More About Alcoholism and the Year He Stayed Busy in AA – Vince Y.

Good evening. My name is Vince, and I'm an alcoholic. And I am really happy to be here, let me tell you, for many reasons. More than you know, it is good to be with you this evening. I'd like to welcome the newcomers. Welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's where you are tonight, incidentally, in case you were wondering. You'll find this very confusing perhaps at first. You've joined this group of people who admittedly cannot manage their own lives but will be delighted to take yours on, which is a, you know. And hopefully you will allow them to do it because that seems to be the prescription here of how you get better is to take a series of actions that seemingly are very distasteful and you don't agree with and seem to have no relationship to what you perceive to be your problem. And if you are desperate enough to take those actions at the behest of some buddy you consider your intellectual inferior, your chances here increase geometrically. I hope that you're willing to do that. I know that if you're anything at all like I was when I was new in my first early meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, down deep in your soul you were utterly convinced that you are not really alcoholic. That your case is different and that you really don't belong here. And I would like you to know that if you feel that way this evening, the very fact that you feelthat way means that you do belong here because that is the requirement for membership in AlcoholicsAnonymous is to be utterly convinced that you are in the wrong place and that your case is different and that you don't belong here. That is certainly the way that I felt at my first AA meeting, which was a long time ago. It was in November of 1965. I know girls. I know. You're thinking he cannot be that old. I was seven at that meeting. Only seven. And it was much like this tonight. It was in the basement of a Presbyterian church on a Friday night in Long Beach, California. And it Was a very exciting electric meeting, much like this. There were a couple hundred people there. It was a big speaker meeting. And it WAS a long time ago. And there weren't that many meetings. There wasn't an AA meeting on every corner 24 hours a day in 1965. And this was the big meeting in Long Beach. Boy, I'll tell you, everybody got dolled up. and they went there on Friday night and it was a big deal. They all showed up and the guys wore coats and ties and ladies wore... I mean, they really did. It was just a big thing. It was a huge deal. And the most common character... The overwhelming thing about that meeting was when I looked around that room I could see nobody that was an alcoholic. Do you know what I mean? No one that looked what I perceived an alcoholic to look like. Everybody looked good and they smelled good and they sounded good and they were clearly had tightly wrapped lives you know it didn't seem that way to me and if you were to wander into that room on any Friday night and you were going to look around you would have gotten the same impression except on this night you would pick me out I had on a ripped t-shirt and a torn pair of jeans and a filthy pair of genes and I had not shaved or bathed in over a week and I just spent the previous five days in the Long Beach City Jail due to a series of unfortunate circumstances that were clearly not my fault. The police department in Long Beach was fascist, and they had abused my civil rights on a regular basis in those days, or so it seemed. And I sat in the back of the wall right up against this cement wall, concrete wall, just like you have back there tonight, and I took a seat, and I should tell you I'm Irish and I'm Catholic, and I'm from New Jersey and I have a great difficulty with people from Texas we have a chemistry problem I don't know what it is and I sat next to this guy who was about 6 foot 5 and he had on cowboy boots and a 10 gallon hat in his lap and his name was Tex and Tex wanted to hep me he told me boy I'm going to hep you I remember thinking go hep somebody else leave me alone but he was going to hep me and the first thing he did was he repeated to me in rapid succession all of the AA cliches and they are grim aren't they I mean really Jesus easy does what hell are you talking about and finally he draped his arm around my shoulder and he said, ah, keep it simple. I thought, I'll bet you do, Tex. I really have absolutely no argument with that, let me tell you. And he put a handful of pamphlets in my lap. We have a pamphlet for everybody here. We cover your case, whatever your aberration is. There's a pamphet here that will cover why you belong here and on top of the pamphlets was a card with the 20 questions on it which is a you don't see around that much anymore but in those days you saw it all the time and i think the reason was it was before the explosion of treatment centers and uh the recovery community which is okay i don't put that down that's don't get i want to be clear on that right now that if you're That's a wonderful thing, but it wasn't available in those days. And old-timers spent an inordinate amount of time convincing you that you were an alcoholic. And so you had to take this test for the old-timer. And it was 20 questions, and the criteria was the way you answered these questions determined how alcoholic you were. If you answered one question yes, chances were you had a drinking problem. If you answer two questions yes, you indeed had a drink problem. problem. And three or more, you were an alcoholic. And I took this test for tax. And I answered about 16 or 17 of these questions yes. I remember I answered no to the question, do you seek lower companions? I could not find any. I mean, where the hell do you go after the Long Beach City Jail, you know, to find a lower companion? And And the meeting began, and it began the same way we began here this evening. They read essentially what is our program. And if you are new and you want to know what it is we have, that's what we have. And if You Are To Recover Here, you are required to take those steps. It is not an option. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stay sober. the requirement for recovery is much different the requirement for recovery is you must take these steps 1 through 12 precisely as they are outlined in this book now I listened to these 12 steps being read and I will tell you I am the end product of 8 years of Dominican nuns and 4 years of Jesuit priests and I heard nothing new here let me tell you As a matter of fact, it is really pretty superficial. It's not... I mean, I've read Aquinas and Augustine and I can prove to you intellectually there is a God. I have all these arguments. I know all about this. This pseudo-Protestant pap is not... I mean... I can see where it might work for you if you're semi-educated and Protestant. It might, you know... I mean… but this is really I mean I expected them to you know and they had a big book I mean a big book I expected them to break out in some hymn about bringing in the crops or something you know this is not my case is different if this any of this would have worked for me I surely would not have to come to a Presbyterian church on a Friday night this was ingrained in me this stuff is just, and the meeting went on and several people participated and they were nice people who said innocuous things that were not applicable to me as near as I could tell. They seemed to be nice people who drank too much, came to the Presbyterian church on Friday night to say a meeting and quit drinking and went back to being nice people and I sent a text where do you send the more difficult cases because there's more wrong with me than it's, and he said shut up or something you know as equally as appropriate and the meeting continued and at the end of the meeting they had oh god birthday parties I mean really embarrassing isn't it cakes with candles on them for some moron who didn't take a drink for a year and they would sing happy birthday I mean god it's like something should take place in a mental institution you know in the day room right after dance therapy you know we have birthday parties for the alcoholics and they had a series of these embarrassing birthday parties and one in particular for a woman who was about 110 or she seemed to be and she had been sober forever so they had fire on top of this cake and they got the cake up the aisle and she got down to blow the candles out it was a question whether pulmonary disease would get her and she'd get the candles up got them out she got up here and she said her name was Phoebe and that she was an alcoholic And then she said something about, did I want what she had? Not tonight, Phoebe. And that was my first AA meeting, and you could safely say I did not have a spiritual awakening, clearly. But I'll tell you what I did, and I think it's worthwhile if you're new, to tell you that for the next three and one half years I drank no alcohol, I use no mold or altering chemicals, and I participate in an Alcoholics Anonymous in virtually every way you can participate. I did everything that was to do here. I lifted chairs and scrubbed ashtrays. In those days we did that, scrubbed coffee cups, did everything there was to do here, set up meetings, was chairman, secretary, spoke at young people's conventions, did everything there was to do here except one thing. I did not take these steps and as a result my alcoholism got worse, and it got worse while I stayed busy and active in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous. There are people here tonight that are exactly in that state of mind and body who've been here some appreciable length of time. You're You're very busy in AA, but you have not taken these steps. And I will tell you, you are living on borrowed time. You can tell who's getting better. The great thing about AA is the people who get better here, you can see it, can't you? All you need to do is be around them. Recovery is visible. I mean, you just look at them, listen to them and you know they're getting better, something happens to people who gets better here. They change. They physically change. Their persona changes. Their eyes change. Their conversation changes. They're going someplace. And if you are like me, you sit in the back of the room and you are judgmental and you're resentful and you watch them get better. And everybody knows here who's who. No one has to tell anybody. The people who are getting better are recognizable and so are the people who are getting worse. And I was one of the people getting worse, I just got resentful. Now on the outside, great things happened to me. I got a wonderful job in a brand new profession. I should tell you from the outset, I come from a wonderful Irish Catholic family with no other alcoholics in it. Which is heresy, isn't it? And alcoholics are not. But they aren't, they're wonderful, accomplished, loving, kind, nurturing, educated people. All of them. Except me. I'm different. I should tell you that I am the fifth child in a family of five children. I have four older sisters. And my youngest sister is 11 years older than I am. My mother was 45 and my father was 50 when I was born, which was a long time ago. And here came this boy in this Irish Catholic family with all these girls. I will tell you the prince had arrived I mean it was during the war and my sisters just fought over who would get to take care of me they dressed me in sailor suits and soldier suits pictures saluting it was nauseating really and I was loved and nurtured and cared for my father adored me he never said a cross word to me until the day he died. He just was so happy he had this son after all his time and he was late in life and my earliest recollections of Christmas are my father kneeling beside the bed in my bedroom in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and he would wake me up and say things like I just saw the sleigh leave let's go downstairs and the entire family would get up and go downstairs and celebrate Christmas at 4 a.m. because my father could not wait. It's true. He was the vice president of a railroad, so we were... There was no... We wanted for nothing. It was a great family. And my parents died within one week of each other when I was 12. My father had a massive coronary and dropped dead, And my mother, who had congestive heart disease since I was born, really. I was a menopause baby. And so she was ill. I don't remember my mother other than a wheelchair. She was just sick. And she passed away a week later. And here I was with this, you know, lost both parents in the space of a little over a week. And it was just a devastating thing. There's no question about that. But I was surrounded by this wonderful family. These girls had all grown up and they had married and they were, you know, and they all married great guys. I had great brother-in-laws. Oh, I mean, nobody was an alcoholic. Nobody, everybody stayed married forever. I mean it was just a wonderful family. I ended up going to live with an uncle, a bachelor uncle, which you might find strange. He was 65 and I was 12. He was, though, a very powerful man. He was mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey for 17 years. He was state chairman of the Democratic Party. He was a boss, is what he was, a political boss. And he decided that I should go live with him. And he would undertake my education and see to it that I was there. And so I went to live with Him. Now, he was an old world man, right out of a book. I mean, he Was right out Of a novel. He went To mass and communion every day. He never married. Politics was his life. and he dressed in dark blue suits and white shirt and a tie that's the way he dressed on Saturday morning I don't recall ever seeing him dressed any other way but he loved me and he cared about me and he wanted good things for me but we had a communication problem he was 65 and I was 12 we would have dinner at opposite ends of a long dining room table every night in coats and ties and we would talk politics, which was really the mother's milk of our family. That's what we did. And so I lived with him, and I began to have problems in school. Now, I'm a very good student. I get A's, but I'm an behavior problem, and so I get in trouble. And by now I'm going to high school, andI went to four different prep schools because I was thrown out of the one I was in every year, and he would get me in another one. And they were all Jesuit prep schools, and they were also a group of people who were all filled with young Irish Catholic boys who drank. Nobody took drugs in those days. It was unheard of, but we drank. And boy, did we drink. And everybody drank, except I drank somehow more than they did and got into more trouble than they Did. In my senior year in high school, I was due to give the valedictory address at graduation I was number one in the class academically although I did not get to give that address I did NOT get to attend graduation because I got drunk and stole this priest's car and went joyriding in May and graduation was in June and so they told me don't even come just don't come and if we ever have a reunion And don't come to that. Stay away. You are a disgrace to this institution. But I was number one in the class, so of course I had to get my diploma. And I went on to college upstate New York, a very good university, one of the very best in the country, and did well. Got good grades but was drunk through almost all of undergrad school. I can't really remember much about it except I was drunk. I was in Ithaca, New York, and I would get drunk in the winter and pass out in snowbanks and cars with no heaters. I mean, it was just, you know, woke up in a sorority house with a young lady in her room. I must have been taking a nap because I was imbed. And with the house mother standing at the foot of the, you know, just dreadful. I guess today that would mean nothing, but in those days that was a big deal. you know those days that was and I was on disciplinary probation for the entire undergrad school I once in one semester it was on disciplinary probation and the Dean's List which was a trick one semester that happened and that's the way I went to undergrad school and when I was in my senior year we went down for a long weekend in New York City drinking a bunch of fraternity brothers and then we got drunk and I got in a blackout and I called my family for money, and they wouldn't send it. I got resentful when I joined the Navy. I left an Ivy League university in the middle of my senior year with a 3.8 GPA in biochemistry to join the Navy, which was a bright kid, a really bright kid. And I found myself getting sober on a train going to Great Lakes, Illinois to boot camp. And I thought, Jesus, this is a... I told this Navy chief, I said, this isn't a mistake. I have this paper due, you know, and I really have to get back to school. And he said, you're in the Navy, kid. And I was. And we got to Great Lakes and I went into boot camp and they give you tests. I mean, you spend a week just taking tests and I do very well taking tests. I really do. And they called me in one day and they said, we want to send you to Albuquerque, New Mexico go to a nuclear weapons program where you become a guided missile specialist. And then they gave me some psychological testing and said, You know what? We think that's a bad idea. And I was on track to go to medical school. So they said, I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll make you a corpsman, a Navy corpsman. And they sent me to Navy Hospital Corps School, and I did very well. I came out of that school with the top of that class, And they sent me to a more advanced school, which is now you would call a physician's assistant program. And that might have been the very first one at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. And I went through that program and I did very well and graduated. And they called me in one day and said, this captain said to me, we're going to send you to Newport, Rhode Island to Officer's Candidate School. So they sent мне to New Port, Rhode Ireland. I went though OCS and I got commissioned as an ensign in the Navy. and they gave me orders to Okinawa to the 3rd Marine Division as a medical administrative officer to the Marines. And I ended up in Okinawo attached to the 2nd Marine Division and I met, they saw my credentials and they couldn't give me a job, they didn't know what the hell to do with me, they didn'T have a job for me so they put me in this officers club on the northern end of Okinaowa and kind of left me alone. and I would get up every day and report to the cocktail lounge at noon for duty and I would drink Hagen Haag pinch at 60 cents a pop it's not bad and that's what I would do and pretty soon they put another guy up there he was a surgeon out of Temple University who was a bad drunk and they didn't want him around patients so they put him up in this officers club and he and I kind of bonded we became brothers and we got up every day about noon and we went to the cocktail lounge in the old club and we lived there and we kind of forgot we were in the military. They left us alone, we left them alone. We grew beards and let our hair grow and wore shorts and kind of lost track of uniforms. You know, we didn't know what the hell they were. I mean, we kindof just hung out in shorts and it was great and then we got notified that the regimental commander of the 5th Marines, this Byrd Colonel, was having a dinner party and all of the officers in his command had to attend. So, I mean, this was bad news, but we had to shave and get our hair cut and get some uniforms and go to the colonel's dinner party and we tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. We sat at the other side of the room and the colonels looked around the room and he looked at us and he said, who the hell are those guys? He said, I've never met those two officers and they're in my command. How can that be? And his adjutant said to him, well, one of them is a doctor. I don't know what the hell the other guy does, but, you know. One of them, both naval officers, one of them is a doctor, and he said, did they have a job? And he said well we don't think so. He said give them a job. They've got to go to work. So we were put in charge of venereal disease control for the island of Okinawa. And what would happen is the Marines would get syphilis and gonorrhea and lymphogra... They'd get hideous disease that you only saw in textbooks. and in Marines, it turned out. I think we were the only two places they ever existed and our job was to go out into the villages and find the young ladies and make sure that they were treated and we had this power to quarantine the bars. So when they would see us, we rode all around Okinawa in a Jeep from bar to bar. That's all we did every day and of course they'd see us coming and they'd know why we were there so we would drink for free, Cheves Regal for free all over Okinawa every day and that's what we did. And so finally our tour came up. I want to get into some AA here. I don't know how I got into all this. Our tour of duty came up we came back to the States and he went back to Temple and completed his residency in cardiovascular surgery and he's a cardiovascular surgeon in Philadelphia today and he has not yet been to AA. which means if you need a bypass, I'd stay the hell out of Philadelphia. It's a funny thing about him. I don't know that he's an alcoholic. I know that he was a heavy drinker when we were in the service. But he always seemed to be different than me. He seemed to stop. He seemedto pull it together. He seemedtobe able to function. He seemedo be able to just pull his life together like that. I was unglued. I couldn't do that, and that might be the difference between heavy drinkers and alcoholics. I don't know, but it seemed to me that that's the way that he was. I went back to Cornell, and I finished my last semester, and I got my undergraduate degree, got tentatively accepted at several good medical schools with the proviso that I had social problems and that I needed to go out and work in the world for a year or two and then reapply, and then I went out in the word and instead of curing my social problems, I did what you did. I got married, which is what you do when you're confused, isn't it? It's what I always did. I mean, really, always was the answer for me. And I married a girl that I had met in the military. She was a Navy nurse. And to say that we were incompatible is to really understate it. We should never have had a second date. Do you remember those relationships? But we got married and she got pregnant. We moved to Southern California. I got accepted in med school at SC, and we moved in with her parents in Orange County. And I needed a stopgap summer job, so I got a job as a bartender. And that turned out badly. I would end up coming home at 3 or 4 in the morning drunk, and pretty soon she threw me out, her family threw me. I found myself on Bolsa Avenue in Orange Country with a lot of Samsonite luggage and no money. and I got a job for the rest of the summer as an ambulance driver and I am a blackout drinker so the ambulance calls were colorful I'd come out with the lights and the sirens going and say where are we going would I nerve the attendant, I will tell you that the crowning glory to that career came in August of that year when I found myself in Costa Mesa, California driving around in a cul-de-sac I came out of a blackout driving slowly around this cul- de-sack and about the lights going on top and you know around the circle around the circuit and the beacon is shining in these people's bedroom windows and they're all coming out in a porch in their pajamas watching this ambulance slowly go down the street and finally they sent a police car in there to lead me out of the cul-De-sat and I lost my job, I lost my license, my driver's license. That's the package I brought to Alcoholics Anonymous and that was in 1965 and a new profession had opened up in civilian medicine, the Physician's Assistant Program. Many of you know what PAs are today but in those days it was brand new and I said most of the original PAs were people who were trained such as I was in the military who went to advanced medical training. And I was the third licensed PA in the state of California with my newfound sobriety. And I got a job, and the only jobs available for PAs in those days were emergency rooms at night because the doctors wanted to sleep. So those were the only job available. So I went to work in an emergency room in East L.A. nights. And we had the county contract and the city contract. We got all the stabbings and the shootings and the industrial injuries from places like Kaiser Steel and all that stuff came into that ER at night, and I was the guy. I was a triage guy, andI would call the various specialists we needed, but it was up to me. It was challenging, butit was exciting, and it was rewarding, and Iwas well-trained, andi did it well, and i was not drinking. I was in Alcoholics Anonymous, by God,but I was not taking these steps. and I met another girl beautiful girl a daughter of a long time sober AA member and we fell in love and we got married she went to Al-Anon and we were precious is what we were except nobody had taken any steps and there wasn't any program going on here and I'd go into that emergency room at night and I would get depressed and I get consumed with anxiety and I would get unsure and I wouldn't know how to proceed and I don't know about you but I don' t have a program but I have an excellent medical education so I had a fixed depression I used Dexedrine 15 mg Spanchels and when I was through with them I was taking 7 or 8 of them a day and I dont know if you know anything about amphetamine abuse but that's got you moving right on down the road boy let me tell you whatever you're doing it will be in a hurry and along about the fifth day when you've not slept nor eaten and you show up in the emergency room boy and your eyes are dilated out over here and your hair stands up on end like that you look like you've just witnessed an axe murder and you show up to work to help the sick the guy you were leaving never wants to go home But there's a remedy for that, believe me. And that is a drug called Demerol. You all know about Demeril, don't you? Demerul is a... I'll tell you something you didn't know. I bet you think it's a narcotic. It's really not. It's a synthetic. But it's academic. Don't worry about it. It doesn't mean anything. But it is part of the family of opiates and it's addictive. And by the way, opiats are addictive for everybody. You don't need an addictive personality. You just need a syringe and a needle, which is different from alcoholism, by the way. Not the same thing. Turns out that 9 out of 10 people who drink alcohol are not alcoholic. We represent 1 out of10, I think, probably close to that. So there's a difference between narcotic addiction and alcoholism. Narcotics addict everybody, psychologically and physiologically. You just needs to inject them. Heroin, morphine, dilaudid all come from the same place. They're all the same thing. They're buffered a little bit differently, but they're addictive. And I began to use Demerol in the emergency room. But the other problem with Demeril is people care about where it is. You know, I mean, they show up in the morning and open the narcotics drawer and all the dope is gone. And they say things like, Vince, Vince where's the Demeral? And I'd have to say, I don't know. I don't know, I was here. And the inevitable happened to me. The Medical Quality Assurance Board of the state of California came in there one night and inspected the narcotic logs and placed me under arrest. Which is what they did back then, incidentally. They were not enlightened. There were no programs for impaired physicians. It was just, you know, the L.A. County Jail was the program. And that's where I went, right? In my green scrub suit downtown to the L, A. County jail. And it was subsequently reduced to a misdemeanor, and I didn't have to go to jail. But I lost my medical license and ended up spending the summer of 1972 drinking one-half gallon of vodka a day in Englewood by the airport. My wife now had left and took the car and everything and just me. Supermarket brand vodka, you remember that? The kind in the wire basket by the cash register where you go. So $7 a half gallon, good premium stuff. Alpha-beta vodka, really good stuff. And that's the way it ended for me. I came out of a blackout in Newport Beach. I don't remember how I got there except it was very hot in 1972 that summer and I found myself sitting on a bench by the Balboa Peninsula that Gordon Davis remembers well, don't you, Gordon? and we were new down there together. I met a lot of old friends here tonight. I mean, it's amazing. Clem and Gordon and Yvonne, people I've known for a long, long time. I'm glad we're all alive for one thing and sober for another and it's good to see them all but I found myself coming out of a blackout sitting on this bench on the Balboa Peninsula about 110 and I had on a three-piece wool suit and a white shirt and a tie I don't even remember how I got there, except I knew I needed a job. And I found a job as a – is it 9 o'clock already? No, 845. 845, I've got to get into sobriety here, I really do. And I find this job, the only job I could find was with a mortician as an apprentice embalmer, which was, you know, I had no – that's all I could do, and the job paid $85 a week and it had a fringe benefit of this bachelor apartment over the room where they kept the caskets. so, Jesus it was grim in the morning you'd walk through, the only way to get out was walk through this casket room and in the morning with a hangover and they would have these chimes and chirping birds on this tape and you would just walk through it was just hideous it would set you free it was dreadful and you'd go through there with a hangover and it was awful and I didn't like this The mortician and I, he was a ghoul is what he was. He and I had an argument, and I got drunk and stole his hearse. I came out of where I hope is the last blackout, driving the wrong way on Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach, California, in this stolen hearse with this young lady next to me who I do not recall meeting, oddly enough, who was screaming at the top of her lungs. I remember thinking, you know, she had that look that these women get with me. I don't know. They all get a certain look. I mean, there comes a time in the evening when the eye makeup, you know, the black streaks down her face. I mean she had that look. And I remember thinking, you know I have a penchant for choosing neurotic women. I mean the women in my life all end up like this. I just choose these kinds. And I told her, I said, you really are unstable. You need to get some counseling and you would do better. That was September the 20th, 1972. Not had a drink of alcohol, nor have I used any mood-altering chemical from that date to this. And that's an amazing thing when you consider my frame of mind. I mean, I was not motivated. I mean I'm just sitting in this hearse across the street from the Arches, Gordon, in Newport Beach, pointed the wrong way on Pacific Coast Highway. and it was seven o'clock in the morning and she was crying and I don't know what happened to her. She kind of dissolved into the Pacific Ocean, I guess, but I hope she got home all right. I'd never seen her from this day to this, that day to that. But I went into this, made my way up into Costa Mesa and got back to this mortuary and brought his hearse back to him and he was upset. He had called the police and they had thrown all my clothes out the window. All my clothes were laying all over this blacktop parking lot at 8 o'clock in the morning and I had a cardboard box and I'm picking my clothes up and this was it. I went to the Costa Mesa Olano Club which was a dreadful place, wasn't it? I mean, it was really not... It was depressing is what it was and I just had a cup of coffee at the coffee bar and they said, they had a meeting there that noon and I went through that meeting and it was a dreadful meeting. It was just awful. People sitting around Formica tables, out-of-work people from Texas. You know, it was just dreadful. And they had a meeting there that night, and I went to that. And the manager of the club let me sleep on the sofa because I didn't have anywhere else to go. And the next day I scrounged some money together and went and rented a room for $11 a week in Costa Mesa. And I can't tell you what that was like. I mean, you can imagine an $11-a-week room. And I moved into that room and it was just – and I got a – stayed sober. I went to meetings and hung out with crazy people and we were all kind of nuts and nobody was working or if they were, they weren't working very much. And we went to the meetings in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach and I stayed sober, I didn't drink and nothing special. I got in a lot – I couldn't seem to get it together to hold a job. I lost a job as a drill press operator in a machine shop, A $1.87 cent an hour drill press operator. God, it was hideous. And I got fired for being incompetent. I remember the foreman coming up and telling me, I can see you're real bright, but you're not... He says, I can say that you're really trying very hard, but you are not too bright because you put the hole in the wrong place about 800 of these copper plates one day. God damn thing went off. And I remember walking back in the rain to this $11 a week room that day about as depressed as I ever was and some male had caught up with me and one was a letter from a physician in upstate New York inviting me to join a committee for my college class reunion. I remember sitting there reading that letter and thinking of the incongruity of my life. How could this be? How could you do this? How could it happen? How do I answer Dr. Medoff? I can't make it this year, doctor. I just lost my job as a drill press operator. I mean, it's just, you know, unbelievable. You can't go from there to there. I'm ashamed to even talk to my family. I just can't, but I stayed sober, and I didn't drink. And pretty soon, and that night was the big meeting down at the Evo Club that Gordon and I used to go to, and it was down on the Ebo Club in Newport Beach in the peninsula, and the speaker that night was the quintessential AA speaker, a guy named Norm Alpey. And this guy was, I mean, he was wonderful. His talk was the same every time. you could almost repeat it word for word but every time you heard him it was as though this was the first time you heard him. And with that I have come I know, I have Come to Believe is the music of Alcoholics Anonymous and if you're new that's what you need to listen for listen for the music because there's music here and you will find it in your heart that's where it will touch you there's nothing here that is about anything that you know. It is all about what you feel. Now, I didn't always believe that, but I do today. I think it's about what you feel, so listen for the music. And wonderful things happened to me shortly after that, although I didn' t know it at the time. I went home and said a prayer that night, the first one I'd said in a long time, and it was very unsophisticated. It wasn't And anything the Jesuits had, it was simply God please help me because I'm afraid and I'm alone and I can't make it anymore. And my recovery began that night because I began to do things that would make me better and I began see and feel things that I had never felt before. And I have stayed sober. Now I needed some help in my life of a more practical nature so I had to get this guy for a sponsor. I didn't have a sponsor, but I knew who the sponsor had to be, and the proposition was not good. I didn' t like this guy. He was a big-shot speaker in AA, but he was really crazy. I mean, if you listen to this guy talk, you knew he was insane, but he wasn' t brilliant also. But additionally, he had this apparent capacity for helping the losers in Alcoholics Anonymous because they would go, and they would get him for a sponsor. and they would join this fascist AA group on the west side of Los Angeles. And they would do things that were not really AA, as near as I could tell. But they would get better. I mean, they'd turn up again in Orange County and they will have paid their child support and gotten jobs and made amends and cleaned up. So I went and asked them to be my sponsor. By now I had acquired some material possessions. A 1964 red Chevrolet convertible with no brakes and a hole in the top. And I drove that to this mission that he ran on Skid Row in Los Angeles. And I went in and had lunch with him, and I asked him for help. And he said, I'll help you on one condition, that you can accept the proposition that your judgment about your life is terrible and that my judgment about yours is terrible. Your judgment about life is infinitely better than yours. And if you will do what I ask you to do without debate, I will help you. And so I made that unholy pact with the devil. and it's worked for the last 30 years because we're still in the same shape and my life took off not right away, it took a long time he had me do things that were preposterous made me live in that mission I was living in Newport Beach I said I'm looking for upward mobility you don't understand but I lived there for 8 months I ended up getting my, a lot of you have heard me before, and I got my medical license back because I ran into the administrator of the Sama Medical Center in which I was arrested in a movie line in Westwood Village. And he found out I was sober, and they wrote some letters. I got myself a license and went back to work in the same emergency room. Worked there for a couple of years as a PA. And then other things happened. I got into a new career, and I met my current wife in 1975. her husband was dying of cancer while she was getting sober which was not an easy way to get sober I will tell you but she did and we fell in love after he passed away. We began to date first and then we fell in love and we got married and we're married for 24 years and our marriage is better today than the day we got marry and I will tell you without embarrassment, I love my wife more with every breath I take And that is a gift of Alcoholics Anonymous. It would not happen had it not been for Alcoholics Anonymous, it is all Alcoholics Anonymous all of it. And I will tell you we have had triumph and tragedy we have made a lot of money and we had Mercedes and BMWs and big homes in Pasadena and then they changed the law about the legislature changed the law About what I did and my income went from $250,000 a year to $30,000 in one year. That's a drop. I celebrated that with a heart attack. Had bypass surgery and recovered from that. And all the time we were surrounded by people who loved us and we loved them. And we remained in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous and we were cared for. And that's what we do here incidentally if you don't know. We care for each other. that's our job we take care of each other and you tell them when you need to be taken you say hey I'm sick take care because that's what we're here for and that's what you did for us this year was a terrible year I had a routine colonoscopy last July and they found a cancer and I had to have surgery and I Had chemotherapy which never had a symptom from the cancer but chemo almost killed me but I'm better now And we were surrounded by people who love us. We were just surrounded by people who cared about us. And Al-Anon's came to my room and made me drink Ensure. Sat there until I drank it. And I will tell you, I love Al-Alanon. And I love the Al-Alanons. And if you're going to trash Al-ALanon, don't do it around me. Because they're wonderful, wonderful people. and I love them so much. They're the people who saved us and our lives are good and they're full and they'RE rich. Our group had our anniversary last week. I belong to a huge group, that fascist AA group. I'm still a member and we had our anniversary. Back in November, we celebrated our 40th anniversary and we have a big show and I produced and directed it and it was on chemotherapy therapy, which was a trick. I'd leave the rehearsals and go throw up in the garbage can outside, but I wouldn't trade a minute of it. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience and it was a great show too if I do say so myself, I will admit. And it's all bound together in this wonderful tapestry of life that we've been privileged to live here. And if you knew it is our gift to you. I will say one thing, Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, he was the president of Notre-Dame University and he was a simple man. He was a priest and he lived in a dormitory. He didn't live like the presidents of most universities. And he was very accessible man. He walked the campus in the quads all the time. And someone recently asked him what did you tell students, new students, freshmen who came to you and said, I'm overwhelmed by the academic load of this place and the rigid discipline and I'm away from home for the first time in my life and I am only 17 or 16 and what do you say to them? He said, I say three words. He said I say come Holy Spirit and I will tell you here in Alcoholics Anonymous there is a spirit. It is the spirit of AlcoholicsAnonymous and if you are new I ask you to invite that spirit into your life. Come the spirit of AlcoholicAnonymous and if you do you will live this glorious life thank you