Step 4: Only Resentments Could Break Through the Fear – Father T.
About This Speaker Tape
Father T. came into AA convinced that Kafka had it right: there is infinite hope, but not for us. He was a seminary-trained, Camus-reading depressive who preferred a brain tumor diagnosis to alcoholism — at least with a brain tumor, he could still drink.
He grew up in a family where Swedish relatives were hospitalized for "nerves" and Irish relatives were called "characters" — nobody said the word alcoholic out loud. His own drinking started young, moved fast, and included years of blackout driving he still considers the scariest thing he ever did. When he finally got sober at 29 in Berkeley, he didn't glow. He was jagged, raw, and couldn't write a paragraph for four months. His Step 4 took 18 months because fear didn't motivate him — only fury did. He could only write resentments when he was angry enough, starting with a man at a meeting whose laugh he despised. He also pulls out a rarely-cited passage from page 292 of the Big Book where Dr. Bob's list of character defects — selfishness, conceit, jealousy, sarcasm, ill temper — hit closer to home than Bill's standard inventory categories ever had.
The AA content here is practical and specific: the difference between identifying at meetings and being in fit spiritual condition, why drinking dreams mean you're not going to drink, how each year of sobriety buys you one extra second of response time before you say something you'll regret, and why Steps 6 and 7 are the slow, ongoing work — not a one-time event.
For the person who's been sober long enough to know the steps by name but still runs on sarcasm and resentment at work, at home, in traffic — Father T. is 25 years ahead of you on that exact road, and he's still walking it.
Topics
Timestamps
Full Transcript
And it's nice to be down here and hanging out with desperate people.
That's one of my favorite things to do on any Friday night, and most Friday nights I do.
So that's a safe place for me to be.
I live in Oakland, and I've been...
That's one of my favorite things to do on any Friday night, and most Friday nights I do.
So that's a safe place for me to be.
I live in Oakland, and I've been...
And it's nice to be down here and hanging out with desperate people.
That's one of my favorite things to do on any Friday night, and most Friday nights I do.
So that's a safe place for me to be.
I live in Oakland, and I've been there since 1981, and that's mostly where I go to meetings.
I travel out a little bit to other places.
But mostly I hang out there. It's safer.
There's visitors, and there's some newcomers, and I'd like to welcome you all.
It takes a while to get used to AA because we do things very differently,
and I'd just like to explain a little bit about that.
When...
When we were 50 years old, back, you know, 10 years ago or so, it was a great big deal.
All the news coverages were about AA, and the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour spent 20 minutes on us,
and there was a big write-up in the New York Times and Time and Newsweek.
I mean, it was a big deal.
And the news folks went to New York and talked to the folks that run AA in New York,
and they said,
How many members are in your fellowship?
And they said,
Sometimes a million.
Sometimes two million.
You know, we aren't sure.
It's frequently higher in January.
Members kind of drift off around July, you know, so...
And they said, So you don't keep records?
And they said,
No, we don't keep records.
And they said,
Well, we've heard that some very famous people have gotten sober in AA.
And they said,
We've heard that too.
Don't you have a list of prominent recovering people?
No.
No, we don't.
We don't do that.
We found that that's not good for people like us to know those things,
and they tried to explain a little bit about anonymity,
and the press doesn't get anonymity.
You know?
And the notion that principles are much more important than personalities
is something that needs to get talked about a lot.
If you like everybody you've met in AA,
it's a sign that you haven't been to enough meetings yet.
Because there are some very cranky, difficult people that come to meetings,
and this is how the traditions develop.
The traditions develop because we don't get along.
And so we have to have some way where those of us who are crazy,
and those of us who are impossible,
and those of us who are irritable can all function together,
or we're dead meat, you know?
So through trial and error, and grace, and human experience,
we've developed some kind of program that works for people like us,
who tend to be cranky,
and tend to be difficult,
and tend to have egos as big as all outdoors.
So welcome, you know?
Also, one other thing that's different about the fellowship,
you remember when you say you are,
and you can't be thrown out?
I mean, what kind of a group is that?
Also, if you weren't real clear on this,
if you're a visitor from the outside,
the impression you might have is that they get the real well people to share at meetings.
Spokesperson for AA, Picture of Mental Health, said, you know?
And what we've discovered is that's not good for us either.
If someone who is totally spiritually evolved speaks,
the whole group gets,
the whole group gets depressed.
However, if you have whiny, self-obsessed, damaged, crazy people share at meetings,
everyone relaxes and says, oh yeah, me too.
So it's interesting how hope works in meetings.
So I am not up here as a role model.
I just want to say that real clearly.
Also, you don't have to agree with anything I say.
My sponsor phrases,
this way, each one of us has one share of stock in the program.
We are equal owners.
Each one of us has one share of stock.
The highest rank you get to be in AA is sober.
There's no more sober unless, I mean, you're just sober or not.
And I'm not up here as a role model.
We'll get along a lot better if you look upon me as a warning.
And so,
I'm not up here as a role model.
I'm not up here as a role model.
I'm not up here as a role model.
You would leave saying, oh, I thought I was crazy,
but then I heard the speaker and I'm doing pretty well.
That's how it works a lot.
So, and this is disagreement.
You can disagree with me on stuff.
You don't have to throw me out.
I don't have to throw you out.
And if you do disagree with me on things,
you don't have to tell me about it at the end of the meeting.
Call your sponsor.
Talk to your sponsor.
You don't have to tell me.
It's a big fellowship.
It's a big fellowship.
And when I started coming to meetings,
I had to hear someone repeat a lot,
take what you need and leave the rest.
Take what you need and leave the rest.
Take what you need and leave the rest.
Even if you do that stupidly,
that's how you have to do it.
And I needed to know that I had the room
to take what I needed.
And leave the rest.
I did not come into AA real comfortable.
I was pretty much on the edge and pretty frantic.
So I took a lot of stuff that I needed
and held on to it real tightly.
And that lasted for a long time.
And then I found with a little bit of sobriety,
I had to make some changes and some adaptations
and change my program because life was different.
I wasn't 90 days sober anymore.
I heard someone,
someone once explained it this way,
you know, I mean, what's the difference in the program?
You know, well, your first year of recovery is physical
and your second year of recovery is emotional
and your third year of recovery is spiritual.
I've heard that thumbnail description a lot
all over the United States.
And I think it's a good one.
But the question that comes up is,
what do you do in your fourth year?
You know, I mean, you've handled the physical,
the emotional and the spiritual,
and now what do you do?
Well, now you judge others for many years.
And, you know, feel fabulous about it.
My suspicion is this.
I think the person that came up with that first year physical,
second year emotional, third year spiritual,
had four years.
And my experience has been that my first ten years were physical.
My second ten years were emotional.
And now that I'm in my third set of ten years,
I'm hoping to fall into spirituality any moment.
You know, it hasn't happened yet,
but it may by tomorrow.
And in my case,
my recovery has been very, very slow.
Some people have
sudden dramatic changes in their life.
I am not one of those.
I'm one of those people who believes,
that slow is real.
And that real things take time.
And it just takes a long time
for some of us to heal.
And that's still real true for me.
What was it like and what happened
and what it's like now?
Well, I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley.
Let me give you some statistics
so you can place me properly in your brain bones.
I was born in 1944.
I graduated from high school in 1967 in San Jose.
I graduated from high school in 1965.
I got sober at the age of 29 in 1976.
And I'm almost 53 years old.
So just to kind of summarize those things.
So that's a long time.
And there's a lot of alcoholism in the family.
And we never talked about it.
Ever.
We were pretty traditionalists.
Traditional Americans.
My mom is born and raised in Sweden.
So she's a pretty much new immigrant.
My father's parents were both from Ireland.
They came to San Francisco.
And my father's father was the chief gardener
at Stanford University for a long, long time.
And my father was born in San Francisco in 1904
and was there for the earthquake.
When he applied for a passport
after he retired from work,
they went to get the documents.
The documents of place of birth.
And there's a big stamp on it
that says all of his birth stuff
was destroyed in earthquake and fire.
That's what it says.
So I think that's kind of wild.
And on my mother's side of the family,
which is pretty much Swedish, Lutheran, Republican,
we never called them alcoholics.
We referred to them as being nervous people.
And literally, I would have cousins.
I would have cousins who were hospitalized for nerves.
And then, you know, they'd dry out.
My cousin Per, I mean, we really are Swedes.
Per, P-E-R.
Per comes out of the hospital and he's pretty steady.
And he just starts slamming back cores
like it's going to be, you know, made illegal.
And he has a bad session of DTs.
And we refer to it for years afterwards
as his nervous spell.
And when he was in his 60s and 70s,
he complained.
He completely lost his memory.
He couldn't remember anything.
And they wondered why.
And I said, well, if you soak your brain
in a quart of vodka every day for 50 years,
you forget details.
And no one wanted to talk about that.
But my cousin Howard was just drunk for years.
He showed up to his mother's funeral sober
and no one knew what to do with him.
You know, it was just so startling.
And so that's that side of the family.
On the Irish Catholic Democratic side of the family,
we didn't call them alcoholics.
We called them characters.
And we would say things like,
Sean is becoming a character, isn't he?
Sean likes the pubs.
He is a character, isn't he?
Yeah, that's right, Mom.
So,
that was how we made polite, I guess.
And we never talked about it.
Years ago, I used to say that alcoholism in my family
was exactly like having a rhinoceros in the living room.
You know, I mean, everybody knew it was there.
But you also knew if you said,
look at the rhino,
everyone gets mad at you
because we were getting along so well
until you came along.
And you're the one that has to take it out
and no one volunteers.
So, it's an interesting situation with the rhino.
The rhino in my family slept a lot.
My dad was a very nice man.
And the pattern for alcoholic males in my family,
he's very much in this.
You hold down a job for years.
You're real involved in school and church.
Also, civic stuff for years.
You're a good citizen.
You come home, you drink, you pass out.
So, we were, I mean, I felt abandoned,
but he never left home.
You know, this was very confusing for a while.
He was, in 1948, I was a year old.
In 1948, my dad was the chairman
of the Dewey for President Committee
for Santa Clara County.
I think this is very funny.
And he never got over Truman's re-election.
I mean, he never got over Truman's re-election.
And,
a couple of beers,
and all of a sudden,
it was back in 1948,
and that damn Truman.
And we just kept revisiting the vomit
over and over and over again,
which is one of the nice things
about being with alcoholics.
Nothing ever changes.
And I know I picked this pattern up.
When I was drinking,
I could resurrect stuff
that happened 25 years ago
as if it happened this morning
and make it fresh.
Nothing ever healed.
You know, I just kept it fresh.
Gats.
I started drinking really young.
I liked it.
I liked the sweet of creme de menthe.
I liked mixing bourbon and Hershey syrup.
I hear judgment.
Judgment.
You know,
may I suggest
that some of you have drunk worse.
But that's little kid stuff.
I mean, I was a small kid doing that.
It was the sweet,
and it was the sugar,
and that pain of alcohol,
which I've always loved.
By the time I was in high school,
I was not doing mixed drinks anymore
because they were just a waste of time.
I preferred vodka,
and I preferred gin,
and I loved bourbon.
And I just thought it was such a nice way to go.
I have all of the symptoms of alcoholism.
Blackouts.
You know, where you're functioning,
but you don't remember much.
I've had conversations with people I don't remember.
I have driven places I don't remember.
I've done a lot of things I just don't remember.
And I think that by the time I was a senior in high school,
I just accepted blackouts.
It's pretty normal.
I mean, they didn't scare me anymore.
It's amazing how little scared me.
They say you can't scare a drunk,
and I think they're right.
But in my fourth step,
doing that inventory stuff,
it doesn't really mention this.
It talks about resentments and fears
and sexual stuff and finances.
And drunk driving doesn't really fit
under any one of those categories necessarily.
Except looking back sober,
it's the scariest thing I ever did.
Years and years and years of drunk driving.
And I rationalized that.
I remember by the time I was 18,
I was telling classmates of mine that
there's no trouble driving while drunk.
The problem, the trouble is just getting to the car.
And I'd laugh.
But I'm...
Veteran drunk driver.
And I like mentioning that
because it's one of those things
that today, looking back, scares me the most.
There was an old-time AA speaker,
he's been dead for a long time now,
named Norm Alpey.
And in his talk, he says
a lot of his story is a matter of seconds and inches.
Couple of seconds difference,
couple of inches difference,
and it would have been a real difference.
It's a whole different story.
And that's very true for me.
So I'm grateful I'm not a statistic
and I'm grateful I didn't make anybody else a statistic.
Also, a pretty classical sign of the alcoholism
is the mood changes.
We go from black to white so quickly.
In the program, we refer to these as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Dr. Jekyll is the good guy, by the way.
And Mr. Hyde is the bad guy,
if you haven't gotten around to reading it.
And if you want to read something that is terrifying
and is not conference approved,
may I suggest Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson.
It's all about us.
And one of the reasons it's a scary book
is there's no recovery.
Mr. Hyde wins.
And it is a long visit with step number one.
Well, I had...
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I also had a pretty good case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
where I would drink
and I would become dopey or grumpy or sleepy or happy.
Occasionally, I would turn into Snow White,
which was really very surprising to everybody,
especially me.
So I was sober a very short amount of time
and I was wondering if I was an alcoholic.
I was very depressed and I was very crazy, I knew.
But alcoholic, I hoped that...
I preferred to have a brain tumor or cancer.
I remember going through a period,
I would have preferred that rather than alcoholism
because at least with a brain tumor or cancer, I could drink.
But with alcoholism, I couldn't drink
and it seemed so unfair.
And I went to the El Cerrito Fellowship.
I got sober in Berkeley.
Now,
now,
this is not a...
By judgment, this is an observation.
But there is no reason to ever go to El Cerrito.
Ever.
Unless you're looking for a meeting,
then there's a reason to go to El Cerrito.
It's an awful town.
And if you're in the East Bay,
because I know geography gets fuzzy as soon as you leave Milpitas,
it goes...
You know, Oakland, Alameda,
Oakland, Emory,
Oakland, Berkeley,
Albany,
El Cerrito.
That's how it goes.
And it's very close to a BART station.
And the old El Cerrito Fellowship had meetings all day long.
Especially for those of us who were jumpy.
And on Friday nights and Saturday nights,
they'd have a meeting at 6,
a meeting at 8,
a meeting at 10.
And if you were still a little on edge,
there'd be a meeting at midnight.
And it was...
There were any numbers...
A number of Friday and Saturday nights,
a number of us just stayed for the meetings.
Because it didn't fix you.
I mean, meetings don't fix you,
but they take the edge off.
And that's what I needed,
because there was no reason for me to go back home.
There was nothing there.
So I could stay at a meeting and stay at a meeting.
So I was at the El Cerrito Fellowship.
They had meetings.
They also had old-timers all over the place.
And may I speak candidly about old-timers now?
And again, this is an observation, not a judgment.
They're not always easy to be around.
And many of them are as cranky as the day is long.
However, if you can overlook their defects of character,
you'll learn a lot.
So we had these cranky old-timers,
crusty, mean, snarly old-timers.
That's how they looked.
And then...
You'd sit down next to them
and you would find pure gold.
If you could get beyond the crusty
and the scary and the snarly.
And there were some old-timer women
and some old-timer men
that hung out at the El Cerrito Fellowship a lot
and they'd bump into people with 18 days,
26 days, 35 days,
and they'd just listen to you.
So I was pretty raw and I was pretty new
and I was very jumpy.
And I bumped into this.
This old-timer.
And I wanted to know if I...
How would I really know I was alcoholic?
Because there could be a lot of other things wrong with me.
And I said,
How do I know?
And he said,
Tom, I don't know if you're alcoholic or not.
I said,
Go on.
He said,
I only know that I'm alcoholic.
I said,
Well, how do you know you're alcoholic?
And he said,
I know I'm alcoholic because I cannot guarantee
my behavior.
after my first drink.
I said,
What do you mean?
And he said,
Lots of times I could drink a lot
and nothing would happen.
No trouble, no problem, easy.
Other times I'd drink just a little
and anything could happen.
And I never knew which one it was going to be.
And that's my story.
Lots of times I drank a lot
and I never knew which one it was going to be.
And I never got into trouble.
The drunk driving,
I didn't get stopped.
There were no accidents.
It's not a problem, right?
I'd be drinking in some awful bar.
I'd get home.
I'd walk up the stairs.
I'd pass out in my own bed.
I'd wake up the next morning,
no vomit, no pee, success.
Other times there were different results.
And I never knew
which one it was going to be.
So I chose to believe I was alcoholic.
I chose to believe I had this allergy.
And I didn't know anything about it.
And most of what I've learned,
I've learned here
and I've learned from other folks.
I read a lot.
I'm one of those people who reads a lot
and sometimes that's helpful
and sometimes it's not helpful
but that's another subject.
I was reading a book this past year
and it's a survey of
treatment programs for alcoholism
and drug addiction in the United States
in the last 200 years.
It's really interesting.
And one of the points that the author makes is
over the last 200 years
there have been hundreds
if not thousands of studies,
examinations, articles, sermons, lectures
given on alcoholism.
All kinds of people have talked about
alcoholism and addiction.
Preachers and medical people
and reformers and politicians.
It's a great big part of the American story.
The big book of Alcoholics Anonymous
is the first piece of literature
written by us
for us.
All of the other thousands
of things have been written
by other people about us.
And it's a real different tone of voice.
So the literature comes from the peer group
and I like that very much.
I learn a lot about me
when I can read the literature
and pay attention at meetings.
I come into meetings,
I'm pretty depressed.
How do I end up in AA?
I'm intervened on.
I have no particular trouble
with step one.
I've always been
a little depressed anyway.
And step one basically says
there's no way out, you're doomed.
It's not a happy step.
I don't know of anybody
who's taken step one gladly.
Most of us have to be
beaten down desperately.
We're bleeding and on fire
and still holding on.
So I don't think step one
is a happy step.
I knew I was a mess.
I knew there was no way out.
I did a lot of reading
that proved that.
When I was in college,
if you're in the seminary,
and I was in the seminary,
if you're in the seminary,
you have to read a lot of philosophy.
They want to try to get you
to think a little bit,
which is very hard.
And so you read
Greek philosophers
and German philosophers
and French philosophers
and Latin philosophers
and drinking really helps
getting through a lot of these guys.
Sure helped me, let me tell you.
And the French existentialists I love,
there's a French writer of this century
named Albert Camus
and he writes
the only serious philosophical book
question of the 20th century
is why not kill yourself?
And I said, yes, yes.
Finally, someone has cut through the bullshit
and speaking the truth.
And I read everything he wrote.
In English, I mean, I don't know French,
but I read everything he wrote
and I would carry his books around with me
and he spoke to me
because there was no hope there.
And he spoke clearly
that there was no hope, yes.
And I'm, you know, 1920, 21,
22 years old at that time.
It's before my drinking got bad.
Then there's another guy
who did a lot of writing
of this century
and he's Jewish and Hungarian
and he lives in Prague
and his name's Franz Kafka.
And his writing is pretty bleak.
And Kafka writes at one point,
there is infinite hope,
but not for us.
Oh, yes.
And this is my attitude
when I come to meetings.
I looked at all of you people
and I said, there's a lot of hope for you people.
You mean well.
You're sincere.
You're trying real hard.
You're simple, but I mean, that's okay.
I'm sure that this simple program
can work for you.
It's not going to work for me
because I'm,
I'm way too twisted,
way too perverted,
way too cynical,
way too sarcastic
to ever get what you people have.
So I'm very glad for you
and I'm just going to try to hang out
for as long as I can,
but I'm not going to make it.
There is infinite hope,
but not for us.
I think that's a step one place.
Bill and Bob can, you know,
Bill's sober, Bob's sober.
They have to do,
they have to do something.
So,
they call the local guy in the hospital.
I just love this story if I can find it.
Oh yeah, they call this guy.
They, they explain their need.
This is in the book on page 156.
And inquired if she had a first class
alcoholic prospect.
Now,
I like bumper stickers that read
first things first
and easy does it
and keep coming back.
I would love to have a bumper sticker
that read
first class alcoholic prospect.
I think that would
add a certain quality to traffic.
Or perhaps just buttons we could wear
in meetings, you know,
so people,
a first class alcoholic prospect.
The nurse replied,
yes, we've got a corker.
He's just beaten up
a couple of nurses.
Now, those nurses
will have to go to Al-Anon
or they will try to date him.
Absolutely.
We've seen this.
Goes off his head completely
when he's drinking,
but he's a great,
grand chap when he's sober,
though he's been in here
eight times in the last six months.
Understand he was once
a well-known lawyer in town,
but just now we've got him
strapped down tight,
which I would also like
as a bumper sticker
is strapped down tight.
I like that.
And then Bill writes
this wonderful line.
Bill, he says,
here was a prospect, all right,
comma,
but by the description,
none too promising.
AA has been founded for 19 days
and already they've raised the bottom.
Bill turns to Bob and says,
you know, Bob,
when we got sober,
we had a better quality of alcohol
coming in.
Right now, it's just trash.
Good Lord.
And he's a lawyer, you know?
And if you go to meetings,
you will hear old-timers
exactly say that,
how when they got sober,
everybody was trying a lot harder
and now it's just trash
coming into the fellowship.
It's an old tradition
for the new kind of,
well, anyway,
we all know that.
So Bill and Bob go see this guy
and who are you?
Why are you here?
Said one of the visitors
were giving you a treatment
for alcohol.
He said,
and this is AA member number three's
first step.
Hopelessness was written large
on the man's face
as he replied,
oh, but that's no use.
Nothing would fix me.
I'm a goner.
The last three times
I got drunk on the way home from here.
I'm afraid to go out the door.
I can't understand it.
That's right.
That's step one.
Yeah, doomed, trapped,
no way out.
I know of a meeting
in Alameda County.
In some AA meetings,
we have a lot of rules.
And in this one,
the rule is
if a newcomer is present,
you can only talk about step one.
And I think that's because
they don't want to give
the newcomer any hope.
Then they wonder
why newcomers don't come back.
Well, all they did
was talk about throwing up.
Oh, really?
Very attractive.
Keep coming back.
When I was newly sober in 1976,
there were people around.
I haven't bumped into people
saying this now,
but there were people around
that said they were two-steppers,
not 12-steppers,
two-steppers.
They didn't like the 12 steps
because they were too much hard work
or religious or something.
But they did steps one and 12,
two-steppers.
Step one, we're miserable.
Step 12, join us.
For an hour,
the two friends told him
about their drinking experiences.
They told him about their...
They told him their stories
and they're brand new.
They aren't preaching at him.
They're not lecturing to him.
They're just saying their stuff
and they're not preaching to him.
And the guy identifies over and over.
He would say,
that's me, that's me.
I drink like that.
And then he goes on to say,
from what you guys tell me,
I know more than ever
that I can't stop.
At this, both the visitors
burst into a laugh.
This is the first recorded instance
we have of inappropriate AA humor.
You're not supposed to laugh
in places like this.
You know, but we do.
I mean, we laugh.
And then I spent 25 years in solitary.
We laugh.
You think that's so funny?
You know?
Said the future fellow anonymous,
damn little to laugh about
that I can see.
And I would have that
as the third bumper sticker
right off this page.
Just put it right there.
I like that.
I do believe that
the great gift we give each other
is our own stories, you know?
And some people will identify
and some people won't identify.
My sponsor,
who is a hopeless alcoholic
of the worst kind,
believes that
you know you're in
fit spiritual condition
if at a meeting
you identify
with what people are saying.
If you don't identify
with what people are saying,
you might not be
in fit spiritual condition.
He and I,
he claims he has never been
to a bad AA meeting
and I have told him
he should travel around with me.
I have been to some meetings
and I just hated everybody
and couldn't stand anything
and full of judgment
and upset
and what I've come to believe is
that indicated that I was in trouble,
not that they were in trouble.
I'm a depressive drunk.
I love,
I loved depressants.
I loved being pretty sedated.
I use alcohol a lot to sleep.
A six pack of beer
was pretty much
what I did before sleeping most nights.
Dr. Bob,
in his writing,
says that he never had a headache in his life.
I had very few
and I had very few hangovers,
but I,
I was a daily drinker
and most of the time
I had no trouble with my drinking.
Like a lot of us,
I held down jobs.
I mentioned that the,
the males in my family,
the alcoholic males in my family
work real hard
and come home and pass out.
I'm the difference.
I would work real hard,
come home,
drink,
and then get in the car
and I wanted to meet everybody
in Southern California.
I'm a loud,
brassy,
obnoxious drunk.
I'm a drunk.
And that's one of the reasons
I got thrown into treatment
at the age of 29.
I was obvious.
I felt real sorry
for myself for a long time.
Poor me,
I can't drink anymore.
I'm so young.
I thought I was the youngest alcoholic
in the history of the world
that had to get sober.
So I was sober a couple of months
and there was a
California State Young People's Conference
going on at Monterey.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
That was a big deal for me.
I also,
I mean,
I mentioned I was a pretty depressed drunk.
Also,
I was an isolated drunk.
I drank in bars for a long time
and I was sociable for a long time,
but I got over that.
And then I could drink by myself
in splendid isolation
where I spent a lot of time
and I didn't have a social life
when I got here.
And the thought of going to meet
a whole bunch of new people
was not my idea of a good time.
But a bunch from Berkeley
were going to this conference
so I went.
And I really thought
that I would stand out
as being one of the youngest people there.
And at this conference,
this was in the spring of 77,
there were about
a thousand people
at this conference.
And in the opening session,
they asked,
how many people are here tonight
who are sober
who are not yet
of legal drinking age?
And about 40 people stood up.
And the place went crazy.
Screaming and applauding and cheering.
You know, yeah.
That's the right response.
And I came to the shocking realization
that if the room had been divided in half
according to age,
I would have been on the older half.
That was the first time at that conference
I danced sober in my life.
And I kept on expecting to fall down,
and there's a real different sense of gravity
when you dance sober,
as some of you may know.
It's terrifying.
It's like being on Nordic track.
I mean, it just...
You're going to follow me.
So,
I was pretty depressed.
I was no longer drinking
or taking some other depressants,
and I found that over a short period of time,
I started waking up.
I started coming to.
And I'm not someone, like I say,
who gets well fast.
I don't come too pretty.
And I don't come too neat.
I'm real jagged.
And emotionally, I'm very raw
for a long time.
I think for the first three to five years
of my sobriety,
it was like the nerve endings
had not yet grown back over my skin.
And I'm pretty raw.
I finished graduate school.
I go back to teach.
And I go back to Los Angeles.
And I really have no tools.
I mean, I know we talk about steps and programs.
I have no tools.
I'm going to meetings.
I'm not drinking.
I'm not using.
Those are the tools I'm using.
But I'm starting to wake up.
Uh,
do you have a sponsor?
Do you read the book?
Do you do this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I really only
have worked steps
in emergencies.
And then I become very good
at the step stuff.
You know, I'm just frantic.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
And then
seconds after the frenzy leaves,
I stop writing.
I started my fourth step
because
I heard someone say
at a meeting
with that tone of truth
in their voice,
that if you don't do a fourth step,
you'll drink again.
And that was motivation for me.
So I,
how do you do a fourth step?
Well, you know,
you get the yellow pad
and the right pen
and the right book
and, you know,
all that stuff.
And you interview people.
How did you do your fourth step?
And what I finally had to do
was start writing.
And I'm comparing,
this fourth step
to that fourth step.
And I want to, you know,
this book,
Hazleton has a book.
Hazleton had a book
on the fourth step
that read
like it was written
by my sophomore religion teacher.
And I wanted to hang myself
when I read it.
It was such an awful thing.
So I mentioned that
and someone said,
then don't use it.
Oh.
Okay.
So I pretty much went by the book.
I wrote about resentments.
And I wrote about fears.
And I wrote about,
I wrote about sexual stuff.
And I wrote about finances,
which is talked about
in the 12 and 12.
But I was waiting
for a spiritual moment,
you know,
so I could begin writing
my fourth step with clarity.
And nothing would come
and nothing would come.
I was in graduate school
when I got sober.
And you're supposed to do
a lot of reading and writing
in graduate school.
And I'm sober now
for three months.
And I have a real big paper due.
And what I discovered
to my horror,
was I could not write sober.
It wouldn't come.
I had never written sober
in my life.
College,
beer,
typewriter,
let's go.
There was concrete in here.
I found out
that at four months sober
I could write sentences
but not paragraphs.
I couldn't develop thoughts at all.
And I never knew
if that would come back.
Writing is still difficult for me
but I'm able to write now.
But it was,
I thought that that part of my brain
had been very damaged.
But I'm trying to do some writing.
Nothing comes.
I go to an AA meeting.
And what happened
was there was a guy
chairing the meeting
that I took an instant dislike to.
I've never seen him before
in my life nor since.
But four minutes into his sharing
I despised him.
And the more he talked
the more I disliked him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I left the meeting
in a white rage.
I can't tell you anything specific.
I didn't like his laugh.
I remember that.
Other than that
I remember nothing.
In that fury
I went back to my house
and began writing
RESENTMENTS!
And his name was number one.
And then I,
people I resented.
I just wrote the list of names
and I went as long as I could
until I ran out of them.
Ran out of steam.
And I had to wait
until I was angry again
before I could write again.
So my fourth step
took about 18 months.
I could only write
when I was very angry.
Fear doesn't motivate me.
I rationalize fear
real easy.
But anger gets me going.
So one of the things
I can do in recovery
when I'm angry
I can write.
And I'm grateful.
I'm grateful for that.
I also have learned
that just because I write it
when I'm angry
I don't have to mail it.
You know?
Keep it.
So,
so the fourth step
was really important.
I learned a little bit about me
and I shared that with my sponsor.
You don't have to.
You don't have to share
your fourth step,
your fifth step with your sponsor
even if your sponsor says.
The book says
we,
what does it say?
It says
admitted to God
to ourselves
and to another human being
the exact nature
of our wrongs.
Some sponsors don't qualify.
And,
and when I've heard
some fifth steps
and I've heard
some fifth steps
it's real clear to me
I'm there
as the other human being.
I'm not there as God.
You know,
I'm not there to judge
or to judge
I'm just there
as the other human being
and I just get to listen to folks.
And I found
writing
and saying some stuff out loud
helped me a lot
grow up
and stand a little taller
and feel lighter.
Some people do a fourth and fifth step
and glow.
I mean,
they're just high
from how wonderful the experience was.
That wasn't my experience.
I,
I did it real business like
real basic
but within a year
of doing it
I was lighter
and I was seen to laugh
without
scaring people.
It was a slow change.
I,
I was looking through
part of the book
I like the stories in the back
and this is still on fourth step now.
Oh,
where is this?
I've never memorized
the book
because it's written down.
Ah,
this is
on page 292.
There's a guy from Chicago
hears there are sober people in Akron.
This is about 1937, 1938.
And so he goes to Akron
to meet all these sober folks
and he meets all the people.
He meets Dr. Bob.
I went to Akron last June.
I did some workshops.
I did some workshops in Cleveland
and I found out that
the distance between Akron and Cleveland
is the distance between Milpitas and Los Gatos.
I mean, it's real close.
I thought it was hours away, you know.
So I went to Akron a couple of times.
There are people who want to turn Akron
into Bethlehem.
I think that's interesting.
And I took the tour
and I saw everything.
You know where Dr. Bob is.
And,
and in Akron,
Dr. Bob is just this huge figure.
He is,
he is the source of AA.
And they've heard of Bill Wilson,
but in Akron,
it's Dr. Bob.
So this guy goes to Akron
and Dr. Bob spends a lot of time with him.
And they go through the program.
Dr. Bob led me through all these steps.
At the moral inventory,
step four,
he brought up some of my bad personality traits.
See, what we're used to is I bring up my own.
Here, the other guy brings them up for you,
which is called, I don't know.
A little scary.
But here's, you know,
Bill Wilson's list of resentments,
various sexual stuff, finances.
Here's Dr. Bob's.
He brought up some of my bad personality traits
or character defects,
such as selfishness,
conceit,
jealousy,
carelessness,
intolerance,
ill temper,
sarcasm,
and resentments.
Now, when I read those this year,
having, you know,
been around for 20 plus years,
that's the first time I ever noticed that list.
And the reason it jumped off the page at me
is this is much closer to my craziness
than resentments,
various sexual stuff,
finances, bills for.
Dr. Bob,
Bob's list is my ongoing stuff
around the defects of character needing healing.
And when I have to promptly admit that I'm wrong,
it's usually over selfishness,
conceit,
jealousy,
carelessness,
intolerance,
ill temper,
sarcasm,
or resentments.
And that's still ongoing stuff.
So I was real glad to find out that that was in the book.
And I found that helpful.
And I found that helpful for my own understanding of my craziness.
We're told in the East Bay that the reason the program works
is we're not all crazy on the same day.
But it's real important to know that all of us can get crazy.
And I have days when,
you know,
I need to be reminded of very basic things like,
do we drink?
No.
Do we go to meetings?
Yes.
Thank you.
And then I go to meetings and I don't drink.
I try to keep it real basic.
My sponsor was talking a while ago and someone,
you know,
we in AA have such deep questions about everything.
And we can go for a long period on questions like,
what is God's will?
I mean,
very long meetings are on that topic.
And I heard my sponsor say this about God's will.
Well,
it is God's will for each of us to have,
a life.
Go get one.
Well,
it can't be that simple.
Yeah,
it really is.
You know,
and I,
I just believe that.
And,
and what I'm able to do in recovery is have some kind of life and,
and what does life look like?
And,
and that goes back to step two.
Step two talks about being restored to sanity.
And what I heard early in my recovery was sane people,
healthy people,
are able to do three kinds of things.
Sane people can work.
Sane people can love.
And sane people can play.
If you know somebody who can work,
who can love,
and who can play,
you know a pretty healthy person.
I had a shrink explain that to me once.
And I said,
well,
you know,
what does that have to do with me?
And he said,
well,
well,
well,
with your alcoholism,
it destroyed your ability to work.
And it did.
I was unreliable.
Part of being a teacher in the state of California,
they have this rule that says,
if the kids are in the classroom,
you should be there too.
And,
and in all honesty,
I can tell you that most of the time I was.
But there were times I wasn't there,
and I rationalized,
you know,
I mean,
I was unique.
I was different.
I could show up late.
I don't have to be prepared.
I can leave early.
All that stuff.
Bad teacher behavior.
I had done it,
and I rationalized it.
And I went back into the classroom sober.
That was in my second,
third,
and fourth year of recovery.
And those were the hardest years.
The hardest years of my recovery.
To teach sober.
I had no idea what to do.
The only tools I had to deal with the kids,
the high school students,
was sarcasm,
resentment,
fear.
You know that list Dr. Bob had?
That was my list.
And that's how I defend myself.
And I was real sarcastic with the kids.
And I was very funny,
but I was real sarcastic.
And I,
you know,
looking back a little older,
and a little wiser,
I'm horrified at my sober behavior,
professionally,
for a couple of those years.
And we had teacher evaluations.
And one of my students,
a bright young man,
said,
he was a senior,
he said,
I like the material very much,
but you have a way of making kids
feel real small.
And I'll never take another class from you.
Bingo.
Clear example of the sober life,
you know.
I was scary.
I didn't have any tools.
I didn't know about restraint of pen and tongue.
I didn't know that a lot of times
I need to keep my big mouth shut.
I didn't know how to handle emotions
like anger,
and resentment.
I mean,
I was raw for a long time.
And one of the things that happens
with age and grace and recovery
is we become a little less raw over time.
I heard a guy from Orange County talk
a few months ago,
and he actually said something new at a meeting.
I mean,
if you go to meetings,
you don't hear a lot of new things.
Don't drink,
don't use,
talk to your sponsor.
Oh, okay.
You hear that for 12 years,
it can get a little flat.
This guy said he heard it from his sponsor.
Each year in recovery gives us one second of response time.
So brand new sober, something happens,
boom, you respond.
10 years sober, something happens,
you've got 10 seconds.
Now, you might make the same stupid decision,
but you've been able to think about it for 10 seconds.
And I think that's real good.
Those early years,
I didn't have any response time,
and I was so sarcastic,
and I was so angry,
and I was so hostile.
And a lot of,
I see recovery is falling under the sea.
We're the sixth and seventh step.
Regularly asking the higher power
to remove the defects of character,
which stand in the way of our usefulness.
And I think slowly over time,
they can be removed,
day at a time,
day at a time,
day at a time.
Let me just say a couple other things,
because I don't often hear these talked about at meetings.
I was sober a little while,
and I was having drinking dreams.
And no one was talking about these.
And I didn't know what they meant.
I mean, does it mean I really want to drink?
Does it mean I should rewrite the big book backwards?
Does it mean, you know, what does it mean?
I've been to meetings where someone said
that they've had drinking dreams,
and people jumped all over and said,
you're not working the program hard enough.
You know, that was very helpful.
And I think that's crazy, by the way.
So I finally asked my sponsor,
but I didn't want him to know that I was having drinking dreams.
Because.
So I think I phrased it like,
what does it mean if someone in a different state
dreams about drinking?
And he said,
have you had the one yet?
And then he described a dream that was so perverted
that I withdrew as from a hot flame.
And about six months later, I had that dream.
And this is the basic form of it.
And I think it's very twisted.
I'm driving.
There is a bottle of Southern Comfort,
which I never drank,
in a brown paper bag on the passenger seat floor.
I lean over, take a hit out of the bottle,
and put it back.
Now, in real life, I never drank and drove.
I drove drunk.
But I never drank and drove.
For some reason, that was real important.
Anyway, that's not the dream.
In the dream, I'm drinking and driving,
and the thought crosses my mind
that I'm speaking at a meeting that night,
and that doesn't bother me at all.
And my only question is,
will any of them smell it?
You know?
I think that's a pretty perverted dream.
And I have it regularly.
So.
So what does it mean?
What does it mean?
And he said two things.
Number one, drinking dreams mean that for us,
our drinking has become a nightmare.
Number two, people who have drinking dreams don't get drunk.
He said, did you ever have a drinking dream
when you were drinking?
Only sober people get them.
It's very strange.
It's very strange.
So that's true.
And the other thing is,
I am, you know, people have different experience on this.
Some people come to a meeting
and never think of drinking again for as long as they live,
and I'm very happy for them,
but that's not my story.
I think of drinking a lot.
It regularly pops into my brain,
and that's because I have an alcoholic brain.
Give me a little discomfort, I think of drinking.
Give me a little excitement, I think of drinking.
Two Christmases ago, I was driving across the Bay Bridge,
and I got to the Oakland side,
and there was a big sign for Chevy's Mexican Restaurant,
and it said, Cranberry Margaritas.
I had never thought of a cranberry margarita in my life,
but I instantly needed a cranberry margarita,
so badly that I almost drove in
into oncoming traffic.
And it stayed with me, gnawing on my brain bone
for the next six weeks.
Cranberry margarita! Cranberry margarita!
And I finally went to a restaurant
and ordered a virgin cranberry margarita,
and I've only had to have one.
But my brain does that a lot.
So, you know, what tool do you use?
I do this.
I don't drink today.
When I think,
I think of drinking, which is often.
I tell myself,
Tom, you can drink tomorrow.
We just don't drink today.
And it takes the edge off,
and it gives me a little room,
and then I can just worry about it tomorrow.
There's a whole lot of things that are going to happen tomorrow.
But today, I don't drink, I don't use,
and I've got a life that looks like a human life.
So I'm real grateful for places
like this and rooms like these.
And if there's anything I've said tonight that's helpful,
I'm glad.
And if not, then go to a lot more meetings
and tell you here's something that's helpful.
Thanks.
.
That's one of my favorite things to do on any Friday night, and most Friday nights I do.
So that's a safe place for me to be.
I live in Oakland, and I've been there since 1981, and that's mostly where I go to meetings.
I travel out a little bit to other places.
But mostly I hang out there. It's safer.
There's visitors, and there's some newcomers, and I'd like to welcome you all.
It takes a while to get used to AA because we do things very differently,
and I'd just like to explain a little bit about that.
When...
When we were 50 years old, back, you know, 10 years ago or so, it was a great big deal.
All the news coverages were about AA, and the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour spent 20 minutes on us,
and there was a big write-up in the New York Times and Time and Newsweek.
I mean, it was a big deal.
And the news folks went to New York and talked to the folks that run AA in New York,
and they said,
How many members are in your fellowship?
And they said,
Sometimes a million.
Sometimes two million.
You know, we aren't sure.
It's frequently higher in January.
Members kind of drift off around July, you know, so...
And they said, So you don't keep records?
And they said,
No, we don't keep records.
And they said,
Well, we've heard that some very famous people have gotten sober in AA.
And they said,
We've heard that too.
Don't you have a list of prominent recovering people?
No.
No, we don't.
We don't do that.
We found that that's not good for people like us to know those things,
and they tried to explain a little bit about anonymity,
and the press doesn't get anonymity.
You know?
And the notion that principles are much more important than personalities
is something that needs to get talked about a lot.
If you like everybody you've met in AA,
it's a sign that you haven't been to enough meetings yet.
Because there are some very cranky, difficult people that come to meetings,
and this is how the traditions develop.
The traditions develop because we don't get along.
And so we have to have some way where those of us who are crazy,
and those of us who are impossible,
and those of us who are irritable can all function together,
or we're dead meat, you know?
So through trial and error, and grace, and human experience,
we've developed some kind of program that works for people like us,
who tend to be cranky,
and tend to be difficult,
and tend to have egos as big as all outdoors.
So welcome, you know?
Also, one other thing that's different about the fellowship,
you remember when you say you are,
and you can't be thrown out?
I mean, what kind of a group is that?
Also, if you weren't real clear on this,
if you're a visitor from the outside,
the impression you might have is that they get the real well people to share at meetings.
Spokesperson for AA, Picture of Mental Health, said, you know?
And what we've discovered is that's not good for us either.
If someone who is totally spiritually evolved speaks,
the whole group gets,
the whole group gets depressed.
However, if you have whiny, self-obsessed, damaged, crazy people share at meetings,
everyone relaxes and says, oh yeah, me too.
So it's interesting how hope works in meetings.
So I am not up here as a role model.
I just want to say that real clearly.
Also, you don't have to agree with anything I say.
My sponsor phrases,
this way, each one of us has one share of stock in the program.
We are equal owners.
Each one of us has one share of stock.
The highest rank you get to be in AA is sober.
There's no more sober unless, I mean, you're just sober or not.
And I'm not up here as a role model.
We'll get along a lot better if you look upon me as a warning.
And so,
I'm not up here as a role model.
I'm not up here as a role model.
I'm not up here as a role model.
You would leave saying, oh, I thought I was crazy,
but then I heard the speaker and I'm doing pretty well.
That's how it works a lot.
So, and this is disagreement.
You can disagree with me on stuff.
You don't have to throw me out.
I don't have to throw you out.
And if you do disagree with me on things,
you don't have to tell me about it at the end of the meeting.
Call your sponsor.
Talk to your sponsor.
You don't have to tell me.
It's a big fellowship.
It's a big fellowship.
And when I started coming to meetings,
I had to hear someone repeat a lot,
take what you need and leave the rest.
Take what you need and leave the rest.
Take what you need and leave the rest.
Even if you do that stupidly,
that's how you have to do it.
And I needed to know that I had the room
to take what I needed.
And leave the rest.
I did not come into AA real comfortable.
I was pretty much on the edge and pretty frantic.
So I took a lot of stuff that I needed
and held on to it real tightly.
And that lasted for a long time.
And then I found with a little bit of sobriety,
I had to make some changes and some adaptations
and change my program because life was different.
I wasn't 90 days sober anymore.
I heard someone,
someone once explained it this way,
you know, I mean, what's the difference in the program?
You know, well, your first year of recovery is physical
and your second year of recovery is emotional
and your third year of recovery is spiritual.
I've heard that thumbnail description a lot
all over the United States.
And I think it's a good one.
But the question that comes up is,
what do you do in your fourth year?
You know, I mean, you've handled the physical,
the emotional and the spiritual,
and now what do you do?
Well, now you judge others for many years.
And, you know, feel fabulous about it.
My suspicion is this.
I think the person that came up with that first year physical,
second year emotional, third year spiritual,
had four years.
And my experience has been that my first ten years were physical.
My second ten years were emotional.
And now that I'm in my third set of ten years,
I'm hoping to fall into spirituality any moment.
You know, it hasn't happened yet,
but it may by tomorrow.
And in my case,
my recovery has been very, very slow.
Some people have
sudden dramatic changes in their life.
I am not one of those.
I'm one of those people who believes,
that slow is real.
And that real things take time.
And it just takes a long time
for some of us to heal.
And that's still real true for me.
What was it like and what happened
and what it's like now?
Well, I grew up in the Santa Clara Valley.
Let me give you some statistics
so you can place me properly in your brain bones.
I was born in 1944.
I graduated from high school in 1967 in San Jose.
I graduated from high school in 1965.
I got sober at the age of 29 in 1976.
And I'm almost 53 years old.
So just to kind of summarize those things.
So that's a long time.
And there's a lot of alcoholism in the family.
And we never talked about it.
Ever.
We were pretty traditionalists.
Traditional Americans.
My mom is born and raised in Sweden.
So she's a pretty much new immigrant.
My father's parents were both from Ireland.
They came to San Francisco.
And my father's father was the chief gardener
at Stanford University for a long, long time.
And my father was born in San Francisco in 1904
and was there for the earthquake.
When he applied for a passport
after he retired from work,
they went to get the documents.
The documents of place of birth.
And there's a big stamp on it
that says all of his birth stuff
was destroyed in earthquake and fire.
That's what it says.
So I think that's kind of wild.
And on my mother's side of the family,
which is pretty much Swedish, Lutheran, Republican,
we never called them alcoholics.
We referred to them as being nervous people.
And literally, I would have cousins.
I would have cousins who were hospitalized for nerves.
And then, you know, they'd dry out.
My cousin Per, I mean, we really are Swedes.
Per, P-E-R.
Per comes out of the hospital and he's pretty steady.
And he just starts slamming back cores
like it's going to be, you know, made illegal.
And he has a bad session of DTs.
And we refer to it for years afterwards
as his nervous spell.
And when he was in his 60s and 70s,
he complained.
He completely lost his memory.
He couldn't remember anything.
And they wondered why.
And I said, well, if you soak your brain
in a quart of vodka every day for 50 years,
you forget details.
And no one wanted to talk about that.
But my cousin Howard was just drunk for years.
He showed up to his mother's funeral sober
and no one knew what to do with him.
You know, it was just so startling.
And so that's that side of the family.
On the Irish Catholic Democratic side of the family,
we didn't call them alcoholics.
We called them characters.
And we would say things like,
Sean is becoming a character, isn't he?
Sean likes the pubs.
He is a character, isn't he?
Yeah, that's right, Mom.
So,
that was how we made polite, I guess.
And we never talked about it.
Years ago, I used to say that alcoholism in my family
was exactly like having a rhinoceros in the living room.
You know, I mean, everybody knew it was there.
But you also knew if you said,
look at the rhino,
everyone gets mad at you
because we were getting along so well
until you came along.
And you're the one that has to take it out
and no one volunteers.
So, it's an interesting situation with the rhino.
The rhino in my family slept a lot.
My dad was a very nice man.
And the pattern for alcoholic males in my family,
he's very much in this.
You hold down a job for years.
You're real involved in school and church.
Also, civic stuff for years.
You're a good citizen.
You come home, you drink, you pass out.
So, we were, I mean, I felt abandoned,
but he never left home.
You know, this was very confusing for a while.
He was, in 1948, I was a year old.
In 1948, my dad was the chairman
of the Dewey for President Committee
for Santa Clara County.
I think this is very funny.
And he never got over Truman's re-election.
I mean, he never got over Truman's re-election.
And,
a couple of beers,
and all of a sudden,
it was back in 1948,
and that damn Truman.
And we just kept revisiting the vomit
over and over and over again,
which is one of the nice things
about being with alcoholics.
Nothing ever changes.
And I know I picked this pattern up.
When I was drinking,
I could resurrect stuff
that happened 25 years ago
as if it happened this morning
and make it fresh.
Nothing ever healed.
You know, I just kept it fresh.
Gats.
I started drinking really young.
I liked it.
I liked the sweet of creme de menthe.
I liked mixing bourbon and Hershey syrup.
I hear judgment.
Judgment.
You know,
may I suggest
that some of you have drunk worse.
But that's little kid stuff.
I mean, I was a small kid doing that.
It was the sweet,
and it was the sugar,
and that pain of alcohol,
which I've always loved.
By the time I was in high school,
I was not doing mixed drinks anymore
because they were just a waste of time.
I preferred vodka,
and I preferred gin,
and I loved bourbon.
And I just thought it was such a nice way to go.
I have all of the symptoms of alcoholism.
Blackouts.
You know, where you're functioning,
but you don't remember much.
I've had conversations with people I don't remember.
I have driven places I don't remember.
I've done a lot of things I just don't remember.
And I think that by the time I was a senior in high school,
I just accepted blackouts.
It's pretty normal.
I mean, they didn't scare me anymore.
It's amazing how little scared me.
They say you can't scare a drunk,
and I think they're right.
But in my fourth step,
doing that inventory stuff,
it doesn't really mention this.
It talks about resentments and fears
and sexual stuff and finances.
And drunk driving doesn't really fit
under any one of those categories necessarily.
Except looking back sober,
it's the scariest thing I ever did.
Years and years and years of drunk driving.
And I rationalized that.
I remember by the time I was 18,
I was telling classmates of mine that
there's no trouble driving while drunk.
The problem, the trouble is just getting to the car.
And I'd laugh.
But I'm...
Veteran drunk driver.
And I like mentioning that
because it's one of those things
that today, looking back, scares me the most.
There was an old-time AA speaker,
he's been dead for a long time now,
named Norm Alpey.
And in his talk, he says
a lot of his story is a matter of seconds and inches.
Couple of seconds difference,
couple of inches difference,
and it would have been a real difference.
It's a whole different story.
And that's very true for me.
So I'm grateful I'm not a statistic
and I'm grateful I didn't make anybody else a statistic.
Also, a pretty classical sign of the alcoholism
is the mood changes.
We go from black to white so quickly.
In the program, we refer to these as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Dr. Jekyll is the good guy, by the way.
And Mr. Hyde is the bad guy,
if you haven't gotten around to reading it.
And if you want to read something that is terrifying
and is not conference approved,
may I suggest Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson.
It's all about us.
And one of the reasons it's a scary book
is there's no recovery.
Mr. Hyde wins.
And it is a long visit with step number one.
Well, I had...
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I also had a pretty good case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
where I would drink
and I would become dopey or grumpy or sleepy or happy.
Occasionally, I would turn into Snow White,
which was really very surprising to everybody,
especially me.
So I was sober a very short amount of time
and I was wondering if I was an alcoholic.
I was very depressed and I was very crazy, I knew.
But alcoholic, I hoped that...
I preferred to have a brain tumor or cancer.
I remember going through a period,
I would have preferred that rather than alcoholism
because at least with a brain tumor or cancer, I could drink.
But with alcoholism, I couldn't drink
and it seemed so unfair.
And I went to the El Cerrito Fellowship.
I got sober in Berkeley.
Now,
now,
this is not a...
By judgment, this is an observation.
But there is no reason to ever go to El Cerrito.
Ever.
Unless you're looking for a meeting,
then there's a reason to go to El Cerrito.
It's an awful town.
And if you're in the East Bay,
because I know geography gets fuzzy as soon as you leave Milpitas,
it goes...
You know, Oakland, Alameda,
Oakland, Emory,
Oakland, Berkeley,
Albany,
El Cerrito.
That's how it goes.
And it's very close to a BART station.
And the old El Cerrito Fellowship had meetings all day long.
Especially for those of us who were jumpy.
And on Friday nights and Saturday nights,
they'd have a meeting at 6,
a meeting at 8,
a meeting at 10.
And if you were still a little on edge,
there'd be a meeting at midnight.
And it was...
There were any numbers...
A number of Friday and Saturday nights,
a number of us just stayed for the meetings.
Because it didn't fix you.
I mean, meetings don't fix you,
but they take the edge off.
And that's what I needed,
because there was no reason for me to go back home.
There was nothing there.
So I could stay at a meeting and stay at a meeting.
So I was at the El Cerrito Fellowship.
They had meetings.
They also had old-timers all over the place.
And may I speak candidly about old-timers now?
And again, this is an observation, not a judgment.
They're not always easy to be around.
And many of them are as cranky as the day is long.
However, if you can overlook their defects of character,
you'll learn a lot.
So we had these cranky old-timers,
crusty, mean, snarly old-timers.
That's how they looked.
And then...
You'd sit down next to them
and you would find pure gold.
If you could get beyond the crusty
and the scary and the snarly.
And there were some old-timer women
and some old-timer men
that hung out at the El Cerrito Fellowship a lot
and they'd bump into people with 18 days,
26 days, 35 days,
and they'd just listen to you.
So I was pretty raw and I was pretty new
and I was very jumpy.
And I bumped into this.
This old-timer.
And I wanted to know if I...
How would I really know I was alcoholic?
Because there could be a lot of other things wrong with me.
And I said,
How do I know?
And he said,
Tom, I don't know if you're alcoholic or not.
I said,
Go on.
He said,
I only know that I'm alcoholic.
I said,
Well, how do you know you're alcoholic?
And he said,
I know I'm alcoholic because I cannot guarantee
my behavior.
after my first drink.
I said,
What do you mean?
And he said,
Lots of times I could drink a lot
and nothing would happen.
No trouble, no problem, easy.
Other times I'd drink just a little
and anything could happen.
And I never knew which one it was going to be.
And that's my story.
Lots of times I drank a lot
and I never knew which one it was going to be.
And I never got into trouble.
The drunk driving,
I didn't get stopped.
There were no accidents.
It's not a problem, right?
I'd be drinking in some awful bar.
I'd get home.
I'd walk up the stairs.
I'd pass out in my own bed.
I'd wake up the next morning,
no vomit, no pee, success.
Other times there were different results.
And I never knew
which one it was going to be.
So I chose to believe I was alcoholic.
I chose to believe I had this allergy.
And I didn't know anything about it.
And most of what I've learned,
I've learned here
and I've learned from other folks.
I read a lot.
I'm one of those people who reads a lot
and sometimes that's helpful
and sometimes it's not helpful
but that's another subject.
I was reading a book this past year
and it's a survey of
treatment programs for alcoholism
and drug addiction in the United States
in the last 200 years.
It's really interesting.
And one of the points that the author makes is
over the last 200 years
there have been hundreds
if not thousands of studies,
examinations, articles, sermons, lectures
given on alcoholism.
All kinds of people have talked about
alcoholism and addiction.
Preachers and medical people
and reformers and politicians.
It's a great big part of the American story.
The big book of Alcoholics Anonymous
is the first piece of literature
written by us
for us.
All of the other thousands
of things have been written
by other people about us.
And it's a real different tone of voice.
So the literature comes from the peer group
and I like that very much.
I learn a lot about me
when I can read the literature
and pay attention at meetings.
I come into meetings,
I'm pretty depressed.
How do I end up in AA?
I'm intervened on.
I have no particular trouble
with step one.
I've always been
a little depressed anyway.
And step one basically says
there's no way out, you're doomed.
It's not a happy step.
I don't know of anybody
who's taken step one gladly.
Most of us have to be
beaten down desperately.
We're bleeding and on fire
and still holding on.
So I don't think step one
is a happy step.
I knew I was a mess.
I knew there was no way out.
I did a lot of reading
that proved that.
When I was in college,
if you're in the seminary,
and I was in the seminary,
if you're in the seminary,
you have to read a lot of philosophy.
They want to try to get you
to think a little bit,
which is very hard.
And so you read
Greek philosophers
and German philosophers
and French philosophers
and Latin philosophers
and drinking really helps
getting through a lot of these guys.
Sure helped me, let me tell you.
And the French existentialists I love,
there's a French writer of this century
named Albert Camus
and he writes
the only serious philosophical book
question of the 20th century
is why not kill yourself?
And I said, yes, yes.
Finally, someone has cut through the bullshit
and speaking the truth.
And I read everything he wrote.
In English, I mean, I don't know French,
but I read everything he wrote
and I would carry his books around with me
and he spoke to me
because there was no hope there.
And he spoke clearly
that there was no hope, yes.
And I'm, you know, 1920, 21,
22 years old at that time.
It's before my drinking got bad.
Then there's another guy
who did a lot of writing
of this century
and he's Jewish and Hungarian
and he lives in Prague
and his name's Franz Kafka.
And his writing is pretty bleak.
And Kafka writes at one point,
there is infinite hope,
but not for us.
Oh, yes.
And this is my attitude
when I come to meetings.
I looked at all of you people
and I said, there's a lot of hope for you people.
You mean well.
You're sincere.
You're trying real hard.
You're simple, but I mean, that's okay.
I'm sure that this simple program
can work for you.
It's not going to work for me
because I'm,
I'm way too twisted,
way too perverted,
way too cynical,
way too sarcastic
to ever get what you people have.
So I'm very glad for you
and I'm just going to try to hang out
for as long as I can,
but I'm not going to make it.
There is infinite hope,
but not for us.
I think that's a step one place.
Bill and Bob can, you know,
Bill's sober, Bob's sober.
They have to do,
they have to do something.
So,
they call the local guy in the hospital.
I just love this story if I can find it.
Oh yeah, they call this guy.
They, they explain their need.
This is in the book on page 156.
And inquired if she had a first class
alcoholic prospect.
Now,
I like bumper stickers that read
first things first
and easy does it
and keep coming back.
I would love to have a bumper sticker
that read
first class alcoholic prospect.
I think that would
add a certain quality to traffic.
Or perhaps just buttons we could wear
in meetings, you know,
so people,
a first class alcoholic prospect.
The nurse replied,
yes, we've got a corker.
He's just beaten up
a couple of nurses.
Now, those nurses
will have to go to Al-Anon
or they will try to date him.
Absolutely.
We've seen this.
Goes off his head completely
when he's drinking,
but he's a great,
grand chap when he's sober,
though he's been in here
eight times in the last six months.
Understand he was once
a well-known lawyer in town,
but just now we've got him
strapped down tight,
which I would also like
as a bumper sticker
is strapped down tight.
I like that.
And then Bill writes
this wonderful line.
Bill, he says,
here was a prospect, all right,
comma,
but by the description,
none too promising.
AA has been founded for 19 days
and already they've raised the bottom.
Bill turns to Bob and says,
you know, Bob,
when we got sober,
we had a better quality of alcohol
coming in.
Right now, it's just trash.
Good Lord.
And he's a lawyer, you know?
And if you go to meetings,
you will hear old-timers
exactly say that,
how when they got sober,
everybody was trying a lot harder
and now it's just trash
coming into the fellowship.
It's an old tradition
for the new kind of,
well, anyway,
we all know that.
So Bill and Bob go see this guy
and who are you?
Why are you here?
Said one of the visitors
were giving you a treatment
for alcohol.
He said,
and this is AA member number three's
first step.
Hopelessness was written large
on the man's face
as he replied,
oh, but that's no use.
Nothing would fix me.
I'm a goner.
The last three times
I got drunk on the way home from here.
I'm afraid to go out the door.
I can't understand it.
That's right.
That's step one.
Yeah, doomed, trapped,
no way out.
I know of a meeting
in Alameda County.
In some AA meetings,
we have a lot of rules.
And in this one,
the rule is
if a newcomer is present,
you can only talk about step one.
And I think that's because
they don't want to give
the newcomer any hope.
Then they wonder
why newcomers don't come back.
Well, all they did
was talk about throwing up.
Oh, really?
Very attractive.
Keep coming back.
When I was newly sober in 1976,
there were people around.
I haven't bumped into people
saying this now,
but there were people around
that said they were two-steppers,
not 12-steppers,
two-steppers.
They didn't like the 12 steps
because they were too much hard work
or religious or something.
But they did steps one and 12,
two-steppers.
Step one, we're miserable.
Step 12, join us.
For an hour,
the two friends told him
about their drinking experiences.
They told him about their...
They told him their stories
and they're brand new.
They aren't preaching at him.
They're not lecturing to him.
They're just saying their stuff
and they're not preaching to him.
And the guy identifies over and over.
He would say,
that's me, that's me.
I drink like that.
And then he goes on to say,
from what you guys tell me,
I know more than ever
that I can't stop.
At this, both the visitors
burst into a laugh.
This is the first recorded instance
we have of inappropriate AA humor.
You're not supposed to laugh
in places like this.
You know, but we do.
I mean, we laugh.
And then I spent 25 years in solitary.
We laugh.
You think that's so funny?
You know?
Said the future fellow anonymous,
damn little to laugh about
that I can see.
And I would have that
as the third bumper sticker
right off this page.
Just put it right there.
I like that.
I do believe that
the great gift we give each other
is our own stories, you know?
And some people will identify
and some people won't identify.
My sponsor,
who is a hopeless alcoholic
of the worst kind,
believes that
you know you're in
fit spiritual condition
if at a meeting
you identify
with what people are saying.
If you don't identify
with what people are saying,
you might not be
in fit spiritual condition.
He and I,
he claims he has never been
to a bad AA meeting
and I have told him
he should travel around with me.
I have been to some meetings
and I just hated everybody
and couldn't stand anything
and full of judgment
and upset
and what I've come to believe is
that indicated that I was in trouble,
not that they were in trouble.
I'm a depressive drunk.
I love,
I loved depressants.
I loved being pretty sedated.
I use alcohol a lot to sleep.
A six pack of beer
was pretty much
what I did before sleeping most nights.
Dr. Bob,
in his writing,
says that he never had a headache in his life.
I had very few
and I had very few hangovers,
but I,
I was a daily drinker
and most of the time
I had no trouble with my drinking.
Like a lot of us,
I held down jobs.
I mentioned that the,
the males in my family,
the alcoholic males in my family
work real hard
and come home and pass out.
I'm the difference.
I would work real hard,
come home,
drink,
and then get in the car
and I wanted to meet everybody
in Southern California.
I'm a loud,
brassy,
obnoxious drunk.
I'm a drunk.
And that's one of the reasons
I got thrown into treatment
at the age of 29.
I was obvious.
I felt real sorry
for myself for a long time.
Poor me,
I can't drink anymore.
I'm so young.
I thought I was the youngest alcoholic
in the history of the world
that had to get sober.
So I was sober a couple of months
and there was a
California State Young People's Conference
going on at Monterey.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
I was sober.
That was a big deal for me.
I also,
I mean,
I mentioned I was a pretty depressed drunk.
Also,
I was an isolated drunk.
I drank in bars for a long time
and I was sociable for a long time,
but I got over that.
And then I could drink by myself
in splendid isolation
where I spent a lot of time
and I didn't have a social life
when I got here.
And the thought of going to meet
a whole bunch of new people
was not my idea of a good time.
But a bunch from Berkeley
were going to this conference
so I went.
And I really thought
that I would stand out
as being one of the youngest people there.
And at this conference,
this was in the spring of 77,
there were about
a thousand people
at this conference.
And in the opening session,
they asked,
how many people are here tonight
who are sober
who are not yet
of legal drinking age?
And about 40 people stood up.
And the place went crazy.
Screaming and applauding and cheering.
You know, yeah.
That's the right response.
And I came to the shocking realization
that if the room had been divided in half
according to age,
I would have been on the older half.
That was the first time at that conference
I danced sober in my life.
And I kept on expecting to fall down,
and there's a real different sense of gravity
when you dance sober,
as some of you may know.
It's terrifying.
It's like being on Nordic track.
I mean, it just...
You're going to follow me.
So,
I was pretty depressed.
I was no longer drinking
or taking some other depressants,
and I found that over a short period of time,
I started waking up.
I started coming to.
And I'm not someone, like I say,
who gets well fast.
I don't come too pretty.
And I don't come too neat.
I'm real jagged.
And emotionally, I'm very raw
for a long time.
I think for the first three to five years
of my sobriety,
it was like the nerve endings
had not yet grown back over my skin.
And I'm pretty raw.
I finished graduate school.
I go back to teach.
And I go back to Los Angeles.
And I really have no tools.
I mean, I know we talk about steps and programs.
I have no tools.
I'm going to meetings.
I'm not drinking.
I'm not using.
Those are the tools I'm using.
But I'm starting to wake up.
Uh,
do you have a sponsor?
Do you read the book?
Do you do this?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I really only
have worked steps
in emergencies.
And then I become very good
at the step stuff.
You know, I'm just frantic.
Right.
Okay.
Right.
And then
seconds after the frenzy leaves,
I stop writing.
I started my fourth step
because
I heard someone say
at a meeting
with that tone of truth
in their voice,
that if you don't do a fourth step,
you'll drink again.
And that was motivation for me.
So I,
how do you do a fourth step?
Well, you know,
you get the yellow pad
and the right pen
and the right book
and, you know,
all that stuff.
And you interview people.
How did you do your fourth step?
And what I finally had to do
was start writing.
And I'm comparing,
this fourth step
to that fourth step.
And I want to, you know,
this book,
Hazleton has a book.
Hazleton had a book
on the fourth step
that read
like it was written
by my sophomore religion teacher.
And I wanted to hang myself
when I read it.
It was such an awful thing.
So I mentioned that
and someone said,
then don't use it.
Oh.
Okay.
So I pretty much went by the book.
I wrote about resentments.
And I wrote about fears.
And I wrote about,
I wrote about sexual stuff.
And I wrote about finances,
which is talked about
in the 12 and 12.
But I was waiting
for a spiritual moment,
you know,
so I could begin writing
my fourth step with clarity.
And nothing would come
and nothing would come.
I was in graduate school
when I got sober.
And you're supposed to do
a lot of reading and writing
in graduate school.
And I'm sober now
for three months.
And I have a real big paper due.
And what I discovered
to my horror,
was I could not write sober.
It wouldn't come.
I had never written sober
in my life.
College,
beer,
typewriter,
let's go.
There was concrete in here.
I found out
that at four months sober
I could write sentences
but not paragraphs.
I couldn't develop thoughts at all.
And I never knew
if that would come back.
Writing is still difficult for me
but I'm able to write now.
But it was,
I thought that that part of my brain
had been very damaged.
But I'm trying to do some writing.
Nothing comes.
I go to an AA meeting.
And what happened
was there was a guy
chairing the meeting
that I took an instant dislike to.
I've never seen him before
in my life nor since.
But four minutes into his sharing
I despised him.
And the more he talked
the more I disliked him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I loved him.
And I left the meeting
in a white rage.
I can't tell you anything specific.
I didn't like his laugh.
I remember that.
Other than that
I remember nothing.
In that fury
I went back to my house
and began writing
RESENTMENTS!
And his name was number one.
And then I,
people I resented.
I just wrote the list of names
and I went as long as I could
until I ran out of them.
Ran out of steam.
And I had to wait
until I was angry again
before I could write again.
So my fourth step
took about 18 months.
I could only write
when I was very angry.
Fear doesn't motivate me.
I rationalize fear
real easy.
But anger gets me going.
So one of the things
I can do in recovery
when I'm angry
I can write.
And I'm grateful.
I'm grateful for that.
I also have learned
that just because I write it
when I'm angry
I don't have to mail it.
You know?
Keep it.
So,
so the fourth step
was really important.
I learned a little bit about me
and I shared that with my sponsor.
You don't have to.
You don't have to share
your fourth step,
your fifth step with your sponsor
even if your sponsor says.
The book says
we,
what does it say?
It says
admitted to God
to ourselves
and to another human being
the exact nature
of our wrongs.
Some sponsors don't qualify.
And,
and when I've heard
some fifth steps
and I've heard
some fifth steps
it's real clear to me
I'm there
as the other human being.
I'm not there as God.
You know,
I'm not there to judge
or to judge
I'm just there
as the other human being
and I just get to listen to folks.
And I found
writing
and saying some stuff out loud
helped me a lot
grow up
and stand a little taller
and feel lighter.
Some people do a fourth and fifth step
and glow.
I mean,
they're just high
from how wonderful the experience was.
That wasn't my experience.
I,
I did it real business like
real basic
but within a year
of doing it
I was lighter
and I was seen to laugh
without
scaring people.
It was a slow change.
I,
I was looking through
part of the book
I like the stories in the back
and this is still on fourth step now.
Oh,
where is this?
I've never memorized
the book
because it's written down.
Ah,
this is
on page 292.
There's a guy from Chicago
hears there are sober people in Akron.
This is about 1937, 1938.
And so he goes to Akron
to meet all these sober folks
and he meets all the people.
He meets Dr. Bob.
I went to Akron last June.
I did some workshops.
I did some workshops in Cleveland
and I found out that
the distance between Akron and Cleveland
is the distance between Milpitas and Los Gatos.
I mean, it's real close.
I thought it was hours away, you know.
So I went to Akron a couple of times.
There are people who want to turn Akron
into Bethlehem.
I think that's interesting.
And I took the tour
and I saw everything.
You know where Dr. Bob is.
And,
and in Akron,
Dr. Bob is just this huge figure.
He is,
he is the source of AA.
And they've heard of Bill Wilson,
but in Akron,
it's Dr. Bob.
So this guy goes to Akron
and Dr. Bob spends a lot of time with him.
And they go through the program.
Dr. Bob led me through all these steps.
At the moral inventory,
step four,
he brought up some of my bad personality traits.
See, what we're used to is I bring up my own.
Here, the other guy brings them up for you,
which is called, I don't know.
A little scary.
But here's, you know,
Bill Wilson's list of resentments,
various sexual stuff, finances.
Here's Dr. Bob's.
He brought up some of my bad personality traits
or character defects,
such as selfishness,
conceit,
jealousy,
carelessness,
intolerance,
ill temper,
sarcasm,
and resentments.
Now, when I read those this year,
having, you know,
been around for 20 plus years,
that's the first time I ever noticed that list.
And the reason it jumped off the page at me
is this is much closer to my craziness
than resentments,
various sexual stuff,
finances, bills for.
Dr. Bob,
Bob's list is my ongoing stuff
around the defects of character needing healing.
And when I have to promptly admit that I'm wrong,
it's usually over selfishness,
conceit,
jealousy,
carelessness,
intolerance,
ill temper,
sarcasm,
or resentments.
And that's still ongoing stuff.
So I was real glad to find out that that was in the book.
And I found that helpful.
And I found that helpful for my own understanding of my craziness.
We're told in the East Bay that the reason the program works
is we're not all crazy on the same day.
But it's real important to know that all of us can get crazy.
And I have days when,
you know,
I need to be reminded of very basic things like,
do we drink?
No.
Do we go to meetings?
Yes.
Thank you.
And then I go to meetings and I don't drink.
I try to keep it real basic.
My sponsor was talking a while ago and someone,
you know,
we in AA have such deep questions about everything.
And we can go for a long period on questions like,
what is God's will?
I mean,
very long meetings are on that topic.
And I heard my sponsor say this about God's will.
Well,
it is God's will for each of us to have,
a life.
Go get one.
Well,
it can't be that simple.
Yeah,
it really is.
You know,
and I,
I just believe that.
And,
and what I'm able to do in recovery is have some kind of life and,
and what does life look like?
And,
and that goes back to step two.
Step two talks about being restored to sanity.
And what I heard early in my recovery was sane people,
healthy people,
are able to do three kinds of things.
Sane people can work.
Sane people can love.
And sane people can play.
If you know somebody who can work,
who can love,
and who can play,
you know a pretty healthy person.
I had a shrink explain that to me once.
And I said,
well,
you know,
what does that have to do with me?
And he said,
well,
well,
well,
with your alcoholism,
it destroyed your ability to work.
And it did.
I was unreliable.
Part of being a teacher in the state of California,
they have this rule that says,
if the kids are in the classroom,
you should be there too.
And,
and in all honesty,
I can tell you that most of the time I was.
But there were times I wasn't there,
and I rationalized,
you know,
I mean,
I was unique.
I was different.
I could show up late.
I don't have to be prepared.
I can leave early.
All that stuff.
Bad teacher behavior.
I had done it,
and I rationalized it.
And I went back into the classroom sober.
That was in my second,
third,
and fourth year of recovery.
And those were the hardest years.
The hardest years of my recovery.
To teach sober.
I had no idea what to do.
The only tools I had to deal with the kids,
the high school students,
was sarcasm,
resentment,
fear.
You know that list Dr. Bob had?
That was my list.
And that's how I defend myself.
And I was real sarcastic with the kids.
And I was very funny,
but I was real sarcastic.
And I,
you know,
looking back a little older,
and a little wiser,
I'm horrified at my sober behavior,
professionally,
for a couple of those years.
And we had teacher evaluations.
And one of my students,
a bright young man,
said,
he was a senior,
he said,
I like the material very much,
but you have a way of making kids
feel real small.
And I'll never take another class from you.
Bingo.
Clear example of the sober life,
you know.
I was scary.
I didn't have any tools.
I didn't know about restraint of pen and tongue.
I didn't know that a lot of times
I need to keep my big mouth shut.
I didn't know how to handle emotions
like anger,
and resentment.
I mean,
I was raw for a long time.
And one of the things that happens
with age and grace and recovery
is we become a little less raw over time.
I heard a guy from Orange County talk
a few months ago,
and he actually said something new at a meeting.
I mean,
if you go to meetings,
you don't hear a lot of new things.
Don't drink,
don't use,
talk to your sponsor.
Oh, okay.
You hear that for 12 years,
it can get a little flat.
This guy said he heard it from his sponsor.
Each year in recovery gives us one second of response time.
So brand new sober, something happens,
boom, you respond.
10 years sober, something happens,
you've got 10 seconds.
Now, you might make the same stupid decision,
but you've been able to think about it for 10 seconds.
And I think that's real good.
Those early years,
I didn't have any response time,
and I was so sarcastic,
and I was so angry,
and I was so hostile.
And a lot of,
I see recovery is falling under the sea.
We're the sixth and seventh step.
Regularly asking the higher power
to remove the defects of character,
which stand in the way of our usefulness.
And I think slowly over time,
they can be removed,
day at a time,
day at a time,
day at a time.
Let me just say a couple other things,
because I don't often hear these talked about at meetings.
I was sober a little while,
and I was having drinking dreams.
And no one was talking about these.
And I didn't know what they meant.
I mean, does it mean I really want to drink?
Does it mean I should rewrite the big book backwards?
Does it mean, you know, what does it mean?
I've been to meetings where someone said
that they've had drinking dreams,
and people jumped all over and said,
you're not working the program hard enough.
You know, that was very helpful.
And I think that's crazy, by the way.
So I finally asked my sponsor,
but I didn't want him to know that I was having drinking dreams.
Because.
So I think I phrased it like,
what does it mean if someone in a different state
dreams about drinking?
And he said,
have you had the one yet?
And then he described a dream that was so perverted
that I withdrew as from a hot flame.
And about six months later, I had that dream.
And this is the basic form of it.
And I think it's very twisted.
I'm driving.
There is a bottle of Southern Comfort,
which I never drank,
in a brown paper bag on the passenger seat floor.
I lean over, take a hit out of the bottle,
and put it back.
Now, in real life, I never drank and drove.
I drove drunk.
But I never drank and drove.
For some reason, that was real important.
Anyway, that's not the dream.
In the dream, I'm drinking and driving,
and the thought crosses my mind
that I'm speaking at a meeting that night,
and that doesn't bother me at all.
And my only question is,
will any of them smell it?
You know?
I think that's a pretty perverted dream.
And I have it regularly.
So.
So what does it mean?
What does it mean?
And he said two things.
Number one, drinking dreams mean that for us,
our drinking has become a nightmare.
Number two, people who have drinking dreams don't get drunk.
He said, did you ever have a drinking dream
when you were drinking?
Only sober people get them.
It's very strange.
It's very strange.
So that's true.
And the other thing is,
I am, you know, people have different experience on this.
Some people come to a meeting
and never think of drinking again for as long as they live,
and I'm very happy for them,
but that's not my story.
I think of drinking a lot.
It regularly pops into my brain,
and that's because I have an alcoholic brain.
Give me a little discomfort, I think of drinking.
Give me a little excitement, I think of drinking.
Two Christmases ago, I was driving across the Bay Bridge,
and I got to the Oakland side,
and there was a big sign for Chevy's Mexican Restaurant,
and it said, Cranberry Margaritas.
I had never thought of a cranberry margarita in my life,
but I instantly needed a cranberry margarita,
so badly that I almost drove in
into oncoming traffic.
And it stayed with me, gnawing on my brain bone
for the next six weeks.
Cranberry margarita! Cranberry margarita!
And I finally went to a restaurant
and ordered a virgin cranberry margarita,
and I've only had to have one.
But my brain does that a lot.
So, you know, what tool do you use?
I do this.
I don't drink today.
When I think,
I think of drinking, which is often.
I tell myself,
Tom, you can drink tomorrow.
We just don't drink today.
And it takes the edge off,
and it gives me a little room,
and then I can just worry about it tomorrow.
There's a whole lot of things that are going to happen tomorrow.
But today, I don't drink, I don't use,
and I've got a life that looks like a human life.
So I'm real grateful for places
like this and rooms like these.
And if there's anything I've said tonight that's helpful,
I'm glad.
And if not, then go to a lot more meetings
and tell you here's something that's helpful.
Thanks.
.
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