The Recovery of the Adult Child of an Alcoholic – Jerry J.

I'm the one, and we don't pay much attention, but his wife, Billy, where is she this morning, Jerry? Stand up, Billy. Lovely gal that kept Jerry going. Did you find out what year it was? What year? 1980. 1980 we met Jerry. I'd heard him before, but we didn't have much conversation, and listen to his tape. But he's one of these individuals I'm going to warn you against, and it's kind of like this old boy went into the doctor's office and the receptionist sitting at a desk looked up and saw him walk in and said, what do you have? He said, shingles. And she said, well, have this seat here and get a little information. She got his age and address and full name and Social Security number and hospitalization policy numbers and all the information. She said, have a seat over there. They'll be with you in a few minutes. So he sat down, and in a couple of minutes, his nurse's assistant came out and got him and said, what do you have? He said, shingles. She said come on in the office here, and she carried him in, and she fell and took his height and weight, you know, and blood pressure and a few things. She said, have a seat. The nurse will be with you in a minute. The nurse came out and said, hi there. I said, what do you have? She said shingles. I said come on in here. And she went in and made blood tests and all of the other paraphernalia she goes through, you know, and said well you go in this room and take off all your clothes and the doctor will be in there in just a few minutes. So the doctor would come in and looked at him and said, Hi. I said, What do you have? He said, Shingle. I said. Stand up. Stood up. The doctor looked at me. Looked at him amazingly and said. Where? He said. On my truck out there. Well, you want them unloaded. The reason I'm telling you that is, you know, Jerry's going to tell you some things about the big book, I'm afraid. So don't take it word for—look it up and try some way to prove he's wrong. Now, if you can get an argument, hell, you look it up for an argument. I can tell you that if you're a drunk. But it's been a pleasure being here. What? Got one already over here, so that's all right. It's real great to see all you Al-Anons mixing in here with us drunks and alcoholics, and we've got some doubters out there. I smelled one on the way in this morning, and I know we've Got One in the crowd. And if we have any visitors here that doesn't belong to either one of our fellowships or just sit down and laugh and act crazy and enjoy living, then we'll thank you one of us. But Jerry's got a wonderful message. I'm not going to say a whole lot about him. I'm going to tell you this, he's good AA, and that's enough. And I'm gonna let him tell you the rest. So it's my pleasure indeed to be here and introduce Jerry J from Dallas. Come on up, Jerry. Good morning. I'm Jerry Jones, and I'm an alcoholic. I am delighted to be here, and I want to thank the committee for having Billy and I over here and for you for allowing us to participate in your 25th anniversary. I had a great way to get this thing all started, except I have an alcoholic mind. And in the very midst of all these introductions, two things have come to me that I must concede are divine origin of some kind because I thought of two more jokes that I just got to tell you. And one of them was when our voice was talking to us. You know, people, drunks have a bad thing about podiums. And you get one up there and we get married to it. You know we can't hardly get down once we get started. And this fellow was chairman and he got up to introduce the speaker and an hour and a half later he was still introducing the speaker. He had talked about a couple of things beside that and he had a gavel on the podium and toward the end the people were getting very, very tired and he was emphasizing a point with the gavel and he slammed the gaivel down and just as he swung it, the head came off of it and he had an old boy in the head right in the front row about where Don's sitting and as the old boy slid to the floor he was heard to say, hit me again, I can still hear him. And when Bill was telling this story about the doctor's office, it reminded me of, you know, people do not understand drunks and drunks do not understanding normies out there. Have you ever watched them check a drunk into a drying-out place? You get him in there, and he's just there. And there's always a nurse or somebody that's got one of these questionnaires they're filling out, and they go through all this stuff, his name and address, and he gets about 50% answers right on that, you know. And they were doing all this with this drunk one night, and it got to his birthday. And the lady said, Date of birth? Huh? what day were you born? What is the date of your birth? You know, they always talk louder to us when we can't. They think they can penetrate the alcoholic haze with volume. He said, September 14th. I said, what year? Every year. it's great to be a part of a fellowship where we can laugh and share together like this and and i i'm glad alanons are here now uh there was a time billy has got i don't know what you count it's not sobriety uh in al-anon they don't have to know they they got all the benefits they they can do the steps and still drink. Matter of fact, they have the same program that we have in Alcoholics Anonymous with one exception. They have no recovery that I've been able to observe. Billy came to Al-Anon about a year and a half before I had a problem. She came and she stayed despite my urgings that she leave and she needed an alcoholic if she was going to stay. So ultimately, because it meant so much to her, I'm about to lie again. I better not do that. I do think so much of Al-Anon because it really was a very important part of my sobriety. If Billy hadn't come, if Billy hadn'T begun to find the truth, I don't know whether I would have ever been able to see it myself. So I'm grateful for that and I'm thankful for her. I'm Grateful to be here on the 25th anniversary of your state convention. I heard a story, one more story and then I'm going to quit. I heard this story about miracles. A miracle, you see, is something that we see happen when we know that we don't have the power to produce the result. And it always has mystified man. And I heard a story not long ago about a little boy who was riding along on a tricycle in front of the parsonage in the at the local church and there was a hole in the sidewalk and as he rode on his tricycle he hit the hole he bent the wheel on his bicycle he fell over tore his pants skinned his knees and he jumped up and he set his tricicle up and his holding his knee it's hurting he gritted his teeth and he said son of a bitch and the minister was standing right there and And the minister said, no, my son. No, my Son. That is not the way. When adversity comes upon you, when you have an opportunity for God to work in your life, say, praise God. The kid just looked at him. Got his old tricycle and drug it off. And as luck would have it, about a month later, same kid, same tricycles, same sidewalk, everything just alike. He hit the hole again. he bent the wheel again, he fell over skinned his knees, tore his pants jumped up, minister was standing where he couldn't see him just off the side watching kid got up and he took a deep breath and he said praise God and the wheel on that tricycle just straightened out his pants were mended right there his wound was healed and he got on that tricycle and rode off down the sidewalk and the minister said son of a bitch Isn't that the way it is? We tell you how it works, and when it works we say, my God. We are seated in the midst of a room full of miracles. What has produced this happy crowd of healthy, loving people is something that is beyond man's power. And we have a tendency, because it becomes so common, to forget it. We have a dependency to think it's not much. And we need to remember that when Pat and John and Bill and all the old-timers began Alcoholics Anonymous in our areas, that it wasn't so easy. It wasn't så easy then, and what was produced was much more often thought of as a miracle than perhaps it is today. Today, everybody's in the act. Every time you turn on television, somebody's going to fix you for alcoholism. But let me tell you something, friends. In my honest conviction, that which heals us does not come from treatment centers, hospitals, doctors. It comes from a power greater than ourselves. I call that power God. When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I had a conception of God that, I don't know, it was a childlike conception. It was a man sitting on a cloud somewhere with lightning bolts and a scorebook and all this kind of stuff. And I had to rethink and relearn a new definition for God. And to me, then and now, God is whatever it is that works in Alcoholics Aanonymous. Whatever it is, it works. You can't see it, but you can feel it. You can see the evidence of it, and it will work for every man. We are so fortunate that we got a couple of good breaks. We got a break one time when Bill Wilson was about to take a drink in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, when he suddenly, for some reason, remembered that what had helped him in the few months he had been sober was helping another drunk, reaching out for others. Your theme, helping others. See, we weren't born out of Bill Wilson's great strength. We were born out of his great weakness. He needed another drunk. And another drunk named Bob Smith needed him. Lucky coincidence? Maybe. Wonderful, wonderful thing for you and me because out of that interaction of those two men the next day Bob Smith told Bill Wilson after Bob got sober on June the 10th 1935 we better find us another drunk bill and they begin to look and those old-timers looked for drunks to tell them what had happened we really got lucky in 1937 when Bill went to Akron Ohio from New York that time he'd in two years he'd been able to get three people sober in New York City. Tough years. But he went to Akron, and they'd got 18 sober there in those two years. And they knew they had something. So they held a business meeting. Now, drunks have all been to business meetings. And by a bare majority, they decided three things. They decided they would have missionaries. They decided that they would be able to would have hospitals and they decided that they would write a book of their experience you and I became the missionaries rooms like this became the hospitals and this book of experience is what gets drunk sober today it is not treatment it is recovery it is recovering the purpose of this book is to enable you and I to form a meaningful relationship with a power greater than ourselves. That's its only purpose, so that you and can find a power. Lack of power was our dilemma when we got here. We couldn't help being what we were if we didn't know that. We lived in a world of illusion and fantasy, delusion—a world that wasn't really there. We were harmed by the real and the unreal. We had a total misconception of the world. Alcoholism centers in the mind. That's what our book tells us. And our book says that when you you are an alcoholic, the only hope you have is to become or to have a spiritual awakening. The Twelve Steps says, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps. So the steps were designed to give you and I an awakening. And these old-timers who carry this message to us are the messengers. They brought that spark of experience to your life and to mine. And for that, we ought to be really grateful. My story is how I have found some of that power, how those steps have worked in my life, how I have broken through a world of illusion into a world of reality and found some of the great reality where? Deep within myself. Probably the only place I could have found it. I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was thoroughly convinced that I was a moral leper. I could not it seemed to me have any willpower I did not want to drink the way I drank but I did it I did in spite of the fact that for a long time I had decided every morning today will be different only the day wasn't different is just worse and it got worse and it got worst. I did not understand that I had absolutely no hope of ever being able to drink like a normal man. I was operating under the illusion that our books talk about that one day I would be able to drank like normal men. We follow that illusion to the gates of insanity and death, our book says. And I was so lucky not to go that way, so lucky. What happened to me was I found I was powerless, enough so that I was able to look out for some help. You see, alcoholism is a disease. It consists of a physical reaction to alcohol. When I take it, something physical chemically changes in me and I will have another drink no matter what. It consists of another side of it, which is the emotional or mental or spiritual side of the disease, which means that I have got to change some ways, the ways I think if I'm going to stay sober. I was raised out in West Texas on a farm, country kid in the midst of a lot of loving folks and had a dog. His name was Patches. Patches was an outstanding dog. He was a bulldog mostly, and he was brave. God, he would fight. Just a few days before this incident, I'm going to tell you about it. He whipped a bull badger that weighed one pound more than he did. Now, Patches was not exactly forgiving. He killed that badger, and every day for a week, he'd go up in the field and catch him and shake him real good just to be sure he knew who was boss. This particular day, he was laying in our front yard and he had no problems except maybe a fly working on his ear or something like that and our boar hog from our neighbor's farm got out and came down to see us big fella six seven hundred pound boar big long yellow teeth mean patches decided that he would go get hold of the boar and he went out and got hold ofthe boarand he did so with a good deal noise and it created quite a lot of confusion around our yard. The pig was squealing, the dog was barking, my dad came out and he began to kick and cuss and kick hogs and dogs and raise all kinds of hell. I was thoroughly convinced my dog was going to get killed and I was hollering and screaming. My mother was trying to quiet me down. Chaos existed in that yard from a quiet tranquil farm to completely chaotic circumstances. We all knew the solution to that problem. The solution was for patches to turn loose of the hog. That would fix it. And in a little bit, he didn't turn loose but he got knocked loose. And as he got knock loose, he got his throat cut. And we were able to catch him and we took him up under the hydrant and began to give him West Texas first aid. We cooled him off. We petted him. We told him we loved him. We knew that now that he was free of this terrible problem that everything was going to be all right, and we turned him loose. And he went right back and got hold of the hog again. Same result. Chaos started all over again. Everybody knew the solution. The hog knew it. We knew it! All that had to happen was, you know, we were the first chapter of hogging on in West Texas. loose of the hog. Hogs are not good for you. They hurt you. This time he came loose again, got cut up a little more, and we recognized that he was not in control of himself. He was not emotionally stable on this particular day. He needed some time. What he needed was to be committed, to be allowed to think about what is going on in his life, to recognize that hogs are just bad for bulldogs any way you cut it, at least for him. So we tied him under the water faucet this time. And we left him there until he wagged his tail. He looked comfortable and easy. And we turned him loose about two hours later. And he had to go two miles, but he found hog one more time. I don't know a story that illustrates alcoholism and Al-Anonism any better than that story. It turned out it wasn't hogs at all, because about a month later he took off after a cattle truck and he just caught one of those. You see, that old dog had a problem when he's hold of a hog. Hogs hurt him, but he had a bigger problem than that one, and it was why did he go get that hog in the first place? And what sent him back after he was hurt a couple of times pretty good. It's that last thing that's called alcoholism. It'sthat thing that sends us back when we know we're going to get hurt. It'sthat part of our life. See, we can't ever do anything about the physical part of this. We don't spend any time worrying about what causes alcoholism it's just there it's as certain as catching hold of hogs that we're going to get hurt when we drink and it's physical and we can't do anything about it so we've got to work on the other problem which is to find a way to live joyous and free without alcohol and that's what our program is all about if we don't stop drinking we've no chance to find out what the other problems are if we solve the other one we have no choice except to go back and drink again And the first thing you do is you ask yourself, are you powerless over alcohol and is your life unmanageable? Well, I had a little easier time with the first part of that problem than I did with the second. After about, oh, I don't know, 20 years, I came to the conclusion one day that perhaps I was powerless over alcoholic. I worked at it for a long time. My wife helped me when she got to going to Al-Anon. Now, I didn't like my wife going to al-Anan. I didn't like my wife going to Al-Anon at all because I was a high-powered lawyer in Dallas, Texas. And I had important clients and I did not want my clients to know I had any kind of a drinking problem. Now you just think about it. Did you ever go when you needed a lawyer to the Yellow Pages and look under alcoholic lawyers? You did not. And I knew my clients were not going to stand still for having a drunk lawyer. And if she kept going to those public meetings, she was going to see somebody or somebody was going to see her and it was going be bad for me. And if it was bad for me, by God is bad for everybody around me. She could see a judge, a judge's wife, one of my partners, my partner's wives. There were hundreds, thousands of people that could see her. And it would be bad bad for me. And if it was bad for me, I'd lose my job, my position, my clients. Bankruptcy would come upon us. We'd lose the house, the cars, the kids would starve to death. It would just, you could just see as logical and clear that she was just ruining our life. She was ruining our life. And I explained that to her as clearly as you can explain anything to anybody. In the midst of my great presentation one night, well, it wasn't in the midst. It was at the beginning of another session. I gave her several sessions of this presentation. Matter of fact, she just kept saying, I need to go. I needto go. And she kept going. And one night I was going to start a fight. And the way I like to start fights is you establish the uncontested facts first. And you build on the uncontested facts to establish that you are right about the contested facts. So I was going to start very simply this night, and I said, you think that I'm an alcoholic. And she said, I don't know whether you are or not. And I said what the hell do you mean you don't know whether I am or not you've been calling me an alcoholic for years and she said yes but I was wrong now how in the hell are you going to get anything going with people talking like that well it got you so I was so totally confused that I made a mistake that no self-respecting trial lawyer ever makes I ask a question when I didn't have a ghost idea what the answer was going to be i said well if i wanted to find out if i was an alcoholic how would i do it my friends if you ever want to drink again don't let them put that on you because they got an answer and if you knew and you question it and you don't get anything out of this conference or this talk besides this, take this home with you. She said, You ought to try some controlled drinking. They tell me that if you can drink two drinks every day, no more, no less, just two every day for six months, you're not an alcoholic. I said, Do you mean I'm supposed to drink to see if I'm an alcoholic? She said that's right. She'd been trying to get me to quit drinking for years. Now, here she's encouraged me to take two drinks. I was totally confused. I just got the hell out of there. I didn't want to talk to her anymore. But it stuck. It stuck. I began to think about that test because I had been drinking a little. Well, I was kind of like the old gal, you know. She wound up drinking out of a metal bowl on the floor, lapping it like a dog because she broke everything else or couldn't get it to her mouth. And she suddenly one day real clear it came to her that I am not a social drinker. Well, that's kind of the way it was with me. I was drinking. My drinking consisted of a half a quart of Beef Eater's Gin before dinner. And then I ate a little bit, not much because you didn't want to mess things up. You had a delicate balance you were maintaining there. And then my drink, I switched like a gentleman to brandy for the evening and I drank a half-a-fifth of brandy. And I knew that was not particularly normal drinking. You know, I didn't know anybody else that drank that way. It's just what I needed to drink. I thought I was drinking that much because I wanted to drink that much. I really did. Now here she gave me this little test. I had been meaning to cut back. You know when I got things kind of leveled out I was going to cut back a little. And she gave me that test and I started trying to take that test. Now I want to tell you about that test that's unlike any other test you've ever seen in your life. The more you cheat, the harder it is to pass it. The very first thing I did was change it a little. Well, it was, you know, I drank a lot and two drinks just didn't do me any good. So I had to change that to three. I had a big glass. I had an ice-cold glass. Nice big glass, so I decided to have two gins before dinner and I'd have a brandy after dinner. That's what I was going to do, and I was gonna do that for six months. I was gone get that crazy woman out of Al-Anon. I was going to, somebody had to save this damn family and it looked like she's going to keep going to Al-Anon so I was gonna have to pass the damn test. I didn't tell her I was gonna take the test and I didn' tell her when I started taking the test thank God. She didn't even know I took the test till I finally got in Alcoholics Anonymous because funny things happened to me. Alcoholism centers in the mind. would have the first drink everything's fine no problem here I would drink the second drink and then I would think well it's about time for you to eat now and then the thought would come drifting in and it was always something like this it was, what are you doing? Whose house is this? Are you over 21? Is that your bottle of whiskey over there? Why can't you take as much of your whiskey and put it in your body in your house as you want? Are we going to let a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes tell you had to drink whiskey? And the answer was always, hell no. And the result was I drank the bottle, the bottles. And I woke up the next morning befuddled, confused, bewildered, angry. You blew it again. Couldn't blame anybody else. I blew it again. It was important to me. It was important to my job, the only thing I existed for really then, to get this done, to get her out of that thing. And here I'd gotten drunk again. I was going to have to start the test again today. And with one variation, the test was always the same. The variation was I'd walk up to the bar and I'd start to take the test and I think, boy, you've had a tough day today. God, they've really been after you today, haven't they? I just don't think I'm gonna take this damn test today and I drank the bottle that way too and I felt the same way took that test for a year and a half I never passed it once and I was whipped to my knees I was trying to drink an amount that I had set to be reasonable and I could not do it and I could not understand why I could not do it my gosh I had a lot of willpower I had succeeded a lot in life I had I had more I'd achieved more things in my life than I ever dreamed I would achieve and I had become something that I never ever wanted to be whipped deep deep inside I was with and on January 1st 1973 I I picked up, I walked into the kitchen and told Billy. I said, Billy, I'm going to try to quit drinking. And she said, good. Would you like to talk to somebody from AA? And I said hell no. I got myself in this mess. I'm gonna get myself out. And she gave me a little 24-hour book and a copy of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous which she just happened to have there. And she said, you may find these helpful. And I threw them across the room. And I said, let me tell you something. I don't know whether I can do this or not, but it ain't going to be pretty. And you keep them damn day A's and them kids and you away from me. And she did. And I began to try to do it by myself. And I want to tell you some friends, strange things happened to me. I began to come apart. I couldn't sleep at night. I walked, I couldnít sit in a chair for three minutes. I had to get up and go somewhere, and a lot of times I got up to go and I had not a spookís idea where I was headed for. But I just had to walk a lot. I sweat. God, I sweat buckets on the outside. I think I sweat on the inside. I know I was shaking on the insides and on the outsides. about second day I was walking the streets of Dallas and I never felt as lonely in my life God I'd walk by people and I'd see them laughing and talking or just sitting still and I think my God what's wrong with me they're not having the kind of problems that I'm having I'm the only one that I know of that's having this kind of problem who's thinking about booze all of the time. And I came to know something on the second day, and that was that I was going to have to do something. So I waited until Billy got out of the kitchen, and I hurried in there, and I found that little 24-hour book. And i grabbed it real quick because I didn't want her to see I was reading it, and i thumbed over to January the 2nd. That's the day it was, and it said, give your drinking problem to God. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was in that book. I've been trying to find God since I'm a little bitty kid. I was raised in that good Christian home. I was raising in the midst of a family that believed and practiced their beliefs in a community where that was the respected thing to do. where that was the end thing to be and I'd grown up in that little old church and and I had heard those ministers talk about those likely lighted experiences and hearing voices and all that wonderful stuff you know and I wanted that to happen to me boy I wanted that to happen and I asked for it and I sat on the back row of the church and revivals and waited for it to happen and I moved closer to the front trying to get up there in the range of where it would happen and the baptist i was a methodist and the baptist almost convinced me one night after about eight verses of a song that ought to go up the front and i recognized i was in real jeopardy so the next time the methodist church offered the invitation i went to the front i thought maybe it's going to happen up the front and i got to the front and uh everybody was really nice they cried and they loved me and they said don't you feel different you know what I told them don't oh yeah yeah I feel a whole lot different now it's your better now but it wasn't so I became a hypocrite at a very young age I began to act as if I believed in something that I did not believe him and I developed a long list of questions that I asked people who believed and I judged them to see how well they answered those questions I judged to see what they whether they believed or did not believe all these things I thought you had to believe to find this power and they flunked and I became convinced that the church was full of hypocrites now it didn't keep me from going to church I kept looking at different churches and going different places I was a spiritual mongrel I couldn't find a home I couldn't find a place and I wanted it And here I was in the midst of the worst problem Of my life and they tell me They tell me Turn your drinking problem over to God And that morning for some reason I didn't have a whole lot to lose So I leaned back in my chair And I closed that little book And I said God if you're there I'm going to give you this drinking problem and if you take it I may do some more business with you best prayer I ever said because I was totally honest I had a great need I was without resources I had no place ago I told God it didn't understand him I was honest with him I made as much of a commitment as I could make if I could get some help and what happened after that will not seem like much to you but it's so important to me because the next morning I knew with a certainty that I wasn't gonna be able to cut this deal by myself that i was going to have to have some help and i called alcoholics anonymous and i became i came in contact with you i came in contact those people who had brought this chain of experience of experiencing god of having him work and live in their lives one drunk at a time from akron ohio to jerry jones in dallas texas I didn't like them I didn'y like their funky little signs on the wall that go and let God live and let live all those things I didn''t like that crap it was Sunday school stuff and I had a real problem but it was the only solution I had and they were doing something they were dong something I wanted bad not to do and that was not to drink they were not drinking and so I began to go to them now the first group I went to I selected because it was called the town and country group And I like to sign on that. You know, I asked the lady on the telephone, do you have one of those AA groups near a country club? I'd like to have college graduates if I could. And she explained we ain't got none of them. And I knew I was in trouble right there. But I started going and then I ran across a good friend who had six months of sobriety. Now, guys like old Bill here, oh, there were some of them around in that group. Hell, you can't stay sober. 25, 27 years if you had much of a drinking problem the way I saw it. I didn't much believe those old guys. I thought maybe they'd had a couple drinks and then just decided they were going to turn themselves in or something. But I had a real problem. And when I saw David, I could look at him and I could tell, man, he had a really big problem too. He had a little problem too, the scars were still fresh on him, man. He was still puffed out a little bit and he still had that beady eyes and the shifty look. He'd been to a hospital and he had a whole handful of literature. and he began to tell me first thing he told me said man we're gonna have to get out of this little home group here and start going to meetings every night or we're going to get drunk so we need a lot more so these are fine folks we can come here some but we need in between times we need to go and involve ourselves in this thing so we're gonna have learn to think again man our thinkers are messed up and we got to be around people who are thinking right so we can check our thinkers and that's why I needed to go to a lot of meetings I had a lot to learn and because I didn't want to be ignorant I read a lot I read the big book and I read The 24-Hour Book and I read the stools and bottles and I red everything I get my hands on because when it came my time in a meeting I didn t want appear ignorant I wanted to say something that was important so that everybody to say Jerry Jones is really doing good, isn't he? But you know, the more I read, the more interested I got and the more began to look at those people around that room and I saw people there who had a look. That's something they got in their eyes. Those easy grins, those hugs that were really, you could tell in a little while they were not sexually motivated. I didn't know there was any other kind until I got to AA. They hugged each other because they liked to touch and feel and rejoice in sobriety. And I saw something there I wanted bad. I had some blocks. I had some big blocks. You see, I had a set of values in my life. I had a set of values in my life that had almost given me what I wanted. I had a set of drives that had given me the money I thought I needed, the position in the community that I thought i needed, that had made me a winner, all those things and they talked to me about my life being unmanageable and hell my life wasn't unmanagable. I have done pretty good thank you. I hadn't lost everything thing, thank you. And so I had a big block thing. But a funny thing happened. As we sat in those meetings and talked, people told about themselves and their experiences. They told the damnedest stories about themselves you ever heard in your life. And their reaction to what those terrible stories were was just amazing to me. Some guy would say I had my 42nd convulsion, drove my 45th automobile over a cliff ran it into a squad car crippled eight people and uh and then i stopped drinking by the time he got through telling that's that line of sentence everybody's laying on the floor laughing you know terrible stories and they were just laughing like crazy you know and i began to think back in my past about some of the things that cute stories you know that i could have told them and maybe they'd laugh with me and i told them a couple of those cute things and they laughed and they patted me on the back and they said you're opening up you're getting better. And I began to examine my past. And I got to thinking about unmanageability one night. Now, during the period of time when I was doing my heavy drinking, when I was taking the test, I grew tired. There wasn't much else to do besides take the test. Billy was just leaving me alone. She, I was unpleasant to be with, she said. So she and the kids were gone somewhere else, and I sat in my green chair in the den. And I grew tire of watching television, so I bought me an aquarium. I bought me a nice aquarium I bought an aquarium exactly the size that I wanted and I set it right beside my chair and I put the color gravel that I wanted in the bottom and I got a little bit of and I put the kind of plants in it that I liked and I put a light on the top and I put the kind of fish in that bowl that I wanted I could turn on the light I could make it daylight or I could make it dark I could feed the fish or there could be a famine upon the land I could clean the water. I didn't have to clean the water, and the kind of fish I wanted were slow-swimming pretty fish, gliders, if you will. I liked to watch them glide between the ferns, calm and serene, and then I could sit there with my fantasy world and dream those wild dreams of what might have been and what was going to be and what I was going to do to them next time and watch the fish. And I liked it. I liked it. But let me tell you something, there's something that screws it up. There's always one fish in the bowl who begins to nip at the tail of another fish. And the more he nips, the faster they swim until the first thing you know, they're all swimming just as fast as they can swim, back and forth. Just drives you crazy. Now this fishbowl was my responsibility. It was my fishbowld, and I couldn't tolerate that kind of misbehavior. And so I devised a system. The first thing I did was give them a little clap of thunder warning. I'd reach over and slap the side of the tank, just like that. Scared hell out of all of the fish. And I knew I was punishing the just and the unjust, but that's the way it is in the book, you know. That's the Way It Happens. You've got to punish the just along with the unjust for the good of all. And they'd stop sometimes for a little while. And I would watch them, and then I would reach over when they'd do it again and give them another whack. And I gave them three chances. Three warning claps. Now you won't believe this But there are fish Who persist beyond those warnings And I reached in there And I had me a little dip net And I would catch The offending fish In my dip net And I was And I said I'm going to take him out And put my hand on top of the dip net And put him on my lap Get my glass And have a drink and i would let him get real still sometimes i'd get to thinking about how there were people out there in life that i'd like to put a dip net on and haul them out sometimes i'll leave them out a little too long and the way you tell that happens is if they float when you put them back in there it's just no use so i'd do that three times too now with three knocks three dip net treatments you would think that they would learn wouldn't you you wouldn't know it but there are such unfortunates that uh they seem to have been born that way and those i just dipped out the fourth time never slowed down just went right to the toilet and flushed them just like that bought me another fish and uh now nobody knew i played that game not a soul ever knew i've played that gain it was all in my mind it wasall that thing that i was going through while I was drinking. But you see, I couldn't even manage a fishbowl. Here I thought I was a big timer and I couldnít run anything to my liking. There was another illusion I had you see. The book says that we suffered from the delusion that we could wrest happiness from life if we only managed well. God, I tried to manage well, didnít you? I really did. But, you see it was beyond my power. I didnít have the power to do that. And when When I began to look at people in AA who had that happy life, they were people who were not trying to manage life. They were people accepting life as it came. They were doing the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, taking those slogans and signs off the wall and putting them in their life, comparing what they thought to those teachings, correcting their actions doing exactly what they've said and so finally I had to make a commitment and I made my commitment that I wanted what they had and I'd go get it. I'd give it all one good go and I began and I started trying to do the steps. I started doing a fourth step. I started looking at my life. I began to try to understand what they meant by selfishness and self-centeredness. I wasn't selfish. I didn't think. I like to give things to my family and my kids, but that's not what they were talking about. They were talking about a life that's lived where you take everything personally. Do you know that, I don't know whether you have them here, but you don't know it, but if I were driving a car in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on one of your freeways, I would own one lane of traffic. I refer to it as my lane. He pulled into my lane and he slowed down slower than I wanted to go and I ran over the SOB that's what I did or he pulled up behind me in my lane and honked at me which led me to drive three miles an hour on a 55 mile an hour freeway. I took traffic personally. If you walked in and didn't speak to me, I never thought about my goodness, you must be having a bad day. I thought what did that SOB do to me? What did I do to them? I took it personally. I lived my life as though I were in the center of everything that was going on. The Arabs blocked the gas sales in the United States at me, almost drove me crazy. and I began to understand that a life lived with that in that basis could not succeed if it could if everybody could have everything they wanted there wouldn't be anybody selling gas anywhere the United States do you know that we'd all be driving Cadillacs on the Riviera that's not the way it works it was an illusion something that I couldn't follow and as I began to work these things, as I began to do these things as I told about my fishbowl to people as I talked about my inner self I began to have a different perspective. I began to see life differently. I begin to have different thoughts thoughts are the thing you know. Did you know resentment is a thought? I didn't know that a resentment is a memory so strong that it stirs up your gut when you think of it. You know what fear is? Another thought It's something that's going to happen in a little bit and it grabs my gut too and I spent all my time I never had any trouble living one day at a time the only question I ever had with was whether I was going to live yesterday or tomorrow I never was right now I drugged the past and I worried about the future and I was back and forth between those two all of the time and I didn't know that was going on in my life I didn'T know all those people that I blamed all those circumstances I couldn't see the lesson there was to be learned because there's no growth beyond blame. If you don't get beyond blame, you're not going to learn anything from an experience. And I began to process. It was as though I had a lifetime of data and experiences over here that I hadn't run through my computer. And with the help of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, I began a process that experience. And I begin to learn the lessons that I'd left there untouched and unknown. and things began to happen to me one time i was out in east texas i was looking for god i'd gone to a baptist retreat one weekend to find god i was looking everywhere i could and i thought maybe they'd help and i was willing to go to any lengths my wife thought it might be a good idea for me to go there and so i went if i had known what they were going to do i would not have gone if i'd known what you're going to there i would have left immediately but what they did there was they began to sit around the very first meeting with me as far away from the door as you can get and they begin to talk about what God was doing in their lives one at a time and nobody was saying I pass right not I don't want to talk now just one two time they were coming around the room and it was going to come to me and I didn't know what I was going to say and I began finally to listen a little bit and I would begin oh the first thing it impressed me with what piddly little problems they had not nearly as important as my problems you know not a one of them talked about alcoholism they were talking about God helped him in their work or God helped him raise their family or God help them in the PTA and I was thinking my god what a piddly bunch of problems these folks have got here and then it came a little girl's turn who said next to me and she said she stood there first let me tell you how she looks she was slender and she was pretty and she had those eyes and that smile easy comfortable warm she had children two or three years of age she was married her husband had done a very unmanly thing he'd cried just before this time he couldn't finish his talk i kind of felt sorry for him but she broke through my planning see what i decided to do along the way was i just tell the damn baptist about what it was like to be a real alcoholic i decided they deserve to know I was just going to blow the socks off that crowd when it came my time. I'd just by God fix the whole bunch. They'd really be impressed when I told them what it was like to say my little prayer and then, you know, a real alcoholic who had been sober through asking God's help. That's showing. But she got to talking and she said some funny things. She said she was grateful that her children would be raised in a Christian home even though she wouldn't be there. And she was grateful that her husband wouldn't go bankrupt because they had a good policy of insurance no matter what really happened to her. And I recognized that I was listening to a young woman talk about dying. Not a long time off, but just in a month or two, she had cancer. She had old cancer. And she talked about how she could face that time and that problem with the comfort and assurance of knowing it was okay, that death's just as much a part of life as birth is. and I had a thought, not my thought. Never had a thought like this before. It came crashing through my great plan to make a speech, to blow the socks off the Baptist and the thought was ain't you got it tough cowboy? Ain't you got het tough? Here you are sucking your thumb feeling sorry for yourself or feeling like some kind of hero because you've given up drinking. You've got an incurable disease. She's got an incurable disease, but your solution is one you'd like a lot better than she likes hers. All you've got to do is go to those meetings, be around those wonderful people, do what they tell you in Alcoholics Anonymous, and you can do everything in your life except one thing. You can't drink. If she could have your solution, she'd give you both of her arms and her legs to boot. I didn't make a speech. Didn't say a word. Couldn't have said a word if my life had depended on it. That was the last day I ever felt sorry for Jerry Jones for being an alcoholic. Just don't feel sorry for myself about that anymore. I went on in this program, and Bill reminded me of some other things. I don't always know what's going to be good or bad. I'd been sober about five years. God, I think my family had come back together. Life was good. I was active in my AA group, and I'd had a little trouble with my law firm. My law firm's a little over about 130 lawyers now, and we're managed by a management committee. And I had a coming-up time, and for five years of sobriety, it looked like it was going to be my time on the management committee, looked to me like it wasn't my time. They were going to elect me to the management community, and I was goingto be able to tell all of you how wonderful it was to have made that kind of recovery from a firm that didn't trust me much to be on the manager committee. They held the election, and Iwas not among those listed as winning. and i went crazy i thought about getting drunk at him i just punished i'd go to the christmas party party and get drunk right there in front of the whole damn bunch just punish hell out of them that's what i do thank god i had enough sense to the next morning after this great announcement came out i went out and i talked had had breakfast with one of my buddies in aa told him about this he said what's the problem i said what the hell you mean what's the problem I wasn't elected to the management committee and he said how important is that And I said, it's damned important. You know what he told me to do? He said, I think you ought to do an inventory on it. Well, that wasn't it. So I asked a second opinion. I called a friend of mine out of town. Obviously they had a little better quality AA somewhere else. I called him and I said told him the same story and he said, what's the problem? And I was surrounded by fools who couldn't understand what the problem was. And I explained to them what the problem was and he said I think if I were you I'd do an inventory and see whether I liked that job or not well hell I did it nobody they didn't even have the courtesy after that election to come up and tell me they were sorry they hadn't elected me nobody mentioned it I kept waiting for somebody to come to my office and finally about a week later one of the retired partners stopped by and he hadn't been at the meeting he said i understand y'all had a big meeting though they what happened boy let me tell you i unloaded on that cowboy i really dumped on him and we got I was winding down my tale of woe and toward the end I said Dan I Dan was a Christian never had a drink in his life he and I used not to have anything to talk about but after I got an AA he spent a lot of time in my office and we visited a lot I said dan I don't know you know I've been trying to do God's will and I know there's a lesson to be learned in this thing some way somehow if I can just see it I said I know it's not all that important to be on that committee but I feel rejected it's my time and I feel like they ought to have made me on that committee. And I said, you know, I'll find something to do this year. He said, not an hour ago. I got a call from the president of the Dallas Bar Association who asked me if I would work with a group to try to help alcoholics who are lawyers. There it was. There it is. And he said, Jerry, it doesn't look to me like right now God wants you to run law firms. Perhaps he'd like for you to serve your fellow man a little more. Perhaps he'd lack for you too go to the drunks work with the drugs. Now I didn't have a lot to do with what followed but a couple of lawyers started this little thing and I was one of them and today there are probably 80 or 90 lawyers in Dallas who are members of that organization. We're not an AA group we're a hunter finder task force we find drunks and get them to AA that's our only function we meet and we're all in the fellowship now I didn't have a whole lot to do with that but just one little touch you see somewhere along about the sixth step in our recovery program we get the real medicine and the real medicine is that we get well by helping other people. We get well by shifting our concern for ourselves and when you finish the fifth step and become entirely ready and ask God to remove those defects, you're doing it for a reason and that reason is so that you can be of maximum service to God and your fellow man. And you stop going to meetings because you need a meeting. You start going to readings because you're caught up in the process and you like to see people getting well and You wonder if old Joe had another day of sobriety and if Sally did in fact get left by her husband or if she got her kids back or whatever it is, you get caught up in the lives of other people and you begin to look outside of that dim little cave which is self-centeredness into the larger and more beautiful world which is God's universe. You are rocketed into another dimension and you find joy there that you did not know existed. You start going to help people for the wrong reasons, stay sober and you transcend that when you find the happiness of seeing a guy who could not get sober. You know damn well he can't make it and you're lifted up and out of that situation. You and I are given so much. God does for us, you see, what we cannot do for ourselves. God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves what we can do for ourselves you see is to do these steps that's our part and i promise you nothing's going to happen until you do your part but when you do your heart i promise the result will follow and it'll show up in a thousand ways around you little things my daughter i never knew what to do with little girl she was a sweet kid when she was little i played with her and bounced her on my knee and all that kind of stuff but then she began to play with dolls and I didn't care a lot about playing with dolls and I couldn't find anything to do with Karen. My son on the other hand was I lived my life through him toward the end of my drinking. I was at all of his ball games, I was at all his practices. I drove him to and from practice and gave him coaching on the way you know I critiqued his every move I fought officials. I am the only man as far as I know in basketball history who as a spectator caused a technical foul to be rendered against his team and I'll tell you today he is still a blind son of a bitch that I didn't intend I did intend for him to hear me too that's what I did and he and I was just dominating that kid something fierce and I came to AA and I began to get some perspective I began they'd be able to see life as it really was and I knew I was smothering my son. And I told him, I said, Mike, I love you, but I'm not going to be as in many of those ball games as I used to be at. He didn't quite know how to handle that, but he enjoyed the ball games a whole lot more when I wasn't there. My daughter on the other hand, see, I didn't know what to do with her. Some Billy or Billy, I guess it was told me one night that she'd heard somebody talk about taking their daughters on dates. And so I began to ask Karen for a date once a week, we'd go out, She'd pick the restaurant, and for an hour I would talk to Karen about whatever Karen wanted to talk about. I would just listen. I'd answer her questions. I'd share with her as best I could. And then I stopped one day because I didn't want to get back in a situation where I was controlling, where I wasn't pushing myself off on my kids. And I waited. The next week she didn't say a damn word about going out to dinner. But the next week, she did. and out of that has grown a beautiful relationship good wholesome free mike on the other hand mike uh got off in medical school mike was wound a lot like i was he had a lot of those same values the need to be a man an outsized idea of what it was to be like to be a man trying to be superman trying to do something he wasn't holding down his feelings trying to be perfect, demanding to win. He got in medical school and he wound up with 200 other guys just exactly like him. The pressures were enormous. One day he couldn't quite finish a test. The pencil wouldn't move. The knowledge was here, it just wouldn't come out of his hand. And he was in crisis and he came to me, he came to me. I didn't have to go fix that kid, he came to me and he told me about this. And I said, Mike, I said this may be the best thing that ever happened to you. He said my God dad how could that possibly be? And I said Mike because the worst day I ever had was January 1st 1973. That was the day I flunked everything. And it turned out to be the best day of my life. And if I had only one thing I could give you in this life just one it would be a crisis big enough powerful enough that you could accept the principles that are contained in this book Alcoholics Anonymous and a little while later Billy had started a group of an al-anon called the adult children of alcoholics and Mike in desperation began to go that and he ran across a young alcoholic who He'd come from an alcoholic family. And he became his sponsor, and he began to hang around at AA meetings. And I hadn't told anybody in the club that he was even my son. And I got him off the side one night, he and his sponsor both, and explained to them that closed meetings are for alcoholics. You're not supposed to take Al-Anons in closed meetings. And Mike listened, but he kept going to closed meetings." and one night when I was not there he came home and he brought a desire chip with him he said dad I've joined AA I said my god Mike I know you had any problem drinking he said oh I didn't have the kind of problems you did dad he said but during the midst of all my trouble in medical school he said a lot of nights I drank times I had blackouts and said as I've sat in these meetings and listened I hear men and women telling what it's like to drink and that's what it is what it was like to me and I don't see why I need to do all that drinking that you did do you? I said oh my God no because if you got a desire to stop drinking you're in if you say you're In and so he joined AA he's in Phoenix Arizona now he's got him he's a young surgeon he's gotten a barber for a sponsor and they're doing real good. Thank you. You and I are in the middle of a great unseen power. I heard a story one time that I want to close with this. It's about Ladino. Ladino is the Mexican word for outlaw or wild one. And there are some steers on those ranches down in Mexico that are outlaws. They won't go the way the cattle are supposed to go. When they come out to round them up and take them in, before the cold weather gets there, they refuse to go, they run off and hide or they just run away and they can't bring them in. It's a wild, rough country, and some of them live through the winter. and the next year when they come bring the herds back out they began to gather up younger steers to be their followers and they're they cause trouble to the ranchers and the rancher's used to shoot them then one day a very wise man decided that he would take some little burros with him the little small mexican burros and he'd take them out there and he had roped those old wild steers and when he had them roped he'd halter one of those little burrows to him and turn the two of them loose together. In the beginning, the steer just drugged the burro wherever he wanted to go. No problem. He went where the steer wanted to go and at whatever speed he wanted to go. But sooner or later, old Ladino, the wild one, would want to stop and rest. He'd want to quit. He wanted to eat a little. And the buro would start home. And it took about two weeks generally for the buró to lead the great big steer docilely into the home corral. head down, following the boo roll. Now I was thinking about that story one day and I thought about that and I like stories like that and I got thinking, you know that's got a great message if I can just identify the players and the players of course, I was Ladino, the wild steer. Always wanted to be thought of as kind of an outlaw and a lover and a fighter and a wild horse rider, you know all that kind of stuff. That fit me to a tee. Now who was the boo role? Well hell, that's pretty easy wasn't it? Al Nons do a lot of talking about butterflies but I never have thought that was an appropriate little symbol for them. I thought I'd just discovered something new here. I'd give them a new mascot. It would be the burro because I was hauled into the home corral, which was Alcoholics Anonymous. But I've grown a little since then, and I really know that Al-Anon saved my life. He helped me a lot. And I wasn't hauled in by Al-A-Non. I thought, well, maybe it's alcohol, right? Well, that fits for a little while, but I've been sober for a while. and I still wind up out in the stickers every once in a while. Out in the wilds, just like I did about that job on the management committee. I might tell you the next year I was elected unanimously to that position. After that organization got started with the lawyers, the lawyers concerned for lawyers, my partners elected me the next time. Not because of that, but just in the right time. Anyway, I thought that alcohol might be up, and then I thought about that situation and others, and I knew that something else was there. I know today that the burro is life. Life is what's going on all around us. Life is that thing which whips us. Life is that thing that keeps you from having your way and going where you want to go all the time. Life is that great gift of a loving father that takes you and I back to the home corral. Back to the place where we start. Not a destination, it's a place a beginning over and over again, a place of rebirth, if you will, where you and I become what God wants us to be. And when we move along with the rest of his children, life is full and sweet. And When we begin to go our way, life brings us back one more time. The nudgings of a loving and gentle father we are the custodians of this great gift bill pato john all the old timers are still carrying that with them but it's time for you and i to pick up that message it's Time for You and I to Become the Message to the Drunk Who Still Suffers we are his hope we must keep these principles pure because they save us and they will save him we are the bridge on which he will find this broad highway the old timers have kept the faith and you and I must now keep the faith if alcoholics anonymous is to do what God would have it do and I believe you'll do that you're here I believe you'll go back to your home groups and tell them that we got a hell of a deal. We ain't got it so tough. Thank you.