The People Who Quit Meetings and Stay Sober Aren’t Here to Tell Us – Jeff P.

My name is Jeff Petrie, and I'm an alcoholic. I got sober on August 26, 1988. Stayed that way for over a decade. Decided to go on maneuvers for a while again. Came back a convicted felon. On June 4, 2002, and I've been sober ever since. So I want to tell you, that's the broad outline, so I want to tell you a little bit more about where all that came from. I said I'm an alcoholic. Is there anybody in here who isn't an alcoholic besides the little one there? And we don't know yet. It's a miracle. Everybody in this room is a miracle. I know what I went through to get sobriety. And it was not easy. God's got his work, his God has just stamped himself all over sobriety for me. I mean, the God moments in my life are just too numerous to even talk about. And I started drinking probably a little bit late compared to a lot of people. I didn't get my first drink until I was 17. When I was 15, I was the... When I was in high school, I was the... And before that, I was the nerd. I was the little bookworm, the little smart kid, the one that everybody hated and wanted to beat up. And when I was 15, we had to do a presentation in English class. We had to give a speech. Two people. persuade. You know what my topic was? Why we should bring back prohibition. Swear to God. That's when I was 15. Needless to say, I got over that. And when I was 17, I had my first drink. Being that little smart little geek, the little nerd, the little smart kid, I was actually asked by the hospital administrator at the place where my dad was, the laboratory director, if I would come and work in their pharmacy department at the age of 16. And this is the kind of kid I was. My job was to work in that hospital pharmacy from 6.30 to 3 o'clock every Saturday and every Sunday. I did that for four years minus two weekends. Guess who was there with me? God. And nobody else. That's the kind of kid I was. So when I turned 17, I decided I wanted to have more fun. And yeah. You know what? I still don't know really why I wanted to do that. I don't know what caused me to do this, but we kept bottles of cheap whiskey and quarts of cheap whiskey and cheap vodka in the back of the pharmacy. This was 1976. And we would get physician's orders to give a patient three ounces of whiskey every night at bedtime. Yeah, we don't see that too much, these guys. Speaker 1 Speaker 2 use vodka and breathing treatments anyway it was good for me or you know depending on how you look at it i was able to uh i was able to uh to sneak one of those bottles of whiskey out the door or i think the first one was bottle of vodka i got it out the back door and and my love affair with alcohol started i'll never forget the first drink the first time i got drunk it didn't take long and i tell you what you know i was absolutely on top of the world everybody remember their first their first experience getting drunk it was awesome wasn't it it didn't you know it it's it stayed fun for a few years until it wasn't fun anymore let me tell you that for about three or four years i had an absolute blast drinking it was fun i never drank though except for one purpose and that was to get drunk i never it never occurred to me i never i didn't even know what a social drinker was it didn't ever occur to me that you'd go somewhere and have a couple of cocktails as a as a social lubricant and then that was it it just it never dawned on me i had a girlfriend that would that we would buy a bottle of wine and she would drink half a glass and i was like what the hell so i would finish her glass the rest of the bottle of wine and then the second bottle of wine and had a and had a great time um but all through this time um i uh i was still doing good in school i would uh good lord i would i would party on a friday night i would be at that pharmacy at 6 30 on saturday morning two three hours of sleep i could drink prodigious quantities of booze without getting a bad hangover for a while i mean my young 16 year old 17 year old body could really handle it good and it was amazing what i put myself through i i just did this every week um i remember graduating for uh high school and getting some free math classes at the local jc and a friend of mine and i are eight o'clock every morning we would our basic you know basically what we did every morning on monday through friday was to look to compare uh drinking stores from the night before it was it was great um obviously uh my a average went down to the following all the way down to the average in junior college was horrible um uh but it was fun still it was still fun i got into pharmacy school to i i grew up in a little place called farmington missouri it's about uh an hour south of saint louis and three hours from kansas city i got into pharmacy school in kansas city moved over there i lived in a very very bad part of town didn't even know it really um still drinking still having a good time my girlfriend and i were in the pharmacy school and i was in the pharmacy school at the time came up to visit me one weekend and my idea for this weekend was to have a good weekend and then when she didn't know it was over i was going to tell her i didn't want to see her anymore every time i make plans god just laughs his ass off because what she did was say hey i'm pregnant that kind of put the kibosh on the l i'm not going to see you anymore deal and i got married in october 1979 i was just 20 years old um i didn't really want to see my daughter i did um my daughter was born in february 1980 the light of my life absolutely the best thing that ever happened to me was my daughter michelle for sure um but that was pretty much when everything started really sliding downhill i'd been drinking for a few years i started getting to that point where it was i had had to drink every night um if i didn't it was not it was not pleasant anytime i did drink it was just stupid amounts of alcohol just ridiculous i remember my 21st birthday and you know in westport kansas city getting kicked out of bars and going into places to get my free shot of irish whiskey and just it was just crazy and i that's the way i always drank from that point on i never just drank a little bit and it was always big time and i started having the hangovers and the headaches and um you know michelle came and i was trying to be a father and i was trying to work because i needed money to pay for school i was trying to be a pharmacy school student and out of all of those three things drinking and fatherhood and school the only thing that remained was drinking i mean obviously i stayed a father but the marriage was in shambles so i flunked out of pharmacy school and those were the first real significant um consequences of my drinking and just being this stupid kid from the sticks that i didn't know what hell it was doing um i was married to michelle's mom for a total of 11 years we might have actually been together five of those we were separated twice um i i didn't finally make it through pharmacy school i got back in um for some reason they let me back in and i i got through and i did my i i got to i got to where i could i could drink pretty heavy and still do my coursework i don't know how i did that i honestly god don't know how in the world i did that and graduated first in my class of pharmacy school then again some more consequences started hitting you know once i graduated from pharmacy school i was you know making some more money blah blah blah and the drinking went off the scale again you all know the deal i mean i'm an alcoholic and i drank and whenever i drank i drank as much as i could drink for as long as i could drink and then when i woke up i did it some more that was it the only thing is is that when i became a pharmacist i had access to lots of other goodies yeah i moved uh my uh my my my wife had moved down to um down to uh she lived in pompano beach and we decided one last time to try to mend things up and she found us a place in west boca i moved down to west boca got a job for eckerd drugs remember eckerd's that's that used that's what cvs used to be and i was i thought i was the shit because i was making big money having my fancy trans am and um well the problem was when you're a pharmacist at eckerd you really can't drink all day people kind of would notice so i got to where i would take solid alcohol through the day i didn't really realize i didn't really realize how um what i was doing i when i when i got into a treatment center later on i read dr bob's story and dr bob's story talked to me because you know what dr bob did he took sedatives all day and then at night he got out his beard and that's exactly what i did exactly my lifestyle and every single day i played i i here again i thought i was a big a big big deal and i started learning how to play golf down in west boca played it every summer you can't get on you can't really get on a course in west boca during the season in the summer and um i don't have an athletic bone in my body and at the end of every summer i was down on my back was just a wreck that i would go see the orthopod and he'd give me all the you know he'd give me the Tylenol with codeines and the valiums and that's that really started my shoe that took me on a freight freight elevator right to the bottom and i didn't know what the hell was going on i really didn't have a clue i i truly did not have a clue that i was an alcoholic it never entered my mind for a split second and um i started getting to where i was you know drinking so much at night because i you know i'd do what i did all day and i'd go home and i'd drink three tall tall boys of beer before my daughter went to sleep because she got she didn't want me to drink the whole six pack so i would so when they went to bed i'd drink the rest of the six pack put the little tabs back in and put them back in the thing so she wouldn't think i was drinking yeah and then i would go get my whiskey and that was every night on top of you know great quantities of codeine and and and and you know you start doing that for so long and you don't go to work every day i was missing a lot of work and if i was missing work i wasn't getting my daily fixes brilliant pharmacist jeff katrie thought he could get away with on his own prescription you know what they really don't like when you do that they just don't and i was um getting calls from the sheriff's department they finally figured out it took him a while to figure it out the sheriff's department started calling myśmy to come up and talk to him i'm like you guys must be crazy you think i'm going to actually go to you on you know voluntarily and talk to you i knew what they wanted to do and that's when i started looking at trying to get some help and i found this was back in 1988 this was back when the medical insurance paid at the yin yang for 28 day inpatient therapy and there's a place down there called anana new i called and talked to them they said come on over so august 26 1980 and they went over to anana new um you saw me walking up here i'm six foot one i was i used to be six foot two i'm getting older i'm like 200 pounds right now i'm not exactly a big blob the day i went into treatment i weighed 128 pounds and i was wider than these chairs they thought i was they thought i had they thought i was sicker than this just drugs and alcohol i thought there's something else because i was really that bad and i've been detoxing off this stuff on my own for like about a month which is just not pleasant but when i got there this is what i thought and it never dawned on me that i was an alcoholic still did it i thought that i was a drug addict physically addicted they would they would detox me get me off of that and they would do some kind of behavioral modification therapy and teach me how to drink the right way that's how i really thought i was pissed when they wouldn't do that because i went in there and they started they started saying all this weird crap like um you know once you're a pickle you're always a pickle you come again i'm going what the f are you talking about maybe it's wayne god you'll figure it out later i'm going like jesus um so this this place that i was in was we're talking about boca raton this place had it was like a resort it was sweet i mean we we're talking about cloth napkins and real silverware and in a pool in a tennis court and weight room and i was so poor poorly physically they told me i could eat anything i wanted any time i wanted no matter what so i was i kicked out it was great but you know they started taking me to you know i started doing you know therapy sessions and they started teaching us about addiction and alcoholism and oh that's nice i mean it's good knowledge to have i'm glad i know it now but i wouldn't do a damn thing to keep me sober not one thing all the self-knowledge in the world i have learned will not do it but what we did is this place had a 12-step meeting brought in every night of the week it was really cool um this is down in you know this is a heavily populated area so we had a come in we had na come in we even had ca come in we had there was a really good cocaine anonymous down there but every night we had a 12-step group and after you've been there for a couple of weeks they would take you out to an a group on tuesday night and my first experience with aa was those this was the Sunday night meeting that we had and it was all the people in the facility plus there must have been 50 people come from outside there was there was usually 100 150 people in that meeting on Sunday night with Amy and here I was I was a miserable wreck here's all these people that are smiling and happy and it dawned on me that that's actually real I didn't think that could be true but it seemed real and they were talking about stuff that I could really grasp on to I was really you know right there so yeah I understand all that but they were happy and they said if you want to stay sober this is what you do you go to find a home group and get a sponsor and you do the steps and I said that is for me so I got out of treatment after 28 days remember that Sheriff's Department they hadn't forgot I was really hoping that since I went to treatment they just kind of brush it under the rug and forget about me they didn't I lived in a I was living in a quad in West Boca with a little six-foot privacy fence on a little courtyard and the big sliders and the drapes were open so I was coming downstairs from my bedroom and I was naked as a jaybird I literally was doing this to close my blinds and the Sheriff's Department came through my gate literally make it like and I got arrested they didn't laugh at least not that I could see they probably get after the they left me up there probably their ass is off that was my first time in jail sadly it wasn't my last that was my first time in jail and and my wife at the time was getting on this advice on how to be a you know a black belt in potem and everything if she was gonna leave me there for a while I was gonna leave my wife out of jail and I don't want to leave ya and細pg Nabci then today was my first time Fern Hollis and that shit I can't believe we've loved you so I've lost my life I've never been in jail we didn't know you and you didn't tell me that much but I've never been a black belt in my life you know and that until I finally talked her into getting me out. I mean, I was there for three days, which was just, you know, I'm a little hit from the sticks pharmacist. You know, why do I end up in jail? We didn't, we didn't get, me and jail just, we just don't really mix. But, you know, I survived that. And, but what I did was, after I got out of that, is I did what they told me at the treatment facility. I got that little group that we, they took us to on Tuesday nights. That was my first home group. My first sponsor was a frickin' golf pro. Even though I, you know, I couldn't take advantage of him because I decided I wasn't going to play golf again in my life because I knew what it did to me. So I did all the stuff they told me to do. And then I'll work. I took the steps. And I got a sponsor. And I worked through the steps. And he decided he couldn't do it anymore, so I got a new sponsor. And he was a musician. He was a drummer. Tony Lavender. I'll never forget. His name. Great stage name. It was his real name. And he helped me. And things were good. I finally divorced the first wife. We were just a wreck together. It was just, it was a nightmare. It was never going to work. It never could have worked. And it wasn't, you know, a couple years after that, a boy meets a girl in AA meeting. Bada boom, bada bang. A year after that, I was married to a nice little AA girl from Long Island. Long Island. I learned how to say it. It's not Long Island. It's Long Guy-land. Yeah. And everything was great. Everything was really good. Got the big house in West Boca. Had a SUV and a convertible. Golden Retriever. Literally Golden Retriever. You know, the whole idyllic thing. And everything was great. And everything was great. Everything was good. But I was still an alcoholic. And even though I took the steps as best as I could, I was still a, I was still prettier than a nut cake. I was just, I was just, I still was, not even a fruitcake. Yeah. I was wackadoodle, okay? I decided that, they kept on telling me, if you don't go to meetings, you'll get, you'll get drunk. And I kept on thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. The people that stopped going to meetings and stayed sober, well, they're not going to meetings to tell us about it. I could be one of those. I told you I was wackadoodle. And so I, I, I did pretty good for about five or six years. And I stopped the meetings. It wasn't too long after that that the second marriage was over. After five years of marriage. It wasn't too long after that I married somebody else from close to, met online. She was from Missouri, for God's sake. We had, we had gone through all the same places when we were a kid. You know, it was just bizarre. But I was still just, you know, loony tunes. I wasn't drinking. I didn't drink. I still didn't drink for, I didn't drink for a total of like 12 years. I don't know how that happened. But I wasn't sober. I wasn't sobriety. I was just not drinking. And without, without meetings, life started having its bumps. I was living in St. Augustine, working at a big hospital in Jacksonville. And my wife went through a severe depression for a year. And it started bringing me down too. I mean, I started, you know, I didn't have any, I didn't have any support system. None at all. And I don't know why the hell I was too proud to go to a freaking meeting. I, I, I never have figured that out. I guess I had to, I guess I needed to hit bottom. I guess I hadn't hit bottom yet. Um, I definitely don't recommend doing it this way. Just going back out as a way to get dead. Somehow I didn't get dead. I don't know how. I really don't. But I was, I was working in this big hospital and I was in this narcotics closet. I mean, this is like the, you know, eight by 10 closet, just absolutely chock full of everything that you could possibly imagine. And I thought to myself, you know what? I could take some of this stuff, throw it in my pocket. Couple of weeks, things will even out and I'll be good. Isn't that the lie? Isn't that the biggest lie in the world? I actually honestly thought it would work. A year later, they put those pretty little silver bracelets on with the chain between them. Walked me out of that place. That's when I got, that's when I got my conviction for drug possession. The first time I got it, they just let me off with a, you know, no adjudication this time. I got better. If nothing, they got me on tape. I couldn't really talk. You can't really talk your way out of it. Take. Well, yeah, he did. So I couldn't, I didn't have a chance to erase it. So I got to spend another night in jail. Like feel it was only one night this time. Um, let me tell you as much as I thought I'd have, I was in a completely different place. I was in a completely different hell. I don't know why it took that, but I was, I hope that God, I never get that low again. I started coming back to AA. Um, I had to move in with my mother down in Palm Bay. Um, for some reason I didn't drink for the nine months I was there. I don't know why in the hell I didn't cause that woman is, who, um, but I didn't drink and I was on house arrest and you're on house arrest. All you can do is go to work and go to church and go to meetings. Well, I decided at that point that being a pharmacist is probably not in my best interest any longer. So I gave that up. I actually relinquished my license. It's, that's a gun. It's gone. Don't have it. And I had been doing a lot of computer work up until that point. I was a little computer geek, self taught and all kinds of database stuff. And I decided to become the self employed then self employed for 12 years doing that. It was another miracle, something that I had wanted to do forever. I wanted to do it for years and years. I had, I had hated not, I hated being a pharmacist for a long time and I wanted to be able to do some kind of computer thing at home. And God has a funny way of giving you what you asked for. So be careful. Um, but if you work at home, you know you can't drive to work and I didn't really go to church so I got scheduled for a lot of AA meetings. Funny how things work, didn't it? I was going to a lot of AA meetings at the Driftwood Chew Club. That's where I met Dave. That I was my first, the first, the first group I went to was the living sober group. It was a Monday night group, seven nights a week or a night, an eight o'clock PM meeting, seven nights a week. Monday night was the big beginners meeting. And this is back in the days when you could still smoke inside and it wasn't that big of a rumor was it was the room was probably from here to there I guess that size and and you couldn't see from one end of the other but that was that was my that was where I started and I set off to the side and I tried to get, I tried to be as little as possible so people wouldn't see me because I just felt lowered and I just felt I couldn't feel any lower and and people kept on telling me, well, we're glad you're here. You're a good example for us. And I'm going, I don't want to be your damn example. I just want to feel better. But here's the thing. I knew from what I did before that if I did what y'all told me to do, I'd feel better and I'd get better. So somehow that spiritual awakening finally really happened. I realized later that when I took my third step that I, that it says to turn your will and your lives over to the God. Well, I turned my will and my alcoholism. I'm over, I think nothing else so near as I can figure it. I think I pretty much kept everything else and I finally gave it all up and only home sobriety. My history, I figured I would start wanting to fade away from the program though. Well, I started doing service work in my second year. I ran a step in tradition meeting for for a year every Wednesday night, for a year. It was really kind of cool. We asked that steps and traditions, traditions one night of the month. Most groups they'll say every fourth Tuesday. That's the step. And that's the tradition night. Well, we didn't do that. We said chairpersons discretion. So you never knew when we were, when I was going to pop a tradition meeting on once a month. But you know what? We had great meetings. The people that wouldn't have come to the addition meeting were there and we had good meetings. It was surprising to them and to me too. That was surprising to me too. And but one of the things that I had one of those little epiphanies that no AA was still here for me. I've only been gone for maybe a year and a half, but I came back and here was AA the exact same way it was when I left it. The exact same 12 steps, the exact same big book, exact same literature, everything. And I started thinking I knew who I was as an alcoholic. And I'm thinking, like how in the hell did we do that? How did a bunch of alcoholics stay together for 75 years, 80 years? And how did we do that? The big part of us, the traditions, the decisions is what we use to make the groups and a healthy. And I, so I kind of got into that and I started doing service work. My first job was literature rep for my home group. And then I became, and I, and I did lots of other stuff too. And I became a GSR and, and, um, started going up to the area and you know, I was going up to the area for a year and then I became the area website service coordinator that was in 2007, 2008. I've been going up there since 2006. It seems like it's forever. I'm still going. Yeah, I'm still going. That's that's, but I tell you something, if I wasn't doing all the service work, I don't know how much AA I'd be getting. I really don't. This is like, this is what keeps me this, this Tom said that this is one of the things that's part of my sobriety. It's, it's a requirement for me to be doing this and I'm really, I'm really grateful for it. Um, I, you know, I've done, I was, I, I was website and then I was an alternate DCM and I was a DCM and I was the webmaster for Brevard for four years. And, and, um, I was a alternate finance chair. And then I was, and at one point I was alternate, finance, share DCM and webmaster all at the same time because we lost our webmaster and I had to, and I stepped in to help right now. I've only got one job and it feels like I'm being lazy and the registrar. So, um, I, I really, I, I left what we do. I love this program. Um, I, there, I do something with four or about AA every single day. Even if I don't get to a meeting, I'm doing something, I'm for AA every single day. I don't know if I would do that if I wasn't in service the way I am now. I'm not, you know, everybody's going to find their own path. There's all kinds of different ways to do service and self step work. There's, there's 2 million alcoholics in North America. There's 2 million, 2 million different ways to do service work. Way off. They do everybody's God didn't call us all to do the exact same thing. It's the exact same time, the exact same way. Okay. But you know, here I am, I'm sober. Um, I started a, uh, a web design business in my mid forties. How in the hell did that happen? That's a job for 20 year olds. Well, I've made it work, but I got all over that. I got something I can think, um, you know, my relationships have been up and down. Um, I'm learning. I actually didn't get married to the last one. I did not get married to John. I know. And that was a good thing. I guess it didn't last. And, um, you know, things are going good. Um, I actually have, I have time to have a hobby that I'm trying to turn. I make guitars now. You know what? That's one of the coolest things I ever did in my entire life. Sobriety wants to sobriety. I've never even, it wouldn't happen. I mean, everything I, every breath I take is because of sobriety and I have to, and I always try to remember where sobriety comes from. And it comes from, from a whole bunch of people in God. And it's an absolute miracle. This whole bunch of people have stayed together. I just try, I try to imagine what it would have been like without the traditions or the general service conference. Can you imagine what we would have done? I mean, we wouldn't have a all over, all over all of North America. There would be, there would be Southern AA and there'd be New England AA. They have to go pack the car and California would have a different big book. I mean, they would have write a big book about this thick. So I tease about that, but it's true. I mean, I love, I love that we're still together. It's a miracle. Everybody in here is a miracle. Every, every breath I take is a miracle these days. I mean, it really is. And I can't think of anything else to say. Thank you all for listening.