Step 3 Removed the Management of His Life From an Idiot – Sandy B.

Since we might not be able to get any of the other facilities till 10 o'clock, I wonder if there might be a few people here who'd like to hear part of my story. We don't like our speakers to be overworked. You know, it's sort of traditional when you're going to introduce a speaker that as soon as he gets here, you try to get up with him and find out a few things about him. Well, I got up with Him, and I hadn't seen Him since a while ago. I was privileged to meet him at the airport and I was late getting there and I'm absolutely honest with you and myself when I say it wasn't my fault and the plane was already in now I'd been told that he was with a fellow that I could easily recognize but I knew him and I didn't know what he might do if he got there and he want nobody there then I didn'y know what I was going to do I didn''t know where to go have them paid and I thought that might be embarrassing I found out the plane had been on the ground about 15 minutes and it just dawned on me to go toward the baggage section and when i started down that narrow passageway to the baggage section i looked down there and i saw one of the most beautiful little things i'd ever seen in my life and i said she's gotta belong to an alcoholic julie would you stand please i went running down there and uh and i saw this other nut and he spoke my name and he said here's john you know very affectionately and Julie turned around and said I'm Julie and then she introduced me to Sandy and we got in the car and came back to the motel and I hadn't seen him since until a while ago but I knew when I met him that he was one of us no doubt about that and we won't go into that But I asked a few people who knew him and found out some things about him that I'm going to let him tell if he wants to. Won't you join me in welcoming Sandy? Thank you, John. Good evening, my name is Sandy Beech and I'm an alcoholic. Hi. I'm very pleased to be here tonight and I do want to thank the committee for asking Julie and I to come down. I think it's just been a fantastic weekend so far and after a short laugh tonight I'm sure the pace will pick back up again tomorrow morning and when Eddie gets up here, but we'll get through somehow. We'll get thru this. I came into AA on Pearl Harbor Day in 1964, which is an appropriate day for me to come in anyway. And I haven't been drunk since that first meeting. And it's, you know, during that time with a rough sponsor like I had, I've been to many, many meetings, a lot of closed meetings. I've heard an awful lot of people talk and I'm convinced deep down in my heart that there's just without any qualifications that I owe all of that to not drinking. I am personally convinced that is the reason that I haven't been drunk since that particular meeting. I like to mention that not drinking part a lot of times we get rolling along in here other areas of sobriety and there was a lawyer used to live up in Washington he moved down to Alabama and passed away recently but he was a great hero of mine when I came into the program Charlie B and he had a thing about the steps and his secret to working the steps was when all else fails don't drink and you know because I really try hard on those steps and I'm hanging in there every day I got the little book you read in the morning the one you read at night and I got little notes I carry around I got pamphlets that I got in my pocket it works I still have days when I just hang on and and I and I sit around you know and I'll with these basic training that I had I'll start with the serenity prayer and I find that it upsets me and I go you know and I think everybody has those days and that's the day when you fall back on the real basic training here and that is that not drinking part I really am a a big believer in that I think it's fantastic, and I mention it here. I know that most everybody's heard of it. But there may be someone new who just got dragged here under the pretense that this was a political convention or something. Oh, I'll go. And you're brand new to the Fellowship of AA, and you're sitting here, and jeez, I hate to be the guy who lets the cat out of the bag, but that is a fact. not drinking is that really is isn't it and also if you came out of the mental institution like I did you got to forget some of the slogans that you had up there I remember one I was up there over the 4th of July and we had on the blackboard when the psychiatrist came in Give us Librium or give us death, you know. Because, you know, I have that feeling that I didn't like to go anywhere alone. Couldn't imagine coming up here alone. I mean, got to have your friend inside to keep you company so that you wouldn't go out there and face all those people alone. I do want to mention something I was have really enjoyed the weekend and I was greatly moved when I heard our Al-Anon speaker Louise I just spent years and years since I've related to a story like that and I just wanted to thank her because of how much good it did me and we have our stories are so similar and here one's an alcoholic and the other one isn't and a lot of times we don't get that close realization that people are people and we have our problems and we're not and we've got this sort of common solution that we have in here but we came in in 1964 I was thinking of all the similarities as she was going along came in 1964 and went through one of the most difficult periods of my time in the program was after eight years in the programme going through a divorce I thought I was going to be thrown out of AA. You know, I figured, oh, your whole family must be doing something wrong. You're doing this stuff and all the guilt that came in. I figured I'd be rejected and all that. And it helped me put it into words. So whatever she said, that's what happened to me. That explains how that... Because I have never been able to get this out correctly in words. And it just was said so well. And I thank you so much for it. You helped me with my problems today as I sat out there this morning. And I really appreciate it. It was just marvelous. The other thing I was thinking about before I get talking about my childhood, which I love to talk about, is I heard an observation about AA that I think is interesting. There's no nostalgia in AA. Did you ever notice that? every other organization, everywhere else I was, you were always talking about the good old days. You know? You don't hear anybody in here going, boy, remember the convention two years ago? That was a real good one. You remember back when I first came into AA? Boy, it was great back then. It gets better all the time in AA. That's why there's no nostalgia. Well, we love our past and we love our history and it's fun to talk about it, but not in the same sense we used to talk with nostalgia about a past that really didn't exist, about those wonderful times that were back there. The only reason they were wonderful was they were over. You know? And it's great. It's great that you never hear about the nostalgia, how great it was years ago, because we're growing and our lives are getting better and we're learning. and if we don't we die it's very funny how that works in the program that's the other thing I wanted to I wanted to mention in connection with that not drinking just to get back to that in case there is that one new person that reason is because of this death angle that's connected with the not drinking they call it the fatal nature of the illness and um I had a sponsor you know and they put these big words in the big book, they try to slide it in very cautiously to not scare us when we're brand new right out the door. But my sponsor helped me with that. He said, what do you think this means when it says we learn the fatal nature of our illness? And I can remember telling him, well, in my opinion, it's quite obvious what that means. It means in certain cases that there are people whose allergic reaction to the chemical alcohol may be of such magnitude that under any given condition it's possible that certain organs within the body cease functioning and there is sort of a demise or whatever you call that and he said no, I want you to check that page again look at it real close what it says is Sandy's gonna die that's what it said in there it says oh and that's the thing that gets you involved is when is when your name is in there you know Alice is gonna die where does it say that I gotta see that and then we you know that caught my attention I think I'll stay around another day I think I want to hear more about this and so I think that's the way I look at the program if I had to sum it up you know just not drinking that gets us going in my opinion of course anything I say is just my opinion which I don't think anybody else would claim anyway but I think that it works kind of like breathing and living it's obvious that we have to breathe in order to live but on the other hand if all there was to living was breathing I might quit you know what the heck sitting around hearing that noise and that's it and uh you know the funny thing is um all along the way i suppose as a certain amount of time went by if all there was to sobriety was not drinking I might quit and that's what I think AA tells us that we have to stay alive and we do that through not drinking but that gives us the chance to work the 12 steps so that we don't return to drinking and this has sort of been my little way that the program evolved within me and I think it's true we may hold on to that just don't drink and go to meetings check your brain at the door um that's terrific in the first month or two but if you checked your brain at the store five years ago and haven't gone back to get it uh I uh I would hate to embarrass you by asking you what in God's name you think that slogan on the wall that says think means um you probably have that one turned around We do have to go back and get our brains and end up with the, you know, the member's eye view where they talk about maturity. I love that guy. I wish I had a chance to meet the guy who wrote that pamphlet, the member of his eye view, where he talks about maturity, where we finally are willing to make our own decisions and stick with the consequences. And I think that's when we do have to think our way through problems and get advice from other people. But that's part of what the steps can give us. But returning to my childhood, which I think is important. I didn't used to talk about my childhood. I thought, what the heck? You're in Alcoholics Anonymous. All you have to talk abut is when you started drinking. You might as well start with your first drink. And I'll tell you why I like to do this. And I did this during the first five years that I was in AA. Because I operated under a certain assumption. And my wife has a quotation about assumption, but I'm not going to repeat it. operated under this assumption all of my problems were caused by my drinking so as soon as I stopped drinking the job was done everything would return to where it was and I would go on from there now this may be okay for a small percentage I've never really calculated the percentage, where this may in fact be true. But in my case, I didn't have anything going good before I started drinking. Life had me so confused I didn' t know where I was going when I poured alcohol in. And the simple removal of the chemical left me where I was when I started to drink, which was a skinny, nervous teenager wandering around wondering what in the hell's going on in this world and that is where i kind of got left off and i but i didn't like uh what was what the implications were if i admitted that my problems were not necessarily caused from drinking but were aggravated by drinking because if that was the case that meant i had to take the step that meant i Had to dig into those 12 steps and do something about those problems that were there before I started drinking. And they came about, oh, I don't know. I can only look back on them the way I saw them through the eyes and ears of a little kid. And who knows if that's what really happened. But I know that this is how what really came into my head. And I come from New England. And I think my parents basically, like a lot of New Englanders, were raising me to be a snob, which is, this is one of the things, may not be a big thing down here but up in New England that's a big thing. Try and be a snob and it takes a certain poise and you try and get a certain look on your face sort of you know disdain was one of our more popular words and that type of thing my problem was that people frightened me and I was very nervous about being around other little kids. And I had a problem keeping up this stuff, so I had to pretend. It became early on in my life I was a pretender. And one of the things I pretended, and I think all alcoholics end up doing this, is to pretend that everything's all right. Because if everything's alright, then nobody's going to question you. Nobody's goingto come in and find a weakness, a chink in your armor. And it soon became apparent that it was a tough world. It was a dog-eat-dog world. everybody's out to get you and you have to sort of be your own person and build a good defense around you so that the rest of these people that are pretty mean tough out to gets you can't get in can't penetrate this thing so as i was growing up but i knew that behind all this defense was nothing that was what i was afraid would be disclosed at some future date there was just a little you know like the wizard of oz that little old guy back there uh and that was what I was terrified about. And under those conditions, I was to meet God. Now, I met God at about age six when my parents said, we're going to now let you learn all about God. And I was brought into the Catholic Church and nuns came out. And there was a and I sat a little six-year-old kid in that front seat. The rest of them are where the kids are waiting for this thing to get over with so they can go play baseball. But I didn't have any thoughts about baseball, I looked up there with my eyes about this big around and started hearing about it. And they said, hello, little boy. We're very glad to have you here. And we're going to tell you all about God. God is love. But God is everywhere. And God knows everything. And мы want to tell you something. You're in trouble. You have original sin. And I went, oh wow, is that bad? And they said, this is bad. That's a stain on your soul that'll get you into hell if we don't take care of it. We have other sins and I heard about all of those sins and I heard about what happened and I heard about Judgment Day and I heard about punishment and I heard about all these things. My eyes got bigger and bigger and I walked out of there just after a few weeks realizing that I was in serious trouble. I had a terrible problem. My future was in great jeopardy and I developed a terror of God and it just came through wrong. So many of my friends got support and got the proper perspective and the wonderful relationship with their religions in their churches. But it came through to me as this terrifying experience that I had to, again, keep a secret. And in my own little mind, I knew by age 12 that I was going to die. That I had approximately 75,000 years to do in purgatory on stuff I had just thought about doing. I hadn't even, you know, done them. And I can remember I kept going, we've got to stop those thoughts from creeping in there. And I thought, okay, now I'm thinking like that. It's like a cash register going off in there with all these years building up. And I've gotto do something about this. And the last thing I wanted to hear about was, and then you're gonna meet God. And I'm going, wrong. This is a terrifying experience for me. Meet God, that's when we're gonna get the scorebook out. Knew everything. and oh I was just so uptight about this whole situation and I couldn't understand the joyous feeling that other people had so I had to make some assumptions about it again never communicate with other people just make observations and try through some form of introspection to understand what was going on and the only conclusion I could come to was none of them sinned that's why they were so comfortable and happy and little did they know in their midst they had this horrible little boy who had all these terrible secrets and if they ever found out i knew they would get rid of me that i would be ostracized from them so i had the terror that this secret would be out and i went through life developing horrible little secrets that i was terrified that people could find out about and i had to pretend that none of this was happening because I was trying to be a snob. And this became a terrible conflict as the teenage years approached. One of my best friends and closest things that I held to my heart was guilt. I just had guilt all the time. It seemed like I never did anything right. I had developed a conscience that was my constant friend. You did it again, didn't you? Well, you did it against me. You did again. And it was just in there. The conscience got tired in later years, and that was replaced by my wife. You did it again, you did it again. The world, in other words, was a very frightening place for me, is what I'm trying to tell you. I did not have any close relationships with people. Of real friends, I had no knowledge. I was afraid to let people get to know me. And when conversations got real personal, I felt frightened by it and I just would move on and change it, develop some sort of a sense of humor, let's joke about it. Could not bring myself to really talking about how I really felt about things because I was learning that a real man solves his own problems. A real person does not ask for help because asking for help is a sign of weakness. And I got this from church, from family, from books, from movies. How many of us remember those Western movies where the hero lived alone in the desert with his horse? And when there was trouble in town, they would send for him and he would come in and put on those black gloves in the bar, have a couple of shots of whiskey and walk out wherever the trouble was. bang, bang, get back on his horse and go out into the desert. And the town people would go, yeah, who is that man? What a wonderful thing. And that was sort of perfection. That was the goal to strive for. And I realize now how unusual it is to live alone in the desert with a horse. But I never questioned it then. I only saw that as sort of the ideal. That's what you could look up to, and that's what I was looking up to. So I found the world frightening. I found my existence kind of terrifying, and I didn't have anything to fall back on. I didn'T really have a spiritual foundation to fallback on. I really didn'T have any principles for living that I could fall back upon, and if you don'T have the fellowship of anyone else to talk to, you end up rather lonely, And you end up sort of a frightened, lonely little kid in a hostile world where all you saw was those tough eyes of other people. And, you know, if the world's hostile in your head, that's going to be a hostile world because that's where it exists. And so I ended up in college up in New Haven, which is my hometown. And I was there and I hadn't had a drink yet and I was keeping some pledge of some sort and I found that the pressure of the peer group, and I'm greatly subject to the pressure of the peer group which is good because that's why AA works is that great pressure of all of us on one another to do this together and I was a natural born follower and I like to follow when somebody come up with an idea and I remember attending one of the first social functions and there was about 50 people in the room. And I felt that normal feeling whenever I entered a room, which was that all eyes turned towards me and they were saying, what's he doing here? That was a typical feeling I had when I walked into a room. There was that look in their eyes, why is he here? What's he going to do here? I just felt totally uncomfortable and I picked a drink up off a tray as it went by of some sort of whiskey and poured it down and found that that chemical had no reaction on me whatsoever. I recall no effect on me, but I noticed that the eyes of the people in the room took on just a different tone. That hostility seemed to, it was amazing. I can remember looking out very closely into the eyes of the people, and there was sort of a warm exchange of glances that was going on. And you know, that was the kind of world that I liked. I remember loosening up a little bit when the way these people were now treating me. So I had another drink, and I waited a while, andI noticed that the room became very warm. I just sensed it, that these people weren't like all of those rotten people out there. This was a warm, caring group of people that I was now in. And they were motioning to me, hello there, hi, boy are we glad to see you here. Some of them wanted me to talk to them, they wanted meto tell jokes, they wanted to know my name and I'm talking to them and smiling and shaking hands. And I'm saying to myself, this is what life is all about. this is the kind of the way the world really ought to be instead of all those mean people out there. I'm so grateful to have found this crowd of people. I'm still here and I'm just so glad to be in the confines of this room and I remember alcohol changed my world. It didn't change me. It changed my word into the kind a world that I wanted to live in where people cared about each other. You talk about Christianity in action, there it was On that first night of drinking, I had a spiritual awakening. I was at peace with my fellow human beings. I was At Peace With Myself because I saw that these people accepted me so I could accept myself. There was that wonderful feeling and it lasted about an hour. And then I started throwing up. You remember how that all was in... I could sit down about five minutes if I leave the throwing up part out of the story. I spent so many hours in the morning practicing, and it was just a tremendous month. The night was a horrible night. The next day was horrible in classes. I got a sampling of the disease of alcoholism. It was almost like somebody was saying, look, we're going to give you fair warning about what alcohol is all about. We're going to give you a little taste of everything during the first 24 hours. And I think I really did get, I had sort of the throwing up, the dry heaves. I had some of the cold flashes, the hot flashes. I had the itchy skin, a couple of twitches, the stomach doing that stuff. I had kind of the general cross-section, like a smorgasbord of all the things that I was going to get to know very good in the years ahead. I had just a little sampling of all of them, and it was awful. It was a terrible experience, and at the end of the day, or at the end of next day, the crowd of these guys came back, and we said, hey, we're having another get-together. We'd love to have you come over. We're going to drink again. Be sort of like last night. And I can remember my body said, no. I mean, every organ in the body said no, no, veto. That's out. but at that particular time my brain was in charge it was going to lose control soon but at the moment at that moment in time my brain was in challenge of this package and the brain sat up there intellectually and said wait a minute let's not brush into this let's make a quick decision let's evaluate the facts let's step back and look at this situation on the one hand we had what little illness little headache not feeling too good you know a few of those little pains but on the other hand we had that hour we had that hour yesterday when all was well and if we sit back here and truly put values on these things we will come to the conclusion that that pain was a small price to pay for that hour and I thought about it And I said, you better believe it was. And I went out and had the drinking. And as the years went along, the hour got shorter and the pain got worse. But the formula kept coming out even. It kept coming up that this is a small price to pay for all the fun that I'm having. And as time went further along, the equation went something like this is a small price to pay for all the fun that I think I'm having. And I would have to check with people who were with me the night before to verify that I had a good time because of the blackouts and I would say geez, I've been in jail I had my teeth knocked out again and I feel awful did I have a good weekend? And then I'd get a lot of people who were there you know how you try and coax them through reliving the weekend pretending that you really remember it. Yeah, you remember we went over and then you're here and wow! Try not to look shocked. And at the end of the recreation of the weekend I would say deep down inside myself well thank God I did have a good time because I paid a hell of a price for it. And that was and I had a problem when I came into AA with the second step with this sanity concept and my whole thinking all during my drinking years went along like that. And I think we have to rationalize like that because if we don't the question of stopping drinking is liable to raise its ugly head if this really wasn't worth it then why do we keep doing it so I had to justify it somehow I got through school and I got into the Marine Corps which was a wonderful place to drink and I ended up being a pilot it was some sort of a hobby I don't know how I really got into that, but that was what I did for most of my drinking years was in fighter squadrons and photo squadrons and flying around in single-engine jets and thinking that I was just the most exciting person in the world. What a wonderful life. And that's the end of that. There's nothing else to really tell about that. Just get back to the drinking because that is what I really was, was an alcoholic and I had a hobby of being a marine pilot because a hobby is something you give about an hour a day to and that's what they were getting and the rest of the time was spent recovering from the night before and getting ready for the next night and covering up lies and keeping notes okay I did this and all of the things that it takes to be a practicing alcoholic and the action in the disease of alcoholism occurs on the inside. This is where all the action's going on and our little careers and our Little Endeavors that we have going on, whatever they are, U.S. Senator, housewife, writer, laborer, whatever those things are, that's sort of the background music to the disease or alcoholism. The action's goin' on inside here where all of the fears are building up and the resentment and the distortion of the reality and the inability to ask for help and this fighting, this battle all alone and hiding in there and pretending that nothing's wrong and just fighting this struggle and knowing we're going to lose and pretending we're not going to loose. God, what a rat race that was. It's all taking place inside and we can't share it with a soul. Terrified to share it with a single person or with a whole lest anyone find out that there's a chink in the armor and they could penetrate and go inside. As the years went along, I can remember I would never look anyone in the eyes. I had heard that the eyes are the mirror to the soul and that someone might be able to see right in there and I was just so afraid that it could happen in a strange city. I might be walking down the street and just happen to make eye contact with the wrong guy and he would look right in and he'd go, arrest that man, there's no one inside. there's an empty shell walking around the streets of this city get him off we only allow real people here we don't want phonies we don'T want people who have nothing left inside but fear and terror we DON'T want that kind of person so i had to keep this a secret and always pretending that everything's all right i think pretending that everything's alright is one of the hardest parts of being an alcoholic. Pretending that you're fine when you've just thrown up to start the day and you come out and throw that mouthwash around in there and slosh around and go out and just attempt to keep track of what you're supposed to be doing and the confusion and the loss of the awareness part of the brain and all of those things that were taking place was a terrifying experience. As the years went on, I became a daily drinker. And I like to remember this process because I did not intellectually become a daily drinker, I didn't sit around the house one day and say, I think the end thing these days is vodka for breakfast before going down to the squadron. i didn't think that the way i became a daily drinker was because of the physical progression of the disease i can remember sitting around at my desk and it would be three o'clock in the afternoon and i had a lot of paperwork to do in the squadron i was looking at the clock knowing that at 4 30 i might venture over to the old club for some friendship possibly have a drink while i was there and go on home and my body started sending little messages up from the stomach just little things there were raw nerve endings down there there were strange little hot flashes that were accumulated and there was sort of a whole basic message that was coming up from all of the organs of the body to the brain and the message was we'd like to start drinking a little earlier today than the normal. And the brain would look around and make sure nobody heard that or was aware, because this was like a terrible, awful thought to come surfacing like that. And a brain was going, we can't get out of here at three o'clock. There's a bird colonel sitting over there. There's general just up the hall. What am I supposed to do? Get up and say, I'm going to go get a drink. We're staying here till 430. And the body would say, wrong. Take a look at your right arm. And I would glance down and there'd be a couple of spasms. I had never really experienced that. And there was sort of a, you know, like I was being a hostage in my own body. And it was this threatening message like, that's just a warning. That is just a hint of what's going to happen if we don't get booze down here. And you know this sort of developed over a period of time but there was these threats, these little innuendos that kept coming up and finally it got stronger and stronger and so I had to rationalize it I had to explain it I always did that when I was going to do something irrational that was the definition of rationalization was a socially acceptable explanation for socially unacceptable behavior you know and so I had to explain it so I explained it to myself I saw a guy who was on leave one day having a drink in the afternoon and I said geez I didn't know these guys drank during working hours here. And finally there came a day that I did leave maybe an hour early and lied about where I was going just so that I could get the drink in a little bit sooner and I had compromised on a position that I would never drink before 4.30 during working hour. I had just compromised that much and I felt awful about it but I knew it was a necessity. It was a physical necessity in order to continue at my job. And even then I had to pretend that it really wasn't happening. And the body was just quivering for the chemical. The nerve endings were that raw. And I was in the car driving over to the club, went up to the bar and the bartender comes walking up and he sees me every day, you know. And I said to him, don't wait on me, go ahead and wait on him. I'm not in a hurry, I'm just going to meet somebody here. and then I stood around and my body is going what the heck are you talking about to get into meeting somebody it was like the dog in the Alpo commercial you know Ed McMahon they don't feed that dog for about three days and then they hold that dog food up there and there's that shaking and a quivering and his eyes are like that that's what was going on and all of these nerves and organs in the body were just shaking because the eyes were telling it that the booze was right there. The eyes were sending the message down throughout the whole body. The vodka's only a foot and a half away and the news was spreading throughout the central nervous system. Our time is near and it was quivering and there was excitement and there Was anticipation and it Was just this and yet I had to pretend. Wait on him. I'm not in a hurry. I'm just going to meet somebody. Well, I guess he's going to be late so go ahead and give me a triple vodka martini on the rocks and let me have it. And I got the glass in both hands and looked around and I was always terrified that people were watching my every move and picked the glass up and got about three big swallows of that vodka and carefully put the glass back down and stood back away from the bar and waited because I knew what was going to happen. and it happened every time. It was just a matter of seconds before that vodka raced down into those legs. And those muscles that had been spasming all night, it was like a massage. It was like solid muscles again. And suddenly I felt like I was standing there on firm foundations, standing in front of the bar, looking in the mirror, watching the whole recreation of a healthy human being taking place right before my eyes. and it came up into the stomach which had been on fire since early morning just vomiting dry heaves and it was just like awful and it cam up in there like a cool foam and moved across the stomach and just went and I went oh god oh does that feel good oh stomach is at peace and then like lightning it raced out the arm down to the fingertips and they just became steady as a rock and at that moment I would light a match to have my cigarette in case anybody was watching and thought I trembled a little when I picked up the glass and I looked around lighting the cigarette to make sure everyone saw I didn't have any trembling in those hands they felt just as solid I could write my name again and then last but not least the vodka swirled around for a second, building up momentum and then raced into the brain. And that brain had been so terrified and addled and confused and frightened and all of the horrible feelings. And it just came sweeping across my head like this and it just went, peace! And I stood there. And I just stood there looking in the mirror and going, what was I so worried about when I came in here? I must have a tough job. I must Have a pressure job like you hear about. This must be up. Isn't it wonderful that a guy with as many problems as I am has a friend like alcohol? Isn't It wonderful? What would life be like without it? Can you imagine going through the world feeling like I did when I came in here without alcohol to calm me down and to give me that wonderful peace that I so richly deserve? Anyone who put in a day like I Did deserves a drink. Little did I know that the drinking was causing the day that I had just put in, and that alcohol for me was like insurance in reverse. If there's any insurance salesman, I propose that there is such a thing as reverse insurance where you work very hard for some money and you take a certain amount and you walk into a liquor store and you hand over $3.62 to a man for an absolute guarantee that your tomorrow will stink. And that's the funny part. You know, the practicing alcoholic says he's drinking because of his uncertain future. He's the only one whose future is certain. It's going to be rotten. There's no doubt. There's not a possibility it could be rotten or could be good. It's gonna be rotten! Practicing alcohol, you just have to say, How's today? He says, Bad. Tomorrow's gonna get worse. That's your future. And it's a guarantee. I feel fortunate that my body gave out as I got into daily drinking and was overseas and so on and so forth. and I feel very happy that my body gave out before my brain went all the way. There's obviously been, you know, something happened up there. And I ended up in a nut ward. And then this happened, I won't go through how it happened, but it was a convulsion. Seizures, whatever you call those things. I was attending a career school at Quantico, Virginia to become the next commandant of the Marine Corps. And I had gotten ready for that school by not eating for a year. And I Had malnutrition. I'd been drinking daily for about a year and just shook and got lost going to school. Got lost. Couldn't find my locker and could never find my seat in the room. It was just an awful month. And one day my body stood up as if to ask a question in class. and just convulsed, and a seizure. And those things are difficult to have on the QT and just pretend, oh, I'm just fooling around over here. Nothing serious, don't worry. That's when it becomes difficult for the enablers, as we call them to continue enabling us when we're lying there with our tongue biting you know and they're going what is that? And the stretcher comes in and they go out and I can remember hearing from friends of mine who were totally honest with me the guys in the room went what's that guy's serial number? And they were figuring whether they moved up a notch or not, you know. That really was a dog-eat-dog world. there's many bird colonels in the United States Marine Corps that never would have made it without me I made them look so good by comparison that they had to get promoted along the way and they owe me a great bit of gratitude and someday I may get it from them but I ended up in the hospital in U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda and then went promptly went into the DPs which explain the convulsions and I went I don't remember much of this but I was out for a week or something and needles going in and in a bed and I woke up and I was in a bedroom with sides on it like a crib and very confused and looking around and hurting and someone had wet the bed that I was in lying in which which by the way is something I have not done since I've been in AA is wet the bed that's funny how we boy that's hard to explain when you're 30 years old try laughing that over and turn the mattress over damn cat oh hell you gotta stop laughing I'm never gonna get through here oh wow and this wasn't funny at all I just got there telling you I'm lying in this bed oh wow anyway it was an awful period of time physically and mentally but I was introduced to AA and a corpsman marched us down to an AA meeting and I sat there resenting it greatly I hated it just the idea that these men were strangers knew that I had a problem you know I was worried about my image and after the meeting I went up and talked to the leader little red-headed fellow from Bethesda, Maryland told him what a marvelous program I thought he had typical snob I was still trying to be a snob I'm locked up in the mental institution. And so this is, I've evaluated what you have to say. I think it's fantastic. If I run into a guy with a drinking problem, I'm going to send him around to see you. That was the first thing. And I can remember what he said. He poked me a couple times in the chest and he said, let me ask you a question, buddy. Which one of us is going to put his overcoat on tonight and go out and get in his car and drive on home to his family like a regular person? And which one of US is going put his little blue bathrobe on and go in the elevator and go upstairs and get locked up like an animal. Now, which one are you? And I resented that man for a long time. I resent him in the elevators, upstairs, hanging around, group therapy, clay class, everywhere. I resanted that guy. And the reason I did was because he had told me the truth. I didn't like the truth That's one of those weapons that you just don't use on people unless you don't like them. Tell someone the truth like that right when you first meet them. But there came a time when I was very grateful that I had been forced into that particular AA meeting because four or five months after I was released from the hospital and I did drink again for three days and in that three days I got right back in the same kind of condition I was in when I would admit it only took just a matter of a day to get right back into shaking and drinking around the clock and being afraid and so on down. And I knew I had to go back as an outpatient up to this mental institution on Monday and so I called over the weekend and dialed in a group and said, help, help, I need help please. And they sent a huge man over to see me. A big Marine. And he filled the doorway of my house. I can remember that. And he came in and he said, hi, my name is Bill. Now this is a 12-step call. I talk, you listen. there was that immediate relationship was established and it still exists his proposition was okay I see you have a drink in your hand pour it down the sink and I said yeah but I gotta pour it down the sinks then he said give it to me I'll pour it on the sink boom and they went down the sink and i'm going this is a strange relationship we have here there's a uh i'm losing control of the situation right in my house and uh they said okay i'm gonna stay here and watch you so you don't drink until eight o'clock tonight and then we're going to go to meeting he stayed and talked and then he got my wife in she was telling all this stuff about how I drank in the morning and was a patient and it was awful. So he took me to a meeting and I was at my first meeting sober. I'd been sober about six hours. You ever been in a meeting sober six hours and your body is just screaming for a drink and the meeting was a group anniversary that lasted until about midnight, dancing, ham, turkey, everybody, more ham, more turkey and I'm going, get out of here. I'm gonna throw up on you. You get away from me with that. Ham and turkey. But my sobriety had just started and I didn't know it. I was calculating when I was going to get my next drink and I haven't had it. For some unknown reason, when I got home that night, that man said to me, okay, you don't drink. I'll pick you up tomorrow night at 8 o'clock. Goodbye. And he drove off. Now, I was just going to explain to him what a busy social schedule I had and all those things. and I was terrified to not drink and I Was terrified what would happen if he came around and smelled booze on my breath. I just You've got to see him I'm going to start carrying a picture about as big as this book so that I can slide so I can flash it on And then I'll say see why I stayed sober I stayed over for a month out of fear of sponsor just And he just had me there. And as time went along, I sat at meetings and I knew I didn't belong there. I was just there temporarily. I was there until I figured out what was wrong because a grown man and a real man figures out his own problems and never asks for help. And some of you may have heard that if I can get the Walt Disney Studios we're going to put together a little comedy routine and it's going to show the death of an alcoholic like the death OF a salesman only this one is going to be done in a toilet bowl, eight feet in diameter. And we'll have the appropriate music and we'll let the guy walk around oozing self-pity for about 20, 30 seconds in front of the camera. Then he makes a speech to the world and gets up on the toilet, takes his last drink of vodka, jumps in, pulls the chain. It sounds like Niagara Falls going there. Pulls the lid down and just as he's going down under, he says, at least I didn't chicken out and ask for help. Vroom! And goes out. And that's the end. And that's our alcoholic. That's the personality that I remember. We're an alcoholic lying flat on his back in the street, feel superior to the people looking down at him because it is secret potential that we have inside. The potential that was hidden and that we've never unleashed on the world. That wonderful potential we all had that we're just going to unload someday. We're going to get up and show all those people that have been spitting on us and kicking us and turning us into losers. One of these days we're going to do it, but today we're not going to doing it because we need a drink. That's the type of attitude that I brought to Haye and I sat out there knowing you had nothing to give me, knowing that I would just buy some time and eventually I would have to figure this out myself. But in spite of that attitude, just sitting at meeting after meeting, in spite OF this defense that was in front of me, I began to have some hope that what you had, I could get. And I started really relating to the people who had what this 12-step refers to as the joy of living. Geez, they kept showing up with that laugh and that smile and they're going, I had a hell of a day today, but I got through it. Man, that's all that counts. Your attitude towards the day. And I'm going, are you kidding? What do you mean that's All That Counts? And they were consistent. I would see them week after week and they had that sparkle in their eye and that feeling. and there was just no way to deny what was going on in those rooms. It went on night after night and I started to be a part of it. I didn't want to be a part if it, I didn' t plan to be a part f it but it started getting me and I was coming there and I dared to hope that this could happen to me. You know, it takes a lot of courage to even hope for something good to happen to you when you're an alcoholic because you've had your hopes dashed so many times. Failures become part of our life. We adopt the philosophy of the born loser. I'm never going to win, so why try? I was born under some bad signs. Yeah, born under Some Bad Signs. Vodka label. And it's a great negative outlook on life, you know, going down. Well, that's well-deserved. It's proper. The facts support a negative outlook. But somehow at these meetings, that attitude was being changed. And the big thing in the beginning that was changing it was not drinking. Not drinking. More time of sobriety. More proof that I could make it through another day without a drink. More days going by. And eventually, I started wanting what the people had and I heard about the steps. And I knew that that was all the people that I wanted to be like always talked about the step. They were the ones. They always attributed. They said, What I got, this joy of living, all of these real good feelings inside came from the steps. And I said, that's what I've got to go after. And I went and got the books and I started reading about the steps and then I saw in there it said, all you have to do is totally get rid of all of your old ideas and turn your life over to God. And I thought, oh, we have a problem. We have a serious problem in my case. And I got my sponsor in there, and I said, hey, we've got a problem here. Let's turn the life over to God. He said, you know who God is? And I started telling him, you don't know, purgatory, 257,000 years minimum, as I figured it now. He's been waiting for me for years. I've been running, hiding, trying to get, but he's everywhere. He knows everything. There's nothing I can do. You want me to turn my life over? I turned my life away from him, and he said, wait a minute. We're going to get a miracle out of you on this third step. A miracle is going to take place in your life. Forget about your childhood interpretation of God. You're a grown man now. We're going to learn about a new higher power. We're gonna learn about the power of God We're not gonna learn about a loving God. You're gonna to learn about it through the results. You're going to feel what God is like. You're going to feel his presence in the changes in your life. All you have to do is begin this step and we're going to have a miracle take place. I said, all right, what am I going to do? Why don't we have you turn your life over to whatever will take it. All right. We won't worry about the definition or having a picture or his biography or anything like that. You just turn it over to whoever will take it, and then we'll have the miracle. Now I'm going, well, the miracle, he kept talking about the miracle of the third step, And I said, well, what's the miracle? He said, the miracle, Sandy, is that if you turn your life over, we will remove the management of your life from the hands of an idiot. And I can remember I felt like I'd been had. I felt Like God. What a joke. What a thing. And it was almost with that proper snob disdain that I threw the mess in at some group out in Manassas, Virginia. Did you guys want to run this mess? Go ahead. I'll watch. But I'm going to be critical. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to stand here watching every day. And I've been standing back most every day watching. And, you know, I really appreciate the job you all have been doing. And I thank you very much. It's incredible what happens when I stop being in charge. I get in there every so often just to see what it's like. Oh, boy. That brings back the memories of how awful it was. But that step was marvelous. That did offer a wonderful beginning. And the second part was getting rid of old ideas. Old ideas. You know, and I couldn't believe, how could I part with my ideas? And if you're new, I'm sure you're saying, what do you mean, part with My Ideas? I thought up all these ideas. This is the real me. I have, these are my values. This is my whole thing. You want me to get rid of all that? Right. That's all we want is for you to get red of it all. All. The whole package. Start all over again. There was an analogy portrayed one time of a flower growing out of a flour pot. And I talked to my sponsor about it and I said, oh, I get it. the analogy would be that we yank the flower out by its roots and then we take it over to the fertile AA soil and we replant the flower and it blossoms and lives happily ever after. And he said, wrong, wrong. We yanked the flower out by its root and tear it all up and throw it in the garbage can and then we grow a new flower up out of the dirt. I said, that deep we got to pull out old ideas he said that deep oh that's gonna take a while he said yeah we got a lot of steps to help you we got steps about inventories we got stuff about interpersonal relations we got theft it'll get you in there so you can find out what all those old ideas are so that you can get your together and put it in a bag and we can throw it away all at once and uh that's the way i look at it now what a relief i think that's a big release in the program it's almost like you're out there with 50 pounds stone on your back and that's the old ideas and you're in the sea of alcoholism and aa throws out their life preserver and you grab it and we start pulling you along in this ship of the journey of sobriety and we're saying drop the rock and you're going I don't want to drop the rock and we're going but you're barely staying afloat and you are saying I know and we are going drop the rock, I can't drop the rock, it's me, it is the real me, I cannot possibly, finally desperation, you are going under and you throw the rock away and it is like a water skier coming up on top and you just skimming along with the rest of the program, and you stand there going, wonder why I didn't drop the rock sooner? What do I want that rock for anyway? Well, what do I want that for? Why was I clinging to those ideas as if they came from God or somewhere? Well I guess we were our own gods so we might as well hang on to those old ideas. The last step I want to touch on before I sit down is the one I'm plugging this year, and it's the one that'll end our isolation from God. I consider this the most selfish step for me in the program, and that's step eight. Little old step eight. Hardly ever gets plugged anywhere. Thought I'd plug it down here before I sat down. Made a list of all the people we'd harmed and became willing to make amends. I wantto make a plug for the list. I'm not to becoming willing, I just want to throw a plug out for the list. I think that has given me as much insight into myself. It's been an exciting trip. The discussion in the 12 and 12 is the most exciting reading about how we can go back over interpersonal relations. I think us alcoholics, if we have one problem, it's other people. Wow, is that a problem for me? Is that a problema for me That is probably my main problem now that alcohol has been removed. Other people. How am I going to get along with other people? And the funny thing is, that could be the obstacle to really getting close to God. I think that's sort of an avenue that Bill W. talked about in ending our isolation from God. So I'll throw a plug out for that step. And if a last little word for someone new, this is what I think happens at these wonderful conventions and meetings and everything throughout the country is that there comes a day, and it may happen this weekend, where you suddenly realize deep down inside your heart that you personally have finished that long, lonely journey of alcoholism all the way down and you're going the other way. When that day happens, it's impossible not to smile. When you know just inside from your very soul that you're all through going down and you're going the other way, you can't stop smiling. You may look and say, wow, it's a long way back up, but you know you're going in the opposite direction. You're going the Other Way, and you want to run down the street just telling people, hey, I'm going the Another Way. I'm Going the Other way. That is one of the greatest feelings in the world. And the second greatest feeling in AA is you took the trip down all by yourself, but you will never be alone again we go back up together we learn what a beautiful feeling it is to put our hands out and tell somebody i just went through that spot myself louise took me through a spot this morning that's what i'm talking about when we listen and we share and there's someone out there and you get that feeling oh he went through it she went through I can do it I'll go talk to him after and you grab a hand and this is how sharing works and this ist how God wanted it to work so if you're new just let it work and we'll all be sitting out there someday looking at that smile on your face looking at that sparkle just radiating out of your eyes and we will know that it worked again thank you Thank you.