Tearing Everything Down During Step 5 – Dick M.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is Dick Martin and I'm an alcoholic. Everybody, but for the grace of God and the actions of AA and sponsorship, I've been sober since September the 15th, 1965, and I'M VERY PLEASED ABOUT THAT TONIGHT. I... It's not true, I didn't teach the people in Omaha how to count. Just like the people in Flagstaff, they still don't know how to count at the proper time. The audience tonight is an unruly audience. And I'd like to, just as a side remark before I get started, I'd like to say that, you know, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 traditions of Alcoholic Anonymous were in place when I came to AA and allowed AA to be AA so that I could recover and so that I could live my life with some dignity. And I believe, therefore, I have a responsibility of treating that program with some dignity. And if I was in the audience and reading out numbers and laughing at the traditions and laughing At The 12 Steps, it may not do me any harm at all. But the newcomer to Alcoholics Anonymous would get the idea somehow that they're unimportant. And that's false, false, I didn't have any respect for anything conventional before I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. As a matter of fact, if it was conventional, I wanted to tear it down. I didn' t want to do anything that everybody else did. If they thought cutting grass every week was right, I didn''t want to cut it at all. if they thought getting a haircut on a regular basis was something that a gentleman should do. I said, screw that. I didn't really work for my employers. I was dishonest with everyone around me and I had absolutely no integrity and I have no honesty and I did nothing to offer anybody or any place. and somehow or another I came to Alcoholics Anonymous with a desire to live differently than what I had I couldn't drink anymore and I couldn' t stay sober anymore I couldn''t stand drinking I couldn ''t stand myself when I was sober and I came down to Alcoholic Anonymous and somehow that got smoothed away and I didn''t know how it got smoothened away it didn't seem like it was terribly difficult to get it smoothed away, it wasn't one of those things that I went through with white knuckles it wasnít one of the things that I had a great deal of difficulty with it was one of those things that i just trudged daily, i didnít take a drink one day at a time i went to a meeting every day and i was in touch with my sponsor every day and gradually i even became got to the point where I could read the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous on a regular basis. Like many people, I started drinking when I was young, and I started drinking when i was 14 years old, and just one instance of that to give you some inkling of what my life was like. So I went to a teenage party when I I was 14, 15 years old. And it was a very nice neighborhood, very nice people, upper-middle class deal. I was wearing a coat and tie at that age even to attend this because that was the proper way to dress then. And I went and knocked on the door, and as I was going up to the door I began to wonder to myself, what in the world is it? Why did they invite me? I thought I was going to die from terminal acne at that point. I damn near did. I wasn't athletic. I couldn't sing. I didn't think I was particularly bright. I wasn'T particularly witty or charming. I didn'T have a girlfriend. I wanted to have one, but I didn'T have a girl friend. And I was kind of wondering why they had invited me. and I came to the conclusion as I knocked on the door that the reason why they invited me was because they were going to make fun of me and I walked in there and I was invited to go down to the rec room and I did and the girls were sitting on the left and the guys were sitting or standing on the right hand side over here in the left hand corner there was a guy sitting on a chair and a girl was sitting on his lap and they were sorting through 45 RPM records and selecting them and putting them on a little square RCA Victor player, which dates me somewhat. It was before stereo or hi-fi or anything like that. And I still felt very uncomfortable. I knew all the kids in the room that were there. One of the guys asked me if I'd like to have a beer, and it wasn't the first beer I ever had. and I said yes and we went off into the laundry room and there was a refrigerator down there and he had a beer and gave me a beer and I drank the beer and we stood there and talked and I walked out and was able to talk to some of the guys and they were jocks and they weren't they were pleasant with me they didn't give me a bad time or didn't make fun of me and I talked to a couple of the girls and they Were Pleasant With Me and I even asked one of them to dance and she said alright and we danced, and I didn't step on her toes. As a matter of fact, she stepped on mine. And after that dance was over, I began to feel a little bigger and a little better than I had before, and I went back and had another beer. Then I drank that beer, and then I came out and I stood there among those children and I realized why they had invited me because they wanted someone of some sophistication and intellect and wit to lend a little charm to this group of little children there. And I want you to know, if alcohol did that for me today, I'd still be drinking. But because it did what it did, I continued to drink at every opportunity that I had. No big deal. I didn't get drunk I didn' t pass out I didn''t puke I didn ''t get arrested it was just one of those deals I went on through high school and drank at every opportunity that I possibly could this was I graduated from high school in 1950 and the Korean fracas was on I joined the Air Force and I spent 3 years, 10 months and 11 days and a glorious career in the Korean deal. I was stationed in England the whole time. I fought the Battle of Piccadilly Circus. Some of the older guys have an idea what that is. I had a grand time. I had good war. I really did. There are others I know who have not had good wars, but I had to go to the war. I had no good war at all. I returned, went to college. joined the fraternity and I joined the fraternity for one very simple reason because it was they partied and I was able to find somebody to drink with every day I had a part time job had the GI Bill I had enough that I could drink and I could go to school and I can have a good time I never got in any particular trouble there I drank more than anyone else around me. I was a little older than most of them, and I was known to be one of those drinking Martin boys. And I drank much, much more than my share, and I had a good time. I didn't get any education, but I had an education. I had had a great time. As a matter of fact, I never finished college. I stopped going to college before I'd finished. and uh which didn't harm me at the time i regretted it later not for any big purpose not because it denied me any opportunities or denied me an opportunity to earn a better living or whatever but more because i would like just like to have had the pride to been able to say that i'd finish something i married one of those gals that i met there at george washington University, and I told her if she'd teach me how to dance, I'd teach her how to drink. She didn't teach me How to Dance, and l didn't teacher her how to drink we I had a job in broadcasting and it was an outside salesman and I had an expense account and I used that abused it to a great extent but I was told never to take anybody out that I didn't buy him a drink so figured I may as well. I was given a license to drink while I was working. They paid for it, so it was fine with me. And I did very well. That was the fair-haired young man. They really expected a lot out of me. I had been nominated the Washington, D.C., Junior Chamber of Commerce Young Man of the Year, and they managed to withdraw that nomination because I made more than a subtle pass at the chairman's wife. She told her husband, they said they didn't want anybody like that as young man of the year. I didn't know why. That was the sort of way I lived my life. I was married, had two kids, I had a son, I had a daughter and a son. And my wife gradually was getting fed up with this and was requesting that I do something about my drinking and I didn't want to do anything about my drinking. I was one of these guys that would call up and say don't hold dinner for me tonight honey. I got a couple of important clients that I've got to have a drink with but I'll be there by seven o'clock and I might show up three days later. i uh i had a running affair with the boss's secretary which i'd had since before i met my wife so i didn't feel it was dishonest or anything run around on my wife i well i i was running around on the secretary for christ's sake when i married my wife the way i looked at it and um I was able to rationalize a little bit, justify a few things. I got in a lot of trouble. I was threatened at work many, many times. My boss called me in and said some people can drink and some can't. You can't? The president of the corporation interviewed me and told me that he realized that I was having family problems, and I was. I was the problem. And that he understood that this created an atmosphere for drinking, but that maybe I should go to Alcoholics Anonymous. That he had taken some people there at one time and it seemed to work. And he said, why don't you think about that? And this was about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. We were having lunch and he left and he said why don't you take the rest of the afternoon off and I said okay so I took the rest of the noon off he left and went back to work and I stayed right there and drank myself into oblivion at the bar kind of proving that I didn't have any problem with alcohol he had a problem but I didn it's funny I was driving back I was trying to get back home that night and I was driving through Rock Creek Park which is a lovely park area that goes through the center of Washington, D.C., if you've never been there. There's a beautiful creek at Munsu there. It's a wooded area. It' s a lovely, lovely drive. And I'd driven it hundreds of times. I'd made this particular drive literally hundreds of times and I got lost. And I didn't get home until about 3 o'clock in the morning. And I know that I had left the bar at about midnight because they had thrown me out and it took me three hours to get home which ordinarily was something like a 20 minute drive but I just went around and around and around in circles and I just was so frustrated and I couldn't understand what was going on and I knew I'd been through there many times and it just didn't make any sense to me but that's the way the rest of my life was the rest OF MY LIFE DIDN'T MAKE ANY SENSE TO ME I finally got home that particular night I didn't get arrested Jim this afternoon was talking about his arrest record I was arrested 23 times for public intoxication and twice for being in possession of a vehicle while intoxicated and once for urinating in public they would have gotten me for indecent exposure except it was insufficient evidence it was one of those nights I was going from beer joint to beer joint and I'd just gotten overloaded with it well some guy had been urinating in the driver's seat for a long time in my car and I didn't want anybody to accuse me of that so I got out and I was relieving myself on some lady's roses and she apparently didn't like that and the policeman came along and tapped me on the shoulder and said when you were through and I said oh shit not again not again I didn't have enough money to bail myself out I gave them my watch they knew me at the precinct I gave him my watch and told him I'd come back and bail my watch out tomorrow which I did but my wife was really getting tired of my addicts and she suggested that we had gone to marriage counselors. One of the marriage counselors I went to was a guy that was a major in the Army. He was a psychiatrist, and he was moonlighting. He was in charge of the alcoholic ward at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and we described my drinking and so on and so forth to him, and he said, well, you're not an alcoholic. You're just confused. Well, if I wasn't an alcoholic, I was a confused alcoholic, I'm sure. But all the time I would do those things, you know, I'd go to marriage counselors and things would get a little bit better. I wouldn't get quite as drunk. And my wife didn't want me to stop drinking. She just wanted me to start drinking. And she really got kind of fed up with my addicts and so I went to see a physician and he suggested that I only drink when she was drinking And that wasn't effective because if I was to get a bottle out, she'd go in the other room and she'd just go away. She didn't want to have anything to do with me at all at this point. I didn't hate her, but she knew so much about me. She knew so many rottenness about me that I didn' t want to do anything with her. It was just one of those situations where she had punctured every fear that I possibly had And she knew all of my shortcomings And I just didn't want to be around somebody that knew me that well And so I stayed away from her as much as I possibly could One afternoon, I had started drinking and drank all night And I got home at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning and got up the next morning and made another promise that I wouldn't drink again. And I told her that I would go to Alcoholics Anonymous. And I went to the AA intergroup office in Washington, D.C., and I picked up some literature and I walked into that central office. And that central officer was a man whose office was furnished, looked like cast-off furniture from the Salvation Army. There was a guy sitting there behind the desk which had gone through all of the wars. and he was old he had enough dirt under his fingernails to plant a geranium in he had holes in the sweater in the sleeves of his sweater at the elbow and I just looked at him and I said yeah, that's Alcoholics Anonymous that's what AlcoholicsAnonymous is and I got the literature and I decided I never wanted to go there because Alcoholics Anonymous wasn't the place for me, that I was above that. And I want to tell you now, I've made a lot of effort in AlcoholicsAnonymous since I've been sober to make sure that central offices of AlcoholicsAnalymous look like business offices instead of some drop-off from the Salvation Army because a newcomer comes in there and he comes in like I did, it may take them a couple of more years to get to AA because that picture in my mind that I had coupled with having read the Jack Alexander article many years before kept me away from Alcoholics Anonymous for another two and a half years. I brought that AA literature home and I showed it to my wife and I looked at my watch and I said you know, it's too late to get to a meeting tonight. They start at 8.30 in Washington, and it was about 8.15 when I brought it out. And I said that I should go, and I'm going to go. And I put the AA literature in my bureau drawer, and I never took it out until my wife packed up everything that was in all my bureau and put it in boxes and put her in the hospital. She put it outside for me to take when I came home drunk that night. The next night. She said, what I want is a divorce. I can't stand this and it's not fair to the kids. And I was just waiting for her to tell me that it was okay to get a divorce I had by this time literally spent thousands of dollars in psychiatry I was going to a psychiatrist twice a week. I'd had more intense psychotherapy and psychiatric care than you get in the fanciest nuthouses in the world, and it didn't do any good. I would walk out of there, and the first thing I did when I walked out of that psychiatrist's office was go and get a drink because I couldn't stand the pain of my own life. I continued to drink. I went home to live with my mother. my widowed mother and my old maid sister and I lived with them for a number of months and tried to drive them crazy as long as we were along with everybody else they were just about as nuts as I was you know, I'd come home in the evening and have a couple of drinks and they'd have a few drinks with me just to keep me at home and they would say something about going in to eat and they'd walk off the front porch into the house and go to prepare some sort of a meal, and I'd just pick up my car keys and go get in the car and go downtown because that's what I wanted to do. I wanted it to get the hell out of there. I didn't want to be anywhere where anybody really knew me. I could go in the bar where they didn't know me because they were just as drunk as I was. i had been going to the psychiatrist and in april of 1965 i went to him for the last time and uh i said uh to the psychologist i said you know when i got here you showed me a number of inkblot tests and you've given me the minneapolis multi-phase personality deal and I said you never told me the resultant of this and he said you never asked I thought uh huh and I says well I'm asking you now what was the result of this and he says you seem to be preoccupied with sex and I immediately thought I must be some sort of a pervert and I say well when do you think I can feel some relief from these life problems and he say how old are you Dick and I'm 33 and he said, it took you a long time to get here, didn't it? And this man was in his 60s. And I looked at him and I thought to myself, my God, I'm going to have to go to him 33 years. He's not going to live that long. What am I going to do when he dies? And I asked him one more question. I said, Doctor, do you think I should go to Alcoholics Anonymous? And he said no, you're not ready for that yet. I said, all right. But I'll tell you what, doctor. I'm not coming back here anymore either. And there's no sense of you sending me a bill, any bill that I owe you I am not going to pay. I am through. And I got him walked out. I continued to drink. Don't remember getting into any particular trouble except with myself. I just couldn't stand myself anymore. I'd gone away. I'd taken a vacation trip. I was going to go deep-sea fishing in Chesapeake Bay, and I'd go on to Annapolis and gone into a hotel room with eight bottles of scotch and four bottles of gin and one bottle of vermouth and sequestered myself in there and gotten drunk the first night, so drunk that I woke up in the bottom of the shower and I had all my clothes on and somehow or another, next time I wokeup, the shower was still running and I was naked on the floor and the television was on and a glass of booze was by me and it spilled somehow or another I managed to get in the shower and get sobered up enough to get out of that hotel room that day but I stayed in that hotel room, in and out of that hotelroom in and outer drunks in and outta deals just like I described to you for three and a half to four days and I began to think that I was going to die there. And it wasn't a bad hotel room, but I didn't want to die there. I never saw the water that I recall. I got in my car put a bottle of scotch between my knees drove back to Washington D.C. some 45 to 50 miles in rush hour traffic I don't remember driving back, I just remember getting into the car and sitting down next thing i know i was in the mayflower hotel drinking then i went home about 10 o'clock that night and i remember going home i don't remember driving home i just remember going home and i remembered going up into my room and crying myself to sleep again which I'd been doing for months and months and month and month because there was no end to what I was in. I just didn't have any future, and the past was so grim I couldn't stand it, and I had to drink myself into oblivion because I couldn t stand it. And I had the loneliness that only an alcoholic has. We can't describe it any other way. psychiatrists try to describe it to us and we don't understand what the hell they're talking about but in our gut we understand what it is the alcoholic loneliness I just couldn't stand my life I had taken this gal Joe Wilson, my boss's secretary out one Tuesday night and we had gotten very drunk She was a bad, bad drunk. I often had to carry her to her car so she could drive home. We'd agreed to meet on Wednesday, September the 14th, and we weren't going to drink because we had really gotten drunk the night before and were both burning hard coal and we were just going to eat dinner and go to a movie and that was it. and so we met at a restaurant on upper Connecticut Avenue and looked at the movie directory in the newspaper and found that the movie we thought was going to be there wasn't there and we had one drink and decided to go out to Old Angler's Inn out overlooking the Potomac River and have dinner and this is a very fancy country inn and we went out there and had a couple of martinis and we ordered dinner and had two bottles of wine with dinner we had a few after dinner drinks went back to the restaurant where we had started and they had a sidewalk cafe there and I sat at the sidewalk cafe with Joe and we were drinking coffee and ponies of Ramey Martang Grand Fien Champagne Cognac I didn't always drink that way, but I had a new credit card. Brand new American Express card. If I'd have kept drinking, I really could have died. And we were sitting there and it was about 1230 at night and she asked me to marry her. And I thought to myself, I had a moment of clarity like I'd never had before and I thought you know we both work for the same company we'd never make it to work because frequently I'd have to call her up in the morning and sometimes I couldn't awaken her and I'd go over and get her out of bed so she could go to work so she wouldn't get fired she had some money this gal she was driving a Mercedes and the secretary you know just doesn't usually drive a Mercedes I never knew how much money she had but you know I think maybe if I'd have had one more drink and asked her she would have told me and if she had I would have died because three years later she came into the equity of her estate quit work went down to the Virgin Islands built a ten room house which must have cost a half million dollars but she had inherited well over 27 million dollars and if I'd have known she had that money you'd have a different speaker tonight I'll guarantee you so if I had one drink more I never would have made it to Alcoholics Anonymous and if I'd have had one drink less she never would have asked me that question and when she asked me to marry her I thought to myself I can't marry this woman I can' t be a husband to my wife that I have now I can''t be a father to my children I am not a good brother I'm not a god son I'm no good employee I'm a good neighbor I'm just looking at her I said, no, I can't do that. And I got up and I paid the bill and I went home. Now, home, I was living with my mother, as I said. And I was in a room with my father-in-law. I was leaving in the sewing room. She had four bedrooms upstairs. She had one and my sister had one. The other two bedrooms, large bedrooms, were unoccupied. I was In the sewing rooms. Sewing room was a third the size of any of the bedrooms. And they had pushed me off into that room because it was less to clean up, I'm sure. They could find me in that room easier. I would roll out of bed and roll under the bed and, you know, things like that. It was a single bed. The other rooms had double beds in them. Some guy had been urinating on my mattress too there. and I figured he kind of thought that, you know, a single bed mattress is cheaper to replace than a double bed mattress so we'll leave him in there. But I went in there and I sat on the edge of that bed and I thought to myself, my God, what am I going to do now? What am I gonna do now I've exhausted every area that I know of. I've tried myself every way that I can try. there's no way that I can stay sober and I know I can't stay sober and I Know I Can't Stay I Can'T Stay Sober Because I CanT Stand The Pain When I Am Sober The Pain Was So Great That I I Wanted To Kill Anybody You, Me, I Didn'T Care I Was So Angry All The Time I Couldn'T Stand Living With Myself Or Anybody Else I Had To Drink In Order So I just, it would tamp that anger down in me so I just wouldn't feel so angry. Just so I wouldn't feeling like killing or dying, whichever the case would be at the moment. And I sat there and I thought to myself, you know, you've been to the doctors, you've bee to the psychiatrists, you have been to ministers, what are you going to do now? and i thought to myself or the thought came to me why don't you go to aa you haven't got any other place to go you can't live like you're living now it's all been thrown up in your face why don'T YOU GO TO AA and i said okay and i went to bed and i want to sleep i didn't have the leaping doze off, so I slept all night. Woke up the next morning. I didn't have a drink. I wanted to have a drink, but I didn' t have a drank. I took a shower and went downstairs and got in my car, and I went to work. I got to work, and I called the minister that I'd had a conversation with one time, and told him I was drinking more and enjoying it less, and that I wanted to go to that AA thing that he volunteered to take me to. He said one of the guys in parish is a member and I'll get him in touch with you and so on and so forth. And this guy made a classic 12-step call on me. He took me to a meeting out in Silver Spring, Maryland, and it was a cool September night and it Was raining in Drizzly. It was the style even for young men at that time, and I was a young man of 33 to wear hats. I lost my hat for the last time. I'd lost a lot of them in bars, but I left my hat in the AA meeting. I've never worn one since. I liked this guy immediately. He drove and talked to me over here the whole time, even paying attention to what he was doing. But he was telling me about himself, and he was telling me About Alcoholics Anonymous. And I didn't even try to interrupt him to tell him about me because I didn't want to go where I was going. I used to sell the Saturday Evening Post door-to-door when I was a kid, and I used to read the magazines so I could pitch them to the housewives as I was selling them. And I remember reading the Jack Alexander article in March 1941, and I knew that Alcoholics Anonymous was filled with derelicts and bums and near-do-wells and used-to-be's and a lot of has-beens and a few gray-haired little old ladies with blue tent who would jump us to Jesus and lead us in prayer and hymns. It was the Salvation Army all over again, and I'd seen them, and it was one of those put a nickel on the drum, save another drunken bum, and God, I didn't want to go there. that was one of a series of things that I started doing that I didn't want to do. I went anyway. I remember walking into that community center. It was a stone building that sat in the middle of a park. I remember walkin' down the steps. They were uneven. It was cold, drizzly September night. I remember walkedin' into the door of my first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, And there was a man standing there, who he was, I don't know. And he stuck out his hand and he said, Welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous. We're glad you're here. Come on in and have a cup of coffee. And I went in. I wasn't welcome many places. And it felt good to be welcomed somewhere. and i went in there and that particular night was a service meeting of alcoholics anonymous the fellow who 12-step me sponsored this guy and he was the dcm and he was showing a film strip something like circles of love and service which i was fascinated with then i've been bored to death with ever since but i sat there and i watched it and i uh he was talking about the structure of alcoholics anonymous and i was a businessman and i realized that that wouldn't work and uh the fellow who uh 12 stepped me assured me that it kept him sober for 12 and a half years so it must be okay. But as I walked into that room, there was about 80 people in the room. It was equally divided into two groups. There were 79 in one and I was in the other. I mean I felt that alien about the whole thing. I don't remember anything about the meeting except what I told you. Afterwards we went to the hot shop and I had a hot fudge ice cream sundae with marshmallow on it which i hadn't had one of those in years i just literally hadn't had one anything like that in years I was afraid to eat it I was worried I might throw it up but somehow or another I ate it he said it and I told him I said you know I might throw this up and he says if you do we'll buy you another one i said okay so i ate it somehow it stayed down and he and two other guys sat there and had me pinned in and i didn't ever i didn'T have my car and they 12-stepped me in the classic sense of the word and they asked me to make a promise to myself that i would go to a meeting every night for six weeks and that I would call this fellow once a day and that I would go to the business men's AA luncheons as frequently as I could, and I wouldn't take a drink a day at a time. I was not in good physical shape. I was very shaky internally, externally. My hands wouldn't stop flying around. and I went to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous every day and I called this guy who was my sponsor every day, followed the name of Buck and Buck somehow or another taught me how to live the steps of Alcoholic Anonymous and somehow or other taught me how to leave the 12 traditions of Alcoholix Anonymous and put me in a light that I had never seen before AA was not what I thought it was I was sober a few weeks and I went to my first AA round up or convention if you will Blackstone AA retreat so called been going on for years and years and years and I was down there and I heard some speakers and I don't remember who was there or who spoke or what they said but I remember becoming excited about it and these conventions such as we are at tonight are always exciting it's always exciting to see your old friends I was glad to see Ted and Margaret from Lamarck, Texas were on vacation and part of their vacation included a stop at the Flagstaff Roundup I was Glad to see Walt I hadn't seen him for a number of years, my friend Hank and Rebecca. Glad to meet Jim, hear his sad story. Jim's story this afternoon was interesting. It was interesting to me because I know today many people come to the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous through having gone through treatment. And Jim, after going through treatment 17 times and failing, is living proof that treatment doesn't work. I spent a ton of money at a psychiatrist, and that didn't work, I didn't learn anything about myself that was any better. the traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous are being assailed from all directions now and they want Alcoholics Anonymous to admit anybody who has a psychodrama problem and so we old timers say strange things like if you have a desire to stop drinking that's the only requirement for membership and only members participate in Alcoholics Anonymous. That seems to get some people angry. I don't know why. I don' t go to Overeaters Anonymous meetings and spout off or Gamblers Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous I don''t go because I don ''t belong there. I go to AlcoholicsAnonymous because I am an alcoholic. I'm not an alcoholic and a somebody earlier today was talking to me about being an alcoholic and on and on and on I'm just a simple alcoholic my father was an alcoholic I was raised in an alcoholic home I was abused and mistreated and that taught me how to be a sneak and a thief which were two things I needed to learn in order to survive my own alcoholism so I could get to AA and I'm very pleased that I got that training because otherwise I would have died all it did was just toughen me up so that I could live through my own alcoholism to the point where recovery was offered to me. I had been sponsored for a short time, and I recalled in my conversation with that psychiatrist and I asked my sponsor, I said, notice how I'm phrasing these things. I said Buck, when I went to that psychiatrist, I asked him if I should go to AA. And he said, no, he says, you're not ready for that yet. And I said, what did he mean? And Buck said, he meant you still had money. God, I love that answer. You know, that was such a cynical answer, you know, it just fit me. And I say, well, what does AA say about recovery? And he says Alcoholics Anonymous says if you don't take a drink or use drugs one day at of time, and you stay sober a month for every year that you drank, and if you used any other chemicals just add a year on top of that, at the end of that particular period of time you will not be cured of alcoholism because once an alcoholic always an alcoholic, but you will begin to be able to reason in your own mind and be as competent and capable as you can be, and as you ever will be. And you can start from that point. God, that was a good answer. That beat 33 years by God. You know, he was talking about maybe two and a half years. That was reasonable, it seemed to me. And I liked Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't want to go anywhere. I wanted to stay in Alcoholics Aanonymous. I didn't think I was going to stay sober but I knew these other people did I didn' t think that I could make it it amazes me yet today this September I'll be sober 25 years I just almost can't believe that I just Almost Can't Believe It it's no big deal four and a half years ago I had a conversation with my sponsor my current sponsor I've had only two since I've been in AA I called him up thanked him for his contribution that year to my sobriety thanked him for helping me he says you're going to be sober 20 years huh come on and I said yep how does it feel to be sober for 20 years and I say well Well, I think I'm getting ready to join a minority group in Alcoholics Anonymous. And he says, What's that? And I said, Old-timers who are still active in Alcoholic Anonymous? He said, What do you mean, old-timer? And I say, Well, he's heard when you had 10 years, you became a holy man. When you had 20 years,you became an old- timer. And I said, you said so yourself. I can remember you saying this fall in October the 31st when I have 20 years and become an old-timer. And he said, yeah, that's what I thought then. He said, now that I have 26 years, I think that you've become an Old-Timer at 25. My sponsor is still alive and still sober and still going to meetings. He's speaking at the Malibu meeting tonight, I understand. Still active in AA? Very active. And I suspect that this fall, when I get 25 years, I'll call him up and say thanks for helping me to get through my 25th year. He'll say something like, I thought 25 would be a good year for you to be an old-timer, But now that I'm sober for almost 32 years, 30 maybe would be right. He also told me something else in that conversation. And I told him I'd be sober for 20 years and he said, good for you. and I thought to myself you know being sober 20 years in AA don't you get any more than a good for you you know I didn't ask him but I thought and I though about it a second and I thougt to myself you know it is good for me and it really isn't good for anybody else I mean some other people have benefited from it but it's really good for me and it is good for me I in 1966 June I started dating a young lady an alcoholic synonymous she'd been sober about a year and a half longer than I had and after a very long and arduous and difficult courtship we were married on August the 12th of that year. She wasn't pregnant. She couldn't have been, not by me. I've lived almost 24 years of sober life with my wife Peg. She's been sober 26 and a half years. She makes me get her a cup of coffee when we go to meetings. Treats me like a newcomer. I had, we had been married for about six months and we were broke because I was, I had to pay a lot of child support and alimony and that sort of thing and we're just getting our lives together and had a lot things to buy and I had start a new house all over again like we alcoholics do and real estate people really love us because we buy and sell and buy and sell and make a lot of commission on drunks but we were living in an efficiency apartment we had two beds that were single beds that were wired together by her brother and he didn't do a very good job because frequently at night during exercise periods they fly apart. But I loved him for his effort. This was after Christmas in 1967, and we had gone out to Omaha to visit our folks. Dad was stationed off at Air Force Base. He was a Surgeon General out there, and then we'd go out to visit them over Christmas holidays and we came back, and we were discussing the fact that we had $3 in the checking account. There wasn't any in the savings account either, by the way. And we decided that we would open our little Christmas gifts that we hade for each other privately there at home. And they were little, and there wasn't much. Still owed it for the airplane tickets. We were going to eke along, and were going make it. We opened our gifts. It was kind of a sad Christmas day for us, although it was past Christmas, but our Christmas celebration, it was kind of a Sad Christmas Day for her because I hadn't been able to afford to get her much with the trip out to Omaha and she hadn't been able get me much. She was just kind of unhappy and we didn't have any money the usual newlywed new alcoholic wed people the usual problems of that and I felt kind of sorry under the situation so felt sorry for her because she was just sad I went into the bathroom and took off all my clothes got a big red bow and tied it around a very auspicious part of my anatomy came dancing out and said here comes Santa Claus here come Santa Claus we had a lot of fun we discovered that they didn't take much money to do that then we did it a lot And I think it was a very valuable start in a marriage. I think everybody who gets married should do that a lot. These new couples, new people in AA, you know, once a week is all I have time for. You know, I don't, in their 20s, Jesus, I'm not going to do that. I don' t understand them. But we've had a great marriage. Peg has stayed sober and she's very active in AA and she sponsors 35 or 40 gals. She's a good member of Alcoholics Anonymous. We don't see each other too frequently and therefore our marriage manages to stay together. we've ridden through difficulties in life just like everybody else has but somehow or another we managed to stick close to each other I had the same sponsor for a number of years into my sobriety finally got to the point where my first sponsor really didn't believe in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and only believed in the traditions when they fit his needs and I changed sponsors it was a very difficult decision I had to make in changing sponsors because Buck was one of those fellows that I went to about anything and I talked to him about everything I'd talk to him the psychiatrist and I'd talked to him about the psychiatrist saying that I wasn't ready for AA yet. I talked to him about solving life's problems and when life was going to be tacked back together again. I hadn't talked to her about my perversion until after I talked with her about that. I told him I'd taken these exams and these inkblot tests and it was just dirty pictures, they're all they were. And I talked too about that I told him the psychiatrist said that I was preoccupied with sex and Buck said you know you used to drink a lot Dick I know how much you drank and anybody drinks as much as you do I want to tell you something if you take the water out of alcohol you have nothing left but ether and that will anesthetize even the smallest parts of your body and so as a consequence anybody that's thinking about it all the time and not doing it, no wonder they're preoccupied with sex. He told me some very simple things about living. Taught me very simply how to live my life better than I had. And he taught me how to laugh again. Taught the validity of all that. But I needed something more. And as much as I didn't want to be disrespectful to the man that I thought had saved my life, I needed something stronger and more principled than what was being offered to me, more structured than what was being offering to me. I went out to California one time to speak and while I was out there I made arrangements. I was going down to Los Angeles to see my friend Clancy and to visit him and midnight mission and go to the Pacific Group meeting. I was on the plane in Sacramento flying down to Los Angels us, and I thought to myself, what I'm going to do is to ask Clancy to sponsor me. And I said, if I do that, he'll ask me to shave my mustache off because he doesn't sponsor people with facial hair. And I've had a mustache for years. AndI thought to myself, I don't care if he asked me to save my mustache or if I don' t care if he askedme to shavemy head. I want him to sponsor him. And so I surrendered to the principle of sponsorship at that moment in that plane. And I went down to Los Angeles and I asked him to sponsor me, and he said, I am no longer your friend. And I said, the hell you're not. And he has been. He's put a lot of joy in my life, he's put on a structure in my wife, and He's put a lot of principle in my life that was sliding by the wayside. Since I've been in AA, I've averaged four meetings a week. I sponsor 60-some-odd guys. I'm very active in AA. I've done all of those things. I've gone through the feeling that I was failing Alcoholics Anonymous because I didn't know what they were talking about when they were developing a conscious contact with God. I thought if anybody talks to God, they're goofy, they lock them up. So I still kind of think that way. If God answers them, I think thatway. And I thought to myself, that'll never happen to me and I'm going to fail AlcoholicsAnonymous. and I kept going anyway thinking that the people that were there knew something that I didn't know they talked about having a relationship people who were sober the same length of time I was they talked about having a relationship with God that I didn't understand at all I didn' t know what the heck they were talking about I really didn' t understand what they were talking about and I didn' t see how they could because I didn' And so I just went to AA. I went to meetings and I started sponsoring people and I was active in Alcoholics Anonymous and spent a lot of time with reading the literature of AlcoholicsAnonymous, spent a long time with other people in AlcoholicAnonymous every spare moment I had. All of a sudden something happened to me because during this period of time I'd done a lot of things. I had written a fourth step and done a fifth step. I've made amends to everyone that I could possibly make except those that are going to be lifelong efforts on my part because there are some things that I have done in my life that I can't make amends for on a direct basis and so I've just got to make my life a living amend somehow or another I owe mankind a lot of lives and I feel a responsibility to help someone else to save their own life as a sponsor. Not because I owe Alcoholics Anonymous but because I owed it to my higher power because I don't owe Alcoholic Anonymous anything. AlcoholicsAnonymous doesn't owe me anything but I owe my life to my higher power because my higher power gave that to me I never thought I would develop this feeling my sponsor was my higher power for a number of years if you think there's something wrong with that I want to suggest this to you if you're new in Alcoholics Anonymous your sponsors are your higher power good for you served me well for many years and I'd much rather someone say that their sponsor is their higher power and pretend they have some relationship with some power that they don't understand and to fake it. What ended up happening with me is that I was in a conference of Alcoholics Anonymous where the old-timers and AA was talking about a talk that Bill Wilson had made. And this talk that bill Wilson made, he was talking abut being in the living presence of God. and tonight as I stood up here before it got dark and I saw the mountains in the background and I said I saw all the people here Coinga talked about the eyes of the people at Alcoholics Anonymous they had something magic in them Karen talked about her fascination with us and Jim talked about the validity of sponsorship and what it all is and I thought myself the living presence of God that's where I am right now I am with the winners in Alcoholics Anonymous the winners in Alcoholic Anonymous are those people that are still active in AA who still sponsor people in Alcoholix Anonymous who still go to conferences of AlcoholicsAnonymous with the hope that they'll gain something in their life The winners in Alcoholics Anonymous are not those people who have been sober many, many years and they go to their one meeting a week or they go there one meeting every year and get their cake. The winners of AA are those people that are on the vomit line on a daily basis who place themselves available to help somebody else so that their life can be better. We do that for that reason. I am willing to help somebody else because it makes my life better it doesn't always make their life better but it always makes my wife better I do it with the hopes that I can help them but the result is that it helps me always helps me doesn't all always help them so here we are tonight Flagstaff, Arizona and we're here together and we are in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous we're enjoying the fellowship all weekend looking forward to hearing Hank tomorrow I'm looking forward to going back home and be with my family do those things that I do but I know that I won't be without you because I know that somehow hour or another, the people here this weekend have touched my life. The late Clint M., who failed to pick me up at the airport. It was a good beginning. I sat there for 15 minutes and cursed him, whoever he was. I'd never met him before. Then I began to think, you know, maybe this is the wrong weekend. By the time I'd overcome that, he came waltzing in, apologetically, and rightfully so. He may be sober longer than I am, but he's a puke. They gave me these guys too that have been squiring me around. Some guy named Charlie from, got sober in Nebraska. Some god named Jeff had 15 years sobriety today. And some guy named Paul who's been sober for a year and a half. They're very active in AA and love Alcoholics Anonymous, and I've loved being with them. And Jeff, you're sober 15 years today, and i want you to know that I mentioned earlier that perhaps you become a holy man after 10 years, and perhaps you can be an old-timer after 20 years, but at 15 years, you aren't anything but redundant. It's sad. But you just got to wait for 20 to be important again. So here we are in the living presence of God. We're with those people, especially those people that I know that I am who would go out of their way and put their life on the line to help me save my life and with people like that I don't want to be anywhere else as far as I am concerned that's the living presence of God and I want to do that and I don' t want to be there for the rest of my life one day at a time thank you very much Thank you very much.