Trying to Be Air Force ROTC and Drink Like I Drank Was Like Being an Opera Singer With a Tracheotomy 🫠 – Will D.
About This Speaker Tape
Will D. tells his story from his home group's Zoom meeting, opening with his sobriety date of December 9, 2004 and his home group at the Chapter 3 group at North Springs United Methodist. He was adopted into a family of brilliant, principled non-drinkers — a linguist mother, a fighter-pilot and scratch-golfer father — but was wired for trouble before kindergarten. School psychiatrists wanted him institutionalized; his mother sacrificed financially to put him in private Catholic school. He was a pudgy skins-team kid taunted for 'A-cup man boobs,' furious at the world long before his first drink.
The first drink that worked was a Bartles and Jaymes wine cooler with Heather Long — it killed the fear and the less-than. He smuggled bottles of his dad's vendor liquor to a seventh-grade dance, was expelled from high school, kicked out of one college, fired from hotel after hotel. Working the front desk of an Oklahoma Marriott, he polished off a two-year-old Kirin and a bottle of rum at a staff party, blacked out down a dirt road at Route 66, and hit his boss Dan's car so hard it bent into a V. He blew .21 two hours later and walked into booking lucid enough that the cops warned his mother this was not normal.
Years later at a Dallas country club, fired by head pro Cotton Dunn for oversleeping a tournament setup, Will walked past a bottle of pills someone had left on a cart and began writing the suicide note in his head. A famous South African pro golfer he barely knew called out 'Hey, Willie, what are you doing?' from the pool with his kids — invited him to hit balls the next morning. Will credits that interruption as a lamplighter moment. He got sober with sponsor Thomas after another golf-course chance meeting, relapsed at four years in 2004 over a back injury and a doctor's prescription, and came back through Bobby Meadows at the Nava Club.
The amends carry the tape. A $100 debt to a Florida housekeeper, made good the same day he lost his job — followed by a phone call that got him a cell-phone kiosk job, then a jewelry counter job through his dad. The capstone: tracking down Dan, the man whose car he totaled 25 years earlier in Oklahoma, through a LinkedIn typo. Will flew to Celebration, Florida with his fiancée Beth and tried to hand Dan a $5,000 check. Dan waved it off — insurance had covered it — then mentioned his father had been vaporized in the Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh. 'You ever come back to Orlando, we'll go play some golf.' Today Will works as a concierge in a luxury apartment building, being of service all day.
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