Thirty-Six Years Sober and I Still Tell My Sponsor I Hope I Never Catch Up to You – Owen
About This Speaker Tape
Owen shares his story at the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting, approaching 36 years of sobriety. He grew up in Florida in a 1960s home he describes as a pretend-nothing-is-wrong household: a 6'1" citrus-farmer father who drank a fifth of gin daily like clockwork and a 5'2" mother who was prescribed Librium, Valium, Xanax, and eventually Haldol. Rage filled the house. As a teenager Owen lay in bed plotting to push his drunk father down the narrow pine staircase, and waited for the church minister to come rescue him. He turned against his parents the summer their longtime caretaker — the only person who ever loved him — was retired, and at the same moment he turned against a Higher Power and declared himself an atheist.
His first drink at 14, home alone, was not experimentation: it was the thought "I need a drink." He chugged cheap bourbon and a Valium from the kitchen cabinet and found it "incredibly stimulating." A bottle of Ripple in high school gave him his first blackout; champagne at a friend's sister's wedding ended with him vomiting out of a stopped car while his date's father pulled him from the driver's seat. He blamed the cake. He binged through the Marines under a first sergeant nicknamed Lord Higher Power Jesus, sailed charters in the Bahamas, met his wife, and after kids were born became a daily high-class drinker — imported beer, a third of a bottle of single malt scotch, cognac to finish — always stopping one ounce short of the room spinning, always craving more.
His last drink was a single bottle of beer the night before flying to a New Jersey Al-Anon workshop he hoped would fix him without touching his drinking. Instead a 77-year-old woman who ran the place looked up from his written critiques and told him flatly: "You've got a problem. You don't know who you are. You need to begin by admitting that you're an alcoholic." A hundred-pound bag of fertilizer lifted off each shoulder. A phone call about a Lutheran minister who had quit meetings after 14 years and was drunk came in seconds later. Owen has not wanted a drink since.
He warns that he hit a much harder bottom sober — impulsive investment decisions that wiped out his inheritance, a year of daily suicidal ideation, a plan to drive his Lincoln Continental off a bridge at 120 miles an hour so he could die sober. A voluntary repossession of the car took the plan away. He stopped trying to prove he was a good person, told his wife plainly "I am not a good person," and closes every day now with Psalm 131 — "I am not proud, I have no haughty looks" — the prayer a bishop once told him to memorize before he understood why.
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Timestamps
Full Transcript
Okay, are y'all ready to have a meeting?
My name is Brittany and I'm an alcoholic.
Hi guys, welcome to the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the Navajo Club,
where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more of sobriety...
My name is Brittany and I'm an alcoholic.
Hi guys, welcome to the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the Navajo Club,
where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more of sobriety...
Okay, are y'all ready to have a meeting?
My name is Brittany and I'm an alcoholic.
Hi guys, welcome to the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the Navajo Club,
where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more of sobriety tells his or her story.
This reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Each individual in our personal stories describes in their own language and from their own point of view
the way they establish their relationship with God.
These give a fair cross-section of our message.
and clear-cut idea of what has happened in their lives.
We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts in bad taste.
Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight
and listening later on aabloochipspeakers.org desperately in need will hear our speaker
and we believe that it's only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems
that any of us shall be persuaded to say,
yes, I am one of them too, I must have this thing.
Before I introduce the speaker,
we do ask that you limit getting up and down during the meeting
just so we can minimize distraction while the speaker is speaking.
I see this guy at beginner's meetings and he's always willing to help the newcomer
and I always hear him share, but I've never heard his story, so I'm excited.
So would that help me welcome Owen?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
With Dom DeLuise, no applause, please, save to Leanne.
So I want to thank everybody for being here tonight.
So it's all about a new freedom and a new happiness, right?
So hopefully all of you will experience a little bit of that tonight.
Maybe I will say something that will help you get there
or maybe it's just how I say it.
But really,
in my mind,
it comes down to being open to experiencing the presence of God in the group.
And if you're open to that, you'll find it.
I want to thank Brittany for the introduction.
She's pretty regular, I think, at the Tuesday Night Beginner's Group, my home group.
And I want to thank Spencer, my sponsor, for reading how it works.
Spencer,
you have one more year than I of sobriety, and I hope I never catch up to you.
And Austin, thank you very much.
I know Austin, he's doing pretty well.
I realize this is an AA meeting.
I'm going to apologize because my story does not include drugs.
A couple of you got that.
Actually, there were two pills and a few of those funny cigarettes along the way,
which I may mention or I may forget to.
I don't know.
But I'm just your classic alcoholic.
I grew up in an alcoholic, drug-addicted family.
Now, I've heard many stories of people who say they grew up in a very loving family
and they felt supported.
And there wasn't conflict in the family.
And, you know, they had their first drink as a teenager or maybe later on in life.
And it was just off to the races.
Well, that's not my story.
My dad was, first of all, my dad and my mom were a very odd couple.
And my dad was about, he's not that tall by today's standards, but he was about 60.
He was about 6'1", had this booming baritone voice, and he looked a lot like John Wayne.
And my mother was about 5'2", and she looked like Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies on a bad day.
And he was the alcoholic.
He drank a fifth of gin, like clockwork, every day that I knew him.
And my mother, I thought, was a saint.
Because she just seemed so calm and everything.
And it turns out that she probably had the very first Librium prescription that was ever written.
And then they gave her Valium.
And then they gave her Xanax.
And then they gave her this.
And then they gave her that.
On and on and on.
And, you know, after about 10 years or 15 years of that, she was on Haldol, of all things.
And maybe I'll get...
I'll get into the story about me putting her into treatment after my dad died.
And, you know, that did not...
That was interesting, that outcome.
My dad was a very emotional person, a very emotional drunk.
He usually would fly into rages as he got drunk.
Sometimes he just got giddy.
He would sometimes come...
He would come home from the country club after a round of golf.
Very drunk, but he was very giddy.
And he'd fall down on the living room floor.
And we'd just all have to, like, pretend he wasn't there.
And that was kind of like the whole family attitude.
All my life, we'll just pretend that there's not a problem.
My mother used to say that she didn't like to be touched.
I know she was touched at least three times because I have a brother and a sister.
But there was, like, no affection between her and my dad.
Many years later, I uncovered...
I think it was after my dad died, and I was getting the house cleaned up
because it was...
It had never been cleaned for 50 years.
It had just never been cleaned.
And I found some old letters.
That were just very...
They were like love letters from my mother to my dad
from many, many years before.
And very poignant and everything.
And, of course, alcoholism destroyed all that in my family.
Probably the number one thing about my family was just rage.
And I had a sister who was...
14 years older.
A brother who was 7 years older.
A mother who was in a rage all the time.
But, you know, kept it bottled up and sedated.
And my father just let it all hang out all the time.
And so, the rage, you know, built up.
And me, I just soaked it up, you know, like a sponge growing up.
And I was a loner.
This was in the 60s.
I wasn't interested.
I wasn't interested in the 60s.
I didn't like the 60s.
I didn't like the music.
I didn't like the drug culture.
I didn't like the politics.
So, I didn't...
I found very little in common with anybody in my junior high or high school.
And I would...
After my parents went to bed at night,
one thing I would do is my dad would have...
My dad had this big collection of records.
And my brother had somewhat of a record collection, too.
But I would listen to all these symphonic recordings that my dad had.
And I really got into it.
And I got to the point where, you know, I could practically hum a whole symphony, you know.
Because I would...
I played them over and over and over again.
And I loved the classical symphonies, Bach and Vivaldi and all of that.
But I also liked the romantic symphonies.
And that was my music.
And it made me feel something deep inside that, you know, I just couldn't feel otherwise.
And it probably kept me from homicide or suicide.
I mentioned...
I mentioned that to a psychologist one time, and he just couldn't comprehend it.
It was just beyond his comprehension.
The...
I was at a meeting one time years ago, but well into my sobriety.
I'll be celebrating 36 years in two weeks.
And...
No, that's okay.
And that is it for that only.
And all you people.
And...
So some guy said, well, unless you remember your first drink and your last drink,
it's not your last drink.
And like a lot of things you hear in meetings, you know, you kind of have to, you know,
be a little careful and not take it too literally.
But I thought about it a lot, and I was able to do some inventory work and remember.
And so my first drink was when I was around 14.
And my parents were out for the evening.
And this was the first time, I think, in my entire life up to that point that I was home alone.
In the house.
Alone.
At night.
I don't know what it is about night.
Why does night cause so many problems?
But they had been invited out to some party or something.
Of course, my dad was a very...
He was a prominent...
He was a very prominent guy in town.
He was a businessman.
He was a citrus farmer.
And I worked on his citrus groves in the summer with a hoe and a shovel.
And later they taught me how to drive a tractor, which is why I can't hear today without hearing aids.
And not from going to rock concerts, but tractors.
And so I'm sitting there, and the thought occurred to me,
I need a drink.
It wasn't, well, let me experiment.
Let me just give this a try and see what all the shouting's about.
No.
I can almost clearly remember to this day the thought, I need a drink.
It was a compulsion that came over me.
So I went to the kitchen cabinet, and there was this pint of cheap bourbon.
And I knew why it was there, because my parents didn't drink anything but martinis.
I've never had a martini to this day.
It didn't prevent me from being an active alcoholic, but I've never had a martini to this day because of that.
But there was this bottle of cheap bourbon, and it's because my mother had a neighbor friend who was an alcoholic,
and she would come over.
And my...
My mother kept this bottle of bourbon for her so that she didn't have to walk from her house down to my house in public carrying her own bottle.
And so my mother would put it in her coffee, and they would drink together.
And the lady had a coffee cup about the size of a soup bowl.
And so I said to myself, well, I'll drink that.
And then next to it were a couple of pill bottles.
One was Valium, and one was Librium.
And I had heard of Valium.
I hadn't heard of Librium.
So I said, well, you know, I'll try the Valium.
So I popped through the Valium and chugged the bourbon.
And that was my first drink.
And I mentioned that to somebody a while back, and they said, well, what happened?
Next, did you fall down?
And I said, no.
It was really stimulating.
Incredibly stimulating.
And I won't go into all the gory details of how stimulating it was,
but let's put it this way.
If the neighbors had seen me, had they observed me,
I would have been put into an adolescent psychiatric facility.
I'm sure of it.
And my life would have been very different.
So I thought, I had this brilliant idea.
Don't mix Valium with alcohol ever again.
I stuck with the alcohol.
I had a neighbor who was in my class in high school,
and he had this apartment set up.
It was an apartment set up with an entrance from outside.
So he had total freedom to come and go as he pleased.
And I was over there one night, and some guy said,
well, I'll go down to the 7-Eleven, and I'll get some guy to buy us some Ripple.
And I didn't know what Ripple was.
And so he came back with, like, there were, like, three or four or five of us,
and he came back with all these bottles of Ripple.
And so...
So, you know, I got my own bottle of Ripple.
And I chugged that.
And that was my first blackout.
I have no recollection of...
And it happened very fast,
and I have no recollection of how I got home or what happened after that
until the next day.
My second experience, I think...
What's the second one?
I was at a wedding,
for a friend's sister.
And every time a waiter passed
with a tray of champagne glasses,
I would grab one.
And I don't know how many I had,
but I blacked out pretty quickly.
And the only problem was I had a date that night.
So, you know, I don't remember getting home,
but I do remember coming in the house,
and going upstairs,
and taking a shower,
getting dressed,
getting in the car,
going and picking her up.
And then I blacked out again.
The next thing I remembered,
the car was stopped in the road.
The door was open.
And I had vomited all over everywhere,
and the girl's dad was, you know,
helping me out of the car.
And I went home,
and I remember I told my first alcoholic,
and I said, why?
You know, I said, well, you know, it was the cake.
It was the cake at the wedding.
And it's interesting how that happens.
It just is automatic, right out of my mouth.
And so there was no, there were no consequences at all.
Nobody said, well, you know, you shouldn't have done that,
or don't do that again, or anything like that.
So I didn't drink a lot in high school,
but there were repeats.
There were performances of binge drinking like that,
usually accompanied by a blackout.
I went off to college,
and it was kind of the same thing.
I would, you know, I would go for periods of time
without drinking anything,
and then if I drank anything at all,
I just couldn't stop.
It was just like, move.
Couldn't get it down fast enough.
Met some friends in college through politics.
That can be,
it can be a great way of bonding with people,
but it's also terrible for your grades.
But I remember one time that we went to a party
at a mutual friend's, and you know,
I, again, I did my normal routine.
I drank very fast and blacked out.
And the next day, one of my friends who was there says,
you, you're never, ever gonna pick up a girl at a party,
because you drink too fast.
And I remember thinking about that, you know.
Is that true?
I mean, could I have a problem, you know?
And then I instantly shelved it, you know,
back in some deep recess.
And the reason why, of course,
is that I could not be an alcoholic.
I could not have a drinking problem.
I could not even have a potential drinking problem,
because that would make me like my dad.
But I knew my dad was an alcoholic.
And of course, I didn't know what alcoholism was, but,
and I just, I hated the guy.
I hated my dad.
And so there was no way, I thought he was a monster,
you know, and so there was no way I could be like him.
I remember one of the worst moments in my life, you know,
I remember one of the worst moments in my life, you know,
I remember one of the worst moments in my entire life.
I was at college, freshman year,
probably the first semester of my freshman year.
And somebody said, well, you got a call.
And we had to use the public phones outside the building.
We weren't allowed to have phones in our rooms or anything.
No cell phones in those days, of course.
So I went to the phone with my dad and he said,
I wanted to call to tell you that I stopped drinking.
He sounded so happy.
And he apparently wanted me to congratulate him.
And I just hung up on him.
I was so angry.
And my thought was, well, you son of a bitch, you ruined my life.
And then as soon as I leave home, you decide to try to get better.
I mean, what kind of SOD would do that to your own kid?
Now, what I should have done probably is just gotten in the car
and gone to the nearest recruitment center
and joined the Marines, you know, but I kept,
I waited two more years to do that, but I kept coming home.
And that's an unfortunate part of my story
is I just kept coming back home.
And I just, every time I went back home,
whether it was from college or when I had time off
from the Marines or whatever, I don't know what it was.
I don't know what it was.
I don't know what it was.
I just, was I thinking that something would be different or better?
And it never was.
It was always worse.
I used to, as a teenager, I used to lie in bed at night
and plot how I was going to kill my dad.
We had this narrow stairway, it was an old kind of pioneer home
in Florida, made out of pine.
And we had this narrow stairway coming up from the living room
and then there was a small landing
and then you took a hard left turn up to the second floor
where all the bedrooms were.
And I had it all planned out.
I would stand just around the corner
and as he struggled to get upstairs drunk,
I was going to peer around the corner.
I was going to take my foot.
I was going to take my foot to his chest
and I was going to give him a good push.
And he was going to fall backwards down the stairs
and break his neck.
And then I was going to go back to bed.
And then I would wake up, get up in the morning,
it was like, sound shocked and surprised.
You know, how did that happen, you know?
And thinking, you know, that whoever came to get the body,
you know, would be no more the wiser.
And many times I ran through that scenario.
I remember also because we were involved in a church growing up,
I remember lying in bed thinking,
when is the minister of the church going to come rescue me?
When is he going to come to the back door,
knock on the door and say,
I'm here to get Owen out of this horrible situation?
And it never happened.
So needless to say, I became increasingly soured towards God.
I remember early in, you know, my prayer life as a young boy,
praying for my dad, asking God to help him, you know.
And that just, I did a 180 on that.
I just, I'd had enough.
And I went from blaming God to just becoming an atheist.
You know, it seemed to be easier that way.
To just be an atheist.
Well, there's no God.
Rather than believing in a God that would inflict me
with this horrible situation.
I remember the point at which I turned against my parents.
I was coming home from camp after sixth grade.
I was headed into seventh grade.
And they told me that this lady who they had, you know,
hired ever since I was a baby, who was always around,
had taken care of me, that they had finally retired her.
And she was my only connection with reality.
She was the only person I ever loved.
The only person who ever loved me or demonstrated any love towards me.
And of course, it felt like I had been just punched in the gut.
And my attitude from that moment on is my parents are my enemy.
And I think that's that same.
That's the thing.
That's the thing.
That was the same point at which I turned against God.
As I mentioned, I went into the Marines.
And I hated school.
And I joined the Marines.
And I kind of liked boot camp.
It was very structured.
They instructed you.
It's all.
It's all based on step-by-step learning, okay?
Like we have on the wall.
And I did well with that.
Very structured step-by-step learning and so on.
But I was such a dysfunctional person.
I couldn't.
I just couldn't relate to anybody else in the Marines.
And so I tended to like mentally isolate myself.
And I would go through phases of working hard and then slacking off.
You know, kind of manic depressive behavior.
You know, I would work hard and stay on the base on the weekends because I was afraid
of what would happen if I went off the base because I almost always would get blackout
drunk.
So I was just continuing that same thing of not daily drinking, but you know, occasional
binges.
And almost always.
And to the point where I was blacked out.
I remember one time the first sergeant called a company meeting in his office.
He had a big office.
And he said, I was a Marine.
Oh, by the way, his name was L.G. Jeter.
J-E-T-E-R.
He was from Louisiana and he wanted to be called Lord God Jesus.
He was my Marine Corps first sergeant.
So I think he, you know, kind of felt he was, you know, and anyway, he, he said, there
was a Marine last night talking to a stop sign.
He was so drunk.
And I'm thinking, holy crap, is that me?
Because I was really drunk.
I was blackout drunk the night before.
And then I looked to the left of me and there was some sergeant standing next to me.
And he was the, the company arm.
The battalion armorer and was missing half his teeth and was a chronic alcoholic.
And I said to myself, no, no, he's talking about this guy next to me.
And so, you know, that's just continuing a pattern of, you know, I don't have a problem.
After the Marines, I bought a sailboat, did some charter work.
And then I met my wife.
We were in the Bahamas, in a little restaurant bar thing, and I was three sheets to the wind.
And we, we tried to get her to sail back from West End to Fort Pierce during a Nor'easter.
And we were, we were picking up a boat for a client and she said, no way, but smart decision.
But I was just totally taken by her.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
A year later, and I got out of the charter business.
And part of me, I think was that it's, you know, say it, you know, doing that business,
there's a lot of drinking.
And I was doing a lot of drinking.
And I was afraid I was going to drink myself to death subconsciously.
I didn't, you know, I never said to myself, you better stop doing this or you're going
to drink yourself to death.
It was never that intentional.
It was never that complicated.
It was never that conscious.
But, you know, that was my fear.
Several years later, we started having kids and my drinking patterns changed.
Okay.
So I, again, I think subconsciously I had to say to myself, I've got to manage and control
my drinking because I don't want them to have the same experience that I had growing up.
So I became a daily drinker rather than a binge drinker.
And by the way, I was a high class drinker.
Okay.
So that was another reason why I could not be an alcoholic, right?
I mean, I wasn't drinking Ripple.
All right.
I had inherited, I had inherited some money and I could afford it.
And so, you know, typical pattern was I would start out with a couple of imported beers.
Okay.
Or maybe a large glass of imported wine and then wait so my wife would go to bed early
because she was exhausted with the babies.
And then I would, you know, some more serious drinking would kick in and I'd polish off
maybe a third of a bottle of single malt scotch or the type that would cost about $60 a bottle
today.
It was about $20 a bottle then.
Okay.
And then I would finish it off with, with some cognac, maybe three, four ounces of cognac,
you know, some, maybe some, some Colossier.
Have you ever had that?
And, or maybe some Rémy Matin, French cognac.
And I had this thing where I kind of knew where in my mind.
If I drank one more ounce, the room would start spinning and, you know, pretty soon
I'd be vomiting.
And so I couldn't, you know, I couldn't allow myself to get to that point.
And the result of that was I just was never getting enough.
I would, my body was craving much, much more than I was getting.
And during the week I was always thinking, well, Friday night, you know, I'm going to
really tight on Friday night and I'm going to have the perfect drunk on Friday night.
And that's, I'll be able to start my life over.
Literally start my life over.
I'll become so obliterated on Friday night that, you know, Saturday morning will be like
starting my life over.
And of course that never worked out.
Now I will say that I'm what AA calls a drunk.
I'm what AA calls a high bottom drunk.
All right.
So I was never arrested for my drinking.
I was never hospitalized for my drinking.
I was never institutionalized for my drinking.
Although I could have happened.
All three of those could have happened.
I didn't lose all my money until I made a lot of bad investment decisions after I got sober.
So when I was sober, I had plenty of money.
And, you know, we were, you know, very comfortable.
And so, you know, I did not hit, you know, what is considered to be, you know, your typical
AA bottom to get sober.
So how did I get sober?
Well, my last drink was one bottle of beer.
And you say, well, how can you be an alcoholic if your last drink was only one bottle of beer?
Well, the reason was that.
The next day I was supposed to fly out to New Jersey to go to a treatment center.
And so, you know, I wanted to prove to myself that I did not have a problem.
Right now, a normal drinker does not drink one beer to prove to himself that he doesn't have a drinking problem.
And I went out to this place and it was I was not there to be an inpatient for alcoholism.
I was there.
I was there because they had this Al-Anon workshop for a week.
And I thought, well, this is going to fix me up, you know, because I'll go out there and, you know,
they'll sympathize with me having been raised by an alcoholic and an addict.
And they'll say things like, oh, you poor little thing.
You know, we really sympathize and we know how much you hurt and all that kind of stuff.
And somehow magically.
This was going to make everything OK.
And it wasn't like that at all.
It wasn't like that at all.
And nothing much was happening in these meetings, these Al-Anon workshop meetings.
But they had AA meetings that we had to go to on site and AA talks.
And we were asked to fill out these little slips of paper called critiques after each AA talk.
And of course, you know, in my mind, this was great because I love to critique.
Right?
Who doesn't?
I was an expert at critiquing.
You ask me, I'll critique it.
You give me a subject, I'll critique it.
Right?
Give me your opinion, I'll critique it.
So, and that was a ploy, you know, by the treatment center, you know, to manipulate us into meeting.
To write stuff down and not really be honest about it.
So that they could discover, you know, where our heads really were at.
So the head of the place called me into her office on Thursday night before dinner.
And this is this 77-year-old battleaxe.
And she's sitting there looking at her, at my critiques.
She's behind her desk and I'm seated across from it.
And she looks up at me over her granny glasses and she says, you've got a problem.
And she says, your problem is you don't know who you are.
And you need to do something about that.
And you need to begin by admitting that you're an alcoholic.
And joining AA.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
So I'm sitting there and typically what would happen is my reaction will be, would have been,
you, B-I-T-C-H, you don't know anything about me.
We haven't even discussed my drinking.
That's not why I'm here.
I'm here because of my family.
And then I would think, okay.
But I'm going to sound compliant, right?
I'm going to sound like I'm listening to what she's saying.
But then as soon as I get through that door, I'm gone.
Because I was very good at slamming doors behind me.
And that's not what happened.
What happened was I had this enormous feeling of relief.
Like I had been carrying around all my life up to this point.
A hundred pound bag of fertilizer on each shoulder.
And I know what they're like because in the citrus business you have to carry a lot of hundred pound bags of fertilizer.
And that was a perfect analogy.
And I felt like these huge big bags had been lifted off my shoulders and I was almost floating.
And I knew something had happened.
I didn't know what.
But I knew something.
But I knew something profound had happened to me.
And then she got interrupted with a phone call.
And she talked for a couple of minutes, listened to what they were saying and hung up.
And she said, that was a call about a Lutheran minister who was in AA for 14 years and he quit going to meetings and now he's drunk.
I don't know if that was a setup.
Maybe God set that up.
You know, to really get my attention.
And say, hey, this is some serious business.
We're going to try to save your life here, but you've got to get serious about it.
And then she looked at me and she said, how can I help you?
And I thought for just a moment, I said, I think you already have.
And I haven't had the desire to drink since.
And that was almost 36 years ago.
I've had the desire to kill myself.
I've had the desire to strangle a few people.
But I haven't had the desire to drink.
And I've stayed close to AA ever since.
I went to my first AA meeting and I knew I was in the right place for the first time.
People were talking about what it felt like inside.
And I had never heard this before from anybody.
And I started to make connections with other human beings for the first time in my life.
I also think that I started for the first time in my life to actually make a God connection.
Which I had been trying to do for some time now.
And was deeply disturbed by the fact that nothing really seemed to be changing.
And so I started to feel like, well, there was hope.
You know?
And did a pretty good fourth and fifth step.
I had a guy after my home group meeting one night.
Still in my first year of sobriety.
He looked at me after the meeting was over.
He said, I feel sorry for you high bottom drunks.
It's so hard for you to stay sober.
And I thought, I'll show you, you son of a bitch.
And I guess I have.
I hit a much harder bottom in sobriety.
I don't really have time to go into it tonight.
Mostly bad, impulsive decisions with money.
And, you know, I was suicidal for about every day for about a year.
I had this big Lincoln Continental, you know, back when they made them with the big long hoods.
425 cubic inches under the hood or whatever.
And so my plan was to drive this thing at 120 miles an hour, either off a bridge or into a telephone pole.
Because I wasn't, I didn't own a gun.
And, you know, I figured that would be too messy.
Too traumatic for the wife, you know.
And I certainly wasn't going to take pills.
Because I had made a vow to die sober.
So I was going to, I was going to kill myself sober.
Right?
And then what happened was I had to do a voluntary repo on the car.
So that took away my ability to kill myself.
And I had to just deal with it.
And I started to do some of the steps that I had never done, like six and seven, you know.
I think.
I think.
Well, let me put it this way.
You hear a lot of times in meetings about how this is a religious program, not a spiritual program.
Or some people might even say I'm not a religious person, I'm a spiritual person.
More and more I'm thinking I'm more of a religious person than a spiritual person.
And I'll explain to you why.
I had this, such a profound experience early on that got me sober.
That it led me to believe that I was just oh so spiritual.
And I wasn't.
I wasn't at all.
I still had a lot of this rage.
And I was still emotionally impulsive.
And I was impatient.
And I was in a hurry to make my mark on the world.
And prove myself.
And prove.
And I wanted to prove.
This is later inventory work I did on myself.
I wanted to prove to myself, to my wife, to my family, to other people, and to God that I was a good person.
I was obsessed with that.
Because I think of my family situation.
I was just obsessed with that.
And I made all of these really bad decisions trying to prove something.
And I remember saying to my wife one day, I am not a good person.
She said, oh yes you are.
And I said, no I'm not.
I'm really not.
And that was, I actually turned a corner there I think.
I stopped trying to pretend to be something I wasn't.
Now I'm not saying I'm an evil person.
I'm just somewhere in between just like everybody else.
Okay.
But I was obsessed with this.
And now I'm no longer obsessed with, you know, trying to prove to you or to God.
God knows better.
God knows.
And so I stopped.
That was a huge burden of relief when I stopped trying to prove that.
You know, whenever I'm sponsoring somebody new, I tell them, as soon as you walk in that door, you have nothing to prove to anybody in here.
Nothing.
But I think probably of anything that trips us up.
Okay.
Coming into AA, we're still trying to prove something.
Okay.
Like we're smarter.
We're tougher.
We'll get this done.
You know, just give me a few pointers and I'll get this done.
You know, give me a road.
I'll get it done.
You know, that kind of attitude.
I'll prove to these people how smart I am and how tough I am.
And, you know, if that attitude persists, you're going to die.
You're going to die a very tough, smart person.
At least that's my observation.
I'll close with a prayer that comes from the Bible.
And a bishop told me to memorize this one time.
And at the time, I had no idea why he was telling me to memorize this prayer.
Of course, now I realize why.
But this prayer is a psalm.
And I do this daily.
And so instead of the prayer admitting my faults, it's a list of my aspirations, which I think is great, you know.
And if you go down the list, I mean, it's a perfect AA prayer because it covers all of the kind of character and emotional defects that we talk about at meetings all the time.
So it goes like this.
Oh, Lord, I am not proud.
I have no haughty looks.
I do not occupy myself with great matters or with things that are too hard for me.
But I still my soul and keep it quiet.
Like a child upon its mother's breast, my soul is quieted within me.
Oh, Israel, wait upon the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.
Amen.
Thank you, Emma, for sharing a little bit of your life with us.
OK.
And I have asked Billy to come up and handle the chips.
Hey, all.
I'm a great woman covering out here, and my name Billy.
You're at .
So we're at lash Tortoise with white chip if you're just coming right toward us and we'll
be able to hear it here now.
You guys cool ?
No.
Great fireworks here.
Thank you.
Anything you need, we've got...
We thank the people.
Thank you.
if you're just coming back in
or if you're looking
for a new way of life.
Anybody want to come
get a white shirt?
Thank you.
Next week,
do 30 days.
You ready to get 30 days?
Woo!
We're going to skip 60 days
because we're already chipped,
so 90 days.
Anybody got 90 days?
Six months?
Six months?
Six months!
Nine months?
Anybody got nine months?
Keep working.
Years are multiples.
Anybody got years are multiples?
Everybody on the pan.
She's a hell of a nine
in the family.
And my sister.
Yeah.
Hey, how are you?
So I'm very happy
that she gave my brother
this chip.
Fifteen years ago,
we came into NABBA.
It's right over there.
It was Kelly.
Me and Jim,
he had asked us for help.
And it's kind of funny.
We told him,
we'll go get,
he was living in my apartment
down in my house.
And I said,
we'll go get all the alcohol
and we'll take that with us
and we'll get it out of there.
And Kelly had a
aviator,
Lincoln aviator,
filled up the entire car.
And I was like,
we're going to get stopped
for bootleg.
And that didn't count
all the cases and cases
of $2 wine.
That I just bought
Whole Foods.
I got a trailer loaded
at the last minute.
But anyway,
we came here
and he sat over there.
He had his head down.
I don't think he looked up
the whole time.
But God was in the rooms.
The guy who was speaking that day,
it was a Monday night meeting.
So,
yeah,
was actually my brother's
girlfriend.
High school little brother.
And I think Tim had probably
given him his first drink.
And he was telling the story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was his bootlegger.
And we were we were both
we were both in the story
that night.
So that was kind of an odd thing.
It was God in the room.
And God's still in the room.
And I hope God is here every day
for you guys when you come in.
I love you.
Love you.
Thank you.
She and Kelly saved my life that night.
And I met my sponsor,
Tim, that night.
He got me a big book
out of the literature cabinet.
And I think Kelly actually
paid for it.
And he said,
you know,
we might need you
more than you need us.
And he suggested
I go home and get on my knees
and ask a higher power.
And so they gave me this drink
not to drink that night.
And I opened the big book
after doing that.
And I think I read about
two sentences before I fell asleep.
That was the first time
I didn't drink myself to sleep
for months and months.
And that was just a miracle.
And I just immediately
scrambled to my knees
in the morning
and thanked that higher power.
Because there's just no way
I could not drink
the day before.
Or the night before
or the week before that
or the month before that.
I just,
you know,
I had NABO
and it was my spiritual kindergarten.
I could come in at 7.30
and do the 9.30
and the 11
and the 1.30
and the 5.45
and the 8 o'clock meetings.
And it was
AA daycare.
For sure.
And,
you know,
it hadn't been for them
and their support.
And I don't know
if I'd have faltered or what.
But as it turned out,
it worked out good.
And we got cake.
So,
please help us make a mess.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And then we offer the white chip
one more time.
Because everybody deserves
a mini chip.
Everybody?
Alright.
Thank God for the chips
that you hold.
Thanks, Billy.
Thank you one and all
for joining the Blue Chip
speaker meeting tonight.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
As I roll from town to town
Can't put the bottle down
Right now it feels like
it's killing me
Life out here
gets so depressing
Needs something to take
the edge you see
I got nowhere to hide
And if I'm alone
There's an empty hole inside
It's the bottle, the book,
or the gun for me
Seems like heaven's out
to get me
Trouble always following me
Feeling like I just
can't outrun
Seem inside
or all around
me
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
My name is Brittany and I'm an alcoholic.
Hi guys, welcome to the Monday night Blue Chip speaker meeting at the Navajo Club,
where a member of Alcoholics Anonymous with one year or more of sobriety tells his or her story.
This reading is based on a passage from page 29 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Each individual in our personal stories describes in their own language and from their own point of view
the way they establish their relationship with God.
These give a fair cross-section of our message.
and clear-cut idea of what has happened in their lives.
We hope no one will consider these self-revealing accounts in bad taste.
Our hope is that many alcoholic men and women in our room tonight
and listening later on aabloochipspeakers.org desperately in need will hear our speaker
and we believe that it's only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems
that any of us shall be persuaded to say,
yes, I am one of them too, I must have this thing.
Before I introduce the speaker,
we do ask that you limit getting up and down during the meeting
just so we can minimize distraction while the speaker is speaking.
I see this guy at beginner's meetings and he's always willing to help the newcomer
and I always hear him share, but I've never heard his story, so I'm excited.
So would that help me welcome Owen?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
With Dom DeLuise, no applause, please, save to Leanne.
So I want to thank everybody for being here tonight.
So it's all about a new freedom and a new happiness, right?
So hopefully all of you will experience a little bit of that tonight.
Maybe I will say something that will help you get there
or maybe it's just how I say it.
But really,
in my mind,
it comes down to being open to experiencing the presence of God in the group.
And if you're open to that, you'll find it.
I want to thank Brittany for the introduction.
She's pretty regular, I think, at the Tuesday Night Beginner's Group, my home group.
And I want to thank Spencer, my sponsor, for reading how it works.
Spencer,
you have one more year than I of sobriety, and I hope I never catch up to you.
And Austin, thank you very much.
I know Austin, he's doing pretty well.
I realize this is an AA meeting.
I'm going to apologize because my story does not include drugs.
A couple of you got that.
Actually, there were two pills and a few of those funny cigarettes along the way,
which I may mention or I may forget to.
I don't know.
But I'm just your classic alcoholic.
I grew up in an alcoholic, drug-addicted family.
Now, I've heard many stories of people who say they grew up in a very loving family
and they felt supported.
And there wasn't conflict in the family.
And, you know, they had their first drink as a teenager or maybe later on in life.
And it was just off to the races.
Well, that's not my story.
My dad was, first of all, my dad and my mom were a very odd couple.
And my dad was about, he's not that tall by today's standards, but he was about 60.
He was about 6'1", had this booming baritone voice, and he looked a lot like John Wayne.
And my mother was about 5'2", and she looked like Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies on a bad day.
And he was the alcoholic.
He drank a fifth of gin, like clockwork, every day that I knew him.
And my mother, I thought, was a saint.
Because she just seemed so calm and everything.
And it turns out that she probably had the very first Librium prescription that was ever written.
And then they gave her Valium.
And then they gave her Xanax.
And then they gave her this.
And then they gave her that.
On and on and on.
And, you know, after about 10 years or 15 years of that, she was on Haldol, of all things.
And maybe I'll get...
I'll get into the story about me putting her into treatment after my dad died.
And, you know, that did not...
That was interesting, that outcome.
My dad was a very emotional person, a very emotional drunk.
He usually would fly into rages as he got drunk.
Sometimes he just got giddy.
He would sometimes come...
He would come home from the country club after a round of golf.
Very drunk, but he was very giddy.
And he'd fall down on the living room floor.
And we'd just all have to, like, pretend he wasn't there.
And that was kind of like the whole family attitude.
All my life, we'll just pretend that there's not a problem.
My mother used to say that she didn't like to be touched.
I know she was touched at least three times because I have a brother and a sister.
But there was, like, no affection between her and my dad.
Many years later, I uncovered...
I think it was after my dad died, and I was getting the house cleaned up
because it was...
It had never been cleaned for 50 years.
It had just never been cleaned.
And I found some old letters.
That were just very...
They were like love letters from my mother to my dad
from many, many years before.
And very poignant and everything.
And, of course, alcoholism destroyed all that in my family.
Probably the number one thing about my family was just rage.
And I had a sister who was...
14 years older.
A brother who was 7 years older.
A mother who was in a rage all the time.
But, you know, kept it bottled up and sedated.
And my father just let it all hang out all the time.
And so, the rage, you know, built up.
And me, I just soaked it up, you know, like a sponge growing up.
And I was a loner.
This was in the 60s.
I wasn't interested.
I wasn't interested in the 60s.
I didn't like the 60s.
I didn't like the music.
I didn't like the drug culture.
I didn't like the politics.
So, I didn't...
I found very little in common with anybody in my junior high or high school.
And I would...
After my parents went to bed at night,
one thing I would do is my dad would have...
My dad had this big collection of records.
And my brother had somewhat of a record collection, too.
But I would listen to all these symphonic recordings that my dad had.
And I really got into it.
And I got to the point where, you know, I could practically hum a whole symphony, you know.
Because I would...
I played them over and over and over again.
And I loved the classical symphonies, Bach and Vivaldi and all of that.
But I also liked the romantic symphonies.
And that was my music.
And it made me feel something deep inside that, you know, I just couldn't feel otherwise.
And it probably kept me from homicide or suicide.
I mentioned...
I mentioned that to a psychologist one time, and he just couldn't comprehend it.
It was just beyond his comprehension.
The...
I was at a meeting one time years ago, but well into my sobriety.
I'll be celebrating 36 years in two weeks.
And...
No, that's okay.
And that is it for that only.
And all you people.
And...
So some guy said, well, unless you remember your first drink and your last drink,
it's not your last drink.
And like a lot of things you hear in meetings, you know, you kind of have to, you know,
be a little careful and not take it too literally.
But I thought about it a lot, and I was able to do some inventory work and remember.
And so my first drink was when I was around 14.
And my parents were out for the evening.
And this was the first time, I think, in my entire life up to that point that I was home alone.
In the house.
Alone.
At night.
I don't know what it is about night.
Why does night cause so many problems?
But they had been invited out to some party or something.
Of course, my dad was a very...
He was a prominent...
He was a very prominent guy in town.
He was a businessman.
He was a citrus farmer.
And I worked on his citrus groves in the summer with a hoe and a shovel.
And later they taught me how to drive a tractor, which is why I can't hear today without hearing aids.
And not from going to rock concerts, but tractors.
And so I'm sitting there, and the thought occurred to me,
I need a drink.
It wasn't, well, let me experiment.
Let me just give this a try and see what all the shouting's about.
No.
I can almost clearly remember to this day the thought, I need a drink.
It was a compulsion that came over me.
So I went to the kitchen cabinet, and there was this pint of cheap bourbon.
And I knew why it was there, because my parents didn't drink anything but martinis.
I've never had a martini to this day.
It didn't prevent me from being an active alcoholic, but I've never had a martini to this day because of that.
But there was this bottle of cheap bourbon, and it's because my mother had a neighbor friend who was an alcoholic,
and she would come over.
And my...
My mother kept this bottle of bourbon for her so that she didn't have to walk from her house down to my house in public carrying her own bottle.
And so my mother would put it in her coffee, and they would drink together.
And the lady had a coffee cup about the size of a soup bowl.
And so I said to myself, well, I'll drink that.
And then next to it were a couple of pill bottles.
One was Valium, and one was Librium.
And I had heard of Valium.
I hadn't heard of Librium.
So I said, well, you know, I'll try the Valium.
So I popped through the Valium and chugged the bourbon.
And that was my first drink.
And I mentioned that to somebody a while back, and they said, well, what happened?
Next, did you fall down?
And I said, no.
It was really stimulating.
Incredibly stimulating.
And I won't go into all the gory details of how stimulating it was,
but let's put it this way.
If the neighbors had seen me, had they observed me,
I would have been put into an adolescent psychiatric facility.
I'm sure of it.
And my life would have been very different.
So I thought, I had this brilliant idea.
Don't mix Valium with alcohol ever again.
I stuck with the alcohol.
I had a neighbor who was in my class in high school,
and he had this apartment set up.
It was an apartment set up with an entrance from outside.
So he had total freedom to come and go as he pleased.
And I was over there one night, and some guy said,
well, I'll go down to the 7-Eleven, and I'll get some guy to buy us some Ripple.
And I didn't know what Ripple was.
And so he came back with, like, there were, like, three or four or five of us,
and he came back with all these bottles of Ripple.
And so...
So, you know, I got my own bottle of Ripple.
And I chugged that.
And that was my first blackout.
I have no recollection of...
And it happened very fast,
and I have no recollection of how I got home or what happened after that
until the next day.
My second experience, I think...
What's the second one?
I was at a wedding,
for a friend's sister.
And every time a waiter passed
with a tray of champagne glasses,
I would grab one.
And I don't know how many I had,
but I blacked out pretty quickly.
And the only problem was I had a date that night.
So, you know, I don't remember getting home,
but I do remember coming in the house,
and going upstairs,
and taking a shower,
getting dressed,
getting in the car,
going and picking her up.
And then I blacked out again.
The next thing I remembered,
the car was stopped in the road.
The door was open.
And I had vomited all over everywhere,
and the girl's dad was, you know,
helping me out of the car.
And I went home,
and I remember I told my first alcoholic,
and I said, why?
You know, I said, well, you know, it was the cake.
It was the cake at the wedding.
And it's interesting how that happens.
It just is automatic, right out of my mouth.
And so there was no, there were no consequences at all.
Nobody said, well, you know, you shouldn't have done that,
or don't do that again, or anything like that.
So I didn't drink a lot in high school,
but there were repeats.
There were performances of binge drinking like that,
usually accompanied by a blackout.
I went off to college,
and it was kind of the same thing.
I would, you know, I would go for periods of time
without drinking anything,
and then if I drank anything at all,
I just couldn't stop.
It was just like, move.
Couldn't get it down fast enough.
Met some friends in college through politics.
That can be,
it can be a great way of bonding with people,
but it's also terrible for your grades.
But I remember one time that we went to a party
at a mutual friend's, and you know,
I, again, I did my normal routine.
I drank very fast and blacked out.
And the next day, one of my friends who was there says,
you, you're never, ever gonna pick up a girl at a party,
because you drink too fast.
And I remember thinking about that, you know.
Is that true?
I mean, could I have a problem, you know?
And then I instantly shelved it, you know,
back in some deep recess.
And the reason why, of course,
is that I could not be an alcoholic.
I could not have a drinking problem.
I could not even have a potential drinking problem,
because that would make me like my dad.
But I knew my dad was an alcoholic.
And of course, I didn't know what alcoholism was, but,
and I just, I hated the guy.
I hated my dad.
And so there was no way, I thought he was a monster,
you know, and so there was no way I could be like him.
I remember one of the worst moments in my life, you know,
I remember one of the worst moments in my life, you know,
I remember one of the worst moments in my entire life.
I was at college, freshman year,
probably the first semester of my freshman year.
And somebody said, well, you got a call.
And we had to use the public phones outside the building.
We weren't allowed to have phones in our rooms or anything.
No cell phones in those days, of course.
So I went to the phone with my dad and he said,
I wanted to call to tell you that I stopped drinking.
He sounded so happy.
And he apparently wanted me to congratulate him.
And I just hung up on him.
I was so angry.
And my thought was, well, you son of a bitch, you ruined my life.
And then as soon as I leave home, you decide to try to get better.
I mean, what kind of SOD would do that to your own kid?
Now, what I should have done probably is just gotten in the car
and gone to the nearest recruitment center
and joined the Marines, you know, but I kept,
I waited two more years to do that, but I kept coming home.
And that's an unfortunate part of my story
is I just kept coming back home.
And I just, every time I went back home,
whether it was from college or when I had time off
from the Marines or whatever, I don't know what it was.
I don't know what it was.
I don't know what it was.
I just, was I thinking that something would be different or better?
And it never was.
It was always worse.
I used to, as a teenager, I used to lie in bed at night
and plot how I was going to kill my dad.
We had this narrow stairway, it was an old kind of pioneer home
in Florida, made out of pine.
And we had this narrow stairway coming up from the living room
and then there was a small landing
and then you took a hard left turn up to the second floor
where all the bedrooms were.
And I had it all planned out.
I would stand just around the corner
and as he struggled to get upstairs drunk,
I was going to peer around the corner.
I was going to take my foot.
I was going to take my foot to his chest
and I was going to give him a good push.
And he was going to fall backwards down the stairs
and break his neck.
And then I was going to go back to bed.
And then I would wake up, get up in the morning,
it was like, sound shocked and surprised.
You know, how did that happen, you know?
And thinking, you know, that whoever came to get the body,
you know, would be no more the wiser.
And many times I ran through that scenario.
I remember also because we were involved in a church growing up,
I remember lying in bed thinking,
when is the minister of the church going to come rescue me?
When is he going to come to the back door,
knock on the door and say,
I'm here to get Owen out of this horrible situation?
And it never happened.
So needless to say, I became increasingly soured towards God.
I remember early in, you know, my prayer life as a young boy,
praying for my dad, asking God to help him, you know.
And that just, I did a 180 on that.
I just, I'd had enough.
And I went from blaming God to just becoming an atheist.
You know, it seemed to be easier that way.
To just be an atheist.
Well, there's no God.
Rather than believing in a God that would inflict me
with this horrible situation.
I remember the point at which I turned against my parents.
I was coming home from camp after sixth grade.
I was headed into seventh grade.
And they told me that this lady who they had, you know,
hired ever since I was a baby, who was always around,
had taken care of me, that they had finally retired her.
And she was my only connection with reality.
She was the only person I ever loved.
The only person who ever loved me or demonstrated any love towards me.
And of course, it felt like I had been just punched in the gut.
And my attitude from that moment on is my parents are my enemy.
And I think that's that same.
That's the thing.
That's the thing.
That was the same point at which I turned against God.
As I mentioned, I went into the Marines.
And I hated school.
And I joined the Marines.
And I kind of liked boot camp.
It was very structured.
They instructed you.
It's all.
It's all based on step-by-step learning, okay?
Like we have on the wall.
And I did well with that.
Very structured step-by-step learning and so on.
But I was such a dysfunctional person.
I couldn't.
I just couldn't relate to anybody else in the Marines.
And so I tended to like mentally isolate myself.
And I would go through phases of working hard and then slacking off.
You know, kind of manic depressive behavior.
You know, I would work hard and stay on the base on the weekends because I was afraid
of what would happen if I went off the base because I almost always would get blackout
drunk.
So I was just continuing that same thing of not daily drinking, but you know, occasional
binges.
And almost always.
And to the point where I was blacked out.
I remember one time the first sergeant called a company meeting in his office.
He had a big office.
And he said, I was a Marine.
Oh, by the way, his name was L.G. Jeter.
J-E-T-E-R.
He was from Louisiana and he wanted to be called Lord God Jesus.
He was my Marine Corps first sergeant.
So I think he, you know, kind of felt he was, you know, and anyway, he, he said, there
was a Marine last night talking to a stop sign.
He was so drunk.
And I'm thinking, holy crap, is that me?
Because I was really drunk.
I was blackout drunk the night before.
And then I looked to the left of me and there was some sergeant standing next to me.
And he was the, the company arm.
The battalion armorer and was missing half his teeth and was a chronic alcoholic.
And I said to myself, no, no, he's talking about this guy next to me.
And so, you know, that's just continuing a pattern of, you know, I don't have a problem.
After the Marines, I bought a sailboat, did some charter work.
And then I met my wife.
We were in the Bahamas, in a little restaurant bar thing, and I was three sheets to the wind.
And we, we tried to get her to sail back from West End to Fort Pierce during a Nor'easter.
And we were, we were picking up a boat for a client and she said, no way, but smart decision.
But I was just totally taken by her.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
And we, we married.
A year later, and I got out of the charter business.
And part of me, I think was that it's, you know, say it, you know, doing that business,
there's a lot of drinking.
And I was doing a lot of drinking.
And I was afraid I was going to drink myself to death subconsciously.
I didn't, you know, I never said to myself, you better stop doing this or you're going
to drink yourself to death.
It was never that intentional.
It was never that complicated.
It was never that conscious.
But, you know, that was my fear.
Several years later, we started having kids and my drinking patterns changed.
Okay.
So I, again, I think subconsciously I had to say to myself, I've got to manage and control
my drinking because I don't want them to have the same experience that I had growing up.
So I became a daily drinker rather than a binge drinker.
And by the way, I was a high class drinker.
Okay.
So that was another reason why I could not be an alcoholic, right?
I mean, I wasn't drinking Ripple.
All right.
I had inherited, I had inherited some money and I could afford it.
And so, you know, typical pattern was I would start out with a couple of imported beers.
Okay.
Or maybe a large glass of imported wine and then wait so my wife would go to bed early
because she was exhausted with the babies.
And then I would, you know, some more serious drinking would kick in and I'd polish off
maybe a third of a bottle of single malt scotch or the type that would cost about $60 a bottle
today.
It was about $20 a bottle then.
Okay.
And then I would finish it off with, with some cognac, maybe three, four ounces of cognac,
you know, some, maybe some, some Colossier.
Have you ever had that?
And, or maybe some Rémy Matin, French cognac.
And I had this thing where I kind of knew where in my mind.
If I drank one more ounce, the room would start spinning and, you know, pretty soon
I'd be vomiting.
And so I couldn't, you know, I couldn't allow myself to get to that point.
And the result of that was I just was never getting enough.
I would, my body was craving much, much more than I was getting.
And during the week I was always thinking, well, Friday night, you know, I'm going to
really tight on Friday night and I'm going to have the perfect drunk on Friday night.
And that's, I'll be able to start my life over.
Literally start my life over.
I'll become so obliterated on Friday night that, you know, Saturday morning will be like
starting my life over.
And of course that never worked out.
Now I will say that I'm what AA calls a drunk.
I'm what AA calls a high bottom drunk.
All right.
So I was never arrested for my drinking.
I was never hospitalized for my drinking.
I was never institutionalized for my drinking.
Although I could have happened.
All three of those could have happened.
I didn't lose all my money until I made a lot of bad investment decisions after I got sober.
So when I was sober, I had plenty of money.
And, you know, we were, you know, very comfortable.
And so, you know, I did not hit, you know, what is considered to be, you know, your typical
AA bottom to get sober.
So how did I get sober?
Well, my last drink was one bottle of beer.
And you say, well, how can you be an alcoholic if your last drink was only one bottle of beer?
Well, the reason was that.
The next day I was supposed to fly out to New Jersey to go to a treatment center.
And so, you know, I wanted to prove to myself that I did not have a problem.
Right now, a normal drinker does not drink one beer to prove to himself that he doesn't have a drinking problem.
And I went out to this place and it was I was not there to be an inpatient for alcoholism.
I was there.
I was there because they had this Al-Anon workshop for a week.
And I thought, well, this is going to fix me up, you know, because I'll go out there and, you know,
they'll sympathize with me having been raised by an alcoholic and an addict.
And they'll say things like, oh, you poor little thing.
You know, we really sympathize and we know how much you hurt and all that kind of stuff.
And somehow magically.
This was going to make everything OK.
And it wasn't like that at all.
It wasn't like that at all.
And nothing much was happening in these meetings, these Al-Anon workshop meetings.
But they had AA meetings that we had to go to on site and AA talks.
And we were asked to fill out these little slips of paper called critiques after each AA talk.
And of course, you know, in my mind, this was great because I love to critique.
Right?
Who doesn't?
I was an expert at critiquing.
You ask me, I'll critique it.
You give me a subject, I'll critique it.
Right?
Give me your opinion, I'll critique it.
So, and that was a ploy, you know, by the treatment center, you know, to manipulate us into meeting.
To write stuff down and not really be honest about it.
So that they could discover, you know, where our heads really were at.
So the head of the place called me into her office on Thursday night before dinner.
And this is this 77-year-old battleaxe.
And she's sitting there looking at her, at my critiques.
She's behind her desk and I'm seated across from it.
And she looks up at me over her granny glasses and she says, you've got a problem.
And she says, your problem is you don't know who you are.
And you need to do something about that.
And you need to begin by admitting that you're an alcoholic.
And joining AA.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
So I'm sitting there and typically what would happen is my reaction will be, would have been,
you, B-I-T-C-H, you don't know anything about me.
We haven't even discussed my drinking.
That's not why I'm here.
I'm here because of my family.
And then I would think, okay.
But I'm going to sound compliant, right?
I'm going to sound like I'm listening to what she's saying.
But then as soon as I get through that door, I'm gone.
Because I was very good at slamming doors behind me.
And that's not what happened.
What happened was I had this enormous feeling of relief.
Like I had been carrying around all my life up to this point.
A hundred pound bag of fertilizer on each shoulder.
And I know what they're like because in the citrus business you have to carry a lot of hundred pound bags of fertilizer.
And that was a perfect analogy.
And I felt like these huge big bags had been lifted off my shoulders and I was almost floating.
And I knew something had happened.
I didn't know what.
But I knew something.
But I knew something profound had happened to me.
And then she got interrupted with a phone call.
And she talked for a couple of minutes, listened to what they were saying and hung up.
And she said, that was a call about a Lutheran minister who was in AA for 14 years and he quit going to meetings and now he's drunk.
I don't know if that was a setup.
Maybe God set that up.
You know, to really get my attention.
And say, hey, this is some serious business.
We're going to try to save your life here, but you've got to get serious about it.
And then she looked at me and she said, how can I help you?
And I thought for just a moment, I said, I think you already have.
And I haven't had the desire to drink since.
And that was almost 36 years ago.
I've had the desire to kill myself.
I've had the desire to strangle a few people.
But I haven't had the desire to drink.
And I've stayed close to AA ever since.
I went to my first AA meeting and I knew I was in the right place for the first time.
People were talking about what it felt like inside.
And I had never heard this before from anybody.
And I started to make connections with other human beings for the first time in my life.
I also think that I started for the first time in my life to actually make a God connection.
Which I had been trying to do for some time now.
And was deeply disturbed by the fact that nothing really seemed to be changing.
And so I started to feel like, well, there was hope.
You know?
And did a pretty good fourth and fifth step.
I had a guy after my home group meeting one night.
Still in my first year of sobriety.
He looked at me after the meeting was over.
He said, I feel sorry for you high bottom drunks.
It's so hard for you to stay sober.
And I thought, I'll show you, you son of a bitch.
And I guess I have.
I hit a much harder bottom in sobriety.
I don't really have time to go into it tonight.
Mostly bad, impulsive decisions with money.
And, you know, I was suicidal for about every day for about a year.
I had this big Lincoln Continental, you know, back when they made them with the big long hoods.
425 cubic inches under the hood or whatever.
And so my plan was to drive this thing at 120 miles an hour, either off a bridge or into a telephone pole.
Because I wasn't, I didn't own a gun.
And, you know, I figured that would be too messy.
Too traumatic for the wife, you know.
And I certainly wasn't going to take pills.
Because I had made a vow to die sober.
So I was going to, I was going to kill myself sober.
Right?
And then what happened was I had to do a voluntary repo on the car.
So that took away my ability to kill myself.
And I had to just deal with it.
And I started to do some of the steps that I had never done, like six and seven, you know.
I think.
I think.
Well, let me put it this way.
You hear a lot of times in meetings about how this is a religious program, not a spiritual program.
Or some people might even say I'm not a religious person, I'm a spiritual person.
More and more I'm thinking I'm more of a religious person than a spiritual person.
And I'll explain to you why.
I had this, such a profound experience early on that got me sober.
That it led me to believe that I was just oh so spiritual.
And I wasn't.
I wasn't at all.
I still had a lot of this rage.
And I was still emotionally impulsive.
And I was impatient.
And I was in a hurry to make my mark on the world.
And prove myself.
And prove.
And I wanted to prove.
This is later inventory work I did on myself.
I wanted to prove to myself, to my wife, to my family, to other people, and to God that I was a good person.
I was obsessed with that.
Because I think of my family situation.
I was just obsessed with that.
And I made all of these really bad decisions trying to prove something.
And I remember saying to my wife one day, I am not a good person.
She said, oh yes you are.
And I said, no I'm not.
I'm really not.
And that was, I actually turned a corner there I think.
I stopped trying to pretend to be something I wasn't.
Now I'm not saying I'm an evil person.
I'm just somewhere in between just like everybody else.
Okay.
But I was obsessed with this.
And now I'm no longer obsessed with, you know, trying to prove to you or to God.
God knows better.
God knows.
And so I stopped.
That was a huge burden of relief when I stopped trying to prove that.
You know, whenever I'm sponsoring somebody new, I tell them, as soon as you walk in that door, you have nothing to prove to anybody in here.
Nothing.
But I think probably of anything that trips us up.
Okay.
Coming into AA, we're still trying to prove something.
Okay.
Like we're smarter.
We're tougher.
We'll get this done.
You know, just give me a few pointers and I'll get this done.
You know, give me a road.
I'll get it done.
You know, that kind of attitude.
I'll prove to these people how smart I am and how tough I am.
And, you know, if that attitude persists, you're going to die.
You're going to die a very tough, smart person.
At least that's my observation.
I'll close with a prayer that comes from the Bible.
And a bishop told me to memorize this one time.
And at the time, I had no idea why he was telling me to memorize this prayer.
Of course, now I realize why.
But this prayer is a psalm.
And I do this daily.
And so instead of the prayer admitting my faults, it's a list of my aspirations, which I think is great, you know.
And if you go down the list, I mean, it's a perfect AA prayer because it covers all of the kind of character and emotional defects that we talk about at meetings all the time.
So it goes like this.
Oh, Lord, I am not proud.
I have no haughty looks.
I do not occupy myself with great matters or with things that are too hard for me.
But I still my soul and keep it quiet.
Like a child upon its mother's breast, my soul is quieted within me.
Oh, Israel, wait upon the Lord from this time forth and forevermore.
Amen.
Thank you, Emma, for sharing a little bit of your life with us.
OK.
And I have asked Billy to come up and handle the chips.
Hey, all.
I'm a great woman covering out here, and my name Billy.
You're at .
So we're at lash Tortoise with white chip if you're just coming right toward us and we'll
be able to hear it here now.
You guys cool ?
No.
Great fireworks here.
Thank you.
Anything you need, we've got...
We thank the people.
Thank you.
if you're just coming back in
or if you're looking
for a new way of life.
Anybody want to come
get a white shirt?
Thank you.
Next week,
do 30 days.
You ready to get 30 days?
Woo!
We're going to skip 60 days
because we're already chipped,
so 90 days.
Anybody got 90 days?
Six months?
Six months?
Six months!
Nine months?
Anybody got nine months?
Keep working.
Years are multiples.
Anybody got years are multiples?
Everybody on the pan.
She's a hell of a nine
in the family.
And my sister.
Yeah.
Hey, how are you?
So I'm very happy
that she gave my brother
this chip.
Fifteen years ago,
we came into NABBA.
It's right over there.
It was Kelly.
Me and Jim,
he had asked us for help.
And it's kind of funny.
We told him,
we'll go get,
he was living in my apartment
down in my house.
And I said,
we'll go get all the alcohol
and we'll take that with us
and we'll get it out of there.
And Kelly had a
aviator,
Lincoln aviator,
filled up the entire car.
And I was like,
we're going to get stopped
for bootleg.
And that didn't count
all the cases and cases
of $2 wine.
That I just bought
Whole Foods.
I got a trailer loaded
at the last minute.
But anyway,
we came here
and he sat over there.
He had his head down.
I don't think he looked up
the whole time.
But God was in the rooms.
The guy who was speaking that day,
it was a Monday night meeting.
So,
yeah,
was actually my brother's
girlfriend.
High school little brother.
And I think Tim had probably
given him his first drink.
And he was telling the story.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was his bootlegger.
And we were we were both
we were both in the story
that night.
So that was kind of an odd thing.
It was God in the room.
And God's still in the room.
And I hope God is here every day
for you guys when you come in.
I love you.
Love you.
Thank you.
She and Kelly saved my life that night.
And I met my sponsor,
Tim, that night.
He got me a big book
out of the literature cabinet.
And I think Kelly actually
paid for it.
And he said,
you know,
we might need you
more than you need us.
And he suggested
I go home and get on my knees
and ask a higher power.
And so they gave me this drink
not to drink that night.
And I opened the big book
after doing that.
And I think I read about
two sentences before I fell asleep.
That was the first time
I didn't drink myself to sleep
for months and months.
And that was just a miracle.
And I just immediately
scrambled to my knees
in the morning
and thanked that higher power.
Because there's just no way
I could not drink
the day before.
Or the night before
or the week before that
or the month before that.
I just,
you know,
I had NABO
and it was my spiritual kindergarten.
I could come in at 7.30
and do the 9.30
and the 11
and the 1.30
and the 5.45
and the 8 o'clock meetings.
And it was
AA daycare.
For sure.
And,
you know,
it hadn't been for them
and their support.
And I don't know
if I'd have faltered or what.
But as it turned out,
it worked out good.
And we got cake.
So,
please help us make a mess.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And then we offer the white chip
one more time.
Because everybody deserves
a mini chip.
Everybody?
Alright.
Thank God for the chips
that you hold.
Thanks, Billy.
Thank you one and all
for joining the Blue Chip
speaker meeting tonight.
And thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
As I roll from town to town
Can't put the bottle down
Right now it feels like
it's killing me
Life out here
gets so depressing
Needs something to take
the edge you see
I got nowhere to hide
And if I'm alone
There's an empty hole inside
It's the bottle, the book,
or the gun for me
Seems like heaven's out
to get me
Trouble always following me
Feeling like I just
can't outrun
Seem inside
or all around
me
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
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