The Consequences Are Not the Bottom — The Bottom Is Admitting You Have No Power – Bart R.
About This Speaker Tape
Bart, sober since June 12, 1995 and a member of the Turn the Page group in Stuart, Florida, opens by saying AA is his family and that he used to want to smack people who called themselves grateful alcoholics — until he became one. He drives hard at Step One, insisting most alcoholics misread it: powerlessness without the second half (unmanageability from trying to manage what we can't) is just a parrot trick. He compares saying 'I'm powerless' while planning not to drink to pushing the start button on a car after someone stole the battery.
He traces his drinking from a New York childhood spent chasing the older boys with the bottle, through fifth-grade booze in a hallway closet, expulsion, juvenile detention, a humiliating first day at his father's business undone by a birthday gift bottle of Jack Daniels at the bus stop, eight wasted years 'in the rooms' from 1987 on where he refused to raise his hand, a 1994 relapse that began the morning he drove his friend Kevin to detox and bought a bundle two blocks away, and a final night of being refused service at bar after bar before Higher Power dropped him into the Utopia Young People's Group.
The spiritual spine of the talk is a sponsor named Eric who met him behind a showcase in a recovery store, read the Big Book to him, and walked him through the steps fast. Bart describes a verbal Fourth Step done over the phone with a near-dead sponsee whose Third Step prayer was 'Higher Power, don't ever let another living thing die because of my alcoholism' after he woke beside his dead puppy. He tells the amends to his cold father — 'maybe Danny loved your mother with all his heart, but his heart's only that big' — the realization that his own father had loved him the same limited way, and how he ended up taking that man into his home to die of pancreatic cancer.
He closes on carrying the message: a tattooed kid at Creedmoor who'd only let him visit if he brought a sandwich, the seven-year Monday drive to Prescott to chair a Big Book in a men's sober house, his wife Tara praying a newcomer into his life in Sedona when he was getting restless and irritable, and a memory of Eric on a hospital cot, leg being amputated in pieces, still reading the Big Book to anyone who came — at his anniversary meeting the whole room stood up as the sponsorship line was traced back to him.
Discussion
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