Our Facility for a Bottom Is Absolutely Extraordinary — You Can Watch People Share Their Way Right Out the Door – Scott R.

About This Speaker Tape

Scott R. delivers one of the funniest and most emotionally devastating AA talks you will ever hear. He opens with a merciless roast of everything newcomers hate about AA — the toothless greeters, the miracle talk, the rug-hooking vibe — then pivots hard into his own story: a Jewish kid from the Bronx, 18 years in therapy, a Broadway actor who progressed from alcohol to marijuana to pills to cocaine to heroin, all while insisting he was just a complicated artist peering over the icy edge.

The heart of the talk is what alcoholism did to his family. His father died while Scott was loaded and unable to be present at the hospital. His wife Nancy deteriorated from prolonged exposure to the disease. Their older son Micah was diagnosed as functionally retarded at age six — not from any organic cause, but from living in constant fear. Their younger son Jesse could not stop playing robot games at preschool because it was safer to be made of metal than to be a child in that house. By the time Scott walked into his first AA meeting on April 22, 1985, the family was completely isolated.

Scott describes doing the steps with a sponsor who refused to tell him how to make amends and instead kept saying "do your job." He started showing up — coaching Little League, volunteering as a class dad, buying a twelve-dollar drum pad that turned into a full AA-donated drum set. Years later, Jesse played the main stage at the House of Blues while a gaggle of middle-aged drunks wept on the side because they had helped raise those boys. The talk closes with the recent loss of his beloved sponsor Paul, who died at 81 just weeks after getting his first tattoo — an L on his hand to remind himself to listen.

The throughline is that AA did not promise his kids would be okay. It promised he would never be alone again. His son Micah later told someone that since he was very little, the men and women of AA and Al-Anon took very good care of him and never once demanded he believe what they believed. Scott calls that the purest expression of what the program distills down to: service and love.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens with ruthless comedy about everything newcomers hate — the toothless greeter, the miracle talk, the tweakers
• 5:00 Three reasons he could not be alcoholic: Jewish, 18 years of therapy, and being a complicated sensitive artist
• 10:00 Alcoholic thinking — the general anesthetic story, the male prostitute who caught his wife cheating
• 16:00 Family background in the Bronx — Aunt Rose's backwards wig, uncle the welterweight who changed his name to Goldberg, steel wool throw pillows
• 22:00 Father's death from a stroke while Scott was loaded on heroin — could not answer the bell
• 28:00 Nancy and the 32-ounce tumbler, selling a friend's car, complete family isolation by Jesse's birth
• 35:00 Found unconscious on kitchen floor — wife called two doctors before paramedics, children diagnosed with trauma symptoms
• 42:00 Working the steps with his sponsor — the inventory, Tino reading Step Eight for the first time, living amends to his children
• 50:00 Jesse intentionally walked at Little League, Halloween connectedness, exercising the sobriety muscles for 15 years
• 58:00 Sponsor Paul's death at 81, the tattoo of an L for listen, son Micah's statement about AA never demanding he believe what they believe