Sobriety Date and Honesty Date Were Not the Same — Still Working the Honesty Part – Nick W.

About This Speaker Tape

Nick W., a Marine Corps veteran and Baptist preacher's son from North Georgia, tells his story at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NABBA Club. He talks about being the black sheep in a family of degrees and discipline, tricking his parents into signing an active-duty contract at 17, and learning to drink from older Marines at Kaneohe Bay with pineapple liquor stolen from the Dole fields. September 11th hit while he was sleeping off a drunk on Okinawa and, for the first time, he was terrified — because now he actually had to grow up. He brought seeds back from Afghanistan, grew them at home, caught a lucrative government contract position, and let "big-shotism" wreck him on Jack Daniels and excess money.

The middle of the tape is the damage: a baby he met after missing her birth because he was drunk, a prayer in that hospital hallway that the mother and daughter would never see him again, parents who locked their doors when he pulled in the driveway, a motorcycle-racing persona that kept getting pushed to the back row with "the drunks and the crap pets," anti-psychotics mixed with cocaine and vodka, and finally his father — a minister — putting a loaded 12-gauge under his own chin in the driveway and saying, "Watching you kill yourself, boy, is killing me." He went to detox, faked willingness, ran, got locked up for impersonating a government officer, and finally hit the bottom in a jail cell where the grief wasn't being locked up — it was that the con was over.

Recovery came through a treatment center and a sponsor who, unknown to Nick, was the same man his mother had called to track him down when he ran. Nick pushes back hard on the AA cliché of lifelong powerlessness: lack of power was the problem, and the steps give power back — the power to help another alcoholic. His core teaching is the David and Goliath story: "Go with what you got. I got your back." Even a newcomer with two days has more sobriety than someone with one, and any message is better than no message.

He closes raw — something painful happened to him that evening before the meeting, and he credits the five or six guys who drove down with him for keeping him from the bottle. The talk ends with a plea to angle your chair toward the door, watch for the newcomer, and carry the message before the live-and-let-live crosstalk runs them off.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Chair Tim opens the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers Meeting at the NABBA Club and introduces Nick W. from the Gainesville Classic Group
• 3:30 Nick on sobriety date vs honesty date — "we're still working on my honesty date"
• 7:00 Tricks his parents at 17 into signing an active-duty Marine contract the day before he ships out
• 11:00 Stealing Dole pineapples in Hawaii, stealing a bobcat, blacking out and walking up to the MPs the next morning
• 15:30 September 11th on Okinawa deployment — first time he is truly terrified because he has to grow up
• 22:00 Meets future wife while driving drunk the wrong way up Georgia 400; his first-ever AA meeting in Honolulu, September 1997, after the Marine Corps brig
• 29:00 Missing his daughter's birth, drunk in the Valdosta hospital, praying they'll never see him again
• 36:00 Father loads a 12-gauge, puts it under his own chin: "Watching you kill yourself, boy, is killing me"
• 44:00 Jail cell realization — not upset about being locked up, upset that the con was over
• 52:00 Reframes powerlessness using the Big Book — "lack of power was our problem" — and tells the shepherd-boy David story: go with what you got