Living Sober and the 60-Yard Dash of Early Recovery – Barney M.

Thank you, Victor. My name is Barney Morris, and I'm an alcoholic. And it is nice to be back in Alabama. I have always enjoyed going to Alabama to conferences. I never had gotten into the state of Alabama until I was a member of AA. And AA has brought me here three times that I can remember. I was in Tuscaloosa once and Mobile and now here in Huntsville. And I have always enjoyed Alabama. I enjoy the food, I enjoy people, the hospitality. This is just a wonderful state to visit. And I appreciate so far everything that's happened for me. I really enjoyed it. And as Victor said, he picked me up last night at the airport. We went and got something to eat and had a wonderful basket of fruits and bananas and all kind of raisins and stuff up there in the room when I got there last night. And I've been working on that pretty good. And it's been a nice day today. We had breakfast with that whole committee this morning. God, they all showed up at 830 in the morning. I think that's dedication. and had their eggs and stuff together and that was kind of fun to see everybody and meet them all. And it was nice to come in here tonight and see Vince. Vince and I, Vince is going to be your Sunday morning speaker and when I see his face I don't worry about what I'm going to say because I know he's a good speaker and so whatever I do he's going to take care of it on Sunday. But you do have a good lineup of speakers here this weekend and you're going to enjoy the weekend, I know. And Clancy, who is a VISTA sponsor and a dear friend of mine, always says that these kind of deals are sort of like pit stops along the way. You know, we come off the track for a little bit and we get some gas and oil and tires, and that's what we do in these kindof deals. We kindof get fired up spiritually and get firedup emotionally and get fired up about AA. And then we'd go back Monday morning and go back out on that track again and start going around with the rest of them. But these kind of things are events that allow us to stop and get together in rather large groups and to spend time with one another. And they're nice little deals. And if you don't get carried away emotionally too much, you'll be all right. You'll probably survive it. But Vince and I are, I think, close friends in many ways. But one of the reasons we are, I think is because we are both in the so-called class of 72 in Alcoholics Anonymous back in our home group in L.A. We speak of classes. And the various classes get together usually. Our class has been real good about it. but they usually get together and have dinner together once a year and identify themselves as all having gotten sober the same year. And Vince and I this year, with the rest of our classes, maybe in our group there's maybe 13 or 14 people in that class. And so I don't know if we're going to have dinner this year. Now we keep talking about it, but we're all going to celebrate 25 years of sobriety this year And so it's a significant year for us. And although I learned a long time ago to stop doing that in my head, to stop marking 25 or 5 or 10 or 1 as if that's some kind of a terrifically important symbol and we're going to all run through a tape at some point and the race is over because that isn't what happens, you know. I remember when I had five years sobriety. I don't know why I thought of this, but I'll talk about it anyway for a minute. When I hit five years of sobriety, I always thought that being five years sober was going to be a really significant moment in my life. And so when I got to five years, what happened was that I was sitting home alone that night as my five years approached at midnight. and my wife had gone to Europe on a little junket because there were a bunch of women that were going to go to this deal in Paris. This was in 1977, in May of 77 and they were goingto go tothis deal and one of the women couldn't go and at the last minute she desperately wanted to get rid of these tickets she had so she sold them to Carol and she got a really good price on the whole deal and so she jumped on the airplane with the rest of them and went over there and had kind of an interesting time because she spent the trip going across the ocean talking to this really nice lady who was on the plane with her and they had introduced themselves and the lady turned out she told her she was a member of Al-Anon and so they had great conversation going across and Carol just really enjoyed it and when they got to the airport at Orly Field, I suppose it was, a bunch of the women ran up to Carol and said, My God, how was that? What kind of trip was that?" And she said, Well, what do you mean? And they said, Well, flying across the ocean with Lois Wilson. And Carol said, Lois, Wilson, she didn't tell me your last name. She told me she was Lois. Remember now? No, no, I don't know anybody. But she said she's very nice And so she had a nice trip and, you know, had called me about all this. And so I knew that she was really having this wonderful time. Well, here I was, my fifth birthday coming up at midnight, and there she was in Paris. And it occurred to me suddenly that nobody cared that I was going to be five years sober. And the terribly significant thing was going happen at midnight. And, you know, my sponsor, I figured he didn't care. And he was out of town also. He was living by that time and I think he'd moved to, I think he'd move by that kind to St. Louis. And so I sat there feeling very badly and And midnight came, you know, and ding-a-ling, I was five years sober. And no bells went off, and nobody put a plaque on the wall or anything. It was just five years. And the next morning, a guy called me, and he said, Our speaker in Laguna Beach can't make it tonight. Could you come and talk for us? And I said, Well, yeah, I could do that. And so I went down, and I told the guy, I said, you know, it's kind of funny because this is my fifth birthday. And he said, oh, great. So I went downstairs, and I talked, and they had a birthday cake for me, and they all sang happy birthday. And, you Know, it was really kind of nice. But the realization that I came to was, finally after five years, that it's a day at a time. The realization I came through was that there are no tapes to run through here, That there are no, we're not in a race out there. You know, we all are pretty good at the 60-yard dash. You know most of us are not very good marathon runners here. And you know we run the 60 yard dash and then we sit down and they all go by us. It turns out they're all running the marathon and we didn't notice. So there is this tendency to think, you know, if I get a year, if i just get a year, then I'll run through the tape and I can sit down and relax. And that isn't what happens. What happens is that we have to keep plodding away and running that marathon out there a day at a time. And so it becomes a year and then it becomes 366 days and 360... So if any of you are coming up on a year, I just suggest that you just understand that. It's a day and a time and you know, it's just today. It's whatever's going on right now because it only took me five years to get that. And so as I approach 25 now this year, I approach it with that sense that the thing that Chuck C. used to say I think is true. None of us are going anywhere. Where the hell are we going? We're not going anywhere, you know. We're just kind of doing what we do here and we're, you Know, a day at a time we're whacking away at this business of sobriety and somehow managing to do it and managing to make it. How many people here, just out of curiosity, have a year or less of sobriety? Hold your hands up so I can see you. That's great. That's about a third of the room, a large number of people with a year or less. How many of you here have 20 years or more? Raise your hands. Now, the goal would be that all of you who have a year or less would stick around and when you're over 20 still be here and still be doing it because my definition of the winners in AA is a definition that I got from my friend Clancy some years ago and that is that the winners at AA, they say stick with the winners. Well, how do you identify the winners? How do you know who the winners are? The winners, I believe, and he believes, are the people who are still doing it. Not necessarily people who have been sober for a long time and show up once a year to take a cake for a birthday, but people who aren't sober. People who are actively involved in participating in Alcoholics Anonymous on a regular basis and still going to meetings and still doing what they've been doing all along. And so my advice to those of you who are under a year is keep doing it, Keep on keeping on. A lot of people drift away in five years, or between five and ten a lot of people drift out. And my happiest days in AA, my best times in AA have come really I would say in the last few years. Not in the first few years, but in the last few weeks. And the longer I'm sober, the more I enjoy it, and the more I enjoy being here, the More I enjoy participating in AA and being alive. I got very ill last year and was in intensive care for a couple of weeks because I had problems with my lungs. I had a bunch of blood clots in my lungs and my breathing capacity was reduced considerably. And there is nothing, I have a son who has asthma and he identified, he understood, but he said, you know, there's nothing like not being able to breathe. There's nothinglike that. You know, it's just, you can't even explain it to somebody until you've had the experience. But it was a thrill a minute, it, I'll tell you. And so I went through all that process of thinking that I was going to die. My wife had gone through that process. She had cancer about four years ago and she genuinely thought that she was going to die and so that, you know, that does something to your head. It really kind of gets you thinking about a lot of things when you really believe it. And so I went through that process. And now, having recovered from that and having gotten better, and I had to retire as a result of all that, and now I'm free as a bird. Retirement turns out to be a great thing for me because I can get here on Wednesday. When they called to ask me if I could talk on Thursday. I said, yeah, sure. I don't care. Every day is Sunday for me now. I heard a guy use a great line today. He said the guy talked about being retired and they said, well, what do you do with yourself? And he said, don't do anything and don't have to start until noon. So I'm enjoying it very much. My wife and I are living in Alderson, West Virginia most of the year and in California in the wintertime. And so besides that, I cannot really detach myself from the AA that I know in California and the people that I love in California. And I have 15 grandchildren in California and I have lots of friends and family and all that and connections and ties in California, so I can't give it up entirely. And so it's nice to be able to spend part of the year there and then come back and be in beautiful, beautiful West Virginia for most of the year. Because we have 30 acres of woods there, and my dog and I like to go out. He chases the deer, and I watch him. But it's a big event in his life, I'll tell you that. I used to drink a lot. I probably ought to throw that in somewhere. Wouldn't want to go without mentioning that somewhere along the line. Because Vince's wife, Pat, who is a dear friend of mine, was ill this week because of the flu, I guess. She's pretty bad. Pat was supposed to talk tomorrow afternoon at three o'clock and she is not able to be here unfortunately and I hope she's going to be feeling better pretty soon. But in any case, they've asked me to come back tomorrow afternoon and do a little workshop on sponsorship so at three O'Clock instead of what it says in the program I'm going to be here so there's other things you could do. You'd probably go out to the space museum and spend your afternoon but I'm gonna be in here doing a workshop at three O'clock on sponsorship So that should be kind of fun. In any case, let me tell you a little bit about me and my background, my history, and what got me here, what happened to me to bring me to Alcoholics Anonymous and a littlebit about the 25 years that I've been in AA because I did not climb into a time capsule 25 years ago and have nothing happen to me. I mean, it's been in some cases difficult years and in some cases has been really, really wonderful years. But there's been, you know, the continuing struggle of life goes on sober just as it did when I was drinking. It's just that it's done a hell of a lot easier sober even in the difficult times because of AA and because the people of AA, because the meetings of AA. Life has just gotten a whole lot easier for me. And as I say, in recent years, I've come to enjoy it even more. Having nearly died a year ago or a year and a half ago, I now enjoy it a lot more. I'm now more grateful every day that I'm able to breathe. Just a simple thing like that. Just to get up in the morning and say, gee, I can do it. Isn't that nice? So life is good. But I grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood on the south side of Chicago in an Irish Catholic parish, St. Lawrence Church, where the Monsignor was Patrick J. Maguire. And I tell you, the most significant holy day of the year was St. Patrick's Day, I'll guarantee you. Because we always celebrated his feast day on St. Patrick's day and had a huge festival and a huge play and all the kids in the school participated. And I went to school, and we had the Dominican sisters were in charge of that school. And I think that those nuns for the eight years that I was there did the best that they could to try to teach us some, in addition to reading, writing, and arithmetic, tried to teach you some values that we could live by. I think now to try to make life easier for us, to try and make life a better place for us to live, to just make it a little bit easier going out there for us. They tried to give us these values. Now, for some reason or other, I had a peculiar reaction to what I considered their rules and regulations and standards, their Ten Commandments and all the rest of it. I just wasn't particularly interested because at a very young age, I came to believe that I was a moral leper. That was before I even knew the words moral leaper. I just knew that a moral leopard, by the way, is somebody who not only sins a lot, but somebody who enjoys it thoroughly. And I just new that you weren't supposed to like it that much. I was supposed to feel guilty and remorseful, and I never did unless they caught me. and I knew there was something wrong with that and I just knew I was kind of a rotten guy and I was a bad person and I didn't belong in church with those good people I didn' t belong with the people that I looked around and saw who were saying the rosary and saying their prayers and receiving communion and so devout people who really apparently believed in everything that was going on there and to me it was I don' t know I just looked around and it was statues and stained glass windows and it didn't mean anything. It was a meaningless exercise for me. And I knew something was wrong. And I new that I didn't belong there. I was an altar boy. I learned my Latin. I knew how to do everything. Intellectually, I knew a lot about God. I went through four years of high school with the Carmelite priests in Chicago at Mount Carmel High School. And I went though three years at the University of Notre Dame with the Holy Cross Fathers and they finally threw me out of there. But while I was at Notre Dame, I had 16 hours of theology. The study of God. The science of God, theos. And so intellectually, by the time I was 20 or 21 years old, I knew an awful lot about God. And I was perfectly capable of arguing with you as to the existence of God and proving to you in a matter of a couple of hours that God existed using all of the proofs of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine and so on. And I could convince you absolutely that God existed. Scientifically, I could prove it to you. You know, I, I can prove that the order and design in the universe require that there be some kind of prime mover. There had to be a prime intelligence behind that kind of design. Because how many times do you have to throw up the parts of a bicycle for them to come down a bicycle? You know, and so on and so on and there are all kind of arguments like that. On the other hand I could prove to you in less time than that, scientifically and absolutely that God does not exist. Absolute impossibility. I could talk to you about the Big Bang Theory and why that makes more sense than anything and oh Lord it could go on and on. The truth is none of it meant anything to me. The truth was the truth is it was all intellectual gymnastics which is all anything ever was to me nothing ever seemed to be meaningful to me it was intellectual gymnastics it was outsmarting, outthinking outperforming, upmaneuvering that was my idea of life and how to get along and how To Be Successful so at around the age of 20 or 21 I just walked away from the church and stopped going and kind of gave up on all that because it meant nothing to me. And because my goal had become, because I grew up poor and I didn't like that. I like rich better. Because I somehow know that if I'm really filthy rich, 99% of my problems have been solved. Secretly, I just know if I have the right house and the right car and the correct clothes, if I got enough stuff, I'm going to feel a whole lot better. And so I set out to accumulate stuff. That was my goal in life. And so, you know, going to church and saying your prayers and going to confession is all a waste of time. Absolutely useless. It's got nothing to do with making me feel better. As I grew up, I was a kid who was a little bit confused, I think, about a lot of things in life, It's not unusual for a kid to be confused about things like sex and to be convinced about things such as success and career and what to do with my life. It's unusual for, for a child to be, to be confused about that and wonder about it and not know it. The problem is when you're 35 and you're still confused, you've got a little problem. And at the age of 35 I was still trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. Now, I had done some things. I had become something. I had worked, had a career. By accident, at the University of Notre Dame, I got into student radio. And I became a radio broadcaster and then I went into radio and then into television. And by the time I was 26 years old, I was the anchorman for a television station owned by ABC in Detroit. And I was very successful. The ratings were good and we were doing very well. And making a lot of money. I had gotten married because, you know, it seemed like a good idea to get married. Everybody seemed to be getting married young in those days. And so I got married young and the girl I married was 20. I was 21, I think. And we began having children, you Know, played a lot of Vatican roulette and we had a bunch of kids. And, yeah, so my wife had joined the Catholic Church to please my mother. You know, I didn't even go to church. But my wife became a devout Catholic. Now, how do you like that? It's a crazy world. And so we had six children and I was successful and I would get in stuff and I did all right and everything looked good on the outside. But unfortunately, I was still that little frightened kid from the south side of Chicago. I still dealt with an awful lot of uncertainty about life. I dealt with a lot of fear. I was afraid of authority figures. I was terrified of the idea of failure. Terrified even of success, because the more successful I became, the more I secretly knew I didn't deserve it. And the moreI secretly knew that I wasn't smart enough, and I wasn' t good enough, and I was' n't handsome enough, and I wa' n' t nothing enough. And when you secretly know that, it just tears at you. And it did me. I never was able to put labels on my feelings. I never could identify emotions by name. Psychiatry was not real big in my neighborhood where I grew up. So, you know, I don't know what I'm dealing with until I get to AA and I begin to hear in Alcoholics Anonymous some of the neurotic emotions described and I began to label them and I begun to understand. and I'd say, oh, that's it. Yeah, that surprised me. I was scared, of course. Or I felt inadequate. God, that is what was going on. Or I was overly sensitive. I was feeling things more deeply than the others and I was just crazy as a result of it. And people didn't treat me well enough. Because if you want me to feel good, you have to treat me special. If you treat me like everybody else, I'm going to know somehow secretly that you don't like me. If you treat me equal, I'm gonna know you don' t like me I gotta have special treatment. You gotta love me a lot. You gotta be more than the others. You gotta prove it to me constantly. You have to pat me on the back all the time. That's the only way that I'm gonna know that I' m okay. Because down deep inside I know that I' n not okay. I know that I am a moral leper. Somewhere in my early 20s, 21, 22, I made a magic discovery. And I think it's the magic discovery that sooner or later every alcoholic has to make. And it's a simple discovery. And it is a moment in time that goes by for most of us without much notice. It's just something that happens. A discovery that we make that changes our lives forever, I think. It certainly changed mine. And the discovery is this. No matter how I feel, no matter what's going on in my life, if I'm depressed or I'm happy, if I're up or I're down, if I've got a problem, if I have a problem with my rich or I have poor, when I begin to drink, I feel better. Simple thing. Bill, when he wrote this book, in 1938 and published in 1939, apparently when he sat in that office in New Jersey, decided that he wanted to put something down about us to sort of define us a little bit. Actually defined us several times in there. At one point he said, we are essentially men and women who like the effect produced by alcohol. And if you're anything like me, when you read that line, you went right by it and said, hey, hey, okay. Of course. It turns out that about 90% of the people who drink don't blow by that line that fast because they don't have the experience that I had with alcohol because I really liked the effect produced by alcohol. It was special for me. Social drinkers apparently don't know they don' t have that experience. Evidently what happens with social drinkers is that they get a little sicky and a little giddy and a little goofy, and they don't know what the hell to do with that. And they don' t like the feeling. They do not like it. They don' T like the feelin g I'm after. Isn' t that odd? And yet I if I'm standing around drinkin' with a group of people you know, those of us who are in the little 10% group, we don' have big A's on our chest or anything. We don't know. I didn't know, looks like we're all doing the same thing. We're all standing around, we're all having a drink. How the hell am I supposed to know that I'm having this special response? And they're not. And the only way I figure it out is that a lot of them go home. And I don't go home, I keep going, I find my little group. I find the other 10 percenters who are hanging around all standing there when the social directors go home and we all identify one another quickly. we know one another somehow we seek one another out and at two o'clock in the morning when somebody says let's go to Tijuana I'm driving baby now I still don't understand and don't know that I'm in this special little category that we later come to define as alcoholics. I didn't know that. I thought I was just with the fun people and all the rest of them were party poopers. And that's really the way it is. The party pooper is in the social drinkers. People who remember that it's Wednesday and they have to go to work tomorrow. People who concern themselves with driving home with one eye covered. but it does help because you get the line to all come and we know that we never tell them but we identify ourselves I did you know we're the fun people and they're the party people well I had about as much fun as I could stand I drank heavily I drank often I drank for about oh I don't know 12 or 13 years drank myself right into the ground and yet I was successful in my career I was making a lot of money I was accumulating stuff I had this nice family I had cars and clothes and I had the most beautiful bar in North America. All glass and crystal gorgeous. If you came to my house, I had every kind of booze behind that bar you could ever imagine. You came in, you ordered a drink at my house baby, I had it. There was nothing you could order that I didn't have. Even down to certain brands that were rare. My ego was such that that was the center of my life. Having that bar and being able to make you a drink, whatever you ordered. Ain't much to shoot for, but that's the way it was. I had this nice little wife who had no idea what the hell was going on. She couldn't understand my behavior. She couldn'T understand why I did the things that I did and yet I was successful and I was bringing in a lot of money and I continually reminded her that I was bringing in a lot of money. That I was successful. That I Was taking care of her. Taking care of those kids. She had her own car. These kids were not dressing like... When I was a little kid, they hung clothes on me that didn't even fit because they belonged to my brother or the neighbors or somebody. My kids have got clothes that fit. My kids've got clothes that are expensive. My kids are taken care of. Don't tell me I'm drinking too much. I need to relax a little bit. I've got to ease off a littlebit. I've got a pressure job. I have a heavy responsibility to take care of this family. Do you know what I do every night for a living? Do you understand? Do you tune in to TV? Do you see what is on there? That's the big guy here. So get off my ass and leave me alone. And finally she did. When I was 35, she announced the divorce. By that time we were in California and I was working out there and I had this five bedroom home with a swimming pool overlooking the San Fernando Valley. It was absolutely gorgeous. and I remember sitting out by that pool night after night after tonight just watching the lights of the valley just kind of fade as I drank my scotch and drank myself into oblivion night after nigh after night after night and she just decided one day it was over and she handed me her lawyer's card and she said, I'm divorcing you and I couldn't believe that she was doing this and I said, you can't do that, I am a Catholic I hadn't been inside a church in 15 years oh yeah, I had gone to this church in the neighborhood once to tell the priest that I was never going to drink again oh Jesus it was another one of those you know confessions I'm really going to shape up this time Father it's not going to be this way anymore maybe I could teach Sunday school to the little ones because after all I had 16 hours of theology at Notre Dame I could teach these children and it was all bullshit it was just aimed at trying to get her off my back trying to shut her up and it Was another one of those events that I went through It was the only time I went to church I did teach Sunday school for a few Sundays there and then I gave up on that She had to be her lawyer's card and a judge that I had never met ordered me out of my house, ordered my house sold, my home, the thing that I have built, my castle. And the two lawyers in the divorce split the money that was left. I hated lawyers for a long time. I'm getting over it though now. to sponsor a couple of them. You can bet they're doing their steps. God, I didn't know what to do. I got out of the house and I ended up in this little apartment with my six kids. Oh, that was another peculiar adventure. I thought I could stop her and get the divorce stopped if I threatened her. And so I told her if she went through with it, I was going to demand custody of the six children. And she said, you can have them, and she left. And the oldest one was 12 and the youngest one was a year. Oh, yeah, sure. Pretty funny now, isn't it? Here I am, this goofy, crazed alcoholic, lunatic maniac. And I'm moving into this apartment. I had no cash. It turns out I owed about 100 grand. I don't know how much. And I didn't have any money. And I did know what to do. and I couldn't make payments on stuff. I owed dead money in some cases. Dead money for stuff that doesn't even exist anymore. You know, stuff you bought 15 years ago that still you're making payments on and it's not there anymore. It's gone. Jesus, that seems unfair. Still got to sit down and write the check to Sears, you know. And I didn't have any money. And I... I didn' t know what to do. I barely could scrape up enough cash to make the first and last month's rent on this apartment I was renting. And I put the kids in there, and then I didn't know what to do because I still had a job. I was still trying to go to work. And my head was so full of cobwebs and bees and craziness that I didn' t know what else to do. And I hired a lady to come and to be with the kids at least and to kind of clean the house up a little bit. and she didn't speak English and I didn't speak very good Spanish so I couldn't tell her that I couldn' pay her but I hired her anyway and I mean those were weird days and I mean you know there's something morally wrong with it but on the other hand you figure she'll figure it out finally and I'll get another one and you know that's the way it'll be and I thought this is for the children this is for the children and I could rationalize anything and I you know I started going to work and one night I really was angry and frustrated and crazy and I'm trying not to drink by the way because now I have the responsibility of these six kids and I've got to get my head cleared up and I gotta somehow get my life turned around something's wrong here I don't understand. I know she thinks I'm an alcoholic, but I know that's not true. Because when I drink, I feel better. Alcohol is not the problem. Alcohol makes me feel better! And so that ain't it. It's something else. It's pressure. It' s anxiety. It' S pressure. I don't know. Maybe I'm in the wrong century. I was born in the right century. Maybe I' m on the wrong planet for Christ sake. I don' t know. I can' t figure it out. And I' M trying to go to work and try I had to do something right and I don't know what the hell to do. And I went over to my friend's house one night and I got drunk there. And he and his wife went to bed and I stayed there drinking and making phone calls, which I do a lot when I drink. And I called everybody that I knew and people were really hanging up on me that night because they were sick and tired of my act. People were tired of hearing from me in the middle of the night. People were sick and tired. Even my sister. My sister had great patience. And she was tired of hearing from me. And my brother told me, I called him and he said, you know, you're a real jerk. I told you years ago that you were drinking too much. You were destroying your body. You were restoring your family. Well, now you're paying the price for it. And I don't even have a brother anymore and he hung up on me. And I didn't know what the hell to do. and I sat there and it was the early morning hours and I felt so sad that they'd all turned on me, those bastards. And I've gone through these cards in my wallet and I come across a card of a guy that I had met some months before who had said to me openly and loudly that he was an alcoholic. And he was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. He just seemed so proud of that. And I didn't understand why he was giving me that card, but I had it there in my wallet. And I thought, well, these people like to talk to drunks. I'll call them. So I called the guy up. And I said, look, I'm not calling you because I'm alcoholic, okay? That's not the point here. He says, yes, I know. I hear from social drinkers all the time at 3 o'clock in the morning. He said, what would you like? And I said, well, my life is really upside down. And, you know, my wife has left me and I'm broke and I owe tremendous amounts of money and it's just everything has turned around. But I've had a successful career and I've been alright in my life and I're not a loser. I'm not a failure. It just kind of looks that way right now. But I've been something. And here's what I think. I think if I don't drink for about six months, I'm going to be okay. I'll just go about six weeks six months without a drink. I'll have my bills paid. I'll get my life straightened out. I'll got that woman back. Everything's going to fine. I just have to straighten it out for about 6 months. Now I can do a couple weeks on my own. I do it all the time. No booze at all. I need to figure out if you guys have like a six-month plan. Because I'm a bright guy, I pick things up pretty quick. And he said, well, we just do this a day at a time. And I said, no, no. I need about six months. I got to go like a five-year plan. It's a six month thing. He said, I haven't had a drink in four and a half years. I said, well, my problem is not that severe. I need six months to be good. So he starts taking me to these meetings and he buys me one of these. And I don't like the meetings and I don' t like this. I don''t like this at all. This book in my view when I glanced through it I didn' t really read it thoroughly But I glanced through it enough to know there's some God stuff in there that I don't want to hear because it doesn't work for me. And also because there's a lot of archaic language in here. If you notice, 1938, 39, I'm smart enough to read publication dates. And now it's 1972. Come on. That's pretty archaical thinking. You know, that's pre-war stuff. And I know it ain't going to work for a bright guy like me because, you know, it's all right for a bunch of losers. But I'm a bright guys. And I go to these meetings and I'm reconfirmed in my belief. I hear people get up. We went to this men's stag in Beverly Hills a lot and I heard people, guys that get up and talk about all their jail time. and they get up and talk about, you know, 28 marriages and 60,000 jobs and, you know, on and on it went. And they're saying, you know, you have to identify and I said, I don't identify with these guys. Are you kidding? And they didn't. And they would come in, it seemed to me, even some of the meetings where they had funny speakers seemed like they did the same crap every night. And it was night after night after night of somebody get up and lead the meeting, and then they have, seemed like they had to have somebody read the same stuff out of the book every night like they couldn't remember it. Chapter 5 and how it works. and invariably they would call on people to read who weren't very good readers. Seemed like they were reading the traditions just so they could get the newcomers to try to pronounce anonymity, you know. And they'd get up and do that and then they all applaud like they've never heard it before. And I thought the whole thing was just really pretty bizarre. I just did not understand any of this stuff. And I thought, this is nuts. You know, they come in here and they sit in these rooms. And in those days, you know, everybody smoked. Everybody smoked. And it was smoke-filled rooms. I smoked. You know? Two at a time smoked, you Know? Can't smoke fast enough. Ah! And it Was Just Crazy. You Know? This Is Nuts. And I Used To Sit And Complain To This Man Who Was Taking Me To The Meetings. we'd sit in coffee shops after the meeting and I would explain to him intellectually why this wasn't going to work for me and why it wasn't my thing and he'd say look, you know why don't you just go to one more meeting and we'll talk about it but just keep calling me every day and keep going to the meetings and don't drink between meetings and let's see what happens and so I kept going to the meetings and I kept calling him and I keep telling him this is crap This is really boring stuff. Some of these people apparently are very happy just to be sober. Well, that ain't going to do it for me. I've got to get my bills paid. I've Got to get some money. I've GOT TO GET SOME STUFF BACK. MY HOUSE IS GONE. You understand that? Don't talk to me about serenity. and when I would do that he would suggest to me that maybe what I needed was to get into action and his actions were really dumb like he said why don't you stand in the door at the Echo Park meeting because a guy named Joe was the secretary that year he said why don'T you stand in the doorway and shake hands with those people that come in And if somebody looks fairly new, give them your phone number. And I said, I have an unlisted phone number Do you understand who I am? Do you realize what I do for a living? I don't hand people, especially these people, my phone number! He said, Barney, an alcoholic with an unlisted number is like having a fire department with an unlisted number. What the hell? You've got to be able to reach people. He said, you can help some of these new people. And I said, well, I don't know how the hell I can help them. I don' t even think I'm an alcoholic. What am I supposed to say to them? I think AA is bullshit. So he gave me, sometimes he would give me names of people to pick up at these skid row places, I would drive down and pick him up and take him to the meeting and I'd say to him, I don't know what to tell these people. I don' t know what the hell to say to them. And he'd say, well, why don't you read them the book? Now, that sounded like a great idea until it occurred to me, wait a minute, I'm driving the car. How am I going to read them the books? And he had an answer for that. He said, why don't read the book the night before and just read a page of the book and then when you drive them to the meetin, tell them what you read. and that was his little way of getting me to read the damn book but my ego was big enough that I thought well, that's good because I can look good in front of these guys so I'm reading the book and I would get, you know and then we'd be driving to the meeting you know, with some guy I just picked up he's got about 28 minutes of sobriety and we're driving to the meet and I'd say things like I bet you don't know what's on page 62 you know they say no and I would tell them what was on page 60 they'd be very impressed you know ooh amazing but I keep hauling these guys to meetings and I keep shaking hands at the door and then I got to be a coffee maker on Saturday night that's where you show up three hours early to make coffee for the goofs and get there at 8 o'clock. And that used to really anger me, but he thought it was important for me to do this. And so every once in a while I'd do something goofy like throw salt in the coffee or something just to see if anybody noticed. And hardly any of them do, you know. They'll drink anything. Oh yeah, how do you like the coffee tonight? Oh, it's fine, it'S fine, It'S fine. These are people with Greg Stern on. What the hell do they know? Jesus. and I became a floor mopper on Tuesday night and I just, God it was crazy when I was six months sober or thereabouts I was getting ready to leave because I did my six months and that was enough and I heard a guy talk that everybody said at the time was sort of the spiritual guru of West Coast AA it was a guy named Chuck C and Chuck was supposed to be the guy who could lead you to God well I wasn't interested in being led to God but Chuck that night said something about he had made a lot of discoveries in AA he said AA is a process of uncovering discovering and discarding and he said when I was about six months sober I discovered I hadn't had a drink in six months. He always chuckled when he said things like that. And I thought, what's he chuckling about? What's so damn funny? That sounds stupid. Six months sober and he hadn't drank in six month. And then I thought wait a minute. I'm six months sober. I haven't had to drink in 6 months. That is significant. And I went up to him after the meeting and I said, you know, I'm 6 months sober and I haven' t had a drinking in 6 month. And he said, that's good son. That's good. He always says things like, that' s good son but I never understood them very well and oh and I had a spiritual experience at a meeting one night I was sitting there casually taking everybody's inventory waiting for some speaker I hated and I saw this redhead walk by and she was wearing a miniskirt. She had the greatest legs in North America and I started chasing her around the meetings and she was three years sober and she wouldn't date me. She said, I don't date newcomers and I said well I'm new now but I'll be old later. How about coffee? And I kept pursuing her and pursuing her and one night she looked at me and she said, how many children do you have? I said, I have six, but they're very small. You'd hardly notice them. But I began to go to meetings just to see those legs and to fantasize about her, you know, because she would have nothing to do with me. And that's why I don't believe it matters why you go to meeting. I don' t think motivations matter. It doesn't matter what gets you in the chair as long as you're in the chair. And so I chased her. And then one night, I heard a guy talk. Clancy is his name. Some of you have heard him talk. And I identified with this guy. Now, I didn't mean to identify with anybody in AA, but this guy is talking in a way that makes sense to me. And i'm sitting there going, yeah, yeah I understand that. Now I'm not identifying with his drinking pattern at all. This guy was a Skid Row guy who got kicked out of Skid row missions, who had his teeth kicked out in the Phoenix drunk tank, who spent his first year living in the back seat of an abandoned car next to an Alano club in West L.A. That's not my story. What I identified with this guy was this whole set of emotions that he was describing in a way that made sense to me. He talked about fear in a way that I understood. And he talked about a feeling of being overly sensitive and feeling things more deeply than the others. And he talks about feeling inadequate sometimes. And feeling frightened. Just all of these neurotic emotions. And he said, if you're walking around with a set of emotions anything like what I'm describing, and you seem somehow unable to control and enjoy your drinking, there's a name for that turns out it's a disease called alcoholism and I went up to him after the meeting and I said Jesus if what you're saying is true I may be alcoholic he said aren't you that guy that mops the floors on Tuesday I said yeah he said how long have you been here I said seven months he says you're a quick study aren't ya I'll remember never to tell him anything again. But now I'm beginning to understand that I have a disease called alcoholism. And I've learned how to do a whole series of actions at AA that are designed to help me to participate in my own sobriety, and I don't even know I'm doing that, but that's what I've been doing all this time. and I end up with this redhead and we get married and I've got six kids and she's got two kids and we raise these eight kids. And I begin trudging the road of happy destiny. And I'm trying to get rich and famous because I still know that that's going to make me happy and that if I get rich enough I'm going to feel good and that if I just can accumulate some stuff again, I'll be fine. And so I worked in television and then when I was two and a half years sober, I got a job in Philadelphia for a lot of money and I went back there, took the whole damn family, went back There. And I'm grinding trying to be successful, trying to make it, trying to beat somebody. Now I'm sober and I failed and I was fired and I felt terrible and I remember sitting I was sitting in an AA meeting in Wilmington, Delaware crying my eyes out one night because my life was such a shambles and and I just felt so embarrassed about that and so terrible about that because I wasn't rich and I, you know I'm fine in an AAA meeting if I'm rich I'll be there with the rest of them I'll look good but when I'm broke and fired and I was fired all over the front pages of the Philadelphia newspapers it wasn't fun and I had to explain it to my kids Jesus, it was awful and this woman that I'd married who was looking at me saying God, you're in a funny business and I said well that's just one of those things and we went back to California and I couldn't get a job I couldn'T find any jobs back there and I finally went to work in San Diego for a while and for not very much money and then I got angry with them and I quit the job and now I'm broke again and I owe a lot of money again and I'm crazy again. And I was sponsoring people. I was mentoring people who were a hell of a lot more successful than I was. Guys would drive it up to my house in their Mercedes Benz saying, how do you work step three? What an honest answer would have been, I don't know, I never tried that one. Because I don' t believe in God. My higher power, I decided, was all of the alcoholics around the world who were sober, linked together in some wonderful spirituality. And as an old-timer said to me one night, he said, how does that work for you? I said it doesn't work at all it's bullshit but it's like everything else today it's just crap we just say it at the podium nobody means anything and I was six years sober not a rocket to start them I sat on a beach one night in La Jolla and cried because my life was such a failure and I screamed at whatever God there might be And I screamed on. I said, I give up! I give off! Leave me alone! I didn't know then and I didn' t know for a long time after that I was beginning a really horrible, ugly, painful process in AA that we call SURRENDER! I didn''t know that! I just surrendered! I gave up! And I went to see Chuck C. Went up to his house at Laguna Beach. I said, Jack, I've got to surrender. I surrender. I give up. He said, that's good, my son. Good. So tell me what to do. Well, a day at a time, don't drink. And turn your problems over to God. I said I don't know how to do that. and what I began to do I got a job finally that I didn't even like back up in Los Angeles and I began to commute from San Diego to Los Angeles to do this job I hated the job and I begun to just show up every morning and try to look alert and try to do what they told me to do and shut up about it. And that's what I did. Day after day after day, I would just show up and look alert and not tell them how to run their television station because they didn't ask and not talk to me and not explain to them how they were doing everything wrong and not even explain to him that I used to be the anchorman at that station and now I'm just a reporter. I didn't do that. I'd just show off and look on the other side. I had 26-year-old assignment editors sending me out on stories and saying, do you think you can handle this one? And I just... And after a while what happened was that I became comfortable with what I was doing. I got to where I was having fun because I was dealing with doing some stuff that I'd heard Chamberlain talk about which is just go out and try to help some people. Try to be helpful. Try to do something for somebody. If you don't do anything else, just try to keep informed. Tell them the truth. Be honest in what you do. And just little bits at a time, that's how you do it. And I came to like me a lot better. And I became to be more comfortable with me. And I was very successful in that job. And I did it until last year when I retired. And one other thing I'll tell you about, and then I'll shut up. When I was 16 years sober, Chuck C. had been dead by that time about five years. And I had his tapes in my car, along with tapes of lots of people that I listened to. And I threw in a Chuck C tape one day, and I'm driving down the freeway between San Diego and L.A., and I'm listening to this tape and I found myself talking to Chuck on the tape and I began to respond and he would be saying things and I'd say, yeah, that's right. That's right, Chuck. Yes, that is true. And we keep going and he'd say something else and I would say, yes, that makes sense. Yes,that's right Correct and on and on I go And finally, I'm yelling at the tape. Yes! Chuck, that's it! You got it! That's right! And I thought, this is insane. And yet what he was saying made a lot of sense to me and made sense to be then makes sense to mean now. It was a very simple thing that I'd heard him say many times, but I just had never registered on it. What he was Saying was, I believe that the first two words of the Our Father mean exactly what they say. He said, we do that at every meeting, don't we? Almost every meeting we stand. We even hold hands and say the Our father, don' t we? The Lord's Prayer. Our Father. My Father. I'm His son. Father, son. Dad, kid. I'm his kid. That's my dad. That's the relationship. And it's so simple. Well, I have all these kids. Have I had many moments in my life when I just absolutely could have killed my children? Yes, of course. Have I ever had times in my whole life Have I have times in your life when they weren't doing it my way at all? Oh, yes! Have they sometimes done things that have really angered me? Yes! Have they sometime done things that I think they almost ought to get jailed for? Yes! Have I ever stopped loving them? Well, I don't think so. I don' t think so I still love them no matter what they do I love them I may not like what they are doing but I love the Now if I have this relationship with my father if that is the relationship if he's my father and I'm his son. Having accepted that, have there been many times in my life when I have done things that haven't pleased him? Of course! I'm a moral leper! I'm an immoral leper. I've been a rotten SOB all my life. I've done things to people that just were awful. I've used them and abused them. I've chewed people up. I'm the user of people. And that isn't what he had in mind. I don't think. Have there been many times in my life that he was probably ready to throw me out? Yeah, I'm sure. But he didn't. What he did was apparently allow me to find you. Even with my bad attitude, even with this rotten tone that I brought into every AA meeting I ever came into in those early years. I didn't bring anything in here. I came in here to take. And in spite of all that, I don't believe that He has ever stopped loving me. If my relationship with my kids is any measure. Because He's all-powerful and He's All-Knowing and He is All-Loving, I'm told. And if that's true, He loves me no matter what. He loves m no matter what. It's unconditional love. We hear a lot about that today, eh? That's what it is. So that's why I talk to him. That's my relationship with him. He's my dad and I'm his kid and I talk with him all the time that way. Now, if you're an Alcoholics Anonymous and you're struggling with this whole business of the third step and God and all that, it's okay. Don't worry about it. I was 16 years sober when all that happened. Okay? But I'll tell you something that if you've never heard of AA, it certainly was of some value to me when I was new. You can have any higher power in AA that you want to. You can add any higher power that you weren't to. As long as you are reasonably sure it isn't you. And And Chuck used to say, empty yourself of self. Empty yourself of yourself. Because God abhors a vacuum. And He will fill it. To the degree that you get rid of you, He comes in. Well, how do I get ridof me? I'm the most self-obsessed, self-aware, egotistical son of a gun I know! How do I gets rid of me? How do empty myself of self? Well, they gave us some tools in here. The one thing they gave us was newcomers. Jesus, we got rooms full of them. Go grab some goof that's drooling and ask him how he got there that night. Because to the extent that I'm willing to sit down and listen to some new guy or somebody that's old for that matter to the extent that I'm unwilling to listen to whatever they're saying to me and keep my mouth shut to that extent I'm able to empty myself of self I'm unable to listen to another human being to try to share with another human being, to try and do the thing Chuck used to talk about, just try to help God's kids and to that extent I can empty myself of self and to this extent God can come in I don't think I'm ready for the priesthood yet I don' expect I ever will be I'm just a drunk I just show up look alert and try to participate in some way. If somebody calls me and says, come on over to Huntsville, I just say yes. Now, Huntsvale happens to be a great place to go. There are places where I'm asked to go that I don't want to go to. There are meetings in Southern California where I've got to drive two and a half hours to get to the meeting and when I get there, I know there's only going to be eight people there and they're going to ask me to talk in their meeting And my ego says, that's not enough of an audience for me. And it doesn't matter what I think and it doesn'T matter how I feel. It only matters that I say on the telephone, yes, I'll be there. Thank you very much. And you go and you do it. And that's participation in my own sobriety. That's the thing that I have done for almost 25 years and the thingthat seems to have been effective for me, the thing that seems to have worked for me, because to the extent that I could come and talk to you and you talk to me and we participate in one another's lives as we will do this weekend, to that extent we find some peace and maybe we find some sense of God who comes in for this process without even being asked. He's here. He's just here and He'll be here this weekend with all of us Because I think this is something he would have us do. I really do think that. So I want to thank the committee here and Victor and Carol and everybody else who has been so nice to me since I got here. I wantto thank all of you for sitting here listening to this nonsense. And I hope we all really have a good weekend. And I know that you're going to hear a lot of good people. And Vince, as I say, is going to wrap it up on Sunday and I'm looking forward to the whole deal. and I just want you to know that because of AA and through AA I have learned to love you and it's as simple as that I really do that's a new experience for me I have earned here to do that and I want to thank you for just sharing just a few moments in my life God bless you Thank you.