The Executive Stress Syndrome Diagnosis from the Mayo Clinic 🤣 – Jim M.

Thank you guys. That was 93 years of sobriety. Let me welcome tonight's speaker, Jim M. Good evening. My name is Jim. I'm an alcoholic. Would you raise your hands in the back row if you can clearly hear me? Thank you. It's an honor and a privilege and a hell of an inconvenience to be here. I want to congratulate the birthday people, that's a major, it impresses me a lot to see that many long term sobriety and short term as well. And I want to acknowledge the newcomers, you're in for a hell of a ride. You may not know it but you're into a helluva ride. First time I got drunk I was 12 years old, I was visiting my cousin in town. I lived on a crappy little farm north of Sioux City, Iowa, 40 acres of yellow clay hills you couldn't raise a damn dust storm on, it was a poor place. And I was visiting my cousin in town around Christmas time, and we had the candy and the peanuts and all the stuff that goes with Christmas. And I found a quart of slow gin in my cousin's house. And I drank that quart of low gin after eating a half a pound of Spanish peanuts. I re-stuccoed my cousin�s house. Twenty-five years later, I was taking a little nap on my kitchen floor up in Ojai, California at 2.30 a.m. I had closed the Firebird Tavern at two, as I did almost every night. And I was having a late dinner out of the refrigerator. I had a cold chicken leg. And I found a quart of Mogan David wine, mad dog wine, in my refrigerator. And I drank that quart of Morgan David wine and ate that cold chicken leg. And I Was lying on my back on the kitchen floor throwing up straight up in the air, trying to dodge whatever it was that was coming down. I like to share those. Those are the bookends of my drinking life. I like to share those stories at early morning breakfast meetings where you got a lot of newcomers that are still burping up beer bubbles and eating the cold, the kind of slimy eggs, you know, the scrambled eggs. Anyway, a few other things happened I better tell you about. I could stop right there because those two bookends would qualify me for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. But I went to school like everybody else. I didn't do well in school. I graduated from high school in 1952, second from the bottom of my class. And I was working in a gas station pumping gas. Nothing wrong with that. It's an honorable profession. But I got polio in August of that year and went into the hospital for 105 days. And I lost the use of my legs and a big part of my sense of humor during that time. And when I got out of the hospital, I wasn't doing anything. I hadn't learned how to walk on crutches yet. I was hanging around my parents' house. My buddies would bring a couple of cases of beer around, and we'd drink the beer and kind of took the edge off, and it was good for taking the edgeoff. Well, one day a guy from the Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation Department comes to my house and says, We'd like to consider sending you to college. And I laughed at him. I said, Jesus, what would I do in a college? I damn near didn't make it out of high school. And besides, sir, I don't think I want your charity. Thank you very much. And he said, Boy, we're not talking about charity. We're talking about making you into a taxpayer. and hit me as kind of odd. So I said, okay, I'll go be a taxpayer if that's what you wanted to finance. So they sent me to college down in eastern Iowa for three years where I studied political science. And one of the professors said to me, you have a weird kind of linear way of thinking. Have you ever thought about being a lawyer? I hadn't up to that point, but I started obsessing about it. And after three years of college, I moved over to Omaha, Nebraska to study law with the Jesuit fathers over at Creighton University. Make that a short story, I shaped up for six weeks and then the first grades came out and I didn't do well. Didn't occur to me that nobody did well. They were trying to break down our little egos so we might be taught something. I took it personally. I'm an alcoholic. I take it personally. Took off the suit and tie and put on the Levi's and went back to the bars where I'd spent three years in the bars at the earlier school. Went back to the bars and drank my way out of that school in a year, less than a year. Bummed around New York City for a summer and moved back out to the Midwest and went to the University of South Dakota School of Law in the fall. I know you've all been to Vermillion, South Dakota, which is where the law school is. I don't see any hands raised. I ran into a guy, somebody that knows about Vermillion. I run into a guy in the valley somewhere not long ago who said he lived in Vermont. I said, nobody lives in Vermont anyway. Um, I got out of there in 1961 and got a license to practice law in Iowa. And I was working in an old real estate firm and they had me doing some of the dullest work on the planet. And I hated every minute of it. And one day my boss, my friend Donald O'Brien called me from the federal building and he said, how'd you like to be a federal prosecutor? He'd been appointed U.S. District Attorney by John Kennedy when Kennedy was elected president. He wanted me to be his first assistant, so I went through a little investigation and got appointed by Robert Kennedy to be Assistant United States District Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa when I was 28 years old, and I thought it was a big shot. It wasn't a big shock. The only thing that changed about my life really was now I'm falling off better bar stools uptown. I've fallen off those upholstered bar stools, you know, and you hit the fine carpeting down there on that step instead of the old wooden bar stules when you hit their brass rail with your ribs. That's all it changed about my life. Well, then in 1963, John Kennedy was assassinated, and Lyndon Johnson became the president, and our jobs were political, so we could see that we were going to be out of work in a little bit. So I left the federal government and decided to run for the state legislature in 1964. I got married to an unsuspecting girl that year in June. She didn't know what the hell she was getting into, and I started campaigning for the state Senate in the bars as God intended us to do. And it was 1964. Some of you may be alert enough to remember that Lyndon Johnson was running at the top of the Democratic ticket and Barry Goldwater was running on the top Republican ticket that year, and Johnson won that election by a huge landslide, carrying himself and a lot of other incompetents into office, like me. I woke up sick, sorry, and hung over the day after election and found out I'd been elected to the state senate. What do you do now? I figured you had to go report somewhere to serve in the Iowa legislature, so I found out that was Des Moines, the state capitol. So I moved my wife, who is now pregnant with our first child, to Des Moine. And about five minutes after I got Right there I found the Savory Hotel Bar, a fancy bar downtown where all the legislators went to get drunk. And I fit right in. You know, my wife wasn't too happy about it after the first month. But in that 175-day legislative session we made some major legislative accomplishments. Iowa had been a dry state. The only way that you could get a drink of hard liquor in Iowa was to buy a bottle from a state store, a little socialism. You had to buy the liquor from a state store and you had to have a permit to do it. Well that was crazy we thought that was crazy so we legalized liquor by the drink. You could buy liquor over the bar like any other human organization. That was the number one legislative accomplishment. The second one was that we classified beer as a food so it could be sold in a grocery store. I don't know about you but I think those are major your legislative accomplishments a few other things we did but i won't go into those those are another that's another story so uh i was drinking a lot of booze and i was paranoid i became truly paranoid from drinking alcohol and i didn't run for a second term i became a lobbyist instead and a lobbyists is somebody that drinks for a living the job is to drink a lot of booze and buy a lot of boozes for members of the legislature and get them to vote your way on certain issues and try to make a friend out of every legislator. And it's a good job. They gave me a good salary and a good expense account, and my job was to drink with the members of the legislature every day. And I did it quite well, I think, except that eventually you can't drink all day every day and not eat correctly. My idea of dinner was a hard-boiled egg and pepperoni out of that dirty bottle on the bar. That was my idea of a meal. And I started having all kinds of physical problems. My cholesterol was through the roof, my blood sugar was high, everything was going wrong. So I went to the local doctors and they looked me over and they couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong with me because I didn't tell them the truth. It wasn't any of their damn business how much I drank, right? Well, wrong. They sent me up to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where the doctors asked me some real dumb questions like how much do you drink? I gave them a dumber answer. I said, I have an occasional social drink. Now they wrote it down because they don't have any reason to believe anybody be stupid enough to pay them thousands of dollars to find out what's wrong with them and then lie to them about the symptoms. They can't imagine anybody doing that. So they write it down. Occasional social drink after three days of testing, they came back with a diagnosis. You know, garbage in, garbage out. They said, we think we know what's wrong with you, but we're not real sure. We think you have executive stress syndrome. Sounded pretty good to me because there was nothing in there about booze or abstaining from booze, which is what I wanted to hear. So what do you do about executive stress syndrome? Doctor said, well, we have these blue tablets, 10 milligram Valium tablets. And he said, you seem anxious some of the time. When you feel anxious, take some of these blue tablets. So I felt anxious all the time, so I took them all the Time. And if you take a lot of blue tablets and drink a lot Of alcohol, Some days you'll get very serene. I got so serene I couldn't hit my ass with either hand Some days. It was going downhill. It was Going steadily downhill like alcoholism does. No stops, just downhill. I loved what that speaker said about if you're coasting, you're going downhill fast. Couldn't be a better description. So it was bad and getting worse, but no matter how bad things get, they can get a lot worse. My wife and by this time 3-year-old daughter and I are traveling on the freeway between Omaha, Nebraska and Des Moines on Interstate 80 when a lady rear-ended us doing about 90 miles an hour, booted us off a high embankment, rolled us over end to over end seven times. My wife was thrown out of the vehicle and killed on a freeway that day. My daughter and I ended up upside down on fire in a dry creek bed 50 yards off the road. My daughter was not physically harmed. I had a broken shoulder and some broken ribs and cuts and bruises, but nothing life-threatening. Some mail truck drivers pulled us out of that wreck. After I got out of hospital for six days or so, I went back to Des Moines. I did what any self-respecting alcoholic that doesn't have a program will do. I got drunk. I stayed drunk for 30 days, I think. I wasn't counting. But, you know, you can't stay drunk all the time no matter how hard you try. Eventually your body will reject alcohol, sometimes spectacularly from both ends. That's what happened to me. And I came to one day sitting on the edge of my bed and I had a keen alcoholic insight. I realized that everything bad that had ever happened to be in my life had happened in Iowa. I see there are some linear thinkers in here too linear thinking only covers half the facts all the good stuff that ever happened to me it happened in Iowa because that's the only place I'd ever lived so I got my elderly mother persuaded that things would be better in California so we moved out here to Ojai, California in 1969 and about five minutes later I found the Firebird Tavern Firebird Tavern was kind of a tacky old roadhouse up in Ojai. At one time it had been a fairly splendid place, but it had deteriorated over the years. Now it was millions of cigarette burns on the carpeting and tattered red drapes. You could see the sun coming through in the morning. It was a crummy place, and it smelled a little bit like beer and urine. It was great place to drink. So I spent three years in there drinking their wares and somehow got licensed to practice law in California I started practicing law down in Ventura, 11 miles away. And I did a lot of criminal defense work. In Iowa as well as in California, I did a lot OF criminal defense work. If there's anybody in here I represented, I'm glad you're out. Well, you know, it was, I would drink downtown in Ventura, and I'd get drunk, and I'd sneak back through the alleys because a criminal defense lawyer, part of your job is to cross-examine police officers. Highway patrol, sheriffs, probation officers. Try to make them look like the Keystone Cops. Some of you never heard of the Keyestone Cops? They were a comedy group in the 20s and 30s, and they used to do goofy car chases, and they'd do pratfalls, and hit each other with pig bladders and all kinds of crazy slapstick comedy, that's what it was. Well, you try to make the officer that's on your case looked like a keystone cop because he will not be believed and your client will walk out the door. And that's the name of the game. It's not a good idea to do that all day and then meet one of those good people on a freeway at night with a two six blood alcohol, which is about where I like to drive. So I would stay in Ventura often and sneak back through the alleys and sleep under my desk in my office. I had a big old nine foot conference table I used for a desk and I'd crawl under there fully clothed and go to sleep, pass out more likely, and wake up in the morning and my partner, Eddie, would come in and he'd lean down. How are you doing, Jim? I'm okay, you know. I wasn't okay. And I'd get off one of that desks and read the paper and pretend like I was practicing law. One day I came off from that desk and picked up the Ventura paper and there's a story in there about the Sarah Retreat House in Malibu which had burned down in a fire, partially. And they said that they were having these retreats and you could make a retreat if you called a certain number. So I called this number and the woman said, You could make an retreat any time now. We're rebuilding the buildings. But she said, And even this weekend you could take a break. You could take an hour to make a retweet, she said. But this weekend is for alcoholics, she says. Long silence on my end of the phone, I said, I'm not an alcoholic, but I'll come anyway. keep your options open as long as you possibly can I went down there on a Friday night real nervous, I hadn't had any booze hadn't got any pills and I roll up that crooked driveway and there's 25 or 30 guys hanging around this old mansion that don't look like alcoholics they're clear of eye and steady of hand they don't looks like alcoholics to me because I know what alcoholics look like I represented a whole bunch of alcoholics the watery eyes the shaky hands the wiring showing in the face, the usual symptoms of alcoholism. They were shooting at each other and driving over each other with trucks and hitting the sheriff head-on with a car and that kind of stuff. And so I was a little put off by these guys until they were very friendly and they invited me to stay and they invite me to come to their AA meeting on Saturday night. I said, I don't really see why I should go to an AA meeting. I don't think I have a problem with alcohol. But I went anyway. They said, you might find something you can use in your practice. They were a little slippery too. So I went to the meeting and these guys were going around the table talking about their experience strength and hope. And they were talking about blackout drinking. Talking about moving from one state to the next or to some other state to avoid yourself. They were talking about night terrors, waking up at 3 a.m., sitting up in your bed with a hair standing up the back of your neck, absolutely terrified and not knowing what it was you were afraid of. All that stuff had happened to me, all of it. So I said, Jesus, these guys really have been there. They really know what they're talking about. When it came my turn around the table, I said my name is Jim. I'm an alcoholic. I did not believe it, but I wanted to belong somewhere. I never felt like I belonged wherever I was in my entire life. And so, Jesus, I got the attention of a couple of old-timers. After the meeting, they thought they had a new pigeon. Two guys cornered me in old... I call them the good cop and the bad cop today. The bad cop says to me, I think you're going to drink some more, but we have screwed it up so you won't enjoy it anymore. Hard. The good cop says, don't pay any attention to him. He says, if you think you might have a little problem with alcohol, go to some meetings up in Ventura and Ojai and see if there's something that will help you there. So they were both right. I went back to Ventura in Ojai, and I got drunk. And I got sick enough and desperate enough to call a guy I knew in AA, a guy named Bud G., Bud Gaston. He's dead for a long time now. I said, Bud, I think I might have the beginning of a little drinking problem. And he said, we know. We know. How the hell could they know? I was a town drunk and didn't know it. I said, what do you think I should do about that drinking problem? He said, go to an AA meeting today. I said where should I go? The Norman and Cooper Manor in Oxnard is having a meeting at 3 o'clock. Sounded pretty good to me. The manor to the manor born, you know, it sounded like a high class place to me It was the worst nightmare you can imagine. I drove over there in my dinged up alcoholic Cadillac of my bullshit three-piece lawyer's suit with the gold buttons. It was the worst place you could imagine. There were 12 or 13 old apostles sitting around a scarred table with a bare fly shit bulb hanging down over the table, and the head leper was reading from a blue book. And he said he was reading If You Want What We Have, and I thought, God, if I don't get out of here in a minute, I may get what he has. so I left and I went back to Bud and I said Bud I don't know why you sent me these people these people are genetic misfits they're rowing with one oar in the water and he wasn't very happy about my reaction to the meeting in fact he was a little miffed he said they have meetings for big shots in Beverly Hills started to walk away I said wait a minute Bud where in Beverly Hills do they have these meetings he came back and told me about the Rodeo Drive group Alcoholics Anonymous that Friday I drove 75 miles to the Rodeo driving group. There was a gorgeous 10-minute talker, a wonderful-looking woman giving a 10-minutes talk. And I knew she had what I wanted and would go to any length to get. So I invited her out to coffee after the meeting. We went to coffee, had a great time. We started talking on the phone and dating back and forth. Eighty-two days after we met, we got married. It's not highly recommended in AA. There's a little bit about that in the 12 and 12. It's called Boy Meets Girl in the AA campus. Well, this last December 3rd, we were married 42 years. So they don't all fail. She's having a meeting of a bunch of responsees up in Santa Barbara tonight, so that's why she's not here. Anyway, marriage was not a cure for alcoholism. She had two kids. I had that little girl, and we put those kids together, and they fit pretty good. And we started going to a lot of meetings and working the steps. A guy appointed himself my sponsor who was a 220-pound Turkish prizefighter. He'd fought Ezra Charles 15 rounds and stayed in the ring with him. He said Ezra Charlie beat the shit out of him, but he stayed inthe ring for 15 rounds. So you got an idea what kind of a guy he was. He was dangerous. He was tough and dangerous. And I wasn't going to disagree with him too much, I'll tell you that. So I went through the steps with him, And he saved my life, and I didn't want my life being saved. So, you know, things are going on and on, and I had to make amends to the IRS and to my uncle and a whole bunch of people that I owed money to. Ten years go by, and one day I'm looking around the courtroom and I notice that the only dude that doesn't seem to be working very hard in the courtroom is a judge. He was up there saying overruled, sustained, not doing much of anything. And when there occurred a vacancy on the Superior Court up there in Ventura County, I made an application to be appointed by the governor. And I didn't have any expectation of actually being appointed. But they sent me a 33-page questionnaire, which I filled out as honestly as I could. And in one question they said, Is there anything about your life the governor needs to know in considering you for appointment? I put in there, I'm 10 years sober and Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't share that at the level of press, radio, films or TV and I hope the governor won't either. Now I know that's a smart ass flippant answer but I had no real expectation of being appointed. They sent a four person commission, four lawyers, two women and two men down from Sacramento to question me about my alleged qualifications and we had a nice conversation for a couple of hours and one of the women lawyers said you say you're a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous for 10 years. How can we be sure that you won't come in drunk some Monday morning if you're appointed to the bench? I thought for quite a while, and I said, you know, I'm not going to promise you that I won't show up drunk because when I was promising people I wouldn't show up junk, I was routinely showing up drunk. So I'm not going to promise that I will show up. But if I continue to do what I've been doing for the last 10 years, as faithfully as I've been doing it, I don't think I'll show up drunk. There's a reasonable chance that I won't show up. My next immediate thought was this rigorous honesty bullshit in AA just cost you that job. It didn't. I was appointed in 1982, served for 12 1⁄2 years, retired in 1995, and it was the best and the worst job I ever had in my life. My anonymity lasted a week and a half. my first assignment was juvenile delinquency cases young kids in trouble with the criminal law I saw this kid coming up for a probation review I'd seen him around the meetings for over a year and he was doing fine he didn't have any reason to be on probation anymore so I took him off probation and he said can I come up and shake your hand he came up to the bench shook my hand and turned to a courtroom full of people and says thanks judge I'll see you at the AA meeting tonight I said so much for anonymity Well, that changed my relationship with a lot of people in the community. But I just kept doing what I had always done, and that was use the program of Alcoholics Anonymous when it was necessary to help people with an alcohol problem. I was six years in dependency court dealing with abused children, serious child abuse cases, 25 a day. And that's a hard place to work, I've got to tell you. Without a really good program, I couldn't have done that work. And nobody in this room will be surprised to know that most of the people that are abusing their children are alcoholics or addicts or both. So I sent them to, I ordered them to go to A-A, N-A-C-A G-A. I even ordered a woman to go down to Al-Anon one night. She was buying this guy a gallon of wine every day and thought she was helping him out. Five minutes. Well it's more important to quit on time than it is to say anything at all. So I'll quit in five minutes. but I got a lot of heat from that from some of the old timers and there are people in this room that don't approve of ordering people to go to Alcoholics Anonymous my problem was out of choice I had the only answer that exists on the earth and I don't give a damn how many crazy ads you see in Malibu the only program that guarantees absolute sobriety for the rest of your life is AlcoholicsAnonymous I don't, I'll challenge anybody to dispute that. I had the knowledge of that program and I was a member of that program. I got these people coming up in front of me that are desperate alcoholics. I can either send them to AA where I know they'll get help or watch them die of alcoholism. I could just sit there and watch them died of alcohol. And I couldn't do that. I've seen people die of alkalism. The esophageal hemorrhage is not a pretty sight to see and that's the end stage of chronic alkalism so I sent them to AA. And, you know, I got a lot of heat, but we worked it out. Some of the old-timers would say, you're sending them damn people to AA and they're disrupting our meetings. And I'd say, well, why don't you kick them out of the meetings if they're interrupting your meetings? Well, the courts are ordering there. The courts don't have any power over AA, just over the poor bastard we're sending there, that's all. So, you could take a group conscience, and if your group doesn't want to sign court cards, you won't see any of my people at your meeting. Very simple. We got it worked out pretty well. Well, anyway, I'm about done here, but I got to say the most important thing I could say. I've had a spiritual awakening as the result of taking the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I hasten to add that the spiritual awakening that I've added is of the slow educational variety that's referred to in Appendix 2 of the big book. I highly recommend Appendex 2 of The Big Book. It talks about an unsuspected inner resource that we have tapped, which we presently come to understand as our own conception of a higher power. Well, I had such a spiritual awakening, but I had a god of my childhood that was taught to me in a religion that was an angry old white guy in the sky that would drop you into a pool of everlasting fire for some very small infractions, very minor infractations. And I hated and feared this higher power, although I didn't know I hated him until I'd done some inventory. So I'm almost embarrassed to tell you that it took me 18 and a half years of sobriety to get rid of that old higher power. I finally said one day, that's it, I'm done with this sin-guilt-redemption triangle. I'm down with it. And I let go of it. For a while, I didn't have a higher power, but now I have a new higher power that's gradually accrued to me. I just call it the healing power of Alcoholics Anonymous. The healing power of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I'll quit tonight on time as requested by inviting the blessing of that higher power on all of us tonight. Thanks. Thank you. okay uh let's thank jim again thank you so much and it takes a lot of people to put this meeting together i would like to thank everyone who makes this meeting possible. Please hold your applause until the end, but before we get started, we have a few announcements from Kevin, our literature guy.