Pat Y. on Early Drinking, Rigorous Honesty, and the 30-Year Secret

Hi everybody, my name is Pat and I'm an alcoholic. And I'm glad to be here tonight, glad to be sober and live in the life that I live. I have some friends in this room. It's nice to, old friends, and nice to see everybody. I haven't taken my clothes off on a stage in a long time. Thank God. I'm an alcoholic. I believe I was born an alcoholic, but it doesn't really matter. I say that because the first time I drank, I got drunk. I behaved very badly and couldn't wait to do it again. I was 13 when I got drank the first year. The first time, I was at a party. People were drinking. I wanted to fit in, so I drank. And the magic happened for me that I assume happened for you if you're sitting in this meeting, and that is that it changed how I felt completely. I've always described myself as being very shy. I don't know how to talk to people. It seemed like other people had this ability to chit-chat with each other, and I don'T know how TO do that. And you seem comfortable with each Other. I'M not comfortable with people. And I was at that party and I drank a rum and Coke and I got real comfortable, more than comfortable, you might say. And it was like magic. I blacked out and I passed out andI woke up in bed the next morning with a Marine that I didn't know, which was kind of a lot more than I'd intended to do there. I was a nice girl from Newport Beach and the girls in my crowd were not behaving this way. And I felt bad the next one. I felt really bad. I was embarrassed and ashamed, and I was terrified that I was going to get pregnant. And yet I drank again at the very next possible opportunity without a second thought. I was apparently willing to pay the price from the beginning. And I say apparently because I certainly didn't think any of this through. Any kind of insight, it may sound like I have as I'm telling my story. Believe me, I didn't have it at the time. It came long after I got sober. Anyway, I was a periodic for a while, mostly because I was 13 years old. I didn't have access to alcohol every day. But, you know, we find each other. Alcoholics, it's not like I woke up the next day and thought to myself, I need to go find other people who drink a lot so I can drink more. But that's what I did. I found other people Who drank, and I found the one bar in Newport Beach that would sell booze out the back door minors and I became possessed of an ID that now 13 maybe 14 years old when I get this idea it says I'm 35 or something and and I look like I'm about nine you know so and uh and I'm drinking and now when I you know from that first night I told you what happened that first night it never got any better than than that. When I drink, well, I like to describe myself as a friendly girl. When I drink I get really, it's not that funny, when I drink I get real friendly and so I developed this reputation in high school that was not actually the one that I'd hoped for and that made me feel bad. You know, I wanted people to like me. I wanted people to admire and respect me. I wanted to grow up and get married and stay married to the same person forever and have some kids and go to church and do stuff that normal people do, but I'm 13, 14, 15 years old and I pretty much know this is not the path my life is going to take. And so as bad as I felt about the way my reputation was going and the things that I was doing, I just kept moving forward. I don't ever remember thinking about not drinking during those years. Gee, maybe if I didn't drink, you know, things would be different. I don'T ever remember having that thought. My parents sent me away to boarding school for my last couple of years of high school because they were very concerned about what was happening to me. And it had the desired effect. They sent me to a very strict all-girls boarding school. A, there were no boys there. B, it was very difficult to get alcohol. And so, you know, I buckled down and studied. I think alcoholics, when they're actually applying themselves to whatever, work harder than anybody. The problem, of course, being that we don't apply ourselves all that often. But I was in this very structured environment. There was really nothing to do but study. And I did, and I graduated successfully. And I started going to a local college near where I lived. And, you know, I just drank and I partied and I got married when I was 18 because somebody asked. I'd like to give you a better reason, but there just isn't. He wasn't even actually the one I liked the most, but he asked. And I remember when he asked me, having this feeling of relief sort of go over me like, oh, thank God, I don't have to worry about that anymore. Now, I was, I think, 17 years old when he told me. he asked me to marry him. This is not over the hill, but I had no self-worth. I didn't know that then. So I said yes and I remember thinking, you know, I read a lot of books and in books brides-to-be feel stuff that I did not seem to be feeling and I kind of worried about that, but then I thought maybe I just missed that gene or something. He was really a perfectly nice person there was no reason not to marry him and and so naturally if you're not sure something overdo it that's always my motto and so we planned this huge church wedding and I remember walking down the aisle on my dad's arm that day thinking this is probably a mistake and I know that's not what you're supposed to be thinking at that moment and it was a mistake now you know we were dating I lived at home with my parents he lived at Home with his parents so the money we had from our jobs that we had, our little jobs, we spent on drinking and partying. Now we're married, and we have to pay rent and utilities and buy food, and we didn't have any money to drink. And in retrospect, I can see that I needed a drink really badly. We used to do something. We'd get together with other couples, and we would buy one bottle of wine and then completely ruin it by mixing it with 7-Up or something so that it was... I can't believe that we would... I mean, you would have to drink seven gallons of this stuff to get any kind of a buzz going at all. Anyway, I was restless, irritable and discontent is what I was, but I just didn't know it. We'd been married about six months and I had one brother growing up who was three years older than me and he was in a bad accident. He was in the Navy at this time and there was a bad accident on board his ship and he Was injured and his ship was in Japan at the time. They I put him in the hospital in Japan, and now my brother, three years older than me, you can imagine, was totally my hero. And so I started sending him cards every day to try to cheer him up. He's in a foreign country in a hospital. His ship had sailed. He didn't know anybody there, and he was very badly injured. So I'm sending him cars every day, every day trying to cheer them up. And one day my mother got – she was getting these telegrams from the Navy Department about his condition periodically, And one day she got a telegram saying that his condition was enough improved that they thought they were going to be able to ship him back to the States. And we were very excited about that news, obviously, because it would mean that he probably would have been in San Diego in the Naval Hospital and we'd get to see him. And so we celebrated that news. And right around the time we got that particular telegram, I had sent another of these many, many cards I'd been sending. This was intended to be funny on the front. It said, heard you were ailing but not to worry. and on the inside it said, only the good die young. I sent it and he died. And I couldn't possibly have felt worse if I'd killed him myself. I mean, I felt so awful. I couldn'T believe that I'd sent such a stupid, stupid card. My prayer was that that card didn't get there in time. You know, the timing was such that, please, God, let him have died before that horrible card got there. A couple of weeks went by before his belongings were shipped back to my mother, and I remember the day we opened the trunk and that card was in there. It had been opened, and I took it when nobody was looking, went in the bathroom, tore it up in little pieces and flushed it down the toilet and cried and cried and cried. Now, I tell you that story because that happened when I was 19 years old. I got sober when I Was 30. I never told that to anybody until I got Sober and Alcoholics Anonymous and did an inventory because I couldn't. I felt so terrible about it. Now, I know today, standing here from the perspective of being sober 31 years, that my brother knew that I loved him. There's no question in my mind that my Brother knew that he was a good man. That I loved Him. But I had no tools whatsoever for living. None. And so that became just one more secret that I'm living with. Already put that one on top of the ones that are already in there and the ones that are to come later. I sat in a psychiatrist's office for the better part of a year, somewhere between then and the time I got sober. My mother actually sent me. She said, if I paid for it, would you go to a psychiatrist? And I said yes. By then, I think I was probably in my early 20s at the time, and I knew by then something was terribly wrong with me. I didn't know that I was an alcoholic. I thought I was crazy. And I saw this as an opportunity to maybe get some help. I did not have a cavalier attitude. I really went with an open mind trying to get some health. The problem is that I was a practicing alcoholic, and I could not tell this man the truth about anything. I would sit in his office, andI would think about that card and how I felt about when my brother died, but I never mentioned it because I couldn't. I would thinkabout the things that went on in my house with my stepfather when I was growing up that shouldn't have been going on and think, boy, I know I should talk about that, but I couldn't. And so I didn't. So I'd sit in his office for 50 minutes, and I'd talk about sort of nothing, you know. And I'd leave, and I'd feel worse than when I got there, and I'd go have a drink. I remember he was on Sunset Boulevard. There was a little bar about three-quarters of a block down. I would leave his office. I wouldn't even get my car. I'd just go down that bar and have a drink before I could drive home. I felt so bad from sitting in his office for that hour thinking about this stuff and not talking about it. So I've essentially wasted my mother's money for that year. Anyway, to go back. So my brother has died and I'm married to this husband and we were very young and very immature and I am crying all the time. I cannot get a grip on my life. And my husband said to me one day, I don't know how to help you get over the grief about your brother's death. Maybe if you went and stayed with your parents for a while, your mother could help you with this because I don't know how to help you. And I said okay and I went to my mother's, to my parents' house and I never lived another day with that husband. He didn't quite know what had happened there. He was trying to help me and now I'm gone and I'm not coming back and I couldn't talk to him. I didn't know why I wasn't going back. I just knew I couldnít. And so I divorced him. Now clearly this is a man when I got sober to whom I would owe amends. clearly. I didn't see, I divorced him, I guess I was 19 or 20 when I divorced him. I got sober when I was 30. I did not see him in all those years. I had been sober about six months and I ran into him. And I thought, wow, this is really something. You know, here I am sober and AA and God just drops him right in my path. This is a good opportunity to make amends. And then my next thought was, you know, I am not sober all that long and I am not actually to that step yet. And, I let the opportunity pass by. It sounds funny when you say it, but that was 31 years ago and I haven't seen him from that day to this. And that's too bad. That's an amendation. I always like to tell that story when I talk because it's my recommendation that when opportunities to make amends present themselves that you do it. Boy, I sure wish I'd done that one. You know, I really do. I hope God gives me another shot at it someday. Anyway, I moved up to L.A. from Newport after I divorced him And I got a job in an apartment, and it was really the first time in my life that I was completely on my own. And I became a daily drunk from the very first day. I was working as a secretary in a trucking company, and I drank with these truck drivers. And I behaved there essentially the way I'd behaved in high school, which is to say before I was through with that job, I knew most of those truck drivers in the biblical sense. And my father was vice president of that trucking country. company. And yeah, I remember when I asked him for the, you know, I had these great secretarial skills, but I'd never actually had a job. You know, when you're young and that first job is hard to get. And so I asked them if he'd hire me there. And I remember him saying, oh gosh, I don't know, dear. I'm, I'm really sort of reluctant to hire a family member. He should have listened to his instincts. He really should have. I really, really, really embarrassed him there. The deal was that he gave me a job with the understanding that I could have it for a year, and then I would move on. And it was a good opportunity. It would give me a good solid year to put on a resume. But I wound up leaving before the year was up because I couldn't face those people. You know, I drink, and I behave badly when I drink. And I just couldn't keep going in there every day. So I quit, and I got a new job, but of course that took me with me. And so I behaved there. So I started my life of one year on a job is just about what I could do. Just under a year is what I Could Do. By then I would have, you know, I'm new on the job and I'm nervous and I want to make a good impression. So I keep my drinking separate there for a while, but then I relax. I'm good at what I do. I am a good secretary. So pretty soon I know they're happy with me, I know their just really pleased with my work and I relax. Now I'm drinking at lunchtime and I'm drinking after work and i'm drinking with the boss and the co-workers and the clients and i'M sleeping with them or their spouses matters not to me and pretty soon it's such a big ugly mess there I gotta go and that's what I did job after job after job. I always in my mind's eye had a good reason a good real reason so to speak for leaving these jobs if it was at a small company I would believe in my heart of hearts. I really think a big corporate atmosphere would be better suited to my particular talents, and if I was at a big corporation, I'd think a smaller, more intimate company, and I'm just, I had to believe this stuff. You can't look at it, you know? You can'T look at it too close. Here's how I drink. I went out with my boss and my co-workers one night. We're bar hopping around downtown LA. Everybody was drunk, but I obviously was drunker than the rest of them because when we wound up in the strip joint, I was the only one who auditioned for a job. It was perfectly innocent, perfectly innocent. We're sitting at the stages like here. We're seating at this round table right in front. There's about eight or ten of us maybe in my group of friends there, and I'd excuse myself from the table to go to the ladies' room, which was down the hall behind the stage. My memory is a little vague on this part, but I vaguely remember bumping into the owner of the bar in the hallway there and making some sort of derogatory comments about his entertainment. It was one of those conversations, you know, essentially if I thought I was such hot stuff, which apparently I did. So remember a moment ago I was sitting at the table dressed pretty much like I am tonight. And now I am on the stage dressed in essentially nothing. And there was that moment when my boss's eye and mine met, you Know, that I don't think I'll ever forget the look on his face. It's forever seared in my memory. That began what I have come to refer to as my show business career. Now, I think I mentioned I'm a nice girl from Newport Beach. Nice girls, when I sobered up the next day, you know, nice girls from New port beach do not work as strippers. I was horrified that I had done that, but it gave me ideas. And this is kind of at the height of popularity of go-go dancing. I can't tell you why I thought go-gog dancing was a cut above stripping. It's not, but it seemed somehow that way to me. And so I went and got actually a paid job as a go-go dancer. Now, all of the nice clubs on Sunset Strip had go-glo dancers at this time. I did not work there. My first paid job als a dancer was at a bar on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. And I don't even know how I got that job because I don' t remember ever meeting anybody in there that spoke English. And then I moved uptown to a place that was, well, it was in downtown L.A., across the street from the Terminal Annex post office. This is just bordering on Skid Row. I think I saw that as a step up the career ladder, if you will, because they spoke English there. I met the man who was to become my second husband there at Nick's where I was working. He was a customer and clearly a man who recognized talent. Did I mention that dancing ability was not really a requirement of this job? It really didn't matter. Also, you know, I told you I'm shy. Obviously, I can't do this kind of work sober, so I have to have a few drinks before I begin work. I would go in the dressing room and, you now, get into my costume such as it was and have several drinks until I was ready. I don't remember ever stepping on that stage when I wasn't ready but I often was over ready I more than once more than, I don' t know I'm guessing more than 30 times passed out on stage crashed to the floor in the middle of a wonderful move I'm sure the kind of bars I worked in it didn't much matter I remember at Nick's in particular, they had a little back room with a sofa in it, apparently for this very purpose. A couple of guys, usually just from the audience, would come pick me up off the stage, carry me in this little room, deposit me on the sofa and leave me there to sleep it off. And I can remember coming to the feeling that I would have. It was a little tiny room. It was like a coat closet or something. It was little tiny rooms and, you know, I would've been in there for an hour or two. And so it was hot and I'd be kind of sweating. And the beat of the music out there, you know, was just sort of exciting. And I would splash cold water on my face and, you Know, pull myself together and go back out on stage to what seemed to me to just be thunderous and enthusiastic applause. I felt so loved by my fans. I cannot even tell you. There is not a movie star in the world that could have felt more special than I felt those nights. But anyway, I met, as I said, the man who was to become my second husband there. He was possibly the most unsuitable man in the state of California. And so, of course, we moved right in together and eventually got married. We got married in Vegas. I understand in Las Vegas there are many fine little lovely chapels one can get married in. We didn't do that. We got buried in the courthouse on a Sunday, which was an interesting experience. I don't know what they do now, but then you went in the courthouse and you filled out your paperwork. And then they said you can have a seat in the court. They had an open courtroom. You can havea seat inthe courtroom and wait, or you can go and come back. In about an hour we wait until there's a number of couples accumulated, and then we call the judge and he'll come over and perform the ceremony. And so we first went inthe courtroom. We sat down with these other couples that were waiting to get married. And, of course, it's Las Vegas on a Sunday, people getting married. I mean, there's an interesting assortment, shall we say, of folks there. And my husband-to-be and I are sitting there looking at these other people and talking about them and judging them. And look at these pathetic people never realizing that, of course, there we were. And then we thought, you know, we have some time, so a cocktail would be nice. So we left. And now you can get a cocktail anywhere in Vegas. We went to a liquor store and bought a pint and sat in the car and drank it and went back and got married by this judge who was actually in his bedroom slippers, as I recall. It's not terribly romantic. So now we're married, but I'm an alcoholic, and I'm still behaving like I'm single. And I don't mean to do this, but it's not my thing. I seem to have no control over it, and so I've got a lot of problems in my marriage, a lot of problems, and we're fighting about my behavior. We weren't fighting so much about my drinking. He drank. I would never have married somebody who didn't drink. I probably would never Have met anybody who didn' Drink, actually. But my behavior behind drinking Became the And he didn't, as it turned out, Drink quite as much as I did. But it was my behavior That became the big topic. And so we fought a lot. And also, I started getting arrested. And I couldn't believe This was happening to me. My first arrest was on Thanksgiving night. I'd been to my parents' house for dinner. My parents were very unhappy about this marriage to the degree that they never met him. They felt quite strong. We were married 11 years until he passed away. They never met Him. They only lived, you know, 30 miles away. So it was Thanksgiving night. I'd been invited to my parents' house. He had not been invited. So he had gone to something that his boss had, a buffet for his workers, and he had gone there up in L.A. I'd gone down to Newport to my folks' house, they were big drinkers, and so I had drunk quite a bit there. And I left and was driving home. And, um, I remember that I needed to stop for cigarettes and I went into this bar on main street in downtown LA, which is Skid Row and is not in a direct line from Newport beach to where I was living in LA, but nonetheless, there I was. And I, um. Got the cigarettes, had a drink. And when I came out of the bar, they arrested me for Common Drunk and took me to Sybil Brand. Now, I remembered, now that's a scary place, by the way. There are some scary women in that place. I was in way, way, away over my head. They said I could make a phone call. I remembered that my husband was at his boss' house, so I called there. And the boss' wife answered. I identified myself, told her I was jailed. Could she have my husband come bail me out? It did not occur to me it might have been nicer just to ask to speak directly to him. you know it's it's hard for me to believe but when i got sober and and was coming to meetings when i was new i would sit in meetings hearing you talk about making amends and i would sit in my chair and seriously think to myself no i don't think i hurt anybody i just can't think of anybody that i hurt you know if i knew you 10 minutes chances are i hurt you because i am as the big book describes i'm completely selfish and self-centered it is all about me anyway um so that was happening and also something else was happening that i didn't understand until after i got sober and that is that alcohol was starting not to work so good anymore i was still getting drunk but it didn't do that magic you know thing with the head that used to do and that was troublesome but i just kept drinking more trying to recapture the magic And so I started drinking at home for the most part. And I spent the next, I don't know how long, several years drinking pretty much in a rocking chair in my living room in a purple flannel bathrobe. My husband and I went out occasionally to a bar up on Hollywood Boulevard and hung out, but mostly I just drank. He was a gambler. He was gone a lot at night, and that was just fine with me. I kind of preferred it when he was gone. I could just drink, you know. And I would play those sad records over and over and over again. I was particularly fond of Ray Charles' Born to Lose. That is just the perfect drinking feel-sorry for yourself song. Sometimes I'd get the idea to call people. I've heard speakers say they call the White House and demand to speak to the president. I would never do something like that. I called people like boyfriends I had when I was 12. I wonder what Danny's doing these days. And so, of course, I have no idea where Danny might be living these days, so I wake up 30 other people tracking him down. And I'm sure Danny and his wife were really thrilled to hear from me when I finally did find him. If there's one emotion that runs through all the years of my drinking consistently, it is just utter, utter embarrassment and humiliation. I was constantly humiliating myself. I would wake up in the morning. I'm actually grateful for blackouts. I drank in blackouts a lot, but I'd wake up in the mornings sometimes and I'd remember just a bit of something and I think, oh dear God, surely not. But yes, in fact. I remember one hot summer day. For some reason I remember it was 10 in the morning. I was in that purple flannel bathrobe. I was very drunk. I was just sweating buckets, sitting in my chair in the living room. We lived in a second floor apartment. You could see from my chair, I could see into the neighbor's backyard. And the neighbors were a young couple about my age, late 20s, I guess, at the time. And they had two small children who were running back and forth in the sprinklers on the lawn. And I watched them that day, and I cried because that's how I meant to be living my life, the way those people next door are. And I don't know how this happened to me. I don'T know how I got into this terrible, terrible condition. but I knew that day beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was never going to change for me because I had by then already been trying not to drink I'm not a stupid woman and it was clear, had been clear to me for some time that nothing good was ever, ever going to happen in my life if I continued to drink the way I was drinking okay, I won't drink and so I had begun that business of every morning I'm really not going to drink today I'm not going to drink. I really am not going to drink it was easy to have that resolve in the morning I felt bad in the morning I was not bouncing back quite so fast as I used to and I drive to work just sick and hung over and I and I would say to myself not only am I not going to drink but I'm going to get some physical exercise and really get into shape and and I'd pull into the parking lot at work and I think and not only that I'm going to go back to college and finish my education it's going to be great it's really going to be great but I don't know but I've been an alcoholic and before the day was out I needed a drink and I would be drunk. It was often as simple as this, walking in the house and an open bottle of scotch sitting on the kitchen sink. Now you and I both know it'd be pretty hard to quit with this open bottle just sitting here. So what I'll do is I'll drink this down. It'll be gone tomorrow. Then I'll quit when there's nothing in the House. There never was a time when there was nothing in The House because as the bottle goes down, I get nervous and I'm calling liquor store to deliver a new one. And so it went. One night I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I was drunk when I called. A real nice man answered the phone at central office, asked me if I was having a problem with alcohol. I said that I was, and I started to cry. This man stayed on the phone with me a long time, told me a lot about himself, way more than I was interested in. But he was talking to me, and everybody was hanging up on me by now. I remember he wanted to send some women over to my house, andI said, Oh, no, no. I don't think I'm that bad. Thank you. And he had offered, I might have been interested, but he didn't. And he said, it was a Friday, he said do you think you could not drink tomorrow and go to a meeting tomorrow night? And I said yes. Now I drink every day. I doubt very much I can not drink Tomorrow. But yes is clearly the right answer. So you bet. So he told me where a meeting place was the next night and we hung up. And of course I continued to drink until I passed out. The next day I remembered making the phone call and parts of it, you know. And it didn't seem like quite such a good idea in the light of day. I thought I'd been a little premature. I'm pretty sure 30 is too young to be an alcoholic. What was I thinking to call AA? But I couldn't get it out of my mind all day long. It was just right there in the front of my head. And I heard myself saying to my husband at the dinner table that night, I'm going to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. He said something like, yeah, whatever, which is kind of how we were communicating. And he went off to the racetrack, and I went off to my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. I dressed with some care. I remember, you know, I've always been a person who wants to be dressed appropriately for wherever I'm going, but I've never been to AA, so I don't know how that would be. I don' t remember what I was thinking. What I remember when I left the house is there was a pile Women will understand this. There was a file of clothes on the bed that I had tried and discarded as not being quite right for whatever reasons. I don''t know. I'm assuming that in the end I decided to go for comfort because what I arrived in were rubber thongs on my feet and baggy jeans and a knit top that had no knit left in it you know it was so comfortable I actually had two of those a red and white striped one and a blue and white stripped one and that's what I wore to meetings for about the first two or three months nobody ever said a word about how I was dressed until one night I was running a little bit late just my day had been kind of weird and I wound up going to the meeting in the clothing that I had worn to work that day, which was a very nice pantsuit, sort of a soft rose color. And I think 300 people individually that night came up to me and said, my, you look pretty tonight. And, I started dressing better at meetings after that. But anyway, to go back to this first meeting, there were about 300 people. It was in the basement of a church. Somehow, I got out of the car and went down those steps. I was so scared, I was so nervous. It was 828, it was an 830 meeting, so of course I got there at 828 because I know I can't talk to you and I didn't I did not drink that day I did Not Drink. Now at 8 28 I'm off and already passed out, so by the time I got to that meeting I needed to drink real bad I went down the basement steps, there was a man standing at the door who put out his hand and said hello my name is Clint, welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous I think it's the most important thing anybody ever does in a meeting, it made me feel welcome and I went in the room and And I went to the back of the room, of course, and where newcomers go. And now it's 829. I haven't had a drink. I'm in these terrible clothes. I'm sick and shaking. I'm going to cry any minute. And a man named Claude came up to me and said, are you new? And I thought, how did he know that? And acknowledged that I was. And it seemed like that. There's about 50 women coming at me with writing their numbers on little scraps of paper and got me a seat in a big book, whatever in the world a big book might be. And the meeting start was a speaker meeting. And the speaker that night was a man by the name of Norm A. And I heard him. I remember two things from that night. One is I was sitting way in the back of the room. And he talked really fast for those of you who didn't know him. We used to say he gave a two-hour talk in 40 minutes flat. I was leaning forward in my chair so I wouldn't miss anything he said. And I thought that was sort of interesting. I became aware of that. And the other thing I remember is really, really laughing at something that he said, I mean, laughing from the tips of my toes all the way up to the last year on my head, just roaring with laughter. And of course I was laughing, laughter of identification when the meeting was over and we said the Lord's prayer and the people on either side of me, the minute they dropped their, my hands, I was out the door again. I'm stark raving sober here. There is no way I can stand around and chat with you after the meeting. So I left and I went home, but I did stay up most of the night reading that big book. And I remember thinking, okay, this is good. I like the meeting, and I thought, this is good, I'm going to go to that meeting every Saturday night and be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I thought every Saturday night seemed like a lot. I drank again on Friday. Now, on the one hand, Saturday to Friday, I didn't drink. Six days in a row, I didn't drink. I hadn't been six days in a row without a drink in years, and every day I was impressed. I remember thinking, wow, this AA stuff really works. And then on Friday night I was drunk, and I couldn't believe it. I went back to the meeting Saturday night and raised my hand for being under a week of sobriety again. I got some more phone numbers and one of these ladies suggested I might want to actually call one of you, which of course I hadnít done. What would I say to you? I donít even know you. I drank a couple more times that week and I called that woman who said that to me. I was drunken when I called her. And she said, you might want to get a sponsor. You don't seem to be doing too well on your own. And most of us have found sponsors to be really, really helpful. And I didn't know what a sponsor was. I said, well, how do I do that? She said, Well, I'll be your interim sponsor and give you a chance to look around. You meet me tomorrow night at the meeting and bring your big book and we'll talk about it. And so I met her the next night. And the first thing she did is she took my big book, opened it to the front cover and told me to write that day's date in there. I wrote that date in There. She said that is your sobriety date. I thought I shouldn't have done this in ink. That's going to be my sobriety date. That is my sobpriety date I'm happy to report. The next thing she did is she took the meeting directory and she circled a meeting for every night of the week. She didn't suggest that I go to a meeting every night. She didn'T recommend that I got a lot to me. She said you will go to meeting everynight and these are the ones you will goto Tuesday night here Wednesday night there. I said excuse me I can't possibly do this. I'M A MARRIED WOMAN I CANNOT POSSIBLY GO TO MEETING EVERY NIGHT MY HUSBAND WOULD NEVER STAND FOR IT. She said, well, maybe you can do it on less, but not with me as your sponsor. She said something like, I will never ask you to do anything that I haven't done, but if you want me to be your sponsor, you've got to do what I do. And the only way I know how to stay sober is to do What I Do. If you want Me to be Your Sponsor, this is what you've Got to do. You're certainly free to go get another sponsor. Now, I've known this woman for, I don't know, five minutes, and I'm not liking her much. and i agreed to do what she said that's the miracle right there for me i didn't agree this is important if you're new i didn'T AGREE HAPPILY AND I DIDN'T DO IT HAPPYLY BUT I DID IT AND THE REALLY GOOD NEWS ABOUT ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS IS THAT YOUR ATTITUDE DOESN'T MATTER IN FACT IF YOU HAD A GOOD ATTATUTE WOULD BE WE'D WONDER WHY YOU WERE HERE IF YOU'RE NEW I MEAN UM OF COURSE I HAD A BAD ATTUTE AND UH MY JOURNEY BEGAN I CRIED AT EVERY MEETING I WENT TO MY SPONSOR'S DIRECTION was to get to every meeting one hour early, not 55 minutes early, one hour early. And I was to have commitments that you do before the meeting like setting up the chairs or the cookies or the coffee or something. I was going to get there 60 minutes early and do my commitment. And then when I was done with the commitment, you know, circulate throughout the room and shake hands with people and introduce myself and chat with people. And get at least three phone numbers of women that I didn't already have. And the next day following that meeting, in addition to calling my sponsor. I was to call these three other women as well. Now, I'm having a hard enough time calling her. I can't imagine calling three strange women. My fear was that you wouldn't know who I was when I called. I could have said, hi, I am the girl who cried through the entire meeting last night and I am sure you would have remembered me because that is what I did. And I don't mean quiet little tears, great wrenching sobs that you can hear from the next room quite dramatic and um so i'd sit by the phone and i'd just be so nervous i'd be sweating thinking about calling you and i you know just gear up my nerve and i dialed a number and i take a you know deep inhale and you'd answer and i in one giant exhale i'd say something like hi my name is pat i have long brown hair and glasses i met you at the meeting last night i'm new my sponsor told me i had to call three people every day and you're one of them How are you? Anyhow, I don't even know if anybody understood a single word. I said that they all seem to get that I was new and everybody was kind to me. I don'T ever remember hanging up one of those phone calls feeling worse. You know, I always felt a little bit better, not a lot, but a little bit better. I was particularly grateful to people who would say something that made me laugh. Marianne Kay. Oh, she was the first one who made me laugh and I was so grateful. She's my dear friend still today and began in one of those phone calls because I was not laughing much, believe me. I never got the point of why I was making these phone calls. I just didn't get it. Here's what I think. If you're like me, if you get a direction from your sponsor and she tells you to do something today, you want to see results by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. It doesn't work that way for me anyway. I think of sponsored directions having this sort of ripple effect. You get a direction and you incorporate that action into your life when you're a day sober or a year sober or 10 years or 30 years, whatever, you incorporate that action in your life. The results are going to come somewhere down the road that you can't even possibly see yet, that your sponsor can't even see yet. And that was true with those phone calls. I just never got very comfortable as I said doing them and I never got why I was doing them. But it's just easier to do them because if you don't, that's going to be the day your sponsor says, have you been making those phone calls? You know, so just do it. And so here's why. When I was well, there's been many times now, but I'll give you a couple when I was three years sober, my husband was dying of lung cancer and he'd been sick for about a year. He was in the hospital again. I was there at the hospital. It was, you know, a bad day. And I just thought that sitting in that hospital, I can't do this anymore. I just, I can't do this another day. It's not that I wanted to drink. I just wanted a different life. I don't know how to explain it, but the thought ran through my head that it would probably be a good idea to call my sponsor. So I went, there was a little pay phone there by the, this is way before cell phones, and I went in there and I called my sponsor and she wasn't home. This was also before voicemail and and I didn't know anybody who had a machine. So it just rang and rang, and I eventually hung up, and the dime came back. That's how long ago it was. And without even thinking about it, I just put the dime back in and called somebody else. And the long and short of the story is I called 11 people that day before somebody picked up the phone. That's why my sponsor had me calling three people every day so that when the day came that I absolutely positively needed to speak to another sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous, the habit of making those calls would be so much a part of me that I would do it without even really thinking about it and that's what happened to me that day that's why she had that ripple effect again and I'll even take that a step further my current and as I like to say final husband was in the hospital three or four years ago with colon cancer, I'm like some kind of a carrier aren't I and again And I really thought he was going to die, and I was having a bad, bad day. And I thought, I need to call somebody. And I went out in the courtyard where my cell phone would work, and I called my friend Rita. And I got her voicemail, and her vocemail answered. And then I said, hi, it's Pat Yeo. And then, I burst into tears. If I hadn't identified myself, I would have just hung up. But I've said my name, so now I feel like I need to stay on here and leave some kind of a message, but I can't. I'm just absolutely incapable, just choking and crying in the phone. I finally just hungup. So I went back in the room with Vince and my husband, and 20 minutes or so later, I thought I really need to call her back. And so I went out and I called and I got her voicemail again, and I said, please disregard my prior message. I'm feeling much better now. The point of this story is it didn't matter that she wasn't home. It didn't mater at all. It's not like Rita was going to have any magic answer. What mattered is that I went outside and made the call. What mattered is that I reached out to another sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous when I was just absolutely crazy. I always feel better when I take the action. It didn't matter whether she was home or not. Just that little bit of hearing her voice on the voicemail was enough to get my head back in the right place so I could go on with that day. To go back, so I'm new. I'm coming to meetings. I'm fighting with my husband about AlcoholicsAnonymous. Now, I need to be clear, Alcoholics Anonymous was not ruining my marriage. We'd had a terrible marriage. It's just a new topic that we're now fighting about. And he thought I was coming here to meet men, which was not a bad guess. I mean, I wanted to be sober. I absolutely wanted to do that. But let's face it, there are men in AA, and some of them look really good. And I was interested. None of them appeared to be interested in me, which hurt my feelings a lot. And it really made me mad that my husband was accusing me of something I wasn't actually doing right at that minute. And so we had a lot of trouble. I thought, of course, that all the problems in my marriage were him. It can't be me. I'm working this spiritual program after all. With an attitude like this, it was inevitable that I would meet a man in a meeting who looked good to me, who looked back. This momentous occasion occurred when I was about ten months sober. The gentleman in question was about 10 minutes sober. i spotted him when he walked through the door the first i'll never forget he had a shaved head and a fu manchu mustache and my heart started to pound i leapt across some chairs to introduce myself to him and my sponsor noticed and you know i did one of those numbers and i went over there and she said let's not forget you're a married woman i said yeah but i'm so unhappy she said nonetheless pat you're married and as long as you're buried i expect you to act married i said it's not a problem. I'll get divorced. And she said, no, we don't think it's good to make major decisions in our first year of sobriety. You just stay married and act married. Well, I'm obsessed with this man. I know you understand obsession if you're sitting in this room. Why would God get this guy sober in my home group if he did not mean for us to be together? This is so clear to me. Why can't she see that? So it began. It begins with the meaningful glances across the room and brushing up against each other in the coffee line. And then he's walking me to my car after the meeting, and then I'm parking further and further away from the meeting. It's a little complicated to arrange. I'm a married woman. Obviously we're not going to go to my place. He's a newcomer. He does not have a place. You can make anything happen, though, if you want it bad enough. Really, you can. And I was at the time working at a record company in Hollywood, and he was very conveniently also working in Hollywood at a porn bookstore. I swear I'm not making this up. I arranged a long lunch hour one day for somebody at work to cover for me, and he didn't have a car either, so I went and picked him up at the bookstore. And we went to a motel on Sunset Boulevard and spent some time together. and I dropped him off at the bookstore that afternoon and it occurred to me in the car that I was living exactly the way I'd always lived I've been sitting in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous for 10 months hearing you say night after night that I'm going to have to change everything about the way i've been living my life or I was probably going to drink and die I'm not sure what I was thinking during those 10 months probably that it didn't exactly apply to me but I knew that day in the card that it did and I was scared because the truth of the matter is I have never wanted to live that way I always thought, well, it was because I was drinking. But now here I am sober and AA and I'm doing the same stuff. I don't get how, I don' t see how you can help me here. I was also afraid to tell my sponsor what I had done because she was very clear in her direction about this guy. But the bottom line is I don''t want to drink. And so I, you know how we are now. I've done something terrible. So I hardly let my sponsor get in the door of the meeting hall that night. I'm knocking her down. I have to talk to you right now. So I told her what had happened, and she said, you know, Pat, I think you've learned a really good lesson here today. I don't think you're a woman who can cheat on her husband and stay sober, and you don't have to live that way if you don' t want to. Okay, I don' T want to, I just told you I' V never wanted to. I don'' T get how you' R going to help me here. Here' S what I did. If you' Re interested in this, you really have to pay attention, because this goes by really fast. This is the whole thing right here. A day at a time, I stayed away from that guy. That's it. Day at a time, I didn't drive by that bookstore. Day at the time, I didn' t call him. A day at a tim e when he called me, I didn'' t take the call. A day and a time when I saw him in meetings, I shook hands with a locked elbow. Does everybody get that? It means we don' t get closer than the entire length of my arm. Hello. And I kept moving. I thought that I should explain to him what was going on here. Fortunately, I ran this fine idea by my sponsor and she said, Oh no, I don' T think so. I think he' l l get the idea. And, you know, the obsession passed, of course, because obsessions always pass. But the really good news for me and the part that I didn't expect is I don't live that way anymore. I didn'T know that the way you stop bad behavior is you stop Bad Behavior. It's just so simple, I missed it. I mean, I could never have done it on my own. But I could do it with the help of my sponsor and my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous. I do not live that way anymore. I am a faithful wife to my husband and happy to be. And I didn't know that I could change. I really didn't now. I thought you'd come to AlcoholicsAnonymous and somehow you stay sober and God, it's going to be a long, boring, dreary life and how are you going to stand it? And it's nothing like that at all. You know, it's nothing like that at all. So now my sponsors told me I have to be a kind and loving wife, pretend that I'm a kind and loving life. I was not feeling kind and lovely. And so I started pretending. She told me every day I had to ask him how his day was and listen while he told me. That's the first thing I did. And he actually looked surprised that I asked the first time. But, you know, after a while, his little stories from his job began to have some continuity to them. He was talking about people that he worked with, and I began to know who he was talking about. And after a While, I got interested in the things he was saying, and she just helped me so much with this. And I started watching couples and Alcoholics Anonymous and how they treat each other, and some of it's great, and some of It's terrible. There's good and bad examples here. And I took what I thought I could do home and tried, you know, to incorporate those things into my life. And I don't know how much time passed, months at least. And I was on my knees one night saying my prayers, which were very short up until then. In the morning, dear God, please help me stay sober today. Amen. And at night, dear Gott, thank you for keeping me sober today, amen. I was On My Knees saying that prayer, and I realized I was comfortable in that house with that husband. And it hadn't happened that day. It had already happened. This is the biggest problem in my life, and I didn't notice when it went away. Remember, I couldn't understand. I was like stunned there on my knees. How could that be? I know, of course, today the reason is because I was so busy in the solution that I'd forgotten about the problem. You know, when I get into the solution, I feel better right away, regardless of what the state of the problem might still be, you know. These steps are really great stuff, believe me. I got back down on my knee that night, andI said, God, I believe if you mean for me to stay married to this man that I could do that and have a happy life and stay sober. Thank you. It was not long after that that we found out that he had cancer. And he was sick for a year and a half, and he did die. And I can tell you this. It was the best year and A half of our marriage because I'm so grateful that I stayed when all of my best judgment suggested that I should leave because I would have missed that last year and А half, which was a very hard year, obviously, because he was so sick. but it was a very good year personally between the two of us. And not only that, again, this ripple effect. I know today that I wouldn't be able to have the kind of relationship I have with Vince if I hadn't started learning the tools there with my late husband. So there you are. After he passed away and I went down to this little chapel to make some funeral arrangements and a couple hundred people from Alcoholics Anonymous took the day off from work to show up for that. They didn't know him, but they came. Obviously, they knew that I would need them, you know. Vince, my current husband, was somebody that I knew and had met in the meetings and was a friend, and after my husband passed away, we became better friends and started dating and got married, and we have a really great life. You know, we are both sober members of Alcoholics Anonymous. We sponsor people, and there's, you Know, the phone's always ringing and stuff's going on, and it's a great life. It's unbelievable to me. It's not to say it's without problems. You know, we've been rich, we're been poor. I like rich better. Hoping for it again. We're somewhere sort of in the middle right now, and that's actually fine. But I'll tell you what, even at the poorest, we were not unhappy. We were not happy. We were very contented with our lives, with our sobriety, with each other. And it's interesting about money. When we first needed to cut back, we cut back to the bone, to the bones. Boy, I would never be able to cut another dime out of this budget. We've cut back three or four times since then. It gets a lot easier as time goes. You really find out what you don't need. The most important things in life as I see it There's sobriety, family, health, friends. The rest is nice, but it's like gravy, you know, really. As I think I mentioned, you Know, we've had sickness. He had a heart attack and bypass surgery 12 or 13 years ago, and that was a really scary time, but we got through it. And then he had the colon cancer, and that Was scarier because I really didn't Think that he was going to live Through that. But, you know, when you stay sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, it becomes like this. And you have a home group. It becomes like This Big Family. I was working and trying to get to the hospital every day and trying to get into meetings. And I was kind of crazy, actually. And people from AlcoholicsAnonymous and Al-Anon just came out of the woodwork and just surrounded us. He would wake up at the City of Hope at 2 in the morning, and there'd be a couple of Al-Anons sitting there. And they might have been there for two hours for all he knew. They wouldn't wake him up. They were just there in case he woke up that somebody would be there. We had an Al-Anon friend who, after he got out of the hospital, I can't even believe this. It's the most astonishing thing to me. She lived in Woodland Hills. We lived in Upland, and she, every Sunday night after her Sunday night meeting, would drive from Woodland Hills to UplAND with food. I hate when I do this. With food for us for the week, and then drive home. She must not have got home until 2 in the morning, you know, but she did that for us because she loved us and she knew we needed it. If you're new, I hate to end on, whew, stop it. So if you're new, if you don't hear anything else here, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. Did I mention Vince is fine? I always like to say that. You go, oh, how is your husband? He's fine, he's fine. If you're knew, I recommend you do three things. Get a home group, a place where you are the person who sets up these chairs or make sure that the toilet paper roll is in the ladies' room or some little job that makes the meeting yours. And get a sponsor. I don't know how you'd possibly do this without a sponsor and the third thing I recommend you do is make a friend somebody around your own length of sobriety you can hang out with and talk to it's really, really important my first friend was sober three days less than me I told her everything before I told it to my sponsor when you're new it's nice to hear how stuff's going to sound out loud before you call your sponsor with it You know, and sometimes you want to tweak the wording a little for the next call. And so I would call her and sometimes she'd say what I hope was, oh, yeah, sounds good. But mostly she'd Say, oh you better call your sponsor about that. It's a really good kind of friend to have when we were 10 years sober. She went out and she didn't just go out and have a happy life. The last time I saw her was when I was 25 years sober and I was visiting her in prison. I am not a better woman than she. I'm not more deserving. I'm as near as I can tell the difference of why I am standing here is because I've done to the best of my ability everything that's been asked of me in Alcoholics Anonymous, whether I wanted to or not. In fact, maybe especially when I didn't want to. I, left to my own devices, would pretty much spend my life on my couch. I'm really quite content. I have little hobbies, and, you know, I'd be fine just quilting on my couch, watching a little TV. But because I have put myself in the center of Alcoholics Anonymous, I'm sort of swept along, and that's a good place to be. If you're new, don't hang out on the fringes. You know, if you're knew and you're sitting in the back row, I heartily recommend at the next meeting of this convention you move up here to the front. Get up hereto the front, really get in thecenter of this thing. I hope you stay. I'm very glad I have. Thank you, Pat. Thank you. Thank you. of A.A. and Al-Anon Talks or to find out about our tape and CD of the month club call Encore Audio Archives at 1-800-878-1308 or visit our website Thank you for watching.