The Inventories That Saved His Skinny A** – Gary B.

hi I am Gary and I'm an alcoholic and I've been able to sit up there I had the best seat in the house these two just did such a wonderful thing of kicking this thing off I'm a little ticked about it, frankly. I've been set up. My dry day is the third day of December 1964 and I'm telling you that because I'm bragging. I did it all by myself. And that's not true and I really do know that. Ooh, this is great. You know what? Ooh, I've got goosebumps just sitting there looking at you all. It ain't because you're ugly. Well, most of you. I too am a real alcoholic and I too Am one of those who discovered it after I'd been around for a while. And very briefly I'll tell you that I hit a nut house a month or so before my 25th belly button birthday. And I started learning this deal then, and I'd like to tell you more about that later, but I didn't drink long. I guess probably from that incident I remember my first drink and that that we've been laughing about, I probably drank maybe eight or nine years. So by the time I'm 25 years old, I'm in serious trouble. I'm 6 foot 2 inches tall. I weighed something less than 130 pounds and I was dying. Hell, if I walked fast, my legs whistled. And I understood what happened when I drank. And I understand that I could not do that. And an incident came about in my life where I had that talk. I thought I had gotten back in the house because my wife had asked me to leave a few weeks earlier than that point, and so I went out and moved in with the Ham's Beer Distributor. I thought that was a remarkable move, but a couple days later he didn't think it was so slick. And I'd done some things, and I'd called the house, and I told Julie I wanted to come to see the kids. And she said, okay. So I thought I was back in, but when I got there, her dad was there. We had that talk. You know about that talk, don't you? That talk's a bitch. You know, that's tough. That's tough talk. And the end result of that is her dad put me on a Greyhound bus and sent me 400 miles across the state of Wyoming to the Wyoming State Hospital. The rest of it was a nut house, but we didn't know what else to do with me. They didn't Know. I didn't No. The only experience I had at that point in time that I even knew anything about Alcoholics Anonymous we saw on the movie The Days of Wine and Roses. Saw it at a drive-in theater. got high centered on empty beer cans just zoned them under the truck and the process started there if you will up in that point in my life I had known everything these two had talked about I'd had to hold my belly with the wind blowing through it and no way to get away from it without liquor couldn't do it and that was the only answer I had and all that and I get locked into this place and I'm learning to eat again and I am recovering from some beatings I had taken I was a fighter I wasn't a winner I was just a fighter and what happened to me in there is they got me physically back together and I learned some things in there I learned that I was an alcoholic and I learned it the way many people seem to learn today. Some of you have been in the jitter joints or the spin drives or seen U-shaped gelatinic charts on the wall. You check off the various symptoms of alcoholism and you get down at the mess in the bottom and then there's the various stages of recovery. Well, I just kept checking them off and I got down there and I thought I'd be damned. I wonder what that means. I'd known I wasn't like anybody else. I was told a lot I wasn'T like anybody elSE. Julie told me a lot like I wouldn't buy it. And that kind of started me on a program. It took me four years in AA to find the book and the 12 steps. And that was probably the most four painful years of my life. I say that absolutely seriously. I didn't drink only because of God's grace. And I'm not trying to make nothing arrogant about that. I lucked out. And then some things happened in life, and we ended up from Laramie Wine to Denver, Colorado. And through a series of circumstances, I ended up around a group called the Denver Young People's Group. So now I'm going to use the old-timer's prerogative here at a deal like this and share a story with you because it involves some people that are important to you guys. Some of them you've never heard of, but they're important to you. You are descendants of what we learned with this big book and a bunch of us getting together and going through the steps. At this point, like I said, I'd been in AA for four years. What time did I start this thing? I'll get you out before breakfast. And I got this young people's group, and it was different from any AA meeting I'd attended to. I'd been in meetings in Wyoming and northern Colorado and the small towns, and I had been well taken care of. I had people who, for some reason I understood, cared about me. I didn't know why. I had no clue why anybody would care about me, but they did, and they kind of led me in a direction that held me together enough that I got around to some people that saved my life. And so I got down there and I attended one of these meetings the first time and some things didn't happen there that had happened at other meetings. When I got sober in Wyoming back then, I probably, I'm sure I've never heard otherwise, was the youngest member in AA in the state. Now I'm in a state of 400,000 people there's more people in Queens than there is in the whole state I know that's true it's got to be true but nobody said to me and I got in there gee isn't it good you got a hold of this thing so young you didn't have to go through all the stuff that we went through nobody said that to me one guy told me sit down and shut the hell up He told me to say things different a lot. And I never heard any of the stuff I was hearing in some of the other meetings I was getting to. And it's some of those lies that we hear all the time, but they just didn't happen there. And I heard a different lingo amongst these guys and gals. And as time came up, some things were going on. We were hustling the prisons, and we were working the prisons and that sort of thing. I mean, there was an old-timer in Denver named Reed. Do you remember Reed, Jerry? And Reed would go up to Canyon City Prison and he'd talk to them regularly. I don't know if it was once a month or every week or how often he went there. But when somebody was getting out, Reed always told them, listen, if you come to this place where I go, which was the York Street Club in Denver, if you come there when you get out maybe you'll stay out and I don't know how many times I heard Reed say that but he said it a bunch of times and one day one of those guys got out and he remembered Reed telling him that and he showed up at the York Street Club and that's where we met him that's who we met Don and so a lot of my adventure from that point on even though I've been dry a little bit longer than he has kind of started out together. We were influenced by some Canadians who had learned that if you do what the big book says, what a concept. Your life will change. And they brought that idea to us And so we decided we were going to start another meeting. At that point in time, the Denver Young People's Group had a closed discussion meeting down on the skid row near the Denver Post, and it had an open speaker meeting at the York Street Club that was kind of a phenomenon. The second floor of that old club was a small ballroom and a mansion, and if you crammed everybody in it, you could maybe get this group in here. But you all got to be able to smoke three-pack cigarettes in an hour. I mean, you flat got to put out some smoke. And I think people would come to that meeting just to see who was going to come in next. You know, it was a phenomenon. And then the young people's meeting was a discussion meeting downtown at the Skids. And I learned some things in there I hadn't heard before. They talked about taking the steps in order. and I thought, what the hell, they're up on the wall. Just reach up and grab one. Little E said, you can go ahead and do that if you want to, Gary. And if you should live through it, you might want to try what we do. And then we had Don come in and some other people came in and we heard what these Canadians had to say and we decided to start a third meeting for that group. And we didn't have a place to meet so we decided we would just kind of meet in homes and go where we had to go. The first meeting we had was on Goat Hill. It's because of the goats. That's where Lee B. lived. I'm sure he had to kick the goats off the front porch to get in the damn house. We didn't know what we were going to do and so we walked in and we all brought our big books. We knew enough to bring those. and we started at the very front of the book. What a concept. And we didn't have any gurus there to tell us how to do it or that sort of thing. And so we started at the front ofthe book and somebody said, you read for a while. And so that person read for awhile and then anybody could interrupt him. There wasn't any rules. Say what you want. If he said something stupid, you heard about it. I said, the way I interpret that. Lee said, we don't much care how you interpret that Gary. All we're interested in is a black print and a white page. He said that to me any number of times over the next few weeks. So that's how it started. And we'd just kind of go around the room. And some time went by, and I don't know what we did, but the girls left. It started out co-ed, and all of a sudden we're down to 14 men. And I really don't now how that's true. I didn't say anything. Some things went on in my life there. At that point, I'd stayed sober, if you will, on dumb luck. A lot of pain. I was going through jobs as fast sober as I was drunk. Writing bad checks as fast sore as I had drunk. Waking up terrified as much sober as i had drunk I was just dry, just dry. So we start reading in the book and I'm doing it because they're doing it. And I liked the guys I'm hanging around with. And I'd never had that in my life. We say we were loners. It's because people didn't want nothing to do with it. And I can just kind of tell you some things happened. I understood clearly, I think I was given the first half of the first step the first time I looked at it in that nuthouse. The first time I heard one of them cowboys talking about her. I understood I was powerless over alcohol and that's a pretty simple concept. Once I start drinking, I can't stop and I can not keep from starting. Pretty simple. If that isn't powerless, I don't know what is. And we came into the third chapter that Linda was talking about a minute ago and I remember when we read it real good the second paragraph right there says we learned we had to fully concede to our innermost selves that we were alcoholics this is the first step to recovery the delusion where anything like other people are presently maybe has to be smashed and I don't know why or how but I was given the keys to the kingdom right there truly was I knew right there that I had no ability whatsoever to manage my life. The trouble is that I have these occasions since then where I get to thinking I can, but so far they've been relatively short-lived. Or I would have been relatively shortly. So I had that gift and it went on and I understood quite a bit then. I had learned about God in AA at that point. I've been dry for a while. I learned the Lord's Prayer in AA meetings. You fake your way through it if you don't know it. You really do. You kind of mumble. You get the Al Farther part real good. So I didn't know anything about God. But I somehow knew there was one. I grew up out in the flatlands of Wyoming, and it don't rain there much very often. and 16 inches of moisture a year, there's a lot of rain. And they measure that in terms of hay crops. Doesn't mean a whole lot out here, I don't think. And it would get real dry and livestock would be dying and people's livings were in jeopardy. My dad would go over to the Mormon's house down the road and he'd ask them to pray for rain. Sometimes it rained. So I always had a hunch that there was this God thing going on. So we looked at the second step in the fourth chapter and we understood a little bit about what that's saying. I discovered that the most insane thing I did, I did stone sober. Anybody got a problem with that? Taking the first drink is the craziest thing we did, right? And I picked that part up out of that. I think for me, right in that point in my sobriety, the most important thing in the fourth chapter was the bedevilments. And I'm sure we'll be talking about those tomorrow because I'm going to do it. But I discovered that talked about when... That's what we do when we're sober. Cool? it's nice to look at that and say yeah I was that way when I bullshit did it sober caused more harm sober than I ever did as a drunk didn't drink long enough to do all that stuff I did it sore not true but I did along about this time this group is going on and one of the members of the group starts talking about the insanity of this second step and not being able to drink. And he equated this to an experience he had as a 19-year-old. They tried to sober him up, and so they sent him to an institution in Denver called Mount Airy. Mount Airly for the airheads. Psychiatric center that at the time did the old aversion treatment for the treatment of alcoholism. Any old geezers in here that remember that? I don't see any. It's a medieval thing, and I think it still probably goes on somewhere. But it was a hospital setting, and he was admitted to this hospital. And the treatment room was just a room, maybe 12 feet square. Had mirrors on the walls, shells on the mirrors, liquor on the shells. the middle room is a barber chair kind of thing had a stainless steel pot that would swivel in front of or away from who's in the chair and they'd given Tom some antabuse and they put him in the treatment room and they pointed at the liquor on the shelves and said you can have anything you'd like to drink I heard an old shit over here The whole idea of that is you drink on the attribution, you get violently ill and you watch it happen in the mirror. You know, your hair falls out, your toenails curl, sweat a little bit, puke a little bent. And after that experience, you're just going to be so adverse to it, and never take another drink. That's what it was about. True story. That's the treatment it's about. And so four or five years later, Tom shows up at this group and he tells us it really worked. He says it really did. He had not had reason or excuse to take antabuse since. Over the years, I've told that story a lot more times than Tom ever did. I'll tell you that. But Tom's one of the reasons that the second step happened to me. I'm not sure you take the second steps. I think it happens to you. It happened to be because Tom was crazy. He's the craziest man I ever knew in AA. I'd love to see him again. He was just wonderful. He did 12 steps on the streets through window buses. He's riding one bus, pulls up next to another bus. And his friend Art's in the other bus. Really what? Roll down your window. Roll down you window. Pulls down the window. Hey, man, I got something neat going on. You've got to come with me tonight. Meet me at the corner such and such. We're going to a meeting. That's how Art got sober. His name is Art Stansbury. Wasn't too long, he was soft-stepping people and taking them to jump out of airplanes with parachutes. So the group moves on and we get into the fifth chapter and we read a bit about the actor. Because it says we're at step three. Very clearly it says, well, you got this far, you're at step three, okay? Cool? So we're step three and we're reading all this and little Lee's got something cute to say. He says, I got an idea. I think we all ought to stand up hold hands and read slash pray this third step prayer together. That wasn't cool with me. I wasn't about to be seen holding hands with a bunch of boys. Worse yet, I didn't want to be seeing praying. He said the reason for that was that last two or three weeks any meetings he went to in the Denver area were all seen to be four-step meetings. People were writing inventories as best they knew how. and he'd go after people after meetings who hadn't written an inventory and ask them why. And many of them said well it's because I'm not taking the third step yet. Many of them. And so what Lee told us was I would like for us all to read slash pray this third step prayer together so that sometime next week or later you hear me telling people I haven't started writing yet because I haven'T taken a third step you can call me a damn liar because you saw me do it. And that's the kind of logic that's always made sense to us. And we did it. In all honesty I did it because them other 13 guys were doing it. You're all nodding your head you know that's why I did it wasn't nothing cool about me I just did it because I didn't want to look like a fool. And driving home that night I told God I said I really mean it man everything I just said in the prayer has got to happen to me it's got to change and I know I need your help I mean it that prayer 14 of us took that prayer one of us went out and drank and froze to death Eddie went out and dined. And the rest of us have stayed sober. Now, some of us are gone. Jay Levy left. He's gone. Don Pritz became a trustee at large. Most sat after speaker in AA probably. And helped more people than anybody in AA. I'll be 40 years sober in December and don't clap that ain't nothing for me you can clap for the group but not for me let me tell you about the rest of these monkeys there's a Don M that lives in Las Vegas now he's 47 years sober tall Indian that was skinnier than me Lee is three months behind me in sober and I've always held that over his head I don't think you can just go anywhere and find 13 guys that had an experience together that have stayed sober and been able to carry the message anywhere they went and anytime they wanted to I don' t think it happened there was a miracle that happened there that none of us earned certainly didn't deserve it but what I'm trying to tell you here is you're the result of that prayer that night when a bunch of us said a prayer because everybody else did. I'm not sure I thought that before. So we went on from there. I wrote an inventory after that and took a fifth step with somebody I didn't like. I'll maybe share some of that tonight here. I've got a couple of minutes, and I'm not going to do much more. One of the guys in that group is a big, good-looking fellow of Mexican heritage. His name is Ernie. and Ernie and I really didn't like each other. Now, that wasn't unusual in that part of the country. Probably still isn't, but we just didn't... We'd go to AA meetings back then and this is back in the late 60s and early 70s. The sign of the times is the peace sign. You love everybody. We didn't love each other I guarantee you I'd walk into the AA meeting but it had to be cool because you're hugging everybody right and you know you're loving everybody you walk in there meeting and Ernie would be sitting over there so I can't let everybody know I don't love him so I give him the peace sign he gives me the peace sign back only he's missing this finger That's only one reason I didn't like him. Ernie was cool, he really was. He's still a good looking man, isn't he, Julie? He'd walk into the club and you'd hear the gals at the coffee table say, You know, when Ernie walks in it just takes my breath away. I'd think that son of a bitch. One day Ernie disappeared Flat dropped out of sight Go to the meeting They say where is Ernie I say don't knock it He's gone I'm serious I'm stone serious And I don't know how long he stayed away Two maybe three weeks And I go to the young people's meeting one night And I walk in there And I looked him in the eye and there was something really different about Ernie. There was somebody home. Hadn't been anybody there before, but there was somebody at home that night. I'm sure she could see it. And Ernie shared that he'd gotten a beef at home and run away and went down to a place in Texas called Lake Whitney and he'd hooked up with a guy named Bob White down there and Bob sat him down with the big book and the pad and the pencil and showed him how to write an inventory. And so Ernie stayed in this old fishing cabin down there on that lake and wrote that inventory and he finally came up out of there and told Bob he was done. Bob says, you want to go fishing? There's only one thing Ernie likes to do better than fish. And you guys are slow out here. I thought, God damn. And so he jumps in the boat, and they take out in the middle of Lake Whitney, and Bob shuts the boat off. He says, now tell me what you wrote in that inventory. And Ernie can't swim, so he took a fifth step. I see him two or three days later, and there's a significant change, and you can by God see it. It's there. Absolutely was there. And that night I went home for the AA meeting and I took my book and my pad and my pencil and I wrote my first inventory. And I've written a lot of inventories and every one of them was better than that one, but that one saved my skinny ass. That kept me sober long enough to get to the next stuff and do that. It was just part of this learning thing that was going on. And I did my best. I mean, I really worked hard. I didn't mean to miss all that stuff. Didn't do that on purpose. So that was the start of the process. That's when I took that fifth step with Ernie. It literally was the time when the hole in my belly and the wind blowing through it began to grow shut. Just did. Like you said. and my life showed some significant change but see then i lost my mind went home julie and i said a prayer because some things in our lives weren't working out real well and the answer to the prayer seems to be that we had to leave all these people in aa that we love so much in this cocoon we were wrapped up in and we were supposed to go to indianapolis indiana now that's a big change I mean it's a big change and I'm not knocking the people in Indianapolis I did for a long time some of them I still will but and out there I learned a lot more about the program but we left this exciting city we lived in and the people we lived in and this wonderful experience I'd had with those people that I still love and we left it And we went out there, and we went to an AA meeting together. And we were really alone. But I had a message to carry. We were so alone at the first meeting Julie and I went to. It was a speaker meeting. And the Southport group, the old Southport groups. and went up there in a fairly large meeting and the guy got up and he says hi everybody I'm Al and I'm an alcoholic and Julie and I hollered hi Al and the whole group turned around and looked at us come time for the Lord's prayer Julie and I reached over to hold hands. You should have seen it. What are you doing? And they just hadn't been around that yet. They're around it now. But they hadn't done that yet and I was pretty sure I knew why I was there after that night because I didn't hear any reference to the 12 steps by a number of people that showed a lot of time in the program. I quote one of those guys still. He was a retired police officer and his last name was Green and I don't know what happened to him since. I don' t know why he thought it. But he told the story of the group secretary that had sconded with the funds and went out and drank. Remember that story? And he comes back. and he's sorry. Oh, boy, is he sorry. This guy is really sorry. So sorry I went back out there and drank and just upset you people so much and ruined your programs and all of that. And he says, but I didn't spend all the money. And he sets it on the table. This guy said they threw him out of the group. They didn't think he was a real alcoholic. Oh, wow. I guess I can tell you this and then I'm going to sit down. We can pretty well wrap this up with this. I've had any number of experiences of going through the 12 steps in order over the last 35 years of my life. 34, maybe. And something happens every time I do that. Ernie used to say it. He said, every time i do this, i get weller. I just keep getting weller and that's been my experience and every time ive done it whether im with a bunch like you or just a few of us wrapped up around in a room in a Catholic church in Indianapolis where we cram, what, 14 or 15 or 16 of us in there and we go through this. And there's never been a time that I've done that that I haven't learned a great deal from everybody else in there. I was thinking about this the other day. when I first got around to AA and got around doing the conferencing a little bit never did it much but a little in that sort of thing I saw myself as maybe going to be the next young Chuck Chamberlain and I had to come to Indianapolis and find out that carrying the message is really about all I'm supposed to do and maybe the next Chuck Chamberlain is going to come out of this work it ain't going to be me that's for sure so as a result of what's going on out there I have learned so much I've learned so many things I've heard so much from Linda and I kind of keep track of it and a guy named Mike who lives there and a big tall guy, friend of mine named Jim probably the best teacher of all of us and didn't get out much because he's got a bad ticker And it all boils down to 14 of us saying the third step prayer and a goat hill. So what I know most is all of us sitting here and all that, and there's friends I haven't seen in years sitting here from California and around, and it's just been wonderful for me to see them. But the only message I really got to tell you is whether you like it or not, this is God's deal. it's absolutely God's deal. And we're just so blessed to be a part of it. I've been blessed to be here with y'all and I thank you for the opportunity.