Putting Two Dollars Aside for Rehab and Only One for College Would’ve Been the Smart Play 😅 – Rhett M.
About This Speaker Tape
Rhett M., sober since September 21, 2011, shares from the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NaviClub. He grew up in a wealthy Boston family — Irish Catholic on one side, Protestant on the other — where his parents were the rare moderate drinkers among festive aunts and uncles. By six he was already sneaking Budweisers, equating the can in someone's hand with the happiness missing from his parents' deteriorating marriage. He wore a puffy down vest year-round from age two to protect himself from "the bad guys," got kicked out of school at three for shoving kids off the jungle gym, and was sent to a child psychologist named Dr. Joe at five. Years later that same psychologist showed him the dents Rhett had hammered into the office floor during an aggression test with light bulbs in a plastic bag.
His first drink came in middle school over Memorial Day weekend with two Japanese exchange students; he polished off three glasses of liquor topped with Coke, threw up, and blamed roast beef subs. A $500 cable bill of ordered porn finally tipped his father off. He undid every privilege he'd been handed: thrown out of private school for selling pot, sent home from a semester at a prestigious college in England after slicing his hand open drunk in a pub kitchen, fired from a teaching internship, and run out of Fairfield University after a six-month bender. At 21 he totaled a car driving the wrong way around a traffic circle, was quoted in the paper as saying "there was no way I was driving that car, I'm way too wicked fucking hammered," and went to jail that night — then immediately fished his hidden drugs out of his parents' bushes the next morning.
A first rehab stint failed and he relapsed the day he got out, drifted to a mafia-owned restaurant in Boston where he started carrying a knife, then took the geographic cure to Georgia. He taught kindergartners while showing up still drunk at 8:30 a.m., then bounced through restaurant work for three years, taking "hostages in the form of girlfriends" and throwing up blood every day for over a year. There was no single dramatic bottom — just exhaustion. At Peachford Hospital a social worker asked if he could go to 90 meetings in 90 days; the question broke him, a warm pins-and-needles sensation moved through his body, and the words "I need help, I'm an alcoholic" came out without his permission.
The back half of the talk turns to service. Rhett describes editing a letter he'd written to a judge on behalf of a sponsee and not recognizing the man he'd described — himself. He recalls a men's retreat where one crusty old-timer with 38 years had "rested back" while others were still actively working with newcomers, and the difference in their quality of life was black and white. His core message: working with another alcoholic has saved the day every time prayer or willingness has failed him, and his Higher Power made him uniquely qualified to teach another drunk something he has lived.
Discussion
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