Trying to Be Air Force ROTC and Drink Like I Drank Was Like Being an Opera Singer With a Tracheotomy 🫠 – Will D.

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 membership and a 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 on Zoom tonight and listening later on aabloochipspeakers.org desperately in need will hear our speaker and we believe this only by fully disclosing ourselves and our problems that any of us shall be persuaded to say, yes, I'm one of them too. I must have this thing. Tonight, Wes D. from the chapter... Chapter 3 group at North Springs United Methodist at Morgan Falls will be speaking and I'm really looking forward to this. He was in attendance when his better half, Beth, told her story recently in a live meeting or in a face-to-face meeting at the Nava Club. We started our first Zoom meeting last... last week and when I called to tell Will about our new format, he was anxious and very cooperative and so he's going to be our second and our second Zoom speaker and our first male speaker and I'm real excited about it and I'm going to hush up and let our speaker talk. Thanks, Tim. I'm grateful for the opportunity. My name is Will. I am an alcoholic and it's always an honor to do anything at Alcoholics Anonymous. So, thank you, Tim, so much for asking. My sobriety date is December 9th of 2004, which puts me a couple of months after the past 15 years of not having a drink one day at a time. My home group is the Chapter 3 group. We meet at Thursday nights at 7 p.m. at North Springs United Methodist Church. It's like this pumpkin church that they sell trees and pumpkins and all kinds of stuff right at the intersection of Morgan Falls and Roswell Road and we are a very active group. So, I'm very grateful to participate in that. My sponsor, Rusty, has a sponsor named Rick and I get the honor and the privilege of taking some men through this work as well, just like what was done for me. So, just a little bit about how I, you know, a little bit about my background. So, my mom... And dad are brilliant people. They're just very smart. And in full disclosure, I'm not just saying that. I told my story a week ago and I said the same thing because my mom happens to be listening to this tonight. So, I'm not altering the pitch in any way. So, my mom is a brilliant linguist and an extremely developed vocabulary, which is probably what I benefited from. She's also really good at reading people. My dad is... My mom actually was an English teacher for years. And then she found out someone was hired for a lot more money than her right out of college. So, she retooled and became a computer programmer and did that through the 80s and 90s and just very versatile. In fact, I grew up in the part of Chicago that you would have seen in any John Hughes film ever, like Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful and Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club and all that. My mom actually taught at New Trier High School where they filmed The Breakfast Club. So, that was kind of my... My childhood mostly. My dad is just a mathematics genius and an amazing athlete. He did all kinds of incredible stuff. He was the New York State High School batting champion. He qualified for the U.S. Open Golf Tournament a couple of times. And he was just an extraordinary guy. A couple of baseball teams and a couple of football teams had scattered him to play professionally and he just didn't want to do it. He just... He's this freak of nature. He's this freak of nature that would just like to see if he can do amazing things. And then when he figured he could, he just walked away. And I don't... Maybe knowing a little bit more about his childhood, I've kind of figured out a little bit of that, but I don't really know. But he was a fighter pilot at one time. He was a... He worked in the intelligence community and walked away from that on principle. He's a very principled guy. But he was very... He wasn't a very talkative guy. But these are the people I was adopted into their family. I got a younger brother who's not adopted. And let me say right here, I do not think being adopted caused my alcoholism. I was probably genetically primed for it. But I don't know. I'm not going to play Dynastore psychiatrist and try to figure any of that out anymore. I just, you know... I have mom and dad who love me beyond any description. I have a woman that made a very difficult choice and continued to carry me. And I have met her and it's scarred her immensely. But again, this... I was brought up... I was brought up in a family and I had everything I could have possibly wanted. But the thing was, I was nuts before I ever reached grade school. My mom... I don't know if chocolate pudding is an outside issue. But my mom has a photograph of me as like a two-year-old with like chocolate pudding all over my face. Because she said that when I tasted that for the first time, I literally inhaled it. Like, I don't know, like booze later on, you know. And I'd like to see that photograph. I know it exists somewhere. But I was... I was into whatever made me feel better, probably from day one. And I don't know why I was like that. Grade school or junior or kindergarten, they literally tried to institutionalize me. They said I was so disruptive. They called the school psychiatrist in and he said, Your kid's nuts. Now, my mom had been a school teacher. So she knew that pigeonholing me into special education was going to be a dead end for me. So she made a very sacrificing, very financially sacrificing, sacrificing and very important decision for me. She put me in a private Catholic school, which shielded me from the dead end that it would have been. And I really can't repay her for that. You know, so, you know, my parents didn't drink because their parents drank themselves to death. All with the exception of my mom's dad, Don. And my mom's dad, Don, apparently, he got sober in New York City. He worked for a large national... Textbook publishing company. And apparently he knew Bill Wilson pretty well. That's the story that I have corroborated from a couple of different family members that he knew Bill. But, you know, everyone else died from this disease. And so, again, I'm not genetically matching up with them, but I'm genetically matching up with somebody. So, you know, and I was from a very young age. What I heard a man I used to love named Keith Lewis used to say he passed away several years ago. He said I was on a war footing with the rest of the world. I was just a middle finger to everybody. And I didn't know why. And I didn't sign up to be like that. I was just angry. I was, as I recently heard it put by someone very adeptly, I was a scream looking for a mouth all the time. I didn't play well with other kids. I wasn't interested in what they were interested in. I was just this weird little pariah. Because when you're in trouble all the time, the kids don't really want you around. You're kind of the kid disinvited from all the kids' houses. You know, it was just nuts. I will tell you, I was a pudgy little kid. And when I got into teams, like my parents did everything they could to socialize me with other kids. They put me on a baseball team. I wouldn't do what they were doing. I was kind of decent at it, but I just would never stick with the team. They put me on a basketball team. And when you are on shirts versus skins and coach makes you a skin all the time and you got A-cup man boobs and you hear get a bra all the time, man, you hate people. You hate people with a white hat. Intensity that only someone with alcoholism could probably have. And I'll tell you, I was pretty decent at that. And from that day, I never did anything with anybody. I didn't do it for the team. I did it at the team. That was my reason for being was doing it at you or showing you that you're wrong. And I mean, that's all precursors to alcoholism. That's alcoholic thinking at 12. Now, you know. If if you're going to be an alcoholic, I think it's important to drink a little bit. So I'll tell you a little bit about my first couple of drinks. First ones were for my grandpa who drank himself to death. And I remember constantly going to the fridge and getting Grandpa Tom his beers. And I tasted it just like a lot of kids try. And I'm like, this is I don't know why anybody would do this. It doesn't make any sense. My second drinks, there was a bit of collateral damage. All right. My dad used to get a bunch of booze from like vendors and stuff over Christmas. And they had cases of this stuff in the attic and they would never touch it. So I don't know really what this stuff will do. So I brought like three bottles of premium liquor to like a seventh grade dance. And Dan Starr just drank so much that he vomited all over a teacher. And they all quickly investigated the source of that booze and found me. And my parents came to pick me up. I had a little bit of a tiny bit of a buzz, but it didn't really I didn't really feel the effects of it yet. It didn't really work for me yet. Now, the first drink that worked for me. I know exactly where I was. I was hanging out with Heather Long and some other kids from high school. And they had given me some Bartles and James wine coolers. And I could get enough of that to me that the taste didn't didn't make it come straight back up again. And everything got smooth. Everything. It was the magic. The thing that alcohol did for me that it does not do for the average temperate drinker. It killed all of my fear and all of my less than and everything fit. And I was. It was just fine. And I didn't intentionally think this, but I was like, there is something here and this works well. And, you know, so shortly after that, I was expelled from. Well, I withdrew from high school to avoid prosecution. The details are not important. I threw a cigarette in a trash can. I will also back up a little and tell you that 1985 to 1987, I was in ninth, ninth and ninth grade in Plano, Texas. We moved from Chicago to Dallas, Texas. From my dad's job. My mom worked for a large global corporation. And I was kind of off the hook and off the leash. And I just I went. I gravitated to the loser brigade immediately. Now, I have a tremendous respect for the singleness of purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous. I will not get into any of the outside issues that I have really experienced other than to say that I've lived in Miami. And I thought it was quite a quite a bait and switch. When they called it high school and then suspended me for it. So just going to leave it at that. So anyway, but I do have a tremendous amount of that. And that's basically what I went with. Liquor was kind of uncomfortable. The first time I drank a bunch of booze in high school, some skateboarding kids that I hung out with brought. We stole some gin from somewhere and I ended up my parents found me hanging out my bedroom window, like literally from the waist over down into the rocks. And I mean, quite frankly, that could have killed me. You know, so drinking was a problem for me right off the bat. I was I never drank safely at all. I went into one school. I did well. I got I dropped out of high school. I immediately made really good. I made good grades in high school, too, because as my friend Scott would say, I was a town drunk, not the village idiot. I had an intellect sufficient to the cause. I just hated at everyone. So I wasn't going to do what you told me to do. In fact, I still remember my parents used to have parent teacher conferences and they would tell them, listen, we don't really we know what makes sense. But we don't really compliment on a bunch of stuff because pathologically, he will do immediately the opposite of what we tell him. So this is crazy thinking from day one. So anyway, move this along a little bit because I want to get sober quickly. I went to one college. I got kicked out of there for some outside issues. I got I tried to be an Air Force ROTC and the fraternity boys scooped me up and really started to teach me how to drink and trying to be an Air Force ROTC and trying to drink like I drank. It was like trying to be a be an opera singer with a tracheotomy. It's just a recipe for failure. They just kicked me out of that school quick. At this point, my mom and dad been married over 50 years, but my mom would take contract jobs in other cities. So my dad's in Dallas and my mom took a job with a company up in Oklahoma City on a short term programming contract. So I ended up up there. They thought that it might be good for me to get a fresh start. So I did. And what happened was this is where I proved that I'm an alcoholic. I got a job at a hotel and after a couple of months, they and I, by the way, my parents did what they could for me to try to keep me safe. They started allowing me to drink alcohol right about before my 21st birthday. I was about 20 something and I was a high school dropout or a college dropout. I'm sorry, a college expelli. Let me be clear. And I'm working at the front desk of a Marriott hotel. They have this party, the front desk, and I go. But I go. With a two year bottle of Kirin beer, Japanese beer, because I'm so international and a bottle of rum and I drank all of it. I thought I was going to share it. I didn't share anybody because I didn't share anything. And I, my boss, Dan, took off about two minutes before I did down this dirt gravel road. I mean, this is in the sticks. This is 20 miles down Route 66, two miles up a farm road. And here's what happened. I got my car. Um, I had put my seatbelt on by muscle memory because I. I had picked up my mom a few times and she got on me for not having it on and I just got in the habit. Otherwise I'd be somebody else to be speaking tonight because I would have been dead. I went into a blackout and they had stopped Dan and this other girl from the front desk stopped about a mile ahead of me. Just I came out of that blackout with tail lights in my face and I hit their car so hard it bent it into a V and put it into a cornfield next to us and all. And with no front end, I remember hissing and Dan just pathetically calling out, get help. And. And I wove my way back to the cornfields with no, no radiator, no headlights, just rolling back and forth. And people looked at me like, what happened? This is so far in the sticks that it took the Oklahoma city police 45 minutes to find the accident, process it, arrest me, get me back downtown and breathalyze me. And I'm probably they say it was about two hours after my accident. I blew point two one. And that's not amazing by our standards, but I'll tell you this. By. My understanding, somebody called my mom and said, ma'am, this is Sergeant whatever at the Oklahoma City Police. We've got your kid down here and he's been arrested. He's been in an accident, but he's fine. The other people are going to be all right. But here's the thing, ma'am. We have to apologize. Our SOP, when their blood alcohol content is this high, we take him to the hospital first. Ma'am, we didn't know your kid walked in here under his own power, had no problem giving clear, lucid answers and knew exactly how to tell us your name, address. His phone number. Ma'am, we don't see this very often. You need to get this kid some help. We don't see this this young guy often. Right. Cops who deal with drugs all the time are telling my mom this is something they don't see very often. And I knew that minute I will never, ever, ever touch a bottle of alcohol. I'll never touch a drink again. There is no way after this. I went to work the next day. We had some kind of training for total quality management and the whole hotel staff are assembled in this banquet room. And it took my boss about five minutes to walk over to me and go, are you feeling all right? Do you OK? Which was her code for you need to go home. You look terrible. You need. And everybody knew what had happened the night before. It's a hotel like any other business. It's just everything went around like wildfire. And I was I was shamed. And I'll say this because I think it's important. My mom, when I got home, didn't react the way I thought she would. I thought she was going to lay into me. What she said was, oh, sweetheart, you must be really scared because I had I had taken a long shower trying to wash the shame off. But I had this kind of particular body odor that a man gets when he almost dies. There's a different smell. The body does something different. And I don't know how she recognized it. Maybe she had. I don't know where she knew it from. But but but I smelled terrible from the from the absolute terror of this. And I've smelled it on another day before. So I know what this is. And so, you know, that was there was that. And after that. Man, it was they say gradually things got worse. Nothing gradually got worse. I go back to transfer out of there. They're happy to have me gone. And, you know, I need to go and I go to another hotel. I quickly get fired from there for my mouth. I go to work at a golf course because I really like golf and I am perfectly fine being a 24 year old club scrubber. I mean, at a country club in North Dallas. And I will tell you, nobody gets promoted to lead cart boy like that is not a career. You know, solid move. That's that's that's for somebody who's made a tremendous number. If you're 24 years old and you're working scrubbing clubs at a cart at a golf course for tips, maybe you like doing that. But I was I was probably right where I needed to be. But I mean, I was I was living and I would start those people didn't care if I fill the thermos full of vodka, you know, but I wasn't stupid. And I looked around and I saw all these people and I'm like, I'm I'm relatively intelligent. I don't know why I'm not living these people's lives. But, you know, I went back to community college for a couple of semesters and I got into New Mexico State University. And here's where my story gets a little weird. And I don't really tell this story, or at least I haven't in the past very much. Tangentially, I had sort of made friends with a guy who was a pretty famous professional golfer at the time. He'd show up at the course with his two kids, their three and five year old. I bumped into a couple of times. And he was kind of a sports hero. My so I was all enamored with, like, the famous guy thing, right? So at this golf course, I'm there for about 16 months and I'm doing I'm drinking all the time and the head pros beginning to get sick of me. And here's the deal. If you sleep through a couple of alarm clocks and you miss a tournament set up where you got to put all the signs with the names on them and the bags in the right place. And you're like the old kind of like considered like senior guy amongst all the high school students working there. They don't like that at all. And. Cotton had been getting his name is Cotton Dunn. He died recently, but he did real well by me. He gave me a lot of last chances. And so anyway, I overslept. The assistant pro calls me. I scramble in there just shaking and hung over. And after everything was said and done, Cotton fired me. He called me in his office. They will. I need to talk to you. And he had never talked to me about anything. We are we weren't on a conversant basis. And I knew what a firing sounded like. I walked in and said, you know, you've been getting it done. I need to let you go. You know, I'll pay you for right now anyway. And got to go. And I'm ashamed because I've been fired a bunch. And there's just something inside that every time I get thrown away like that, you know, I heard someone say that alcoholics tend to be some of the most enthusiastic people any organization will ever have. But what they do is slowly or quickly, they fall in love with the way of life or something. And then they slowly or quickly violate every principle and every rule and they get fired or they leave. And then they blame the organization. And I was furious walking out of there. And it just kind of came on me. And I'm hesitant to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway, because my parents would have been devastated by this. I'm walking out of there. And the assistant pro, Kevin, says, Hey, can you give this guy a message in the locker room? He didn't hear me get fired. And I just take it because I don't even know what to say. And I walked out from the building towards the pool area. And I'm thinking to myself, I got a bottle of vodka. I know I've got a huge bottle of vodka. I know I've got a huge bottle of vodka. I know I've got a huge bottle of vodka. And the first time I see a bottle of vodka, this bottle of pills and somebody left on a cart, I can't keep living like this. I'm always going to be the club's clubbing loser at this club is never going to get any better. I'm just going to. I don't even know what I'm going to do now. I was supposed to leave for college in like a month. How am I going to pay my rent? This doesn't make any sense. I'm sick of this and it's never going to get better. And I really started thinking, how do I write a note to make my parents understand? That's, you know, I've heard alcoholics suicides, not that a big deal. It's just the next thing. And as I'm walking past this trash can, about to toss this stupid message in the trash, I don't know why I walk through the pool area. As I walk into the pool area to do this last thing before I slink away from this job, I hear this heavy, thick South African accent saying, Hey, Willie, what are you doing? And I look over, and it's Mr. Famous Pro Golfer sitting in the pool with his kids. And I'm like, how does this guy even know? At first, is he talking to me, and why is he even, how does he know my name? What is, and I pretend, and now I'm like ashamed, because I'm like, I'm fired, and I don't even want to talk to this guy. And he's like, hey, Willie, because that's the name he used for me. And I've like, I pretend, oh, I just heard you, sorry. And I feign like I just heard him, and I walk over, and he's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I'm giving a guy a message. He's like, oh, cool. What are you doing tomorrow? What am I doing tomorrow? Well, I'm, I don't like it. All I could say is I'm not working. I wasn't like, yeah, I don't know, I'm probably going to be found by some medical examiner and zipped up in a bag. Like, what am I going to say to that, right? And he's like, oh, cool. Well, you know, if you want, you want to come help me practice tomorrow, you know, over at my club? I just, you know, come over, take a look, help me hit balls, you know, see what, and I'm like, what? Yeah, it's better than killing myself, I guess, you know? And I only tell that story because a friend of mine in AA, a guy named, Bob, told this story a long time ago about these lamplighters in London years ago. Before electric lighting came around, you could sit on a rooftop and watch the lamplighters, the lights come on all over the city and you couldn't see the lamplighter, but you could see where he had been. And one of my sponsors made me look back in my life and see where the hand of God was there. Now, I don't know about you, but the imminent suicide of someone interrupted by some famous sports hero of his, unknowingly, no idea what was going on. I think that meets the definition. So it was a crazy situation. I actually did something very uncharacteristic for me. I slinked back into Cotton's office and I'm like, hey, you know, is there any, you know, I've been screwing up, blah, blah, blah. Would you give me another chance? And he's like, you know what? You're only here for another month. You hit it out of bounds one inch. You're gone. You don't get three chances with me. And I don't. Let me see you the rest of the day. And I slinked back into the bag room and I cleaned clubs as happily as I ever have. And an hour later, one of the pros comes in and goes, hey, such and such left this for you. You know, the guy's name's not important, but it was a big, big deal to me. And the next morning I had an experience I can't even begin to describe and it wouldn't even be pertinent to this conversation, to this talk. But that guy became a friend of mine for 30 some odd years and he still, I get to spend a little time with him here and there. I'll come back to that a little later on because there was an episode. Later in my life, it's kind of important. I think I'll touch on it in a minute. But anyway, I go off to college and I'm there for four years and I drink like a madman. I drink because the chains are off. I had a girl, girlfriend that came with me and quickly, like she had a family and woke up with the bong and went to bed with half a bottle. And so she knew what she was looking at and didn't want any part of it either. So she skedaddled and I'm glad she did. But, but my, my, all my anchors in life were gone and I got fired from jobs and I would end it. I was in this golf pro. I was in this golf pro. I was in this golf pro. And I went to two different internships over the summers. I got fired from both of them and I blame them, right? You have no idea how insanely angry I was at these people. And, you know, was there some culpability, sort of some strange things that happened? Sure. But I could have fixed any of that. But my attitude, you just didn't want to be around me. And I will tell you, I have heard from a very respected man in my life that you can tell the alcoholic in an organization whether there's booze on his face or not. Whether there's booze on his breath or not, because he's the person who everybody walks on eggshells around, just caustic, blows up at any little, little perceived slight. And that's just me. You can't survive jobs with that kind of crazy alcoholism. So anyway, I finished college. I go to Miami for a while. I don't know what I'm going to do. I go to work at another hotel. Now I've graduated with a good GPA, with a business degree. And the only jobs I'm going for are like $10 an hour hotel jobs. And in Miami, things got damaged. It was pretty quickly. And I began to keep company with very nefarious characters to get what I needed to feel all right. I got out of Jacksonville. I went to, I mean, I got out of Miami and I went to Jacksonville. I started working in a different, beautiful resort that I was on the verge of getting fired from for my mouth for about three years. I just, I would say stupid things that I think are funny. And pretty quickly, I would have a meeting at Human Resources and they would tell me not only are they not funny. You say anything remotely close to that. Again, you are fired. We were going to get a business divorce. And it was just, you know, that sort of thing. But what happened was I got back to Jacksonville and I started, I knew I was in trouble and I knew I needed to, I started auditing the class in AA. I was in the row of half measures in the back. I got a guy's number. I started calling him. I didn't really do anything with him. Now here's another funny scenario of how Mr. Golfer guy comes back into this whole story. He. This is absurd on the face of it for an alcoholic. The guy owns a wine vineyard and he was going to this huge national convention in Orlando, Florida, where all the people that make golf stuff go. It's called the PGA Merchandise Show. And he invited me to come hang out with him. Now, I haven't drank for 19 days and I go on down there and I hang out. I just kind of help out his little booth while he's doing the like press the flash to sign the autographs thing. And it's cool experiences there. I get to watch him get a lesson from his instructor and all. But he gives me this stupid hat and I still haven't. It's got his name and his wine vineyard on it. And I will tell you, the most pathetic thing in my life at the time was that if I didn't know you, I would somehow work into the conversation that I am an acquaintance of Mr. Such and such. Right. It's pathetic. And that's all I really had going for me early in sobriety. So I go back to Jacksonville after this this show and I'm on the golf course. Now, I'm making 10 bucks an hour, but I can play some resort golf. Of course, it's for five bucks around, you know, so with a college degree. So I'm on the golf course and I run into this guy on the third hole of the ocean course. Big guy hits the ball a mile. And, you know, I'm a pretty decent player. So I want to show him up a little bit. So I say, hey, can I play along with you? And he's fine. If you've ever been around somebody who's not drinking and not sober and you know how crazy they are. It took this guy about a hole and a half to look at this hat and go, how's the wine? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't. I don't drink. I mean, I don't drink for 19 days. I don't drink. And he goes, well, did you ever? I'm like, well, I did. He goes, listen, man, are you in recovery? I'm like, well, yeah. I mean, I go to meetings at Penman, but I don't. I had a sponsor, but we don't really talk very much. He goes, listen, I've been sober for 17 years. And that man, by the end of the round, was my first sponsor. And I don't know. You tell me if there's a hand of God in that. You know, try to make that stuff up. Right. And Thomas got me to do the steps and he got me to do enough of them where enough of the crazy got got kind of kind of, you know, enough of the crazy got taken out of my head. And he had me do some silly things like pick up a guy I didn't want to pick up for meetings. My first home group was the Tuesday night Sherry Drive meeting in Jacksonville Beach at eight o'clock. And I would have to go pick up Mark. And I didn't like Mark. Mark always tried to borrow money. And Mark lived in a trailer. And I lived in my palatial 700 square foot. Corner apartment in a 1920s building. So I looked down on Mark from my palatial estate. And one day Mark died. And Thomas called me back and told me that Mark wasn't going to be with us anymore. And I will tell you, his parents came into town and they just wanted to meet the AA group. They didn't want to go to our meeting, but they just want to meet with us. And they all said, you know, we just want to thank you. So you people who gave our son nine months with his daughter that he would have never had if it wasn't for you people, you know, and I came unglued. I tried to be cool in there and I just started crying. And it was the first time I had felt any empathy for another human being in decades at all. I just didn't relate to humans. Right. And that's the magic alcoholics anonymous is little by little. They trick us. They they bring us back into humanity. They bring us back. I don't know about us. They brought me back into being a part of because I was separate from all of, you know, somewhere. I think it's in the 12 and 12. It says our inability to form true partnerships with other people very well may have been the cause of our alcoholism. I just didn't connect with other people. So I will tell you, I was sober for about four years. People met me and brought me to Atlanta to work for them. And I will tell you, if they the old timers used to say there's a slip under every skirt. I don't know if it would have done me any good, but it would have been much more helpful to have heard. If you you seriously use every woman you can possibly get your hands on without any regard for their well-being and you act as promiscuously as probably humanly possible without any dignity or or or concern for another person at all. You are going to drink again and it might kill you. Like if they had said that, I probably wouldn't. I got drunk at four years, but I did. And in 2004, I relationship ended. I started working out real hard because he got to get another relationship and I hurt my back. And the doctor gave me some medication. He said, oh, it takes two to become an addict. So I'm only going to prescribe for you. And I wasn't being honest with my sponsor, the late great Bobby Meadows at the time. And he and he just was like he gave me the green light to do what the doc said. But that was what I was hoping he would say. And very shortly after that, I was loaded real fast. I was and I relapsed in 2004 for about three weeks. And it took me about three weeks to get right back to where I was. I was in a hotel room. I had been robbed. I didn't know where my car was. I had been in the company of ladies of fairly ill repute. I was five hundred dollars at every charges on my credit card at every Walmart within 20 miles. I'm explaining to the credit card company. I passed out at a party. It was just crazy. And, you know, I called my friend Fred B. And he was like, I told him, listen, man, I've been drinking. He goes, well, no, you know, why don't you meet me at the Nava Club tonight? And, you know, very same place. I have the honor and privilege of telling this long rambling story 15 years later. And I started over and I got a new sponsor and I started doing what he said. And I got very. Very active in sponsoring guys going to meetings and being of service and doing that kind of stuff. But I will tell you a couple of things to kind of end this up. I sponsor a lot of guys. I take them through the 12 steps. The two places where I tend to lose them is why they're going to start right in their four step or when they're going to start work, making their nine step amends. Let me tell you a couple of the nine step amends that I think saved my life. I moved up here and I lost my job. And my sponsor, Thomas, who I hadn't gotten a new one yet, said, Hey, did you miss anything on your four step? And I had stolen a hundred bucks from a housekeeper back when I lived in Florida. And he said, well, why don't you why don't you make a hundred dollar donation? Now, this is on the day that I lost my job that brought me up here and I got two hundred nineteen bucks in the bank. And he said, well, and I'm like, Thomas, I can't go to my parents. I don't know what I'm going to do. And he goes, well, this is where the rubber meets the road. Click. And he never hung up on me like that before. As I am making a left on Stewart Drive to head to the Bissane room. There's this radio station. It was on at the time. Dave FM. It plays a bunch of Generation X and 80s and 90s music. I hear on the radio and for a hundred dollars, you could feed a family of four. Feed the poor. Call 1-800-blah-blah-blah. And I'm like, are you kidding me? I don't even have a credit card at this point in my life. I have a debit card. And I watched myself make a hundred dollar donation on this debit card. That night, I went to the Bissane room and my friend Dave, who had sold me this little Nokia phone, said, Hey, we need something. Somebody in our kiosks, like when singular wireless was a thing. And the next day, he introduced me to his boss and I had a job paying a little bit more money than the one I had lost. And I worked there for six months and it wasn't paying any money anymore because they changed the whole thing up. And I'm telling my dad about this. And my dad was a legend with the department store that he worked with. He had a huge reputation there. He had done a lot of amazing things for him. Run the jewelry division. He goes, hey, would you ever consider working for my company? And I'm like, I don't know what I'd do. You know, just put in an application, see what happens. And a week later, I was selling jewelry at a very expensive department store. I mean, they gave me the keys to millions of dollars worth of small pocketable things because they didn't know me. You know, but I mean, I would have never taken anything and I never did. But, you know, my dad put his reputation on the line by helping me get that job. He said he didn't do anything. But I mean, I'm not an idiot. I'm not an idiot. A couple of years later, I lost that job because I was careless with keys. I walked across the street. I used the principles. Yeah. I told him the truth that I got another job doing the same thing for a lot more money and its biggest competitor. They hired me on the spot. I just told him the truth. I was careless. I left my keys out and they fired me. You know, I have fallen uphill professionally ever since. Today, I work as a concierge in a luxury apartment building. I get to be of service all day long. It's a very fascinating job. And it's one that really suits what I can do. The last one I want to tell you about. I hit that guy and that girl with my car 25 years ago in Oklahoma, and I could never find this guy. I mean, he had no digital footprint whatsoever. I looked for him, couldn't find him. And his name was Dan. And it was a Germanic last name Van something or other. Right. And I told my then girlfriend about to be fiance, Beth, about this whole story one night and the next morning, I'm just thinking about it and I go on LinkedIn and I accidentally forget to put the space between the guy's name, boom, he pops up right away. He's a manager at a hotel complex in Orlando, Florida. And I'm like, that's the guy. That's him. I've been looking for him for years. I call the hotel. I get the PBX operation. Oh, no, he's the night manager. I set my alarm to wake up at two in the morning. I call to get him on the radio and he comes to the phone and I hear this oaky voice I haven't heard in a quarter century. And I'm like, hey, Dan, listen, this is Will. I work with you at the Oklahoma City Marriott. Listen, you may not remember my name, but you're going to remember I'm the guy that hits your car after that party that night. He goes, oh, wow, man, that was a long time ago. I said, listen, I was always given a script to make amends. OK, it makes it real simple and I don't have to get into how amazing I am now or any of that craziness. It's real to the point. Listen, I'm a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and I really got to make right selfish or hurtful or inappropriate things I did in the past. And I'd like to talk to you about it and see if I can make some of this right. Right. Mike doesn't know what to make of this. And he says, well, here's my number, man. If you're ever in Orlando, you know, just give me a call. The next few minutes later, I talked to Beth. I'm like, I found the guy. He's he's there. Can we go to Orlando? And we did. And I met him in I met him at Celebration, Florida. He sat down and ordered himself a beer. And at this time, Beth and I are it's pretty clear we're going towards marriage. We're about to get engaged. I know it. And our money, our financial picture is is is now becoming somewhat interrelated. And I tell her, listen, I think I think I could probably afford to pay this guy five grand. And he and we agreed that I brought a checkbook with me and I sat down and I tried to give him the money. He's like, no, man, listen, insurance took care of everything. I'm fine. She was fine. And we used to get those cars real cheap at government auctions. And I was like, oh, really? How did you do that? Because, well, my dad worked for Housing and Urban Development. And I said, oh, is your dad still with us? And he just gets this look in his face. He says, no, he worked at the Edward P. Murrow Federal Building. He was vaporized by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing. And I'm I am astounded by that. And, you know, but all he said to me is, listen, man, you keep my number. You ever come back to Orlando, Orlando, you call me. We're going to go play some golf. And I will simply say that nobody has ever treated me the way I thought they would treat me when I go to make amends to them. Some people kind of dodged a weave and didn't really want to see me at first. But I will tell you, making those amends is the things that saved my life. I no longer have my past catching up on me. I am someone of value that God loves dearly and is allowed to make right a lot of really awful things in my life. I have done terrible, terrible things. Um, that have all. Generally been put right by following the steps of the program, Alcoholics Anonymous. Um, so I am very, very grateful for the opportunity to. I hope that is helpful to someone. Um, and, uh, you know, that's basically that's all I've got to share. So thank you very much. On the circle, getting upside down. Falling off the edge. Everything. Everyone. The lessons. The guilty logic. Sleep away the day. Hiding from the stuff. We gotta stop fighting everything. Everyone fighting.