The Program Is Guaranteed to Work Under Any and All Conditions – Charlie M.

I'm Charlie Morgan. I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict. Some things that don't make for good telling as well. CD, who has been my sponsor forever here, says that. And that is true. So thank you for not telling the things that don't makes for good tellin', Roy. I appreciate that. He's got a picture of us up here, all of this group from the lodge that's laying up here too. That's why I said, oh Lord, when I got up here. because it is true that I have been blessed in my sobriety. I was blessed before that, too, but I don't think I knew much about being blessed before that. But I have Been Blessed in My Sobriety by the people who have been with me ever since I came into this program, and there are enough people out there tonight who know me that if I don t tell the truth, they ve told me they re going to stand up, so I m going to have to be careful of that. But anyway, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. It is so good to be here today, so good to be hier this weekend and to be with all of you. I feel like I'm home and I feel this is where I was raised and I was here for a long time. So that's probably why I feel that way because I came down once and ended up staying for quite a while. And we're not talking about weeks or months we're talking about years and and that's probably why but I did grow up here and and you all are very very special to me and I I had such a good time at the sharing meeting last night with what people were talking about with gratitude and seeing people with all different times in the program and I have to tell you um that just means I get strength from people who are coming into the program and people who have been here for a long time and people who are just in the program. You all give me strength and I do appreciate that. Anyway, I want to thank you for asking me to come. I really do. You got me down here and that means the world to me. The world. So, thank you very much and we have a lot of liquor to drink and a lot of dope to shoot and I said to Melissa one day not too long ago, about a year ago. I said, Melissa, you know, they talk about the sobriety being that layer, that onion with the layers and layers that you have to peel off and then you get to a new layer. And then you peel that layer off and then there's a new later. I said well, Melissa I think my onion is bigger than other people's. And I thought she would say to me, oh you're an egomaniac. You know, you're just trying to be worse than everybody else And she did not say that. She said, well, you have had quite a few problems. So we've got a lot of stuff to do, both before I got here and after I got here. And that's one of the things that I have. My sobriety date is May 12th, 1981. And I have not found it necessary to pick up a drink or a drug since that day. I have found it necessary to go back into treatment, again, sober, dry as a bone about to burn up, and to do all sorts of things, to seek help from wherever I can get help because I've needed a lot of it. And without my sobriety, without the AA program, and without you people, no one would have been able to help me with anything. So the key to this whole thing for me is all of you and the sobriety itself. So I really do appreciate that as well. But I grew up in upstate New York, and I lived on a farm. And I've had all sorts of feelings in my sobriete and working on those things about my upbringing. and there were a lot of things that happened in my upbringing that don't particularly need to be talked about, you know. And yet what I do know is that there was a lot of good stuff that happened back there. And I grew up working hard. My dad put me to work on our farm when I was eight years old and I resented that for many, many years because I thought I didn't get to play the way other kids got to play. But what I know about that today is that that's one of the things that has given me the ability to work hard at the things that I value. So I value a lot of the things, what this program has given me. It's given me a way to take things like that, that I was so resentful about for so many years and to turn them around and find out what they really do mean. So that was one of the things that was true about me. And I never felt like anybody else. Well, I didn't really know what other people felt like, but I thought I did. And and I felt different. And I was very shy. I remember I hated kindergarten because there was nothing to do there except play with other kids. And that made me very, very nervous because there wasn't anything. Nobody told me how to play with other kids. And if I didn't know what I had to do, I had a hard time doing it. So I was relieved when I got to first grade and there were classes to go to and I didn t have to talk. I m really a very shy person. A lot of people don t believe that, but Alcoholics Anonymous has given me the ability to talk too long sometimes and too much. But anyway, I think I was an alcoholic in the making. It does run in my family. It's in the generations before me. It is in the generation after me. And I think that was waiting to happen because when I was seven years old, I don't remember a lot of things from childhood. I can't tell you the details about a lot my childhood but I can tell you the details of this. When I was seven years old, I was at a New Year's Eve party with my mother and father, and my aunt and uncle had punch that was made with wine. And I don't remember a lot else about that party, but they had this wine called Mogan David Wine, and it looked very, very pretty. And I got a hold of some of it, and I drank it, and I remember my face getting all red and I remember I didn't like it and so there was something really significant about that first taste of wine and about the same time as that happened I had my tonsils out and I had a general anesthetic and I was scared to death of having that anesthesia at that time but I learned something very important then, I learned that I liked operations. And I had to have a couple of more operations when I was a kid, and when I had the anesthesia for those operations, I was very happy. I wanted to have more operations, and thank God I was just a kid so that I couldn't sign myself into the hospital to get caught up because I probably would have done that too. But those first exposures to those chemicals in my life were really, really important to me, and I remember them. I didn't start, so when I was seven, I had my first drink. And, you know, they tell you that when you are, your age of emotional development is arrested at the age of your first exposure to a chemical. And so when i got into the program, after I'd been sober for a couple of years, I was talking to this guy who knew me when I first came in and he said, Charlie, you now, you, most people when they come into the programme, they're like a newborn baby. But you, you were like an abortion. And so if the age of your first use is what happened, then I do believe that that's exactly what happened to me. I've had a lot of growing up to do since I've been here. And you people have raised me. That's why I feel this way. So I waited a while until I took my next drink. The next thing I remember was when I was 12, I started drinking as much as I could. I couldn't get a lot of alcohol back then, but as much as I would do, I got a hold of. I drank through high school and I certainly, if you had looked at me at that time in my life, you wouldn't have probably, unless you knew about alcoholism, you would not have probably picked up that I was an alcoholic because I didn't get drunk all of the time. My grades were pretty good, you know. And yet I think that the symptoms of alcoholism began then because I started lying right away. And by the time I was a senior, I was having comments made to me in high school like the teachers would say, Charlie, I don't know what's wrong with you. You used to be such a good kid and now you act like this. What is the matter with you? So I was getting criticisms like that. Besides that, Iwas lying. And that's a characteristic. When I was in the lodge, one of the guys there said that an alcoholic is somebody who, when his lips move, he's lying. So I fit into that category. And there were a lot of lies that I told, some of them that I really believed until I had been sober for a while. Those lies came very, very naturally to me. But I told a lie. My mother asked me if I had Been Drinking back then. And this is just an example of how things that I did very early on in my addiction that seemed not very big, but they had huge effects on my family and other people. Because she said to me, Charles, they called me Charles, and she said, Charles we're going to believe whatever you say, but we heard you were drunk the other night. And I had been very drunk the another night. And one of my friends had apparently told them that. And she said, but we are going to believe whatever you say. They woke me up in the morning to ask me this question. And I thought about it. I thought, what am I going to tell my mother? And this was my mother. And I said, no, I wasn't drunk. Well, my mother decided that she hated the person who had told the lie about me. But not only did she hate him, She hated his entire family, and he had 11 brothers and sisters. And so in the small town that I grew up in where people – it was a town of about 5,000 people, and my father was a businessman in that town and needed to be able to have relationships with that particular family. When I told that lie, he decided – my mother gave him a lot of trouble about the relationship. So it caused a lot of family fights and stuff. They still fight about it today. I have tried to make amends to them and tell my mother that that was a lie, and she said, I don't care, I still hate them anyway. But the consequences of my actions, even very early on, were very, very far-reaching. So I didn't know that was going on at the time, but I had symptoms of alcoholism from the very, Very beginning. That's what happened to me. So, I got out of high school and moved on to college. And there, I discovered bourbon. There was bourbon and not only did I discover bourbon, but at Passover there was Manischewitz wine. And my roommate would bring back all these little bottles of Manischewitz, and I would drink them. And I liked the toque, and all those different things. And what would happen would be he didn't drink very much. And I would have to find a way to sneak that wine and drink it at that time. And the bottles would continuously disappear, and there was nobody else in the room. So that began a whole pattern for me of trying to help look for things that had disappeared, that had actually gone into me. Anyway, so I was consuming that stuff at that time. The first semester, this was a lie that I told them for a long, long time about my grades, that they had always been good. But in the first semester of college, I ended up with a D plus and a C and a B and another grade. I can't remember. I don't know what the other grade was. But the D plus was in my math class. And I had this way of thinking that they would call, I guess the psychiatrist Bobby, you would know, they would called this magical thinking. I guess, I don' t know what they'd call it. But anyway, it was the magical thinking I didn't study my calculus at all. Not at all, the whole year. I didn't like it. I didn'T want to know about it, and it scared me to death. So I didn' t study calculus, and what I did was I went into the final exam thinking that when they wrote all these math problems out, somehow the miracle would occur, and I'd know the answers and be able to write all these formulas down on the paper and everything. Well, that miracle didn' T occur. So I'm really lucky that I got a D plus at all and that I didn'' T fail the course. But that's the kind of stuff I was doing too because a very, very strange thing happened. And that first semester, I did not drink. I just didn't do it. And I used to hear Dot when she was here. I used hear Dot say that she thanked God for every pill that she ever took because it kept her alive until she could find a place where she could get some help in here in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I have only understood that in the last few years, that that's what happened to me, that the alcohol and the drugs were killing me. But because there was so much else wrong with me, I needed to do that to stay alive to keep from killing myself until I could get to the place where you people could help me. And that is the absolute truth. So the first semester I didn't drink. I did very poorly in school. And this is how my alcoholism affected. It nearly killed me because the second semester is when I discovered the bourbon. I didn't just discover the bourbons, I found NyQuil too. And I liked the NyQuill because it came, it was green, which was my favorite color, and it came in this little bottle with a shot glass on top. And you could drink that NyQuilt, even though it said only take it at night, you could actually drink that during the day. And I discovered that, and I found out that if you took that with contact, and you took that with a few other cold preparations, you didn't really have to drink the bourbon all the time and you could drink these other things that you could easily buy in the drugstore. And the other thing was back then I'm old enough that the university where I was, I was 17 year olds when I went into college the university acted in loco parentis that was a word that I learned to love because that meant that even though I was underage for drinking they assumed the responsibility and allowed me to drink Now that's not the way it is today, but that's the way it was back then. So I could drink all the beer I wanted at the beer blast and everything else. And that second semester I discovered bourbon and all of a sudden that school that I hated, I loved. It changed my whole attitude and outlook upon life that bourbon did. And it wasn't until I got to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous that I found something else to change my whole gratitude and outlook upon life, and I needed that by the time I got here. But anyway, during that time, I did a lot of drinking. My grades went up. They went way up. That's very, very strange. But just because your grades are going up or just because you're having a certain level of success, which is what happened to me until the very end, except in my personal life, in my professional life and things like that, I kept doing better and better and better. And doing better, and better, nearly killed me. So during that time, Dottie, I'll tell you this thing if you want me to. But during that Time, I had my first suicide attempt. And that was quite a thing too because what I did was it was near graduation and things were not working out the way, people weren't acting the way I needed them to act. And I decided that I needed to teach them a lesson. And so what I needed To do was kill myself. So what I did was I got my NyQuil together and my contact together, and I went out and I bought myself a fifth of bourbon and a pint of rum. Well, I drank the pint of Rum, and that went down pretty good, which made the bourbon go down even easier. And I started in on the bourdon, and I decided that just getting drunk really wasn't the thing that I needed to do. I did need to kill myself, really. So I lived on the second floor of this dormitory, and we had these Venetian blinds. They were fairly flimsy. They were little mini blinds and everything. But I took the cord, and I wrapped it around my neck, and I started heading out the second-floor window with the Venetians blinds around my back. And then what happened was somebody knocked on my door in the middle of my suicide attempt, And I had to go answer the door and let them in. So, the next thing I knew, I woke up and my mother was in the room. And my roommate was in that room. And they were talking about admitting me to the psych unit. And I couldn't imagine going to the psyc unit, so I convinced them that everything was fine. And finished the year out. And graduated from there. I had wanted to go to medical school, but I hadn't gotten in. And so I decided to go to graduate school for a year. And this is one of the places where I had a lie that I had told where I believed it until, I don't know how long, I was sober probably five years before I knew that I lied about this. I failed a course in graduate school. I actually did because, again, I wasn't going to study and I didn't tell anybody I was failing and I had an advisor there. She became very, very upset with me for not telling her that I was falling so that she could get some help but the lie that I told was that I never failed the course and I got away with that lie because what they did was they expunged the failing grade. I learned what expunge meant that year. That means they erased the failing grade from my transcript and so they let me repeat the course and I got an A in it. And that's another thing that happened. But during that year, I knew there was a problem. And this was several years before I got sober. I knew there was a problem because I cut down on my drinking. And for some reason, people who, like our speaker this morning, she can't drink more than a drink and a half. I mean, to me that's like really, I don't understand that I've seen people do that, and it seems like it's a perfectly good waste of alcohol to leave that drink there. When I was in Willingway, Dr. Al had a picture of a bottle with a drip hanging. It was just a pictureof a beer bottle with one drip hanging on it, and it was on its side, and the drip was going to fall. And it was just the picture, and I always wanted to get underneath it and get that drip because that really made me nervous to see that that alcohol was going to go somewhere. So that's the kind of stuff I really couldn't be. I wasn't a normal drinker. I knew I needed to cut down, and normal people don't need to cutdown on their drinking. That's very strange. I don't know why they don't, but they don' So I went through that year and applied to medical school and I got into medical school. And I moved from New York City to Buffalo, New York and went through the blizzard that year and a number of things that really I should remember, but I don't. And that's when the blackouts really started for me in medical school and what I have learned in sobriety in just the last few years my sister has been giving me more information and I have to tell her sometimes look, I know enough, I don t want any more information You know, please don't. But what I've learned now is that I knew I was having blackouts, that there were large chunks of my life that I didn't remember. But what she – I have been talking to her about some things that I have very clear memories of, and those things never happened. So what I didn'T know was that – I don'T know what happened and what didn'T. So what Iím telling you is all I know. Itís the stuff that I think went on. But I didnít know that could happen, that you would have these memories of things that never happened at all. And she was sober the whole time, so I do believe that she is the one who's right and I'm the one whose wrong, but we still argue about it anyway. But anyway, so, I really started drinking a lot then. I continued with the NyQuil. I started buying the wine in the gallon jugs. I would buy it by the case. I got it so that by the time I was an intern, I had an account. I had no money at all because they don't pay interns much. But I didn't have any money, but I had enough skills at manipulation that I got a tab at the liquor store so that I could buy my wine. And I would buy the wine in big-gallon jugs. I drank a lot of martinis at that time, butI really didn't want them to put any vermouth in my martinis. So I had started hitting the alcohol straight by then and drinking it that way. And, you know, I had this idea that I was drinking fine wine, and yet it was in gallon jugs and it was cheap. But I always had the illusion that I Was at a Cocktail Party. And I wasn't at a cocktail party at all. And, but I, things were getting much, much worse. I was really, by that time, things were going downhill. And in the second two years of the school that I went to, you had to interact a lot with staff. And basically what they did, it felt like to me, was grill, grill you and try to humiliate you and things like that. So I found a refrigerator in one of the areas on the floor and hid behind that. And so I spent my two clinical years hiding behind the refrigerator and trying to stay away from people and that's not really normal behavior. But it's what I needed to do. And I was terrified, honestly. When you look at the way that I... Did I knock that off, Jamie? Okay. All right, I'm getting a little excited, I guess. Okay. But I was really terrified of people. And I had started by that point to get rid of friends and eliminate friendships from my life. I finished up medical school somehow, got out of there. Maybe that's a reflection of how hard it is to get out of medical school once you get in. I don't know. But anyway, I got out Of There and I went on and decided that I would choose a specialty where I didn't really need to be around people too much and I could get rid of them because I was scared to death of my patients. I was scared to death I was going to kill somebody, and it's a miracle I didn't. So I decided that I would become an anesthesiologist and put people to sleep for a living. And you can imagine what happened then. And I spent a lot of time asleep myself, but we're getting to the part CD where it doesn't make for good telling. But anyway, I did a year of internal medicine first, and it was pretty awful. I mean, the blackouts were happening all the time at that point. And I was drinking all the time. And that's about the same period where I started to be unable to shut the TV off. I don't know if any of you have had that situation where you turn the switch on the TV and it stays on anyway. It has like a picture that won't go away or snow on it and stuff like that. So that's that period where i probably started to have these memories of things that never really happened. And I finished up there, and I moved away from everybody. I moved to a place where I didn't know anyone. I moved into Philadelphia, which is where I live now, and it's a wonderful, wonderful city. Philadelphia is not my problem. My addiction was my problem, but I moved there, and again, I knew, I must have known that there was something wrong because I cut down on my drinking again, and I cut it down in a big way this time. What I did was I bought beer, and I would buy beer by the case, and I Would put it in my closet. And I'd take one six-pack of the beer out of the case and put it in the refrigerator. And other people were starting to comment on my drinking by now too because my dad would call me, and he'd say, Charlie, Charles. They called me Charles. That's right. Charles, you need to watch your drinking, son. I told you you needto watch your drinkings. And I'd say, well, Dad, I've had the same six-pack of beer in the refrigerator for months. And what I didn't tell him was that was true. I left that six- pack of beer and I was drinking the beer out of the closet that was in those cases. Nobody lived with me. I didn' t even have a pet. I don' t know who I was hiding this stuff from. But that's exactly what I did. And about that time, Billy Beer came out. Do you remember Billy Beer? President Carter's brother developed a beer thing and a beer line. And the beer line became worth a lot of money. That Billy Beer went extinct after a while, probably because of people like me. But anyway, what happened was my parents had some of that Billy Beer that they were collecting. And after I got sober, they were fighting again. They were fighting about where the Billy Beer Went. And my father was telling my mother that she got rid of her something. Well, I drank it all. I drank all of their collection of pills. Just like I drank everybody's collection of whatever they had. You know? So I went into this anesthesia program and I decided I needed to stop drinking. And I did. And but what I had in mind was that I really needed to know what my patients were feeling when I gave them these medications. And I did. I found out. I took about everything I could find there. And what I discovered in that particular situation, that it was, it didn't really matter whether I liked it or not because if I didn't like it and I didn' t have what I wanted, I took it anyway. I took the stuff I didn''t like. There was this one stuff that was called ketamine which is closely related to animal tranquilizers but it gave me a terrible, terrible experience one time. I took in the privacy of my own home. I was administering general anesthesia to myself And I took the ketamine, and I remember that, again, the TV was on. And I don't know if you know what a shag carpet is, but some of you do. The fibers were like this long in that shag carpets. And I was laying on the couch, to the best of my recollection, laying on The Couch and the TV was over across the room. And I had to get to that TV to turn it off and I couldn't get there because I got stuck in the shag carpet. And it was a terrible situation because that TV wasn't doing anything that I needed it to be doing. So I got over there somehow though and it wouldn't shut off. It just wouldn't turn off. So I never wanted to do that drug again. That was one of the worst experiences I ever did. But as soon as I ran out, I kept a supply at home anyway. As soon as I ran our of my other stuff you know what I was doing. I was dealing with doing that stuff again. I am the kind of drug addict and the kind of alcoholic that this is what I firmly believe. I need a program and Alcoholics Anonymous that will work when I don't want it to and when I do want it too. Because there were many, many times when I wanted to be sober before I got... I hear a lot of people say, I stay sober because I want to. I cannot afford to have a program that works because I wanted it to. I need a program the way it works. It will work even when I didn't want to because there were many times during those years, you know, the stories can be funny now, but that pain was horrible. I hated what was going on with me back then. I absolutely hated it. I wanted to die and I couldn't die. I had tried the suicide attempt before and I'd seen the look on my mother's face when she walked in and I wasn't going to do that again. So I had made the decision somewhere in these years that I was going to have to learn to live, not learn to life, I was gonna have to live until I died. So I tried all sorts of things. I tried shooting dope only at home, I tried shooting dope when I was only at work, I tried shooting dope only on the weekends, I tried shooting dope only during the week, and I tried shooting dope all of the time. So nothing that I could think of to do was working. And in December of that year we had one of those episodes where I had to help try to find this stuff again because what had happened was I had taken some of a drug called fentanyl in the operating room and they had discovered it was gone. And they came in and they said, we're going to have to report this to the DEA. And I got down on the floor and I looked all over for that stuff. I looked in that operating room everywhere. I look and I couldn't find it because I knew it was in me, but I helped look. And I went on a vacation that time for about a week or two. I can't really remember how long. But I went through narcotic withdrawal in my parents' house and it was absolutely awful. AndI went back to work having gotten off of all the withdrawal was gone. And I said, I'm never going to do that again. And I meant that with all my heart. I'm not going to be sober then. I didn't know what sober meant. I wanted to not use drugs then. And yet when I went back into that hospital and I was alone with those drugs, I was right back in it again. And that was about five months before I got sober, and that's when I let loose and I said there's no controlling it. So I drank, I used drugs, I did whatever. There was somebody living with me, and it was terrible. That person had to leave. I cut off communication with my friends. The newspapers and the mail piled up on the floor. I wasn't eating, but I would order pizzas anyway, and they would pile up onthe floor. The apartment was a terrible mess. I didn't clean anything. There were things growing everywhere, and I hadn't planted them. and life was really terrible and one April day I was walking down the street and the azaleas, the things that bloom in Philadelphia were in bloom and I said nobody needs to use drugs on a day like today and I knew that I was headed to the hospital to use drug that day and I thought God help me it was probably the most honest prayer that I had said in my addiction because it was always God help me not to get caught, God help me do this and that. And that one was an unconditional prayer that day. And what really happened was the proverbial stuff hit the fan and things got a lot, lot worse. Really, really, really quickly. And that's what saved my life. There was a person who worked in the place where I worked who confronted me and said Charlie here's the data you know this is what we see that you know you've been taking out for the patients, and we want to know where this stuff is gone. And he finally told me that I told him I hadn't taken any of it, of course, but what happened was he told me that there was a way for me to get help. And I had been wanting to tell them that I need, but I couldn't. I couldn' t tell them. I just was unable to ask for help myself. And so when he said that there was a way for me to get help, I said yes, I have been using it and we talked a little bit about it. He didn't know a lot about addiction and I told him that I missed my mother. And by the end of our conversation, we were both crying because I missed my mother so much. But what he did in addition to commiserating with me about my mother was he called somebody from AA. And when I got the person on, and I got on the phone with this person from AA and I told him about missing my mother he didn't buy it. And he said that I needed to go to AA. And I couldn't understand why a person like me would need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I had met somebody several years before who was in Alcoholics Anonymous, I was talking about this last night, this person a unit secretary in the hospital one day when I was having a little drink in the hospital I asked her to join me and she said no I don't drink and I said why and she says well I'm an alcoholic I'm in AA and I thought well you poor thing and so I had had some contact with people in AA and since then I've seen her in meetings and been able to tell her all that and make amends to her but at any rate what happened was because this person from AA was very concerned about me, and he wanted me to go to an AA meeting, and I told him I needed a vacation. And he said, well, how are you going to make it through that vacation? And I didn't know what he was talking about, and he said、Well, we're worried about you. And I said、 Well, I'll just go through withdrawal. Well,I went on that vacation, and for the first time in my life, I shot drugs in my parents' home. And by that time, I was using everything. It doesn't matter. There was alcohol, it was benzodiazepines, antihistamines, antidepressants, whatever there was in anybody's cabinet really was what I took. So I had all that stuff and when I went back, and this is the miracle, this is part that I don't understand any of it really, but for some reason when I got back into town I went to that AA meeting And it wasn't a regular AA meeting. It was a doctor's AA meeting, meaning I needed a little something special, you know. And so I went to this thing. But I cannot explain why somebody with my lack of willingness, my bullheadedness, and all of that would ever do anything that somebody else told them to do. And I was scared to death. But I remember that day when I was going to go to that meeting, I told the people that I was a resident then. I hadn't finished my residency. I told them I was going to go into the meeting, and I walked off the job. I just left the job I didn't care whether they fired me I didn' t care about anything I just needed to get to that meeting And when I got there, there was a whole room full of people And that night they told me their stories in brief And I could identify with them And I felt like I was home They read how it works I heard the words God I knew that I needed a miracle in my life and somehow all of that stuff that they told me was comforting to me. After the meeting was over, three of them stayed after with me. Two of them had been, this is how it works. I made rounds. I was very fortunate today. I got to go to Willingway and make rounds with Dr. Robert and those of you who were patients there that I got to see, I really do appreciate you letting me do that. That means a lot to me and I appreciate you letting me doing that too, Bonnie. But Dr. Roberts said, well, Charlie was my doctor when I was here, and I had to say, well somebody else was my doctor when i was here. You know because that's how it works. And the next day those three people stayed after with me and I ended up on a plane to Georgia. I didn't have any idea where I was going and after the plane took off if I could have jumped out the window I would have. so it's a good thing I was in that plane but I ended up down in Statesboro I took my last drink in the Atlanta airport I had to go all the way to the international terminal to find a place where I was accustomed the kind of atmosphere that I was accustomed to drinking and so I went over to the international terminal, took my las drink there and the reason that I took the las drink was I wanted to prove to them at Willingway that I wasn't an alcoholic and I don't understand that either but I thought that if I could tell them that I took one drink that they might let me keep drinking I guess or something anyway when I got there they didn't argue with me about whether I was an alcoholic or whether I wasn't an alcoholic or whatever and they came in and they decided that they wanted to give me some medication and I said well I think probably what I'm going to need is Demerol and the nurse was wonderful and she went out and she said we'll ask the doctor and she came back in and I didn't get any Demerol but I couldn't find out what it was that they were giving me they wouldn't tell me what it is and what was really important I think that's when I surrendered because I had to take down my pants and let them give me this shot that I didn't want and what happened was when they gave me that shot, Demerol I thought was my drug of choice I don't know what my, I'm just a garbage head really when it comes down to it so I don'T KNOW WHAT MY DRUG OF CHOICE IS ANYMORE. BUT WHEN THEY GAVE ME THAT SHOT I COULD NOT TELL WHAT IT WAS AND I THOUGHT IT WAS FELT LIKE DEMEROL BUT I DIDN'T LIKE IT AND SO WHEN I REALIZED THAT I DIDNT LIKE WHAT I thought was my drug of choice, I decided to do whatever they told me to do. And there were a lot of questions that they asked and a lot of stuff that went on there at that hospital that time. And like I said, I entered there on May 12th, 1981. And what happened was I cried, things like that. I remember Dot going around saying that we were interested in feelings, and I didn't even know what that was. I had no idea what she was talking about when she said we're interested in talking about feelings here and the whole staff talked like that you know and I couldn't figure out what they meant and then we would go to meetings and we'd get in the van to go to meeting while I was on unit one and they talk about being sober and I figured what they had done was they'd gone out and had a few drinks and not fallen over. You know I didn't know what sobriety was, I had no idea what that meant but I really did think they had an angle. And I thought that their angle, I couldn't figure out what their angle was, but I thought that they had one. Later on, I ended up working there and I found out there is no angle. It's absolutely as simple as they say it is. But I think what they did for me there, honestly, was besides giving me good medical care, getting me off the stuff, and they loved me and they cared about me. And it was the first time in a long, long time that I had felt like anybody loved me. I can't talk about how powerful that has been in my life and you have all done that for me over and over and ever and ever. I mean some of the things that I did in my drunkenness were not lovely things to do but I've done some unlovely things in my sobriety as well and people have loved me through those things as well. I remember C.D., when we would talk, he would say, you know, you can do most anything in sobrietry but you can't live with guilt. You've got to find a way to get rid of your guilt, you know, and a lot of that for me is honesty. It has to do with honesty, it has to deal with acceptance that other people give me before I can give it to myself. So they did that for me, and then the other thing that they did, and I've heard so much about that this weekend that I've got to say the same thing. It's the same things everybody else is saying. They somehow convinced me to go to AA. I don't know how they did it, but whatever they did. And I thought, I wonder if they're brainwashing me. And then I thought well if they are, that's okay really because I need that too. But they convinced me to go to AA. And when I got out of treatment, I did not know. I remember the Sunday night before I was leaving, we had a speaker meeting that night. An outside speaker came in. And again, I'm sorry, C.D., but I can't help but mention your name. You mean a lot to me, a whole lot to be. C.T. spoke, and he said something that I want to pass on. And this talk that I knew I was going to make tonight, I mean, that thing, let it go, has been so important to me because I realized that I don't have anything to share except what other people have told me. There's nothing that I've got to share of my own that could help anybody. The only things that I'm going to share are what have happened to me in this program and what you people have taught me. I don'T have to worry about anything. As long as I stand up here and tell the truth, that's the only thing that matters. So I didn't know if the program was going to work for me. And I wondered how in the world it would be that I could go home, because I figured I'd be one of those people who went home and picked up a drink right away. And I heard him talk, and he said this thing that has stuck with me ever since, and I believe this with all my heart, and it is true for me, it's been true for almost 24 years now, the program is guaranteed to work. It works under any and all conditions. All you have to do is work it. Is that the correct thing, CD? That's it. That is the most powerful thing that I had ever heard in my life. So I went home. I went to a meeting. Well, I made a sandwich, and I ate it first, and I tried to, but the first thing that I did before I did that was I made a phone call to find out where the meeting was going to be that I was going to go to that night. And I went to an AA meeting for the first time in my life that wasn't filled with doctors, and outside of Willingway, that is. And I walked into that room, and there was a blind woman who had her dog. There was another guy who was dressed in leather and chains. And there were a couple people who had on just regular old work clothes. It was like a 5.30 or 6 o'clock meeting at night. And I thought, what am I doing in this room? and then they read how it works and then they started the meeting and I felt like I was home that contact with AA is the most important thing that I did when I got out of treatment that has been the most important thing that I have done since then as well as I've said I've had a lot of other things that I've had to work on and I've had to go to therapists or whatever and I'm not up here to talk about therapy or anything like that, but without the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, none of it would be possible. None of it could be possible, so I went back up to Philadelphia. I got involved in the program of Alcoholic Anonymous and some are sicker than others and I got sick again and I had a problem with honesty and what happened was I had some problems and there's some of the problems that people could have maybe they don't, I hope you don't have them but anyway I did but I wasn't talking about it with anybody And what happened was I got to the point where I was going to kill myself. And to me, one of the ways that alcoholism and addiction can come out if you don't pick up a drink is you can get a dry drunk. And I was on a dry-drunk syndrome at that point in my life. I had that thing that the big book talks about, the dry-Drunk Syndrome, and I was getting ready to kill myself, and I had a shred of honesty one night, and I told my sponsor that that's what I was going to do, and he said, Charlie, what would you tell somebody else to do if they told you what you just told me? And I said, I'd tell them to get back into treatment as soon as possible. So I had been sober for a year and a half or dry for ayear and ahalf at that point, andI got on a plane and went back to Willingway. I figured that since I had ben without a drink or a drug for that length of time, that they'd keep me for a short period of time. And I went in on November 4th of 1982. And I got out on, I think, January 9th. I spent Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's there. And then they sent me to the lodge. And you know what the sad part about the whole thing was? I didn't want to leave. I did not want to get out of that hospital. I was scared to death to leave that place. But I went to the Lodge, and that's where I met Roy and a whole bunch of other people that are in this picture up here. And what we did was we just went to meetings. We just went zu meetings all of the time. We got a lot of help, we got a lof counseling and stuff like that too. But the main thing that we did is we went zu meeting. And if we didn't go zu meetings, we gotta ask why we didn' t go zu the meetings. But I get strength from all of that today too. One of the things that I remember, and this is how I know today for myself that there is no excuse for missing meetings, was Roy. I remember Roy. Roy had a broken back, and Roy was on crutches. And at that time we had a young people's meeting over on Savannah Avenue, I believe, and the Smokehouse was the other place where we went to meetings across town. Roy had an unbroken back, and we would go to the young people'S meeting and then head over to the Smoke House, and he was on crutches, and he would go on the crutches. And it didn't matter if it was raining. It didn't mater if it were sunshine. And it did not matter. He would just go on crutches. And so if he could go to meetings on cruches across town with a broken back, then I don't have any excuse to miss meetings. And that gives me strength. And that's what happens to me as I stay in this program. I get strength from all of the people that I'm in the program with. And I know how to live because of what you teach me. So I stayed in there. We worked on a lot of stuff. And I ended up, well, this is hard to talk about. I'm very grateful for this. I endedup being able to work at Willingway. It was not something that I had ever dreamed that I would do. And it was a wonderful, wonderful part of my life. I ended up staying in Statesboro for around 10 years until 1992. So I had come down for less than 28 days and stayed for 10 years. And during that time, I grew up an awful lot. What I know now, and this isn't about my family, this is about me. My family did whatever they did to raise a boy. Okay? So it's not about them, and please understand that. It's about the way the boy was, not about the way the family was. I needed a place where I could grow up in a family, and the people here in Statesboro, at Willingway, and also in town took me in as their own, and I grew up here. I was over at the hospital today too, and I was looking at how it is set up like a home, and I thought that's not a coincidence, you Because I needed to learn to live in a home there. And then in the lodge, we had a home. We had brothers in the lodged. There were no sisters there. There were just brothers. And we had a family there. Then I had my family in AA. And I told my secrets to the family in AA I told a lot of different things. And Ida used to say, this was another thing Ida used to say, this is the place where we come and they accept us warts and all. So this is The Place Where I Come to be accepted. A lot has happened since then, a whole lot. Sobriety is not about everything being okay all of the time because it's just not. Sobpriety is about finding a way to live. It's about finding ways to live without drugs and alcohol and to be comfortable with what happens as comfortable as possible. And there are times and there are things that have happened to me in sobriety that if I wasn't upset about, I don't think I would be normal. So I've had a lot of those things happen, and if you live long enough, those things will happen. My niece was born severely disabled. She lived for four years and she died. If I was not upset about that, there would be something really, really wrong with me. But what happened as a result of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous was that when my niece was alive, before she died, she became a poster child for a charity. And I went to the fundraisers that my niece... My niece was born with only part of her brain. She was bornwith a condition called microcephaly. And Iwent to the fundraiser and here I am. I've got a pretty damaged brain, but it's not a bad one, you know? And so here is this little girl who can't see sometimes. Sometimes she can smell. You know, sometimes she can smile and she can't even eat. She can't Even swallow. And I watched this little Girl like that doing all of this good for all of These people as the poster child for this charity and raising all of This money. and I think about that and that's truly humbling for me to watch her accomplish more in her life with her disability and I work hard so those are the kinds of things that happen you can't be happy about a thing like that Morgan's life was not easy her death was not easily neither one was easy but at her death my friends came my friends from AA came. And I had the strength to do what I needed to do that day. I had to strength to give a eulogy. I had strength to sing a song. I had strengths to do what my sister asked me to do. I didn't have any strength after that. As soon as I was finished with it, I broke down and I cried. But I have the strength to do what I need to do in the program. And there's a part in the third step that is so important to me. It's the part in this step where it says power flows just where it's needed. And it's right after it talks about how nobody understands God's power because it's like electricity. And I always, when I would read that part or when I'd hear it read, think, well, I understand electricity. I'm a scientist. So I would miss the point, you know? And I would missed the next part because it would talk about the light switch and it would say the power is not there until you turn the light switch on. And that's the way my sobriety has been. I don't know what's going to happen next. I don'T KNOW HOW I'M GOING TO GET THROUGH WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT, EXCEPT THAT I KNOW NOW AND I'VE BEEN AROUND LONG ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IF I STICK WITH YOU GUYS AND I WORK THIS PROGRAM, I AM GOING To GET THREW WHATEVER THE NEXT THING IS, WHETHER IT'S A MESS I'VE CREATED MYSELF OR WHETHer IT'S A MESSAGE THAT HAS FALLEN UPON ME BECAUSE THAT'S THE WAY LIFE IS. SO THAT'S WHAT I HAVE COME TO UNDERSTAND. It's what I value. The way my life is today, it's a terrible mess, really. And yet I'm okay. I'm in the middle of doing a house over and I have to be out of my mind for doing it because I had a perfectly good house before that I sold and got a new one and ripped it apart and I can't even live in it. But it's an awful, terrible thing. It's one of the worst decisions I've ever made in my life. And so I have no place to live. And my parents are getting older, you know, and I have to go back and forth to take care of them. I hate this role reversal stuff. You know, people who have been in my life, Bobby, you talked a little bit about this too, you know people who've been in the people that I have known and I see you back there Ruby, you've been one of my people too but the people in my life who have been here for a long time some of them aren't here anymore and now I'm here and I've got as much sobriety as they had when I came and I don't like it I really do not like this but because of that I know now more than I've ever known in my whole life that I have to get up here and I have tell you what AA has given to me because I've got to let this out. I've gotta share this message. So, I don't really know what else to say except that I love you all and I appreciate everything that you have done for me. I would not be here and if I was here, I'm one of the people who lived through terrible, terrible dry drunk stuff and his sobriety, and my fear is that I could go crazy. But if you were crazy, you might not know it, but I knew that there were problems at that time in my life, and so it can be worse for us. So I appreciate what you've given me. I'm glad that I'm here. Thank you for the hospitality. Thank you für everything that you've done for me, and I love you all. Thank you.