The Tacky Tension of a Lawyer with an Al-Anon Wife – Jerry J.

Hi I'm Jerry Jones and I'm an alcoholic. I am delighted to be here. I'm not only an alcoholic, I'm a lot of other things. I' m a lawyer you might as well get the worst part out first. I'm the adult spouse of an Al-Anon, and she's with me, I might add. Billy, would you stand up and let everybody see you there? You know, you spot Al-Alanons. Now, Al-Anons are easy to spot. I heard Lou Holtz, the Notre Dame coach on television last night, he was talking about how happy he was to come to Cotton Bowl and we all knew he was lying. He wanted to go to the Orange Bowl, but we were listening anyway. And he was telling about this guy who was picked up for speeding. He was driving 68 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone and the cop pulled him over and as he told the story, I could just tell that he was with his wife and I could tell this wife was an Al-Anon. Here's the way you could tell it. The cop said, sir, you were speeding. I'm going to give you a ticket. You're driving eight miles an hour, 13 miles an hours over the speed limit. And this guy said, you may not know it but I'm fairly important and if you give me that ticket I'm gonna do one of two things. Either I'm gotta get out of here and whip hell out of you or I'm going to have your job. The cop looked over at the lady, his wife who was in the car and said, is he always this rude and nasty? And she said, only when he's drunk. Had to be, had to be. I do thank you for having me here. It's nice to be here. Everyone in Texas today asked me where I was going and I told them, and they said, why? They were a little surprised to know people lived up here at this time of the year. The Vikings, yes, we know about them. Right, whipped the hell out of us down there. Good football game. Last week was Thanksgiving, and I spent Thanksgiving with my new daughter-in-law and my new son-in law and my two children. My daughter-in-law cooked us Thanksgiving dinner in their little apartment in Houston, Texas. My son is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and a physician who is in training in surgery. My daughter joined us, and she and her husband live in Washington, D.C. It was a peaceful, harmonious, beautiful experience—nice as I'll ever have. And I got up here tonight, I don't know what I intended to talk about, but it suddenly occurred to me five minutes ago that I ought to say this. You know, a lot has changed since December of 1972. A lot has change since then. December of 72 was a tacky month for me. I had a fair amount of problems in December of 1972. My alcoholism was pretty bizarre. It had created some very serious problems in my life. One is that it had created an al-anon in my mind. That's the worst thing that can do for you, to get an alanon in your life when you're drinking. I knew that was a bad thing from the very beginning. She went off to all those meetings and had been going for a long time. You may not know this, but anybody can go to an Al-Anon meeting. Anyone who has a friend or a family member or an acquaintance who has an alcohol problem can go there. They welcome you there. That's a very non-exclusive organization. My wife was going to those kinds of meetings where just anybody could go. And I am a big-time lawyer in Dallas, Texas. I'm a senior partner in the biggest law firm in town. It's not good for people to know that my wife has a friend or acquaintance or husband who is an alcoholic. It really isn't. It's tacky as hell for her to do that. I have explained this to her in the simplest terms you can imagine. I've explained to her all that we have to have happen is for one person to go to one of those public meetings where they are discussing my problem, and see her there, and think who could Billy Jones have as a friend, acquaintance or family member who's an alcoholic? And as near as I could tell, I was the only candidate for probably 2,000 miles. When they found that out, when they saw me there—when they knew that my wife didn't see me there but they saw her there—they would go tell one of my partners. Somewhere the word would get back. Now we had alcoholic partners in my law firm. They were always talking about it. I knew what we had planned for them. We were going to get rid of them just as quick as we could. I had been hearing them talk about it for years. We'd been getting them out of trouble, and I'd been on the side that had been getting them out. I knew they were going kick me out. I thought we just didn't have any more openings for alcoholic lawyers in my law firm. And then when that happened, the money would stop. When the money stopped, the house went. The cars went. Everything was hot. Everything was going to go, and when everything went, we were going to be on the street with our children. Now, we're not talking about college educations now, friends. We're talking about survival. I'm the only one that's working. And I explained that to her many times, and her answers were always the same. I need to go. Why? Because I have a problem. What is your problem? The way you drink. That sounds like my problem, but I couldn't make her stop. I asked her not to go very nicely. I told her not go. I explained to her that I would kill her if she ever went again, and she just kept going. Now that's kind of the background of what it was like in December of 1972. She kept telling me about what wonderful people she met in Alcoholics Anonymous. If people just knew what there was there, they would pay $500 a seat just to go to those meetings. I saved my $500 every time she offered me that deal. Just one day along in November, she said, Jerry, I really have met some nice people and we're going to have a party. It won't be identified with that party. We've been invited to go to this party. It's just a little get-together, kind of an open house. Would you just go meet some of these people? And since it was probably 30 days away, I said I'd go. And then it rolled up on that day. She said, Remember, remember we're going to that party tonight. And I said, Oh, which party? She explained to me that that was the party and I said oh God is that tonight? Yeah. I said what time is that? And I was thinking maybe I've got a conflict and she said nine o'clock this evening. I said nine O'clock? What kind of party starts at nine o clock in the evening? He said, well, truthfully, it's after an A.A. meeting, but there will be other kind of people there. You won't be, you know. So I sat around the house and thought about that party a lot and had a few drinks, not too many because I needed to stay sober enough to get through that party, and it occurred to me long late in the day that I couldn't go to that party. I couldn't go to that party and I didn't know why for a while but finally I understood it it was going to be a B-Y-O-D party bring your own drunk and they were going to parade us around the room and say this is the guy I've been telling you about this is one that hit me he locked me out of the house he didn't come home for three months this is a guy, this is it we might even get awards or pin ribbons on us I didn't know what they were going to do. But I knew I wasn't going to that damn party. And so I went to my wife late in the day, and I said, Billy, I can't go to that party. I just can't get there. I just won't make me go to one of them damn AA meetings instead. And she said, That's fine. So I went into my first AA meeting. I knew when I went to that meeting that I had a little problem drinking. That month we also had a Christmas party at our house. There had been a bunch of people that we met at the church, and it was kind of a Sunday school party. That's what it really was, a Sunday school party, and I was the only one who got drunk at the Sunday school. It was at our house, and I tried to get everybody to have a drink with me when they came. Not one of those people would have a drank with me. And I played like I was having one drink all night long, and then I'd just keep sneaking back in the bedroom and had a bottle back there and I'd keep adding a little to it. And I got pretty drunk, I guess. I don't remember all of the evening. I think I sang some very interesting Christmas carols that I learned in the Navy. Those people, as far as I know, we never have had another party like that at our house or had a lot to do with those folks. That was one deal. I had an experience that month. We went to an open house and I did have a little too much to drink. We got ready to go home and Billy wanted to drive. There's nothing in the world that frightens an alcoholic like an Al-Anon driving his car. Just scared me to death to think of her driving, and so I got in and I would not let her drive and I drove all the way home very carefully. We have a loop around Dallas, it's about eight lanes, and I was on that and I was driving about 30 miles an hour, and everybody else was driving about 70. And I'm one-eyed, you know, to stay in the lane and everything. And I remembered that. You know, I knew all these things were going on. It's hard to play like I didn't have a problem. And I went to that meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that night. Really felt sorry for the old boys talking. He had hell of a time. Looked around at all of them and was kind of surprised that there weren't any people with, you know, T-shirts with their hair growing out through them. I fully expected that they'd look like that. have to shave them to get the shirt off, that kind of deal. They were kind of nice and a couple of them even spoke to me. But I got out of there real quick and knew that I had to really get my act together. That was on, I believe, December 29th, the last day of the year. We were going to go out and bring the new year in. We had a few friends left who would do something with us, and we were going to go out to dinner with them, and then we were gonna come home. And I knew why we were coming home, because if we stayed out and I got drunk out, it would be a problem. It was really important for me that night, very important for my life. It was important for the New Year to bring in the New year to last until midnight. And I remember waking up and looking out the window of our house, and it was dark. And I looked in the chair, and Billy was sitting there in her robe reading the magazine. And I said, Shouldn't we be getting dressed to go out to dinner? And she said, Oh, Jerry, don't you know what time it is? And I look at my watch, and it's ten o'clock at night. I had passed out at five o'clock that afternoon. That was the end of a long road for me, a road that had been filled with what I thought was a lot of fun and a lot excitement, a lot pleasure drinking, a nice dinner in nice restaurants with white tablecloths and silver and beautiful china and long-stemmed wine glasses and fine wines and fine liquorice. A lot of nights when I was drinking with the boys, a lot of fun partying, a lot of fishing trips, a lot of all those things that I thought had to have alcohol in them. That night I was sick of me. That night, I was sick of what I was not and what I was. I had one more drink and went to bed. And the next morning I woke up to the sorriest looking world I have ever seen in my life. I was absolutely without hope. Another thing that happened to me in the year or so before that morning, while Billy was going to Al-Anon, we had a thousand fights about that. I just couldn't leave that alone. every time we started any kind of a disagreement it wound up ultimately being a discussion about her going down to al-anon and me being an alcoholic and i remember one night i decided to pick a fight with her and when i pick a flight i i plan it out in advance i like to sneak up on you know i like go in talking reasonable and calm and peaceful and get them to admit all the facts that i need i'm going to need to win my argument you know and this particular night I don't know why I needed this. I don' t even remember what I was trying to do. But I was going to start off by saying, and I did say to her, Billy, you think I'm an alcoholic. And she said, I don''t know whether you are or not. I said, What do you mean? You've told me a thousand times that I'm an alcoholic, and she said yes, but I was wrong. That's hard to get a fight going when they're acting like this, I want to tell you. I said, I didn't understand that. She said it doesn't matter whether I think you are an alcoholic or not—that is immaterial. It's only important if you know you're an alcoholic. You're the only person in the world that it makes any difference at all whether you are or are not an alcoholic, and you have to decide that for yourself. Because I was totally caught off base, I said, if I wanted to find out if I was an alcoholic how would I do it? That's a terribly dumb thing for a trial lawyer to do. I asked a question when I didn't have a goose's idea what the answer was. And she said, Well, you should try some controlled drinking. They have an answer. Try some controlled drink. Drink two drinks a day every day for six months. No more, no less. Just drink two a day. I said, That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. She said, Try it. Now that broke it off, I realized that I was not talking with a rational person. Some more of that stuff had been coming out of those meetings like all the other things that she did. And so I went off and had a drink and began to think about this thing. And over the course of several days, I decided I was going to have to make a great sacrifice to get that woman out of Al-Anon. I was gonna have to take and pass that damn test. Now I wasn't dumb enough to tell her I was taking the test. And I did have to make a slight change in the test . I mean, well two drinks didn't do me any good. But I had a big glass and I thought three drinks would be reasonable, three. I would have two martinis before dinner and a great big brandy after dinner. That would be reasonably. Nobody could fault me for drinking that much. And so I would start it, and I would get it rolling real good, and in a couple of months she would notice it, she would probably say, okay, I was wrong. I'm not going back to that place with all those demented women. I'm going to stay away from there. You're safe and you can go on with your life. Except I had some really interesting experiences with that little test. I found when I'd drink about the second drink toward the end of the second drank I'd have this thought. He would come drifting in and he would say, Well, that's about all the martinis today. And then right behind it would come the next one, What are you doing? What are YOU doing? Are you over twenty-one? Are you a man? Who supports this damned household? Who's the breadwinner here? Are you going to let a bunch of little old ladies in tennis shoes tell you I drink whiskey?" And the answer was always, always, hell no. And I'd go to the bar and I drank the bottle. And I woke up the next morning and I'd wonder why did you do that? Why did you? You're a grown man. You've shown you've got discipline and integrity in a lot of areas of your life. Can't you decide to take three drinks, and just drink three drinks? What's wrong with you?" Now, that didn't always happen. There were weeks at a time when I could forget to take the test. Guess what I did when I forgot to take a test? I drank the bottle until a particularly bad occurrence would come up again, and I'd think thing I got to get that test going and I try it again and then I could get it going or I think I'd get it was gonna get it going and walk up the bar and I think I just don't feel like taking that damn test tonight the hell with it the hell would it I'm not gonna try you know I took that thing I gave it a fair chance I'd had her running about a year and a half never passed at one time that I can remember. So when I got up on January 1, 1973, I didn't have a lot of hope. I was living in a lousy world. I was in a world where I could find no purpose in my life. I was more successful than I had ever dreamed I would be. I had professional standing that I never thought possible. I had a wife. I had two nice kids. I didn't know anybody I would rather have. I had all the things that the world told me was going to make everybody happy, and I am sick to death of need. I sat on the edge of the bed that morning and thought about it a little. The only thing that I had not tried, ever, was to stop drinking entirely. And that morning I decided I'd give it a go, and I told Billy that I was going to try to stop doing it. And she said—she happened to have a booklet just like that one, and a little 24-hour day book put out by the Hadleton Foundation—and she handed them to me, and she said, Would Would you like me to call somebody from Alcoholics Anonymous?" And I said, hell no. I got myself in this deal and I'll get myself in that. As far as these damn books and stuff, threw them against the wall. I said you keep them AA's and the dogs and the kids and yourself the hell out of the way because this may not be easy, but if it's going to get done, I'm going to do it. She said, you got it. And I started trying to have it. Now if you're doing something real bad for you and you stop doing it, it ought to get better right away, shouldn't it? Didn't work that way with me. I had some strange things happening to me. I shook on the inside. I shook one the outside. I had a disquieting experience, you could call it. I couldn't find any place in the world where I was supposed to be. If I was sitting down, I ought to be standing up. If I'm standing up, I'll be walking. If I's walking, I'd be laying down somewhere. Inside, I would be outside. Just constantly in motion, constantly shaking, sweating. It's January in Dallas, and it ain't as cold as it is here, but it's cold enough you're not supposed to sweat. And I'm sweating. I can't sleep at night. I got a thing I call the yippies. You know just where you're sitting there all at once, and you just give it a little deal like that? There's a yippy. Real quick. Real quick, you know what I think about? Guess what I think about. I think about wanting to drink all the time. I wish I had one. I wish I didn't have one. I wish I'd never heard of it. I wondered if I could sneak one. Was I really going to be able to stay with this damn thing? And I walked the streets of Dallas and I looked at people and they were happy and going about their lives and it was obvious to me that there was something going on inside of me that wasn't going on inside of them. So at the end of the second day, I caught my wife out of the kitchen. And I suspected that she had left those books in that kitchen. And I sneaked in there and I just didn't have time to read conference-approved literature. I had to read quick because she was going to be back. And I grabbed that little old book and I opened it up to see what these people did. And with my keen alcoholic mind, I saw that there was a date at the top of each page. This was January 2nd. I went to January the 2nd, and they told me, guess what? Here's our solution. This year you're going to give your drinking problem to God. I have never been as disappointed with anything in my life. What are we talking about here? My God! How do you give it to something you can't find? I've been looking for God all my life! And you know, I wouldn't have done what I did if I'd had any other choices. But because I didn't have any other choice, I kind of leaned back in that chair and tossed that little old book out in the middle of the table and said, God, if you're there, I'm going to give you this drinking cup, and if you take it I may do some more business with you." It may have been the best prayer I ever said. I admitted I was absolutely honest in that moment. I saw things as they really were. I was praying to a dim God when I didn't know whether He was there or not. I was in deep need, and I was willing to take some action. I was going to do my part. The next day I knew something. I knew the next day that I was not going to be able to do this thing by myself. I needed some help. I needed help with skin on it. I really did. So I called the only place I knew, which was Alcoholics Anonymous, and immediately began to resist doing everything you told me to do. In that first telephone conversation, the lady said, You're going to need to go to a lot of meetings. And I said, Well, I'm very busy. And she said, How many meetings are you talking about? She said, Do you need to meet every night? I couldn't possibly do that. And she said, How often did you drink? I said, Every night. She said, Well, you're going to have some free time, aren't you? I said well maybe I am. You know the old line, you can't get to the post office from here. I came to Alcoholics Anonymous as negative about this thing as you can get. I didn't believe in any kind of power greater than myself. I was absolutely convinced that I was some kind of a moral leper, a lily-livered, weak-powered, weak no willpower kind of person. I didn' t know what was wrong with me. I had no hope. I was just desperate. And I began an adventure that's been the most exciting thing in my life. I hadn't been here very long until I began to be attracted to what was going on here. I had never seen anything like what happens in Alcoholics and Violence. I sat in these meetings in amazement, and heard people, grown men and women, tell things about themselves in public that I would never even think about telling. And when the guy said he had 47 convulsions, 32 automobile accidents, 18 divorces, and then it got bad, everybody just laughed like hell, you know, most inappropriate group of people I'd ever seen in my life. But I'm competitive, you know. And I always have one to be a part of. And so I got thinking, well, you know, I did a couple things that were kind of cute. Maybe I'll tell them one. And so I told them one, and you know what they did? They put their arms around me and said, looky here, lookie here. Jerry is beginning to open up. Ain't that great? Well, I kind of like that. I even got to where I kind like the hugging they did. God, I hated to be hugged when I got to Alcoa's Lounge. I couldn't stand it. I didn't want to hug inside or outside. I just didn't want to hug. I Just wanted to be left alone. And there was an old gal there that just every time she saw me, she just grabbed me and hugged me. And pretty soon I began to think, hell, that ain't too bad. That's not too bad because a little while later she said to me, She said, Cowboy, I've been watching you. She said I think you're going to make it. She said I've been in this program, said I was in this program for 13 years and I got drunk. And I got off on drugs and I did everything wrong. And said I want to make it this time. I want to make this time." And she said, I want you to watch me. Here's the way I act when I'm getting off the beam. She said you watch me real close. And when I've gotten off the beams, she said I think you're mean enough you'll tell me. And I'll listen. Will you do it? And I said, I damn sure will. And she said, Good, because that's what I'm going to do for you too. I didn't know that was a part of the deal. But she did and we got started. And we were given a process. Alcoholics Anonymous is centered around the disease of alcoholism. I call it a disease. You know, the Veterans Administration doesn't think it's a disease, and the United States Supreme Court is just about to decide whether it is or is not a disease." Doesn't that give you a lot of comfort? But, you know, Bill ducked that question when he wrote this book. It doesn't say it's an illness. It says it's in the illness. And I don't care whether it's your disease or isn't a disease It is absolutely immaterial to me, because you folks have told me some common things about this situation, this disease, this illness, this condition that are very meaningful. They allowed me to compare your experience with mine and for me to recognize that what you were talking about happening to you happened to me. When I read Dr. Silkworth's letters in the beginning of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, I understood something about what he was talking about. Looking back on my life, I could clearly see that something physical happened to me when I took a drink of whiskey. I just was going to have another drink. Whether I wanted one or not, it just seemed like something happened, something took me over and I drank. I didn't always get knee-walking drunk, but I generally drank more than I intended to drink. That had gone on through my entire drinking experience from the time I went to college until I was 40 years old. Many, many times I wondered about that. I didn't know that everybody else didn't have that same experience, but I got here and you told me that that's reserved—that experience is common only to alcoholics. We have something that's like an allergy, an ab reaction, an unusual reaction to alcohol. You told me something else. You told that this is a disease or an illness that has a mental side to it, an obsession, an obsession of the mind. And the way I think that shakes out for me is that it means that I have a thought process And my thought process could be summarized as, a drink will make it better. It doesn't matter what it is, a Drink would make it better. It could be a wake, a wedding, or a fancy ball, an ice cream social. Whatever it was, a Drink would make it better, and I lived for the Drink to make it better." It absolutely dominated my life. I got so lost lost, that I didn't know the truth from the false. I developed defense systems which were enormous, which kept me from ever seeing what was going on with me. I did some things that you won't hardly believe. Well, you might. My wife continued to nag me about alcohol, and I was always solving the peripheral problems out here. I decided this poor woman has got some kind of bad, bad overreaction to alcohol. She's got a phobia of some kind, so I sent her to a psychiatrist. And they treated her for that for a long time. In the midst of our craziness as we went along, I smoked a lot. I smoked about a couple of packs a day. I was an automatic smoker. In the middle of the night, no matter how drunk I was or had been, I could swing my feet off to the side of the bed. when my feet hit the floor, my left hand went out precisely to where my cigarettes were and there was a lighter on top of them. And I always got that done. Light the cigarette, go to the bathroom, get lost in the house, do whatever you do in that kind of condition, come back and sit down and I don't know about you but I was often very tired when that happened. Just kind of needed to lay down and rest a minute and finish up my cigarettes. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. once or twice, you know, maybe a half a dozen times. There was a little bitty ash fell off and burned a little hole in the blanket. No big deal, right? Overreaction again on her part. Why do you have that cover you put on the top if it's not to cover up that kind of thing? You just spread it up there, you don't. Well, this one night I woke up and I had a pretty fair fire going on my side of the bed. We got it out, and I got up the next morning and was very generous. I told my wife to buy any kind of bed she wanted, and I had to leave right away. I didn't have time to talk about it. I got back, and again, she'd overreacted. She had written me a letter, and she was right there, you know. She hadwrittenme a letter. So I read the letter, and it said, Dear Jerry, I've talked to you about your drinking and smoking. It's now reached the point where I can't go to sleep tonight without worrying about my life or the lives of my children because of your drinking or smoking. You're going to have to do something about it." I'm responsible I'm a man I love my family I did so I did something I quit smoking it never crossed my mind to quit drinking I just quit smoking never smoked again blacked out every night had packages of cigarettes right there on the coffee table beside me wanted one bad but never smoked another cigarette lots of willpower Something was working on me besides lack of willpower. Something had a hold of me, and I lacked the power to break it. I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I began to look for this thing called God. I began looking for this things called a higher power. It doesn't matter what you call it. All of the old timers told me that you will not recover in this program unless you enlist the aid of a power greater than yourself. That's the only way you're going to do it. And I began to try to look for this power. I had always looked for this powerfulness in myself. I'd always been hungry for this. But I was kind of a spiritual mongrel. I could never find a place. I'd sit down with a preacher and I'd begin to ask him questions. What do I have to believe? Tell me what I've got to believe. Okay, if I've got to believe that, prove to me that it's true and I'll believe it. And he says have faith. Have faith. Hmm. Did you ever try to have faith? I've decided a lot of times to have faithful. I've sat down in a chair and I'm going to sit right here by God until I have some faith. Hmm! Haven't got it yet. You just can't make it up. You either got it or you don't got It. You either believe something or you Don't Believe It. and basically you believe what you have experienced. And I had no experience that I could see that worked for me. So I began to ask questions in this program, and I was told to make a list of the things I believed about a power greater than myself and a list about things that I didn't believe about the power. Well, I had a long list of what I didn' t believe and a little bitty short list of what I could believe. And they said, throw the long list away. It's not doing you any good. All it's ever done is to keep you from acting on what you do believe in. So forget it. What you don't believe means nothing in Alcoholics Anonymous. What you do belief means everything. You must be honest, open-minded, and willing. and if you do that and give credit where credit is due and take the action which we direct your life will be transformed because you see Jerry you're not going to simply get well by just stopping drinking there's a dimension of your disease that won't allow that to happen there's part of you that has to be dealt with that'll send you back again and again. You've got to learn a new way to react to life. You've Got to Change the Way You Think to change the very foundations of your mind. That's the only way you've got any chance. You've gotta change the way you react to live. I heard a story not long ago about an old umpire in one of the National League baseball, professional baseball business. And he was umpiring this game, and it was a big game. And the guy was on first base, and he tried to steal second base, and the throw was made to second, and there was a great deal of pressure. There was a very big cloud of dust. It was a Very Close Play. The ball was there almost the same time the runner was, and there were these dead silence for a moment. And the umpire was sitting there looking at him. And the runner looked over at him and he said, well, hell no. What is it? The old umpire said, it ain't nothing until I call it. Well, you see, that's the way life is. It ain't nothin' until you call it that. We don't have a program that changes life. We have a problem that changes the way we react to life. And the difference is enormous. You've all read Chuck's book, A New Pair of Glasses. That's what it's all about. That's what this process is about. We have to do our part, and then it comes along. And when you do your part, you begin to see some really remarkable things take place in your life. I watched the people. I was drawn to people who had that quiet sobriety, those quiet eyes, who would sit and talk to me. They never talked to me about whether they had a swimming pool or a big car or how much money they had or anything like that. They talked to me about loving and caring and feelings and how was I. And they talked about how we might help somebody else. And I began to be attracted to those people because I saw from looking at them, they were the real commodity. This is a real thing. Once again, you see, it's this experience coming in. Do you know that's the greatest principle we have? What man has done, man can do. The principle of experience is the foundation of this program. I remember when I was a kid one time, I lived out in the country. And we'd go to town once a week and I saw the town kids riding bicycles. And I wanted a bicycle. And I didn't know anybody that had one, but I wanted one. And I talked my dad into ordering one out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog. And it came and we got the directions out and we put it together and we pumped up the tires. Dad gave it to me and I went out there and swung up on her and just busted my can. It never occurred to me that there would be any problem in riding a bicycle. The town kids didn't have any problem riding bicycles. So my mother got out there, and she'd run along beside me and hold it up, you know, and I'd get the pedal, and if she turned loose, and I would fall over. Now we have a lot of stickers out in West Texas, and I had stickers all over me in just a little while. And it wasn't much fun. And I wasn't making any progress, and we did that a couple of days. And a great truth came to me. I had been sold a defective bicycle. Well, I had. I'd been sold a bicycle no one could ride. And I explained that to my mother, a little Irishman. I said, nobody can ride that bicycle. And she said, Jerry Jones, I've never ridden a bicycle but maybe once or twice in my entire life, but I can ridethat bicycle. And I said you cannot. So she walked out there and got the bicycle up, stepped up on it. Guess what? Fell right over and busted herself. I felt a little sorry for her not much I told her it was going to happen but she got up again and she got on that bicycle again and this time she rode it maybe 30 yards wobbly barely could keep it up and she laid it down and she said it's all yours an hour later I was riding that bicycle pretty good now you see watching these old timers watching these people who had been here preceding me as they had watched those that preceded them gave me the principle of what can be done. They said they had no power when they came here. They said there was no power in the world. They said we had no beliefs when they became here. They said it wouldn't be necessary to drink when they come here. And I believed them. But I could see they had one now. and when i asked them what to do i really didn't think it would work for me and they said they didn't care whether i thought it would or not just take the action the result will follow and they directed me into things that i had never thought about before they talked to me about a thing called self-centeredness now you probably haven't had any problem with that but i'd you know i didn't either when i got here i remember reading in that book where it said selfishness and self-centeredness. This was the root of our problem. I skipped the rest of the page because I knew they were talking about something besides me, you know. I wasn't selfish. Hell, I gave to churches and charities and all kinds of things. You know, helped my kids. Self-centered? Why, Lord, no, I wasn' t self- centered. I was always thinking of others and what they ought to do. But in a little while, because you shared with me, I began to get some ideas. One night I was sitting in a meeting, and I heard some guy talking about something. I wish I could remember exactly what it was, but I remembered an experience from my own life. I remembered my fishbowl. Now, I don't know how you were when you drank. I didn't get out after a while. I did all my drinking at home. I brought my disease home and shared it with my family. and I sat right there in a green chair and watched the television tube until I passed out and saw the snow and usually Billy would help me go to bed until she went to Al-Anon and then she started leaving me out drunk and you know it was a sad deal and I got tired of watching television even drunk it's terrible I decided that I would buy me a fish tank and I bought me a fishing I bought the size of fish tank that I wanted and I put it between my chair and the wall. It was my tank. And I put the kind of gravel in the bottom that I liked and I fit the kind of plants in it I liked, the little ferns and the willowy type of things. And I filled it with water and I filled the kind of fish in it that I like and I like slow-swimming pretty fish. And I pulled a light on it. I could make it daylight or I could made it dark. and I fed my fish if they were to be fed. Sometimes it was a land of plenty and sometimes there was a famine upon the land. And I sat there in that meeting that night and was thinking about that and I remembered, you know, I was feeling, they did a lot of talking about unmanageability and self-centeredness and all that kind of stuff But I was, you know, I'd managed pretty well except for a little problem with alcohol. And I was having trouble identifying. And I tried to help those poor folks that hadn't trouble managing. You know,I tried to give them some clues, but I wasn't picking it up much. But that night I remembered when I was working with my fishbowl, there was always one fish. Generally an ugly fish. A bowl cleaner of some kind. who would invariably get after the pretty fish, one of those that was gliding gracefully up the top to get a little tidbit of food and then sailing back down among the ferns. I could watch him and just get off and dream Walter Middy-type dreams. It was just wonderful, just wonderful. And he'd come and bite their tail. And, of course, they'd try to swim fast to get away from him. And as they swam fast, they passed other fish or ran into other fish. And the first thing you know, all the fish were swimming fast. They were just going back and forth, a damn bowl like this. Just drove me crazy. And I reached out and I just walked beside that bowl. Boy! Let them know there's a power greater than they are outside that bowl who don't like what's going on. Now, I was fair. I practiced the mythical rule of three. I gave them three chances. You'd think they'd learn after three times, wouldn't you? You'd think they know something's going on when you bite that other fish and shot something. Every time it happens my ears hurt if fish have ears. Then I decided maybe some of them need a little more direct proof of the power. Sort of a hands-on experience. So I brought me a little dip net and I would catch the bad fish and I'd haul him out of the tank and I'll hold him in my lap. I'd have a drink. I think about the people in the world that I'd like to get my dip net on and haul out. In this game, timing is everything. if you keep them out too long and put them back they float and if they float as far as I can tell there's nothing you can do for them so you got to get them back just right and I got pretty good at that so I gave them three dip net treatments having they already received three noise treatments claps of thunder now you just know they're going to, you just know that they're going to all get well now, don't you? They're not going to do this anymore. Well, I hate to report this to you, but there are such unfortunates that seem to have been born that way. The last time I hauled them out of there, I looked neither to the left nor to the right. I went directly to the toilet bowl and flushed them. Just started with a new bowl. I was telling that, I was doing a 12-step call one night in the hospital where my son was working and he was listening over my shoulder back in the back of the room. You see, nobody in the world knew I was playing this game. This was all going on up here. All going on up here and he heard me talk about flushing him from the back of the ring. He promised he wouldn't say anything but from the background he said, My God, I wonder where all those fish went. See how I was smug and complacent and I couldn't even manage a fish bowl and self-centered Was I self-centered? How many grown men do you know that really get upset because one fish nips another on the tail? See, I was taking everything personally. I had good motives. I wanted peace in the fishbowl, but I was caught up in that kind of stuff, you see. And it wasn't just there. It was everywhere. Every area of my life there was a need for things to be the way they ought to be, including myself. i needed to be the way i ought to be i didn't measure up to my expectations i set i set goals for myself like passing that test one of the things that test did to me was destroy any self-confidence i had in myself i couldn't understand why i couldn' t do that and it just wiped me out and alcohol's done that to all of us We plan not to do this again. We plan to not embarrass ourselves again. We plan no to be a fool again. We don't want to go to jail again. And we do it again. And we get destroyed in that. And those feelings that we have, where we take everything personally, where we consider a lane of the freeway my lane. Do you do that? It's my lane, don't mess around in my lane! Don't slow up in my Lane! I have an obligation to punish people who misbehave in my lane, you know. I change lanes and that becomes my lane. I speed up and I run them out of my former lane and it becomes my line again, you see. That's the kind of games I was playing. I didn't understand what that was doing, but that kept me in a perpetual state of disappointment. Our book says you can't possibly hope to live life successfully if you're self-centered. You can't have it your way. We can't all have it our way. If we could all have it our way, who would go to work tomorrow morning? Nobody would go to work. Nothing would function. So I had this realization. I didn't know that. I didn' t know that those old memories that I had from the times that people had offended me were powerful enough to make me sick again. I didn''t know that a resentment was just a thought, a memory of something that had happened to me in the past that I could sit down and remember and did. I had some favorite ones when i started drinking and felt like it i just kind of get my old crank out the old tapes and think well am i going to think about this guy i'm gonna think about that guy i think i'll give him hell tonight and i sit there and think about what he did to me and my body didn't know whether it was really happening today or not the adrenaline started pumping the gut tightened up the anger came and i went from jackal to hide right before your very eyes all because of my mind and i had recognize that I had to think new thoughts. I had to find new ways to do it. I had to let somebody into that world and tell them what was going on in my mind. I had to appreciate what was happening. I had also to understand there wasn't anything I could do about that by myself. I hear a lot of people talking about learning to deal with anger, fear, resentment. I didn't have any luck dealing with it. When I dealt with them, I was drunk. What I had to do is what the program of Alcoholics Anonymous told me to do, which was to recognize what they were, appreciate what they were doing to me, tell somebody about them, clean up my part of the action and get on with my business? No. Because I've committed that I will make my life this power's business. I've got to shift from a self-centered life to a God-centered life if I want what this program really has to give. If I want to reach that place in my life where I don't have to deal with blame and guilt and all of those negative things, I've got to make that shift. And I've Got to Live to a New Criterion. And if you'll look at the steps, at step seven, you give the power to those old problems and you get on with the business of trying to rectify your past and work with other people. That's just exactly what the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is all about to me. It changes us from a life of self-service, self-gratification, self fulfillment to a life that if we work it is dedicated to being of service to other people and paradoxically all the happiness and all the gratification and all of the fulfillment that we ever thought we wanted comes when we do that. You've never been on a 12-step call in your life. No matter what time of the day or morning, no matter whether he puked on you or did not puke on you, when you left there, you felt good about yourself. And you knew and I know that I've been exactly where I'm supposed to be at that time. It's been remarkable. It's very remarkable. My life just got changed. My life just got changed. I was one of the angriest men you've ever seen when I came to Alcoholics Night. Nobody spent one hour telling me how not to be angry. Oh, I decided lots of times in my life not to being angry. Only to be angered in ten minutes without any control over myself. But I began to do this program and I got involved and I don't know what night it was but one night I was going home from a meeting and I realized that I had been to a meeting that I did not need to go to. I didn't have to go to that meeting. I didn' t go there that night because I needed the meeting. I went there because I wanted to be a part of what was going on there. I was there because Sally maybe got a new job, and I was going to find out whether she had a new Job or whether George stayed sober another day or whether Slim got out of jail. The whole thing, I became caught up in the lives of other people, and I became a partof a process. I saw people getting well who had no chance of getting well. I saw people that couldn't make a complete sentence, sober up, work these steps, and in a few months they sounded like college graduates. Miracles were taking place right in front of my eyes, and I got caught up in all that stuff. And one day, I was in a fishing store in Colorado, and I looked across the room, and one of those guys that had been in that Sunday school party where I got drunk, or had been to that class at least, I'm not sure whether he was there that night or not, was across the road from me. And he looked at me kind of funny. And he started walking toward me with this physical look on his face, And he said, aren't you Jerry Jones? And I said, well, hell yes, Bill. I'm Jerry Jones. I've known you for years. I've been deer hunting with you. I've Been on church board with you, you know, all these things. Yeah, I'm jerry jones. He said, what happened to you? I said well, I got a few dinks on me and a few more miles but you know. He said no, no. You're not angry anymore. You're Not Angry. what happened and I said well I had to make some changes in my life no that's not right either some changes took place in my life and he said he wouldn't have anything that I come out and sit on the curb with him and tell him what happened I didn't do that I did not do that I've had all kinds of things like that happen when I was a I always loved my mother a lot she was just a really classy little lady and i no matter how bad it got for me no matter what a rotten son i turned out to be no matter that i drank in her home when she didn't want me to drink there and no matter i did a lot of things that she didn t approve of i always knew there s one place in this world i could go and i would be welcome she told me she didn t like what i was doing she told m e i was running my life and the lives of my children and my family, but she loved me and she took me back whenever I needed taken back. Well, when I was still drinking, I got a call one time that said she had cancer. They were going to have to operate on her. She had had it once before and we thought it had gotten well. She'd had chemotherapy and things had worked pretty good. And I went up to her home and I didn't take any whiskey with me because I knew this was a bad time and I wanted to please her. And I just wouldn't drink this time. And they had the surgery and it hadn't been going on very long when one of the doctors walked out, the old family doctor walked out of the surgery. Came over to my dad and I and he said, boys, it ain't no good. He says, it's just everywhere. Cancer is just everywhere and when he said that I just turned around and walked out of there all the resolve all the thoughts about pleasing my mother everything else had just left me I didn't even think about it I got in a car and went to a liquor store and for several days I was around there playing like I was sober but I was drunk drinking vodka and coffee and all those wonderful things that you do I was in my mother's room she knew I was drinking she recovered from the surgery and once again chemotherapy for a period of time and I got in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous one of the first things I did one of best amends I ever made in the ninth step was I mailed my folks a copy of the book AlcoholicsAnonymous the first month I was sober And I said, I've quit drinking, and this is the way I'm going to try to live. And they read that book to each other. And my dad would have bought Alcoholics Anonymous if it had been for sale. Every time they passed the hat and he was in a meeting, he reached for his billfold, and he Was just going to dump all of it in there. And I'd tell him, no, no. We're self-supporting through our own contribution. He never could understand me. I got things straight with her. I lived the kind of life she wanted her son to live then i got another one of them telephone calls said we found another lump better come up again so i went up there and this time i went in and visited with her and he you know it was easy she was she was at peace and i was at piece and we visited a little while and she said jerry i want you to get the family in here i want to talk to them so i got up and around them all up and got in there. She said, folks, I've been fighting cancer for 17 years. I'm tired. I ain't quitting fighting, but I'm tiring. And I don't know whether I can make it this time. And I expect this is going to be pretty difficult. She said, while this is going on, it's going to be hard on all of you. But she said, you can lean on Jerry. He'll be your strength. He'll be your strength. In the next two weeks, I watched a woman that I loved a lot suffer an awful lot. Had a lot of pain. I even prayed that God take her because I just knew it was time for her to go. My dad didn't handle it as well. He had a big perforated ulcer go in his stomach and had to take his stomach out the day she died. it was a mess you know during that entire time not one moment not one second did everything about taking a drink you know I was the strength of that family no I wasn't I had a power I had taken the action and I had found a power greater than myself that did for me what I could not do for myself I got that power through the program of Alcoholics Anonymous the only place I got it I believe what it says if what we think or feel means anything at all it means that every man woman no matter what his race, color or creed can form a meaningful relationship with his creator if he has the honesty and the willingness to try that's what I think we have here we have been blessed I have been but there ain't no free lunch to those who have been given much much is expected we didn't deserve this we really didn't deserve this it was a free gift we've been given away and found given a power that's available to all men but we've been given a way to get back from the depths of depravity and disease to a wholesome, full life. And we owe it that. I heard a man speaking the other day, and he said that when he came into Alcoholics Anonymous 35 years ago, the average age of an alcoholic was 52 years. You know what it is today, he said? 52 years。 With the advent of AlcoholicsAnonymous, wouldn't you think it would have declined? Of course, there are many people who have been given recovery. What's happening then? What's happened is that we're making more alcoholics than they were making when he came into Alcoholics and Alcoholics. The need is greater today than it ever was. The solution works today just as well as it ever did if you and I will be the bike riders, the people with experience to take it to those who need it. That's our legacy. That was our gift. And that's what we owe. We owe keeping the faith. Staying close to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Don't let it be diluted. Stay close to this book where it was all written down and where the truth was preserved for you and I. Preserve it for the next generation of alcoholics. Find them. Hunt drunks. don't worry about messing them up. They're already messed up. Don't worry about whether you've been sober long enough to 12-step and go 12-stepping. You can't screw up a drunk. He's gone. He's already screwed up. Get him in here, in this room because here truly is the solution. The power is here. Do you sense it? Don't you know it's here? Can't you feel it in meetings like this? It's not this meeting or other meetings. It's here. It's as real as any other fact in life. It's like gravity. Can you see gravity? No, you can't see gravity. Step off the building if you don't think it's out there. It'll bust your can every time you step off the building. This power works the same way. You take the action and the power is there for you. It will revolutionize your life. It will give you things you never dreamed possible, more than you ever anticipated or hoped for. It has to me. It's our greatest message and our greatest legacy. God does for us what we can't do for ourselves. Thanks again for having me. I enjoyed being here very much.