“Leo Told Me to Go Drink Arsenic and Stop Bragging” – Jim P.

I'm Shannon. I'm an alcoholic. Requirements for chairing a meeting at the Central Orlando Group Saturday Night Speakers Meeting are one year of continuous sobriety and attending a group conscience meeting, and I have done both of those. I started drinking at 15, and as soon as I put the alcohol in my system, I knew it was for me. I continued to drink for 19 years. I was a blackout drunk, so I didn't have to drink every day, but I always knew when my next drink was going to be, and that's what kept me going. Again, at the end of my drinking career, the way I felt on the inside, because I didn' t have a lot of outward consequences, but the things that I had done and the way that I felt on the outside, the drink, the shopping, boys, whatever, couldn' t fill that hole anymore. So it was suggested I took that test. I came in here, and I really just wanted to stop drinking. Well, I didn't really want to, but I knew I had to. And I came to a beginner's meeting at 6 o'clock on Sunday night. And I thought once I put down the drink that everything I did would change, and it didn't. And that's when I learned that I hadと live with me and learn how to live life on life's terms without alcohol. And I'm truly grateful for what this program is doing in my life. I've found a higher power, and I know that there is a solution other than alcohol today. And I knowthat no matter what I'm going through or what happens in my life, that God will carry me through it because he carried me this far, and he won't drop me now. So I'm truly grateful to be here tonight. Thanks for helping keep me sober. The group asked me to remind you to please make sure your cell phones are off and to refrain from moving around or talking while the speaker is sharing, which gets me to introducing our speaker. The first time I heard our speaker speak, he made me smile because it was his accent, I think. But I also went, ooh, I want to be like him when I grow up because what he said just touched me. And every time he shares, he touches me. And I know that he truly walks with God, and I know that he's a wonderful man. He calls me little Dutch girl. I haven't quite figured out why, but I was so tempted to wear some Dutch shoes tonight, but I didn't want to get looked at like I was crazy. But I know when he gets up here and starts talking, God will speak through him, and you will be touched by what he says. So with that, here's Jim. Look at all these people. I'm an alcoholic. My name is Jim Powers. And it is an honor and it's a privilege to be here tonight. It's a pleasure to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous to begin with. And I really appreciate Shannon asking me to speak. I leak, so I've got to find the Kleenex before I start. Dr. Bob said that a long time ago, grown men don't cry, but we leak. So if I leak a couple times, it's because I really mean it. I am nervous. Some of you have heard me speak before. Some ofyou have been at meetings. A lot ofyouhave been in meetings with me. I do have a very strong passion for Alcoholics Anonymous and the main reason is it saved my life and then it gave me a life beyond my wildest dreams and I just can't pay it back enough I can't play it forward enough and I'm more than happy to speak when I'm asked to but I'm always scared to death that I'm not going to do it right or I'm going to leave something out so I'm gonna start off by telling you the only reason I'm here tonight is God's grace grace. I should be dead. I should have been dead many years ago, and for some reason God saw fit to keep me alive for whatever reason, and I don't know the reason, but it's none of my business is what I'm told. God wants me to know why I'm here. I'm sure a lightning bolt will come down or something and tell me. I am here to share my experience, strength, and hope. I Am here for the newcomer because that is what I have always been told since I got here. is I really don't have anything to give anybody except the newcomer. A long time ago when I first got in here, I went to the little room next door and a gentleman named Leo who kind of sponsored me for a while the first few years I was bouncing in and out of here told me that, you know, don't go in that little room anymore. You don't need to go in there. You don' t have anything else to offer all those people who've got sobriety in there or you need to be in the big room where the newcomers are. So this is why I've always been in this room. He told me one day he'd tell me when I could go back in the other room, and then he died. And I just never have been back in any other room. My sobriety date is February 18, 2002, and that is not the date that I came in here. Shannon did not know it. When she asked me to speak a month or so ago, I didn't know what day I was going to speak. I said yes, and Then when I came In here the first of October and I saw it was today, day. She had no clue that, you know, a few things happened on this day in my life that I remember. Number one, for the past 16 years, I've been in Georgia with a rifle in my hand every morning on this day. I'm a deer hunter and if you don't like that, I'm sorry, but that's what I do. Maybe that's my accent that she likes so much, a redneck accent. It's also 11 years to the day that I walked into Alcoholics Anonymous. And like I said, I didn't come here with a nudge from the the judge, as they say, or from detox or the emergency room or rehab. I kind of feel like I missed out on all those things that some people got, you know. Maybe I ought to start over again and get all that. But I think God just brought me here for a reason, you now. And I didn't know what it was at first because I wasn't planning on getting sober. I didn' t think I had a problem. And I'll get to that in a minute. It's also the day that a year ago today I got a phone call up in Georgia Georgia, that was the catalyst for me coming back. And that phone call was my younger brother who was 10 years younger than me. He was in a coma from alcoholism and he was getting ready to die. And he did die. And we didn't get the time that we thought we were going to get. But it's a deadly disease, people. It's a real deadly disease. I've been here now 11 years. If I had been sober, just going on eight. And I've seen a lot of people that have come in this room that I've really got to know and got to like change their mind. And they've decided that they, you know, got well. They got well enough that they could go back out and start drinking again. And they didn't make it back in the rooms. And, you Know, I'm really sorry about that. I really miss a lot Of those people. A lot Of y'all knew who they are. But the only thing you're going to hear from me tonight that's original is my experience. What happened, you know? When I got here and what's happened to me now is all what I've learned in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. So that's nothing original when you start hearing things later on. But I'll just, you Know, I'll go through my story. You know, I was born on April 1st in 1954. I was brought into a military hero and my mother and they were not alcoholics. Most of my brothers and sisters were not alcoolics. The one that was did pass away last year. And we were in a military family. My dad was the commander, Air Force commander, and we moved all over the place. And I knew that both my grandfathers were alcoholics, but I didn't know it when I was young. I knew it sometime when I got in my 20s. And my dad and my mom both were not going to be like their parents, their fathers. And so when my dad went up to Gainesville in 1942 on a scholarship to play basketball, and then World War II broke out, he signed up for the Air Force. And that kept him from becoming an alcoholic. He told me years later that you just couldn't be on standby flying airplanes and be having a hangover or be drunk. And he really credited that with him staying away from it. We moved all over the world. I was born in Atlanta, and then we went to New Mexico, and then we went to Japan, and I was thinking about this the other day, that the longer I'm sober, the more I can remember. And I don't know if that's funny or not, but it really is, because I can Remember things that I used to forget. And when I was 10 years old, before I ever had a drink, we lived in Tacoma, Washington, McCourt Air Force Base. And a little friend of mine and I were coming home from school, and there were some woods between the elementary school and the housing project there, and we caught a little mouse. And, you know, we were playing with it, and мы thought it was kind of cute, and we put it in a little backpack or whatever we had to take home, and my friend got, you Know, just nipped on the finger. And he went home, and all of a sudden, You know, if you live on a base, everybody knows what's going on, especially the commander's wife and everything. And my mom got a phone call from his mother, and she said, You and Bobby found a mouse. And I'm like, Yeah, did you get bit? bit. I'm thinking to myself, maybe I can get out of school on this one, you know? So I said, yeah. Yeah. Holy crap, man. This is a long time ago, people. I just want you to know I am a little bit old. And back in those days, what they had to do was cut the mouse's head off and send it to Washington, D.C., to see if it had rabies. And in the meantime, time, you got to go every day to the base dispensary and get a rabies shot. So that was really stupid. You know, here I am lying at 10 years old thinking I'll get out of school and I'm telling my parents, look, I got no bites. I really, you know, I was joking. And if you've never had a rabie shot, try not to get them. They hurt. And it was 11 days Days before that test came back from D.C., you get 13 of them, it's a series of them. And I got 11 of them every day I had to go get one. And luckily, because I've talked to people who had them in the stomach where they originally gave them, apparently I lucked out. I had them on the arm, but your arm would swell up about the size of a softball every time. And, you know, I just look back on it now and I go, geez, before I even drank alcohol, I was an alcoholic. You know, and I was trying to get out of school, and here I was. You know? Have some fun with that. The next year we moved to Duluth, Minnesota. I don't know what my dad did wrong, but apparently we got moved to some places that just weren't any fun, and Duluth Minnesota is cold, really cold. And my oldest sister got married. I was 11 years old. We had a big reception for her, and the colonel said everybody could have a little sip of champagne at the reception. And there were so many people there, nobody was paying attention to me, And the 11-year-old boy, you know, I was just doing whatever I was doing. We all went by the fountain to toast my sister. And I got that little cup of champagne and everybody toasted her. And my sisters still to this day said they'd sip theirs and watch me gulp mine. Man, that was it. That was it, you now. I didn't eat anything else except for nobody be watching that champagne fountain for a while because I kept going back by there and saying that was pretty good And about five of them into it, they started paying attention to me because I was spinning around. And they were like, what's with this little boy? And they put me to bed and the bed was spinning and my stomach was spinning. And you know the story. I threw up. But the whole thing was when I got up or I came to the next morning, you know, my head was just killing me. I mean, I had a little man in there with a sledgehammer and an anvil just pounding away with the worst headache in the world. And I could taste that stale vomit. And, man, I hear it all the time, and I'm the same way. I just couldn't wait to do it again. I couldn't Wait to get that feeling of out-of-control spinning again. And I chased that feeling for an awful long time. I mean, you would think somebody that had some intelligence would have stopped somewhere along the line, but I didn't. We moved down here in 1966. I found people that were a little bit older than me that did the things that I like to do, and I like to get drunk. I like smoke cigarettes, and then I graduated. And this is Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm going to focus on alcoholism. I do believe in the traditions of it. It is an open meeting, so drugs are part of my story, and every now and then drugs will slip in there. since I did an awful lot of them, but I met the people that, you know, it wasn't like they talked me into doing things. I wanted to do this stuff. I wanted us to get out, slip out late at night and steal stuff and cars and things like that, and, you Know, my mom's, my dad's in Vietnam most of the time when we first moved down here, and My mom's got six kids. Five of them are doing pretty good, and one of them is out of control. Well, there's a little building up on Michigan called the Juvenile Detention Facility, and that's where 13, 14, and 15. I spent most of my youth when I wasn't free. I was in juvenile detention, and I learned something there. You still had to go to school. I always wanted to get out of going to school, but you still had TO go to school there. But they taught me burglary. You know, that's what I learned in juvenile detention. I don't know about rehabilitation, but it wasn't happening then. You know? In the 60s, you know, you were going for punishment and I went for punishment and the guys there were telling me how to break into houses and things like that and I thought, well, you knows, it was a career for me. And I came out of the juvenile detention and for the next four years I was a burglar. And I don't say this jokingly, but it is, you know, it comes out that way. But if you or your parents lived in central Florida between 1968 and 72, I'm sorry. You know, if you got broke into, I probably did it because we were, my group was not, you know, kind of like alcoholism. We didn't have any discrimination. If your house was unlocked or your windows were easily to get into, I was there because I wanted your stuff so I could trade it for booze because I want to be drunk and I wanted to be drunk all the time and I was very successful at it except that I never wore any gloves and eventually I broke into enough houses that they were taking fingerprints and sure enough one day the police were knocking at my door and they were saying you're going to jail And I was 17 at the time, and they took me to jail for burglary and a number of other offenses that they found out I did. And I tell you, jail was not fun. Everybody knows that that's been there, but I didn't like jail at all, and I just begged my father. He had gotten back from NAMM, begged him to put up the bond. I was done being that kind of a person. Just get me out one more time. Get me out of trouble, Daddy, one more thing. And he did. And that night when they went to bed, I broke into his gun cabinet and the .45 automatic that he carried through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, I put it in my back pocket, and I went over to the back wall, and I took off and jumped bail. $5,000 he lost within 24 hours on me. So I hauled ass to California, went on a burglary spree in California, along with a few other things out there, and I wound up in a military hospital with serum hepatitis. I was an IV drug user at the time, and I wasn't really smart enough to know that you're supposed to use clean needles and things like that, so I woundup with hepatitis C and almost died in the military hospital when I was 17 years old. And the reason I was in a Military Hospital is because I still had an ID card, and that's where my friends were with me and I was turning yellow and looking pretty bad. They dumped me off at the base and nobody wanted to touch me until they got me to the hospital and then it was like, you know, it was pretty serious. I really felt like I was going to die. I know I should have died but I didn't and sure enough I moved up to Minnesota again. I don't know why on my own but I went to Minnesota and I was doing things up in Minnesota I shouldn't have been, and I got out of there pretty quick and got back down to Florida to visit some friends. And they were having a party at somebody's house that wasn't supposed to be having a partying. And the parents, it was people who used to own Walker Chemical that Massey Chemical bought out and pretty well-known people with a nice house on Lake Maitland. The parents went out of town and told their sons they don't want to have a party and they didn't tell their sons, they told the police They weren't supposed to have a party, too, so here I am wanted for interstate flight to avoid prosecution, burglary, breaking and entering, assault, carrying a concealed weapon, a number of other offenses. And the police show up at the party, and, you know, I'm drunk. I've done some pink little pills that a guy had there called fetacyclidine, And they're animal tranquilizers is what it is. And I wanted to be drunk and crazy, so I took a bunch of those. And then I bought a gun while I was at the party. And, you know, next thing I know there's the police coming up the stairs and there I am holding a gun in my hand. And I remember the police officer, his name was Butch Doyle. He wound up being the chief of police and retiring from the Maitland Police Department. I'd like to say he's arresting me, probably got a promotion, but I don't think he did. But I was holding a loaded gun, pointing it at him, and he was pointing one at me. And we both were in this standoff thing that my recollection went on for minutes with him yelling, drop it. And I thought we were being ripped off by a bunch of drug dealers because I'd had that happen up in Minnesota. And I was pointing mine at him saying, drop It. And God, I don't know why he didn't shoot me. I really don't knows why. And I don' t think he knows why either, but he didn' t. And then I dropped mine, went back to jail again. and this time there was no bond, and I had hepatitis again. Even though I'd spent almost six months in a hospital in California, I didn't learn anything. I went right back to IV drug using again and dirty needles and everything else. And I was in an isolation cell, and then I went before a judge, and I really didn't think I'd done all that stuff until that prosecutor started reading all that staff, and then I realized that I'd done a lot of stuff. And I'm 17, no, I just turned 18 years old and the judge looked at me and said, you know, I'm going to sentence you to 52 years in a state penitentiary in Rayford, Florida. And man, I was floored. I had known people who had gone up to Rayford. I'd never seen them again. You know, they'd never come back from Rayford and I knew that place was a pretty awful place And I knew an 18-year-old boy going up there was going to have a hard time because I'm a lot fatter and bigger than I used to be because I wasn't very big, and it's not something I was looking forward to. And they took me back to that isolation cell, and the only book that they allowed you to have, and I don't know if AA was doing jail meetings at the time or not, but they weren't coming into hepatitis rooms, that's for sure. And so I had a Bible, And that was the first time I remembered that I just grabbed a hold of that Bible. It's like, dear God, help me. You know, help me. And he always had helped me before. I believed in God before I ever got here. And so those words up here didn't scare me off like they do a lot of people that either don't believe in God or God didn't treat them right or whatever. But I begged God for two weeks and I went back before a judge and he said you might have a chance. You know, I'm going to change my mind. I'm gonna give you 18 months on a chain gang. And where 33rd Street Jail is, there used to be a small building there and all the rest of that was nothing but fields. And we grew our own food. We did our own cows. And six days a week, you got up before sunrise, you ate, got in the back of an open-ended truck with chains around it. You weren't going to escape. And if you ever seen the movie with Paul Newman and Cool Hand Luke, that was us. us. I mean, that's what we did six days a week. Sun up to sun down. You were in the ditch. You're using a Kaiser blade is what they call it. It's a swing blade. But I drive down the interstate now and I see these prisoners out there with weed eaters and blowers. Not in 1972, they didn't do that. You had things that made you want to not be there. And I You know, I just came right out of an isolation cell. It was July. I was falling down, you know, and I was just, I couldn't keep up with anybody and the heat was getting to me. And you would think that if you were passing out, they would go ahead and send a truck out and take you back to the prison farm. Uh-uh, uh-uh. They put you underneath the truck in the ant beds and that's where you kind of hung out until the end of the day. And that happened like four days in a row before I figured out to slow down, take the salt tablets, drink the water, and try to keep up with everybody. But it was miserable, and I did not want to be out there, and I didn't care what anybody called me. I saw trustees, andI saw them sharpening the blades and them hanging around the truck in the shade. So I did my best to impress on the boss that, you know, I needed to be a trustee, you now. And eventually nobody got sentenced to more than two or three years At that time, the Orange County Correctional Institute is what they called it. It was really a chain gang. They had just taken the chains off of us. They were getting progressive. But you still had guards at each end of the line with shotguns, and you still weren't. If you wanted to run, have at it. I had no interest in running it. I mean, it was a guaranteed five years in prison, and I was trying to make my time there. But I became a trustee, and then as I saw what was going on inside the building, I really worked as hard as I could to convince them that I knew how to cook. Because, you know, if you cook, you had to get up early, but you're cooking for 150 people, and so you're inside a building all day. You're not out in that hot sun. And so I was able to make my way into the building and make my away from dishwasher into prep cook into a cook. And, you know, I had already known something from my redneck days and some of the things that people had taught me, and that was how to make what prisoners call buck. If you've ever been to jail and got lucky enough to get drunk in jail on something they made there, it was not moonshine because that was kind of hard to make wherever we were, but feeding 150 people, you could put all that stuff together into a container stainer and hide it and let it ferment. And rotten grapefruit, I remember is what we used as our filler to make the fermentation started a little stronger. And we drained it through a sock. I think it was a clean sock. Good guarantee and didn't care at the time. I just knew that when it came out of that sock, I was going to get drunk. And that's exactly what happened. And I continued to make that for as long as I could while I was in the the kitchen because we were allowed, the cooks were allowed to go around the cell block at night and if we had bologna sandwiches left over, we could sell them for a quarter or 50 cents to the prisoners because you're allowed to have your own money at the time. They allowed you to smoke and they gave you cigarettes. So I made a small little living in prison off of selling alcohol and it wasn't very good tasting. And in the doctor's opinion, that was one of my great convincers when I got here was It talks about right there that men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. It doesn't say anywhere in there they like to taste, and they just like the affect, and that was me. And I was an alcoholic then, and for a long time after that I was a alcoholic. I served my time. I got out. I had a little bit of probation to do. I served that. that. I never got caught, really, during my probation time. But to show you my age, and I hate to do that, I got pulled over three different times after I got off probation for DUI. And I refused to blow. And the first time they suspended my license for 30 days. The second time they suspended my license für 30 days, and the third time they suspend spending my license for 90 days. Now, that was back in the days. You don't blow now, you don't get your license for a year, and it's about $15,000, I think, for your first DUI right now. So I got lucky. You know, I didn't have to go back to jail. I moved to a little town in Mississippi with a friend of mine where I met my ex-wife. And years later, after we got through counseling, counseling, which we signed up for 12 sessions when I was getting ready to get a divorce, which was 21 years of marriage. You know, we didn't make it past the second session before I had heard that, you know, I never dated my wife. You know? I never took her to the movies. We never went to dinner. I didn't meet the parents. You know. Nothing like that. She came over to the house. She was dating a friend of mine that was managing one pizza hut. I was managing another Pizza Hut, and she didn't have a place to stay. And I said she could stay on the couch. And some friends from Florida came up, and I said, well, she could stay in my room, and we won't do anything. And we got drunk. We got some Valiums in us, and off comes the clothes. And that was our first date, you know? Drunk and naked was how I dated my wife. And never knew that either. You know, I hated it. And, you know, 21 years later, that's what she remembered. And I kind of remembered all kinds of fun things that I don't remember now, but, you Know, I thought we had a good life. And we did have a good life. I mean, I've got to admit that she did stay with an alcoholic for 21 years because I was an alcoholic then. But I didn't think I was. I really didn't feel like I was a good person. I didn' t think I had a drinking problem. I did a lot of drugs. I did every drug there was except crack because because they came out with crack after I had, you know, retired. But I never retired from alcohol. You know, I got rid of all the drugs because of the business I got into. You really couldn't have that in you. But alcohol, that was a big deal in the real estate industry. And so, you Know, I had no problem drinking in the evening. And that's why I didn't think I was an alcoholic when I got here is because I didn' t wake up in the morning with the shakes. I didn''t have to have a drink to go to work. You know, I didn't have to have all these things that other people I hear had. But when I got off at 5 o'clock, I started putting down my drink. And, you know, my drink of choice was Schlitzmalt liquor. And like I said, it doesn't say anything about taste in this book. You know? It talks about effect. And that's generally what I was shooting for is effect. And I could get pretty hammered every night. And I did that. for a long, long, long time. And I look at it now and I just wonder how I'm still alive after all that. We went along. Everything was in my mind, everything was great. In her mind, it sucked because she was spending the night with a drunk every night. I remember doing crazy things. I didn't think I was crazy when I got here. That's why I kept drinking after I got here because I just couldn't get that step step two thing, because I wasn't insane. But, you know, I did things like I'd get drunk every night, but I liked sugar. You know, and I liked sweets. And so I'd eat a piece of cake or some ice cream or something like that, and about 2 o'clock in the morning, man, my head would be throbbing because mixing that alcohol with that sugar right then, it wasn't good for you. And there was only one way, andI don't mean to gross anybody out, but there's only oneway to get rid of that, and that was put your finger down your throat and throw up. And then, you know, I didn't understand why she didn't want to kiss me when I went back to bed. And she put up with a lot. We were married 17 years. We'd lost three babies. She had lost three bodies through ectopic pregnancies. And then she got pregnant again. And in eight months, she was going through the exact same thing that we'd lost the other babies. We were rushing her to the hospital. She was bleeding. And the doctor said, you're about to have a baby. You know, and it was like that was a really cool experience because I wasn't drunk at that time, you know, for some reason. And I got to be in the delivery room. I got To Catch My Son as he came out of my wife, which is, man, what a thrill that was. I was like, wow, this is cool. You know? And I proceeded to go home while she did her thing at the hospital and got drunk then. And I was really happy. happy. Son came home, you know, premature baby, so we were real careful with him and all. Then it just came the time where my drinking was just more than she could handle. My drinking had progressed, and I didn't know anything about progression or anything else. Like I said, all that I've learned here. But my sister was dying from bone marrow cancer at at the time. And she had a bunch of Percodan, and she lived a lot longer than she should have because of some experiments they did on her. And my back was going out from work I'd done earlier, and I'd run some Percadan and drank, you know, a lot in my life, and it was no big deal. But then for some reason, one night it happened. You know, here I am taking a couple Percudan and getting drunk. And I don't know if it's ever happened to anybody else. I never assumed that it has, but if you take a sedative and you put a lot of alcohol on it, sometime about two o'clock in the morning your bladder says get up and your brain doesn't hear it and I woke up to this screaming woman yelling, you pissed all over me, you pissed all over my head. I didn't know it. I mean, you know, I'm asleep and I would have just as soon gone back to sleep if she had let me, but we had to get up to get the mattresses turned over and all that and and I thought I'd be nice the next day and go buy her a brand-new mattress, since ours was about 20 years old anyway. And I spent $250 on a brand new mattress, and I didn't marry a dumb girl. She spent $20 on a plastic mattress cover. She thought it was going to happen again. I never believed it was gonna happen again, and about a week later, it happened again, and abouta week later after that, and after about the fourth or fifth time I was doing that, it was like I was back when I was two years old. I was just wet in the bed every night. She decided she had enough. And she said she wanted a divorce. And I said, okay, you know, I'll give you a divorce, not only that, I'll pay for the divorce and I'll gives you anything you want. And you've got to understand, you now, I've got a little boy. The only thing I ever wanted in my life was my little boy, he was four years old. And she says, I'm taking the boy with me. And I say, all right, go ahead. You know, and I traded my little boys to stay in the bottle for another few years. And somewhere in the book it says that great events will come to you and countless others. You know, if you abandon yourself to God as you understand him. One of the greatest events that happened to me was a couple of years ago. My son told me that he forgave me. I'm about to leak. He's been to thousands of AA meetings. A lot of y'all know him because he works a coffee bar here when he's here on vacations in springtime. But he said that, you know, he understood that I was sick when I gave him up. And I was real lucky. The guy that she was online trying to get. I think I'm one of the first persons that actually had a wife that was online with a love affair. But, you Know, it really happened and she fell in love with some guy on the computer. It was her best friend's ex-husband back in the little town that I met her. And he's a great guy. I mean, my son's stepfather is a wonderful man. I got lucky. I really got lucky because he treats him like a son. He takes him hunting, does a lot of things with him. And it was a wonderful thing that that happened. But when I look back on giving him up, I didn't fight for him. I didn'T try to keep him. And he didn'T get taken from him. I gave him up. Just like everything I don't have that I used to have, I never lost anything in Alcoholics Anonymous, or to do with alcoholism, I didn't lose anything. I gave it away. I freely gave away what I had to continue to be drunk. At that time that we were getting the divorce, it was recommended that I come to AlcoholicsAnonymous by my stepmother, and so I did. But I didn' t come here to get sober. I didn''t come here just to stop drinking. A friend of mine killed himself. He was four years younger than me. He got tough-loved out of his house, and he committed suicide and burned himself up in his car. And I went to his funeral, and I was just overcome, just overcome with everything that was going on in my life. And so I made the decision that I'd driven by this place, the little house next door, but this place. I'd drive by it thousands of times because my office is right across the street. I thought it was a labor pool. You know, I'd see all these people standing outside. I saw it. I thought there was a labors. pool. I had no idea what it was. And I called a friend of mine and said, you know, I'm thinking about going to an AA meeting. He goes, well, there's one across the street from your office. And I'm like, oh, that's what they are over there. So I came in here crying. And I came here for one reason. I came hier to tell a room full of old men in trench coats that smell like alcohol, that is who I thought you were. I came in to tell y'all that if you didn't quit drinking, that you're probably probably going to commit suicide. And I walked into a room full of people looking just like yourself right now, and there's a man sitting there with 30 years sobriety, and a little girl named Julie happened to be sitting next to me, and she was saying it's going to be all right, and I was just in tears. And i left that meeting, a guy stalked me down the street and said, you know, why don't you come back? And I said, why Don't you leave me alone? You know, I came back. I don't know why. I came back and for 27 days I kept coming into this room and crying because I couldn't quit drinking. I didn't hear you saying get a sponsor. I didn' t hear anything about the life saving measures these steps were going to have in my life when I finally did get sober. I just kept coming back. The old man Leo, it was a Friday afternoon it was my 27th day I was crying and he pulled me aside afterwards and he said, why don't you just go home and drink a bottle of arsenic? I'm tired of you coming in here and bragging how you can drink. And I was pissed off at that old man. I mean, I don't know how many people he got sober on a resentment. That was the first time in over 30 years that I didn't go home and take a drink or a drug. And I came in the next day and picked up a white chip. And I'd like to say that was the only white chip I picked up, but I didn t. I continued to come in and out of the program. I would feel better. I would overstate my alcoholism. I didn't have that big of a problem, and then I'd go back out, and when they talk about the progressiveness of the disease, they're not kidding. It's there. It's waiting for you. It's waitin' for me, and I always thought, well, if I go back and I just start slowly, and it just never happened with me. Every time I went back and started drinking again, I picked up right where I was, and that was drinking to get drunk. I went nine months without taking a drink coming to AA. I said I had a sponsor. I saidI was working the steps, and I was in my own mind, but I wasn't working the program, and that was the difference is I was not working this program. And I came to a Saturday night speaker meeting. A guy came up here and actually told my story. And the guy who brought me to the speaker meeting said, I said, why don't you go shake his hand afterwards? And, you know, people crowd around speakers sometimes. And I just said, he's busy, you Know, I'll get with him later on. And Dan wouldn't let me get with it later on, so he kind of walked me through the middle of this crowd of people. And he said, hey, Joe, this is my friend Jim. I think he needs a sponsor. And, You know, I was stuck. You know where I am shaking the guy's hand saying I drank schlitz malt liquor too. And I'm not a racist at all. I might be a redneck. But, you know, all I knew was slush malt liquor was not something any of my friends drank. You know, it just wasn't. It's what I drank. And I took out my business card and on the back side of it I wrote my phone number down and I asked him, would you sponsor me? And he said, well, are you done drinking? And I said, yeah, I just picked up a nine-month shift at the meeting and I'm pretty sure I'm done. And he took out his business card and onthe white side he wrote his phone number were down, and I was still kind of stupid because I said, if you want to sponsor me, why don't you call me on Monday? That's not the way it works, folks. But what did work was when we turned those two business cards over, we both worked for Coldwell Banker Real Estate. He worked in the Winter Park office in new home sales. I worked in the Orlando office in commercial real estate, and i'd never met him in my life, and had no clue that this was a God shot, and I knew it. And I knew right then it was a God shot. And so we made plans to meet on Monday to go ahead and start working the steps and on Sunday I decided that I could take one drink of alcohol. I could do it. You know, nine months I could be do it and when I came to on my kitchen floor Monday morning half of a half gallon was gone and I didn't spill any of it and I did not know what the hell was going on and I do not think he was going to sponsor me and I called him and he told me, pour out the rest of the alcohol. I'll meet you at a noon meeting, pick up a white ship, and let's work the steps and see if your life won't change. And that's exactly what we did, and that was my road to recovery right there. And sobriety and recovery are not the same thing. Sobriety is part of recovery because once I got rid of the alcohol, there was an awful lot of gem left inside, and that wasn't the only thing I had to work on. And that was the part that I had to work control, or I was self-centered. I knew I was a liar, you know, and I knew I stole, but I hadn't done that in a lot of years. But we started working the steps. And I work with people now because that's what my sponsor suggested that I do when I got back from Georgia. I found a dream in Georgia, and I thought it was the greatest dream in the world. And I own it. And my brother's up there, my older brother's up there right now. But when my younger brother was diagnosed and going to die, I decided that I needed to come back. I needed be around new people. I'm in the middle of nowhere, Georgia, 60 miles to get to a meeting. And I just needed to be around alcoholics because I was not thinking about drinking. But I didn't know if that wasn't going to happen if I stayed up there. And for some reason, God brought me back. And once he brought me Back, then I started working with people. And And it's been the greatest thrill in my life to be able to watch the light come on in somebody else's eyes, you know, to see that little flicker of hope to a guy who walks in here just like me, crying and saying, I can't quit drinking. I don't know what to do. And it is a matter of let's sit down and let's start looking at these steps. These steps are very important. You know, I heard things like, you Know, when do you reach your bottom? You know, people would say, you know, when did you reach your bottom? And I said, when I put my shovel down. When I stopped digging the hole, I put myself in it. I put a shovel down and in Alcoholics Anonymous, what they'll do for you when you put the shovel down and you ask for help is they'll put a ladder down in that hole and all you've got to do is walk these steps up that ladder to get out of that hole and get your life back. Now, they did tell me there was a couple steps that I was going to have to build myself. One was the fourth, the other was the ninth but I want it out of that hole and that hole is still there you know it doesn't get eroded there's no water that fills it up it's still there it's waiting for me to pick that shovel up again and I don't want to I don' t want to drink today I don''t have a desire to drink I have a desired to live a life that God has given me you know I didn't get justice I got grace God gave me grace because I worked the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to the best of my ability not just once, not just twice. I work them in my life. And yeah, my ego jumps out. Yeah, I take my will back. And I'm not perfect. I'm never going to be perfect. And I don't want to be perfect. But I do want to just keep progressing in the program. You know, I don' t want to progress in a disease anymore. And when I got back, I got really into Alcoholics Anonymous. You know this is what it's called a textbook. You know and in the textbook that's to learn from. And, you know, in the first 25 pages there's two little asterisks on the bottom. And one of them says you might see Appendix 2 and the next one says you should see Appindix 2. And by page 47 the asterisk says please read Appendrix 2. And so Bill and Bob are trying to tell you to look at that spiritual experience in the back of the book, you know. And I didn't have that, and I'll try not to say white lightning experience, but I didn' I didn't have that white light experience. But I started seeing things, and I do this with my sponsees. I said, don't look for that big flaming bush or anything like that. Look for little things like this because God is all around you, and he's giving you little flickers of light of hope. If you can just stop drinking long enough to get your mind clear, if you can understand that this book was written by a couple of drunks with the help of a few other drunks, four drunks. And that's all I am is a drunk. I'm a sober drunk, but that's all I am. I'm just a drunk, a common, ordinary, everyday, drank too much, couldn't stop drinking, drunk. And, yeah, they designed this program for me. They designed it simple enough that all I had to do was follow some steps, look at myself, get rid of some of that crap, and on a daily basis work six and seven, ask God to take those defects away from me, work 10, 11, and 12. I don't really need to go to bed tonight with any anger. If I want to, that's a choice, but I choose not to today. I do the simple things that I hear people 30 years still do. I ask God every day to keep me away from a drink of alcohol. That stuff will kill me, and I know that. And I should have been dead, and if there's some reason God's got me here, that's one of the reasons is for me to pass this thing on. And I didn't know when I got here, and nobody told me, you're going to have a responsibility when you get sober. I do know that, you know, when you got to the 12th step that you were supposed to start giving this away. My sponsor and I both agree that you don't have to get to the 12th steps to start getting this thing away. You know, a guy with 15 days can help a newcomer out. He can tell him that, because when you're first getting sober, 15 days is a long, long time. You know? You might look at people and say, 30 years, oh well. That guy who's got 15 days, how did you do 15 days? So you don't have to have years of sobriety. All you have to do is have the program. All you Have to do Is understand that this was designed to keep alcoholics alive. And it's one drunk talking to another drunk. That's what the program's all about. We're doctors telling me I was going to die, didn't get me from drinking. It was one alcoholic talking to me about how they got sober and how they stay sober, one day at a time. You know, when you first come in here and you think the rest of my life, oh, my God. No. The rest of your life could be today. Because in the big, big book and in this big book, I have not yet found a place where it says there's a guarantee that you're going to wake up tomorrow. There's just no guarantees. And so you're getting one dayatatime. When you get up in the morning, if you're not coming to, if you are actually waking up and remembering where your car is, then just sit there and say, God keep me away from a drink. Just for today. Help me not be selfish and self-centered. Help me help somebody else. And the responsibility thing that I know now is that I am responsible as a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and especially Central Orlando, landfill i'm responsible that anywhere anywhere anyone and that there's no limit there is no classification there is No color barrier there's No sexual barrier I only work with men because that's all like I only know about mid stuff women should work with women because they know women stuff but you know I'm responsible to reach my hand out if somebody reaches their handout and and says, I need help. Because when I reached my hand out, the hand of AA was there for me. And I'm responsible to do the same thing to the next alcoholic that comes through this room because I don't know whether or not my son will get this. I believe it's hereditary. He might have the opportunity to get it. He's seen what it does to people. But if he gets it, I want these rooms to be open. I want these doors to be open for your children, for my children, for anybody's children. When the time comes that they reach out their hand and say, you know, I've got a problem with drinking and I can't stop, I want somebody to reach out Their hand and say, let me show you how I did it. Let me show You how I worked the steps with God's grace. And my life is amazing. My life is totally amazing. There's not enough time for me to go into everything in my life, But I can tell you this, that when I hear Amazing Grace, you know, that's me. And the guy who wrote that song, if you don't know, was a slave captain bringing slaves over from Africa. He wrote the words to Amazing Grace. And I was a Slave to Alcohol. And God gave me Amazing Grace to give me the ability to stand up here tonight and tell you how much I love you and I love this program. And thank you for letting me be here. I'm still Shannon. I'm still an alcoholic. I told you see why I love him? That was wonderful. I knew it would be. Thank you so much Jim.