Tenth Step on Paper — Keeping It in My Head Never Worked — Ranaldi C.
About This Speaker Tape
Rinaldi tells his story at the Monday Night Blue Chip Speakers meeting at the NABBA Club. He grew up in a close family where Wisconsin cousins drank and laughed in the backyard, and as a small child he was the runner who fetched the drinks. His dad put beer on his tongue to stop him crying. The first real sip came from his mother's bottle at a cousin's house, and the first real drunk came on a private school mission trip to Honduras, where he bought liquor, fooled around with a girl on a bench, and washed someone's feet at communion while blacked out. He was caught with liquor in his book bag on the way home and kicked out of school.
Public school broke him. Fear set in the day somebody threw a basketball that hit him in the back of the head and everyone — grown-ups included — laughed. From then on he chased the reckless, pot-smoking kids in his Gwinnett County neighborhood so he would never be the joke again. He drank to throw up, he drank to belong, and he cycled through the lover, the fighter, and the sad guy. Jail started at eighteen when older guys dropped weed into his McDonald's bag; from there he went to jail every year until sobriety. He fistfought his father in the front yard, stole and pawned his mother's gold jewelry, took $800 from his dad that was rent money, and slept in an abandoned car the night they finally wouldn't open the door.
The turn came in a hospital bed, handcuffed after a hit-and-run and a suicide attempt, when a pretty nurse had to hand him a bowl to relieve himself in and then wipe him. A judge who said he wanted to send Rinaldi to prison instead sent him to a residential program. At a Christmas Eve meeting he said something that got a stranger's attention — that stranger is his sponsor today. He worked the steps, made the A-B-C amends list (there were no Cs), and found his family gentler than he expected — his dad waved off the $800, his auntie told him to get straight first.
Today Rinaldi sponsors other men, bought two cars in sobriety and kept insurance on them longer than a month, and is set to finish school in early 2025. His mother handed him the keys to her truck to drive to dental school in Augusta. He practices the tenth step on paper because keeping it in his head never worked, meditates by sitting still and letting thoughts pass, and leans on his great-grand-sponsor's line — "you see the headline, man; did you read the file?" His sponsor's recurring question, "how free do you want to be?", is the one he carries into every day.
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