Redneck Twelve Steps — I Can’t, He Can’t, I Think I’ll Let Him 🤣 – Bill T.
About This Speaker Tape
Bill T. is a 30-year veteran of Alcoholics Anonymous who came back home to Atlanta from Utah to mark his anniversary at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the Nava Club. He was raised in Chamblee and Doraville, fed paregoric as a toddler and wine by age eight, blacked out at thirteen, and wrecked eleven cars between fourteen and twenty-eight — once trapped screaming upside down for an hour and a half on a road nearby. A 92-mile blackout drive ended in a Dawson County DUI exactly thirty years to the day before this talk, cost him $42,000, a marriage, and a medevac pilot's career with the Georgia Power Company as his day job.
After thirty-five days at Turning Point, he walked through the door still "hip-slick, cool, bulletproof, and ten feet tall," and stuck his hand out to Russ McGraw, who answered "you think I'll give a shit?" The men who raised him in the rooms — Russ, Stan, Joe Hubbard, Joe Lewis, Don Sherrill — loved him when he couldn't love himself. Broke and reluctant to attend a workshop, he prayed behind Oglethorpe University one morning before meter-reading and walked straight into a $50 bill stuck in a bush, then a $100 bill a hundred feet later. He calls people who only do the first three steps "waltzers" — one-two-three, one-two-three, in a circle — and insists the freedom lives in four, five, and a ten-step every night.
The tape's emotional heart is a thirty-five-year-old amends he finally made this past weekend to his boyhood wingman. Drunk and stoned in flight school he had nearly blown his own head off, then stampeded forty cows through three strands of barbed wire. No bill ever came. Riding a four-wheeler down to a creek, the wingman pointed at a river birch where Bill had carved his distinctive signature forty-two years earlier — a signal that everything was already forgiven. He layers in a plea about his seventeen-year-old daughter and a controlling boyfriend: if somebody says they can do it, they can do it — act that minute, not the next afternoon.
He closes on September 11, 2001, when he diverted a flight to see Don Sherrill in Daphne, twelve days before Don died of cancer from throat to liver. Watching the towers loop on the television, Bill said "isn't that terrible" and Don answered with piercing blue eyes that it was exactly the way it was, exactly the way his Higher Power planned it — otherwise it'd be different. Sixteen years later Bill is still unpacking that lesson in acceptance. His friend George N. once told him his problem was a Higher-Power-shaped hole in his belly with the wind blowing through, and filling that hole has been the most productive thing he has done in the program. Don't drink, go to meetings, get a book, work all the steps, use your sponsor until they're used up, seek the Higher Power of your understanding — if he can do it, you can do it.
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