Rigorous Honesty Means Telling the Truth for More Than Fifteen Minutes in a Row — Kendall L.
About This Speaker Tape
Ken tells his story from notes at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NAVIC Club in Brookhaven, where he first walked in during October 1987. Born on the University of Texas campus, he grew up an Army brat who spent more than half his first eleven years in Puerto Rico, met his wife Carrie freshman year of college (they have now been married fifty years), and fell in love with Scotch whiskey the same season. He calls himself a professional drinker — not an amateur — with an expense account, a thirty-inch waist, a custom tuxedo, and a contact list that included Sammy Davis Jr., Pat Conroy, Jimmy Carter, and Dale Earnhardt. He sold liquor out of a Chi Phi trunk at the University of Georgia while Dean Tate raided his room every Saturday morning for four years without ever finding the stash.
The drinking years carried a cost he could not outrun. His son Patrick was found in the apartment pool at Dorchester and died seven days later; Ken notes that 98 percent of couples who lose a minor child divorce, and only a handful of miracles kept his marriage intact. Two of his drinking friends, years apart, died at exactly age fifty-four when their hearts exploded. In 1983 a pain like an axe in the back dropped him in his own backyard; DeKalb Medical gave him four shots of morphine, and chief surgeon Bill Hardcastle later told him his chief nurse vomited in the OR when they opened him up and found gangrene wrapped around a destroyed pancreas. The doctors warned him one more drink would kill him. He drank for four more years anyway.
A Brookhaven DUI — his four-year-old VW Rabbit versus a forty-eight-hour-old 280Z — finally landed him in jail, and a priest from St. Bartholomew's drove him home saying, "we knew you weren't going anywhere, we were busy." Sponsors Stan Parks and Gerald Daly took him in and refused to let him do his fourth step, because twenty-five years of drinking had taught him he could not tell the truth for fifteen minutes in a row. They told him: just don't drink, go to meetings, and do what we do.
The last stretch is about the second life that honesty bought him. He published two books of poetry starting at age fifty-six, got useful in his Episcopal diocese, and carries with him Stan's office demonstration — a Big Book, a pint of vodka, and a loaded pistol laid on the desk for newcomers who said they did not know if they wanted to stay sober. They always picked the Big Book. Ken closes the way Stan taught him: if you do what we did, you'll get what we got.
Discussion
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