Step 4 and the Depressive Type Who Felt He Got a Raw Deal – John K.

Hi folks, my name is John Keith and I'm an alcoholic. I'm from the Chino Outside group and I heard that I'm missing a good speaker tonight that Red was supposed to get up here and do his thing I wanted, I read, I went through trouble putting this tie on. And, you know, I never did, I went to parochial school as a little guy and I never learned how to tie a tie. I think I got a mental block against it. My mom used to buy those ties that were just a piece of elastic with a tie on the end of it. And, geez, I'd be getting busy with both my hands on the drinking fountain or a basketball and some kid would run by and grab the tie and run off 50 feet and let it go. I think, uh, I think I got a damn melon block. Anyway, I always go into the store and say, I'll buy that tie if you tie it. And so the guy ties it. So I have to be real careful when and take this turkey off that uh oh i had to go buy another time anyway they say that's the only uh three things you need to be an a speaker that's to wear a tie um to be from out of town and uh to be asked and i think that's most important because i have a tendency to be in a speaker when i'm not asked and uh that's probably why they never follow me in those participation meetings anymore yeah get drunk on the sound of my own voice i um i feel real uh i feel real good this is sort of like a home group to me this uh lakewood has treated me so fine i've been down here a couple times and it seems like i know everybody and And I was telling Ruthie, I had the honor of being able to speak down in Atlanta, Georgia. And that was, I was on pins and needles all the time down there. My talk was supposed to go up Saturday. And I kept sounding everybody. I tried to figure out what these Georgia AA people were like, you know. And I thought, I told my wife, I said, better not say anything about being a catholic because these people are all baptists you know and uh i said i'm not gonna say anything about drugs because these people were all moonshiners you know and you know uh that wasn't the fact i found more dope head catholics down there in atlanta it was really amazing but you know those people i had had You know, I always drew my conclusions from twice in the South I had bad things happen to me. I went to jail once in New Orleans for being drunk and disorderly, and that was a bum rap if there ever was one. I've been drinking, but I don't think I'm disorderly. And of course we got in a fight in a cat house. That might have had something to do with it. and then i had a sheriff knock me forward with one of those dream sticks and so i wasn't too uh excited about going down south again you know well you know it's funny when you're sober how things change and those people treated me like the king geez they rolled out the red carpet and what was uh what was the uh my qualifications um my qualifications i've been a failure at life and um but i was an alcoholic and i did this program and uh i come home to my family no matter if it's deep in the heart of dixie or um in lakewood i'm with family anyway i better get it going uh i've told my story lots of times and uh my wife used to go with me all the time and she finally pooped out she She, I says, you want to go with me tonight? And she did something like that. I think she was going to watch Bowling for Dollars or something exciting on TV. So anyway, that's her problem. But I was born to an Irish Catholic family, and that don't make you an alcoholic. My grandfather was a daily drinker. He was born in Ireland, Cork, Ireland, and my dad was born of Colorado. I was raised in Southern California, East Los Angeles, down on 3rd and Rowan. I mean, 3rd Rowan is where I went to church, Lady of Lourdes, and I lived there first in Rowan, but the family was breakers. My wife comes from a family who never drank. I met her dad and I'd take a couple of snorts on Christmas Eve, but our family had to booze out on the sink always. There was always a bottle on theink, and people were always drinking it and putting more bottles on the sink. And I've seen a lot of, as a kid, I don't know if this affects people or not, but I've see a lot violence connected with booze. We had, like on Christmas Eve, it got to where we called that Stomp the Christmas Tree Night. And we had another day, it was Mother's Day, you know. That was good for a real pure sick sprawl. And then funeral. Man, I've seen some ass-kicking contests on Jimmys. But I guess we were just a sentimental bunch. You know, I remember too as a little kid my mom and dad would be going at it and then all of a sudden we'd get woke up 3 or 4 in the morning and we'd come out into the living room My dad would say, are you gonna stay here or are you going to go with me? And Jesus' kids would all start screaming and everything. But you know what? My folks were good people. And I love my old man. And I loved my mom. She's still alive. I drank that stuff and they drank that stuff and I was different. I'm the only one in AA. They're still out there having their fun. And you know, if I'd had two more weeks of fun it would have killed me. I just couldn't handle it anymore. When I drink, I'm the depressive type. I found myself in the 12 and falls right there. When you're starting to get up to step four and you're reading in there, you read about the depresive type. That was me. I was a crybaby. Everything that blew me, I've gotten a raw deal. I've been shortchanged in a life that dealt me a losing hand. know if that's body chemistry or what, but that's the way I felt. I always was on the outside looking in. You know, the rest of the family wasn't that way. My mom's in her 70s and she still likes her snorts. IW Harper is her favorite. And if you've ever been around Chino or Pomona and had an old lady in her 70s give you the finger from the car, that with my mom. You know, when she drinks, she gets aggressive. I know. I've been drinking with her. When I was a young man, she and my older brother would go into a bar with us. And I wanted to sit in there and review all these bad things that had been happening to me. And she tapped me on the shoulder and said, take care of that SOB down at the end of the bar. I looked down there, there'd be a 300-pounder lurking there, you know, tattoos on his eyelids. I said, what did he do? She said, I don't like the way he looks. And you know what, when their fists start flying, no one's going to punch an old lady. And I learned real quick never to go into bars with my mom my brother never did learn anyway that was our family i was around booze and booze was to drink and um my dad when he drank would whistle and sing and us kids would run to him we'd put our hands in his pocket we'd get money out of his pocket when we heard my dad whistling we'd run to them and roll him and uh it was usually like on a saturday afternoon and he was happy-go-lucky and uh so uh but then come sunday morning he didn't drink sunday he got ready to go to mass and sunday mornin he was dangerous we stayed as far away from him as we could and he had a really quick temper hungover like he was and one particular sunday i was to make my first holy communion and so on that particular Sunday on the way to church I had a white suit and tie. I've seen pictures of myself and all I can remember, I can't remember the white suit in time but I could remember that I reached down alongside the seat and I found a peanut and I ate it you know just uh chomped it down and then I got to think it because I had studied that catechism hey wait a minute I'm not supposed to eat nothing from midnight on I'm supposed to fast and so I should have told somebody about it but I wasn't about to tell my dad he had been planning on this for a long time and I didn't tell anybody about it I went ahead down the aisle and I received the sacrament well you know what folks some of you know the rules I had committed a mortal sin and according to the catechism mortal sins were murder, rape and adultery and I wasn't even six years old yet and I'd already hit the big time. I didn't even know how to do those things, but you know what I'm trying to tell you, I had a hell of a lot of guilt. I was a guilty person and you know, I never told anybody about that peanut until I got to AA. I finally found somebody I could trust and so anyway, when I told you about the peanut, you folks told me about eating hot dogs on friday you know and having dirty thoughts and um that kind of stuff so you know it wasn't so bad i think eating hotdogs is worse than eating peanuts anyway that's what i was stuck with my wife says why do you remember that crap but that's why i'm in a i can remember it and so i carried this guilt around and i was a guilty person and um so i had a hell of a time with living i just never did grow up i remained a small child i tried to become a man i um my dad started dying when i was 14. i went from uh fourth grade school into public school and he wasn't there he was so sick with leukemia he couldn't lean on me anymore and the nuns weren't there anymore because i was in public school and i just took off i never out too small to be a football player and not smart enough to be a scholar so i majored in being a jackass i just went into i just screwed up didn't do a damn thing about my schooling and i guess i'd do anything for attention i didn't know that i tried to be fired up and i felt like a outsider as usual i was always on the outside looking in everything seemed to be going on and i seem to be a spectator watching and uh so anyway um by the 10th grade i'm plunking real bad by 11th grade i'm not passing anything and he died and i went to see have become merchant seaman i had an old brother that was a merchant semen and so i went down to galveston with him and i caught a tanker i never rode anything off the tankers and i was five foot two weighed a little over 100 pounds and I looked around, and I guess I wanted to grow up. I wanted be like the big guys, and the big guy drank. And they drank, and they really drank. Those guys really drink fast. They don't sip their drinks. I noticed that about merchant seamen. They're what's called gophers. And you have to. You're primed that way. the tanker comes in the port it's not like a freighter tanker come to the port i was in one port down in venezuela that that empty tanker was loaded in six hours it almost looked like it was sinking and uh the oil was coming out of the hill you know gravity flowing man that thing went down in the water quick and uh so six hours and you got 45 men on that and a certain few guys have got to stay on watch for four hours so that might mean he only had two hours and uh to really get sloshed you really got to go at a tooth and tongue and uh of course these guys had a hell of a thirst too you know they'd be tripping over their tongues going down the gangway and they come back usually on their hands and knees their pockets turned inside out and badly beat up sometimes and sometimes you had to visit the first or three days out to sea and um that's when you knew you had a good time you really knew you'd had fun so and then i got introduced to dress on the ship size um i run around with those dope heads and uh down in panama we could buy a whole sea bag full of wheat for 10 bucks good stuff really good week and uh i brought home some one time almonia i went in the garage and i smoked one joint and i laughed for six hours my mom got a little concerned she couldn't figure out what was so damn funny in the garage anyway uh i smoked a lot of that i was on one ship uh an old union oil tanker we called it the marijuana maroon everybody on the ship smoke weed even the skipper We would miss our porch by 200 miles, eh? No one even give a damn. But you know, I... You can see that baby out to sea by this trail of green smoke. So I smoked a lot of weed and I was sort of lazy. In fact, my last drunk when I was in the Ontario jail, the winos had to roll my smoke for me. I never learned how to roll. uh i didn't know how to roll a joint you know i rolled joints that looked like tootsie pops i just grabbed a handful of charge typos edge you know it looked like a tamale and once one end burned out the charges fall out on the floor and uh you don't look too cool with a pretty zigzag paper hanging out i ate a lot of pills in fact i took anything anybody offered me and they said hey this this would make us high and i run around with guys that that's all we worried about was getting high that's our whole thing in life our whole primary purpose was to get high and um i tried everything the hashish over there in saudi arabia and anything that we thought would make it highly tried and i ate a lot of pills i ate those damn whites My wife falls on diet pills, some people fall on amphetamines. And I didn't like that feeling. I heard a speaker say one time that taking whites is like going 90 miles an hour with their shoes nailed to the floor. And then I had...I always thought I was a little dingy anyhow and a lot of times if I got sprung out them real bad if I was on them for quite a while people would call out my name, I'd hear my name being called And I'd turn around real quick, and there would be nothing behind me except a small lamppost or something. And that kind of stuff sort of worried me. Anyway, you know, what I finally settled on was booze and heavy drugs. I had about three years of heavy drugs, shoving a needle in my arm, tying my belt around mine. I had one of those belts with all the teeth marks in the end. And so I had About Three Years of That Real Hell. And I had to steal, and I wasn't a good thief. I'm an underachiever at everything. I didn't finish high school, and I started at the bottom and I worked down. I never accomplished a damn thing. One thing I learned how to do was fire boilers. And, you know, when you get out around Pomona, there's not a big demand for people firing boilers I live in Chino now, and there's no demand for People Firing Boilers. But anyway, this is the thing I learned how to do. And so I finally run out of ships. The Union made sure I ran out of ship. I had a bad habit of stealing stuff off of the ship. I would have sold the anchor if I could have found somebody to buy it from. And I was the same way with even my family. I sold for my family My mom, I could see a look of terror in her eyes when I'd show up. I'd be strung out and I'd running with that stuff. stuff and i'd be running out of ideas and running out of money and i show up at her place and man i mean the minute she seen me i i finally grew it up in height but emotionally i'd gotten smaller but uh she knew i was going to be there to either borrow money or to rip off something while she wasn't looking and i'm not proud of it but that's the way it was i stole anything that i get my hands on then i wasn't a real hyperpowered thief i never did pull off any big scores I never even snatched a purse. I always had a fear that if I grabbed an old lady's purse, she might catch up with me and beat the hell out of me. So anyway, I ran out of ships and run out of money, and I had a terrible fear of going to jail. And I quit drugs, and it wasn't a noble thing on my part. All of that stuff was killing me. The funny thing about it, I wasn't getting high anymore. I'd wake up in the morning, and they called it going on the nod. and a cigarette had burned all the way through my fingers and I hadn't even felt it. Now that's exciting living, you know. You try having someone lay a cigarette on you and you'll jump out of your shorts. But I wasn't even feeling it when I was using that stuff. So I got in a real bad accident. I went on the Nod and I hit a truckload of tuna coming off of Turtle Island. I was trying to make it to a ship and that truckload of tuna was trying to get off the island, and I stopped him. I knocked tuna all the way to Long Beach. And it took them about five hours to put me back together again. But anyway, I was no longer going to sea, and I got married. And I always figured that I just stayed on the beach too long, you know. But anyway this poor girl married me. She knew I was using. And so we've been married about six years, and that girl went through probably the most miserable she tried to change me i couldn't change and uh there was no changing me no fixing me whatever was wrong with me i hadn't found the experts yet you know they say when your watch breaks take it to a watchmaker don't take it go carpenter and i kept taking my broken watch to the wrong people and you know what when i got here i found the watchmakers these were the experts thank god for you people you know that you were waiting for some yo-yo like me to happen to come upon you but anyway i had five years of fun drinking um i quit using drugs and my family was overjoyed they said john's returned to normal because i wasn't stealing from him anymore so i started my normal drinking and uh i drank for sleep you get real bad insomnia from that stuff i drank for sleep i take reds i like to i like the peanut barbato mix with whiskey i didn't know that i wasn't really asleep i just shut my head off you know i go down to skid row once a month now with a bunch of us we go down there and you know I've seen men that have shut their head off and shut their head up and shut their hair off until finally it stayed shut off and uh i was trying to do that i know i was but i didn t know i thought i was having fun you know. I got caught up into all that romanticizing and stuff i run around with guys that romanticize the chest beaters john wayne type beat someone's face football make love to all those women drink all that whiskey we wasn't doing it but we was talking like we was going to do it if we could ever get off the floor we was gonna do it i went through all that war stories and everything with those guys and um we was always going to do great things but mostly we just ended up getting drunk and maybe you might slap your wife around i the last two years i couldn't uh the whiskey was bouncing on me and um even when i used drugs as a great one for barfing and now with the booze i drink an sr mashed whiskey and i take one drink in the morning and swallow the same thing 20 times and i think that i'd have it down and some damn car would backfire or someone would slam a door and here they come and uh but i start all over again i was very patient you know but eventually i um i got the word you know when they read the chapter five here tonight and they said that the abc's i love the abcs the abccs it just it just spells it out for me the three pertinent ideas and a says that i'm alcoholic and i cannot manage my own life and b says that probably no human power could relieve my alcoholism well i started that going to human powers to relieve my alcohol i started going to doctors and um one doctor gave me an abuse i drank on top of that and about killed myself i'm sure and uh i went to one doctor over there chino used to give me b1 used to break out a hypodermic needle looked like a bicycle pump and he pumped B1 into me and the minute he pulled the needle out I could taste that cod liver oil on the end of my tongue and he pumps a damn bunch of that stuff in me cats start following me around one other thing, the B1 that wasn't doing anything for me but he gave me a prescription for nervousness And, you know, folks, every time I quit drinking, I got nervous. And so this little bottle was phenobarbital. And I'd take those damn things until I'd get so goofy that I'd drink again. And I hated that gooey. You know, I'd stand in a corner and cry when I was eating those things. And I would go back to drinking, you now, go back through the fun. So anyway, I had a couple years of, and I had couple years, the stuff finally got me in here. I learned on all the ships and the drugstore stuff too. charcoal and rocatussin. Paragoric, we used to get paragoric on the ships. It's gum opium and alcohol solution. And it's a nifty high, that stuff is, but man, you'll be constipated for 10 years. You know, turpentine hydrate too, elixir of turpentite hydrate. And that's what I come in to aim. I drink a turpentate hydrate and sweet wine. And by this time now I wasn't moving around much anymore. I'd become sort of comatose. I had a tendency to lay down a lot. And I have a brother that says that, a brother-in-law that said that I picked a fight while I was laying on my back. So I must have thought that was the normal position to be in. But I had two years of sweet wine drinking and turpentine drinking. And that got me ready. That got me read. That proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of the fun was gone. You know, I was a great thrower-upper. And at one time, the whiskey bounced, and then pretty soon the sweet wine bounced. And you know, I talked to a guy that's like a sponsor until he was in his 70s, and he had told me about tequila cure back in the 30s and 40s. And this was a cure that you go into this hospital, and they say, what do you drink? And you said bourbon. And they give you bourbon until you start to gurgle. And then about the time you couldn't take another drink of bourbon, they give you a shot of morphine sulfate in the chest. And you throw all that up. And then as soon as you got through throwing all that up, you start drinking bourbon again. And then a shot, and then you threw it up. And that's the way it went. That was the cure. I was practicing that five years before I got to AA and I didn't know it was a cure. And you know, it's a funny thing about every one of us here. If we went through that cure, you know what we'd do when we walked out of that place? we would have to test to see if that cure really worked and we'd take a drink and there starts the whole ball game again because this is one thing for sure that none of us have to argue about, is that when we take that first drink, we're on our way you know, that's the that's back down into the pits again, I know that to be sure anyway, the sweet wine got me ready and I got to where The one doctor, the guy that had given me the anti-abuse, he told my wife, he said, John's messed up his liver. And so in 1956, in October, I checked into a hospital there in Pomona. And I was not feeling well. I had my mom on one side and my wife on the other, and I could hardly walk. I weighed about 270 pounds. I had turned into the color of the stuff I'd drink, and I was purple. You know, I'm the best color I've ever been right now. And, but I was purple and I had these yellow eyeballs. And I went into that hospital and I, like I say, I could not hold anything on my stomach. I got death zone reason I went in that hospital. I couldn't even hold that damn sweet wine on my stomach anymore. And so his cure was spiring a tranquilizer. I couldn'T hold it on my tummy. He wouldn'T give me anything with a needle because I've been honest with him about me being a drug user. And so three days after I was in there, I had a water cooler going in my room, and I started hearing a football game, Minnesota-Michigan on that water cooler. Bill Stern was the announcer. Well, I listened for a while because I didn't have a radio. You know, I was going to have the DTs, and the first thing that started would be sound. And then, psych, pretty soon I had about midnight that night, I started getting visitors, people coming to my room with no heads. And I enjoyed the visits, but I wish they had brought their heads. I got panicky and I jumped up. I'd been carried in there, and three days later I still hadn't eaten, still hadn'T slept. And the only medication that was really there was putting cortisone in my eyes. My eyeballs looked like two pee holes in a snowbank. So I got up and started running. I got panic-y. I knew that I was going to be killed. And I just knew that. could hear this guy fought in my downfall he's going to slice me up and i ran and ran that night and um i went into this room this sounds almost like a script but it's the way it happened for me and i think my higher power figured out so flaky what he had to do take extreme measures for me to hear about a and uh even the doctor that was treating me said that i was too young he says uh told me later on he says i didn't tell you about a because i thought you were too young you know well let me tell you what i wasn't going to get much older i don't know when he's going to tell me about it but anyway um i ran into this room there's a guy laying on his back troop and every hole in his body and uh that was couldn't be my sponsor a guy named kenny hamilton north dakota wheat farmer uh drank up his farm had been in the in the family three generations and scotch-irish descent and um he drank it up and he stood there on the farm he's taught me and watched some auction at all out from my room they come out to california and he's working as a termite inspector and he was sober five years and he told me about hey i was so crazy that night though i ran in iran and they finally gave me some feraldehyde and i slept but you know one thing that happened when they come to see kenny He would send them over to see me. The AAs had been alerted, you know. They had a freshman. And they'd come into my room and they'd stare at me. And I just made their guilty, you Know. And they told me, they said, You've got a disease. And I thought they were trying to whitewash the thing. You know, I figured it was because I was a dirty rat. I had no character. I had low willpower. I didn't have the strength and the fortitude to beat this thing, you KNOW. and I left the hospital there in a week's time and there were people waiting there to take me to meetings and I took a prescription for nervousness and it was this tranquilizer and it's firing. I went to meetings, I didn't drink for six weeks. Even my mother-in-law started patting me on the back. She said we're so proud of you that you're not drinking and we're thinking you're doing a beautiful job. I didn' t know what I was doing. I went to those meetings. I sat in those chairs. The meeting could have lasted 10 hours. It wouldn't have bothered me any at all. I had all the peace of mind and serenity I could handle. I just sat there like a cigar store Indian, you know. I didn't want to go in any place. I had no worries about nothing. The future held no fear for me. And I said it before. If I landed on my nose, I wouldn't even bother to brush it off. Uh, my thinking was eventually he'll fly away or I'll outlive the son of a bitch. Anyway, I got drunk again six weeks later. I got around my father-in-law, a Welshman, and he handed me a half pint. And I said, bud, I'm not supposed to be drinking that stuff anymore. He said, don't be a sissy. Well, that rang a bell with me. But I always drank to be a he-man, so I took a slug. Six weeks later, I'm down again. I'm not drinking Old Casper's. I'm back on sweet wine again. I didn't get to go to a hospital this time. Six weeks, I was down, comatose again. And this time I went to 12th Step House. They took me to 12nd Step House, and I'm glad I went. The first one I went through was called the Harmony House. and they'd take an old house out in the middle of an orange grove that looked sort of like the Adams Mansion and they would put some all-the-way beds in there and they wait for customers. And these were AAs in there. They had brow to hide, they had all kinds of goodies, you know. And so I checked in there, they took my clothes, they gave me a bathrobe that didn't fit and it would have fit some guy half my size. So, anyway, I'm glad I went because I was in there with the world's greatest lovers. World's greatest fighters. There were guys in there cleaning out a bar single-handedly. Two or three of them won World War II for us. And there was a guy there that settled the West. Every one of us was in a bathrobe. And, you know, the thing that I, I was glad too, you know, because I started getting over that romanticizing that booth, you know, cause I used to get caught up in that crap. So the guy bogeyed down the beach, a couple of gals in bikinis and they're going to cook up some lobsters, you know? Let me be honest with you, I wasn't going to make it to the beach. I wasn' t going to make it out of the Harmony House. And I finally would leave there and I'd drink again. When I was there and they were watching me, I drank a little carbon hydrate because I didn't get too drunk and I know they kicked my ass out. So I would drink again and finally this time I go back with zero muncie and I was left home at 16, I'm back at 25, messed up really bad and she decided she's going to fix me. That's the way those Irish mamas are. She's make me well and uh because she's a drinker and they know how to do it you know and so she told my sisters i still had twin sisters at home she said to their boyfriends her uh their boy friends not to buy me anything not to lend me any money not to take me to the liquor store and not to be drinking around me but you know i was a sneaky person i could still walk to the drugstore and sign for turpentine and i could steal five bottles sweet wine and you And you know what? This big two-fisted drinker wasn't drinking much anymore. I'd drink a little bit of that red wine and I'd whimper. And I'd whimper and I drank a little Bit of Red Wine. And I find a place to lay down, you know. This stuff I was drinking was called Cuckamonga Pride. And a guy told me one time, he said, You know that crap you're drinking never seen a grape? He said, They squeeze the grape. We've got a lot of connoisseurs of fine wines out there where I live. And said they squeeze the grapes and on the first press they get the cognac, the brandies, whatever. And they keep on going down the line. And they finally make a press about the fourth time. And that's the skin, seeds, stems, leaves, and whatever else has fallen into it meanwhile. And then he said to get the alcohol content up, they zing it with ether. And to be honest with you folks, I never did drink for flavor. All you gotta do is drink one bottle of turpent hydrate to know that to be true. Turpentine hydrates taste like rotten oranges. And I drank for that ether because that ether used to put my problems to sleep, which was me. And, you know, I've become the problem around here. It was always moving me in the back bedroom. I still had twin sisters at home and my mom. I've begun the back bed room. One time my grandmother come to visit, and they never even told her I was there, you know. And I was just so drunk, I didn't say anything. I didn' tell Grandma I was There. I just laid in the back bedroom, hoped she wouldn't see me. And they didn't know what to do with me. They drank, they'd go to jail, they get hangovers. They get, when Richard was talking about drunk driving, I never have gotten a drunk driving in my life. 502. I used to get 504s. That's drunk driving without a vehicle. And I got a lot of them. Besides, they call it 23-102As now. But I was one of those laid-down drunks, horizontal. And I just wanted to whip her and tell everybody what a raw deal I got. I lost my wife and baby. That made it that much worse. So two things got me kicked out of there, and it was important that they did because they didn't realize that I had drank to be a man and not become a child. I was very dependent on my mom. mom and um i know that she could have killed me with kindness lucky that they knew that i was drunk they used to come and try to get me to go to meetings but i was too drunk i just laid there i wasn't drinking a lot but i always usually laying around someplace and so uh one night i committed suicide i begged my mom to put me in patton state hospital because i couldn't drink anymore but i kept drinking and she wouldn't do it she said you're not going to put the stigma on the keith name i guess i should have died you know that way uh you just bury your mistakes you know but uh you know so that uh that night i went took a razor blade and cut my wrist and not too deep you can get hurt really bad that way in fact by the time they found out i committed suicide the blood is dried it's sort of like a shaving cut anyway uh i made my point i wanted to get a drink but anyway they they got the poor family they They got the money together, and they took me to the psychiatrist for $50. I got drunk that morning. I was supposed to go see him. I always got drunk. And I wouldn't call it drunk anymore. I just said a comatose. But they got me on my feet, and I went to see the psychiatrist. And this is a funny thing. My mom says, I'll wait for you. And she says he's been paid. But she did tell me this guy had a real bad back somewhere in his history. And he had a choice of sitting down or standing up the rest of his life. And this guy chose standing up. I knocked on the door. He said, come on in. I walked in. This guy is sitting in a chair, if you want to call it that. The back of his head touched the chair. His feet touched the floor. No other part of his body touched. It was like a surfboard laying there. And I was screwed up anyhow. and he wanted me to talk about myself, and I wanted to talk about him. You know, as drunk as I got, I never could get that stiff. And I spent my whole $50 just staring at this guy, and I couldn't figure out how in the hell he was doing that. But anyway, he told me some things when I left. And I went out and my mom was waiting. She'd been shopping and she's waiting. She says, what did you say? And I said, well, he said that when he gets my thinking straightened out, I'll be able to drink like you. And she was mad as hell because she knew I couldn't drink. And I know I couldn'T drink. And she thought that maybe he had the solution, a $50 solution. Anyway, one thing I did ask the man as I left, I said, how long will that take? How long will it take for my thinking to get straightened out? Because I was so goddamn goofy I couldn't even remember my name at times. And he said, about two years. And you know what, folks? I didn't have two years left. I had about two weeks left. And I didn' t have no 50 bucks an hour. You know what I love about this program? It starts right now. The very day that I come in here and I got over the idea that I had any good ideas left and I surrendered to the idea that you people could fix me, then that program started to work for me. That very day, there was no two years, two months, two weeks, or two days. It was now. I love it. So anyhow, one more thing got me kicked out of there. I still was with my friend around and drinking that sweet wine and I guess today I've been talking to my mom and one night I heard an ultimatum in her voice. I knew that for sure. and she says tonight you're going to eat something you're gonna get well you're gonna go to work and I said I can't eat there's no way I can eat I know that I can't digest food and he said look at buddy I'm tired of you you know messing up our life so she dished up fifty pounds of macaroni and cheese on a plate and I was afraid not to eat because I knew I'd be kicked out so I started eating and eating and eating and eating. I was there for days, it seemed like, and she went to bed and went to sleep, and I was sick right away, but I wasn't about to start throwing up. The bathroom was right next to her bedroom. I used to keep her up at night throwing up, and she used to come in and say, what do you do this to yourself? And I didn't know. I didn't know why I did it. I guess I should have told her I didn't want to miss out on any of that fun, you know. But I wasn't about to throw up and get kicked out so i passed out on the couch and one of those sisters when we're just not talking after 20 over 20 some odd years uh we're really where we can talk and um anyway she came home with her date and as they hit the door it woke me up and i woke up sick i woke up super sick i knew i had to get to the restaurant super fast and my mom's got cork towel floors and i started moving towards the bathroom as quick as i could And I'll bet you I threw up 30 feet ahead of myself. And I hit that, and I lost my footing. And I had up some momentum. And I went by my sister and her date on my hands and knees throwing up. And she didn't even introduce me. You know, I went back too fast. No. And you know what? That guy never came and dated her again, either. We've never seen him again. But I guess she couldn't explain to the guy that that's how I always went to the bathroom. I had... I knew right away I was going to travel. I'm being kicked out. And so I got kicked out, and I drank for three more weeks. That's a story in itself. I moved in with a guy that was in his 40s and drank that sweet wine and bullshit most of it. About the tremendous things we're going to do tomorrow. We weren't going to be able to do anything tomorrow. We'd get sicker by the day. And I went to jail. I was stealing booze out of the store. I didn't get arrested for that. I got arrested for being drunk. And I was in jail. I went into jail in San Bernardino County. The judge told me not to drink in San Bernardo County anymore. I was going to do 180 days, so I went into one sandwich. I drank some more that day. When I got out of jail, I was in the jail over the weekend. It was on St. Patrick's Day that I went to jail. And I got up on the 19th and I drank about maybe a third of a fifth of whiskey, which I shouldn't have done. I couldn't handle whiskey, hardly worth a damn. But it was the only thing available. And so I knew I'd never quit drinking, but you know, I did. That was 1957 and March the 19th, and so I haven't drank since then. And so you'd wonder why a thirsty rat like me would quit drinking. well you know i uh surrendered to the idea that uh i just couldn't uh i lost the battle and i come to you people here and you know you put your arms around me not so dirty inside i felt like such a dirty rat and you knew i thought if these people ever knew how dirty i was inside they kicked me out but you know you did know how dirty I was inside and i had come to the home of the dirty rats and um you uh you brought me back and uh great things started to happen 270 pounds i got down to 180. i started working i started sleeping that's the most beautiful thing that happened a physical sobari i love it i can eat like a champ in fact i overdo it i'm overweight right now but i was looking at a scale the other day you know i'm the correct weight for six foot eight so i uh i like to figure that i'm just too short you know but i'm actually not overweight but um anyway i met my wife i was five years sober and i went to a sunday night meeting and i go to a meeting every night because i don't have any place else to go and i said i'd like to be with my family and um i went there and my wife walks into that sunday night meeting in ontario wearing a tight red sweater she's a beautiful mexican girl and the minute i seen her i had a spiritual awakening i uh i wanted what she hadn't was willing to go to any lengths together So we've been married 18 years, and she gave me a little girl. She had two boys. She gave me an old girl, and I didn't raise my other little girl, and so now I've got a family of my own. This little girl is 17, and I love her. She's a cantankerous little kid. She's amiss, what she is, but I love it. you know i love it and our family when we get together my wife and the boys the boys are as brown as i am red and then my daughter from previous marriage is a redhead and then my little daughter is a brunette with olive colored skin we've got every and when we walk into a restaurant it drives people crazy they try to figure out what the hell happened looks like the league of nations you know Well, you know, I get Father's Day cards from these boys, and I'm their daddy. And Little League, okay, and I love it. I told you about Atlanta. That's the most beautiful thing that's happened to me in a long time. But I've had sad things and good things, and I take them as they come, because that's what it's all about. I had a fellow who he hated my guts when he first met me and that's understandable he'd come into AA with a court card and here in June he before that about six months before that he's a young man and he had lung cancer and the veterans told him that it was they'd do everything they could but he wasn't going to make it and you know that guy went down so fast with that chemotherapy and become bald and he becomes so frail. He's just like a little boy. His arms are so small and thin, and he's a beautiful person. He has these beautiful eyes, and he got to wear... They had so much tools when I last went to see him that he couldn't talk, and I said, How you doing, Harry? And he'd hold his thumbs up like it's okay, and I thought, Jesus, what fantastic courage. You know, I always wanted to have... I wanted to be around courageous people. You know? I think this is why I love it about AA. They're so courageous, But he said, he told some people that he wanted to live to Father's Day. At Father's day he would have four years of sobriety. Now that meant more to him than anything else in the world. And his dad was a minister. But AA meant everything to him. And you know what he did? He lived and it had to be determination. It had to God's will. There was nothing left for the man. Just a piece of skin stretched over his bones. And he was in terrible shape, but he lived to Father's day. We went up to his room and we took a cake and we took a medallion that said four years. And you know what? When he seen that medallions, it was hard to believe, but his eyes twinkled. He couldn't talk anymore. And I would just, I don't know if I was trying to gain the courage that he had, but at least over him, I kissed him on his forehead, and I said, you'd probably wish that it was my wife doing this to you, Harry, but I tell you, I really love you. And he died the next day. But I was glad that I went up there and seen him having his four-year birthday. But it meant so much to him. He didn't want anybody to give his eulogy except AAs. And we had a drunken minister that was sober, just got out of jail. than me, and he had about four or five drunks that got up and said something from my heart about Harry. And that's what AA is about. This is our family. You know, we really don't need anybody. No human power can relieve our alcoholism. But when we come in amongst these people, we have the power. They give us the power to do it. I get to the ABCs. I almost forgot c c's the one i like to talk about c says god couldn't you would have thought well our grandfather used to say that god hung out at the catholic church and he probably does but you know i found him here and um you can believe uh that or not but i do and every time i come to an aa meeting he's here and i can feel it the tremendous power that's in this room a power that i can make it one more day i don't have to suck on a sweet wine bottle i don t have to work for anyone i can take my shots and act courageous even if they ain't um and i get it from you people uh it's really beautiful um i'm at a meeting every night yeah if i didn't if i wasn't here i would have been at the 39th meeting listening to john ackerman he's at pomona speaking tonight And last night I was at the Men's Tag. That's really a bunch of loonies. That is the biggest collection of brain-damaged lunatics I've ever seen. But I heard this down in Palm Springs, and I'm going to get out of here. It's not mine. This was a fine speaker from New York, and he was speaking there in Palm Spring. He said some beautiful things. And the thing that struck me is when he said that an AA meeting was a celebration, a celebration over life over death, a celebration of getting well after being sick. And I like that. I do believe that we're here tonight. We're celebrating. We're celebrity for the newcomers that are here, and we're celebrating that we'RE here, and we'RE sober. We're not drunk. We're NOT using. and we're celebrating that maybe we found our dad and that's a good feeling it doesn't have to be a big God even a little God will do but a fine one so anyway, we had cakes we had singing and I was glad that I was at your celebration tonight, thank you © transcript Emily Beynon