The Difference Between Knowing and Realizing Is the Difference Between Sobriety and Recovery – Don M.

My name is Don Popejoy and I'm an alcoholic. Hi everybody. By the grace of a loving God that I came to understand by taking the 12 steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous with a lot of help from a good sponsor and a strong home group, I haven't had a drink of alcohol since the 21st day of February, 1980, and I'm very grateful for that. Thank you. Having said that rather pre-orchestrated little spiel, I probably ought to sit down and shut up before I break any of Charlie's bleeping rules. I love these church camp conferences. The first thing we have to do is do like Charlie did and read the rules. and, you know, here's a room. I'm sure at least half of the people in this room are alcoholic and boy do I know what to do with rules. Break them suckers. I'm already trying to figure out a way to get to the women's meeting at 1030 instead of the men's meeting. But I'd like to thank the committee for asking me to be here tonight when Charlie called some time ago and asked if I would come down and share. I was elated. This is my absolute favorite kind of conference. There's another little conference similar to this called Sea to Glen that was the first AA conference I attended in May of 1980 down in Oklahoma, or down in the Texas panhandle south of Amarillo, Texas. I look around the room and there's about five of you here that were there. some of the first people I met outside of my home group, which is the Ulysses Group of Alcoholics Anonymous in Ulyssa's Kansas. Some of the rest of you I've met at various conferences and service functions around the area, and those of you that I haven't, I'm looking forward to getting to know as many of you as possible this weekend. I identified with Charlie when he was talking about trying to get people to help out. It reminded me of the story of I have a mother walking through the park one Sunday morning with her little six-year-old boy. And they were walking along and came upon a couple of dogs in the park, and the dogs were doing you know what. And they watched them a little bit, and the little boy tugged his mother's hand and said, Mommy, Mommy, what are those dogs doing? Well, she really didn't think that it was the time in his life to be explaining the facts of life, and she was a quick study and she said well son well here's what's happening those the doggy on top is very very sick and the doggie on the bottom is taking the sick doggy to the hospital and kids that uh-huh and they walked along another 100 yards or so and he tugged her by the hand and they said my she said what son he said it not just the way life is she said whatever do you mean he said well you try your very best to help someone out and you end up just getting screwed. That's certainly not the way I really feel tonight. I'm grateful to be here, grateful to first be on this agenda of speakers. That way I can get the butterflies out of my system and enjoy the rest of the weekend. in. I'm looking forward to hearing all the speakers. I always look forward to hearing Susan talk. After all, I'm responsible for half her story. Nice to meet Ed and look forward hearing him tomorrow evening. And Nancy, she assumes the role of our spiritual giant Sunday morning. I am just grateful to be here and to be a part of this conference. I think I had my first drink of alcohol. It was the first drink I can ever remember. I was 17 years old. It was during the summertime. My folks were planning to be gone for the weekend. My dad had a brand new 54 Ford Coupe, and I had asked him if I could use it that weekend. He said, If you're careful, I think it'll be all right. I called my buddies and asked them to go to the drive-in movie, and we went around and picked them up. We went to the Drive-In, and after the Drive In, I don't remember how, but we ended up with a jug of tequila. deal. I had grown up in a home that knew pains of alcoholism. My dad's drinking had caused a lot of trouble in our home, and I had made myself a promise at a very young age that I was never going to drink and cause that kind of trouble in my life. Somebody took the cork off that jar of tequila and started passing around it when it came my turn without any thought of any of that whatsoever. so ever. I tipped it up and took a big swallow, and I can remember it burned like hell, and there's the first drill broken. It burned like all Hades going down, and it hit the bottom of my belly, and if felt kind of strange in a little bit, some really nifty things started happening in my head. And that's the way it was, and that's absolutely the last thing I remember about that night. I don't remember any more at all about that night! I woke up the next morning, I was in my room at home and I was in my bed. I was a little surprised to find I still had on the same clothes that I was wearing when I went to pick up my friend. The only thing different, the front of my white t-shirt was multicolored. It proves that the corollary to Newton's law is probably also true. What goes down sometimes does does come up, particularly if it's tequila in a 17-year-old belly. I got out of bed, had a busting headache, my mouth tasted terrible and I looked out the window and there sat Dad's 54 Ford Coupe and the left rear fender looked like an accordion in a collapsed position. When he came home, I had to cook up some way to get out of that and I said, gee, I don't know what happened. We went to the drive-in restaurant after the drive in movie and walked out and there, there's somebody crinkled that thing up. And I think the only thing significant that changed in my drinking for the next 24 years was how much of it I did, because the same thing always happened when I drank alcohol. I never drank except what I got drunk. I, uh, I never got drunk except what I blacked out. Whenever I drank, I got into trouble, and when I got in trouble, it was It was always necessary to lie and cover up my way out of it. And that's just the way it went for me from the time I was 17 until the time I was 41 when I walked in the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous. We used to have a member of Ulysses' group, he said, lying wasn't a necessity, it was a virtue. And that is the way that it was with me. I got drunk in Denver one time in the early 1970s, and as the big book says, my drinking by that time had found its lower companions. I was in the seedier part of Denver, and I got drank and ended up in the backseat of my car, passed out in the parking lot in kind of a tough part of town. That's where the cops found me, and after a minor altercation, which they won, they ended up taking me to Arapahoe County Jail. And the next morning I got up and I managed to get a lawyer and he posted some bond and I got out of there. I had flown to Denver in my little airplane for a business trip and I went out to the airport and got a cup of coffee and got my stuff gathered up and bought a copy of the Denver paper and got in the plane and was flying back to Ulysses. And I thought, well, this will probably be all right. Nobody knows about this. The cops that picked me up and the judge that I appeared before and the lawyer that I called, there isn't much of any way Susan can find out about this deal because by that time my drinking was causing a lot of trouble at home. And I thought I can probably just kind of pass this one right by. So I put the plane on autopilot and started reading the newspaper. And when I got back about page 104 somewhere, somewhere I was suddenly overcome with a sense of impending doom because I was sitting there looking at something called the Weekly Court Transcript of Denver County. And it was a record of all the indictments and convictions and court appearances that had taken place that week in Denver. And I thought, my God, sometime next week, this week's record is going to appear in the Denver paper and somebody in Ulysses is going see it and going to take it and give it to her and there's going to be hell to pay. So when I got home, I went around town and checked all the places that sold the Denver paper. Ulysses is a little town, 5,000 people, 300 miles from Denver, the only place that sold the Denver paper was the grocery store next door to my office. So I went over there every day for a week, bought every copy of the Denver Post, took it out behind the office and burned it in an incinerator. I kind of followed a program of going to any lengths before I heard you read how it works the first time but I go to any length to cover up the trouble that my drinking caused in my life and that's my drinking history I'd get drunk I'd have to lie my way out and that is the way it went And, you know, I grew up in Ulysses. I'm very provincial. I've never been very far from home. Went away to college, met Susan. We got married, had two kids, boy and a girl. My drinking, at one time, I drank every day. And that caused so much trouble that I sometimes say I got one of those ultimatums. It really wasn't an ultimatum. some of you guys might identify with this were sometimes presented a choice you can either do this or live under a tree live in the only motel in town which doesn't have running water where I come from what she said was is that I can't live like this anymore and I want to go see a marriage counselor And I'm going to go whether you go or not. And if you don't go, then you have to go somewhere else to live." What she really gave me was in choice, so I tended to view it at the time as an ultimatum. So to tell you how good things were going at home at that point in our lives, which I guess would've been the mid-1970s, we drove to Wichita, which is 240 miles, 220, 30, 40 miles from Ulysses. We drove in separate cars. She went down one day, and I went down another day. And we went to see the psychologist, marriage counselor. She went in first, and she talked to him for about an hour, and then he came in. And I tell you this story to illustrate a point. And the point is that it was after I got into Alcoholics Anonymous and after I did the fourth and fifth steps that I came to understand that my basic problem wasn't drinking. and the kind of trouble that my drinking caused and then the kind lying and covering up I had to do as a result of that drinking, my basic problem was that I absolutely could not accept the reality of life on life's terms. And to try to tell you what I mean, I walked into the psychiatrist's or psychologist's office and we sat there for a minute and got the pleasantries out of the road and he said, does your drinking cause trouble at home? and I thought, my God you've just been sitting here talking to her for an hour what kind of quiz is this supposed to be? And I said, you've got to be kidding me what did she tell you? And he said, well, then I have a question for you why do you drink? But I couldn't accept the reality of that question so I turned it around for him to say to me then why do you drink at home and you know I had an answer for that I I had in airplane and I had a reason to be in Denver a business reason to be in denver occasionally so I decided I'll just run away from home to drink and from then on I rarely drank at home you know drinking cause trouble at home then I just won't drink at at home. And I, for the rest of the time that I drank, I would get in my little airplane, fly to Denver on Wednesday. If I'd get drunk Wednesday, sometimes stay drunk Thursday. Sober up Friday, come home Friday or Saturday, heal up, put in two days of work at the office and fly back to Denver. And if that made me a periodic drunk, then that's whatever one of those is what I became because I didn't drink, rarely drank daily from that point until I got to Alcoholics synonymous. My drinking, all the relationships in my life, you know, I drank them up. And that's just the way it was with me. I hurt most those that loved me the most dearly and and cared the most for me. And it wasn't that I wanted to, it's just the way it turned out. I just couldn't accept the reality of life and the only way that I knew to deal with it was to drink at it and when I drank at it that little three-step cycle took in again. I'd get in trouble, get drunk and have to lie and cover up my way out of it. So to give you an idea how my alcoholic mind works, and I suppose sometimes still does, I've been about as ball-headed since I was in my late 20s or early 30s as I am right now. And I was a bar drinker. I liked to go to those places where the ice cubes were tinkling in the glasses and the smoke was so thick that you had to cut it with a knife and they had a little disco or a band or something, and the music would get to rolling and the girls would get beautiful at midnight. But those evenings just didn't turn out the way I wanted them to turn out. And I couldn't figure out why, and I couldn t accept the fact that they probably didn t turn out right because Because I was a stumbling, stinking drunk, I concluded that the reason they weren't turning out the way I wanted to is because I was prematurely ball-headed. So I knew about finding solutions to problems before I got to Alcoholics Anonymous and I went to a doctor in Wichita who I thought paradoxically he was also ball-headed and his business was hair transplants. And I said, how do I get some hair? He said, for $5,000 and a lot of pain, I can give you some cornrows of hair on the top of your head. And I looked at him and I said how come you don't have them? He said it doesn't bother me, that must be in ball-headed. It kind of bothers me but I don't like pain, I'll pass. I walked out the door and headed for a bar and on the way to the bar I walked by a kind of a men's barber shop that sold wigs. And they had all these little styrofoam heads in the window with hair on them and they had, I mean, lots of hair, you know. So I thought I'll go in and I walked out an hour and a half later and I had a full head of hair and a big pompadour and I was certain that I looked exactly like Glenn Campbell. And I thought the only thing to do is go to a country and western joint and celebrate. Now, I don't know how much you know about men's rugs but here's the way they worked, or they did then. The object is to make the rug stick on top of the ball head so you take some double-sided adhesive tape and you cut it into little strips and you stick one side of it on the wig and you pull the stuff off of it and so it's sticky on both sides and you can stick the other part on your head. So one side stuck to the wig, one side stick to your head and in theory and probably for non-alcoholic people it tends to work pretty well. But what happens to me when I drink scotch whiskey I put it in my mouth it always burned a little going down and it gets to my belly and it does those wonderful things And about half an hour later, it all comes off the top of my head and forms sweat. Now, when you mix sweat and adhesive tape together, you've got to know it doesn't work. So I go out to the country and western place, and they've got the music going. And then when I'm dancing and I'm doing the boogaloo, you know, and I'M DRINKING SCOTCH AND I'M SWEATING, and the rug twists around sideways on the top of my head. And I've got to tell you, it's hard to be a cool operator in a swinging singles joint when your part's sideways across your head and your pompadour is hanging over your right earlobe. I couldn't accept the reality of my life. And I'd get into trouble and have to lie my way out of it. And that's really kind of the story of my last drink. On a scale of one to ten, my last drunk is a real bummer. It's just the way it is. I ran out of lies. I was planning my weekly Wednesday trip to Denver to drink and do the things that I did when I went to Denver. and about ten minutes before I left on the 20th day of February, 1980 Susan called and said Joyce and I are going to go with you to Denver. That was real bad news for a couple of reasons. One is that Susan was the mostest, lastest person in the world I didn't want to go to Denver with me that day and Joyce, her friend Joyce who worked with her was the second mostest lastest woman in the whole world I didn't want to go to Denver with me. The reasons I didn' t want Susan to go, I'm sure, are obvious to you. The reason I didn''t want Joyce to go is a little bit different. Joyce and I had, I always thought, had something in common. We drank a good deal of life. Her husband John worked for me. She worked for Susan. We were social friends. They'd come over to the house, and Joyce and i'd say, ''We'll go to the kitchen and fix some drinks.'' And we'd go fix us three drinks and drink them real quick and then fix us all one and take one out to John and Susan. And they'd let their ice cubes melt and stuff like that, and we'd say, We'll get some more drinks. And we'd go to the kitchen, and we'D have three quick shooters and fix them a mixed drink and take them back out. And I enjoyed Joyce's company, but that New Year's Eve, a very strange thing had happened to Joyce. While she was drinking, she had tried to take her own life. She was unsuccessful in that attempt and after a brief hospitalization, she had started attending of all things the Ulysses Group of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I absolutely didn't want to go anywhere with her. But it happened too quick. I mean, I used to think that I was so good at covering things up that if Richard Nixon had had a bunch of alcoholics like me working for him, he'd still be emperor or king or something. I think I could have covered up Watergate, but this happened too quick and I couldn't get out of it and they got in the plane and we went to Denver. We checked into the hotel and I went to the bar and they went about doing their thing. They tell me we went out to dinner that night at a rather nice place and I had two bottles of Poulet Fusay and three martinis and didn't make too big of an ass out of myself, second rule. drill. Sorry, Charlie. We got back to the room. I got up the next morning and I was going through my little drill that I did when I woke up in Denver, Colorado. Part of this little drill was to go through the stuff that came out of my pockets to see if a credit card was there, the American Express card because I usually paid for things with my my American Express card, and I usually didn't have it when I got up in Denver. Or about a lot of the time I didn't have it. I was on a first-name basis with the American Express Lady in Phoenix. I'd call up and say, this is Don, and she'd say, you lost it again? And I'd say yeah. And she'd say, that's okay, we'll send you a new one. After I got sober, I always worried that maybe she thought I had taken offense at her or something because I didn' t lose it anymore. But I was going through my stuff up and Susan woke up. And she said, what are you doing? And I said, I don't know. You know, I ran out of lines. To me, it was my moment of truth. Not very dramatic, but it's my story. It's the one I got. And I says, well, I'm looking for my credit card. And he said, why? Can't you remember if you left it? And he says, no, I have no recollection of whether I left it. I don' t remember where we were. And She said, Don, how long has it been like And I said, Susan, it's been like this for a long, long time. Again, I guess I just ran out of lies. Then we, as I recall, we did another little drill that happened when I woke up hungover after a drunk and when I was with Susan. We kind of had this thing perfected. She would sit in her nightgown cross-legged on the bed with a pillow behind her back, you know, propped up against the headboard. And I would sit In a chair with my head hanging down between my legs. And she would tell me all the things that I had done wrong and bad the night before. And I Would sit there and say, Yeah, yeah, and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. We kind of really perfected that drill over about the last 15 or 20 years of my drinking. And I remember my sponsor telling me when we got to talking about Step 8, he said, you know, Don, in your case, I don't want you going home and saying, I'm sorry. He said, You are the world's running expert on saying, I'm Sorry. And he said, for you it's going to be necessary to make your amends by not doing the things that you're doing and starting to do some different things. But we went through that little drill and then got cleaned up and ordered some coffee and Joyce was staying down the hall and Susan asked Joyce to come up and have some coffee with us and I really didn't want to see her. And she walked in very cheerful and bright eyed and bouncy and I'm sitting there trying trying to get the cup of coffee down, spilling some of it on my shirt. My hands are shaking. And she says, Don, how are you? And I said, now we're at the dam. And she said the five little magic words of Alcoholics Anonymous. She said, I know how you feel. And I knew she did. And I looked at her and I looked me a little bit, spilling the coffee, trying to get it to my mouth. And I said, Joyce, would you tell me something about this thing, Alcoholics Anonymous, that I think they're doing? Well, God not only sent me an angel that morning, he sent her on a cloud. It started snowing right there. And for all the rest of that day and that night and the next day and well late in the next afternoon when it quit snowing, Joyce, this was the 21st day of February of 1980, She was, she had been there since the first day of January or the first week in January. She probably didn't know all the 12 steps by heart, probably could have not told you very many of the traditions and I'm sure had never heard of the 12 concepts but she had a sponsor and a big book and she was going to 5AA meetings a week and if you're new or fairly new don't let anybody tell you you can't carry the message because she carried the message to me in that day and a half. Susan, in a sense, said she never got so sick and tired of hearing people talking about drinking and not drinking and how not to drink and all these kind of things in her life. And I did some really rash and stupid things in that day and a half, one of which was I promised her to go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Well, by the time it quit snowing the next afternoon, the heat was off, Susan was speaking to me again, and we got on a little plane and flew home, and I thought this, too, will surely pass. I knew that line before I got to U.V., but after supper that night, and it was a cold February evening in Ulysses, Kansas, and the doorbell rang, and I opened the door, and she grabbed me by the arm, no coat on or anything else, and jerked me outside, and I said, where are we going? She said, we're going to an AA meeting, and we did, and that, I've been going ever since, same group, and And that started about a two-month love affair for me with Alcoholics Anonymous. I liked everything about you. I liked your laughter, I liked you sharing, and you most of all, I liked the fact that you came up to me and told me I was welcome and that you were glad I was there. And people were not telling me at that time in my life that I was welcomed. As a matter of fact, they were throwing me out of places. They weren't telling me that they were glad that I wasn't there. And I liked it. and that night you sold me a big book of Alcoholics Anonymous you said that you would have given it to me except you thought I could afford to pay for it and you handed me a little pamphlet called Sponsorship and I started going they had five meetings a week we did it the Ulysses group then now we have seven I went to about every meeting and they kept saying have you asked anyone to be your sponsor and I said no for a few days and then I found out, you know, that that wasn't cool and the only way I was going to stop that question. So there was this guy that I knew who had always kind of been a hero of mine and I asked him to be my sponsor and he started coming by and taking me to meetings on the nights that we had meetings and the nights when we didn't have meetings he would come and pick me up and we'd go to a nearby town for an AA meeting. And I liked it. I liked everything about it. We'd drive to those meetings and we'd talk about how powerless I was with my life, and he'd talk abut his life, and I could see that I was the same way in mine. Please turn your tape and I'll rewind. Turn your tape and continue on site. ...over alcohol, and because of that, my life was so unmanaged. And we'd share about, you know, The fact that this crazy kind of thinking that I've been doing ever since I took my first drink when I was 17 years old. I mean, I knew what booze did when I took that drink and I didn't even consider it could do it to me and from then on all my experience told me what booge did to me when I drank it but I never once thought about that as I was picking up the jug to pour it down. And he explained to me that that was the kind of insanity that the second step was talking about. the kind of thing never even give a thought to the consequences I just do it without any thought consequences be damned and then we kind of got started talking about the third step and I said I got a lot of trouble right here because I I pride church at one time I was going to church on a regular basis those good people People, they did about everything to me you could do. They baptized me and they chastised me and they exercised me and they prayed over me in English and other strange languages and I'd run right out of there and go to the bar and get drunk and just do the same thing over and over again. And I said this God thing isn't going to work for me, Louie. And he said well, we talk a lot about God as I understand Him and most of all he got it real simple for me. One night we were on our way to Johnson, Kansas to a meeting. and he said, now, how did we come to go to Johnson, Kansas? And I said, well, you came to get me. And he said right. And he says, did we go north or south? And I say, well we went south and then we turned at the corner and we went straight west. And he say, why do we go west? And I says, I don't know. And he sa, I do. We made a decision to go west. He said, all I'm asking you to do is to make a decision to go down this road with those of us in Alcoholics Anonymous for a while. And I kind of thought maybe I could do that. And we went to a meeting a couple of nights later We were at the Ulysses group. And a guy got up, and they used to do these miraculous things. They were having a third step meeting. And this guy gotup and was sharing about step three. And it became my turn to share. I said, I just can't see how God can have any effect in my life. And he said, Don, maybe you could accept that God works through people. And I thought that was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard. And we talked about that for the rest of the meeting, and we talkedabout it after the meeting until 1 o'clock in the morning. Now, my drinking, as I said or tried to explain before, kind of messed up my wife's thinking. And when I was out drinking, she would sleep on my side of the bed so that, you know, when I got home, I would have to wake her up and she would roll over and she could check me out and find out what kind of shape it was in and know what time it was. And I got Home That Night, and she had not yet started going to Al-Anon. and I shook her awake and she was on my side of the bed and she said, what time is it? I said, one o'clock. She said, where have you been? I said to an AA meeting and I said Susan, I learned the most amazing thing tonight in that meeting about Alcoholics Anonymous and she asked me what? And I said do you know that God works through people? And she said oh. She said Don how long do you think you're going to keep going to Alcoholics Anonymous? And I said, gosh, Susan, I think maybe the rest of my life. And she said, oh, my God. God works in strange ways. Two days after that, she attended her first meeting of Al-Anon family groups. And Susan grabbed a hold of the program of Al Anon like a drowning person who's been washed overboard. Let's see, she early on made a commitment to the 12 steps of the program of Al-Anon and the Al-Alanon Fellowship. She's today an Alateen sponsor. She's an active member of Al Anon and I'm so very grateful for that. I believe with all my heart when it says in the book that wife or no wife, job or no job. Any man can get sober and all he's got to do is trust God and clean house. But it's this drunk's experience and story that Susan being in the Al-Anon family group has enhanced my sobriety. It has made our walk a thing for which I'm truly grateful. And the miracle of my life is that I stand here sober tonight. The greatest manifestation of that miracle, other than the fact that I'm not drunk and I'm not drinking, the greatest manifestation of that miracles is the new relationship that Susan and I have together. And that's come about as a result of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Al-Anon, and the fellowships in the program and sponsorship of each, respectively. Well, my love affair with Alcoholics Anonymous was rapidly approaching an end. My sponsor had been after me for a little while to do the fourth step of this program, and I said, I'm not ready. I don't want to. I'll get around to it. Finally, he showed up in my office, and he had a big chief notebook Notebook, you know, cheap yellow paper. Two big ballpoint pens. And he said, write until you run out of paper or you run out of ink and be over at my house Saturday night. He said, I've got to go out of town. This was Tuesday. He said I'll see you Saturday night and I said, no, I don't want to do this, Louie. And he says, okay. He said. I'm going to tell you, Don. I don' t think you're going to stay sober much longer unless you do this. And he sa d, I sponsor a lot of people. I'm very busy with my job and I care about you and I have a continuous ongoing interest in your sobriety, but if you don't care to do this, then I want you to find somebody else to work with. Here was a guy that had just spent two months, spent a lot of his time the last two months with me and I didn't have any friends and I thought, oh my gosh, I don't want to lose this friendship with this guy and I really looked up to him. He, as near as I could tell, practiced all of the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous as best as I Could Understand Them in all his affairs. I thought he was the AA program personified. As a matter of fact, I still do. But I didn't want him. I didn' t want to lose him. So I said okay and I started as best I could writing that fourth step and for the rest of that week I wrote The Immoral Litany of My Life and showed up at his house on Saturday night and he got me with a hand and we went upstairs and we did a very weird thing. We got down on our knees and said a prayer. Ask God to deliver us from the bondage of herself. We'll have victory over our troubles. Be a witness to those that he would have as help. Then we sat down and I handed him my inventory and he handed it back. He said, it's yours, you read it. And I didn't want to because I knew it was going to shock him. And I started reading that letter. If there was ever a bad thing that I could think of that I'd ever done. And when I was about halfway through, and I was too ashamed to look up, and he said, Don, stop for a little bit. And I looked up, and there were tears running down his face. And I thought, God, I've done it now. I've shocked him so bad, he can't take anymore. more. And he looked at me with tears running down his face and he said, don't you know my friend, you're telling me the story of my life. There was some time later that I read in the 12 and 12 where it says that the fifth step is the beginning of the end of loneliness. But I knew it that night because here was a man that I thought was almost perfection and he was telling me that he in his experience could relate to the things that I had done and that maybe if he could make this kind of a turnaround in his life there might be hope for me so I went ahead and read him that inventory and when we got through we went through it and we quit looking at the places and the events the circumstances and started looking at the underlying causes of these things and he helped me to see that what was operative here were some things that were fundamentally wrong with me. Fundamental things like fear, that I was eaten up with fear and fundamental things like resentment that I would not be able and I was so resentful at my mother and my father and my brother and all the people in my relationships that that coupled with my basic selfishness and self-centeredness kept me from having any meaningful relationship in my life and that forgiveness was a word that wasn't in my vocabulary and tolerance and patience and understanding the concepts that I couldn't even begin to understand. That I operated strictly on resentment and judgment. And we talked about, was I willing to give up these things and end up getting down on our knees again and saying a seven-step prayer and asking God to take these things from me? And I thought, gee, it's been a pretty darn good evening. and then my love affair came to a total stop with Alcoholics Anonymous because he said now get out a clean piece of paper and we're going to make a list and we'll make it from this inventory and it's going to be a list of the people that you have harmed and I'd been around, I'd hung around for almost two months now I knew I was coming I knew we were going to start talking about making amends and I said look I can't do it there's no way I can do this And he said, yes you can. And he shared with me the story of how he had cleaned up his life and how he hade paid back small amounts of money over many years and how hed got the slate wiped clean and how hade made a living kinds of amends to the family members of his family. Not saying I'm sorry, but not doing it that way anymore and doing it a different way. But I really didn't believe I could do it and I almost stuck out the rest of the evening because I didn't want to lose his friendship. And he had me put down all these names and started with mine and then Susan's and the kids and my mom and my dad and my brother and a whole raft of other names, including the state of Kansas, the federal government. Because I was in the highway construction business. I like the story about the short construction season. It would have been great in those days up there. I worked the short season anyway. But I had been engaged for many years, and I'm primarily a governmental contractor. I work for the State Highway Department and the federal government and theoretically our work was obtained on the basis of competitive bidding but apparently for a long time in that industry there had been a way to circumvent that process and it was called bid rigging and to me it was an easier, softer way. It was a way to take away the competition to artificially inflate the price of the work. And when I was first approached, I thought it sounded like a neat idea and I had done it ever since. And I had very carefully explained this in that inventory to Louie. And when we got to that point, I stopped and I said, now, Louie, you understand this is the way I do business and this is how I do my work. business is done in my industry. Oh yeah, Don. Don. He said, I understand it very well. He and Charlie came from the same school. He said there's a one word name for it, Don. I said, what is it? He says, it's called stealing. And he said if you keep doing it, you're going to get drunk. Well, this area of my life, my business life, just like my family life, my personal life, I did stop doing some things that I was doing and in terms of my family life and my personal life I started doing some different things. I quit rigging bids in my business life. But I knew because my sponsor told me that that wasn't enough that there was some way I had to find a way to make amends for this. The problem is you can't rig bids by yourself. By definition it takes more than one He won the tango in that game, you know. And so this business about except for injuring them or others came into play. And he said, well, pray about it and the answer will come. Now, if you're new or fairly new or if you happen to be at that point in your program dealing with the ninth step, I have news for you. Be careful what you pray about because after I started praying about it, one month after I was one year sober, over, the Justice Department of the federal government came to help me take my ninth step. They sent a special task force out of the Chicago Division Antitrust Division to Kansas City, opened up shop and I was the second person they indicted. I had done precisely the things that they had said that I had done. I went through an agonizing period of how to deal with this because I couldn't plead not guilty. I was guilty. I had done exactly what they said I had done yet I felt that if I pled guilty I was incriminating those people who had also bid on the same job with advice of my sponsor and with the help of he told me to go get a good lawyer tell him exactly where I was coming from, what I was doing and I was in AA trying to explain the 8th and 9th step to him and see if we could figure out a way to deal with it my lawyer went to the government and said he'll plead guilty to what he's done and you've got to figure out the rest. He'll admit to what his, what he did. And so that's what I did. And I wondered what was going to happen. The money part, actually, I took the figure that I had written in my first inventory of what I thought I had cheated the government and the state of Kansas out of and gave it to my lawyer. He said, my lawyer said, why do you think you owe him? And I said, here's what our inventory. And he went, I thought, you know, they'd say, well, gee, you're being a nice guy and you've admitted doing wrong. And so he called me back and he said, they agree with you, absolutely. They want that much back. But we worked out a five-year program to pay it back. And by the grace of God, it's paid back. It's been paid back now for about five years, four years. But we also had to appear before a judge. I had to up here before a church. judge. And I wondered what was going to happen. And we went up before the judge, and a lot of people in Alcoholics Anonymous had written letters to the judge telling them they knew I'd quit rigging bids when I got to that point in my program. And it said in the big book we were to be prepared to go to prison if necessary, and I thought, Jesus, that sounds a little severe. But I stood before the judge, and he said, have you got anything to say? And I couldn't think of anything original. I stole a line. I said, well, Your Honor, I know my troubles are of my own making. He said, I agree with you. And he said it's a serious crime and he said I sent you six months in federal penitentiary. Well, that was in October and because the pens were full or something, they weren't going to send me until the sixth day of December, which also happened to be my naked birthday. I thought that was a hell of a way to celebrate. great. But that started a really weird, scary period of time for me because I decided I was going to get sexually molested in prison. I had seen this movie on TV. Now, I was going to a minimum security prison and this was like an Atlanta in the big house or something, but this guy had really gotten worked over. It was R-rated, should have been worse, you know, and I just, I went bananas. And I told my sponsor and I was bawling and crying and carrying on and he made me write a special inventory about that and it didn't help. And one night I went over to my A-buddy's house and I said you know I was a basket case and he said what is wrong with you Don? And I said Kenny I'm going to prison and he says well hell they're going to let you out you know you're going to be there the rest of your life. I said you don't understand I think they're going to rape me. He did that, but he wasn't near that polite. He started roaring with laughter and he got down on the floor and rolled around and roared with laughter. And I said, Kenny, this isn't funny. I'm scared to death. I've written an inventory. I have prayed about this. I can't get any relief. And he finally, you know, wiped the tears out of his eyes and he said, Don, your ego has no ends. I said, whatever do you mean? He said, look at you. He said you're 41, almost 42 years old. You're going to be 42 the day you walk into the joint. You're pot-bellied, ball-headed. He said baby, you ain't got what they want. And he was right. Prison wasn't so bad. I'd already been in the Navy. I knew how to look busy without really doing anything. you think. And Alcoholics Anonymous was there. And that's really kind of part of Susan's story, and I'm not going to get into that since she's going to share with me here. But because of the program of Al-Anon and Alcoholics Anonymous, we made two very dear, wonderful friends. They met us at the airport when I went to prison. They took care of Susan when she'd come down on visiting day. They made I made sure my kids had a good Christmas that Christmas. It's one of those stories that only happens in AA. And he's very ill tonight. I remember him every morning in my prayers. But a strange thing happened. My lawyer called me after I'd been there two months and had just about gotten my bed warm, and he said, Don, very unusual things happen. He said, because of all the letters that members of Alcoholics Anonymous wrote on your behalf, half of the judges granted you a court-ordered parole after serving two months, and he placed me on two-and-a-half years probation, and I went back home. So many things have happened. So many wonderful things have happen. If I had, the day I walked into AA, the 22nd day of February of 1980, if you had given me a blank ticket and said, Okay, Don, here's the ticket for your ride on the AA Way of Life. You fill in what you want. I would have sold myself short. I would Have probably said Help me get my drinking Under control at least. Help me Get some of the heat off at home. Help me straighten out some of The mess that my business is in. And that's about all I would've expected. But what's happened to this old drunk Is just like it says in the book I got rocketed into another dimension. the relationships of my life have risen like phoenix from the ashes Susan and I have a relationship that I never even dreamed about we used to stand toe to toe and scream at each other with the help of good sponsorship on both of our parts we learned how to communicate we'd start out talking to each other we got to be friends and I learned that that loving wasn't getting, that Susan wasn't going to be able to give me what I needed to be okay. That that had to come from a power greater than myself and that it wasn't her. The relationship with my kids. When I first came to AA, my son would hide my big book. He'd heard all the broken promises. My daughter cried because I was doing all my drinking away from home. She wasn't aware of my drinking. and she said, Daddy, you can't be an alcoholic. May of 1988, that kid who one time called me after I was sober and called me every name I'd ever heard and some that I think that he invented especially for me. In May of 1998, that kids called me up and asked this old ex-problem banker to be the best man at his wedding. And I think that only happens in this guy's life because of Alcoholics Anonymous. That daughter who was so ashamed that I was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous ended up going to a rather prestigious university in the East. When she was a senior, her faculty advisor was a guy who was a former non-alcoholic trustee of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholic Anonymous and she wrote an honors thesis on employee assistance programs primarily how they utilized AlcoholicsAnonymous. the mother with whom I was totally estranged my sponsor made me go over and start talking to her and just seeing if I could be of some help to her and we became good friends my dad had died 12 years before I got sober and it was necessary for me to go through a graveside amends situation and a lot of inventory and some outside professional help to get that relationship healed. In the time that Susan and I have been in the program, her father died and her mother died quite young and we were so angry about that because we felt cheated and her dad died after suffering a long and lengthy illness and it was a really hard death and when my dad died I was so eaten up with resentment and so wrapped up in active alcoholism that it was like I wasn't hardly there. But when my mother passed away last August the 4th, it was like saying so long I'll see you later to a good friend. And that was kind of a neat experience for me. I don't have to look over my shoulder anymore at business. Finally got the amends made, got reinstated. Some years my business is good, some years it's not. but I play with the rules. Contrary to what I said at the beginning, I do play with rules in life anymore because of the program of alcoholics and non-alcoholics. There's one more thing to say and then I'm going to sit down and shut up. It's something that's kind of hard for me to talk about, to put into words. And it's this business about having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. When I got sober in the Ulysses Group of Alcoholics Anonymous, the closest treatment center was about 180 miles away. To me, I think that was a great blessing. And I don't mean to say anything pro or con about treatment centers, but it was a blessing to me because a 12-step group there, a 12‑step job there meant something different than taking somebody to treatment. Our local group, through good PI and really CPC work for many years, had a great relationship with the local hospital. and the doctors would take in a sloppy wet drunk, dry him out for a few days and we would go up from the group, two people at a time, two hours at a time, all night long and sit with him if he wanted us and if he was willing to have us. Right after I did my first fifth step, my sponsor encouraged me to put my name on that list and very shortly after that I got a call about 3.30 in the morning and it was PI chairman of the local group and he said, Don, we've got a guy in the hospital room, so and so, his name's Raymond, and would you go set from 4 to 6? And I said, oh, I guess so. And he said, no, I want to know. He said, we don't do it that way in AA. Will you go or won't you go? And I say, yeah, I'll go. But I didn't want to go. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was go up there at 4 o'clock in the morning and set with some guy. And Jerry and the AA buddy went. And what we really did for two hours was two things. One, we helped him chase little green dogs off the bed. Raymond was in great shape. But he was like me. He had a lot of pride. I used to lay in the alley behind those nice restaurants in Denver and my own vomit and be mad when they'd call people to come get me, and Raymond wouldn't use the bedpan. He wanted to go into the bathroom, you know, and so he was wired up with all these tubes and bottles, and I'd help him walk, and Jerry would push along the damn tubes and bottle and we'd get him into the bathroom. And then he was really in great shape, so he didn't have any aim at all. And every time after getting back to bed, I'd have to wash my shoes. And I did this for two hours. I mean, Raymond not only didn't... I mean he didn' t have anything I wanted. There wasn' t anything that he had that he could have given me that I would have taken, you know. But I still couldn't quite see the point. and at 6 o'clock a couple other members of the group came and said you guys can go home and I walked out to get in my car and I opened the door and I looked up and the sun was coming up and I'll never forget the feeling because I never had it before I thought this is really weird I just spent two hours doing the last thing in the world that I thought I wanted to do helping a sick sloppy drunk and I've never felt this good in my life I was aware of something I couldn't define it but I knew it was a part of me and I knew it was somewhere in here and I didn't have it when I went down there that morning but I did then I went home and shaved and went to work and for the first time I think since I've been in AA the first thing the first one I can remember I could then recall or since recall recall, since I had been in AA, I went all day long and never had one thought of taking a drink of alcohol. Not one thought. It's been that way ever since. And I know that since that time I have been able to feel and believe and to do things that I could not feel and do and believe on the strength of my unaided will alone. I've been able able to go this many days without a drink. I've been able to restore things in my life that I didn't believe were restorable. And I believe that all this is by the grace of a power that I still can't describe much better now than I could then, but that I simply choose to call God. Thank you very much. Thank you.