Newsflash — You Can’t Drink Anymore, What the Hell Are You So Grateful About? 🫠 – Mike B.
About This Speaker Tape
Mike B. from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sober since June 3, 2003, tells the story of an alcoholic made, not born — raised in a disgustingly normal home with a non-alcoholic brother who'd call it quits halfway through his first beer. Milwaukee itself was a drinking town (taverns on all four corners, the Bavarian Inn on a Sunday, cops drinking on duty), but Mike is emphatic: his alcoholism was self-inflicted, not environmental. He hated the taste of beer as a kid and had no interest in the party scene until age 16, when a girl he had a crush on threw a kegger. He walked in, saw her making out with someone else, spotted the keg, and let upperclassmen funnel beer into him through horns. Everything changed that night — alcohol didn't make him better, it made him feel better, and that feeling ran the rest of his life.
The tape tracks the descent: college cross-country where he'd cross the finish line thinking about drinking, senior week where his parents drove from Milwaukee to upstate New York and saw the look of disappointment for the first time, nine years in Washington D.C. that he can't remember, a blown shot at a top law school, estrangement from his parents by his mid-twenties, and work as a mule for some very dangerous men — a human shield doing grunt work he'd have called morally reprehensible a year earlier. Around 9/11 he had to run, not from the law but from the other side, and landed back at his parents' house. A cancer diagnosis followed — the kind caused by drinking — and he drank through chemotherapy.
The day after his birthday, his controlled-drinking plan (six beers over five hours, miserable the whole time) collapsed when he ran into an old Milwaukee drinking buddy and played dice until closing. He woke up to the most disgusting night of his life and walked into a posh Milwaukee club for his first meeting, called in with the Budweiser flu, refused to raise his hand as a newcomer, refused to hug the cheerful serenity people, and went anyway because AA was literally the only place he was still welcome. On day four or five a man who didn't scream (but yelled and screamed) asked if he had a sponsor, told him he wasn't serious about AA, and handed him five non-negotiable daily actions: meetings every day, no dating the first year, pray and meditate, read a page of the Big Book daily, and work with another alcoholic one-on-one.
He closes with post-Katrina New Orleans, two and a half years sober, on a roof you had to reach by boat, when a stranger asked if any AA was around. No central office, no intergroup, no helpline — a dozen drunks found that makeshift meeting on top of a Winn-Dixie by word of mouth and a little Higher Power, including two newcomers who'd looted all the booze they could and figured now was as good a time as any to quit. Mike stopped counting on miracles because he sees them happen around him every day.
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