Remember Is the Word in How It Works That Keeps Me Sober Forty-Two Years – John L.

About This Speaker Tape

John L. shares his story at the Monday night Blue Chip Speakers' Meeting at the NABBA Club. After a warm introduction from Isla — who recounts John taking her to an Elton John concert and pushing her wheelchair a mile and a half through a parking garage with complete patience after her knee gave out — John takes the podium and tells the room his sobriety date is April 22, 1982. He got sober on Maui in Lahaina, a place he notes is now gone but whose sobriety lives on. He was 43 years old, freshly out of his third marriage, when a girlfriend called the cops on him after a blackout rage in their apartment.

Most of the talk is a long, comic taxonomy of his drinking — the linear blackout, the movable brownout, the time warp, and the retrograde blackout he discovered while tending bar after counting down his till. He spent twenty years as a bartender, including the first eight of his sobriety, which he flatly does not recommend. He tells two stories that pin down his old insanity: a girlfriend named Vera who threw an ashtray and then came at him with an ice pick because she 'thought it was a knife,' and a third wife who drank wine from a glass perched on the toilet tank during her shower — a scene he found completely normal because his own scotch was sitting right next to it.

The spiritual core of the tape is the word 'remember.' He says it is the most important word in How It Works, more important than alcohol, cunning, baffling, or powerful. He remembers because his mind took him places he never wants to go again, and because telling the story is how he stays out of them. He recalls the tall, tan man named Paul who shook his hand at his first meeting on Maui and said 'I'm glad you're here' — a line he has tried to pass on to every newcomer and old-timer for forty-two years.

He closes with two pieces of advice. The first came from an old-timer who wrote it on his first-anniversary card: 'Don't believe your own bullshit.' The second is to take a chair, any chair, and watch the parade — watch the sponsored newcomers go out drunk and the unlikable craphead stay sober year after year, and quit pretending you understand how any of it works. A government worker once helped him see that three years without a drink meant he was no longer handicapped. Don't take a drink today and you have a chance. Take one and he doesn't know if you'll ever get back.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Isla opens the Monday night Blue Chip Speakers' Meeting at the NABBA Club and reads the page 29 preface
• 1:30 Isla's introduction — breast cancer diagnosis, the Elton John concert, the wheelchair through the parking garage, John's patience
• 5:30 John takes the podium, sobriety date April 22, 1982, sponsor's diary entry, Lahaina is gone but sobriety lives
• 9:00 Why 'remember' is the most important word in How It Works, and the prison speaker who killed someone
• 13:00 Childhood, the missing gene, first drink at 16, the bliss in his fingernails and hair
• 17:00 Four kinds of blackout — linear, movable brownout, time warp, and the retrograde he discovered after a bar shift
• 26:00 Vera at the bar — the ashtray, the ice pick, and the next-day reconciliation
• 32:00 The third wife's wine on the toilet tank, his matching scotch, and what 'normal' looked like at home
• 38:00 Cops at the door at age 43 — the moment 'next week' finally arrived
• 44:00 The unemployment-office worker, three years sober, 'you're not handicapped,' and the closing advice: don't believe your own bullshit, take a chair and watch the parade