Recovery Is a Logical Design for Living – Tom I.

Thanks, folks. I'm Tom Ivester, an alcoholic. Evacuating a room will be no problem. I've evacuated many rooms. It'll just be braced to bolt. Delighted to be here. I, uh, I'm not an overly Freudian guy, but do you notice that the only time Clark coughed was when he got to the We Are Not Saints? Got to be a message. Great to see you. And hey, great to be back in Nevada. Great to be in Laughlin. And I want to thank you for a fine, fine conference. It's just we're weird folks. We come to a place where you're supposed to play and sin and dissipate, all that stuff. And I swear to God, all I've done is run from one meeting to another. We are really, really different, and that's a doggone fact. I like that action, and it's been really good to be here. It's been good to me with a bunch of old friends. and I was just thinking about, you know, at a baseball game they have a seventh inning stretch and it just kind of breaks the big mow of the game and gives you a chance to stand up and relax a little bit. Well, I kind of figured out why I'm sort of in the middle of this program. This has been a high energy thing. I'm going to be talking as fast as I can but compared to the other speakers, This is going to sound like slow motion, man. And it's been high energy. We've got another one coming up shortly after me. And so my job is to kind of work in the seventh inning stretch and just sort of dumb it down a little bit. If you leave this meeting any smarter than you came in, it won't be my fault. You'll be reading between lines or something. And I am delighted to be here, though. Delighted to be a part of this. One other little thing. I always like to just mess around a couple of snippets because everything reminds me of something. That anonymity thing that we just read. It's a peculiar thing of what happens in Alcoholics Anonymous with this anonymity business. I believe in it. But I have some questions about its infallibility. I was at a professional meeting sometime back, and we had a coffee break, and I was out walking around with a young lady having a coffee, just talking like you do. There's a little banal chatter, you know, who are you, where are you from, what do you do, what's your dog's name, you're in all that stuff. So we're going away with all that mundane stuff, and all at once she just stopped and said, Are you Tom High? I said, Well, in some circles that's how I'm known. And I'd already told her my full name, rank, serial number, every kind of a number. And it is really a commentary on anonymity when my anonymous identity is better known than my real identity. And all it was was that she'd listened to some tapes that she picked up somewhere and she recognized the voice. Now, isn't that strange about how things happen in this program called AA? So my name is Tom Ivester. I live at 1007 Glendale Drive in Aberdeen, North Carolina. Telephone number is 910-944-1581. And my email address, tomi.pinehurst.net. I'm an extremely anonymous fellow. And I am glad to be here. What I want to do, let me ask one other question just to get my bearings. Can I talk an hour and not get preached on? Okay, all right, good deal. Now wait a minute now. Does somebody know when the preacher comes? Can't tell me that. I swear I don't want to try to compete with him, her, it, or whatever. All right, well, letme get going then. I'm just an average slice of life, I think. I'm a guy who, I'm just going to cut to the chase because I want to talk about a whole bunch of stuff. I'm the guy who found himself at the age of 24 sitting in a maximum custody penitentiary. And when I say found myself, I think you know that I'm not talking about recognition of time and place, but it's like the other time I mentioned a little earlier when the fog lifted And I started to have clear recognition of what was going on. That's where I found myself. And God knows that was not some place that I ever had any desires to go or never believed I would ever go, just like most folks, I imagine. And so I'm sitting there, a 24-year-old guy, pointing at life when most folks are just getting started to live. My life's over. And I, honest to God, never believed I would never live to come out of there. I had a max sentence of 15 years, and to add to the difficulty, it was for a crime of which I had absolutely no recollection then or now or ever. But I was one of those people for whom the alcoholic nightmare became a fact of life. I was one of these fellows who woke up, came to the realization that in a drunken blackout driving blind drunk down the main street of a city, ran down and killed two human beings. And my response to that I guess would be like anybody's shock and disbelief. I just was incapable. I mean I could believe anything. I was not a hothouse flower. I could belief anything. But I was capable of taking that in and handling the information. And so my response at first was to just push it away and say, no, no that couldn't be. And then the realization sat in. People who may have conventional beliefs about alcoholism would tell you that that would be an absolutely given point from which the drinking would stop. I'd like to be able to tell you that but it just wasn't so. And even after something as horrendous as that, I drank till the day before I walked into the penitentiary. And so that was what I was looking back at. I'm looking at a life that had culminated with being locked up like a wild animal and looking back At a crime so horrible, that there's no suitable punishment. I mean, how can you adequately punish somebody who takes two lives? There is none. And so I was at that point in my life living under an absolute mountain of guilt, deeply ashamed to be breathing when two fine young folks no longer were because of me. And so there I sit, and I'm reflecting on a life that even in my kindest eyes would have been by my valuation better had it never happened. Now, I wasn't just some young preppy on the way to a fraternity dance who had a tragic accident. I was a fellow who drank like a runaway train. You know, when I look back at my life, what stood out in it was that the whole thing looked like a blur. It was not well-defined with peaks of success and long patterns of anything. I'd never held a job for as much as a year in my life, except the Army. I held that one for more than a year, but I didn't want to. I kept trying to quit that one, but every time I'd quit, they'd come get me and put me in jail. And so I finally just quit quitting, and they got tired of messing with me and threw me out with an undesirable discharge when I was 20 years old. So when I look back at that life, you know, what I saw, it literally looked like a blur, that I was a guy who was always kind of tantalized with the idea of alcohol. My first drinking preceded my first memories, but my family has told me about it when I Was a Child. I always had a kind of a a strange fascination with booze. I was one of those guys who would try to sneak little snippets of drinks here and there, and then the experimental drinking, and my serious drinking started when I was 16 years old. When I started serious drinking, the magic happened for me. This stuff clicked with me. It did something tremendously important. I fell in love with boozes. I took to it naturally. Nobody had to train me how to do it. It was just an instinctive kind of thing, and I started to drink. To the untrained eye, it would have looked like I drank too much from the very beginning. I never did understand the notion of too much. All I drank was all I could get. And so I was a guy who just loved booze. I loved what it did for me. I love the way it made me feel. I love that freedom that he gave me. Loved all of that sort of environment where it occurred. Loved the trashy folks that did it with me. I loved that kind of stuff. Loved all of that kind of intrigue and romance and sense of anticipation that something's getting ready to happen. And if it doesn't happen real quick, I'm going to make something happen just to get it going. And so that's what I remember. It was a guy that just sort of took off like a runaway train. Life happened very quickly. I had periods when if I was sober, I looked good. If I was sore, I had a quality and by which people tended to overestimate me I've been estimated almost all of my life. I swear to God I've operated over my head so so long that I get air sick just trying to Imagine being there. I mean, that's the fact yeah I get so would be sober two days I go look for a job People would hire me for a better job than I'm looking for It put me in charge all I wanted to do is pick up a box or something And they put me in charge, but it didn't take them long to figure out what they had on their hands. That's why I held jobs so poorly. And so I just sort of took off like that and had that kind of little peaks of doing fairly well followed by unbelievable chaos, confusion, and failure. I was a guy who, you know, my alcoholism happened so quickly. You heard somewhere that the chains of habit go on so gently that you don't feel them until they're too strong to break. Now, certainly mine was no general process. But in that process of that wild and crazy drinking, what happened was that my life just started to fall apart, and I developed alcoholism. Now, I had not a clue that I developed alcoholism when I did. It had no signals that I recognized. But what happened to me when I was somewhere around 18 years old, I did what we call crossing a line from sort of wild, crazy, recreational drinking to uncontrolled drinking or alcoholism. Now, I had not a clue about that. No signals went off in my mind, but when I got sober and looked back and saw what happened, what I recognized was that from that point forward, if I took one drink of anything with alcohol in it, my life was unpredictable. I could not predict how long I would drink, how much I would drank, or what I would do when I drank. Now, I didn't know that. And so the result of that was that I started to experience a life that seemed characterized by wild, crazy drinking and then unbelievable crashes. And it was just almost routine. When I started the drink, I would get to a point and quite often black out and wake up in some strange circumstance. Now, I'd like to tell you of a few thousand of those because they get funny after about 10 years. They have little humor at the time. Yeah, I don't know of anything more frightening or panicky than that thing of coming to and having that instantaneous reaction of where am I? What have I done? Now, I got to the point that it was comforting to wake up to the sound of clanging metal because I knew then somebody put me in jail and I've never had anybody do that by accident. At least they didn't admit it. And so that got to be a comforting thing. And my life just became a sort of a sickening routine of either jails, hospitals, psych wards. Woke up one time and, well, I won't get into a bunch of these because that would take until the preacher got here. But I'll tell you one. I came to in a car and there was a policeman banging on the window with his nightstick and I'm trying to chase him away for bothering me when I'm not doing anything. Well, the only problem was the car was on fire and it was parked in the main street of the little old town I lived in. Well I thought he was abusing my rights you know so I'm giving him a tongue. Well that was sort of minor. I woke up married one time for God's sakes to a lady I didn't even know. Never did get to know her. she saw what you had left very quickly and so that was that kind of thing where I would wake up in whatever the latest wreckage was and and here's the thing that that was telling to me almost every time that I came to in those circumstances and they were many but I would experience is what Bill wrote about in the book somewhere in there I can't tell you where anything is without lying. It's somewhere in the book. And there's a place where, maybe in alcoholism or somewhere, where it describes the state of mind that I had every time I came to in those circumstances with three words. He referred to it as pitiful, incomprehensible demoralization. And that was always the routine, every single time when I would come to finally take a look and see what had happened, and then would proceed the moral whipping, where I would take a look at that and experience pitiful, incomprehensible demoralization. It would always go something like, well, you've done it again. You've done it again, you're no good, you have no spine, you have no backbone, you have no sense of responsibility, all of which might have been true, but that was exactly the way I look at pitiful. You know, when I first read those words in the book, I thought Bill got to waxing a little eloquent when he was putting it together. I thought that's an awfully fancy name for a hangover until I started to see clearly what my life became when I would go through with that routine. And then when I got through with the moral whipping, it would go to looking at my options. Almost always the first one would be, why don't you just end it. Why don't you just end it? Everybody would be better off. Probably true. Or how many times that kind of mystical notion of why don't You just keep going? Why don'T You just vanish into the sunset? Why Don't You Just go away and don't even pretend to try? Tantalizing kind of thing. Or do You suck it up, make up a new set of lies, and go back and try to start one more time? And what I never recognized was that every time I would go through some kind of a debacle like that and start over, I would settle for a little less, a little more, and so that my life was incrementally falling apart, going downhill in a predictable kind of way. But I was so busy doing it that I never did really notice it. The amazing thing to me about alcoholism, mine particularly, is that my serious drinking started at my age of 16 and stopped. I hope to God it stopped. It did so far when I was 24 years old. And in the incredibly short period of eight years, that life was absolutely decimated and wound up like I described in the beginning. And by the time I came to my crashing and burning area, I was living up north in a marvelous city by the name of Flint, Michigan. It's a lot like Laughlin, Nevada. It's a very, very pristine place. At one time it was voted the worst city in United States in which to live. And when that thing made the worst City list, I felt kind of proud of that. Well, at least I contributed to that, you know. It was an arm pit, I'll tell you well, it deserved a guy like me. And that's where the string ran out. And I wound up in a city of a half million people, General Motors plants all over the place. They'd hire anybody to get on the bus and they wouldn't hire me. And I'm walking right there, red-blooded American. They wouldn't even hire me? Well, that's Where It Came Down. In the last couple of years that I drank, I used to say that I lived by my wits, but that's a little bit of a euphemism for what I did. Now, I'm not a criminal per se. I did a lot of things that folks considered illegal, but I was not a criminal in the sense of plotting crime or stalking to hurt somebody or something like that. I wound up living in an environment where the food chain consisted of feeding on each other. And so I woundup living a way of life that at one point in my life would have seemed unreal. It would have seemed impossible to believe. I didn't know people lived like that, and by the time I got there, it had become the only normal life I saw. When I would look at the world around me during those days, I can remember it was like looking through a fog. That life looked unreal.It wasn't something I longed to join. It was something I had left, and the way I lived became normal. Hustling, scuffling for stuff, taking advantage of folk find some tender-hearted lady to take me in until she found out what you had and just using folk rolling other drunks if they weren't rolling me and uh selling my blood five bucks a throw yeah i was not reared to live like that but by the time i got there it seemed amazingly normal interesting to me that when i got sober it took me probably a couple years to start thinking in terms of quality i would instinctively think of the inferior because that was what was normal to my life at that time and so that's uh that's that's where it wound up i'm confident i don't have any doubt whatsoever that i would have drunk myself dead people who drink like me don't drink long they do it intensely but it doesn't last long i never figured i would make 30 and i'm confident today that that that prediction would have been absolutely true except that it came to a crash, just like I described to you when I woke up in jail and was greeted with the fact that I'd taken two lives. And I knew that I would never drink again, and by the time I got out of that jail, I was drunk almost at once. And so there I sat in that institution. And so that's who I am historically. I want to share with you about what is it that can happen to a guy? You know, I'm a 24-year-old guy, and there's absolutely no melodrama in that. That's an absolute fact. I'm the guy who's sitting in there not only with an experience too horrible to even contemplate, with a guilt for which there's no relief, but I was a guy who was always a real isolationist. I mean, I made a lot of noise, and I created a lot OF havoc around places, but inside, I was always A very isolated guy. And when I went into that penitentiary, I just absolutely isolated, didn't communicate with anybody, didn't try to. And the amazing thing to me, you can picture that fellow, a 24-year-old social wrecking ball just sort of crashing through life, screwing up everything that he got near. And so I'm sitting in there reflecting on that kind of a history. What on earth would it take to turn that around? And here I am in Laughlin, Nevada today as free as a man can be. What on earth would cause that to happen? And that's what I'd like to just sort of visit with you about. Because I believe, I believe without any question that alcoholism is a killer illness. I don't only believe that, I know that it's a killer wellness. I have participated in too many deaths to have any question whatsoever. I've participated in too many tragic histories of failure and alcoholics anonymous to have any doubt about the pernicious nature of this illness that will drag me back I'm absolutely convinced of that I am a truly fortunate man in that from the day I walked into my first meeting to this one I've never drunk again nor used anything that replaced it and and that was absolutely nothing to do with any heroics on my part, and I'll absolutely guarantee you that. And so what happened? That started to turn that around. Tom earlier today mentioned the word intervention. You know, that's a great word. It's fairly modern in terms of our dealing with alcoholism. I was thinking about that, that if you want to read a real treatise on intervention, read the chapter to employers and read the Chapter Working With Others. You knows, Those were the seedbed from which interventions and employee assistance programs and stuff like that came. And when I came in the program, intervention was not existent as a word or an activity that certainly I'd never heard of it before or after my recovery. But what happened looked a little bit like a minor version of that. One day, and I was spending my time sitting in my cell staring at my navel or doing anything I could do to keep from thinking. And one day, I was sitting there, and a guy called me out for an interview. His name was Martin. He was a social worker there at the facility. And he'd just graduated from college. He'd been there just a very few months. I don't think he liked it very well because he left shortly after I saw him. I don'T think I caused that. He just left. There was probably a lot of guys like me that caused his belief. But that guy talked to me about my alcoholism. alcoholism. Now, I didn't know I had any. I'd had a lot of people talk to me about my drinking, and this guy was no exception. He sounded just like a Xerox copy of everybody I ever heard. They would always look at my history and say, my God, you drink a lot, or you're a bad drunk, or you'RE an alcoholic, and on and on. And prior to that, it had always gone on to something like, why don't you quit? Well, I never could think of a good reason to quit. Now I never, I don't know, i hardly ever hear anybody say this if ever but i was a guy who simply never connected the first drink with that outcome of pitiful incomprehensible demoralization i never connected that i never knew till i was sober and alcoholics anonymous that the first drink had any implications for me different than anybody else nothing ever happened to me when i took the first drank i just took another drink and another one, and then woke up in jail in Alabama or somewhere. But I never put that together. I never connected those two things. And so I didn't know anything about alcoholism. This guy made the same exclamation everybody else ever had. And they would normally say prior to that, why don't you quit? And it would make no sense. And then this guy added something I'd never heard before. He said, we have an AA group here at the institution. I think you ought to go. Now, it wasn't an order. It wasn't a capturing ethic like we have in place now, you know, where they say if you don't go, we're going to shoot you or something. It was nothing like that. It just said, we have a group, just a flat kind of a statement. We have a Group. You ought to go, was about the way he put it. I don't know if he tried to explain alcoholism. I'm glad he didn't because I don' t think he knew anything about it. They taught him at Michigan State when you see a case with a file like that and it's all about booze. Tell them to go to AA, and that's exactly what the guy did. I walked into my first meeting. I say walk. I kind of shuffled in like a guy on Thorazine, but I kind of wandered into that meeting, and I didn't want to join AA. I'm 24 years old. I didn'T think I was an alcoholic. I mean deep down, I truly did not believe I was an alcoholic My belief was that I was a guy who was loaded with potential, and And one of these days, man, I'm going to get off on the right foot and look out world. That's really what I believe. Now, I knew I was having an incredibly long run of bad luck waiting for the big break, but I didn't believe I was alcoholic. And so this guy had told me that, and I walked into that first meeting. Certainly not any ownership of the problem, not any belief in the problem. I'm just another tragic face shuttled into Alcoholics Anonymous like millions of others another tragic face I'm walking into a program and you absolutely nothing about I'd never heard of it I've never heard of anybody helping a drunk you don't help drunk she hit him upside the head with a blackjack that's what you do with drunks and I knew nothing about that and I walked in and sat down did that first meeting one person spoke to me had an officer on the door Ivester yes sir sit down and I sat down in in the in the middle of 300 guys in a maximum custody penitentiary and took in the first meeting of alcoholics anonymous that ever heard now tell you it had absolutely no effect on me whatsoever in terms of any sense of affiliation or I'm home at last or I really belong here absolutely none I really didn't leave us an alcoholic they ran the meeting much like this they read a lot of stuff I didn't know what it was I thought steps and stuff like that was poetry or something. I had no clue what that stuff was, and then they introduced the speaker. The guy got up to speak. It wasn't his name, but the only thing anybody ever knew him by was Shy Walker, CHI. He loves Chicago, and he used to do a lot of crimes down there. He'd done some time in that prison and thought Chicago was the guard spot of the world, and I mean, the guy was a wild man. I listened to that story in shock and amazement. The last crime this fellow, I guess it's the The last one that he got sentenced for was robbing a superior court judge. Now, come on, man, you don't have to be a criminal. You don't rob no judge. I mean, you only speak to that sucker if you can help it. And he robbed one. And he got 15 years. That was a very popular sentence in Michigan. And so I'm listening to this guy, and that was mild compared to stuff this guy told me. And I'm sitting there in shock and amazement. He was about like a guy in a circus performing to me. I didn't identify with him. He was as different from me as anybody I've ever met, a little old short guy with absolutely no education, roughneck fellow. And that day, if I had anything on my mind when it left, it would have been, my God, what is that? And so I walked out. The amazing thing is the next week I walked back. Nobody would have come looking for me if I hadn't. But the next weak I found myself back. And I'm absolutely convinced the one thing, the only thing that brought me back was the magnetic personality, the magnetic enthusiasm that was Shy Walker's life. Thank God for enthusiastic people. Thank God für people who communicate by their attitude, their frame of mind, their actions, their stimulated interest in reaching out to others. Thank God för folks like that. because had I gotten introduced by some sad sack who was just deliriously happy but his face had not a clue that that was the case I doubt if I'd have come back because the only thing that pulled me back and I didn't analyze it I just found myself back there the next week sitting and the week after that I never missed a single meeting the entire time that I was there amazing to me amazing to me. You talk about what turns around a life like that, think of what I just said. A rookie social worker who knew nothing about alcoholism had been taught, say this is what it looks like, said there's one, you ought to go over there. That's it. I responded to the first invitation I ever heard and have never looked back. I walked into a group of Alcoholics Anonymous where a man shared about his life in a galvanizing kind of way and I guess that just drew me back. But I'm sitting there, the lost face of the crowd. I didn't believe I was an alcoholic. I didn' t identify with Shy Walker. I never missed a meeting. For a good while, I said I was an alcoholic, but I didn''t really believe it. Didn' t believe it I said it was because I hated to be the only one out of 300 that was something else and so they all said they were and I said, oh yeah, me too but it didn' d mean a thing. It was a word and so I kept sitting there and the amazing thing I've always been a reader And so I read everything we had. It wasn't much back then. We had 12 publications total, and I read all that stuff. I said, darn nervous. Well, I'll just throw this in there for a little whatever it is. I'm not a drug addict, but I'll assure you I took enough speed to launch a space shot. It launched me, I tell you that. And that stuff does something to your wiring, man. And, I mean, I was cross-circuited a lot of ways when I got here. And I was rather quick. I really spoke quick back then. And read, Jesus, I could read the big book in 30 minutes, it seemed like. I was just looking at that thing. But it didn't mean anything much. You know, it was just a flurry of stuff. And so I was a little quick. I'll tell you one other thing that's kind of jumping. Well, I'm not following anything anyway, but throw this in. I was, you've got to picture this. I'm sitting in a maximum cost penitentiary, and it's a bad place. I'm the youngest guy in there, and rather cute. And 6,000 yo-yos in that place, most of them lonely. And I mean, it was bad news. That thing was fed out of Flint and Detroit. And I mean, that was not a place to hang out. Well, anyway, one of the byproducts of a lot of speed was I couldn't sleep. And I couldn'T go in a dark room. Yeah, I mean I wasn't afraid of spooks or anything. But if I went into a darkroom, I'd hear a lot stuff and it would just look like a kaleidoscope with all the colors going off and I thought, Jesus. And one day, you hear some magnificent stuff in Alcoholics Anonymous. I went to meet one day, and this rocket scientist of a speaker, he said, some of us have trouble sleeping. Well, my ears shot right up. They're sizable anyway, but I mean, they shot up. And he said—I'll tell you what helped me. I've learned that if you can't sleep, stay awake. Well, I thought, I'm missing something. Yes. What is wrong with this fool? If you can't sleep, stay awake. Well, it finally sunk in. My God, that makes sense, you know. No, I couldn't sleep so I'm trying to make myself sleep. I finished two years at Michigan State University while I couldn'T sleep. So there's some byproducts that if we can deal with them and incorporate them and use that energy, most of us are a little overloaded with compulsive energy anyway we get sober and just directing that into things well anyway uh it was a tricky kind of a time trying to get settled into this thing uh i was fortunate and when i look back to the things that really influenced me what were the things that really turned around i mentioned something i mentioned that guy i've mentioned shy let me tell you that that one of the reasons i'm a strong group person i don't mean i am philosophically a strong group person. I'm somebody who fundamentally believes in the value of purposeful, well-structured groups that carry the message effectively to alcoholics. I am not a chat room guy. I mean, that's all right if I'm just hanging out. But when I get down to recognition of what it is that effectively carries this message, you know, I'm a great believer in groups of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'm that way because that's how I was introduced. You know, isn't it interesting about how our loyalties are shaped? Everybody in this room had some place where it began for you. And, I will guarantee you, you have loyalty to that that will last a long, long time. I believe the maximum custody penitentiary at Jackson, Michigan is the finest place in the known world to get sober and to really develop recovery I bet I have told a hundred thousand people that more than that I've never had a taker yet but I'm loyal to that I go back up there every couple of years just to make sure I ain't there I think it's part of it, and maybe to say something to the guy who is. But anyway, that group was tremendously important. I'll tell you a couple of things of why it was so important and why it Was so significant in shaping my recovery. Now, I'm a guy, when you live a life like I did and some others of us in here I know that have had this, where you're not really participating in society, you're in kind of a subset of society. You know, it takes on certain beliefs that just shape. One is you don't trust anybody. I mean nobody. I didn't trust everybody for anything. I didn'T believe any human in this world did anything for another human without a hook on it. I truly believed that. Alcoholics Anonymous was the first place sitting in a maximum custody penitentiary in a group called the Recovery Group, was the first place that I ever truly invested trust in other humans. Isn't that strange? 300 people, many of whom by their own description defied imagination as citizenship models. And yet these are the first people I ever trusted. They were the, and I don't mean across the board, I'm talking about a group ethic. This was the first group of people I never saw who did exactly what they said they were going to do, 100%. Never seen that. I'd never seen people so committed to ethics and integrity as I saw exhibited in that group, and I was tremendously affected by that. The first place I ever from deep down uttered the words I'm an alcoholic and meant it was in that Group because I trusted that Group. When I did that, I expected somebody to say, oh, no, not you. My God, you're a fine young man. Nobody said a word. And trust was well invested. Trust was well-invested. That was a tremendously good group. The other thing was that they did a great job of helping new members to develop an understanding that AA is not some obstacle course or some course of instruction or some set of rules for achievement. What to help me understand was that Alcoholics Anonymous is a very logical design for living. It's not some mystical event that happens to a fortunate few. It is a well-designed, well-put-together design for life and for living that will work, I believe, for anybody who will give their lives to this simple thing and take the actions, take the actions. And that's exactly what happened. And I came to understand that not from Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob but from other drunks just like me. The only difference was they were a few steps in front of me. And they said, hey guy, here's what we did. Tremendously important. What a great foundation that gave me for a new way of life. I'd like to visit the steps but I won't because I won'T have time. But that's what the design for living is about you know there are three basic things have to do with surrender with with surrender in those first three and and and recognition of a power as tom called it hope yeah recognition of the power great foundation for recovery the the next four that to me that have to deal with coming to understand my illness and what is it that drives my life and in six and seven those decisive points where I start to take a stand and say yes I truly want to get well. I share the belief that my buddy Steve and others have said that that point is probably where we lose more members who are trying to take the steps than any other point in the program because the game changes and if it doesn't change I personally believe that sobriety will be time-limited. If I never get past the point where I simply see AA as a place to go get what I need, I believe it'll be time limited because only so long our story is going to sound interesting and heartwarming. Only so long are discussions going to sound challenging and if I don't get to the point so that Alcoholics Anonymous becomes a way of life, a way to live, it'll start to get old and repetitious and boring. And the folks I work with, that seems to be where that kind of thing happens. And then the last part of that, where if I were going to dwell on it, I'd tell you what I would talk about, that the surgery of Alcoholics Anonymous that's laid out in the eighth and ninth steps to me is enormously important in terms of freedom. I'll just distill it down to this one thing. I believe that my defects of character were not bad habits. They were the things by which my life performed. That's what drove my life. And they don't go away just by some sort of thinking about it and decision making. They go away as I start to put these principles in place. I believe the reason the surgery of the 8 to 9 is so important Is Defects of character are deep-seated And in the course of my alcoholism I hurt and abused and misused a lot of people And my fervent belief is that I will never be a free man Until I make right those wrongs and I got straightened out those warped and distorted relationships I'll never be free as long as I drag that stuff but these steps guide us through that so so clearly and specifically and I'll be grateful for that forever and in the last three of if I were going to talk about him I'd simply say that that's where the rocket gets lit you know that's where these principles become a way of life you tend to me is not about just admit when I'm wrong if I look at it says in the book it talks about how well am i putting these principles in place do these principles do indeed become a way of life or is it just a little fix-it place and then 11 is where the action starts to become clear for me and and then the principles that well i i just indicate a little something about those because i'll tell you something about the power of Alcoholics Anonymous. Those steps are a magnificent design for living that are a vehicle to new life, to freedom, to joy, to usefulness, to wholeness, to self-esteem, to worth. There isn't one single thing that's attributable to Alcoholics anonymous that did not happen to me in all its glory in a maximum custody penitentiary. A point in my life where the living was unbelievably crude and obscene and vulgar and dangerous, and I became a free man. A free man in every way that matters except physically. New life. Found the joy of giving. Found The Joy of Serving. And I'll tell just one barometer of that that I certainly wouldn't told anybody back then but I was an incredibly active member of AA back then and still am but I was incredibly active back then. And I hated that place with a purple passion. I never got out at a maximum custody facility it wasn't because I was Charles Manson. I mean, they just knew I was a totally unpredictable cat. And the night before I was getting out, and I was up to my ears today, the night bevor I was getting out I found myself thinking, geez, I wish I had a couple more days. I need to finish up some stuff. Now you can believe I didn't tell anybody. I hated even catching myself thinking it. But isn't that something? Is that a commentary on what the freedom's about? As much as I despise that place, hated every second that I was in there with a purple passion. Hated it worse the day I left than I did the day i went in and the program had such an impact on my life that I'm thinking geez I need a little more time. I got work to do but I believe in the spirit of rotation so I turned that over to somebody. And gradually left. And they had told me, they'd turn me loose if I'd go to North Carolina. And so I did. I stayed there three and a half years, and they told me they would turn me lose if I would go to South Carolina. I really didn't want to go. I'd been to the big city. I've seen the bright lights and the noise and grown to love jazz and all that stuff and I didn't want to go back in here bluegrass I really wanted to stay downtown but it was a wise thing and in uh 1960 I went back to North Carolina I was just really set for sad slinging singing a slow ride I had my arrangements made I knew I was got I knew my lifeline was alcoholics not because I had no questions about that and one thing about transitions I know that Clark just made one. A lot of us make transitions. My buddy Will from North Carolina is just thriving on being out here, that transitions are no big deal. Now, that was a big deal for me, of course, but it's no big detail in terms of challenge and danger if I am solidly involved in the program. It's just changing groups. And so when I hit the street, I mean, there was absolutely no question in my mind. I had my arrangements made. I got off the bus, called an old man I'd never seen before in my life. I sounded like a Yankee back then. And so he answered the phone, and he said, been looking for you. Want to go to a meeting? I said, I sure do. And I went into my first meeting that night, 12 folks strong in that group, and I was welcomed like the prodigal son. They didn't even know me, but I was welcome with absolute no question. And I just hit the ground running. And I took off like a wild man. It's a dubious kind of a blessing, but I was really blessed with coming into Alcoholics Anonymous in that part of the world when it was still at a very fragile stage. This was a long time ago. And AA was still very fragile there. There were just a couple of guys standing. That old man and the guy that became my second sponsor moved away. And I wound up being the only standing member of Alcoholics Anonymous in a city of 50,000 people. Now that has some real challenges and some wonderful growth opportunities. Man, I could regale you for a long time with stories about that. I'll just give you one aspect of it. Working with women was a particular challenge because I was still kind of cute. and I was single and there's nobody there but me. I mean, how do you answer the phone when there's no one there but you? You say, well, I'm sorry, but we don't do that. Well, we do do that if there's somebody else to go and I made the first 12-step call I made on a woman alone and I have never made another since alone. I didn't care if it was a teeny bopper or a grandma. Every one of them went And it wasn't just my irresistibility. It was that a lot of women simply had not had good, warm, solid, trusting relationship with guys. And so almost invariably the sincerity and the warmth was mistaken. And so I had not ever went on another one alone, but I had no other women. And my mother, I'll guarantee you, has been on more 12-step calls than 80% of the folks in this room. I mean, I tell her, I say, You've got to go protect your boy. I mean we're going. Our house was a detox. Man, we loaded it up. I had a girlfriend. I'd take somebody. I don't care who it is, a hitchhiker. Hey, somebody's going with me. It was real fun. I'll tell you what little story that had with drunk women. And I'm not reflecting on women. It just was the way it was. I had one girl, and I really had hope for her. She had, oh, God, must have been three weeks of sobriety. I just saw her as the next Marty Mann. I knew she was coming. So I went to pick her up one night, and there she was, drunker than a billy goat in all her glory, and had another one with her, drunker then she was. Well, I didn't know the other one, but I didn' t have any time for any deep-seated counseling or anything, So I just gave them the old one-line message, get in the car. We're going to the meeting. I don't care if you are drunk. Get in the cart. What about the liquor? Bring the liquor. Bring it on. I don' t care, man. So I took them. Now, if there's anything more challenging than one drunk woman, it's two. And so we got up there, and I was the president that day. I was chairing the meeting, and got through some of it, and finally I said any announcements. And the one that I didn't know stuck her hand up, and I said, oh, God, what is it? She said, I'd like to announce it. I'd love to get the hell out of here. And did. The other one finally got sober and died with 23 years of sobriety. Well, Godly was a lot of fun, a lot OF fun. It's the special kind of fun that you hear talked about in those early days in A. And it truly was a marvelous period. So I just took off. Second week, I was out. Somebody asked me to go over to a prison with them. And I said, geez, they were not going to let me in. They may not let me out. And they said, all right. So I went. Two months later, I'm the outside sponsor of that prison. What a tremendous affirmation for a guy who just walked out of a maximum custody joint. And I'm a trusted servant. People got pushed into active service a lot quicker then because there was no army. And so I got pushed in to it and just absolutely loved it. I couldn't have been more affirmed or happy had I been elected governor. Tremendous thing. About the same point, my parole supervisor came to me one day and said, Tom, you're real active, is that anything? And I said, yes, sir. And it concerned me because I thought he was going to tell me to slow down and I knew it wouldn't. And he said, wouldn't it help you if you could drive? And I said, yes, sir, but I can't, like he didn't know. And he said that when I'd left Michigan in letters that big, this man's would never drive a motor vehicle, this man would never drink alcohol. I took both of those as facts of life. And he says, well, let me take a look at it. A couple weeks later, he called me, asked me to meet him at the Sears store. My sister drove me up, pulled up in front of Sears. I could see my guy standing back there in the back where the fellow didn't know, went back, talked with him, visited, and all we did. and we got through visiting the guy handed me a driver's license didn't even ask me if i could drive no test road written verbal nothing didn't even pay for it that can't be legal it just can't believe but i've been driving ever since you know and you know what it to me i mean i've had people tell me that jesus you must have been well connected politically. Yes, you bet. You bet. Yeah, Sheriff and I were intimate friends. What I honestly believe, not only on the basis of my experience, but on the basis of God knows how many unbelievable recoveries and restorations I've seen. When God's got work for us to do, the walls come down. And I don't care what they are. The walls come down. I heard a little gal yesterday talking about going into law enforcement, and good God, you know it as well as me. Those kinds of miracles are so prevalent here that they almost get no notice. My God, if you told those kind of things in the Kiwanis Club of Laughlin, Nevada, good God it would blow their minds, blow their mind. But miracles are here, the power, and when God's got work for do all I did was give a broken and wasted life to this simple program and man it's given me back more than I would have ever dared dream I mean by far five months after that I was elected DCM I couldn't spell DCM they didn't teach at it Michigan State but I was elective DCM and and uh and I was a pretty good one as a hard-working DCM and two years after as I was sitting in my house one day minding my own business fella call from the state capitol, introduced himself. I'd met him one time. He visited the group where I was outside sponsor just making a sort of an official visit. He was from the head shed of corrections and so he introduced himself and he said Mr. Ivester we're expanding the rehabilitation program in our prison system and we were wondering if you would consider accepting a position. I'll tell you something folks that does not make headlines today but at that point there had never been an ex-con in history hired into anything like that and I knew that. Never occurred to me, never occurred anybody else I don't guess. And I said to him I guess automatically do you know who you're talking to? And he said yeah we probably know you better than you know yourself and and I said geez I'd rather do that than I could imagine and I knew it would never happen, but it did. And I went to work in 61 as a rehab officer in the state of North Carolina and that started a 39-year career that was just absolutely marvelous. Like any kind of a career, I mean, I could bring you to tears with some stories, but on balance, I'd tell you this. I would not have traded my career with anybody on the face of this earth. If you think about it, you can see why. What a great opportunity to be able to go into an environment like that and hopefully make a difference. Now I'll assure you then or now nobody was ex-recruiting ex-convicts. I had to write a little paper one time. Steve knows about it. I hadto write a little paper once when somebody attacked the notion of hiring ex-offenders and I didn't have to but I did. I wrote a little position paper And I put a line in there that I truly believed, and it was a good line, I think. It said, I have no interest in hiring people with criminal histories, nor do I know any reputable employer who does. Who would want to hire somebody with a criminal history? What I want to higher is people who have the skills and abilities and competence to do a job. and if the history is history fine let's move on and so that was a tremendous thing I worked my rehab stuff for a good while in one day the head of our system calm but call me asked me to stop by his office and he asked me if I would take over an institution as superintendent or warden it and and my reaction was even though I was in the system my action reaction was stunned disbelief And I didn't want to do that. I didn'T want to be the man. I didn' t want to beat a guy that's turning the keys and all that. Yeah, I wanted to duke it out with the guys. And then I saw that, you know, if there was maybe a little power, I might be able to do some stuff. And I started a 20-year interval in my career where I was head of institutions. Unbelievable job. Unbelievable. Lousy job. Jesus, I wouldn't want hire you to do it again. But what a wonderful place to make a difference. And then last part of my career, I had an opportunity to set up an alcohol and drug program in our system. And that was – so I finished up 39 years, 10 years past retirement, and a great thing. The day I retired – I'll tell you how you want to go about this retirement stuff. You either move to Laughlin or Las Vegas or do what I do. When I retired, I already been elected to be the chairman of AA Service Work and Correction in North Carolina upon retirement so my retirement lasted about one nanny second and then I'm gone again and I have right today I've never been busier in my entire life nor more filled with joy and a sense of worth and fulfillment in my life been an absolutely heck of a trip there's a there are a lot of other elements to that that that it won't go into but now not to that I mean that's obviously important to me. I share that because if there's anybody and I know that there's some people here early in recovery, and I know that there are times when you try to see the future and it looks like a long dark tunnel and you just wonder is there a future? I share that not as any tribute to me you know what I told you what I did I gave a broken and wasted life to this program and man it's given me a life that I I wouldn't have dreamed of it. And I wasn't just some star they picked out of the convict robe, you know? I took my place in that system as a professional and I developed my credentials as a profession. I'm not a professional ex-convict. You know, I'm somebody who took my place in their position. This program made it possible for me to serve very well. And so tremendously important to me. Otherwise, I'm just an average guy, just live in a little old town in North Carolina. Regular guy. My town's not much bigger than this casino. It's probably smaller on a given day. But I'm a citizen there. You can count on that. And I'm good citizen. Pay taxes, vote, always wrong it seems but I vote. I persist if nothing else. and I'm a good citizen I own a home there we own it now got a little wife who's here with me this weekend by the name of Fern I was up in Saskatchewan I couldn't even pronounce that when I was drinking barely can now I was out there doing God's work she was working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police not on the horse but I don't think and they have a reputation that says the Mounties always get their man And she did. And we'll be celebrating 35 years of continuous marriage right quick like. And we have a couple of kids that are all-American kids. I thought both of them were dopey airheads when they were kids. I really did. You know, I tried to get them to run away from home or join the Army or something. Jesus. But they wouldn't go. They just kept staying there. And both of em went kind of bad. My daughter went into psychology, and she's supervising something like 76 or so folks who work with development of disabled people. I'm very proud of that girl. And in spite of that psychology degree, she'll be back on this planet in time. And I'm proud of the girl. My son went to – I had a lot of hope for him. He went into NC State University and majored in fraternity the first year. And I tell you what, I'm prouder of that boy. thought he was just really making his mark. He went to Jamaica and was elected King Reggae. My wife said, geez, isn't that awful? And I said, oh yeah, it's really bad. That's my boy. I can see him today. Well, Yo-Yo went bad in the second year, knuckled down and started in three years. Developed his grades up to a point he got into medical school and finished in the only special area that I told him to avoid at all costs, OBGYN, and there he goes. And told him get a law degree while he was at it. Wasn't bad enough, he's now just wrapping up a fellowship in high risk so he can get sued more often. And now he's being recruited by our university in the state of North Carolina, and his wife, I think, on the recruiting team the way she's working on it and we think he'll be back home. And I say that because I just tell you this and I hope you'll just give it some thought. I know there's some active members of AA here. I've been as active in AA as anybody I know for as long as anybody I know. If a fella could get more active, I don't know how. And in the course of my life, when I take a look at the things that matter most in my life, my family, my community, my profession, my personal security, finances, my circle of friends, there is absolutely nothing, nothing in my life that has not been richly blessed by the activity. Sometimes when you're real active in service, you naturally wonder what kind of a price am I paying? Am I doing this and penalizing my family in the process or penalizing my job in the process? Alcoholics Anonymous does not compete with anything else in my life. I'll say it again. Alcoholics Anonymous doesn't compete with anything else in my life. If it does, I'm not doing it right because alcoholics anonymous is a set of principle. It's my way of life and if it doesn't make me better in the important areas of my life, I am not doing that thing right. So it's been a hoot folks. I tell you it has been an absolute blast and I am delighted to Look forward to the rest.