Our Courtship Was 20 Minutes — Alcoholics Take a Long Time with Heavy Decisions 😂 – Jay P.

They always have these things set up for tall guys.
My name is Jay Plumback and I'm an alcoholic.
Through the grace of God and the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous working my life a day
at a time, I've not had to take a drink since March the 8th of 1974, and for that I'll never
be able to truly express how grateful I am.
You know, a lot of things run through my mind this morning, or run through my mind yesterday.
It's been a great weekend.
It's given me an opportunity to re-examine some things about me and to think about where
I am and where I fit in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And what Alcoholics Anonymous is.
I remember when Bob called me and invited me, I told him I was honored, and I feel honored
to be asked to participate in your state convention.
And then Jeff called and we began to communicate and we had both worked, he still works in
and I had worked in a very small industry and we knew a lot of the same people.
And we experienced a lot of the same things, both sober and drunk, in that particular event.
And it was real special, this whole weekend has been real special, and I'm glad to be
here, although I will be a lot gladder in about one hour.
And just to make you feel a little easier, you don't have to set your calendar.
In one hour, I'll be done.
If you ain't done, re-listen to the tape.
You know, I never planned on being here in Maryland, I never planned on being an alcoholic.
Of course, I don't know many people that did.
I can't remember every meeting I went to saying, you know, my lifelong ambition is to be a
drunk.
It just didn't happen that way.
It didn't happen with me.
I wanted to be a lot of other things.
I had all kinds of goals as a kid and things I wanted to do.
And I never seemed to be able to attain any of those.
You know, one time I wanted to be a lawyer.
Now, like I mentioned, because I did, I wanted to be a lawyer, I'd read a book about a guy
named Clarence Darrow, and I was so impressed by this man and by what he had done and by
how good he was that I said, I want to be like that.
That represented influence, represented just a lot of things, but I was never able to be
that.
Because to be something like that, I'd had to pay a price, I'd had to go to school, I'd
had to have discipline in my life, I'd had to sacrifice things, and I didn't do that.
Any of the other things I thought I wanted to be, I was never able to attain because
I wasn't able to pay the price to attain it.
To attain those things.
And yet if one of you would have taken me aside at any age in my life, any young age
in my life, and told me the price that I would pay to gain admission to Alcoholics Anonymous,
I'd have said you're crazy.
If you'd have told me I was going to sacrifice a career, I was going to give up a family,
I was going to destroy my health, I was going to darn near die, I'd have said you're nuts,
I'll never do that.
And yet that was the price that I paid to gain admission to Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know, I had a lot of things going on with me as a kid that I thought were normal.
And I later found out that they were a part of my alcoholism.
Yet these things that I mentioned to you did not make me an alcoholic.
They just made me a screwed up kid.
I was mad as far back as I can remember.
You know, before I go, I want to take another moment.
They were talking about when I thanked Bob and thanked Jeff, I need to thank Sandy and
I need to thank Chuck and I need to thank everybody sitting here that's a member of
the group that has made me feel an integral part of this conference.
You all really welcomed me and let me feel, and you let me do what I needed to do when
I needed to do it, and yet you included me in everything you did.
And the guys and the gals that I'd stand outside smoking with and talking with, you know, it
just, the weekend's just fantastic.
So the committee, every volunteer, and everyone here that's taking the time to make me feel
welcome, please let me, I want you to know I thank you.
But anyhow.
As a kid, I was mad as a kid, and I was mad as far back as I can remember, but I didn't
know I was mad.
I didn't know I was mad until I was sober for a year and a half.
Well, I was in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous at that time.
I belonged to the Nuestra Esperanza Big Book Group in West Palm Beach, Florida, met on
Kirk Road, and I was an active member of that group, a year and a half sober, and I was
sort of a poster child in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And if they'd had poster children, I'd have been there, right, big and showing, you know.
I'd done everything in that group.
I'd made coffee.
You know, it wasn't very good, but I made it.
I cleaned the cups.
Back then, you had porcelain cups, and you had to wash them after the meeting, and we
had ashtrays, and you had to clean them.
And you know, they gave me those jobs, and I did them, and I was chairman, and, well,
I'd even talked once or twice, and they were lies, but I talked, you know, sounded good
to me.
But I'd done everything in that group except apply any steps, you know, so that's the kind
of member of AA I was.
And I was there that night, and we were studying the big book, and I remember repeating, I
don't remember what it was.
But I repeated something that I'd learned the other day across town.
What I would do, see, is go to meetings where there would be old-timers, and I'd listen
to what they had to say.
Then I'd bring it back to my group as though it was fresh and new and straight from me.
And the people in my group showed me love and tolerance.
They didn't tell me I was, you know, crazy and that I was nuts.
They just said, keep coming, kid, you'll be all right.
But this particular night, after I'd given out whatever wisdom I'd given out, there was
a guy that took me aside.
His name was John.
And he put his arm around my shoulder, and he told me that he loved me.
And he told me that I was a phony, and that I was about to get drunk, and I hated him.
And then he took me home with him that night.
He asked me to go with him and I did, and we went to his house.
He lived out in Loxahatchee, which then was just a swamp out in the west side of Palm
Beach County.
He took me out to his trailer.
He took me out to his manufactured home.
.
For many, many years, I considered them trailers, especially when I had that 4,000-square-foot house on the 16th Fairway.
Those were trailers, but now I live in one, and they've become manufactured homes.
There's a guy that talks around a whole lot, and he always talks about perspective, you know, and that's what it is, is perspective.
Until you got it, you don't know what it is it is.
But anyhow, he took me out to this manufactured home, set me down on the stoop of it, and we're sitting there talking, and he talked to me about Alcoholics Anonymous.
He talked to me about the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And, you know, I'd accepted the first step, I thought, you know, first step just, you know, admitting that I had a problem with alcohol, and that's as far as it went.
I never saw the second half of it, admitting that my life had become unmanageable.
Never had I looked at that, hadn't accepted it, but based on the knowledge in the first half of the first step, I attempted to work the remaining steps.
Hence, I was all screwed up.
And John talked to me about unmanageability, and he had me look at my life, and he pointed out areas that I didn't want to look at.
He asked me specifically about my marriage.
My marriage was not in good shape, this poster child of AA.
My wife and I had no relations whatsoever that weren't ugly.
It was so bad in our home that I was an active member of Sex Without Partners.
That may not have got up here to Maryland or not, but it's a big self-hate.
I had a big self-help group down there, I'll tell you that.
Legally, I wasn't in very good shape. I was on the verge of going to jail. The law wanted me.
Because, you see, what had happened, I'd been over in a country called Ceylon, they call it Sri Lanka now, but I'd been over there, and I'd been to AA meetings.
We were there 30 days, I went to 30 meetings. I went every night to a meeting, and I met guys who thought just like I thought.
You know, they were crooked and dishonest and conning, and that was me.
And I met good guys, too, but I met these guys.
And these guys that I met, we weren't friends.
We went into business.
And we were exporting semi-precious gemstones from Sri Lanka and importing them into the United States.
Now, we weren't using any laws to do it with, so the government called it smuggling.
And I wasn't a gemologist, I was a marine engineer.
I didn't know a damn thing about stones, but I knew how to steal and cheat.
But I always thought that was business principles.
I just thought in business you had a different set of rules to go by.
And I was going by those rules, and I was on the verge of going to jail.
I was on the verge of bankruptcy, because you see, all the money that I'd had and accumulated was gone.
And I was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Every area of my life, I was in trouble.
I had no spiritual relationship to speak of.
Every area, I was in trouble.
And as John pointed it out to me, I accepted that.
And for the very first time in my life, the first step in its entirety became a part of my life.
I'd known from very early on in Alcoholics Anonymous that I was powerless over alcohol.
I knew that my drinking was different from a social drinker's drinking.
I knew it, and I accepted the definition you gave me in the book on page 21.
I knew I was a real alcoholic.
That definition boils it down, no matter what else is going on in my life.
If that definition fits me, then no matter what other problems I have, I am an alcoholic.
And that says, what about the real alcoholic?
I love that word, real.
It gives us, you know, makes us feel important.
Sort of like being a doctor or a lawyer or something, you know.
But anyhow, so what about the real alcoholic?
He or she may or may not be a heavy drinker.
May or may not be a daily drinker.
But at some stage of his drinking career, begins to lose control once he starts to drink.
That fit me.
It fit me as accurately at age 13 as it fit me at 30 and a half when I got here.
So I'd accepted that early on in Alcoholics Anonymous.
But with just a half a brick, you can't build a foundation.
And then John talked to me some more.
And he said, so step one, simply make it, I can't.
He said, step two, he said, let's look at it.
He said, you know, that's came to believe that a part greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
John explained sanity to me.
It does not mean bizarre behavior in our particular instance.
I still have bizarre behavior.
Ask some of my friends.
You know, I'm crazy as hell at times.
But that's got nothing to do with the insanity that it talks about.
In the second step.
In the second step, John said the sanity meant he used the book.
He always used the book.
And when I say the book, the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous is what he used to direct me.
And he had me look up sanity in the book and insanity.
And Bill talks about that strange insanity that precedes the first drink.
You know, that thought, that notion that this time I can take a drink and it'll be different.
This time I can take a drink and I won't behave the way I did the last time I drank.
That's insane because I had nothing to bear that out.
He talks further on.
Like after the promises, you know, it says,
if tempted by alcohol, we react as if from a hot flame for sanity has returned.
So sanity for me was simply going to be that taking a drink would not be an acceptable alternative.
Step two, he can.
So I had two premises.
I can't and he can.
And with that information, John suggested we get on our knees and we pray the third step prayer.
And he opened the book up and we read that prayer out of the book.
And I remember reading it with him that night.
And I remember how I felt when I read it because he talked to me about what it was going to mean.
And I read that prayer and I literally prayed that prayer that night.
And that began a ritual for me because I have prayed that prayer or said that prayer on a daily basis with rare exception from that day to this.
I don't take the third step every day.
But what I do is reaffirm that decision I made on my knees that night with John.
And when we got off our knees, John handed me a legal tablet.
I was almost afraid this was the one.
But he handed it to me.
And I'm moving it away because I don't know what's on it.
But he handed it to me.
And there were three columns on one side of the page.
And he turned it up.
There's nothing on the back side.
And he said, up in the upper left-hand column, I want you to write the word, I resent.
And I looked at John.
And then my vocabulary was not quite what it is now.
And I said, John, I don't resent anybody.
I didn't know what it meant.
He said, well, hell right.
I'll write the word, I hate, down.
I did.
Now, let me tell you something.
When I say hate, I feel good.
I get warm all over.
I hated everybody.
I didn't have to single anyone out.
Hell, I hate.
I could have put him first, for God's sake.
But John told me who to put first.
When I put I hate, he said, put down the name Siraj.
And I did.
Siraj, that name doesn't mean anything to you probably.
It was the Indian that was living in my house, the guy from Salon.
I'd brought him over there on a visa.
And they were using him to watch their money.
You know, I'd have him in my house.
So he's staying in the house.
And I hated him.
I hated him because he's sleeping in a bed and my little boy was sleeping on the floor.
I hated him because he'd eat raw meat and we'd eat rice and beans.
I hated him because they got all my money.
And I didn't get theirs.
I hated him for everything.
I hated him because he wore a dress.
Now, they didn't call it a dress.
They called it a sari.
It was a dress.
I'll tell you, it was a dress.
You see, John told me that I didn't have to understand why I hated him.
Just put down why.
And he didn't have to understand it.
But if I felt it, put it down.
And I put it down.
And I put down that I hated him and all the reasons why.
And then he had me go back through my life from that point to as far back as I can remember
and put down who I hated him and why I hated him.
And I found that hate and anger was a part of my life to my earliest memories.
And nobody taught me that.
It just came with the package.
And that's a part of alcoholism.
Yet it didn't make me alcoholic, just made me mad.
I was a liar as far back as I can remember.
You don't have to be a liar to be an alcoholic.
It helps, but you don't have to be.
There might be an alcoholic somewhere that wasn't a liar.
I ain't met him or her, but there might be.
And, you know, the thing about lying was I always thought it was like a gift from God.
Like he said here.
Because with lies I could make myself into whatever you wanted me to be.
You wanted me to be tall, I'd be tall.
Short, smart, whatever you wanted me to be, I was it.
And if I told you what it was, if you didn't believe it, I got mad.
Because I believed it.
And once I believed it, it became truth.
When you can lie like that, I set myself up for the biggest lie I was ever going to tell.
The lie that almost killed me.
The lie that this time I can take a drink.
And it'll be all right.
This time I can take a drink and I'll be able to control it.
This time I'll take a drink and I won't hur-hur.
I won't do that or I won't go there.
And I believed that lie.
Almost to the point of death.
I was a thief as far back as I can remember.
I didn't think I looked like a thief.
You know, I just thought I was a short, fat Robin Hood, I guess.
I just sort of...
I might go over to Dick and take something from Dick.
And I never thought about the fact that he'd earned money to pay for that and that was his.
I'd turn around and give it to Jeff.
Now, I'd give it to Jeff because Jeff would like me and want me to be around.
Now, if one of you would have pointed out to me that I was trying to buy somebody's friendship or buy their relationship,
I'd have said, you're crazy.
And yet I was doing just that.
And that didn't make me an alcoholic.
It just made me a thief and made you want to lock your stuff up when I was around.
I had all that going on before I ever started school.
Then I went to the first grade.
The first grade was a real experience.
I was born in a Midwest city.
I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in a suburb of it.
And I went to a parochial school.
A lot of you know that means Catholic.
So I went to this Catholic school.
And I had a nun there.
Her name was Sister Lucy.
And I can only...
I can best describe her as sort of early S&M.
Yeah, yeah.
You got to picture her.
Let me draw the picture of how she looked.
She wore this black.
They called it a habit.
And she wore this thing.
This thing covered her from head to toes.
She wore black boots.
She had this white thing here.
Her head was covered.
She looked mean.
And she had leather and chains hanging down to those boots.
And it made noise when she walked.
And I was scared of her.
And halfway through the first grade, they called my parents in.
And they were going to have a parent-teacher conference.
They said, you know, I didn't know why.
I figured I'd done something wrong.
Whenever anybody called them in, I'd done something.
I didn't know what it was.
So I stood outside the door and I sort of eavesdropped.
I always was nosy.
And I listened to what she said.
And she told them that it appeared as though I was a very gifted child.
That I had a high intelligence and I'd be able to go anywhere or do anything.
And as soon as I heard that, my education stopped.
As soon as I heard I was that smart, I couldn't learn nothing.
And I started getting in trouble.
You know, when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was surrounded by dummies here.
I was so damn smart, I almost died.
After John started talking to me, I realized how stupid I really was.
Maybe the word is ignorant.
Because ignorant is different from stupid.
Ignorant means you just don't know.
Stupid means you know, but you decide to do differently.
So I guess I was just ignorant, you know.
But anyhow, there I was getting in trouble and I didn't want to be that way.
Mind you, I hadn't took a drink yet.
I was just normal.
And I started getting in trouble and I didn't like my home.
I didn't feel that I was a member there.
I didn't feel my parents loved me.
In that inventory, I thought my mother and father hated me.
That I wasn't in that family.
And yet I'm sure that they did love me.
I saw them give my sisters.
I have three sisters and I have a baby brother.
And I saw my sisters and my brother given physical love, given emotional love.
I'm sure that I was given the very same thing.
And yet there was something inside of me that kept me from ever receiving it or feeling it.
And has kept me from ever remembering it.
And I think that's a part of alcoholism.
Yet it did not make me alcoholic.
It just made me screwed up.
And because of that going on in my head and not feeling like I belonged, I started running away.
And the more I ran away, the more trouble I got into.
And one day I wound up in front of a juvenile referee at about nine or ten years old.
And he sent me off to an orphanage.
Now that doesn't make sense.
Send a guy who's got a family to an orphanage.
I thought orphanages were for orphans.
When I got there, I found out there weren't no orphans there.
They were just guys like me.
You see, that juvenile referee labeled me.
He called me incorrigible.
Now I didn't know what incorrigible meant.
I know what it means now.
It's a multi-syllable word. It means punk.
I was just a punk they sent off.
With these other punks.
And I thought they were punishing me.
And they weren't doing it to punish me.
They were sending me to this place so that I would change.
And so that I would be better.
And so that I could fit into life as I was supposed to fit.
As God intended for me to fit into life.
But I didn't know that.
I always perceived it to be as they were punishing me.
They were doing something to me, not for me.
To make a long story short,
I stayed in one institution after another from then until I was 17 and a half years old.
And I didn't want it to be that way.
Every time I'd get out I'd do something and go back in.
Go somewhere else.
They'd send me there, send me here.
And I didn't want it to be that way.
And then at 13 a miracle came into my life.
I decided to drink.
I'm sure that I had alcohol in me many, many times prior to age 13.
I'm sure of it because of how we lived.
My dad was a drinker.
And I don't mean just a sipper once or twice a year.
I mean he drank morning, noon, and night.
I never saw him without a drink.
I never saw him drunk.
But I always saw him drinking.
He was a news commentator for a radio station.
He had a coast-to-coast hookup.
And he was a big shot in that city.
And people knew him and he traveled in big circles.
And his behavior just didn't get him in trouble.
So I just never knew him to be drunk.
My mother drank every night.
She'd have one or two drinks to relax.
So I never saw her out of the way.
And the family got together.
Uncles and aunts and all those people get together
and they'd drink heavily three or four times a year.
They'd have kegs of beer and wine and mixed drinks.
And when they'd get together,
all the kids from the different families would be there
and we'd be given alcohol.
We'd be given drinks.
A little wine or a little beer or a little mixed drink,
watered down.
It was just whatever they had, we were given.
So we didn't steal, it was just given to us.
And I remember nothing at all about it.
And I guess if I was talking to one of you,
you would explain to me that that was my social drinking.
Because that's really how social drinkers drink.
I was married to a social drinker for 34 years.
I studied them.
I mean, they studied us, but I studied them.
She, you know how social drinkers are.
If you ask one of them if they'd like a drink,
a lot of times they say no.
When they say yes, they usually don't finish it.
I mean, I think they're nuts.
And that was me up until 13.
Alcohol did nothing to me or for me, so it meant nothing.
I don't remember anything about it.
But at 13, I decided to drink.
You know how you had to be 21 years old to drink.
Hell, I didn't look 13.
I hadn't cultivated my first zit yet, you know.
So I knew I wasn't old enough to drink.
So along with stealing money out of my mother's purse
so I could get something to drink, I stole an eyebrow pencil.
And I gave myself a beard and a mustache.
Just sort of dotted it on.
It was sort of like a George Clooney 5 o'clock shadow, you know.
I remember doing it.
I don't know what it looked like.
It had to look really wonderful, you know what I mean.
And if it had rained, it would have looked good.
I headed down to the lower end of 25th Street in Cleveland,
which is a skid row.
Sort of like what East Baltimore Street used to be here.
You know, just a skid row.
And you know, if you get onto a skid row,
you go to enough of them gin mills and put your money on the bar,
eventually you get what you want.
And we went to enough of them.
We got what we wanted.
We got two bottles of mixed screwdrivers
and two bottles of Thunderbird wine.
I don't really know why we ordered that.
I can only surmise.
Screwdrivers, because it sounded so sexy.
Like there was a promise there.
I had no idea what the promise was, but it sounded good.
And Thunderbird, because of what I'd learned about it.
There was a billboard.
I used to see it on the bus when I'd go down 25th.
And this billboard had a picture of a bottle of Thunderbird
and it showed that bird just soaring through the air,
just promising something, you know.
And the words I'd learned for it, you know,
what's the word?
Thunderbird!
By God, it promised excitement.
If you think I'm kidding, try and get yourself fired up with Mogan David.
There's just a ring to it.
And it was the price.
The price was very attractive.
I was able to afford it for many, many years.
That stuff was so cheap.
Now, I don't even know if it's still on the market.
It probably is.
It was so cheap.
But they put it on the lowest shelf like they're begging you to steal it.
You know, we don't care. Take it.
We went out behind some bushes and we started to drink.
Don't know which one it was.
Don't know what it tasted like.
But I know what happened shortly after we started with whichever one we started with.
For the first time in my life, all the bad feelings went away and I was okay.
I never felt okay in my life.
And I felt okay and that everything was going to be all right.
And I never got that feeling back again.
I didn't even know that I got it then until I looked back at my life.
That feeling had to be so fantastic because the pursuit of that feeling cost me everything that I was to have.
And I never got it back that way again.
And then some things happened.
I got up the next morning in a way that I was going to wake up in over and over again until I got to you people.
I woke up in a mess and it was mine.
I woke up with a new fear.
And I didn't wake up and say, well, Jay, you got a new fear today.
It wasn't that way at all.
I just woke up.
I woke up and I was sick.
And, you know, as I was taking that inventory I was telling you about, I had them people down who I hated and why I hated them.
When I had that all done, John had me look at that inventory again.
And he said, now, he said, we're going to look and see how each of that affected you.
And we'll take that first guy, Siraj, and how it affected me.
It affected my self-esteem because I knew I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do as a father and as a husband and in my work.
I just wasn't doing what I should.
It affected my security because I was broke.
It affected my sex life.
Well, I told you how.
It affected every area of my life and I put it down just the way the book outlined it.
And I did that with each and every resentment on that list.
And then John said, now we're going to go back and look at it from a different angle.
We're going to put out of our mind the wrongs you think others have done.
Or that they have done.
Because they could be real.
That people have done things to me.
It wasn't like I was always wrong.
He said, but put out of the mind what they have done to you.
And look and see what you have done to them.
What could you have said differently or done differently?
And I looked at that first resentment against Siraj and said, I've done nothing against him.
I've done nothing to hurt him.
And John suggested that I pray about it.
He said, ask God to help you if there might have been something you could have said or done differently.
And I will tell you what I found.
I found that, I told you I was a marine engineer.
I went to sea for a living.
I was not a gemologist.
I went into business with these guys strictly to try and make money.
I had a lot of greed there.
I thought I was going to be a multi-millionaire and I'd get their money.
They were involved with money in Germany and I thought I'd be able to get my hands on it and I'd get their money.
And as soon as I saw my greed, my selfishness in the picture, what they had done or what I thought they had done no longer made me angry.
My anger went away when I saw my part in the wrong.
And it did something else too.
You know, this guy, this Siraj, by what we had done, he was never going to see his family again.
He'd never see his home country again.
If he ever went back, he'd go to jail for a long, long time.
So I'd robbed him of that because of my behavior.
So I looked at that and my anger for him left.
Did I like him or do I like him today?
It's not necessary that I do.
It's necessary that I don't hate him and that I'm able to love him.
And that inventory did something else with that.
By looking at what I had done wrong, I had a game plan right in front of me for what I was going to have to do to make it right.
Because I had to do the opposite of what I did wrong to make it right.
I did what I was supposed to do when I got to that step with Siraj and was able to make it right.
I can talk to him today or if I see him today, I'm not ashamed, I'm not embarrassed because I did what I was supposed to do when I got to step eight and nine with that.
But anyhow, there was that inventory and every single one of those instances of every resentment,
I was able to find my part in the wrong.
And as I found my part in the wrong, the anger that was deep inside of me went away.
And then John had me look at fear.
And I listed my fears as he told me to do.
I put down what I was afraid of.
I was afraid she was leaving.
I was afraid she wasn't leaving.
Don't get me wrong, it was the same she.
It was different times of the day.
I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to work or go back to work or make a living.
I had all kinds of fears, real and imagined, but they were there.
And I wrote them down and John said, now I ask God to remove them.
And I got on my knees and I prayed again and asked God to take them.
And I got up off my knees and told John I was still afraid.
And he said, Jay, what are you afraid of?
I said, I don't know. I'm just afraid.
And I was the most honest I'd ever been.
And John opened up the book to Bill's story where Bill talks about that fear of impending calamity.
And John took those Gothic words and put it into words that made sense to me.
He said, that's the fear that something bad is going to happen and you can't stop it.
Hell, I knew that fear.
I'd had that fear all the way through my life, as far back as I could remember.
And as my alcoholism progressed, that fear grew.
And that fear would have killed me had I not found sobriety.
I can't live with that fear.
I'd escape from it for periods of time and it'd come back stronger than ever.
You know, I make 12-step calls whenever I have the opportunity.
And I love making 12-step calls and being able to tell somebody about me in the hopes it'll give them hope.
And in making 12-step calls, if you're not making them, you miss a heck of an opportunity.
And you can see that fear every time you make one.
I go to a guy's house. He doesn't have electricity.
There's no food for his kids. Doesn't have gas for a car, if he has a car.
About to be evicted, but by God, he's got a cell phone. We'll call her I.D.
Understand that fear.
I got back on my knees and I asked God to take it and that fear was removed.
And in large part, it's been removed from then until now.
It occasionally comes back.
And I'll start to get feelings of that fear.
There's beginnings of that fear.
And I have to look at my life and see what I'm not doing that I should be doing
or what I am doing that I shouldn't be doing.
And then I ask God to help me with that and ask the fear to be gone.
And it's gone. So that fear comes back as a wake-up call because I know I cannot live with it.
You know, there's a third part of the inventory.
I'm going to just mention it before I go on to where I was.
The third part of the inventory is as important or more important,
if there is such a thing, as the other two parts.
And that's about sex.
The book spends three pages talking about sex.
It spends nearly that much time talking about resentment and fear.
And the way it talks about it makes sense to me.
In the writing of it, it says,
We all have problems there. We'd hardly be human if we didn't.
You know, that closes all loopholes.
I don't know anyone that isn't human.
So it says, What do we do about it?
It says, We can talk to other people about it. That's okay.
But avoid a hysterical advice.
Some will say, No flavor for your fare.
Others say, All-pepper diet.
My sponsor told me that he didn't know what was right for me,
what was between me and God.
And all I was to do was list my behavior.
And after I listed my behavior,
to ask God to help me to shape a sane and safe sex ideal.
And to write it down.
And for the very first time in my life,
a year and a half sober,
I put down a standard for my sex life.
It wasn't very much,
but it was a whole lot compared to what I'd had.
Because I'd never had a standard.
It was always, If it felt good or I wanted to, do it.
There was nothing else that got in there.
And now I had a standard.
And once I had a standard, I could improve on that standard.
Bill talks about growing in the sunlight of the Spirit.
That means that I have to have something to grow.
So I had a standard, and I was able to improve on that standard.
And it has stood me in good stead.
So if you have not worked that part of the inventory,
I strongly suggest that you do.
Don't ignore it.
Don't say, Oh, well, there's nothing wrong here.
Unless you ain't human.
Anyhow, there I was, 13, and there was a third thing
that was wrong that morning.
And that was the fact that I didn't remember
what happened the night before,
and what I had to drink.
Now again, if one of you would have explained to me
that what I'd had was a blackout,
I'd have said, You're crazy.
I didn't have a blackout. I just don't remember.
I didn't know that blackouts and not remembering
were the same thing.
And don't get me wrong.
You don't have to have blackouts to be an alcoholic.
There's a lot of people as seriously alcoholic as I
who have never had a blackout.
But on the other hand, I've never met an individual
who had a blackout related to drinking
that was not an alcoholic.
But if you'd have pointed that out to me
that I had these symptoms of alcoholism,
I'd have said, You're crazy.
How can I be an alcoholic?
And I wouldn't have listened.
I got locked up shortly after that,
went back to another reformatory
on an indefinite sentence.
I ran away from there at 17 and a half years old,
went down on a skid row and got signed into the Navy.
Went away to boot camp.
And I found out what happened.
What the law did as soon as I left that place,
ran away from that place,
they went to my parents' house.
They wanted me back. I was an escaped criminal.
They wanted me to stay in the Navy.
They petitioned the juvenile authorities
to allow me to stay in the Navy
in the hopes that the next three years
of a semi-controlled environment
would help me become a productive human being.
I didn't know they did that.
If I'd have known they'd done that,
the thought in my mind would have been
don't mess with my business.
Leave me alone. Let me do it my way.
I don't need your help.
You just don't understand.
You see, that was a refrain that went around
and around in my head all the time.
It just drove me nuts with that.
People would say, well, can you talk about it?
I couldn't talk about it. They didn't understand.
So anyhow, I went off to the Navy.
I was going to go in the Navy
and make a career of it.
Well, the career didn't last long.
It lasted five months and 29 days.
I remember my parents came up
for the graduation of boot camp.
And that's not a big deal,
but it was a big deal to them.
And they came up and watched this ceremony
and then they took me into Chicago
on a 12-hour pass.
They looked over at me and said,
son, you're not old enough to drink,
but if you're old enough to be in the service,
I'll buy you a drink. What would you have?
And you know, I got a glow inside of me
because now my dad and I were going to be drinking buddies.
He'd always drank and we were going to drink together
and I said, I'll have a beer.
And God, I felt good.
And he ordered me a beer and he ordered himself
a cup of coffee and my mother a Coca-Cola.
I looked at him like, what, are you nuts?
I said, aren't you drinking?
He said, no, I'm not.
And my mother said, your dad doesn't drink anymore.
I said, yes.
Let me tell you how my dad got sober.
My dad got sober in a place called
Rosary Hall.
When he went in there,
he was in convulsions and he stayed there
five days in convulsions in a hallway.
He almost died. They thought he would die
and they wouldn't put him in a room,
but when he came out of convulsions,
they kept him one more day and they discharged him.
And Sister Ignatia gave him that little thing
they give him when they leave and she suggested
to him that he go with his sponsor,
Alcoholics Anonymous, and that if he'd do
what you told him to do, he would never have to
come off another drunk.
And he went with his sponsor to Alcoholics Anonymous
and he did what you told him to do
and he didn't have to drink from that day
until the day he died in 1981.
My dad listened to you.
Now, I did not see him offering me a drink
as an act of unconditional love.
I mean, him not drinking with me
as an act of unconditional love,
but I saw the fact that he wasn't drinking.
I saw that he didn't want to drink with me,
that he wasn't my friend.
And I thought to myself, I looked at my watch
and thought to myself, how soon can I be away
from these people, meet my friends, and drink?
When you talk to me about selfishness
and self-centeredness being the root
of my problem, I have no trouble
at all accepting it.
All I have to do is look at my life.
And I got away from these people
and met my friends and I drank.
And I woke up the next morning the same way
I woke up the last time I drank.
Same fear, same not remembering
what happened the night before.
Same mess.
I told you my career in the Navy
was not that long.
Five months and 29 days after I went in,
I was in front of a board.
The last thing I remembered, I was on a ship
called the USS Antietam.
It was an aircraft carrier in Pensacola, Florida.
And I'd come ashore on a pass
and that was the last time I remembered.
And I woke up inside a room,
and it was much smaller than this,
but it was a big room and it had big screens
on the inside of the windows
that you couldn't get through.
And it was a nut ward of the Naval Hospital
in Pensacola, Florida.
If I signed it, I'd get an honorable discharge.
If I didn't sign it, I'd be court-martialed
and dishonorably discharged.
Easy decision, I signed the paper.
Then I asked them what it was.
And they said it was a guarantee.
I'd never attempt to re-enlist
in any of the armed forces as long as I lived.
I was a lousy sailor.
Well, I can tell you this,
that was 47 years ago
and I have kept my word.
I ain't been back.
They told me,
I was a lousy sailor,
and they said I had what they would term
to be acute alcoholism.
They said by that we mean
when you drink, you get in trouble.
Like that was a real news flash to me.
I knew I got in trouble when I drank,
but see, they didn't understand.
They didn't know why.
They thought drinking got me in trouble,
and drinking didn't get me in trouble,
you got me in trouble.
If you wouldn't pick on me,
if you wouldn't say that to me,
if you'd give me a break,
that wasn't the cause of it.
You were the cause of it.
I was the kind of guy who could sit in a bar,
and I remember doing it.
I'd go into a bar and I'd sit there
and I'd sit by the jukebox.
I love country music, always have.
It's always got a message to it for a drunk, you know.
Great songs.
I've heard so many good songs.
There's one from a number of years ago.
Every once in a while I still think of it.
It's just a great song.
Never heard it drunk, but I heard it sober,
and it's a great song.
If you listen to that song,
it makes sense,
if you be alcoholic.
But anyhow, I'd be sitting there in a bar
just listening to that music and thinking
and, you know, worrying,
because you can think and worry and cry a little bit
and drink, and just me and the bartender.
And all of a sudden I'd look up,
and back in the corner there'd be two of them,
and they'd be talking about me.
I knew they were.
See, when you talk about selfishness and self-centeredness,
I understand.
I thought they were, and because I thought they were,
they had to be.
And I'd go back to do something about it,
and I'd get beat up.
I'd always been a fighter.
I'd never been a winner, you know.
And I'd get back to the ship beat up,
wake up next morning bloody and bruised,
and I didn't want it to be that way.
But anyhow, these guys told me that if I quit then,
I'd have a good life ahead of me,
and if I continued, it wouldn't be long,
and I'd be chronic.
I ain't even quite 18 yet, and they're telling me that.
Chronic.
I see my parents for what was to be,
to stay with them for what was to be the last time.
I bought a car when I got up there,
got my very first driver's license on my 18th birthday,
and got a car, an old Studebaker,
and I remember going out to celebrate my birthday.
And I woke up the next morning the same way
I woke up when I drank,
woke up in that mess, woke up with that fear.
My surroundings were a little different now, though,
because there were bars on the door.
I hadn't been in jail before.
And they had given me eight traffic violations,
starting with drunk driving
and ending with hitting an officer.
It seems like they accuse little guys of hitting cops.
Big guys they never accuse.
All of those small guys get picked on.
But they gave me all these tickets,
and they let me out of jail on my own recognizance,
because my mother was clerk of courts in that suburb.
And I went over to her house, went to her house,
and as I walked in, God, I felt terrible.
As I walked in, she was sitting there crying.
And my sister was sitting with her.
My younger sister was sitting with her.
And my mother was crying, and I said,
what's wrong? Because the thought in my mind,
why is she crying? I'm the one who just got out of jail.
I ought to be crying.
And she looked at me,
and by then my dad had been sober,
I can, about nine months,
and my mother said,
I'm pregnant.
And I'm crying because I'm afraid
this child inside of me will be a boy.
And I would rather have it
be born dead
than be another boy like you.
You know, I always thought to myself,
and would tell people,
the only one I'm hurting is me.
I was 18 then, and I was to say,
I'm only hurting myself.
I'm not hurting no one else.
I said that until I got here.
Said it for a while after I got here.
But if I look at my life,
under the magnifier of truth,
I know that I've hurt everyone with whom I've come in contact.
Anyhow, I left her house,
and I didn't know what to do,
so I went in a merchant marine.
They said I was a lousy sailor.
When you tell me I can't do something, I do it.
I had an injury that took me out of it.
And I got on my first ship, and it was heaven.
I was around these guys that knew everything,
about everything, and we went over to Japan,
and I went ashore, and I took a drink,
and they came and got me three days later out of jail.
Captain brought me back to the ship, and he logged me.
That's a disciplinary action.
I was real upset about it. I thought it was really bad news.
But he put it in the logbook, and he said I was fired.
And that doesn't mean a hell of a lot,
because you ain't gonna walk home from Japan.
And these guys on the ship explained to me
what all that was. They said,
it don't make no difference. We usually all get fired,
and the ones that don't quit anyhow.
It's just a tramp freighter.
At that time, we had about 300 ships under union agreement,
and every ship was a separate entity.
That meant if I got fired from one,
another one couldn't refuse me.
You know, I wasn't in no responsible position there.
So I thought to myself, did the math real quick.
Normal voyage, three or four months.
300 ships, 1,200 working.
Hell, I won't live long enough to run out of ships.
And you got paid an awful lot of money.
Now, they didn't pay you very much money per hour back then,
but they didn't give it to you when you earned it.
You didn't get it until the end of the voyage.
And then they give it to you in $100 bills.
Now, that's good for an alcoholic ego, I'll tell you that.
I'd go out and buy me a nice suit,
and go on Skid Row, and I'd drink,
and I was better than the people I was drinking with.
And when I'd run out of money, I'd ship out again.
And that was to be a way of life for a while.
And I wanted things to be different.
I wanted it to improve.
So I stopped drinking for a short period of time,
and I read a lot of books, and I was able to pass the test
of becoming that licensed engineer in the merchant marine.
I was able to pass that test, and my drinking resumed.
And I thought that that would make things different.
It didn't. Things kept getting worse.
And then I thought to myself one day, I said,
well, you know, if I got married, things would be better.
Married people never have the problems that I have.
So if I get married, things will be all right.
So I was sitting in a bar one day,
shopping for a wife, and she walked in.
At that stage in my life,
all I ever did was drink and go to sea.
So I'm sitting there, and she walked in,
sat down next to me, a little bitty old redhead,
first human being.
I'd seen smaller than me.
Sat down in a chair next to me,
and by God, she was mad.
I looked over at her, and I said,
can I buy you a drink?
I recognized that anger.
She said, no, I don't drink.
Well, it was true love right from the get-go.
I could not afford another drinker. I knew that.
She got a Coca-Cola,
and I hauled them $100 bills out of my pocket
and sort of spread them all out.
And I began to lie, and she began to listen.
And after a lengthy courtship, I proposed to her.
Now, if she were here and you were able to ask her,
she'd tell you it was about 10 minutes.
I personally think it was 20 minutes.
I think alcoholics take a long time
with heavy decisions.
We don't rush into things.
But anyhow, I found out why she was mad.
She was mad because she hated men.
She had a husband that had beaten her
and abused her very severely.
She had a baby just a few months old,
another one four years old.
She hated men, she hated drinking, she hated life.
Now, there's a challenge.
And I began to court her.
And after a lengthy courtship, we got married.
She got divorced on October 14th of 1965,
and we got married on October 15th.
When I got married to her, you know,
I told you I didn't drink off and on.
And because of these off and on periods,
I didn't think I was an alcoholic.
I thought to be an alcoholic, you had to drink every day.
And yet there was a period of time in my life
when I didn't drink every day.
If I didn't take the first drink, I just didn't drink for a while.
And if something was important, getting married, getting a license,
something was important, I just didn't drink.
That was to leave as time progressed.
My alcoholism progressed, and time went by.
That seeming, and it isn't really ability,
but it seemed like ability to not drink for periods.
Anyhow, that went away as time went on,
but it was there right then, and I'd had to quit drinking
for a while before we got married,
because she didn't want to be married to a drinker,
and we got married, and I remember the wedding.
I went to the farmer's market, and I got our rings,
and I went over, across the street
to the candlelight flower shop on Congress Avenue
in West Palm Beach, Florida.
And I remember as I went in and negotiated the wedding,
I'd been off the ship a while, didn't have much money,
and they were going to have the daughter of the woman,
the Justice of Peace, was going to play the organ,
and she was going to give my wife a corsage,
and we had witnesses there,
and I got her down for a lot less money.
The bond got one rose, a sort of lousy old rose,
and they hummed, Here Comes the Bride.
It just wasn't much of a wedding, you know.
And I say it in a humorous way,
and it wasn't a humorous thing for me then.
It was real serious.
You see, I didn't know what the word divorce was.
None of my family had ever been divorced.
I never knew anyone who was divorced.
You know, I'd hear about somebody.
So divorce, I just thought when you got married,
you got married and you stayed married.
That's not a pitch for that.
It's just the way I thought then.
So, you know, we got married, and I'm thinking about the marriage,
and I'm going to be these things to her she's never had.
I'm going to be this husband that's faithful to her
and that supports her and that gives her
all the things that she's not had.
I'm going to be a daddy to these kids.
I never had a daddy.
I'm going to be their daddy.
That little boy, Ricky, hanging onto my leg,
crying and saying, Please be my daddy.
God, I wanted to be his daddy.
Holding Kim in my arms,
I was going to be this little girl's daddy,
and I was going to be all the things to her
that daddies are to little girls.
And if you'd have told me that alcoholism
would keep me from it, I'd have said you're crazy.
I thought my wanting to do it was enough.
I thought my will, my want,
was able to make me do it.
I didn't know that I had lack of power in that area.
Just didn't know it.
Didn't know when I took a drink.
I had no choice.
And now we left that little ceremony,
went over to her aunt's house, and they had a reception.
Reception wasn't much.
It was just family people there.
None of my family, of course, was all hers.
And it was down the floor, and they had this little reception.
And I walked in, and they gave me a glass,
and I took a drink.
And it was punch.
I hate punch.
I'd been to weddings a long time before I got married.
I didn't know who got married.
I'd just look in the paper.
You go to Baltimore or Cleveland,
I'm serious, dress about like I am now,
look halfway decent, and you walk in,
and you can drink all night,
as long as you don't throw up or hit anybody.
They're huge.
Polish and Italian weddings are the very best.
They're huge.
Yeah, I'm with them. Nobody knows.
But I'm at my own wedding,
and I heard nothing to drink.
They gave me this punch, and I got mad.
So I got mad, and I grabbed my new wife,
and I left the wedding.
Went off on our two-day honeymoon to Miami.
We're driving, and I stopped at a liquor store,
and I got a bottle to celebrate my wedding.
Now, she didn't drink, and I did.
And I wanted to celebrate with somebody,
so I picked someone up who was a bum on the side of the road.
He got in the car, and we passed the bottle back and forth
across my new wife.
And I woke up the next morning the same way
I woke up in every time I drank by then.
I woke up in a mess, and it was mine.
Woke up with that fear inside of me,
not remembering what happened the night before.
And she was laying there next to me crying.
And I'm going to talk about the crying.
It's that deep down sobbing.
Everyone in here has either heard it or done it.
And you know how badly you want to stop it when you hear it.
And there's nothing I could do,
and I felt so helpless and powerless with it.
And I looked at her, and I said,
I'm sorry.
I said, what did I do? And I'm sorry.
And she told me what I had done.
And she told me, she said,
I'll not live this way anymore.
I lived this way before, and I will not live this way again.
And then I took a vow.
I swore to her
that if she'd give me just one more chance,
I would never behave that way again.
And she believed me.
And she gave me a chance.
And she was to give me that chance
over and over and over again
until March the 8th, 1974.
I cannot tell you
how many times.
I can't tell you
how that marriage stayed together.
I can only guess.
I can guess because when I'd be gone,
and I'd be gone for three months or six months,
one time in that period, I was gone for a year.
And I would write her letters and tell her that I loved her
and tell her that I needed her and that I wanted her
and that I'd be good to her.
And I meant what I wrote. They weren't fairy tales.
It was truth. And I'd write every single day.
And even though we couldn't send mail every day,
she'd get a big flocks of it at a time.
She'd read this, and she would believe it
because it would be the truth.
And yet, when I'd go to the ship to get in,
wherever it got into, and I'd fly home,
she'd see me coming off the plane, and she'd have the kids with her.
She'd be smiling and happy
and she got close enough to where she could smell me.
Because I was drunk.
And the hope would go out of her eyes
as though you hit her with a bucket of ice water.
And I didn't want it to be that way.
And things got worse.
I can't tell you the horrors that went on over those next years,
but it was absolutely terrible.
It was a nightmare for everybody involved.
A son was born to this marriage in 1968.
He's a spitting image of me at any given age.
So I know that he's mine.
Yet I remember nothing at all about his birth
or the first few years of his life.
And that's how my alcoholism progressed.
In 1973, I was blackballed out of the industry that I thought,
the business, the work that I did,
that I thought I could never lose that job.
They blackballed me out of it for chronic alcoholism.
They labeled me a performer.
They didn't want to say alcoholic.
They thought it'd affect their union contracts
where they got guys running ships that are drunk.
So they just said performer.
That meant lack of performance.
They never knew if I was coming, when I was coming,
what I'd do when I got there.
They just knew it'd be different, it wouldn't be good.
I couldn't come back in unless I proved I could stay sober.
That was in 1973.
March the 7th of 1974,
I found myself knocking on a man's back door
who lived 1,200 miles away from where we lived.
And when he answered the door,
the first words out of my mouth were,
I think I have a problem drinking.
I'd never said that to anybody at any time in my life.
I don't know where it came from.
And he laughed.
What a gift laughter is.
He laughed and he invited me into his house,
sat me down on a couch in his study,
read the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
He had me open it up and on the fly leaf
there were words written in ink that said,
if you want what we have and are willing to go to any length
to get it, God will help.
And it was signed, Love, Dad.
My dad had been an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous
as my alcoholism progressed.
And he wanted to say something to me
and he wanted to interfere with me.
And you people told him, don't.
You said, leave him alone, let him go where he's got to go
and do what he's got to do.
Don't say anything because he will not hear you.
He hasn't listened to you before.
Do it now and you might kill him.
And I'm glad my dad listened to you.
Had he not, had he tried to intervene or interfere,
you'd have another speaker this morning
because I believe I'd never heard the message.
I had a door to knock on and I knocked on
and he asked me to come with him that night to a meeting.
But I wouldn't go because I was drunk
and he tried to encourage me to go but I wouldn't go.
So he wrote two numbers down on a piece of paper
and he said, put them in your billfold.
He said, tomorrow morning, he said, when you wake up,
call one of those numbers before you take a drink
and then meet me tomorrow night and we'll go to a meeting.
And I went out that night and I drank
and I don't know where I went or what I drank.
You just know I drank because that's all I did by then was drink.
Drink, pass out, go to sleep, whatever, wake up, drink.
That was all I did.
And I woke up the next morning the same way
I had always been waking up then.
And there was a drink next to me
because there was always a drink next to me.
But something was different.
As badly as I wanted to drink,
I didn't want to drink just a little bit more.
In our meeting rooms, we see the slogans.
And there's one that has particular importance to me
and that's, but for the grace of God.
I know what grace means.
Grace comes from a Latin word that means gift.
And I believe God's unasked for gift that morning
was that desire not to drink
that was stronger than the desire to drink.
I had not said, God help me.
I had said, help me to a man.
And through him spoke God.
That came in the form of a desire,
the same desire that every single alcoholic in this room has.
It was given to me with a responsibility.
A responsibility that I do everything I can to keep it
or I would lose it.
The same responsibility that I have today.
Today, I am able to do far more than I could then.
That first day, I couldn't do much.
I just didn't drink and I was sick and I was shaking
and I needed a drink and I wanted a drink, but I didn't drink.
And she took me to the hospital.
My wife took me to the hospital and gave me a shot.
Back then, the shots they gave you were vitamin B12.
And to my knowledge, the needle was about,
oh, about that long.
It was square and I'm firmly convinced
that we have a tattooed spot on our left buttock
where the nurse hits the needle.
And they use that same spot every time just to get you.
They told me B12 would help me.
I don't know if it did or not, but I didn't have to drink.
And then they told me to give them honey and orange juice.
We had a terrible marriage at that time.
Didn't get along and she wasn't happy.
She got K-Rose syrup and orange juice.
Now, K-Rose syrup and orange juice in Ohio in March
is sort of like frozen road tar.
It will cut your throat when you swallow it.
They said that that stuff would help me,
that it would help do the same thing that alcohol,
that the sugar and alcohol do,
that that sugar would help me and help my system.
Don't know if it did or not, but it must have
because I didn't drink.
And then they told her, they said every time
he opens his mouth, if he acts a little grouchy,
he'd put hard candy in it.
Well, she did. Sour balls.
My mouth was sucked in so bad,
so if you're working with a new person,
get him chocolate or something sweet.
Be nice.
Study that.
Love and tolerance is our code.
She hadn't heard about that, I guess.
I don't know if it helped.
It must have. I didn't drink.
And then that night I met my dad and we went to a meeting.
It was a meeting filled with people just like you.
We come in the back door and there's a guy standing there
with a baseball cap on and he stuck his hand out
and grabbed mine and my father said,
that's Jimmy and he's your sponsor.
My father took off and I got this yo-yo
out of my hand.
I never want to forget his hand.
I never want to forget it.
Jimmy gave me Alcoholics Anonymous.
He said, my name's Jimmy and I'm glad to meet you.
And I can refill his hand today.
And I knew that he was.
And then he did something nobody else had ever done.
He began to talk to me about Alcoholics Anonymous
in his life.
He told me how he drank and where it took him
and what he did and how it got worse.
And as he talked to me, while we should not have
gotten along on any level.
He lived, he was from West Virginia.
He lived in Ohio, worked in an auto factory.
We had nothing in common. Absolutely nothing.
But as he talked to me about his alcoholism,
we had everything in common.
And then some guy told his story.
And I don't know what the guy said.
It was a speaker meeting. I don't know what he said.
It had to be funny because I remember laughing.
But it certainly wasn't a seminar. I know that.
I found laughter is the greatest thing that's ever happened
in Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know laughing is super. You can't be mad when you laugh.
When you laugh, you can't even think.
There's people that put stuff in their body
to make what happens when we laugh.
When we laugh, endorphins get loose.
I didn't know that. I thought endorphins were something weird.
Endorphins get loose. I like it.
Runners run for miles to get that feeling of endorphins.
We can laugh and get it.
So laughing is good, especially if you're thinking
start laughing. It'll stop bad things happening.
I don't know. I read the book.
I've never seen a chapter into thinking.
I don't know. Maybe you have.
But anyhow, this meeting was over and Jimmy talked to me some more.
And he introduced me to the winners in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And the winners was everybody there.
They'd stick their hand out and they'd say,
Keep coming, kid. You'll be all right.
Keep coming, kid. You'll be all right.
Jimmy gave me Alcoholics Anonymous.
And then Jimmy asked me how I felt and I told him.
I told him I was sick and I was scared.
And he said, I understand.
And I knew that he did.
For the very first time in my life, I knew that somebody understood.
And I have had that feeling from then till now
from members of Alcoholics Anonymous that you understand.
And he told me, he said, Jay, I'm going to make you a promise.
I'll guarantee it.
You will never have to come off another drunk
if you do three things on a daily basis.
Will you do them? And I said, Sure. What are they?
He said, Number one, when you get up in the morning,
say, God, help me not take another drink.
Number two, if you can, go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And number three, when you go to bed,
say, Thank you, God, for a sober day.
Will you do it?
And I said, Jimmy, I can't.
I can go to meetings when I can,
but I can't do the other because I can't pray.
I'd had a God in my childhood.
I'd believed in a God. I'd never had a faith,
but I had a belief in a God.
I might have had a knowledge of a God.
Then I just couldn't pray. I couldn't bring myself to it
because I didn't know if God was or wasn't.
I just didn't know. And he laughed.
And he said, That's all right.
You don't have to pray.
You don't have to believe them.
You don't have to mean them. Just mouth them.
I could do that.
And I began to do that.
I remember the next day, and don't get nervous.
I'm not taking you through 28 years.
It's a day at a time.
But I'm going to take you a little bit here.
The very next day, we're on our way to a meeting.
And it wasn't like he said, Do you want to go to a meeting?
He said, I'm picking you up, and we're going.
That's how they did it back then.
So he picked me up, and we're going to a meeting.
And he said, Have you had a drink since last night?
I said, Of course not.
I've never been asked.
He didn't drop me off until 2 o'clock in the morning.
I went to sleep.
I got up at 6, and he called.
Make sure I was going to the hospital.
Called me at 8 to make sure I got back from the hospital.
Get another one of those shots.
Called me at 12, called me at 4, got me at 7.
When did I have time to drink?
I didn't tell him that.
I just said, Of course not.
And he said, Man, that's fantastic.
I thought he was nuts.
He said, No, that's great.
He said, You know, you've just stayed sober.
This is the absolute longest period of time
you ever have to stay sober.
Is he crazy?
No.
He said, One day is all we've got.
We only do this deal one day at a time,
and you've just stayed sober for one day,
and you never have to stay sober longer than that.
And with that statement, he took away
every excuse for drinking.
All I've got to do is look at the history.
If I stayed sober one day, do what I do the next day.
I don't have to drink.
And I've only got to do it today.
But I ain't never got here.
Still ain't never got here.
Still just today.
Two weeks into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous,
we're coming home from a meeting,
just before I went back to Florida.
And I looked over at Jimmy, and I said,
Jimmy, I still don't believe in this God business.
And he looked at me, and he asked me a series of questions.
He said, Jay, have you been doing what I told you
to do every morning and every night?
And I said, Yes, I have.
I don't believe what I'm saying, but I'm saying it.
I feel like a hypocrite when I'm saying it.
There's times that I've said,
Help me not take a drink, and I'd think about drinking.
He said, That's right. Thinking ain't drinking.
You've been doing it every day, haven't you?
I said, Yes, I have.
And it wasn't a question about going to meetings.
Hell, he'd been there every night.
I went to a meeting every night.
By the time I knew I had a choice and didn't have none,
I was already trapped into the rhythm.
And there were never meetings of my convenience,
you know, so I could get Monday night football.
No, hell no.
They were always at 8 o'clock to break the rhythm.
8 o'clock meetings are great.
They break the rhythm of a day worker, you know.
Just about the time you're going to fight with her,
you're at a meeting. You're screwed.
So he said to me,
But you've been doing that every morning and every night?
And I said, Yes, I have.
He said, Man, that's great.
He said, How long has it been?
And I told him, I knew then 12 days or 14 days.
I knew exactly, believe me.
And I told him, He said, Man, that's fantastic.
And they said, When was the last time
you've been this long a day at a time
without taking a drink?
And an awareness came over me
that I could only share with you
was the knowledge
that God was personal.
There was a power in my life
that was personal
that had allowed me not to drink
a day at a time
for that fantastically long period
of 14 or 13 days, whatever it was.
And from that awareness
has grown a relationship
that would take me 28 years
to tell you about.
And it's been absolutely fantastic.
I didn't jump into the steps
I told you that.
It was a year and a half before
I was able to apply the steps
the way they're written in the book
with the help of a sponsor.
But once applied, things began to happen.
We started an inventory on Tuesday
after I left his house.
By Friday, I'm making amends.
The book says things like at once and next.
It doesn't say, Well, check with your sponsor
in three months.
Believe me, I'm not here
to ever take pot shots.
I'm here for you.
Then try something.
Then just try what you see other people doing
that has worked for them.
Try it.
My sponsor told me, he said,
Jay, if it ain't in the book, don't do it.
No matter what I tell you,
what I suggest to you, he said,
if it is not in the big book
of Alcoholics Anonymous, do not do it.
Many of the people that wrote the book
or part of the book being written died sober.
He said people might tell you things
not in the book that can kill you.
Keep me sober and keep me sober.
What is Alcoholics Anonymous?
Bill talks about it in the 12 and 12.
He said Alcoholics Anonymous is a set of principles
spiritual in their nature which,
if practiced as a way of life,
can relieve the sufferer from the obsession to drink
and enable him to become happily and usefully whole.
That is powerful.
What's happened since I've been sober?
Everything.
Went back to sea, worked on the biggest ship
ever built in the United States,
was in charge of it, had an injury, got knocked out of it,
went into sales, did well at that,
went bankrupt this year.
Fantastic life.
My kids and I get along great.
My oldest boy is 42.
He called me this morning at 7.15 from Puerto Rico.
He's on a tow boat over there
to wish me Happy Father's Day.
My little girl called me.
She's 38 now.
She called me from Alabama on Friday before I left
to wish me Happy Father's Day
because she didn't know if she'd find me today.
The guy is 34. He's in Mexico.
He's married in Mexico. He's got a nice job.
He's coming back, but he called me
and said, I'll be calling you Sunday.
You gave me that.
My wife and I had a fantastic marriage,
had good days and bad days,
days we wanted to be married,
days we wanted to be divorced.
It was just normal.
I was able to learn how to become the husband I wanted to become,
to be faithful and to be honorable
and to give her the life that she wanted,
to give her security.
You gave me the steps to do it.
In 1994, my wife had a stroke.
It took six years for my wife to die.
She was to have many, many strokes.
They found a disease inside of her, a blood disease
that was to kill her in six years.
And she died six years later,
and it was just a horrible time for her.
She wound up with breasts.
She wound up with a lot of different things in that six years.
And yet I never heard that woman moan about it,
complain about it.
We prayed together every morning.
And we thanked God for the day that we had.
We'd ask him to help us to look through the windshield
and not look in the rearview mirror.
Grateful for what we have.
She died on July 12th of the year 2000.
The last words from her mouth to my ear were,
I love you.
And the last words from my mouth to her were,
I love you.
And I loved her.
And I still love her.
And it's a healthy love and a good love.
And a friend of mine called me shortly after her death
and he said,
she's dead.
And she'll be just as dead in ten years as she is now.
And you're not.
And it helped me to accept her death.
It wasn't said in a cold way.
It was said in a loving way.
I was surrounded by you people in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Earlier this year I got married.
And I'm able to be a husband
because of what you have given me in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Because what she had given me,
I know how to be a husband today.
My life has been fantastic.
Relationship with my mom,
the woman that prayed the child inside of her
would be born dead rather than be a boy.
On that Sunday when I started taking that inventory,
it started on Tuesday,
on that Sunday I called my mother for the very first time
in many years.
And my words to her were,
hi mom, this is Jay.
And she said, hi son.
I said, it's been a while.
She said, yes it has.
And I said, I gotta go.
I'll call you next week.
And I began to repair that relationship,
work that amend step in that relationship.
And I began to be the son that I was supposed to be.
And I would talk to her
and I learned how to communicate with her.
And by the time she died in 1999,
that relationship was whole and complete.
She lived in Ohio and I lived in South Carolina
and I was going back and forth to see her
every time she got sick or she had diabetes
it was just terrible near the end.
And I remember that my sister called and said,
would you please come up, mom wants to see you.
And she's really on her way out.
And I flew up and I walk into the hospital room that evening
and the nurses are hovering there and the doctors
and my sisters are there.
And my mother's laying there
in the bed and as I walked in her face lit up
as though a spotlight was there.
Just lit up.
And the nurse said, this must be your son
that you were talking about.
And my mom said, yeah, that's my son Jay.
And you know he's a member of Alcoholics Anonymous
and he'll be sober 25 years this March
if he doesn't drink.
And he's the very best son a mom could ever have.
You gave me that by telling me
how to practice these steps as a way of life.
By telling me, don't say I'm sorry.
But repair the damage.
My dad, dad died in 1981.
When dad died, my dad and I never had that fuzzy warm relationship
that I'd always wanted.
My dad was a very intellectually cold man.
He was an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous
but he was not the kind of guy that would ever hug a person.
But I did what I thought I could do
and I talked to my sponsor.
My sponsor at the time, Brian.
And I'd say, what can I do?
My dad was dying of cancer and it was a drawn out deal.
And I'd say, what can I do?
And he'd say, do what a loving son's supposed to do.
And I said, what's that?
And he said, if you're a loving son, you'll know.
And I did what I was supposed to do
and I left my dad die with dignity
and I didn't try to interfere.
And he died shortly after my 7th AA birthday.
But on my AA birthday, I received a card from my dad.
And I couldn't read it.
It was all scribbles.
It was his loved dad.
And a letter fell out from my mom.
And the letter explained the card and it said
your dad wanted to communicate with you on your birthday.
And he took himself off all his medication
and he tried to write and he couldn't write.
And she said she'd write.
And it just didn't work.
And at that point, he had accepted his coming death.
He told her, he said, Reid, I'm a sick man.
I know I'm going to die.
And my mom said, it's important you know
what he was trying to say.
She said, congratulations, son.
On your AA birthday.
What a glorious and wonderful day.
And how can we ever be grateful enough,
he said,
to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous
and for all that it's given us.
For it's given us a loving God
who's returned a lost son
and rediscovered a lost father.
I knew then that everything was okay
between me and dad and God.
And I draw on that many, many times
when things go on in my life.
My wife died when I, you know,
the money went away when things go on.
I thought about that many, many times
over the last 20, 21 years now.
Since I got that card.
How can I be grateful enough to this deal
we call Alcoholics Anonymous?
And I came to some conclusions.
And I will close with the conclusions.
I believe that Alcoholics Anonymous
is a set of principles spiritual in their nature.
I believe they were laid out in a book
we call Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I believe that those principles
were given to Bill and Bob and the others
through divine intervention.
They got them in the book
and they passed those principles
and the program on to other people
who gave it to other people,
who gave it to you, who gave it to me.
Each and every one of us in that chain
charged with the same responsibility
that we do nothing to weaken it.
We do nothing to water it down.
Nothing to tweak it and make it better.
But to leave it just exactly
the way it was when we got it.
Alcoholics Anonymous.
So there is a place for a guy or gal like you
or a guy like me to go
who's got absolutely nowhere else to go.
I will never be able to tell you
how grateful I am
for what you've given me with my God
through Alcoholics Anonymous.
Thank you.