Picked an Anchorman for My Sponsor Just So I Could Brag About Knowing a Celebrity – Pat M.
About This Speaker Tape
Pat M. celebrates 41 years of sobriety (sober since September 15, 1975) at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the Napa Club. He grew up Irish Catholic in West Philadelphia — one of seven kids in nine years — living over his father's shot-and-beer bar, McDonald's Cafe. From boyhood he carried a quiet disconnect, always comparing his insides to everyone else's outsides, unable to talk to the Italian girls on the bus to high school. Two 16-ounce cans of Colt 45 at sixteen flipped the switch: suddenly he could talk, tell jokes, fit in. Alcohol was magic, and he says if it was magic for you at the start, it will be a bitch at the end.
He drank through a lost football scholarship at Virginia Tech (173 class cuts his freshman year), Army Reserve, a Villanova career that ended in a blowup with his coach, and years bartending at his father's Philadelphia bar where he was held up at gunpoint. He totaled his sister's car in Westchester, Pennsylvania — an eye hanging from its socket spared him a DUI. A wrong-way run across the Ben Franklin Bridge through red lights, a late drunk on the White Horse Pike stopped by a state trooper who had lived catty-corner to the McDonalds, blackout drives down the Garden State Parkway — the luck kept holding while the magic kept dying.
The last six months he tried everything except quitting: three scotch glasses with melting ice as a timer, 44 vitamins a day (until he peed gold from the B-complex), quitting two-pack-a-day cigarettes, drinking his coffee black, a book called Let's Eat Right to Stay Fit. His brother John called from Los Angeles and quietly said he was in AA; Pat went silent and didn't call him back for four months. After a Labor Day weekend blackout ending with a friend named Soggy chasing him with a quart of beer, Pat looked up Alcoholics Anonymous in the Yellow Pages and walked through the back door of the Ardmore clubhouse.
A Marine stuck a finger in his chest and told him he'd drink again if he didn't go to more meetings. Pat stayed dry out of spite — and kept coming. His sponsor turned out to be Barney Morris, the WCAU-CBS anchorman with a booming voice; Pat confessed he had only asked him to sponsor because he was a celebrity. Barney kept him anyway, made him clean his nail-gun-stuffed van ("if your van is this messy your mind is messed up"), made him give back 14 days for taking Valium, and taught him the paradoxes: die to live, give it away to keep it, surrender to win. Pat quotes Clancy I.'s boxing-ring image — throw the towel in, never pick it up again. He closes on gratitude: a brother with 41 years, two sisters and another brother sober, five nephews in the program, and the promises that, if you stay, under-promise what your life becomes.
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