My Feelings Are Seldom Facts but They Are Still Feelings – Chico C.

About This Speaker Tape

Chico C. came up through the streets of West Palm Beach — drinking at eleven, carrying a straight razor at fifteen, and running with the roughest crowd in the neighborhood. Born in New York to a Puerto Rican father and Colombian mother, he drank alcoholically from his first drink and was smoking dope by twelve. By seventeen he had been arrested dozens of times, expelled from two schools, and was strung out on opiates and barbiturates while maintaining a savage daily drinking habit.

His first contact with AA came at twenty-five through a religious retreat, but it took four years of bouncing in and out before he stayed. During those years he descended into psychotic episodes, a suicide attempt, and a plan to go house to house with a shotgun killing everyone who had wronged him. What brought him back was not a spiritual awakening but the simple fact that there was nowhere else to go. His sponsor told him five meetings a week — he said he would go but would not listen. That was enough.

Chico's sobriety was anything but smooth. He married his second wife at four and a half months sober, and their early years were explosive — running away from home into the closet, loading a .38 and driving to her office with plans to kill. At three and a half years sober and serving as chairman of his local intergroup, he came within inches of putting a butcher knife through her neck. His central teaching — that we become "sober too long to be sick" — comes from watching an old-timer with thirty-five years take his own life on Christmas Day because he could not admit he was in pain. Chico's humor is legendary and relentless, but underneath every joke is a man who knows exactly how close he came to dying, and who insists that honesty about pain is the only thing that keeps any of us alive.

Topics

Timestamps

• 00:02:00 Opening jokes — the sow in the wheelbarrow and the painted toilet seat
• 00:10:00 Introduces himself as a Puerto Rican with an Irish disease, first drunk at eleven
• 00:18:00 Terminally cool on the streets — Marlon Brando, straight razors, and getting it wrong with the cops
• 00:28:00 Violence in the first marriage — bullet holes in the door, machete marks on the door frame
• 00:38:00 A priest takes him to AA and the magic of those first meetings
• 00:48:00 His daughter stops breathing — he saves her life sober but still plans to go back out
• 00:55:00 Suicide attempt to The Doors, then a plan to go door to door with a shotgun
• 01:05:00 Wife asks if he is running away from home again tonight — and that cured him
• 01:15:00 Loaded the thirty-eight and drove to her office to kill them both — they never showed up
• 01:22:00 The man with thirty-five years who killed himself on Christmas Day — sober too long to be sick
• 01:30:00 His son and the spilled milk — conditioned to think he was worth eight ounces
• 01:40:00 McCorkle and the 23rd Psalm — I know the words but Father here knows the shepherd