Put Your A*s in the Chair and Leave Your Head Outside – Barney M.
About This Speaker Tape
Barney M. speaks at the 15th San Diego Roundup in 1992, approaching 20 years sober. A former television news anchorman for ABC Detroit and CBS back east, he walks the audience through a life that looked successful on the outside — a five-bedroom house over the San Fernando Valley, a swimming pool, all the stuff he could accumulate — while he felt inadequate, frightened, and like a moral leper every day. Raised on Chicago's south side by Dominican nuns and the Holy Cross fathers at Notre Dame, he rejected faith early and spent 35 years trying to make himself happy, and failing.
His first wife divorced him after six children. He demanded custody in court and she handed them over — her sponsor had taken her to Al-Anon. With $80–90k in debt, he rented a Santa Monica apartment, kept faking it at the anchor desk, and one night came to in a Marina Del Rey apartment realizing his six kids were home alone. A friend finally took him to the Beverly Hills men's stag, where his sponsor put the Big Book in his hand and put him to work: mopping floors on Tuesday, greeting at Echo Park, making coffee, picking newcomers up at the Vimini Hotel and Royal Palms. He hated all of it. At seven months, a skid-row derelict who had his teeth kicked out in a Phoenix drunk tank described a set of feelings that nailed him to the wall, and he finally knew he belonged.
At two and a half years, CBS pulled him east. He denied the eastern meetings his presence because they ran AA wrong, started his own California-style meeting, and got crazier. His sponsor's sponsor Phil, passing through Philadelphia, prescribed meetings he didn't want to attend, newcomers he didn't have, and a 'phony prayer to a phony Higher Power' because he was a phony. Then he got fired, came to San Diego, quit a job for not paying enough, burned through five months of savings, the bank wrote for the La Jolla house, and his second wife told him she might have to leave. At midnight in March he sat on the La Jolla beach, looked up, screamed 'I give up' — and began the surrender he still works every day.
His core teaching is that getting sober is the easy part and the Big Book never teaches it — the real problem is the sobriety problem that grabs him by the throat each morning telling him he's not being treated right, the boss is screwing him, he's not making enough. The Third Step is a daily surrender, not an event. AA is the pit stop where he drains other drunks of their energy so he can go back out Monday and live among the social drinkers without a drink.
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