The Daily Reprieve Born from the Crucible of Defeat – Tom I.

Thanks for choosing Dicob Tapes. If you enjoy this tape, you can order other titles from us by calling 1-800-999-3381 or visit our website at www.dicob.com I hope you'll tell that fellow not to jump in my yard. It's kind of scary. Tom Ivester, an alcoholic, a member of the Primary Purpose Group of AA in Southern Pines, North Carolina. And let me fill you in on that old as rat in the barn information just for frame of reference. If I make it to one week from tomorrow, it will be 44 years since my last drink. at least I hope and pray it was my last one my sobriety day what I count as my recovery date is the day I came into Alcoholics Anonymous which was February 2nd of 57 I'll elaborate on that a little more as we go along that's always kind of a mixed feeling when there are countdowns and you happen to be the oldest rat in the barn. And in some ways, it's a tremendously gratifying thing, and in other ways, I was over at a meeting in Toronto last week and the fellow in the room that was the oldest guy was 55 years. And what a great feeling to have some seniors there in case I get in trouble. So it kind of reminded me of a thing that I like to think about sometimes because when you get older in the program, you really question your utility and vitality and all that kind of stuff. And so I liketo think about a thing where I'm from in addition to letting his son land out of the airplane. Why on earth would anybody jump out of an airplane? I don't know. That in addition tothat, the area I live in is right by Pinehurst, which is the home of the U.S. Open and is a magnificent area and it's also horse country we have a tremendous number of I mean real snooty horses some of those suckers cost more money than I make in a year and live in barns better than my house and it is just beautiful to see so when I've got rich Yankees in town I always take them around and introduce them to the horses And with those trips, something struck me that I didn't understand. You'd see these beautiful pastures with the rail fences and these magnificent horses, and every once in a while you'd see an old mule standing in there. Well, I always figured the guy got drunk at a horse sale or something. He thought he bought an Appaloosa until he woke up and looked at it. A mule's not a handsome beast. and I was intrigued by that and I asked some of my horsey friends why they did that and it turns out that a mule has a sort of a pacifying effect on horses and those high bred horses like high bred humans sometimes just get goofy when they get bred too high and they're dangerous they just sort of run into stuff anyway, it's just dangerous for them so they found out that these mules kind of settle them down. The minute I heard that explanation, I knew what old-timers were for in alcoholic synonyms. We all got a place. And even though the zip sometimes seems like it's gone, I think our job is basically just sort of hold it in place and don't let it go to the moon, I think is what we're for. I'm just delighted. I told that young lady that with one day that something I hope she remembers and I remember is that the darkest day of my life was the doorway to the brightest days I've ever known. Isn't that a strange kind of... I've got to find, is there water anywhere around here? I haven't even started and I'm already wanting to drink. But that is so true. Thank you, Jim. How did you get to be the chairman of the talker thing? I could tell that. Real quiet. Thank you very much, y'all. Just a minute, I'll go to work. I want to thank you, number one for being here I really have appreciated the conference I just want to congratulate you on an excellent conference good meeting room good crowds, good spirit good level of enthusiasm fantastic greeters I've never been greeted better except the international where they outnumbered the participants I think but fantastic greeter fantastic transportation folks they took adventuresome routes but we ultimately got there great hospitality rooms i'm telling you man that was killer stuff i haven't been to the restaurant but once since i've been here i've had a fair grazing man on that stuff and it was great i want to congratulate that congratulate you on an excellent outline of out uh lineup of speakers That's good stuff. And I've been, Kendall's been talking to me solid all day long, so I know she's got a lot to say. Been trying to tell me how to do it. And so I do want to congratulate you on that and on the excellent participation in the panels and all of that. It's just been a great spirit and a great conference. I've bee intrigued. We were chatting a little bit about this before the meeting. I've be intrigued a bit by, I'd love to know the history of this conference. Because I was just, you know, just for a point of perspective, I was kind of musing on where this conference must have come from. Because 59 years ago we were in year 1941. And in year 1941 in Alcoholics Anonymous there were fewer members in the entire world than are sitting in this room tonight. And this thing had to be a heroic effort by a few stout-hearted souls and what a tremendous legacy to respect of folks who've kept that commitment, who've seen it through and have left a legacy of not only passing it on but genuine service that's something to behold. If I'm not mistaken, this thing is close to, I think there's one conference in this country that I know of that's older and I just think that's a tremendous, tremendous thing. And so I'm just really delighted to be in your company. What I want to do is tell you, yeah, I'll send it at anonymity. I've just got to get this out of the way. We've got the strangest approach to anonymity I've ever seen. Kenna was telling me that in California she's only got five letters in her name, and when they're anonymous they put three of them in her anonymity, MCR. And we have a strange approach. I was at a professional meeting a while back. It wasn't nothing to do with AA. and we were on a coffee break and a young lady and I were out having a coffee just chatting you know like you do with folk that's just a professional deal who are you where are you from gave her my full name rank serial number children's name all that stuff and all at once she said are you Tom High I said well yeah in some circles that's how I'm known and it was exactly what you would expect She'd been listening to some tapes. She was in the program, and she recognized the voice. And I thought, isn't it a strange commentary on an anonymous fellowship that my anonymous identity is better known than who I really am? Honestly, sometimes tempted to give up. Well, I want to tell you a lot about drinking whiskey and all that stuff. I don't know exactly why I'm an alchide. There are a lot of theories about that. geez, you can get all you want and just take your pick. I'll tell you one I like a lot is the one that sort of springs out of the notion that we alcoholics are not quite like average people, that we just tend to have a little extra drive, a little extracromosome or something that just puts us into a little different level of function in this world. We tend to be a little keener, a little brighter, a little more creative, tremendous imagination. And it's just mind-boggling about how brilliant we tend to be. I've never had that discussion with a non-alcoholic. But isn't it an interesting theory that we are somehow cut above? and there is a little school of thought and some evidence to support that. Now, I don't think anybody's over at NYU studying the fantastic alcoholic brain. I don' t believe so. But I like that notion, and there IS some evidence to support the idea that, for example, you know, I had people tell me I had potential all my life, and the fact of the matter is I did. Yeah, when I went in, I'll give you just a couple examples. When I went in the military, I loved it for about 30 minutes. Then I met the first guy in charge I ever met, and that man talked to me like a dog, and I never saw him for my life. And I just didn't like it. It went downhill from there. I didn't know anything about it. I didn' t let me fly an airplane. He let me hardly get on one. I was a ground pounder and stationed down in South Carolina in a place with knee-deep sand in the hot, hot weather. And none of it made sense. Here we would go out with a big old pack on our back. I never knew what was in that sucker and didn't care. I just wanted to put it down. It was heavy. Wearing an old iron hat out there, and it's 100 degrees, plowing through that sand. And they got vehicles. They got more vehicles than soldiers. and what they do with them is line them up and wash them every day they put a line down to make sure every radiator cap is perfectly in line nobody rides the dumb things here we go walking past them slogging through that sand I said, my God, explain that to somebody it made no sense in spite of my marvelous adjustment to tell you about the military evaluation system. Out of 1,000 people, I was picked out as one of the outstanding folks. And I was a doofus in the first order. I promise you that. I made Gomer Powell look like a hero. But they figured out with that military genius that I had that wonderful alcoholic mind, I guess. And they picked me out as a leader of men and gave me an opportunity to go to leadership training in the OCS and become a shavetail. And so that was great. I leaped at it, and about the time I got into school, shavetail means a second lieutenant. I saw somebody say, what's a shavatail? And I got in the school, and at about that time, they found out what they had on their hands. And instead of becoming an officer and gentleman, I was moved up to the great state of Alaska. It wasn't a state then. It wasn' t nothing. It was just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere, and I was stationed for the most part on a rock in the Middle of the Bering Sea somewhere called Adak. Adak! My job was to stand there like some kind of an idiot holding a gun, and if a Russian came up there, I' m supposed to shoot him for stealing the rock. I'd have given him that sucker on a bet. Well, that didn't make any sense to me. So a lot of interesting things happened. I developed alcoholism while I was in there. I don't think those conditions caused it, but what do they call it? Exacerbated the problem. It ran that sucker up about ten years, I think. Well, here I am. Now, that's a great military start with kind of a gray zone in the middle. And remember that guy started out, leader of men, bright young guy, being an officer and a gentleman. Thirty-eight months later, I was kicked out with an undesirable discharge for alcoholism. They always had a marvelous ability to screw up the best thing. The first year I was on the street, went to work for a company, I was voted salesman of the year in the biggest city of North Carolina. Fired the same year. There's always evidence. always had that tendency to be overrated. And I'd go out looking for a job, man, I just wanted a job. And they'd want to put me in charge of something. And I knew better all the time. And so they'd hire me and my career pattern was to go work my way down. I honest to God don't remember ever having a promotion on marriage or any other thing. I don't know if I ever had one, never had a raise unless they raised the minimum wages. So it was that incredible ability that I think it was evidence of potential. But the fatal flaw with me was that alcoholism would absolutely subvert anything that came into my life. And so I like that theory. I don't think that's exactly where it came from. I was just for a whole bunch of reasons. I'm not going to go into causation. I've got to hurry. It won't sound like it to y'all, but I'm going to talk as hard as I can. The only guy here to make me sound like I'm talking fast is Jim Holmes. Yeah, I'm no longer going to the causation stuff. Just suffice it to say that I was sort of set up like most everybody I've ever seen. I Was a guy that was kind of uncomfortable with this business of living. When I was in my mid-teens, I found that marvelous stuff and it was magic for me. What I found was a great solution to the problem of my life. I'd have been stupid not to drink. And so I just took to it. I wasn't an alcoholic. I was just a guy who found something great and the logic prevailed that more would be better and so I had more. And I just fell in love with that stuff. That became my way of life. I wasn't an alcoholic. I was just a guy who wanted party time. I loved that kind of environment. I loved the people who drank, the places they drank, the stuff they drank. The behavior they got into when they drank and that just became the norm for me. That's what I did. I was a drinking guy and I had a drinking lifestyle. I did nothing, absolutely nothing that didn't involve alcohol. I mean nothing. Work, recreation, play, talking, sleeping, whatever. It all involved alcohol. Not an alcoholic, just a guy who drank a lot, and that was the norm for me. There's a place in our book, I'll just jump into the heavy text here, a place on our book where it describes something that I've experienced God knows how many times, where I would go through some god-awful orgy of booze and wake up sick unto death. God knows, those awful, awful hangover mornings. And hanging over that John, gagging, eyeballs run out on their stems, throwing up my toenails, and absolutely sweating bullets one minute, freezing the next, and not sure if I was going to live or die, and not caring which. I mean, it was just brutal city. and then as soon as I was physically capable of doing so you know what I'd do take another drink and what the book talks about is how people who observe this are baffled by the behavior God, I was kind of baffLED by it but folks that would make no sense to any rational thinker makes eminent sense to the guy who has it, because that's what I did. The abnormal thing for me would have been to not drink. So I was a party guy, didn't want to let the party dry, stop. I wanted to just sort of drive that sucker from now on. I'm a pretty clean living type of guy. I never did get on too many, there weren't too many things around back then when they had stuff, but I did get into speed a fair amount. Now, I admired speed. That stuff just did something for me, man. I could go three or four days nonstop and absolutely wide open and then finally run down. And when I'd come out of the fog, I'd look like a raccoon, you You know, it was just a bit of a dark circle. But I was the kind of a dude I was. Now, it Was kind of ugly to an observer, but it made a lot of sense to me. And I'll tell you the God's truth. If I could have done that even with the baggage attached, I'd be doing that tonight. I loved that dirty living. And I'd be doing it. I'd me in some old sultry jazz joint tonight just sucking up that smoke, even if I didn't smoke. Well, unfortunately or fortunately, I wasn't to be able to continue because I developed alcoholism. Now, I don't think I didn' have a clue that any of that happened until I got sober and AA. Started most everything I know, I know by hindsight. and when I got an A and started to look back it was clear to me that somewhere in my 18th year yeah I only had about two years of that kind of raucous crazy drinking and then then I had that experience that you hear described here so much Jim described it today this thing of crossing a line you know it's not written anywhere but but we all kind of identify what that means that we cross the line from whatever and that's what I did when I was 18 years old I crossed the line with absolutely no awareness whatsoever from that kind of wild, crazy drinking into uncontrolled drinking or alcoholism. Now, I drank about as much as I could before I was an alcoholic. The compelling difference after I crossed that line was that if I took one drink of anything with alcohol in it, I simply could not predict my behavior. I had not a clue what I would do. and now I don't know about you but I never once suspected that the first drink posed any danger for me when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous and heard people talking about it's the first get drink to get you I thought that's the dumbest thing I'd ever heard grown folks say I mean that made no sense to me nothing happened when I took the first drank except I just took another drink and then another one and then woke up married in Alabama or somewhere but I never associated that with the first round I associated that with irresponsibility lack of discipline, being amoral I just associated it with a lot of stuff that had to do with my human frailty never once did I even connect that idea in first rank. And so that was the way I just sort of took off, and from the time that happened, my life became just a seemingly endless series of bizarre kinds of things, of waking up in strange places with not a clue how I got there. I was one of those guys who had considerable difficulty with blackouts, and I tell you, they're funny after about 10 years. They are not funny at the time. I don't know of anything more terrifying in the annals of alcoholism than blackouts. When you wake up with an absolute blank of periods of time in your life that are gone, I'm not talking about going to sleep. I'll give you one example of the type of blackout. I was driving in Charlotte, North Carolina one night, and the last thing I remembered was bumping over some railroad tracks on the main street there in the city at the old train station. I remember that the next morning I woke up sitting at the base of a cliff somewhere and I had not a clue where I was and you know how studious drunks can be when you're sort of in that comatose deal I remember laying there sun coming through that window and I'm laying there looking at that cliff trying to figure out how I did that and thought my God, I should be dead and there's not a wrinkle on the car And I was thinking about that heavy weight for a long time. Then I finally looked out the other window, and, well, God, there was a road there. I drove up there. That was 100 miles from the last recollection I had. That's scary. That's scaring. But that was rather commonplace, and so it just became that kind of bizarre stuff. I came to my senses one night, and I was trying to duke it out with a couple of guys. And I had pretty good firepower, but I couldn't stand up. If I could have kept my feet, I think I could handle them. But they, well, they got me under control. And who these guys were, I thought it was somebody still throwing me out of a bar or something. And who it was was, you know the old, I don't know if they still do this or not, but they used to make up trains in a switchyard, you knows, where they would take that and they'd move stuff around. And when they wanted to move a train over somewhere, they'd throw a big old lever that would cause a rail to move and it moved the train. Well, who these guys were were two fellas walking in front of a freight train pulling the switch. And they found me literally draped across the rails, head over one, feet over the other. And so I'm trying to fight them for getting me off the rails before the train got there. I mean, it was just that kind of stuff, and I could go on forever with that stuff. Let me just sort of boil it down this way because I know that I started at nine on the nose, so I want to be real precise about time and I will lie just a little. What my life basically became it seemed to me you heard the old saying that the chains of habits go on so gently that you don't feel them until they're too strong to break. Now mine certainly wasn't a gentle process but the process was so subtle that I didn't even know I was in trouble until I was way past the point of no return And when I got sober and looked at my life, if I put it on a graph, it would look about like this. I would make a start here, fail, start over. And my life became just as seemingly in the series of failures, new starts. Failures, new stars. And what I didn't recognize was that every time I failed, started over, settled for a little less and a little less and a little less, until finally I was living a way of life that I barely knew existed in my early days. When I got out of the military, I just bombed away, and I went wherever drunks went. You know, I didn't want to go to North Carolina. I'd seen the city, and I didn' t want to be down there in Mayberry. I wanted to be out where the lights and noise were, and so I just wandered away,and one of the places that I migrated to was up in the Detroit-Flint, michigan area not not really a marvelous place to be after and i spent a few years in flint michigan that i took i took some pride in it a while back flint was voted the worst city in in america to live and i was kind of proud of that i thought geez at least i did that you know i kept bringing brought it down that's where i that's Where I Crashed and Burned i went up there I worked in General Motors until my reputation got in front of me. And then, in a city of half a million people, I was unemployed darn near unemployable. And, you know, I'd get some old piece of a job or something like that and come up there, go and get some room in the house, stay a couple weeks, and then get drunk. Either forget where I worked or just whatever. And fired, just that crazy kind of stuff. The last year that I drank, i hope to god that i never forget one second of that that i recall i hope i hope even more that i ever get so comfortable or arrogant in my sobriety that i'm unwilling to share i never want to get diluted into the notion that i was just some fellow with a little bit of mild aggravation who woke up and smelled the roses i don't want to get that. Because that last year of my existence out there was almost a subhuman kind of an existence. I basically lived on the streets. I would be, I mean, I'd hole up every once in a while, but my most frequent address was a place called a Rialto Theater or the street itself, whatever, you know, just some place I could hole up. And I used to say that during that period, I live by my wits, but that's not really an accurate description. I live bei my lack of character, you could say, in that I don't know of much that a man can do that I haven't done. That's certainly no Wild West macho statement. I'm deeply ashamed of the life that I lived, but that's what it was. When you live in a jungle, you survive by the rules of the jungle or you don't survive. And so I'm not seeking anybody to make amends to. It was just the food chain of that environment, and some days I ate, the next day the other guy ate. It was a matter of survival by whatever means you could. I'm proud of the fact that I hustled and bummed and connived from people, that I robbed other people. I'm no proud of that by any stretch of the imagination. But that's what I did. I'm a predatory criminal. I was just a guy that was, you know what I'm talking about. I don't want to forget that. I don'T want to FORGET selling my blood five bucks a throat. That's what my kind lined up did. That's WHAT I did. And if they'd have taken me, I'd have let them suck me dry. That's just WHAT it was like. And I pray God that I never, never forget that for one second. It'd be nice, many of you, I've got many friends in here, and many of you are well aware, that my story was not to end in a real heartwarming kind of a way. I was one who wound up doing the kind of thing that I know every alcoholic in this world fears doing. Thank God most don't. Most of us who wake up with panics after a blackout take a look around, realize we've dodged a bullet again, take off and do it again. And, God, I did that hundreds of times. But one morning I woke up in jail there in Flint, no novelty, no novelty. My God,I was a regular there. Most of the guys locked up, about everybody that worked there. And I assumed I was in there for the same as always, either drunk, hustling, or whatever, just street behavior. And after I was awake a while, a jailer came by. I knew him quite well, and I asked him when I could get out. And normally he would say 10 o'clock. That was the drunk getting-out time. And he didn't say 10 o'clock. He said, I hope never, and walked off. And I had not a clue what he was talking about. And then some of the other guys in there told me the night before, driving blind, drunk, blacked out down the main street of that city, had run down and killed two people. And my—I don't know if you could imagine a response to that. I sure couldn't. But my response, I guess, was pretty predictable, that the mind only takes in what it can handle, and I understand that now. But I just pushed that away, and if I knew I was capable of anything but I couldn't deal with the fact that I had done something like that, the only time I'd ever been to jail I didn't try to get out. And then somebody learned that I have family in North Carolina, one policeman I think, and contacted them and told me I was in deep trouble, and so they came up, negotiated my release on bond, got an attorney, he was charged with manslaughter. I didn't want to get out. I was afraid to get out. I was ashamed to be breathing. And I'll tell you, people who don't know much about alcoholism will tell you that if it ever gets bad enough, you'll quit. Don't you believe that for one second? That when I left there, I knew that I could not...I would be physically incapable of picking up a drink. I didn't believe I could do it. And I walked, of course I drank. My God, a stage sober day and a half walking the streets, and of course that's right. And from July to November, like nobody I've ever seen, and then November the 19th was the date of what I hope and pray was that last drink. Finished off a bottle of gin, about that much, went down for the trial. I had no defense. I couldn't even tell them what I'd done. They had to tell me what I've done. I was obviously found guilty and sentenced to five to 15 years in the Michigan State Penitentiary. Yeah, I'd been a street character, and I'd be in jail God knows how many times. But they were always sort of short-term lockup things. And where I was going, I had no illusions about it. I'd hustled around there with guys that had been in and out of that joint. I know that it wasn't Disneyland, that it was bad news. And when that sentence was passed, it really tells me something about alcoholism That I had an instinctive reaction of fear any human being would But almost simultaneously the most real sense of relief I'd ever known Because I knew it was over It was over It wouldn't be anymore Not optimism or hope I wasn't even looking for anything like that I just knew it Was done And I would be gone And that's what I wanted Walked into that institution the next day mighty beat up, mighty sick young fellow. Didn't know how sick I was until I started to clear up. And sat in my cell first month I was in there, never engaged in a conversation with a single person that didn't ask me a direct question. I was way past that. I Was almost comatose. I was so isolated and withdrawn that there was no social interaction. I sat in myself, did anything I could do to keep from thinking. And then one day a guy, it's amazing when you think about it, at least when I think of it. It's amazing. If you look at a young human wrecking ball like this, it just sort of crashed through and screwed up everything he ever touched and then commits a crime for which there is no adequate punishment. There isn't an adequate punishment. And sitting in a maximum custody penitentiary, who on earth would bet a nickel on any outcome that had any meaning from that. And I assure you, I wasn't looking for anything. One day, I'll tell you what happened to start turning it around. One day I was called out for an interview by a guy, a little social worker who'd just graduated, and I think it was the only job he could get. He came to work there, and his job was to interview people like me. Now, he interviewed me. I'd had a lot of people do that. He diagnosed me as having a lot of trouble with booze. A lot of people had done that. And heretofore, every time somebody had concluded that I had a lot of trouble at booze, they would give me well-intended but useless advice like, why don't you quit? Or don't drink so much. You're always so stupid when you drink. Well, that was all nice. It just didn't fit my world. And this guy said something that I'd never heard before. He said, we have an AA group here, and I think you ought to go. It wasn't an order. We're talking about leverage. It wasn'T an order up there. Nobody said you've got to go over there, you've got to do this. It was just a flat statement. You've got a drinking bottle. They fix it over there. And I walked into my first meeting, Groundhog Day of 57, and not a clue what to expect. Not a clue. Just like you were, probably. I knew it was going to be a little religious. I just felt that coming. I knew that had to be, if you're going to help drunks, somebody had to sing over them and blubber over them or something. And it wasn't that too far off either when I got there. It's funny how we kind of emulate things, isn't it? If you look at our opening procedures, they don't look a hell of a lot different than they do in the church for that. We don't do the singing. We're not to that yet. but I hope we don't get there they got up and read the stuff it sounded like poetry to me I didn't know that was the stuff you're supposed to do they'd read that stuff and it sounded wonderful philosophy had absolutely no meaning to me whatsoever they did pray said that's for any prayer just like we did and then they introduced the speaker and I will always be grateful for the guy that spoke that day but not that day This guy, they introduced him. His name was Shy Walker, a marvelous fellow. And he stood up and told his story. Now, I'd heard drunks tell stories, but not their own. And this one had to be. There ain't nobody going to make up a story like that. That thing was awful. And I couldn't figure out why he was doing that. I mean, this idea of it helps me to help you was pretty foreign to the world I'd been living in. And that's an amazing thing. And the most amazing thing that happened was that I came back to the next meeting. I stayed in there three and a half years. I never missed a single meeting the whole time I was there. Now, you can hurry up and believe it wasn't because of any lightning striking or great revelations or deep commitment. I'm home at last. None of that. I think there were two reasons that I stayed on the program. One, I think the only thing that really brought me back, well, there were too many. One, I was so beaten, so beaten that I was just docile. You know, I would have followed any herd, I think. And I know that was part of it. I just didn't have resistance. And the other thing, though far more important, was that guy who spoke at my first meeting was either gifted or had developed or whatever. He practiced the most incendiary, contagious program of enthusiasm that I'd ever seen in my life. I'd never seen anybody that so lightened up a place when he walked in. What a great guy. And I know without any question that that spirit that I felt, that sense of maybe there's life here is what brought me back. It's like a moth going to that light. I didn't have a clue where I was going. Now, I didn' t fall in love with Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn''t think I belonged. You know, I really knew deep down that I was a guy with a lot of potential. And if I could ever get off on the right foot, man, I'd revolutionize this world. That's what I believed. I thought I was too young. They kept me in there because would not have been kept in a maximum custody penitentiary with, you know, five to 15-year sentences. But my record was so bad, I mean, just not criminality, just irresponsibility. And they knew if they ever showed me daylight, I'd just wander off, I'm sure. So I never got out the whole time I was in there. And so I didn't like it. I thought I was way too young. And back then, well, I don't think it might have been somebody here before I was and got a new date. But there were no 24-year-olds in the program that I ever met for a long, long time. I was the youngest guy in that group by several years. I was a youngest guy in every meeting I ever attended for several years and that's wonderful when you look back on it but it ain't so wonderful if you're sitting there and the guy beside you outweighs you 20 years we can talk about identify don't compare all we want to but I guarantee you're going to compare and you're gonna come up short and so I didn't feel, you get a lot of help too around here from crusty old dudes like me. And guys would come up to me, how old are you, boy? 24. My God, are you going to quit drinking? Well, I was sort of thinking about it. Oh man, you don't even know what drinking is. I was just getting started at 24. That's really encouraging to a guy who was just sort of hanging by a fingernail and not even wanting to hang too bad. Or the others who'd come by and, not literally, but kind of figuratively pat you on the head. They'd say, My, my, my. How old are you, son? 24. Oh, my God. Aren't you lucky. Aren't You Lucky. I'd say oh yeah. Inside, you know, I'd say, how lucky can you get? Yeah, I'm 24 years old. I'm sitting in a Massachusetts penitentiary. My life's over before it even started. I've committed a crime too bad to even think about. I'm standing in a geriatric ward called Alcoholics Anonymous with a bunch of old warts that ought to quit drinking. Fun time. Yeah, great, great run of luck. I was not a happy camper. I really did not fit, but it just kept going back. Now, I've always been a reader. I read drunk or tried to, but I've already been a Reader and when I first got in we didn't have much in the way of publication. We had about a dozen, and I read all of those right off the bat. It's a strange thing that the words are important, but it's kind of like the book says. Self-knowledge or book knowledge isn't enough. It's about how we get it into action in our lives, isn't it? Well, I mean, I had learned the lingo a bit, but I'll tell you what the real turning point for me that was significant where some real solid sobriety recovery started to occur. Didn't mean for it to, but I'd been regular, been there. And I went to a meeting one day about nine months into it, and the guy spoke. He was from Flint. He spoke for the entire meeting about nothing but the inventory process. Four-step. Went into great detail. Talked about the criticality of writing the thing. And so when he finished it, I went back to my cell, and I said, okay, I'm going to do that. Now, I'd sort of been thinking about how such a nice guy as me got in such a mess. And I'd come to some conclusions, many of them over time. And I'll tell you just real quick. I'm going to have to hurry here. I'll say this real quick where I was at the time. Now, this is a pretty pitiful story. I hope you kept your napkin because you're probably going to need it. My family broke up. It didn't break up. My father just left when I was four years old. I remember the day that guy left. I didn't know where he was going, but I knew he wasn't coming back. And I don't know why, I just knew that. And he didn't. You know, I never saw him twice in my life. And they were, I mean, coming up, both times frustrating, disappointing stuff. Well, that was bad enough. But then she found another one. And she married this turkey. And when he came in, I'm a little boy. And here he comes with this stupid little old jerk of a guy named Alvin. And I hated that dude the day he drove up. And my sister used to be older than me. We're twins now. I don't know how she did that. But here he came, and she got to call the thing out of it, and I had to call it Daddy. And every time I'd call that sucker Daddy, I would just burn. Now, I'm talking about a little boy. And I thought, my God, anybody who grew up under that kind of junk would have to be a little twisted, and I was. And so what I meant to do was write that little story about the pathos of Alvin and his influence on me. Now here I'm a 200-pound guy, 6 feet tall, and I'm letting that run. Jesus. It made sense until I started to write it down. And then it made no sense whatsoever. Now, I had sat down, and what I meant to do was write that. I wrote about two lines of what I had in mind, and then with no intent whatsoever, I mean none, it was as if I hit a wall, and all at once the charade was done. Old Hemingway called that the time when a person comes face-to-face with themselves, and that's exactly what happened. I came face-To-face myself, and it was done, and almost in one motion, almost in one motion with no thought preparation other than just a little bit of thought it it just started to pour out i've heard a lot of people say it's hard to take an inventory maybe it is i could not have not taken an inventory that day if i wanted because it was like Vesuvius it just absolutely erupted and yeah all it was was a tortured young guy just sort of pouring his heart out. That's all. But I'll tell you this. When I got through, I had three pages of scrawl, really. It wasn't legible by anybody but me, but it wasn't written for anybody but me. I'll show you what it was. It was without question the most important day's work I've ever done, bar none. More important than the day I was married, more important than today my son was born or my daughter or my career or anything else because just like my friend said all of those things are suspended from that point of recovery far more important because what happened to me that day were two significant things one i knew i was alcoholic i accepted that at the core of my being in that process not that day but that that was the foundation for knowing that I'm alcoholic I accepted that as an absolute truth in my life I have never doubted it for one second since not one I'm one who is fully convinced that our program is not about achievement or attainment or affirmation those are all nice things but they have to be born out of the bitter crucible of defeat and that process of surrender happened for me that day i've come close to drink it a few times in early years but never once with the old delusion that well maybe i'm not really like that no i know i am the other thing that happened that day is that i became a real member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Didn't sign anything, didn't tell anybody. But from that day to this, I have never been the lost face in the crowd. I've never been to a single meeting, including this one, that I didn't know exactly why I was there. Not one. It changed the character of the game. I became a purposeful member of that group in a program of recovery. Well, that was critically important, but it isn't enough. What is it that turns the life around? Certainly that's the foundation. And I'm trying to think of a way to do it succinctly that you take a guy like that And fortunately, I was in a group, an excellent group in that penitentiary that was committed to carrying out the Fifth Tradition, committed to a plan of action. And I got pushed into action long before I was ever ready or really willing to do so. And how tremendously important it was for me to get out of that shell of fearful isolation and start engaging in a process that made me belong to what I was about. That was tremendously important. But there's a place in Silkworth's chapter that says that for people with problems of this magnitude, like alcoholism, that frothy emotional appeal won't suffice. That we have to have a solution that has depth and weight. now certainly that experience of the foundation of surrender put me in position for a new life but a new life doesn't automatically happen just admitting defeat and just stopping drinking never made me anything but miserable what do you do with a life I tell you the best place that I've ever seen and I'm hearing a little more now but I just kind of walked into this one day and it just made so much sense to me. I never have really been a primary 12 and 12 guy, it's okay, but 12 and 11, I got here about the same time, and I always thought of it as a newcomer or something. I just never did get into it that much. But there's a place, of all places in the preface of that book, that I think describes so clearly what this process that we call recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous is about and what this what the new life that's generated is based in and it's a real simple little thing I can almost quote it but it won't be accurate it'll be close enough you can check it out and find out if I'm lying it says something like this that our steps the program of study in the steps are a set of principles spiritual in their nature that tells me what the tools are that they're spiritual principles and then listen to what it says which if practiced as a way of life practiced as way of life not seminar or studied or written or worked those are nice things but that's not what it says if practiced as a way of life every day of my life i have to live in the spirit of those steps they're a set of principles that if i live live by some things happen a couple of things are mentioned one says it will expel the obsession to drink now that's a powerful promise that if i will simply but i like the word expel because it means to force out when you read our book it's a little confusing because it makes it sound like the obsession is removed by lobotomy or something that has just kind of pulled out got to read a little further because what it says is that what we have is a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of our spiritual condition we practice these principles as a way of life and as new principles come in the old deals are pushed away they're expelled and so now mine has been expelled for a long time i haven't had an obsession to drink for something like 38 years that dude's been pushed away but it ain't far old charles is sitting on it right over there just holding it for me all i gotta do to revisit that sucker is what quit practicing those principles as a way of life and look who's knocking at my door and the other thing it says which is a magnificent promise but it sounds like like a nursery rhyme almost when you first said it. It says, We'll enable the sufferer to become happily and usefully whole. I'm here to tell you that ain't poetry. That is an absolute promise. That happened for me inside a maximum custody penitentiary. The first day of absolute freedom I ever enjoyed in my life, my entire life, was inside a minimum custody penitenciary. A man's spirit isn't combined. And freedom has to do with some basic kinds of principles. That cage was the lightest prison I was ever in. The prison of my own skin was the most severe one that I was ever in, and I became a free man in every way except physically. I became usefully whole, got active in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, got doing the things that we do, helped start groups inside of Maximum Custody Penitentiary. Started one in a mental health, it wasn't health, it was mental ill health unit, really. Interesting place. Sometimes we'd have ten meetings going on at the same time at the same table. I don't know if any of them got better, but boy, it lit my life up. Back then, Well, back then the addiction, alcoholic thing was not even much of a factor. It was barely mentioned. About the only thing we had in there then was horse junkies, heroin guys. And the thing we noticed was that when winos talk, junkies nod. And when junkies talk, winos nod. And Narcotics Anonymous came out just shortly before I came into A. And we in the recovery group there in Jackson Prison helped start a group of narcotics and arms. I was not an addict, but I was a good neighbor. And we helped start the group, and one of the things that I'm deeply grateful for, that group meets to this day. Tremendous thing that what pauses the joy. Well, when I got out, I'll just tell you one other thing that happened. There's some miraculous things happened in my life that, and I'm a pretty practical guy. I'm not a real kind of a mystic fellow. I'm Not One of Those Foggy Type of Thinker guys. I like a very practical approach to things. I like, I like the spiritual life that's part of my every day, part of work life, part of everything that I do. And so I want to practice this spiritual program as a way of life and not some other kind of dimension. And so, I have pretty practical ideas about things like miracles always are kind of a mystical thing to me. Until I started to put it in terms I understood is that the miracles that I see happen are what occurs when preparation and opportunity meet and God handles the introduction. And that's exactly what happened. When I'm prepared and an opportunity comes, the miracle happens. And don't explain it, it just happens. And so that's sort of the way. I got turned on with a business of living. You know, a lot of alcoholics, not everybody, but most alcoholics you don't need to say giddy-up to them. You've got to say whoa to alcoholics. They want to get three jobs at one time. And I was no different. I was compulsive and wound up with nowhere to go. And I'll tell you, somebody invented television while I was drunk. I woke up and there it was, just grinding away. And Michigan State University piped their campus down to the penitentiary. And anybody there could be a student if they just passed entry stuff and paid tuition and bought some books. Well, I did that. Enrolled at Michigan State. They didn't let me go to campus, but they brought the campus to me. And I finished two years of my college education in that Max Ferguson joint. You know, there's a strange thing. You hear some marvelous stuff in alcoholics and alcoholics. Some of it sounds so trite, but it is just marvelous. I was at a meeting one day, and I had some real problems. I don't know if anybody else here ever touched anything as illicit as speed, but I did. And, man, that stuff will do something to your head. I mean, it really did something to my head. And when I got sober, I was not able to sleep in a dark room. I mean I wasn't afraid of boogers or anything like that, but I couldn't go in a dark room, if I closed my eyes in the dark room it would look like a kaleidoscope going off in there and I tell you that's miserable. Now when you're in a maximum custody penitentiary and you've got 6,000 rather the desperate fellas in there, you don't want to let it get out that you're afraid of the dark. I'll tell you that. Well, that's the problem. One day a guy came to the meeting and he said something that just startled me. He said, if you can't sleep, and I perked right up, he said, stay awake. I thought, God, how profound is that now? But doesn't it make sense? I said, what are you going to do anyway? I finished two years at Michigan State University while I couldn't sleep. And that's something, you do what you got to do. So anyway, I got recommended for special parole. I didn't make it, but I got recommend it. I didn' t know it, but that happens once in 10,000 cases. And they picked me just because I'm doing what we do here. And when I got out, it was just a matter of keeping on. It's no big deal if you're well-connected. And so I was plugged in. I knew where I was going when I went out. Went out, got immediately active the first day I was there. Got immediately active. Second week I was out, some guys did some prison work over near our house. And they asked me to go. I said, man, they're not going to let me in a place like that. They may not even let me out. And I don't know if I want to go or not. They said, ah, yeah, it's okay. So I went two weeks after I'm out. I'm going back trying to do whatever I was there to do in a place like I'd left. Two months after I was out, I was asked to be outside sponsor of that place. You imagine what an affirmation to a guy that just left the bottom of the barrel, and I'm asked to Be A Trusted Servant in that same environment. About the same time, and what I'm gonna tell you is absolutely true, About the same time, my parole supervisor called me and came by one day, and he said, Tom, you're real active. He said, hey, thing, I said, yes, sir, and it concerned me because I thought he was going to say I need to slow down. I knew I wouldn't. He said wouldn't it help you if you could drive? And I said yes, sure, but I can't like he didn't know. And he said well, let me check at it. A little later he asked me to meet him at the Sears store uptown. It happened to be where the license agency was. My sister drove me up there, and I remember that day as clearly as the day that I could see my guy standing all the way at the back of the store with a guy. I went back there, he introduced me to him, we chatted a little while. The guy handed me a driver's license. Didn't even ask me if I could drive. No test, road, verbal or otherwise. Didn't ever pay for it. Now you know that can't be legal. There ain't no way. I've had a lot of people tell me I must have been very well connected politically Yeah, I sure was The sheriff and I were intimate acquaintances I'll tell you what I truly believe You talk about miracles And I don't base this on just my own experience Although it's profound But I base it on that God knows How many people I've seen make unbelievable comebacks I believe that when God's got work for us to do and the walls come down. And I don't care what they are. I don' t care what they are." That's exactly what happened. Two years after I was out, I said to my husband one day, I got a phone call from the state capital. The fellow introduced himself. I'd met him once. He came to the AA group that I sponsored, and he said, Mr. Iverson, we're expanding our rehabilitation program in our prison. He said, we were wondering if you would accept a position. I'd never been offered a job in my life except by some drunk who didn't have one himself. And they're talking to me about an unbelievable thing. That had never been done in the history. And he was asking me if I would consider that, so I answered him at two levels, and you know what they are. One up here, I said, my God, man, I'd rather do that than anything I know. I'd never had thought about it, neither had anybody else. And then deep inside, I says, hey, no way. But sure enough, I was employed two years after I was out, and I was employed as a rehabilitation supervisor and started a career that I will be terminating 10 days from now when I retire and go to the farm and all that stuff. I tell you what's the most startling thing about, I never have counted this up, somewhere around eight or nine years, something like that, head of our system asked me to come by his office one day and I said, yes sir. Went by and I says, what do you want? And he said, Tom, I'd like for you to take an assignment. And I said, what? Normally he'd want me to pinch it for him speaking or doing a class or something. And I says, what is it? He said, I would like for your to take over an institution as warden. And when I got up off the floor, I said boss, I don't know if I want to do that or not. Man, I do not want to be the turnkey. I do want to mud wrestle with the guys. And then I asked him if I could have time. He gave me five minutes. I took it, went out, prayed hard, prayed hard, and went back in and said, yeah, I'll do it. And I saw that I might be able to get some stuff done that I thought needed to be done and that launched a 20-year stint as heading up institutions. My specialty became developing new facilities. You know, I'm not somebody who lives in a box. I'm always somebody who likes to get cutting edge and beyond. I like to make stuff happen. And so my deal was to develop new stuff and have a marvelous career. That's important to me for obvious reasons. I hope it's important for you because of the symbol of hope that that is. I don't care what your situation is. I mean, I care, but there's no limit to what can happen. And I know that a lot of times, I know what it feels like to be sitting and wavering in the hope department. I'm here to tell you there's hope. And that's obviously very important to me, but that's not who I am. My job is not whoI am. That's an impossible dream. I mean, no convict in the world would ever dream of a career path like that. It'd put him in a funny farm if he did. I mean you just don't do that. I did bother to finish my education in correctional administration and I also bothered to outwork anybody I've ever met. And I wasn't ambitious. Man, I was just zealous about that thing and a marvelous career that I wouldn't trade for anything. But that really isn't who I am. That's just a very important piece of my life. And guys don't dream about that. When I left the institution, I had dreams, of course, little dreams. I wanted to be a citizen. For the first time in my life, I wanted it to be part of a community and take part and not destroy the stuff around me. I wanted to be there and be in a cell. I never had been. I wanted it to take part in community life. I wanted t o have honest work, a job that I could stick to, and so I found that. It wasn't much of a job, but I found one, and I was deeply grateful for it. I wanted maybe someday to have a partner, and I made a trip to Canada 35 years ago, and I had tried marriage a couple times, once drunk, once sober, and neither worked very well. So I was a sworn bachelor, but I met a little girl up there who worked for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and their reputation is that they get their man, and she did. And we'll be celebrating 33 years of continuous marriage this year. Unbelievable, unbelievable. And a couple of all-American kids who've done reasonably well. I don't think they inherited any brain power from me or their mother either one, but there is something beneficial about growing up in a home where recovery is in place and principals live. There's something useful about that. It doesn't always have an happy ending, but I'm here to tell you that it's been a major influence in the lives of my kids. They both finished the university system, and my daughter went bad. She went off into psychology and hasn't been seen since. She'll be back to this planet sometime. And my son was even worse. He went—I had hope for that boy. He majored in fraternity the first year that he was in college. And, boy, he was a comer. He was elected king reggae in Jamaica. and when that happened my wife sounded just absolutely forlorn she said can you imagine that i said yeah god that's awful isn't it inside i said that's my boy go get him tiger i could just see him leading at a meeting or something like this he could have been a contender but something went horribly wrong and sucker buckled down his second year in three years may have got scores up adequately to get into medical school finished that he's finished his residency he's now practicing down at a little old dinky little old hospital down in the city of new york city called columbia presbyterian in a in a high excuse me and don't y'all convert him into a yankee now i gotta get him back home i want him just make a lot of money and then come on back down there and take care of his old man in style. I'm obviously very proud of the boys and girls. Something else. I want to wrap up around this notion. Who am I really? I'm an average guy. I're just an ordinary guy who's had some extraordinary experiences, and I will assure you that every Every unbelievable thing that's happened to me, I had absolutely nothing to do with it other than doing the footwork. And I mean that, not one single thing. It's all come as a benefit of practicing these principles as a way of life and then becoming a useful and productive citizen. And who I am right now, as you gather from the countdown, I'm getting a little long of tooth. And I tell you, I was kidding around a little bit when I said that when you get older, you lose the vitality and the zip. Well, I don't know when that happens, but not yet. In my almost 44th year of recovery, and I'm telling you this straight. This is not podium chatter. I am having my very best year by far. I've never been more actively involved I've ever been more enthused about what's going on I've had more creative energy firing than I do right now Some people tell you that the pink cloud has a predictable lifespan That you come in, you go up and then you come down That's a bunch of hooey What happens is it comes in and it gets on that pink cloud and you stay there as long as you do the things that make you stay there. And I am having I'm I'm having a great time in Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm a pretty fundamental type of guy. I'm somebody who believes intensely in home groups. I'm not a meeting guy. There's nothing wrong with them, but it's just not where I do business. I'm somebody who beliefs in commitments. I believe in a home group i believe in being a part of that group i believe in sponsorship i i sponsor a lot of people i i don't honestly i don'T even know how many i know them all but i don' t never have counted them up it doesn't matter they're all individual folk and they're it's all stages of repair i got one guy not too far from here with 47 years i got a couple who are under one and and uh so it's a wide range of things i sponsor a lot of people. I have a very simple approach to most things so I can understand it. I think a sponsor has one basic job description. That is to show the person that there's a solution and that I'm not it. That I'm not it, and so those are things that I've committed to, and the fundamental reason is for this, and I'll leave you with this thought. I have a commitment, and I hope you do too. I have an idea that I have a commitment that is personally imposed and it's one that I feel very deeply about. My commitment is that I want to see that every person, like the young lady who came in tonight, that every excuse me, every person who comes into a group where I'm any part of that group whatsoever, I want to see that they get exactly as good as I got. No less. No less, and that's my commitment, and a lot of things go into making that happen. What kind of a member do I want be? Do I want some old relic who's living in the past, and all I can talk about is the old days? No. I want somebody who's alive. I I want to stay alive until I die, and not die on my feet. I want stay alive as long as I'm able to do so. I want be able to greet people and look them in the eye and actually see them. I don't want to greet them and look over their head and look off somewhere else. Yeah, good to see you, Joe. My God, how many times I see that. I don' t want to do that. I want take young people who come into this program just like I was young when I came in, and I don''t want to intimidate them with a bunch of junk. Take them seriously and let them know that they're in the right place. Now, those are things I can do, a lot I can do if I'm going to be an old-timer, and I guess I'm going to have to accept the fact that I am. My choice is what kind do I want to be. I want to be one who strengthens this chain of love and service. I don't want to be selfish enough to let it stop with me. If you're not on fire with your program of recovery, that's your business. But for God's sakes, man, don't let this thing go by. Just lay back your ears, jump in this sucker, give it your heart and soul, and I'll guarantee you can't give back more than you get.