The Gift of Grace for a Low-Bottom Drunk – Mary S.

My name is Mary and I am an alcoholic. Hi, I'd like to thank you very much for the absolute honor and privilege of addressing your convention today. It's just, wow, that's all I can tell you. What a thing for me. I am what is commonly known as a low-bottom drunk. And to be standing in front of you this afternoon, it's unbelievable. It's the no matter how far down the scale you have gone, you can see how your experience can benefit others. And that is one of the things that has kept me going in Alcoholics Anonymous. When I first came to AA, I was extremely suicidal, and I couldn't even conceive that my life would get better. It's like the big book says, we suffer from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. And I was totally hopeless when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. I could not even conceive that I could overcome my difficulties. And I used to think, well, I'll just get in the car and just go over Mulholland and that way my kids won't know what I did because I was such a bitter, bitter failure to my family and to everyone. So it all started for me back in the Midwest. I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and I'm the oldest of five children. I have a brother and sister my own age, and I have another brother and a sister who are quite a bit younger. My father was mentally ill, and I grewup in a very violent and sadistic family. He was a World War II vet, and he used to tell us after the war was over, he told us that he was going to teach us discipline and fear. That we would learn discipline and we would learn fear from him. And my brother and sister my own age and myself grew up in a household just beyond your wildest imaginations. He would take my mother down to the basement and I would hear her screaming in the basement for mercy and crying for help and I'd go sit over at the neighbor's on their porch hearing my mom screaming down there and the neighbor would try to calm me down and those days you just didn't go to the police or do anything you didn't have any power at all one time my mom went to talk to the priest about what was going on in our home And I thought, oh, God, this is great. You know, we're going to get help here. And she came home and I opened the door and she had a look on her face and I knew that there wasn't going to be any help for us. And she said, the priest told me that it was my cross in life, your father, and that I have marriage vows and that was the way it's going to Be. And at that point I made a decision never ever again to trust any kind of institution where men had control and power. I grew up hating men beyond anything. I hated my father. And I didn't, I was raised Catholic and I had no use for any of that. I was a very angry little girl. And I was also a very, the household burden fell on my shoulders. Mother gave up. She just couldn't deal with it. So when the two babies came, I was 9 years old when my brother was born and 11 when my sister was born. And she just handed me the babies, and she just said, here's the kids, you take care of them. I can't do anything anymore. And so I was, in fact, the mother in the family, and I did the cooking and I took care of the babies and I loved the babies. And that was my real saving grace because I adored my baby brother And I just loved him and my little sister so much. I just absolutely adored them. So that gave me a source of love in the family. In my family, you were taught that you never expressed any type of being dissatisfied or unhappy. If I even had a frown on my face, the old man would just backhand me. He'd say, wipe that look off your face, you little bitch, and just hit me. So there was never any sense that you could express dissatisfaction. I'd go to school with buckle marks up and down my legs, welts from the meetings in the basement and all of that. And everybody at school knew what was going on, but nobody helped us. We were very, very poor. Mom used to say, fill up on the bread and save the meat for your father. And dinner for us was a quarter pound of pickled pimento loaf from down the street at Andy and Bill's and a loaf of bread, and we would just like shred it up and just fill up our bread. And that's how I grew up. And I grewup in a fantasy world where someday I would escape. I loved reading. I was very bright. I loved those Nancy Drew mystery stories, and I would go down to Yonkers in Des Moines, which is a department store, and they had a book section, and they realized that something was wrong with me, and they would let me sit there and read Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. And I had this fantasy world where I was going to be Nancy Drew. I was gonna come be a star. I was gunna marry a lawyer. I was just gunna have a little convertible. I was jus gunna be like this glamorous person. And when I turned, I was 19 years old, and I came out to Los Angeles 1963 on a bus with $10 to my name. Didn't know a soul in the world. I decided one day I'd just gotten a bus from Des Moines, and then I came back to L.A., and I decided I was going to go to Hollywood and be a movie star. And so when I arrived in L. A., I got a newspaper, and they had a room-to-rent ad, and I got on a local bus and went up to the gal and knocked on her door. And I said, you don't know me or anything, but I said I'm going to get a job and I can pay you. I don't have any money right now, but if you'll give me a room, I'll pay you when I get a job. And she goes, I don'T know why I'M taking a chance on you, she says, but I'M going to. And she gave me a room. And the next day I got a job. Went downtown to the unemployment office downtown L.A. and got myself a job as always resourceful. Now that's one good thing about growing up in a family like mine. You could drop me in the middle of the Sahara Desert and I'd be okay. I always, that's the truth. I know that I can live by my wits. I am very resourceful, and I can make it in the world. And I met a man out here when I came out, and he was an attorney. Actually, he was a law student. There he was, you know, my Ned Nickerson. And so we got married. We got married and had two little kids, and i was the lawyer's wife. And we had a lovely little home in Gardena. But I didn't understand there was a price to pay for that, And that price was being a housewife, which I hated. You know, going to Mommy and Me and this crappy bowling alley and joining bowling leagues and cooking and cleaning. And I had absolutely no social skills whatsoever. I didn't know how to eat with my mouth closed. My husband had to teach me, like, you know, he'd say, you don't chew with your mouth wide open, you knows, and stuff like that. I did not know that. In our house, food was not put on the table. It was on a pot on the stove. And if you were starving, you ran in there and got yourself a little plate of something and gobbled it down and all this kind of stuff. So I had no social graces at all. And my husband was very embarrassed by me. He thought I was like just a big old oaf, you know, from Iowa, which was true. And so it really was. But you know what I did do? I went and got books on how to learn manners and all that kind of step. But I got so sick of him yakking about how uncouth I was that I left him. One day I just said, You think I'm so uncouth? What the hell with you? So then I took off and left him, And I was then 26 years old with two little girls to raise and no skills. I had never been to college. I had been to collage for one semester in Texas when I was very young. Anyway, I started hanging around a neighborhood bar, and it was called Grant's Grotto. And in Los Angeles, Grant'sgrotto was a biker's bar. It was a heathen bar. And as soon as I walked in that bar, I knew these were my people and I belonged there. You know, this was the real me. And it was one of those real crazy places where they drank Mad Dog. And we'd go out behind the bar in the alley and do a lot of other things besides alcohol, which I won't talk about at this meeting. But anyway, I did a lot. A lot of stuff. And I met a guy there that was a heroin addict and an alcoholic, and I fell madly in love with him. And that started an eight-year run beyond your wildest imaginations. You know, I call myself a vampire. At 6 o'clock, when it got dark out, my hair got bigger and my makeup got darker. My skirts got shorter and I'd have higher heels until I turned into this person. And I'd strut on down to the Grand Squadron, the R&R Club, and I was this dynamite chick. Man, I loved myself. You know, I thought I was so cool. I thought it was just great. And during the day, I went to my little job and I did my little work. But at night, I was her, this other person. And I loved her, and I had such a good time. I used to love to go to Ensenada. Oh, my God. I've been at Huson. I mean, I loved Husons. I had it in my will that my ashes were going to be scattered over Husons when I died because I just loved going down to Husons and all of that. And in that relationship, my drinking got worse and worse and worst, and it was getting harder and harder for me to pull together my day life where I had my work and my night life where i was the queen of this biker bar. And it was very, very hard. And I'd come home and I'd be all goofed up from drinking and I would sit on the edge of my bed and I started crying. I got my high school graduation picture out and I said, Whatever happened to her? Whatever happened with her? And I started to cry and then I called the president. I was calling all over Washington and complaining about the state of the world and oh, I was just like an insane person. And my kids would be screaming in the bedroom, Shut up! We've got to go to school in the morning! Shut up, shut up! And then I'd say, oh, you're so spoiled rotten, you girls. You're spoiled rotten. I can't even go have a little fun. All you ever want to do is just bring me down and let me go have fun. And my daughter one night, I said to her, Laura, run me on down to the bar. And she went, I'm not going to take you down there, Mother. You're an alcoholic, and I'm Not going to contribute to it. She says, look at you. And I said, what's wrong with me? And I was like talking a mile a minute. I was so drunk the next day from the night before that I'd go to work, and I had to shake so bad I couldn't even pick things up and drink it and I'd be walking into the filing cabinet and Richard and I were having these god awful fights so you know when you're living with a heroin addict it isn't fun a lot of the time it gets real crazy one time I was sitting watching television and he came in and took the TV and hocked it and got down by the time I got my clothes on he'd already gotten down and going getting the TV out of the pawn shop and breaking up and the big scenes and fights and all this stuff and trying to outwit him and oh my god It was really nuts. I lived a crazy, crazy life. What happened was my kid said to me one day, either he goes or we go. And I think that's pretty true of every alcoholic woman I've ever known that's been involved with an alcoholic man at some point or another. When they got kids, they say either Bubba goes or Wego. And it's always, but I love him. I love them. You don't understand. He's just sick. If I just love him enough, he'll get better and all this crazy stuff. And that's how I really thought. And I did tell him he had to move out of the house because my kids were really, they had had it with me. I mean, it was just beyond anything, the scenes and oh, my God. And I missed him terribly. And he was living then, he moved down to the bar. And he Was living behind the bar in a car and cleaning up the bar for drinks. And I went down to see him. It was his birthday, February 1984. And he called me, begged me to come down and see him, and I thought, well, if I get him out of the bar. Maybe he'll get clean. He went through a rehab once at the VA. I thought maybe he'll go through a rehabilitation rehab at the V.A. So I went down to take him out for his birthday and we were sitting at the bar and we would drink and we started arguing and I looked in the mirror and I thought, my God. I looked at myself and oh my God, I just can't live like this. This is so crazy. All this fighting and carrying on and it was wearing me down And I got in my car, and I pulled away from the side of the bar to go home. And I saw him like for a split second on the passenger side of my car with this fist like kicking the door to get in the car. And we did this stuff all the time, this craziness going on. And I Got Home, and several hours later there was a knock on my door. It was around midnight. And I opened the door. I'd been in bed, and then I got up to fix something to eat. You know how when you're all drunked out, and then you kind of come to and you're hungry or you're thirsty and you're just dying of thirst, and I was like, oh my God, I'm so thirsty. So I went in the kitchen to get something to drink or something to eat, and there's a knock on the door, and they said, who is it? And I said, it's the police. And I says, the police? So I opened the door and all these police people came into my living room, and I had on a pair of bikini pants and a t-shirt because I was in bed, and I said what's going on? And just then my daughter came home with her date, 16 years old, to walk into the living room and see her mother in this condition, still drunk, and the police all in the living room. And she says, what's going on here? And they said, we're taking your mother down for questioning. And she said, questioning? And I said, I need to put some clothes on. And they made her dress me in the moving room in front of everybody, like all the police people were laughing and carrying on. And I thought, oh brother, now Richard's calling the police on me. That's just typical of him. This is how my mind was. I'm going to have to go through a big thing with the police. Because this is what we did. I called the police one hand, he called the place on me, we'd have all these big scenes going on all the time. Oh, my God. It was like so crazy. Anyway, I got down to the police station, and this detective, I sat there for a couple hours, and he brought me in, and he read me my rights. And I said, why are you reading me my writes? Am I being charged with a crime? And he says, you're being charged mit manslaughter. And I say, manslaughter? I said manslaughter of who? And he told me Richard, that Richard had somehow got caught on my car and had been dragged down the street under my car and that someone driving down the Street had found him laying in the street bleeding to death. And I have no memory of that. I have not memory of any of it. I do not even know what in the world. I could not even conceive that I would ever drag him anywhere, let alone drag him, that I'd leave him to die. I mean, I can't even imagine it. I was like so shocked. And then my daughter had called my husband, my ex-husband, and he was a lawyer, you know, and he came and got me out of jail and bailed me out. And I said, oh, my God, you now. And he says, Mary, what are you going to do? by this time it was like 4 or 5 in the morning, and I said, well, I need a drink. He says, you need a drank? What are you talking about you need to drink? And I said – well, that was an accident. I mean, what's that got to do with my drinking? And that is the kind of alcoholic I was. I just had no clue as to how crazy I was, and I got home and I started thinking about, oh, my God. I thought, well he's not dead. He's just gone underground because he's always running guns and doing all kinds of stuff. You can't even believe, oh my God, the life I led. So I figured he's just underground somewhere running guns, and he'll come back. And then it took a couple of days when I realized that he was dead. He was not coming back. And Monday, I went to see an attorney, and I thought, oh, my God. I mean, I'm in charge with manslaughter here. And it was like I couldn't even conceive of it. And I had a girlfriend leave me off down on Pico Boulevard, and I was walking down Pico, and they had a West Side Alano club there, and I walked upstairs. Don't even ask me what I was doing. And there was a meeting at 6 o'clock that had just started, and I sat down, and I heard them say, rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. And I got it. It's like, oh my God, I'm a failure. It's clear as anything. And one of the things that I have found for me is that in Alcoholics Anonymous, you get it or you don't get it. I have never heard of a person yet that said, I got lectured into getting sober. Nobody's ever said that to me. You know, there's all kinds of reasons how I would get sober. But for me it was just like a gift of grace from God is all I can tell you. And I sat there crying through the meeting. And after the meeting was over with, this man came up to me and he said, What's the matter with you? And I said, My boyfriend is dead and they're saying that I killed him. And he said there's a woman over there and that happened to her. And maybe she can help you. And that was a great gift in Alcoholics Anonymous. And he didn't say to me, Well, let's go out to coffee and talk about it. You know, I believe that men work with men and women work with women. And that's how I believe. And other people have their own opinions on that. But over the long haul, men were with the men, women are with the women. That's how i believe. And he gave me a great, great help when he said she can help you over there. And I sat there and I listened to her talk a little bit. And then I went home and I called it for a cab to take me home. So when I called for the cab, the cab driver pulled up and he goes, where do you want to go? You want to go to the R&R Club? Do you want to go down to Grand Scrotto? And I said, no. I didn't know who he was from The Man on the Moon. I said no. I want to go home. He says okay and drove me home. So in these blackouts I was taking paths all over town. I had no idea who they were. Cab drivers all knew me. Just drove me right on home. I went oh my God. That was like really scary. So when I got home my daughter was standing there and she thought I had been out drinking and she said mom where have you been? And I said, I went to AA meeting. And she goes, oh my God, don't start that AA stuff. Because she thought it was like a cult. Because I used to chant. Oh, I did all kinds of weird old things. You know, I was like, a real weird person. So, she thought I was involved in some kind of a cult kind of thing. And, she says, Mama, what are we going to do with you? And, I said. I don't know. And. She said. You need to go to that Schick Shadel place that Dad's always talking about. We need to put you into that Schick place. And I. Said. I'm going to try this AA. And if it doesn't work. I'll go to the Schick thing. I said I just don't. Know what I'm. Going to do. And so. That's how I started now called Exonomist. I started going by myself to meetings, one meeting after another. And I sat at meetings and I went the following Saturday over to the club, the West Adelano Club, and I sat there and I was just crying my head off. And somebody made me come up to the podium and introduce myself. And this man came up to me afterwards and he looked at me and said, you're going to be okay. And I said, I don't think so. And he said, you're going to be okay. And I looked at him and I thought, oh, I bet God put him in my life. That's why I'm here in AA and all this because God wants me to meet him. He's the one that's going to save me from all of this. And so that's how my head was. And they said that you're supposed to get a sponsor when you first get sober and all these things. So I asked this woman, I heard her speak and I said, I'm going to ask her to sponsor me. So she said, meet me at this dance and we'll talk about it. It's an AA thing. I said okay. So, I got down there and that guy was sitting there And I said, thank you very much for what you said to me today. You know, that was really helpful. And he says, well, come here. I want you to meet some people here. And he introduced me to some other AA women and this and that. And the one gal became my best friend in Alcoholics Anonymous. And anyway, the gal that I was going to ask to sponsor me, she came in, but she was like a nervous wreck. You know? She's like, ooh, ooh. And I thought, God, I'm a nervous wreck. And she's a nervous wrack, so we're going to be two nervous wrecks. Forget it. You know. I don't want to ask her to sponsor. So I did it. But I gave that guy a ride home from the meeting. And we started seeing one another. Anyway, I asked another woman to sponsor me who was very sweet and very soft-spoken, and she said to me, Mary, are you willing to go to any lengths to stay sober? And I said, yes, I am. And she says, okay. And I say, but I met this guy. And she said, you know, honey, in the first year it's not so hot to get involved with somebody, but she said would you promise me that you will tell me if he interferes with your sobriety? And I says, yes. She says, Okay. Now, she said, Mary, here's your problem. You don't know how to give and receive love. And that is what you're going to learn in Alcoholics Anonymous. And the way we learn about that is by doing for one another. It's called being of service to one another So if you want me to sponsor you, at the end of 30 days, you have to have an AA commitment. Okay, dear? And she said that you need to go to a meeting every single night for 30 days. Okay? And I said, okay. And I went to 90 meetings in 30 days and I worked. You know, I mean, I went into my job, I worked before my work, I went on my lunch hour. I went after work. And this girl that I had met at the dance, she had been in and out, in and out, and she had the same sponsor. So my sponsor told her her job was to take me to meetings because they took my car away from me right away. I didn't have a car. So she said her job Was to take Me to Meetings. And in the course of doing that, she has stayed sober. And that's when I really learned it's one alcoholic helping another. You've got to give it away to keep it on a very basic level. So Maureen was running me around to meetings. My sponsor is like, I love her so much. She's still my sponsor, my only sponsor in AA. She had a car. Her son was a police officer, and we called it the drunk mobile because it didn't have handles to get out of the back door, you know, those little police cars. So we'd get these newcomers, we'd throw them in the drunk automobile, and we'd take them off the knee. We'd be taught. We'd have tapes going. We'd talk in AA, talk in AAA, and they'd say, oh, they want it out, but there's no way out. They had to go with us, you know? And the funny part about it all is that all of us that got sober at that time were still sober, this whole little group of us. Anyway, at the end of 30 days, I took the commitment to start the women's meeting at the West Ritalano Club. At the end for a month, we ran the big book study there. And at the 11 months of sobriety, I started an 11-step spiritual meeting because I was having such a problem with God. And Clancy was my opening speaker. I called him. I thought, I'm going for the top, boy. So I just called Clancy up out of the clear blue sky. I said, hey, Clancy, I'm starting this meeting, and would you come be my opening speaker? And he said, I sure will. And then afterwards, he called me to thank him for that honor. And I love Clancy. I'm not part of Pacific Group, but he has been a very dear and good friend to me throughout my billing at Alcox Anonymous. Okay, so what I did was this. I jumped into it like full steam ahead. 90 meetings in 30 days. Had a commitment at the end of 30 days took commitments all over everywhere, wiped down tables, made coffee. Here, there, everywhere, there I was. And through all of this, I cried. I just cried through everything I went through. I sat there sobbing my head off making coffee, sobbing my head clean up the tables. And then I said to my sponsor, I can't keep doing this because these newcomers see me crying all the time and they're going to think that AA doesn't work because all I ever do is cry all the Time. And she said, you know, Mary, she said that's your job in AA, to show people that no matter how much you cry, you don't drink. That's your job in AA. I said, okay. So I understood that. And that's how I started Now Collects Anonymous. Step one and two was really easy for me. I mean, I'm not dumb. My life was totally unmanageable. When I was four months sober, I was offered a plea bargain. If I take the plea, they would make it a misdemeanor, hit and run, I don't know what. And I thought, no, I can't remember dragging him. I can never conceive that I would do that. So I said no, and then I was recharged with murder. when I said no. So when I was four months sober, I was charged with second-degree murder and Richard's death. And that was a terrific blow to me because I'd hear people get up at the podium and say, I drove drunk all the time and I look at my fender and I looked at my bumper and there's never any blood on my car so God must really love me and blah, blah, bla, bla about God loving him and all this stuff. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, God doesn't love me when I owed it. God never did a darn thing for me, you know? And here I am four months over and I'm this perfect AA and I've been in worse trouble than when I started. You know, they'd say, I haven't had to go to jail since I got sober. Boy, God has a sense of humor. God loves playing jokes on me. I couldn't find a parking spot today. And I'd hear this stuff from the podium, and I'd think they were raving lunatics. You know? I was so angry. I was crazy. And I heard all these notions about God, and I had no concept of any kind of a just or loving God. Forget God. And the funny part was my sponsor was like kind of religious nuts. She had these holy cards and holy water everywhere and all this. And I said, don't start the Jesus talk. I don't want to hear none of that. You know, she'd say, Jesus loves you, Mary. I said, I don' t want to here about Jesus loving me. Oh, no, no. And she'd said, That's okay, honey. You know? That's Okay. So anyway, I was ready for my preliminary hearing and it was time to do my four steps. I did make the decision to turn my will and life over to the care of God. And that, to me, was AA. I mean, I believe that. But no, nothing more than that. But I was staying sober through all of this. And I said, I can't do the inventory, and we live all this stuff with the old man and the weapons and all this other weirdo stuff that he was doing with me. And I thought, I just can't deal with it. And she says, you cannot afford not to do it, Mary. The steps are spiritual help. You need that help when you go into your preliminary hearing. You can afford not – you just – you do your inventory. And I did a very thorough inventory, a very painful inventory, and I did that. And I felt for sure when I went to my preliminary hearing, they would let everything go because I'd hear people say that too. I was facing all these charges and they just lost my case never heard from anybody again you know how you hear that jokey old stuff so they didn't lose my case so they bound me right on over I was bound over for a murder trial so I had that then to face me and the murder trial was set to start in November and I found out in October I had a tumor and they postponed the trial they thought I had a malignant tumor and I went in and I had to have a hysterectomy and all this stuff, but it turned out I didn't have cancer, thank heavens. And so they rescheduled my murder trial for January, and I was really, my first year of sobriety was very hard. I can't even tell you. And through all of this, I went to work. And that's something else that I really believe. AA should work. The worst thing that can happen to an AA is to go unemployment or disability. It really is. AA should be a good thing. It should work, in my opinion. You just go to work, you learn how to work be self-supporting with your own contributions. There's a reason. Some people are really disabled, and that's okay. But this notion that, you know, it just makes me insane. It does. I think that's why Bill has that in one of our traditions because he knew how valuable it was for us to learn how to work and be self-supporting through our own contributions and not be looking out for the old handout. Anyway, through all of this I was working. I had my murder trial face in me, and I didn't know what to do, and they offered me another plea that if I pleaded manslaughter, they would drop the murder charge and they wouldn't send me to jail. They'd give me probation. So I called Clancy up, and I said, Clancy, I don't know what to do. And Clancy said, you know, honey, I won't give a damn if you kill that guy or not. We live life on life's terms. You're alive, he's dead. That's the way it is. You take the plea bargain, you get on with your life. And I said okay. So I took the plea. I go and stand in front of the judge, Judge Leslie B. Light, and he informed me that women like me made him sick and that I was mentally ill, and he couldn't send me to a mental institution, but he could send me into jail, and he did. So this whole plea was supposed to have been all worked out, and I walk out of there, and he sent me to Sybil Brand Institute for Women when I was a year-and-a-half sober. And that was quite a shock. I didn't really think that that would happen. So anyway, I go off to jail, and I'm sitting down at SBI, and I am in 4100, which is maximum security lockup at OSBI, and I m in the cell, and I'm sitting there, and I am so angry. I was so mad. My first four or five years of sobriety, I was so mad, I would vibrate with rage, I were so angry, and I said to myself, you know, I said to God, I prayed, I begged, I begged what have you ever done for me? Nothing! You haven't done one darn thing for me. I was like so mad and then this voice as clear as a bell said, stop begging. So I said, okay what shall I do? And this voice I said, get into action. AA is a program of action. It's not a program of thinking. It's a program of action so okay what shall I do and I've always learned in AA you do exactly what's in front of you if you don't know what to do exactly what's in front of you so I looked around the cell block it was like really dirty and it's very crowded there because there's so many women so there's this area in front of the cells called the freeway that's what they call it where you're supposed to be able to exercise but it's all double bunk because there were so many people there so there was like people everywhere and so I asked a deputy for a bucket and a mop. And she asked me why. And I said, because I wanted to clean up the cell block. So she gave me a bucket in the mop and I like wiped everything real careful because I'm like very immaculate. I like everything pretty and neat. And it was like wiping everything nice and taking my time and cleaning it all up. And these girls, this girl was laying on the bunk and she goes, her name was Sleepy. She found the cell block and she go, what you doing girl? And I'm a sober and clean member of Alcoholics synonymous, and I'm being a service to you. And she says, listen to that bitch. And everybody started laughing, you know? And I went, oh my God, that's why God put me here. You know, I thought really the reason I was in jail was that I had inherited my father's nutty bad genes and that I was like a sociopath and didn't even kill people and don't even know I'm doing it. And that I'm a total alcoholic and just a total disaster. And then I got this like illumination that I was in Sybil Brand because God wanted me to be of service to another woman there. And I grew to love the women very, very much that were in my cell block. And when I went to leave, Sleepy said to me, I'm going to miss you, Mary, when you leave. And she said, I said, you come down to the Westside Llano Club sometime when you get out of jail. You know, you can come on down there. She says, oh, I'll come down there, you would ignore me, you wouldn't pay attention to me. You talk all that stuff here sitting here, but you wouldn�t. I said you come into the West Side Llano club girl, you're going to be the queen of the Westside Lionel Club. You come on down there. So she and I laughed, and I went back and visited her after I got out, and I don't know what's happened to her, but someday I'm going to look in this room and she's going to come up to me and give me a hug. I really believe in that. Anyway, so when I got Out of Jail, I had to then cope with all of the loss of Richard's death, of having the guilt, the remorse, not even knowing what happened, everything. That's when my rehabilitation really started. The six and seven steps, they say separate the men from the boys and the women, the girls from the women. I had to address the issue of character defects. I hadと understand that I am not a character defect, you know, that I'm basically a decent person, and that I had то learn that the hard way. I went to a daily meeting for nine years. The first nine years of my sobriety, I went tо a meeting every single day. I went то a step study for seven years. Each day was a different step, and you could ask questions of the speaker. And one of the questions I asked is, how can you tell when you're a sociopath? And the speaker said, sociopaths never ask questions like that. And I went, oh, my God. It was like such a relief. Oh, yeah. And that's what gave me, like, a lot of comfort in Alcoholics Anonymous. I did a tremendous amount of service work. I got a general service commitment when I was a year and a half sober GSR for two years, GCM for two years, the Southern California Area Assembly, I was chair or co-chair of the picnic down there with all the food and all blah blah blah and all that kind of stuff and during that commitment that is what taught me to be part of a group and to be a worker among workers and this is the joy of alcoholics anonymous for me. It is a pattern of life that takes me out of these rooms into the big world. Like Bill says, most good ideas are simple. It's very, very simple. If I use these 12 concepts, 12 traditions, 12 steps in my business world, I will be as successful there as I am and I'll call it synonymous. And it's really true. I mean, I try to govern my business by the 12 concepts. Okay, what happened was they took my license. I was an insurance agent. I got an agent's license, and he took it away when I had the felony conviction. And my PO sent me – I want to say about this too. I was on formal probation for five years. I appeared monthly for five ears. I owed close to $60,000 in attorney's fees. No, it wasn't $60. It was $30,000 In attorney's Fees. It took me eight years to pay that back monthly. That was part of my amends. And that's something else I think that, you know, I really want to emphasize. Because I did all this stuff, it's easy to say, I have a living amends. Oh, brother, when I hear that, that kind of gets my goat too. I have no living amens. I had to have a money amends right in that checkout every single month with interest, all that money. It took me almost eight years to pay it back. They took my license away. I asked my PO if he would send a letter to the state asking them not to take my license away. I got a letter back from the Department of Insurance in, I think it was in Sacramento then. I'm not sure, San Francisco, saying, actually the guy called me. He said, it's my duty to protect the people in the state of California from people like you. And I said, you know what? I understand how you feel. I do. I'm just asking you before you make a final decision to consider this letter from my probation officer. That's all I'm asking. I understand that. And they reinstated my license. My P.O. wrote me a beautiful letter, yes, and they were going to say that my license, and you should see my P.o., my little P.os, little cubicle where I would go to report. All my A activities were on the wall, you know, all the flyers from events, everything. Everything was on the walls. I'd walk in and it's like going home or something. Here's all my stuff for me, you Know, one probably person, not one, but one of the few that ever really took it to heart. I did everything my Pio told me to do. You know, I didn't drive my car for a year. I didn' t sneak around. I didn't do anything like that. Okay, so then what happened was this man that I had met, when I first got sober, he and I started dating. We had a lot of trouble in the relationship. I'm older than he is. It was a very problematic relationship, and we ended up breaking up for a year. I also had a deformed foot. I had a physical disability, and I was laid up for another year, 1990. They did like four operations on my left leg. They cut my Achilles tendon, they cut off my heel, and we inserted a fake thing, blah, blah. Anyway, I went for a whole year on crutches and this horrific, horrific therapy because scar tissue adhered from my Achille's tendon to my calf muscle. So three times a week I'd have to stick my leg in this boiling hot water at the therapy office. Then they'd put it into a bucket filled with water and ice with electric current running as high as I could stand it to shock my calf muscles back into activity. and I would start crying just as I approached it, you know, because I couldn't stand the pain. And that's when I learned about meditation. I went to a place, and I got a mantra, and I learned to do my mantra before my physical therapy sessions, and I had a lot of content prior to investigation. I used to think that people that went like, ooh, were like fruitcakes, you now? And I realized, really, I realized that it was like focusing, that we focus our mind on something other than ourselves, And I was able, with my mantra, to get through a lot of this physical pain. This man then came in 1991. He came over to my office. I hadn't seen him for a whole year. And he came over and he said to me, will you give me another chance? And I says, no, no more chances for you, Buster. You've used them all up. And he looked at me and he says, Mary, if you give Me another chance, I'll never leave you again. And I said, okay. Okay. So we had another chance. Anyway, we've been together since then. We decided to start living together in 1993. We were so happy we decided to buy a little house together. He had, we went outside the house and he had like a little spot on his, near his breast. And I said, what the heck is that? And he does fire extinguishers. He does labor. He's a laborer. And he thought he had hit it with the fire extinguisher and bruised it. So we went to the doctor, and the doctor said, oh, it's a little broken blood vessel. Take it out of the office. Well, it turned out that night I had to leave him at the doctor to take my daughter someplace, and I came back, and he wasn't there. And I asked the doctor where Steve was, and she said, well, it turns out that it was a tumor, and I gave it to him to take across the street to be biopsied. I said, did you hand him the tumor? And he said, well, it was in a jar. And I said for God's sake, I never heard such a stupid thing like that. You know, I used to be very volatile. What the heck are you talking about, you know? So I went driving around trying to find Steve and he was walking down the street. And he got in the car and said, what are you walking down this street for? What is with the tumor, what is going on here? And he had wet himself and the doctor's office, this guy was digging this thing out of him and he called me that night at the doctor and he said it's malignant. I said oh my god. So he says, you tell him to come back in here. I'm going to take the rest of it out. And I thought, yeah, in a pig's eye, you're going to take the last of it off. So what I did was I called UCLA and I got a consultation with the cancer specialist at UCLA. And as he had no insurance, he has epilepsy and he was uninsurable. And we got over there and the doctors that confirmed the diagnosis, he had a soft tissue sarcoma, stage four soft tissue sarcoma. He said he'll be dead in a year if he doesn't start this really intensive chemotherapy. And I said, he has no insurance. He says he's got to get Medi-Cal. So Steve went down to apply and they said that he'd have to wait for six months or I don't know what, you know how that thing goes. Well, I got myself on the old phone. This is something else I've learned in AA. I hate it when people say, because we want to ask for. I hate that. It's like so defeating. You know, everything I've asked for that I have gotten, I have loved. There has been nothing I've ask for that i've gotten that I hated, really. And I thought to myself, I need to get him some medical insurance. So I call up the Board of Supervisors, Ed Edelman, who I had voted for. And I said, listen here, I voted for you. I'm one of your constituents. My husband, I just said it was my husband, is going to die if he doesn't get treatment. We need Medi-Cal. You better do something here if you want my vote. And I'm not kidding you. And he said, okay. And by that night, I'm Not Kidding You, that same day, his deputy guy called down the MediCal and got the Medigal in. And Steve started then chemo, radiation, surgery, chemo. I said, you know, he was like little E.T., I called him, because he lost even his eyelashes. Oh, my God, the poor thing. He was like pitiful. He had an infusion pump 24 hours a day pumping that chemo into him. Then we have to go back to get the shots for his platelet count, build his platelets count up so they've had more chemo. It just about killed him, but it didn't kill him. And not during any of that did we say, why is this happening to me and all that kind of stuff. We have learned about life as life happens. Life on life's terms. Thank God it happened. We were both sober and had our wits about us to be able to cope with it. We joined the wellness community in Santa Monica, which was a place for me to go and to express my anger about it and my fears and what have you. And out of all the people at the wellness committee, my husband, he's not my husband. I was going to tell you that later. I slipped. Anyway, he is the only one out of 25 that is still alive from 1993 to now. He's the only One of Our group that's alive. And he did, it was a terrible, horrible ordeal, I can tell you that. But I'm very, very proud of them. And then I didn't really want to get married because I was so afraid, God, if we get married and he gets sick again, they'll take the business, they'll do this and that, all this stuff we've worked for, it'll be all wiped out and all this stuck. Well, one night I spoke at a meeting way out in Timbuktu and this little old lady came up to me and I said, you know, I think I might get married, but, you know、 we're older, who cares if I get married? And she looked at me in the eye and she said, Do you believe in God? I said, yes. She said, that's your answer. I went, it is? It took me a while to figure it out. And I thought, oh, okay. Okay. Well, the truth of the matter is, yes, I do believe in God. God can do everything. God is or God isn't. You know? God always was, always will be, will always remain the same. That's what God is for me. A source of power. God is not a manic depressive. You know, God isn' t a jokester. God is n' t an prankster. God doesn't run around plotting little ways to undo me. I mean, God is, always was, always will be, always remain the same. And I thought about that. So Steve and I went to Vegas last year to meet my brother and his wife, who were celebrating 25 years of marriage. But another long story short, he turned to me. My brother went to get us dessert. And he says to me, Mary, let's do it. I said, okay. So my brother came back, and he says, we're getting married, and Heath does when? And I says, right now? He says, sis, right now? And I said, yep. And we got in a car and drove downtown and got ourselves a license and got hitched. So I am like, and then we went away. And it's been so absolutely wonderful. I love being married. I love my little wedding band. All those things that I said about doesn't really matter, just a piece of paper, it's a bunch of hogwash, you know? I have turned into like a real citizen. You know what I mean? I really have. This rebellious girl who is always going to get in your face and all this kind of stuff has turned into a solid kind of a person. The little company I worked for, my boss there, he stood by me through all this mess and it was an insurance and real estate agency in West L.A. He decided he wanted to retire so I had an insurance license and I said, I'd like to buy the business from you. Why don't you sell it to me? And he says, to you? And I said well yeah, I've run it for 20 years. I mean, yeah, me. He says Mary, you don't have a real estate license. He says you can't get one because you're a felon. And I says, well, you just never know about things in life. You know? God's pretty powerful. God's more powerful than Judge Wesley D. Light. More powerful than the Civil Ban Institute for Women. More powerful then the Insurance Commission. So maybe God be more powerful then real estate people. So anyway, learn what you do first is go take the test and pass it. So I went to school and I took the test. And I passed the test I didn't lie on my application, nothing. And they gave me my license. So I'm a real estate broker and I now own the business. Isn't that something? Yes! I can get a dog on this. Here I was in 1986 sitting in Silver Band Institute for Women, not a penny to my name. My license revoked on my insurance. No prospects of anything in sight. Mentally ill out of my freaking mind, you know. And here I am 12 years later and I have a husband. I have two beautiful girls who have forgiven me. And then the last thing I want to talk about are my daughters. My daughters suffered terribly from my disease. And I think it's something else that we need to really keep in mind, you know, that no matter how long I stay sober, no matter How Spiritual I become, no matter much you love me, no Matter How Much All This Happens, I cannot take back their childhood and their adolescence that I totally wrecked with my insane, crazy, stupid behavior. You know, I've taken them to AA with me, taken to Al-Anon. I paid for therapy for my daughter, my younger daughter, for a while. And then I said to her, you Know, you're becoming a woman now. If you want to continue with this, you need to take responsibility for yourself. And my girls have forgiven me. My older girl is Laura was not as angry with me as my younger one, the one that was there the night that they arrested me and actually saw it, you know. My older daughter is like beautiful. She's like something out of Jane Austen. I could see her riding down in her carriage in England or something. She's just absolutely beautiful. And she met up with this guy, really wonderful young man, and they fell in love and they decided to get married. This is 1994, and Steve had gone over to Cedars-Sinai to get his cancer check, and he got an all-clear on his cancer. He called me up, and he says, oh, honey, everything's clear. My cancer, everything looks good. I said, great. Two hours later, I get a call from CedARS for my daughter, and she had gone in for a pap smear, and it came back funny, and she'd gone over the CedARs for another check, and she said to me, Mom, there is not good, and she was diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer. Same day, I got Steve's all-cleaner. I got my daughter's bad news, and that was four months before her wedding day. She was diagnosed with that. It was a terrible blow to me. I think in AA, it's the hardest thing that I've had to deal with is my daughter'S cancer. And even worse than Steve's, which I shouldn't say that, but it was like because she was like so pure and innocent and sweet, you know? In a way, I kind of feel like maybe Steve and I deserve it or something. And I got this notion, and I do, I had this notion in my head that God was going to take her for Richard, you know, that was a life for a life, a tooth for a tooth and all that kind of stuff, that in return for my sobriety and peace of mind that God would take my daughter. Now this is how my head is. This is how insane I am. This is why I need to have a sponsor, why I needs to show up with another alcoholic, why I needed to write inventory, why I had to do amends, why I'd need to pray, why I've needed to work with somebody else because this head is out to kill me one way or another. And I sat and I talked to a woman at a meeting and she says, honey, she says you have children and I said yes. And she said, do you love him? And I said, yes. And she says, do test them? And I said test them, no. And then she said why do you think God is testing you? Why do you thing God would do this to you? It's got nothing to do with you. Your daughter's sick and that's that. But what you can do is be a source of strength. Experience strength and hope for her. And I say, you're right. And it meant backing down and letting she and her fiance settle how they were going to handle her treatment. not me, which I wanted to go and just yank her up and take her home and tell her exactly what she was going to do because I have had experience with cancer. You know, blah, blah. It was like shutting my big fat mouth and letting those two work it out. And she had a hysterectomy. It had spread. She had a hysterectomy, Mother's Day of 1994. And she came over to me about a month later, and she had to have radiation, and she was too sick for her wedding. And she said, I'm going to have to postpone my wedding day. I'm too sick to get married, Mom. And I said, that's okay. It'll work out. And she says, no, I don't think it's going to work out if you don't get married. I don'T THINK IT'S GOING TO WORK OUT, MOM. And her husband turned to her fiancee, Dan, and he says, Laura, I've loved you from the day I met you. I'LL MARRY YOU TONIGHT. I'LLL MARRY YOUR NEXT WEEK. I'ILL MARRY A YEAR FROM TODAY. YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT AND WE'RE GETTING MARRIED. And they left. And I called the Bel Air Hotel, which she wanted to get married at, but we couldn't afford it. And this is what I learned in the 8th. You want something, you ask for it, and you take the steps to get it. And I called up, and I said, my daughter would like to be married there. Is there any way we could work out a deal? And they said, you come on down here. We're going to give her the wedding of her dreams. And they did do that. She got married in August of 1994 to Michael. She had this exquisite wedding. I got her the fairy book. I had it all videotaped. So every time I get depressed or unhappy, I just play the tape and watch the wedding. No, I loved it. I'm Scottish. We had a bagpiper at the wedding, and we had a celebration of all. And my ex-husband was there, this man that has been my friend for all of these years. He got to dance with his daughter, the father-daughter dance. And I set it up in advance. You didn't know about this. He starts to dance right there, and I had set it off to play the theme from The Godfather. So he goes, da-na-na, na-na. And all of a sudden he goes. And everybody just clapped. He's Sicilian. Everybody just clapt. And the look on his face of ecstasy and joy. And that is what Alcoholics Anonymous is all about, the joy of living. I love my husband. I have the sweetest husband. He is so good to me and so sweet and so supportive. I'm very sad, and he isn't here with me today. He wasn't able to make it today to come with me, and I feel kind of sad about that because he has the love of AA like I do. Both of us, from the day that we got sober, there's a lot of AlcoholicsAnonymous. You know, if you're struggling and you're new in the room, And please, you have to just keep in mind that it's not, it's trudging the road of happy destiny. It's not going to be all smooth sailing. I think the most important thing that I did, I got a wonderful sponsor who has a brain in her head. She's not one of these negative with her bird and she hates man and all that kind of stuff. You know, she's a person who enjoys life and embraces it. You know? If you want to learn how to work, you don't go to some guy that lives in a car and hasn't worked for 20 years. You know, and I didn't know that. I go off asking advice of lunatics. You know? You go to somebody that has a job, that shows up every day, you say how to do it. My husband and I have had some conflicts in our marriage. I am extremely competitive. I'm very, very girl-oriented, very intense. My husband is totally opposite me. He's very easygoing. He's so sweet. You know. Like, I'll say, you know, honey, we need to put the curtain up. Okay, my mind. Go down. Get the thing. Look at the curtain, you put it up. That's it. No. He like looks at it and he thinks about it. Then he goes down to the basement. I don't know what he does in the garage. It's like a basement garage. I don'T know what HE does in there. I swear to God. Hours he spends there like looking in his boxes and looking at things. I DON'T know WHAT men do in their garages, but he does the garage men thing. So he goes and does that for a while. Then he'll come back and he'll look at it again and he'd go, yeah. Well, I might have something here to... Okay. Then he'd be like, okay. Then he would go out and have a cigarette, you know? Because he still smokes, he would. And anyways, and then he comes back in, and he looks at us some more. And I'm like, oh, my God, you know, put it up, put It up. And I've had to learn to not do that. And that was because of general service. I just sit there, and I'm quiet, andI just say, okay, okay. So we get it together. And what we have decided to do a couple weeks ago was we went up to a convention in San Jose, the N.A. convention, basically, because I wanted to hear Eric Clapton. I don't have anything to do with the N-A., but I wanted To hear Eric Clapton. So we're at the convention, and my husband, well, anyways, my husband just kind of disappears. And he does that thing. I don't know what with men. They just disappear. One man up there next to you, the next man up they're off doing. God knows what they're doing. So he had disappeared. And I said, you know what? This disappearance is making me insane. He says, we need some help to resolve this. And so we're seeing a counselor, not because our marriage is troubled at all. And I think the counselor about fell off his chair. You know, he thought we were going to come in here like the two warring, I don' t know what. He says,"I love my wife. She loves me. We have this conflict. We don' te know how to resolve it. will you help us? And that's what I've learned in AA. If I have a problem with something, I go to somebody who's an expert and I ask them how to do it, how to help me, and then I do what they tell me to do. I mean, as simple as that. I don't start questioning them, challenging them, telling them that they know what they're doing, but I know I do it better. You know what I mean? That's what i do. So, in closing with all of this, I love Alcoholics Anonymous. If you're new in the room, get a sponsor. Get a sponsor that's got some sobriety. And I tell you, not necessarily years and years of it. I think sometimes somebody with maybe five, six years with a newcomer is even better because they're closer to the last drink in a way, you know. So don't just go by time. Go by someone who's happy, who has what you want, who has loving relationships in their life, who doesn't hate their father and hate their mother and hate the wife and be beating people up and all that nutty stuff. Somebody that's got some kind of, like, tranquility in their life. And do the steps. Do your inventory. Make your amends. You know? It's a wonderful life. I have a fabulous life. My children have forgiven me. I have an wonderful husband. I own a business. We are going to leave on the 27th of October. We're going to Europe by frequent flyer miles because I'm always doing stuff to get miles and everything. Anyways, we're going on my frequent flyers miles to Paris and Venice and Vienna. things that we had only dreamed of. I am nothing but a fruitcake from Des Moines, Iowa, and I have been given this wonderful, wonderful life, and it's all due to Al Kleck's Anonymous. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks for watching!