactly the same way that my father acted. Somehow or another, I thought that I had the moral high ground because unlike my father, I told nobody about it. I didn't talk about my conquests with best friends or with my brothers or with anybody that I was working with. I did all the things that my dad did. I just didn't tell anybody. And somehow or another I thought, That made me different and it did not. And I met Leslie on the show she described to you. I was workin' in Page, Arizona on a movie. We had a stuntman get killed on that movie. I was involved in his rescue attempt. I was talking to one of the guys I sponsor about something related to that this morning, something he's struggling with back home that the story fit. And Leslie and I hooked up. I was on a date with her best friend and talking nice about my wife. That was catnip to the alcoholic for some reason. She found me totally irresistible. She asked me to dance, and she actually tried to seduce me on the dance floor. I'm out on a day with her bed. She said, I'm your best friend. And I said, i'm with somebody. She goes, I know. That's why I like you. Something I noticed about her right away was that when you poured in alcohol, her clothes seemed to fall right off. I really liked that. I didn't tell you I was deep. When we started dating, we changed locations. Leslie came down to see me on the next location. She told me her dad was very sick in Omaha. He was sick for a long time before he passed away and she needed to go home. So I bought her a ticket on the last flight. I took the next plane out of there and drove her to the airport, put her on the plane. My wife had just come out on the other plane, picked her up, went back. Why make two trips to the airport? I went back at the end of that movie, and Leslie showed up on the West Coast. She was in a series of geographics to go as far west as she could go without actually swimming and called me up for a date, and I believe it was our first official date. We'd seen each other once or twice, but we were actually going to go on a date. And she told you what happened, that I went up to go find her at this phantom uncle's house, and I can't find it, andI keep calling her from the pay phone. We didn't have cell phones then, and l'm telling her there's no street to go straight. It's a T-intersection, and she's drunk and not from around here, you know. And I'm trying to get her to give me directions. And she finally comes out to find me, and I'm doubling back, and she's in this car wreck. She's gone head on with her Honda with an Oldsmobile, a big car. The woman on the Olds was a little banged up, but she wasn't breathing. And they were really in a hurry to get er out of the car. And the police were there, and the fire trucks, and the paramedics, and they got the jaws of life cut in the car apart. And I hear the officer say, we don't know who she is. She doesn't seem to have any ID. She's got Nebraska plates. We can't run those. And I said, well, I know who he is. So I followed the ambulance to the hospital there. It was just a little emergency room. It wasn't really a trauma center, and they took her in, and they put her in one of these little rooms, and we're sitting back there waiting for somebody to do something, and she's really hurt pretty bad. She stops breathing, and I'm thinking our date's not really going the way I'd planned it. So I ran out in the hallway. It was a dingy little room, dingy Little Hospital, and I screamed at the nurse, and I grabbed the crash carts, and I ran in there, and he jumped on her and got her going, And she looked at me, and when they got her heart started again, she rolled her head over on the table. It was about all she could move. She looked right at me with those great big loosey eyes that I love so much today. And she said, let me go. Now, I absolutely could not wrap my mind around that. And my wife's sponsor, who she described to you, I call her AA's answer to Lizzie Borden, told me that I am not an alcoholic, and I will never know what an alcoholic knows. And I believe her. I wasn't sure I believed her then, but I really believe her now. But I know that that day what I saw for just about two-tenths of a second was the pain and misery involved in the act of drinking. That door opened and shut really fast where she would rather die than to pay the price for doing it again for another wreck, for another mess, for somebody cleaning it up, for going to jail, dying looked better. And when she opened her eyes and saw me instead, it was not good news. That was to become a continuing theme in our relationship later on. So now she's breathing again, and they decide that they're not going to keep her. They said, She's got to go. I said, What do you mean she's gotto go? She's died twice tonight, and she's gotta go. Yep, no insurance, gotta go, and then they put a neck brace on her. That was nice of them. Put her in a wheelchair, and it wheeled her out to the little Mustang. I still had the Mustang. I miss that car. Nurse is loading her in, and he says, I hope you live near a hospital because she's really not doing very well. I said, oh, thanks for sharing that. So now we're trying to discuss what to do with her, and she can't talk. She took the steering wheel on her throat and crushed her windpipe. She got a broken leg and some other, she's all messed up. She died a couple times tonight. And she whispers to me, I guess you can take me to a hotel. And I thought, nah. About one, even eight seconds, I reached over. I remember her hand on the console, that thing, that little stick. She had her hand in the console. I reached around and patted her on the hand. I says, that's all right. I've got a better idea. I'll just take you home. Did you all forget I got a wife and kids at home? She didn't. She thought, oh, I'm drunk, but I ain't drunk enough for that. But she had a little choice. So I called that wife on one of the pay phones and said, friend of mine's been a wreck. I'm bringing her home. She met us in the front yard. She grabbed Leslie's ankles, and I grabbed her armpits, and we carried her in. Leslie'd been sharing up podiums. You missed it today, hon, but she's been sharing podiums for 19-plus years that I dropped her coming through the door. Might have been a little nervous bringing the girlfriend home to meet the wife and kids the first time. Took her into a little room that was a bedroom then, it's in my office now that my son and my sister moved away, and put her on the bed and sat next to her waiting for her to die. She was in really bad shape, and I really thought she might not make it. After about three days, it became apparent she was going to be okay, and we found out through her folks that she actually did have insurance, and I started taking her in the back door of this little, it wasn't dirt floor, but it was close, this little clinic down the street, and they set her bones and taped her up and started giving her meds. And it was the longest period that she ever went without drinking. She was consuming a lot of medication. One night at dinner, just me and the family, right? Or me and my wife and girlfriend and the kids having dinner at the house there. And I got out a little glass of wine. I'm going to have some wine. And I would have a glass about the size of one of these only it's got a stem on it. And I'd pour it about half full. And I might leave some of that. My wife will tell you that that is alcohol abuse. And Leslie says, I'll be having some of that. I said, no, you won't. She said, yes, I will. I said no, you won t says right here on your medication. I read it out loud to her. She said you may not consume alcoholic beverages when you're taking this product and she, my wife, my girlfriend had such a hissy fit in front of my wife and embarrassed me. I gave her the whole bottle. She was so well behaved that that wife and I made sure she had her own bottle every night from then on. That was how long sobriety went in those days. So now she described to you what happened. We all take a shower together. I'd hold her up by the armpits. Wife would wash one side. I'd flip her around, and she'd wash the other side back in the wheelchair. I made a wheelchair for her so she'd fit through all them little skinny doors in the house. We'd wheel her up to the table and wheel her to the can, pick her up, drop her trousers, set her on. She couldn't do anything. One big happy family we are. Now she's starting to hobble around on crutches, and she's trying to make some phone calls and send out some resumes about jobs and stuff, and that wife has decided that she needs to start going on double-blind dates with us. So she's calling up guys that we know to set them up on dates with Leslie, and we're going out to dinner. Just the four of us. Me and my wife and my girlfriend and some poor bastard thinks he's getting lucky tonight. Nice restaurant with a tablecloth and the waiter and the maitre d' and all the stuff and we have a little wine. And somebody kicks their shoe off and they're barefoot as up my pant leg rubbing my calf. And my highest ambition in life is it ain't the guy. Because I have no idea which one of them is doing it. But I'll tell you what to do if you're ever in that situation. Take a little sip of wine, wink and smile at everybody. I have reason to believe since then that it was my beautiful wife Leslie, but I had some serious doubts at the time because she was coaching my then-wife about how to improve our marriage and some weird things were starting to happen. And I was trying to get her to butt out. Anyway, Leslie got a job offer in Texas and off she went to Texas and I said about finally dissolving that marriage, which really hadn't been much of a marriage. Today I know that it wasn't a marriage because I didn't show up for it. I wanted to put all of that in her side of the court, but it was really about me not showing up. I simply didn't shows up for the marriage. Even when I was there, I was absent. I was an absent father, an absent husband, an absence provider. I sent the money. I came from a place maybe not exactly like Mert described this morning where we didn't know where we would live or if we'd had food on the table, and the best I could do as a parent was make sure there was a roof over the top and food on the table. That was as close as I could get to love and commitment to that family, and I did nothing else because I had no tools to do that. Leslie called me up after about six months in Texas, got in trouble down there, lost her job. She worked in the hotel and restaurant business in management, and she could drink at the bar for free as the manager, which saved us an awful lot of money over the years I realize now. Asked if she could come back to California, and went and got her. I took my foster brother, jumped in a truck, drove straight to Houston, Texas and loaded her and her furniture and her cat and put them in the car and drove them straight back to California and moved her in to live happily ever after. Yeehaw! Holy crap, I had a tiger by the tail. I had no idea what I was up against. It was exciting for a while and she told you this. You know, I'm a little commitment-phobic now. Wasn't happy to be married. Wasn't unhappy to be a parent. Didn't do any of it very well and she's talking about moving in and making this a commitment and I got a little fear of that And she's told me about the heart attack and the two heart attacks and the stroke. I've seen her die a couple of times. She seems to be hanging on by a thread, and she says the doctors tell me I'll never live to be 30. And I go, she's 29 now. I can hang on that long. So I called an insurance guy, and I bought two 20-year term life insurance policies on her and moved her in. that was 22 years ago and they both laughed lapsed jokes on me she's still here threw all that money away i really thought that honest to god i thought that i can do this for a year and then i'll be a grieving widow that could be good i could get laid with that that'd be all right i had priorities so now she's living with me and i'm traveling a lot and i come home and she's never happy to see me that same thing when the eyes opened up i come home the conquering hero and she you know i come through the door to hellfire and brimstone i don't know that she's a floor drinker she can't be a floor drinking one on there because she's trying to maintain the facade you know but when i'm gone she can be a four drinker so she's not happy that i come home and invade her space because she cannot drink the way she wants to and needs to when i am there and i just you know I don't know what the hell happened i'd come through the door of this hail of bullets and i was always glad to be gone and you know and she's on probation all the time we're not married she's embarrassing me in front of friends and and colleagues and i went up on that movie and she says it's 500 miles home i got news we drove from portland oregon to los angeles in that truck without speaking a word and i'm going to tell you it was summertime but it was about 40 below on the cab of that truck because i had the ability to lower the temperature by the absence of my conversation that's what i had as a gift and she knows i'm throwing her out when we get to the house and on the way down the ramp she says i i've you know the only time we have a problem is when I drink. Maybe I have a problem with alcohol, and I said, no, you don't. Isn't that odd? You have a couple of glasses of wine a day, just stop. She goes, I think it's the alcohol, but I need to get some help. But what she says is that I told her if she went somewhere to get help, that I was done and she was out of there. I don't remember saying that, but I don' t disbelieve that it's true. Maybe I did. I can't imagine my saying that but I believe that she believes it and it might have happened. So at seven, eight months of sobriety, she gets sober. She called this place and checked herself in, and a woman came in on a hospital and institution call and gave her her phone number. That was Lizzie Borden. The scariest sober woman in Alcoholics Anonymous. Oh my God. She scared the pants off of everybody. I'm serious, and I say this, but I'm serious. You'd be in here chatting before the meeting, getting ready to go, and Pat would come through the door back there and a hush would roll over the room. And I'll look and see how Pat's doing. If Pat's okay, they're all going to be okay she was scary sober and i loved her because she was mean to my wife she didn't scare me i love that woman to pieces i called her up and said you know i think she skipped over a little stuff in that third step you might be paying attention to she thanked me for the information hung up the phone a guy called me this week out of front of mine a lady friend in aa and she told this guy he needed to talk to me and he called me up and i wasn't sure what it was about he'd broke up with his girlfriend because she wasn't drunk and then And they'd been apart for a couple, three, four months or something. And she called him and said, I need some help. Can you help me? And he went right over and picked her up and took her to detox and paid the bill for it. And then she got out and got a sponsor and was going to meetings. And she went to a meeting one night and didn't come home. And the reason he called me was because he'd been at the AA clubhouse demanding that somebody give him her sponsor's number so he could call and check up and see what was going on. And he could not understand why they wouldn't give him the number. So they made him call me. And he didn't like what I had to say either. I said, you know, this is none of your business. you know, when I call her my wife it implies ownership. You guys made me take the label off of that. That's my beautiful wife Leslie. She has her own life and her own personality and her own world is separate from mine. Anyway, so now she's going to AA as a courtesy coming out of this place and she's gone and Pat's saving her seat at meetings and she shows up because she knows Pat's saving her seat and she better be in it. She's meeting people at meetings and doing this deal and she comes home. We're fighting every weekend. You know, I got sobriety that's kicking my ass. Drinking I got handled. I have the moral high ground when she's drunk all the time. And bonus, blackout drinker, she don't know if she did anything wrong. If I'm pissed off, she has to assume it's about her. I wake up every morning pissed off. She has to wake up Every morning. Sorry, what does that do? I get control of everything. Moral high ground in all areas, social calendar, checkbook, You know, money, TV clicker. That was a big one. She got sober and two things happened I didn't really care for. One of them was she didn't ever seem to sleep for a year of sobriety. She never slept. Part number two is she comes home from an AA meeting. She says they told me at AA that my brain is broke and I should never believe anything that comes out of that. I said okay. And then the next thing out of her mouth is you know I've been thinking. And I'm going, Whoa, whoa, whoa! What happened to that? Everything in there is broken. Then we would get into an argument and she would chase me through the house. I wheelied my motorcycle through a chain-link fence to get away from her because I knew I was going to put my hands on her. I have never hit a woman in my life but I got close that day and I had to get away. And she chased me down the street dragging pieces of that fence behind my motorcycle. Because she's terrified if we don't resolve this she's going to lose her house. And when she drank she didn't care if it burned down. So I'm not impressed with sobriety. She wants the TV clicker. It took a while to give her a little of that. I had to get her her own satellite dish. I still have my own clicker and I'm waiting for the spiritual awakening on the TV Clicker. She comes to me and she says, you know, we fight every weekend because my sponsor said I need to tell you that if I get you mad enough it will be okay for me to get in the cupboard and drink that booze. And we've got 40 bottles of booze We've got booze I've had in there for over 20 years because it doesn't mean anything to me. I don't drink. I quit drinking. You know, I'd have a glass of wine was, well, I just never drank. It didn't do for me. I don't even think about it. And she picked a fight with me the next week and I said, oh, God, no problem. Got this. I understand now. Went and got the hammer and the 33-gallon trash can for appearances only. And I threw those bottles up in the air and it was actually a waffle hammer, a 28-ounce waffle claw hammer. And I drew them up in here and before they fell I got both hands on that hammer and hit that bottle as hard as I could hit it. And I smashed 40 bottles of booze all over my kitchen and any of it go down the trash can and very little down the sink. out of my mind. She hasn't had a drink in eight months. She's in the room, in our bedroom with the door shut talking to her sponsor on the phone. She's getting better and I'm clearly not. And the idea that I'm telling her sponsor no I'm not going to Al-Anon, she's the one with the problem, I'm just leaving me alone is starting to not look so good anymore. Then she tricks me into going to AA. She says they think I'm her imaginary friend at AA and I better go be seen over there. I don't know why I was afraid of that. It scared me to death. I went right to AA with her and started, I was the mascot of the AA meeting. None of them had ever actually seen or met an Al-Anon. They heard about a second cousin that had one once, but they weren't sure. And I'm sitting in the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and I'm hearing the music and the laughter that you heard about this morning. I'm here and I want it. I loved that. The things that those guys said at those early meetings of sober alcoholics have stuck with me to this day and I will never forget them. One of them was, I'm watching the new people every day. You know, every month those guys got their hand up and they're new again. Guy comes in, he says, Hi, I'm... He says his name, I'm an alcoholic. And he says... Anybody in here know who wants to be sober than any of the rest of you? Who wants it worse than any one of us? Any of you. Them people that just put their hand up again for another 30 days want it more than any of you and don't you ever forget it. I've never forgot that. Never. I've ever forgot that Those guys changed my life. I went to Leslie and I said, you know, I'm refusing to go to Al-Anon but I told her, I said, I love what you have in AA. I want that. I wish I had something like that in my life. She said, hell, join. I said one thing's a little problem with my lack of alcohol consumption. My wife was so desperate for me to get any kind of help, she said to me, I'll vouch for you. One of those guys standing at the podium had mentioned rigorous honesty. It was necessary to his sobriety and I thought that would be bad for her sobriete which I was still in charge of, by the way. And I thought that would be a bad idea. And, you know, I had gone to the care unit with her and they tried to pitch me for Al-Anon, and I really did. I argued with the counselor over the alcohol disease concept. They were really glad when I left because there were some other people there that needed help and I wasn't ready. I smashed up my house at eight months, and at a year and a half I finally called the Al- Anon Central Office in L.A. and asked them to send me a directory. And I got to the mailbox first every day so that her and Lizzie Borden wouldn't have the satisfaction of knowing I was going to go. And I went to three meetings, and nobody was there. Three times I went to meetings listed in the directory, and there was no meeting when I got there. And I thought, maybe they are a figment of somebody's imagination. I'll tell you what, I've been going to the same meetings now for over 18 years, and never had a meeting there. Every night that that meeting is supposed to be there, there will be a meeting there even if it's just me. There will never be a dark night. It's the worst thing we could ever do for the new person, ever. For Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, New Year's Day, there will be a meeting. And I'll be there if nobody else is. I'llbe there. I went to that fourth meeting. There was a newcomer meeting at a hospital on the ward where everybody had relatives in the ward. They had like 15 minutes now and on. There was like one or two people that had a year. It seemed like an enormous amount of time to me. Did all the talking. That didn't strike me sober. The next two days later, I went into a meeting that I went back to for a long time. and it was exactly my worst nightmare, exactly what I knew Al-Anon would be. It was eight little blue-haired ladies sitting in a circle and me. Now, been to AA, seen the newcomers, didn't look too good to me, don't want to stand out. So I didn't raise my hand as a newcomer. I came early and set up the chairs. When you got there, you figured I must know somebody, and when the meeting was over, I cleaned up and swept the floor and washed the coffee cups, and I was the last one out, and you all left me alone. I think you knew that I needed to be left alone. But those little old ladies shared things of my own insanity that I thought were unique to me, that terminal uniqueness you'll hear from podiums in AA, and I suffered from that. And I knew that I was in the right place. And like my wife, when she went to her first meeting, it was a Salvation Army meeting. Guys that lived in cardboard boxes and wore trench coats and drank out of brown sacks with bottles in them. And she says, if this is what I've got to do not to die, I'll do this. And I walked into that meeting of those eight little blue-haired ladies, and I thought, this is What I Need to Do Not to Die, and not to be miserable anymore, I'm willing to do it. and I stayed that meeting until it closed. That Saturday, I went to a meeting that was to become my first home group. I picked it out of the directory because it was a direction I could ride my bicycle to and I could go up there and take up a meeting on Saturday mornings and then finish my bicycle ride and get a ride in too. But see, my first sponsor told me, he said, do you know why you come to Al-Anon? I said, oh yeah, because I got problems. He said, no. That's the sponsor laugh. No, he said. He says, you come down on because your solutions make your problems look good. My problem is I don't want to be noticed, and I don' t want to become the newcomer guy. I don''t want anybody to see me. I just want to get the secret handshake and get the hell away and have you not touch me. I hated it that you made me hold hands and say the Lord's Prayer at that first AA meeting. I was horrified. God was in the ground with that daughter in 1977, and I meant for Him to stay there. You could keep that. And so I'm trying to be anonymous. I go to this meeting. I'm going to ride my bicycle up there and try and be anonymous, but there's a problem. It's him riding a bicycle, and I wear bicycle-appropriate clothing. That would be the spandex glow-in-the-dark heat shrink-to-fit, no secrets from the world road cone-colored roadie bicycle suit to be the only guy and be anonymous at the meeting with 40 women. I had a plan. Plan A. Backpack full of my street clothes show up up there before anybody's there slip into the little patio off to the side change into my streetclothes when you got there First one through the door, setting up the chairs. I'm still the first one in almost every meeting I go to and I still set up the chairs because apparently I'm the only one who does it right. My home group just got out and I guarantee you that the chairs were not right and they will say, where the hell were you last week when I show up next week? Anyway, I'm trying to hide out in this meeting and a couple of months go by and I'm listening to what's going on and I know that I belong there and I started hanging out with the people that were doing service. After two months, I had my first spiritual awakening. I realized it was my meeting and that's my chair. Actually, let me rephrase that. I called up my meeting for a long time. It caused me to have a lot of my ego involved as a person who's got some time in the program and some service experience to fight for my meeting and how my meeting should be, and I'd have to give that up. But that's My Chair, and it's got my name on it, and I've earned it by my behavior. And what I figured out after two months was that you weren't going to ask me to leave. I was the only guy. He hadn't asked me to leave yet. She was sober. Why was I here? But you didn't ask me to Leave. The things that I did, I'm sure, were a lot sicker than any of the things any of you did. But nobody had asked me To Leave. And I realized that day that that was my chair. And I rode to that meeting with my bicycle suit and left my street clothes at home. I walked in and I claimed my chair as who I am. My guy rides bicycles on Saturday morning. And this red-headed woman who's still at that meeting walked up to me and she patted me on my spandex butt and she said, And you keep coming back. I shared that at a meeting the other day where she was, and I said, I hope that doesn't embarrass you. She goes, oh, I love that. She just loves that. She's one of my dearest friends today. So I suit up and show up, and I'm trying to figure out what to do, and I get this sponsor, this woman sponsor, and she panicked. We're not getting along, and now I've got a woman sponsor. There's another little nail in the coffin, and we'd have a fight, and the fight would end up with, did you call your sponsor? Have you done your sexual inventory yet? God did for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. I had to stop bringing home anything that I heard at a meeting in any of my experience and quit telling her what I was doing and who I was talking to. Couldn't do it. And as a result of that, I had the butt out of her program and stopped calling her sponsor and tell her what step I thought she might have glossed over or what she was doing lately. What it did was it got us out of each other's program. What I know today is that we're on parallel paths. We're going from here to there. Whatever spiritual discovery is, we're going that general direction, but we're not on the same path. We're not going to be doing it and traveling at the same speed. We're just going the same general direction. We got our hands out of each other's hair for the first time. People in AA were betting against her getting sober. Her sponsor said, I don't sponsor you. You're a loser. We know you're not gonna make it. You can call me if you want though. You can see why I liked her. And then when she stayed sober for a while, they were betting again against us staying together. And I'm showing up at Al-Anon with 40 women going, you know, she's still not minding me at home. And if that don't work out, well. I've shared that a couple of times at meetings and I've never found it necessary to ask for a show of hands. I think that they were too well to sleep with me, but I've Never Asked for a Show of Hands. And when I'm set up, boy, if you ever ask for show of Hands, I'm going to be in the back going, ooh, ooh me, me, so I've never asked. I don't want to know. I think they were too well to sleep with me. Anyway, I started getting busy. That woman sponsor was involved in service, and every time a service commitment came up, her hand went in the air, and I got the job. I thought there was something wrong with her. She developed a tick or something. She said, we've got an opening as this commitment at the meeting. And she, oh, oh. And I go, holy crap, what's the matter with her? She goes, I nominate Jack. And I get another job. One time, intergroup came up. She says, I dominate Jack. He says, wait, I've been here 11 months, done a little bit of reading. Think I saw somewhere that you can't do that job unless you've got a year in Al-Anon and I've only got 11 months. Somebody said, motion to table for 30 days. Seconded. They would not let me go. They figured I didn't want to touch you or meet you or talk to you. I just wanted to get the secret and get the hell out. They made me a door greeter. You know, you shake hands a day, we're going to hug you. You come through the doors of Al-Alan. I was shaken when I got here, but I'm a hugger now. And that means something to me. I love hugging the guys that really don't like to hug. The ones that lean way, way from you and get that full neck on them. Just pull them over and lay the neck on. I got a long old neck. I love that. Because I was untouchable when I came to you. I was completely untouchables. So now I'm taking commitments. They sent me off to intergroup. I wound up on the board. I woundup as the chairman of the LA intergroup, a job which they gave me knowing full well I had no idea how to do it. I didn't know enough to screw it up. I didn' t know how to d o it either. And after I was there for a year, they rotated me out because I figured out enough I might hurt it. That's why we have rotation of leadership. And I started going places in service. And that sponsor made me get busy on the steps. She says, you know, you're in that chair every week. You're going to be there every week? Guys are going to show up and see you in that cheer every week, and they're going to stay, and then they're ask you to sponsor them. You better get busy with the steps, and she walked me through the steps in that big book. It wasn't, you don't study the big book in my meetings back home. Personally, I don't think they belong there for some specific reasons. but I have a big book study at my house for the guys I sponsor every month. I sponsor some guys with long-term sobriety in AA, and they sit in that room with their mouth hanging open because they see new stuff in there when we look at it from the Al-Anon and AA perspective, which we get to do. My rules for living are in that book. Anyway, we walk through an inventory now. I came through the door with that secret, that terrible secret I've already told you. I'm never telling anybody, the one I'm taking to my grave, that I'm not enough of a man to be a man for my daughter and for my wife when they needed me and for our family. I can't measure up to that, and I'm never going to tell anybody. And it was that one thing, you know, the one thing you hold out of your inventory until the last. That one thing that I knew you didn't have the power to fix. Fine and well, it works. You know, if I stole money or if I cheated on my wife or whatever, I can do the work and I can deal with that stuff. But that one you aren't going to be able to fix, and at the last minute I took the chance that I hoped to God you take, and I told her the one things, and she said, okay. She said, here's what we're going to do. And with this stuff, we cleaned it up. I don't think a psychiatrist could have done it. I don'T think a therapist could have done it with 25-year run and start, but you guys cleaned up that stuff. And I hold my head high today. You guys taught me to walk with dignity and grace. And I went and made amends to that daughter graveside. I know that's possible. And I sponsored guys who've had to do a men's graveside, and I can tell you that it works. I can also tell you that if it's not done, God will figure out a way for you to finish it because that's what He did for me. I'm starting to sponsor a lot of guys who are showing up early for the meetings. You know, I'm talking to all these newcomers, And, you know, all these guys I sponsor are sick like me. They all show up a half hour before the meeting. There ain't a woman anywhere in the zip code. It's just the guys get all the chairs set up. If they beat me there and set them up wrong, I fix them. After a while, they'd set them off exactly perfect and put one backwards or upside down or something so I could fix it and be okay. I'm okay. Got the chair set up, we go out front and greet the newcomers. And here comes a newcomer woman across the parking lot. I'm going, spread out, guys. They're scaring the newcomERS, you known. And I'd ask these people what my sponsor taught me to ask them. I'd say, what brings you to Al-Anon? I'd ask those guys, what bring you to the Al-Alanon? There's one guy. You heard a little bit about this stuff this morning. He walks through a little circle of guys. Nobody's there except the guys. And this guy comes marching across the parking lot to his first Al-Alanon meeting and he marches right up to the circle and I stick my hand out and said, hi, I'm Jack. He says his name. I said, what's your name? What brings you down on? He says, I am here to find out the name of that stuff you grind up in their food makes them puke when they drink. And my foot slipped off the clutch there prematurely, and I said, you mean anabuse? Woo! This guy lived the Al-Anon dream. He showed up at his first Al-Alanon meeting with a burning question, got it answered before he went through the door, turned on his heels, and headed for the car. And that ran him down. I said you know you can hurt somebody with that stuff. Why don't you come in and sit next to me? I walked up to a couple one time. I was talking to the guy. They'd gone outside to have a cigarette. Two newcomers, smoking cigarettes out front. I walked up to introduce myself. I looked at the guy and I said, what brings you to Al-Anon? Both of them thought I was speaking to him. And in unison they went like this. They did. Pointed at each other. Welcome. So we're sponsoring all these guys. My wife's sponsoring all These Women. And I'm the designated driver. She speaks somewhere and we load them in the car. I got all of her sponsees in the back. And apparently I've become absolutely no sexual threat whatsoever to any of them because I've heard way more of fifth steps in the car on the way to the meeting than I ever really care to know. And occasionally I will go, oh, we're sharing, and they will all in Houston go, hands back on the wheel. Because they trust me, because they trust us. My wife talked about the woman that she sponsored in and out for five years and she called up and she's on the street. Five years in and Out of AA, can't get sober. She's 29. She'd get sober and a couple of days she'd look like she'd never had a drink in her life. She'd get a job she wasn't qualified for, and in two weeks she'd get drunk and lose it again. So she called up looking for some help, and my wife got her a bed down in Laguna and asked me to go down and take her. And I said, I don't do AA 12-step work. You guys have beat into me that I'm not qualified to do that, but I'll go if you send one of your sponsees with me. So Kit and I went on an AA 12 step call. AA's answer to Batman and Robin, right? So we go down to get her and bang on the door, and she don't answer, and we're drawing straws see who's going to push the other one over the fence into the little patio and pick the lock on the sliding door. I was thinking it was probably going to have to be me, and the door swings open, and there she is, butt naked and wet, thinking that commitment to go to recovery today might have been a little hasty. And Kit looks at me, and I look at her, and Kit says, now I know why I'm here. I said, you dress her, I'll pack her, let's go. Took her in, got her a bottle of booze, and put her in the car. That was different 12-step work for an Al-Anon like me. and drove her for two hours down the laguna where she got completely unconscious, drunk, and carried her and laid her on the bed. Formed the kids out wherever they would go. Grandma had one, neighbor had one. There was next-door neighbors to grandma had one and Leslie came home. You know, her biological clock came on about four or five years of sobriety and she came to me and wanted to change my mind about having kids. I didn't enjoy being a dad. I was really poor at it. I figured my best amends to my children was not to do that to any other children. I knew I wasn't going to do it. She said, you're in recovery. You've changed. You'd be a good dad. And I said, I don't want to know. And she came home and told me that one of those children had to move. And knowing full well that there was no chance of me allowing her to bring him home, and I said I think we've been in recovery long enough that we can talk about just about anything. And she said, what do you think? Can we bring him for a couple of weeks? And I not only said we can bring that one home. She's very closely bonded to the other one. Why don't you bring them both? And these two little girls, three and five, deeply affected by the disease of alcoholism and their mom came to live in our house. And they're still there. That was almost eight years ago. And Peggy and Clancy and we were at a conference down in Des Moines and we had to decide to take an action because the courts and social services is about getting involved. We either let them go or they stay. And I looked at my wife one day and I said as far as I'm concerned those kids are done traveling. They're either going home to a sober mom or they're staying here. They're done traveling, and then we talked about it. She said she was of the same idea, and we talked to Peggy and to Clancy and some other people, and they said, you know, can you live with yourself if you don't take an action to protect these kids? And the answer was no. We drove back to Nebraska, to Omaha, got on the phone, had a lawyer before Sunday afternoon, and on Monday we had a court order to keep those kids, and on Tuesday she showed up, called up drunk. He'd just gotten out of jail again, and they were coming for the kids, And we said, no, you're not. And it set up a court battle. It was a year-and-a-half court battle to do the adoption. And in the middle of that, it was awful. They had my wife on the stand for seven days. And she was cracking under the pressure because everything she'd shared as a sponsor with this woman, which is basically her fifth step, was coming back through four attorneys like pit bulls taking turns at her on the stands. And she's having to say, yeah, I did that. Yeah, I Did That. And yes, I'm sober now. And she had to do it. And it looked like we were losing the case. Our attorney had never lost a case before this judge, and she knew this was the one where she was going to lose. My wife came to me in the middle of it, and she said, I'm done. Can't do it. Give her the kids. I quit. And I said, can't. She says, what do you mean you can't? I says, I can't stop now. We made this decision together. I'm in. I gave those kids my word. If I tell you I'm laying on the train tracks tomorrow at 10, it don't matter if they change the schedule. I'm In. I told their grandparents. I'm Into my last breath and my last dollar. It was almost like that. She said, if you love me, you'd quit. And I said, If I loved you, I wouldn't rob a bank for you, but you have to know that I love you and you've got to decide. The only thing I bring to this package now is a man with children. What's it going to be? And my ego really didn't like it when she didn't answer right away and throw herself at my feet. My ego wanted that really bad. She spent six weeks doing her process with her sponsor and her meetings and her girls in AA. She came to me after six weeks and she said, I'm in and I'm In all the way. And I said, okay, let's get busy. In the middle of that, she called me up. She said, I need some of your time on Saturday afternoon. We've got to talk. And I thought, this is it, divorce. We're going to do the divorce thing. She called up my sponsor, Willie, who's a former delegate from California. And I says, well, Saturday's it. We're gonna talk about divorce. And I told him everything that was going on. And he said, well... Sponsor, he's not big on giving me direction most of the time, but he gave me direction that day. And he says, Well, when you sit down, you will not bring the one who brings up disillusion of your marriage. I said, Willie, it doesn't matter if I bring it up. It's coming up. If you're going to swing on me, I'm swinging first. If you are going to hurt me, I am going to hit you first. That is what is in here. That is the guy that is in there. And I said it doesn' t matter if i bring it first. He said but you will not bring it. I said fair enough. I call you after it is over. She walked in and she sat down. She said before we start my sponsor said I need to do this. And she got her AA-12 and 12 out. And she read all 12 of the traditions. She says that she read part of them. She read all twelve. And everywhere where it said Alcoholics Anonymous in the AA-12 tradition, she substituted the words The Family. Read all 12 of them, closed the book, sat on the coffee table, and she said, Now let's see if we can find a spiritual solution for what is clearly a spiritual problem. And we did not talk about the disillusionment of our marriage. When you undergo pressures like that and life happens to you, I heard a term not long ago which just blew me out of my chair, we're going to in recovery be subjected to something called unmerited suffering we're gonna have things happen to us that we didn't do anything to deserve that are painful, losses we're gunna have unmeritted suffering it isn't about that you didn't tell me that was not gunna happen you told me no matter what happens I'm gunna get tools to get through it and those things which had the ability to drive us apart had the property of driving us together instead we became a unit we began to fight for those children it was a little bit longer before we became unit to get help for my emotionally ill daughter. And then last year, a year and a half ago when it came time to send her away she had to go away. I found out she was right. I'm a good dad. I'm the damn good dad! Those kids think I'm the dad of the century. I come through the door and they're on me like I've got Velcro on my leg trousers one on each leg I've gotta whatever I'm going and my obsession stops we're gonna have a hug. Those kids love me. I'm in recovery. I'm not alone. I'm looking at this kid who's got problems and we're not enough. And my ego does not want to let me up from that. I'm starting to have feelings that are exactly like when I lost my daughter that I had no tools for dealing with, that I shoved away for years that grief because I couldn't deal with it. I put it away and it waited. It didn't go anywhere and it didn't get less. It just waited. I had to do it in recovery. It waited. And I was feeling that loss again. And what I was doing was a contrary action for me. I was going to meetings. I was telling them I'm dying. I'm going to have to give my daughter up and I'm telling you, it is killing me. And we'd have a break and I'd go find the newest guy in the room and I give him my card. I say, please call me. A couple of those guys started calling me and I still sponsor them today. Those are the guys that saved my life. It wasn't the sponsor. It wasn' people in the meetings. They all helped hold me up. The guys that save my life were the ones that called me on the phone when I was in here and couldn't get out. And they called me and tell me what's going on with them and they did more for me than I'll ever do for them. Bob said it in the big book. It talks about what's it going to take. It's going to takes two things. It's gonna take self-sacrifice and constant work with others. My hand is out to the newcomers. Good time, bad time is out through to the new comers. Is an interesting property when I reach down to pull somebody else up. We both get pulled up. When you call on the phone for experience, strength, and hope for me, God can send it either way he wants on the telephone wires. None of my business. Maybe it's coming the other way. And you guys got me through that. I'll tell you very briefly about my son. My wife didn't get around to that. My son was out there. He ran away when he was 16. She called me up. She was sober by then. We tried to make amends to my son, and he had gotten violent, stole some things, and took off, and I was on the road. And I was around just long enough. She said, what do I do? I said, that's easy. You call old man Stokes, have him change locks. She called him up. He changed locks on the house. My 16-year-old son went on the street. I didn't think he was an alcoholic. I thought he was me. He seemed to be a rescuer. He'd find some girl that was pregnant and decide that he was going to be the dad and move her in, and then she'd go back to her husband, and he'd just call me devastated. I know today that he's an alcoholic for some reasons I hope to get to here in a couple of minutes. But he was out on the streets until he was 31, and because we get the gift of coming to do stuff like this and do service now and on, you guys do something that Leslie tried to describe to you a little while ago. I don't have the power to help those who are close to me. I could not help her. I don'T have the POWER to help my children. You have to know that I'll crawl a mile on my hands and knees through broken glass to come and get your kid, but I can't help mine. I just have to take it on faith that you will do the same thing for me, and that's what you did. We got asked to speak at a conference up in Seaside, Oregon, and we could bring a guest because we were both talking, and my son came as a guest, and he was still drinking. And the chairman, the AA chairman of that conference, a dear friend of mine, made my son his science project for the weekend. Still drinking? Okay, leave him to me. Sold out conference, you can't get a ticket for this thing, and he got him in every meeting and sat him in the front row when they worked on it for the weekend. He got sober eight months later, and four months after that we went back to that conference just to visit. And my son stood up there with four months of sobriety in a suit and tie, and he read the Twelve Traditions. I've never cried and blown snot bubbles when they read the Traditions before, but I did that day. And I wasn't the only one. I looked down the front door and all the speakers were friends of ours as they are this weekend. We all knew each other. They all knew our story, and they were all crying too because they knew what had happened and what was going on. He was sober and active in AA and the level of our relationship changed in a flash. We had a blast. We took him to Crested Butte. We went to conferences. We went back to Seaside with him. We had things in common on the phone that we'd never had. And he stopped calling and he started being angry about a lot of stuff and at Christmas we called him on the telephone and he said, I quit going to meetings about four months ago and I'm drinking again. I'd been in a retreat. I'd done a retreat one weekend and he'd come up while he was sober and he was talking to some AA guys and telling a piece of his story and when I walked out on the porch he stopped talking. And I saw what was going on and I turned around and went back. He came in, he followed me in my room and he sat in the bed and he says, I think I need to tell you what was happening. And I said, no you don't. It's not information that I need. He said, but I want to tell it to you. And he told me a part of his alcohol and drug story that he didn't have to tell me and I don't need to know because information is not my friend anymore but he told him the most horrifying story I've ever heard from a podium or otherwise and Alcoholics Anonymous ever. My son told me and removed all doubt that he's an alcoholic and now he's drinking. It's a measure of my recovery having got on a plane to go get him, haven't called his sponsor, I haven't stalked him, I'm waiting for him to call. He called me up, he said in one breath, he said you know I quit going to meetings and I started drinking a couple of, you know four months ago and I've lost my job and they repossessed the truck and the state wants their money and they've taken my driver's license again and I'm listening to that one exhale with all that stuff in it, and I'm going, can you see the connection between this and that? And you know what I said? How'd you like that Super Bowl? Because I can't go there with him. I know that you will. I knowthat you'll crawl a mile through broken glass in your hands and need to come and get him, andI can't. I've just got to wait. But I know there's a seat for him in AA, just like there'sa seat for me in Al-Anon. I intend to claim mine and keep coming back here. I live life beyond my wildest dreams. I'm the luckiest man on the planet, and it's because of the things that you brought to me, which is just a different way of looking at the life I already had when I got here. Thank you so much for letting me share.