Using an Eyebrow Pencil to Fake a Beard at Thirteen — Jay P.

They always have these things set up for tall guys.\nMy name is Jay Plumback and I'm an alcoholic.\nThrough the grace of God and the miracle of Alcoholics Anonymous working my life a day\nat a time, I've not had to take a drink since March the 8th of 1974, and for that I'll never\nbe able to truly express how grateful I am.\nYou know, a lot of things run through my mind this morning, or run through my mind yesterday.\nIt's been a great weekend.\nIt's given me an opportunity to re-examine some things about me and to think about where\nI am and where I fit in Alcoholics Anonymous.\nAnd what Alcoholics Anonymous is.\nI remember when Bob called me and invited me, I told him I was honored, and I feel honored\nto be asked to participate in your state convention.\nAnd then Jeff called and we began to communicate and we had both worked, he still works in\nand I had worked in a very small industry and we knew a lot of the same people.\nAnd we experienced a lot of the same things, both sober and drunk, in that particular event.\nAnd it was real special, this whole weekend has been real special, and I'm glad to be\nhere, although I will be a lot gladder in about one hour.\nAnd just to make you feel a little easier, you don't have to set your calendar.\nIn one hour, I'll be done.\nIf you ain't done, re-listen to the tape.\nYou know, I never planned on being here in Maryland, I never planned on being an alcoholic.\nOf course, I don't know many people that did.\nI can't remember every meeting I went to saying, you know, my lifelong ambition is to be a\ndrunk.\nIt just didn't happen that way.\nIt didn't happen with me.\nI wanted to be a lot of other things.\nI had all kinds of goals as a kid and things I wanted to do.\nAnd I never seemed to be able to attain any of those.\nYou know, one time I wanted to be a lawyer.\nNow, like I mentioned, because I did, I wanted to be a lawyer, I'd read a book about a guy\nnamed Clarence Darrow, and I was so impressed by this man and by what he had done and by\nhow good he was that I said, I want to be like that.\nThat represented influence, represented just a lot of things, but I was never able to be\nthat.\nBecause to be something like that, I'd had to pay a price, I'd had to go to school, I'd\nhad to have discipline in my life, I'd had to sacrifice things, and I didn't do that.\nAny of the other things I thought I wanted to be, I was never able to attain because\nI wasn't able to pay the price to attain it.\nTo attain those things.\nAnd yet if one of you would have taken me aside at any age in my life, any young age\nin my life, and told me the price that I would pay to gain admission to Alcoholics Anonymous,\nI'd have said you're crazy.\nIf you'd have told me I was going to sacrifice a career, I was going to give up a family,\nI was going to destroy my health, I was going to darn near die, I'd have said you're nuts,\nI'll never do that.\nAnd yet that was the price that I paid to gain admission to Alcoholics Anonymous.\nYou know, I had a lot of things going on with me as a kid that I thought were normal.\nAnd I later found out that they were a part of my alcoholism.\nYet these things that I mentioned to you did not make me an alcoholic.\nThey just made me a screwed up kid.\nI was mad as far back as I can remember.\nYou know, before I go, I want to take another moment.\nThey were talking about when I thanked Bob and thanked Jeff, I need to thank Sandy and\nI need to thank Chuck and I need to thank everybody sitting here that's a member of\nthe group that has made me feel an integral part of this conference.\nYou all really welcomed me and let me feel, and you let me do what I needed to do when\nI needed to do it, and yet you included me in everything you did.\nAnd the guys and the gals that I'd stand outside smoking with and talking with, you know, it\njust, the weekend's just fantastic.\nSo the committee, every volunteer, and everyone here that's taking the time to make me feel\nwelcome, please let me, I want you to know I thank you.\nBut anyhow.\nAs a kid, I was mad as a kid, and I was mad as far back as I can remember, but I didn't\nknow I was mad.\nI didn't know I was mad until I was sober for a year and a half.\nWell, I was in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous at that time.\nI belonged to the Nuestra Esperanza Big Book Group in West Palm Beach, Florida, met on\nKirk Road, and I was an active member of that group, a year and a half sober, and I was\nsort of a poster child in Alcoholics Anonymous.\nAnd if they'd had poster children, I'd have been there, right, big and showing, you know.\nI'd done everything in that group.\nI'd made coffee.\nYou know, it wasn't very good, but I made it.\nI cleaned the cups.\nBack then, you had porcelain cups, and you had to wash them after the meeting, and we\nhad ashtrays, and you had to clean them.\nAnd you know, they gave me those jobs, and I did them, and I was chairman, and, well,\nI'd even talked once or twice, and they were lies, but I talked, you know, sounded good\nto me.\nBut I'd done everything in that group except apply any steps, you know, so that's the kind\nof member of AA I was.\nAnd I was there that night, and we were studying the big book, and I remember repeating, I\ndon't remember what it was.\nBut I repeated something that I'd learned the other day across town.\nWhat I would do, see, is go to meetings where there would be old-timers, and I'd listen\nto what they had to say.\nThen I'd bring it back to my group as though it was fresh and new and straight from me.\nAnd the people in my group showed me love and tolerance.\nThey didn't tell me I was, you know, crazy and that I was nuts.\nThey just said, keep coming, kid, you'll be all right.\nBut this particular night, after I'd given out whatever wisdom I'd given out, there was\na guy that took me aside.\nHis name was John.\nAnd he put his arm around my shoulder, and he told me that he loved me.\nAnd he told me that I was a phony, and that I was about to get drunk, and I hated him.\nAnd then he took me home with him that night.\nHe asked me to go with him and I did, and we went to his house.\nHe lived out in Loxahatchee, which then was just a swamp out in the west side of Palm\nBeach County.\nHe took me out to his trailer.\nHe took me out to his manufactured home.\n.\nFor many, many years, I considered them trailers, especially when I had that 4,000-square-foot house on the 16th Fairway.\nThose were trailers, but now I live in one, and they've become manufactured homes.\nThere's a guy that talks around a whole lot, and he always talks about perspective, you know, and that's what it is, is perspective.\nUntil you got it, you don't know what it is it is.\nBut anyhow, he took me out to this manufactured home, set me down on the stoop of it, and we're sitting there talking, and he talked to me about Alcoholics Anonymous.\nHe talked to me about the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous.\nAnd, you know, I'd accepted the first step, I thought, you know, first step just, you know, admitting that I had a problem with alcohol, and that's as far as it went.\nI never saw the second half of it, admitting that my life had become unmanageable.\nNever had I looked at that, hadn't accepted it, but based on the knowledge in the first half of the first step, I attempted to work the remaining steps.\nHence, I was all screwed up.\nAnd John talked to me about unmanageability, and he had me look at my life, and he pointed out areas that I didn't want to look at.\nHe asked me specifically about my marriage.\nMy marriage was not in good shape, this poster child of AA.\nMy wife and I had no relations whatsoever that weren't ugly.\nIt was so bad in our home that I was an active member of Sex Without Partners.\nThat may not have got up here to Maryland or not, but it's a big self-hate.\nI had a big self-help group down there, I'll tell you that.\nLegally, I wasn't in very good shape. I was on the verge of going to jail. The law wanted me.\nBecause, you see, what had happened, I'd been over in a country called Ceylon, they call it Sri Lanka now, but I'd been over there, and I'd been to AA meetings.\nWe were there 30 days, I went to 30 meetings. I went every night to a meeting, and I met guys who thought just like I thought.\nYou know, they were crooked and dishonest and conning, and that was me.\nAnd I met good guys, too, but I met these guys.\nAnd these guys that I met, we weren't friends.\nWe went into business.\nAnd we were exporting semi-precious gemstones from Sri Lanka and importing them into the United States.\nNow, we weren't using any laws to do it with, so the government called it smuggling.\nAnd I wasn't a gemologist, I was a marine engineer.\nI didn't know a damn thing about stones, but I knew how to steal and cheat.\nBut I always thought that was business principles.\nI just thought in business you had a different set of rules to go by.\nAnd I was going by those rules, and I was on the verge of going to jail.\nI was on the verge of bankruptcy, because you see, all the money that I'd had and accumulated was gone.\nAnd I was on the verge of bankruptcy.\nEvery area of my life, I was in trouble.\nI had no spiritual relationship to speak of.\nEvery area, I was in trouble.\nAnd as John pointed it out to me, I accepted that.\nAnd for the very first time in my life, the first step in its entirety became a part of my life.\nI'd known from very early on in Alcoholics Anonymous that I was powerless over alcohol.\nI knew that my drinking was different from a social drinker's drinking.\nI knew it, and I accepted the definition you gave me in the book on page 21.\nI knew I was a real alcoholic.\nThat definition boils it down, no matter what else is going on in my life.\nIf that definition fits me, then no matter what other problems I have, I am an alcoholic.\nAnd that says, what about the real alcoholic?\nI love that word, real.\nIt gives us, you know, makes us feel important.\nSort of like being a doctor or a lawyer or something, you know.\nBut anyhow, so what about the real alcoholic?\nHe or she may or may not be a heavy drinker.\nMay or may not be a daily drinker.\nBut at some stage of his drinking career, begins to lose control once he starts to drink.\nThat fit me.\nIt fit me as accurately at age 13 as it fit me at 30 and a half when I got here.\nSo I'd accepted that early on in Alcoholics Anonymous.\nBut with just a half a brick, you can't build a foundation.\nAnd then John talked to me some more.\nAnd he said, so step one, simply make it, I can't.\nHe said, step two, he said, let's look at it.\nHe said, you know, that's came to believe that a part greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.\nJohn explained sanity to me.\nIt does not mean bizarre behavior in our particular instance.\nI still have bizarre behavior.\nAsk some of my friends.\nYou know, I'm crazy as hell at times.\nBut that's got nothing to do with the insanity that it talks about.\nIn the second step.\nIn the second step, John said the sanity meant he used the book.\nHe always used the book.\nAnd when I say the book, the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous is what he used to direct me.\nAnd he had me look up sanity in the book and insanity.\nAnd Bill talks about that strange insanity that precedes the first drink.\nYou know, that thought, that notion that this time I can take a drink and it'll be different.\nThis time I can take a drink and I won't behave the way I did the last time I drank.\nThat's insane because I had nothing to bear that out.\nHe talks further on.\nLike after the promises, you know, it says,\nif tempted by alcohol, we react as if from a hot flame for sanity has returned.\nSo sanity for me was simply going to be that taking a drink would not be an acceptable alternative.\nStep two, he can.\nSo I had two premises.\nI can't and he can.\nAnd with that information, John suggested we get on our knees and we pray the third step prayer.\nAnd he opened the book up and we read that prayer out of the book.\nAnd I remember reading it with him that night.\nAnd I remember how I felt when I read it because he talked to me about what it was going to mean.\nAnd I read that prayer and I literally prayed that prayer that night.\nAnd that began a ritual for me because I have prayed that prayer or said that prayer on a daily basis with rare exception from that day to this.\nI don't take the third step every day.\nBut what I do is reaffirm that decision I made on my knees that night with John.\nAnd when we got off our knees, John handed me a legal tablet.\nI was almost afraid this was the one.\nBut he handed it to me.\nAnd I'm moving it away because I don't know what's on it.\nBut he handed it to me.\nAnd there were three columns on one side of the page.\nAnd he turned it up.\nThere's nothing on the back side.\nAnd he said, up in the upper left-hand column, I want you to write the word, I resent.\nAnd I looked at John.\nAnd then my vocabulary was not quite what it is now.\nAnd I said, John, I don't resent anybody.\nI didn't know what it meant.\nHe said, well, hell right.\nI'll write the word, I hate, down.\nI did.\nNow, let me tell you something.\nWhen I say hate, I feel good.\nI get warm all over.\nI hated everybody.\nI didn't have to single anyone out.\nHell, I hate.\nI could have put him first, for God's sake.\nBut John told me who to put first.\nWhen I put I hate, he said, put down the name Siraj.\nAnd I did.\nSiraj, that name doesn't mean anything to you probably.\nIt was the Indian that was living in my house, the guy from Salon.\nI'd brought him over there on a visa.\nAnd they were using him to watch their money.\nYou know, I'd have him in my house.\nSo he's staying in the house.\nAnd I hated him.\nI hated him because he's sleeping in a bed and my little boy was sleeping on the floor.\nI hated him because he'd eat raw meat and we'd eat rice and beans.\nI hated him because they got all my money.\nAnd I didn't get theirs.\nI hated him for everything.\nI hated him because he wore a dress.\nNow, they didn't call it a dress.\nThey called it a sari.\nIt was a dress.\nI'll tell you, it was a dress.\nYou see, John told me that I didn't have to understand why I hated him.\nJust put down why.\nAnd he didn't have to understand it.\nBut if I felt it, put it down.\nAnd I put it down.\nAnd I put down that I hated him and all the reasons why.\nAnd then he had me go back through my life from that point to as far back as I can remember\nand put down who I hated him and why I hated him.\nAnd I found that hate and anger was a part of my life to my earliest memories.\nAnd nobody taught me that.\nIt just came with the package.\nAnd that's a part of alcoholism.\nYet it didn't make me alcoholic, just made me mad.\nI was a liar as far back as I can remember.\nYou don't have to be a liar to be an alcoholic.\nIt helps, but you don't have to be.\nThere might be an alcoholic somewhere that wasn't a liar.\nI ain't met him or her, but there might be.\nAnd, you know, the thing about lying was I always thought it was like a gift from God.\nLike he said here.\nBecause with lies I could make myself into whatever you wanted me to be.\nYou wanted me to be tall, I'd be tall.\nShort, smart, whatever you wanted me to be, I was it.\nAnd if I told you what it was, if you didn't believe it, I got mad.\nBecause I believed it.\nAnd once I believed it, it became truth.\nWhen you can lie like that, I set myself up for the biggest lie I was ever going to tell.\nThe lie that almost killed me.\nThe lie that this time I can take a drink.\nAnd it'll be all right.\nThis time I can take a drink and I'll be able to control it.\nThis time I'll take a drink and I won't hur-hur.\nI won't do that or I won't go there.\nAnd I believed that lie.\nAlmost to the point of death.\nI was a thief as far back as I can remember.\nI didn't think I looked like a thief.\nYou know, I just thought I was a short, fat Robin Hood, I guess.\nI just sort of...\nI might go over to Dick and take something from Dick.\nAnd I never thought about the fact that he'd earned money to pay for that and that was his.\nI'd turn around and give it to Jeff.\nNow, I'd give it to Jeff because Jeff would like me and want me to be around.\nNow, if one of you would have pointed out to me that I was trying to buy somebody's friendship or buy their relationship,\nI'd have said, you're crazy.\nAnd yet I was doing just that.\nAnd that didn't make me an alcoholic.\nIt just made me a thief and made you want to lock your stuff up when I was around.\nI had all that going on before I ever started school.\nThen I went to the first grade.\nThe first grade was a real experience.\nI was born in a Midwest city.\nI was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in a suburb of it.\nAnd I went to a parochial school.\nA lot of you know that means Catholic.\nSo I went to this Catholic school.\nAnd I had a nun there.\nHer name was Sister Lucy.\nAnd I can only...\nI can best describe her as sort of early S&M.\nYeah, yeah.\nYou got to picture her.\nLet me draw the picture of how she looked.\nShe wore this black.\nThey called it a habit.\nAnd she wore this thing.\nThis thing covered her from head to toes.\nShe wore black boots.\nShe had this white thing here.\nHer head was covered.\nShe looked mean.\nAnd she had leather and chains hanging down to those boots.\nAnd it made noise when she walked.\nAnd I was scared of her.\nAnd halfway through the first grade, they called my parents in.\nAnd they were going to have a parent-teacher conference.\nThey said, you know, I didn't know why.\nI figured I'd done something wrong.\nWhenever anybody called them in, I'd done something.\nI didn't know what it was.\nSo I stood outside the door and I sort of eavesdropped.\nI always was nosy.\nAnd I listened to what she said.\nAnd she told them that it appeared as though I was a very gifted child.\nThat I had a high intelligence and I'd be able to go anywhere or do anything.\nAnd as soon as I heard that, my education stopped.\nAs soon as I heard I was that smart, I couldn't learn nothing.\nAnd I started getting in trouble.\nYou know, when I got to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was surrounded by dummies here.\nI was so damn smart, I almost died.\nAfter John started talking to me, I realized how stupid I really was.\nMaybe the word is ignorant.\nBecause ignorant is different from stupid.\nIgnorant means you just don't know.\nStupid means you know, but you decide to do differently.\nSo I guess I was just ignorant, you know.\nBut anyhow, there I was getting in trouble and I didn't want to be that way.\nMind you, I hadn't took a drink yet.\nI was just normal.\nAnd I started getting in trouble and I didn't like my home.\nI didn't feel that I was a member there.\nI didn't feel my parents loved me.\nIn that inventory, I thought my mother and father hated me.\nThat I wasn't in that family.\nAnd yet I'm sure that they did love me.\nI saw them give my sisters.\nI have three sisters and I have a baby brother.\nAnd I saw my sisters and my brother given physical love, given emotional love.\nI'm sure that I was given the very same thing.\nAnd yet there was something inside of me that kept me from ever receiving it or feeling it.\nAnd has kept me from ever remembering it.\nAnd I think that's a part of alcoholism.\nYet it did not make me alcoholic.\nIt just made me screwed up.\nAnd because of that going on in my head and not feeling like I belonged, I started running away.\nAnd the more I ran away, the more trouble I got into.\nAnd one day I wound up in front of a juvenile referee at about nine or ten years old.\nAnd he sent me off to an orphanage.\nNow that doesn't make sense.\nSend a guy who's got a family to an orphanage.\nI thought orphanages were for orphans.\nWhen I got there, I found out there weren't no orphans there.\nThey were just guys like me.\nYou see, that juvenile referee labeled me.\nHe called me incorrigible.\nNow I didn't know what incorrigible meant.\nI know what it means now.\nIt's a multi-syllable word. It means punk.\nI was just a punk they sent off.\nWith these other punks.\nAnd I thought they were punishing me.\nAnd they weren't doing it to punish me.\nThey were sending me to this place so that I would change.\nAnd so that I would be better.\nAnd so that I could fit into life as I was supposed to fit.\nAs God intended for me to fit into life.\nBut I didn't know that.\nI always perceived it to be as they were punishing me.\nThey were doing something to me, not for me.\nTo make a long story short,\nI stayed in one institution after another from then until I was 17 and a half years old.\nAnd I didn't want it to be that way.\nEvery time I'd get out I'd do something and go back in.\nGo somewhere else.\nThey'd send me there, send me here.\nAnd I didn't want it to be that way.\nAnd then at 13 a miracle came into my life.\nI decided to drink.\nI'm sure that I had alcohol in me many, many times prior to age 13.\nI'm sure of it because of how we lived.\nMy dad was a drinker.\nAnd I don't mean just a sipper once or twice a year.\nI mean he drank morning, noon, and night.\nI never saw him without a drink.\nI never saw him drunk.\nBut I always saw him drinking.\nHe was a news commentator for a radio station.\nHe had a coast-to-coast hookup.\nAnd he was a big shot in that city.\nAnd people knew him and he traveled in big circles.\nAnd his behavior just didn't get him in trouble.\nSo I just never knew him to be drunk.\nMy mother drank every night.\nShe'd have one or two drinks to relax.\nSo I never saw her out of the way.\nAnd the family got together.\nUncles and aunts and all those people get together\nand they'd drink heavily three or four times a year.\nThey'd have kegs of beer and wine and mixed drinks.\nAnd when they'd get together,\nall the kids from the different families would be there\nand we'd be given alcohol.\nWe'd be given drinks.\nA little wine or a little beer or a little mixed drink,\nwatered down.\nIt was just whatever they had, we were given.\nSo we didn't steal, it was just given to us.\nAnd I remember nothing at all about it.\nAnd I guess if I was talking to one of you,\nyou would explain to me that that was my social drinking.\nBecause that's really how social drinkers drink.\nI was married to a social drinker for 34 years.\nI studied them.\nI mean, they studied us, but I studied them.\nShe, you know how social drinkers are.\nIf you ask one of them if they'd like a drink,\na lot of times they say no.\nWhen they say yes, they usually don't finish it.\nI mean, I think they're nuts.\nAnd that was me up until 13.\nAlcohol did nothing to me or for me, so it meant nothing.\nI don't remember anything about it.\nBut at 13, I decided to drink.\nYou know how you had to be 21 years old to drink.\nHell, I didn't look 13.\nI hadn't cultivated my first zit yet, you know.\nSo I knew I wasn't old enough to drink.\nSo along with stealing money out of my mother's purse\nso I could get something to drink, I stole an eyebrow pencil.\nAnd I gave myself a beard and a mustache.\nJust sort of dotted it on.\nIt was sort of like a George Clooney 5 o'clock shadow, you know.\nI remember doing it.\nI don't know what it looked like.\nIt had to look really wonderful, you know what I mean.\nAnd if it had rained, it would have looked good.\nI headed down to the lower end of 25th Street in Cleveland,\nwhich is a skid row.\nSort of like what East Baltimore Street used to be here.\nYou know, just a skid row.\nAnd you know, if you get onto a skid row,\nyou go to enough of them gin mills and put your money on the bar,\neventually you get what you want.\nAnd we went to enough of them.\nWe got what we wanted.\nWe got two bottles of mixed screwdrivers\nand two bottles of Thunderbird wine.\nI don't really know why we ordered that.\nI can only surmise.\nScrewdrivers, because it sounded so sexy.\nLike there was a promise there.\nI had no idea what the promise was, but it sounded good.\nAnd Thunderbird, because of what I'd learned about it.\nThere was a billboard.\nI used to see it on the bus when I'd go down 25th.\nAnd this billboard had a picture of a bottle of Thunderbird\nand it showed that bird just soaring through the air,\njust promising something, you know.\nAnd the words I'd learned for it, you know,\nwhat's the word?\nThunderbird!\nBy God, it promised excitement.\nIf you think I'm kidding, try and get yourself fired up with Mogan David.\nThere's just a ring to it.\nAnd it was the price.\nThe price was very attractive.\nI was able to afford it for many, many years.\nThat stuff was so cheap.\nNow, I don't even know if it's still on the market.\nIt probably is.\nIt was so cheap.\nBut they put it on the lowest shelf like they're begging you to steal it.\nYou know, we don't care. Take it.\nWe went out behind some bushes and we started to drink.\nDon't know which one it was.\nDon't know what it tasted like.\nBut I know what happened shortly after we started with whichever one we started with.\nFor the first time in my life, all the bad feelings went away and I was okay.\nI never felt okay in my life.\nAnd I felt okay and that everything was going to be all right.\nAnd I never got that feeling back again.\nI didn't even know that I got it then until I looked back at my life.\nThat feeling had to be so fantastic because the pursuit of that feeling cost me everything that I was to have.\nAnd I never got it back that way again.\nAnd then some things happened.\nI got up the next morning in a way that I was going to wake up in over and over again until I got to you people.\nI woke up in a mess and it was mine.\nI woke up with a new fear.\nAnd I didn't wake up and say, well, Jay, you got a new fear today.\nIt wasn't that way at all.\nI just woke up.\nI woke up and I was sick.\nAnd, you know, as I was taking that inventory I was telling you about, I had them people down who I hated and why I hated them.\nWhen I had that all done, John had me look at that inventory again.\nAnd he said, now, he said, we're going to look and see how each of that affected you.\nAnd we'll take that first guy, Siraj, and how it affected me.\nIt affected my self-esteem because I knew I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do as a father and as a husband and in my work.\nI just wasn't doing what I should.\nIt affected my security because I was broke.\nIt affected my sex life.\nWell, I told you how.\nIt affected every area of my life and I put it down just the way the book outlined it.\nAnd I did that with each and every resentment on that list.\nAnd then John said, now we're going to go back and look at it from a different angle.\nWe're going to put out of our mind the wrongs you think others have done.\nOr that they have done.\nBecause they could be real.\nThat people have done things to me.\nIt wasn't like I was always wrong.\nHe said, but put out of the mind what they have done to you.\nAnd look and see what you have done to them.\nWhat could you have said differently or done differently?\nAnd I looked at that first resentment against Siraj and said, I've done nothing against him.\nI've done nothing to hurt him.\nAnd John suggested that I pray about it.\nHe said, ask God to help you if there might have been something you could have said or done differently.\nAnd I will tell you what I found.\nI found that, I told you I was a marine engineer.\nI went to sea for a living.\nI was not a gemologist.\nI went into business with these guys strictly to try and make money.\nI had a lot of greed there.\nI thought I was going to be a multi-millionaire and I'd get their money.\nThey were involved with money in Germany and I thought I'd be able to get my hands on it and I'd get their money.\nAnd as soon as I saw my greed, my selfishness in the picture, what they had done or what I thought they had done no longer made me angry.\nMy anger went away when I saw my part in the wrong.\nAnd it did something else too.\nYou know, this guy, this Siraj, by what we had done, he was never going to see his family again.\nHe'd never see his home country again.\nIf he ever went back, he'd go to jail for a long, long time.\nSo I'd robbed him of that because of my behavior.\nSo I looked at that and my anger for him left.\nDid I like him or do I like him today?\nIt's not necessary that I do.\nIt's necessary that I don't hate him and that I'm able to love him.\nAnd that inventory did something else with that.\nBy looking at what I had done wrong, I had a game plan right in front of me for what I was going to have to do to make it right.\nBecause I had to do the opposite of what I did wrong to make it right.\nI did what I was supposed to do when I got to that step with Siraj and was able to make it right.\nI can talk to him today or if I see him today, I'm not ashamed, I'm not embarrassed because I did what I was supposed to do when I got to step eight and nine with that.\nBut anyhow, there was that inventory and every single one of those instances of every resentment,\nI was able to find my part in the wrong.\nAnd as I found my part in the wrong, the anger that was deep inside of me went away.\nAnd then John had me look at fear.\nAnd I listed my fears as he told me to do.\nI put down what I was afraid of.\nI was afraid she was leaving.\nI was afraid she wasn't leaving.\nDon't get me wrong, it was the same she.\nIt was different times of the day.\nI was afraid I wasn't going to be able to work or go back to work or make a living.\nI had all kinds of fears, real and imagined, but they were there.\nAnd I wrote them down and John said, now I ask God to remove them.\nAnd I got on my knees and I prayed again and asked God to take them.\nAnd I got up off my knees and told John I was still afraid.\nAnd he said, Jay, what are you afraid of?\nI said, I don't know. I'm just afraid.\nAnd I was the most honest I'd ever been.\nAnd John opened up the book to Bill's story where Bill talks about that fear of impending calamity.\nAnd John took those Gothic words and put it into words that made sense to me.\nHe said, that's the fear that something bad is going to happen and you can't stop it.\nHell, I knew that fear.\nI'd had that fear all the way through my life, as far back as I could remember.\nAnd as my alcoholism progressed, that fear grew.\nAnd that fear would have killed me had I not found sobriety.\nI can't live with that fear.\nI'd escape from it for periods of time and it'd come back stronger than ever.\nYou know, I make 12-step calls whenever I have the opportunity.\nAnd I love making 12-step calls and being able to tell somebody about me in the hopes it'll give them hope.\nAnd in making 12-step calls, if you're not making them, you miss a heck of an opportunity.\nAnd you can see that fear every time you make one.\nI go to a guy's house. He doesn't have electricity.\nThere's no food for his kids. Doesn't have gas for a car, if he has a car.\nAbout to be evicted, but by God, he's got a cell phone. We'll call her I.D.\nUnderstand that fear.\nI got back on my knees and I asked God to take it and that fear was removed.\nAnd in large part, it's been removed from then until now.\nIt occasionally comes back.\nAnd I'll start to get feelings of that fear.\nThere's beginnings of that fear.\nAnd I have to look at my life and see what I'm not doing that I should be doing\nor what I am doing that I shouldn't be doing.\nAnd then I ask God to help me with that and ask the fear to be gone.\nAnd it's gone. So that fear comes back as a wake-up call because I know I cannot live with it.\nYou know, there's a third part of the inventory.\nI'm going to just mention it before I go on to where I was.\nThe third part of the inventory is as important or more important,\nif there is such a thing, as the other two parts.\nAnd that's about sex.\nThe book spends three pages talking about sex.\nIt spends nearly that much time talking about resentment and fear.\nAnd the way it talks about it makes sense to me.\nIn the writing of it, it says,\nWe all have problems there. We'd hardly be human if we didn't.\nYou know, that closes all loopholes.\nI don't know anyone that isn't human.\nSo it says, What do we do about it?\nIt says, We can talk to other people about it. That's okay.\nBut avoid a hysterical advice.\nSome will say, No flavor for your fare.\nOthers say, All-pepper diet.\nMy sponsor told me that he didn't know what was right for me,\nwhat was between me and God.\nAnd all I was to do was list my behavior.\nAnd after I listed my behavior,\nto ask God to help me to shape a sane and safe sex ideal.\nAnd to write it down.\nAnd for the very first time in my life,\na year and a half sober,\nI put down a standard for my sex life.\nIt wasn't very much,\nbut it was a whole lot compared to what I'd had.\nBecause I'd never had a standard.\nIt was always, If it felt good or I wanted to, do it.\nThere was nothing else that got in there.\nAnd now I had a standard.\nAnd once I had a standard, I could improve on that standard.\nBill talks about growing in the sunlight of the Spirit.\nThat means that I have to have something to grow.\nSo I had a standard, and I was able to improve on that standard.\nAnd it has stood me in good stead.\nSo if you have not worked that part of the inventory,\nI strongly suggest that you do.\nDon't ignore it.\nDon't say, Oh, well, there's nothing wrong here.\nUnless you ain't human.\nAnyhow, there I was, 13, and there was a third thing\nthat was wrong that morning.\nAnd that was the fact that I didn't remember\nwhat happened the night before,\nand what I had to drink.\nNow again, if one of you would have explained to me\nthat what I'd had was a blackout,\nI'd have said, You're crazy.\nI didn't have a blackout. I just don't remember.\nI didn't know that blackouts and not remembering\nwere the same thing.\nAnd don't get me wrong.\nYou don't have to have blackouts to be an alcoholic.\nThere's a lot of people as seriously alcoholic as I\nwho have never had a blackout.\nBut on the other hand, I've never met an individual\nwho had a blackout related to drinking\nthat was not an alcoholic.\nBut if you'd have pointed that out to me\nthat I had these symptoms of alcoholism,\nI'd have said, You're crazy.\nHow can I be an alcoholic?\nAnd I wouldn't have listened.\nI got locked up shortly after that,\nwent back to another reformatory\non an indefinite sentence.\nI ran away from there at 17 and a half years old,\nwent down on a skid row and got signed into the Navy.\nWent away to boot camp.\nAnd I found out what happened.\nWhat the law did as soon as I left that place,\nran away from that place,\nthey went to my parents' house.\nThey wanted me back. I was an escaped criminal.\nThey wanted me to stay in the Navy.\nThey petitioned the juvenile authorities\nto allow me to stay in the Navy\nin the hopes that the next three years\nof a semi-controlled environment\nwould help me become a productive human being.\nI didn't know they did that.\nIf I'd have known they'd done that,\nthe thought in my mind would have been\ndon't mess with my business.\nLeave me alone. Let me do it my way.\nI don't need your help.\nYou just don't understand.\nYou see, that was a refrain that went around\nand around in my head all the time.\nIt just drove me nuts with that.\nPeople would say, well, can you talk about it?\nI couldn't talk about it. They didn't understand.\nSo anyhow, I went off to the Navy.\nI was going to go in the Navy\nand make a career of it.\nWell, the career didn't last long.\nIt lasted five months and 29 days.\nI remember my parents came up\nfor the graduation of boot camp.\nAnd that's not a big deal,\nbut it was a big deal to them.\nAnd they came up and watched this ceremony\nand then they took me into Chicago\non a 12-hour pass.\nThey looked over at me and said,\nson, you're not old enough to drink,\nbut if you're old enough to be in the service,\nI'll buy you a drink. What would you have?\nAnd you know, I got a glow inside of me\nbecause now my dad and I were going to be drinking buddies.\nHe'd always drank and we were going to drink together\nand I said, I'll have a beer.\nAnd God, I felt good.\nAnd he ordered me a beer and he ordered himself\na cup of coffee and my mother a Coca-Cola.\nI looked at him like, what, are you nuts?\nI said, aren't you drinking?\nHe said, no, I'm not.\nAnd my mother said, your dad doesn't drink anymore.\nI said, yes.\nLet me tell you how my dad got sober.\nMy dad got sober in a place called\nRosary Hall.\nWhen he went in there,\nhe was in convulsions and he stayed there\nfive days in convulsions in a hallway.\nHe almost died. They thought he would die\nand they wouldn't put him in a room,\nbut when he came out of convulsions,\nthey kept him one more day and they discharged him.\nAnd Sister Ignatia gave him that little thing\nthey give him when they leave and she suggested\nto him that he go with his sponsor,\nAlcoholics Anonymous, and that if he'd do\nwhat you told him to do, he would never have to\ncome off another drunk.\nAnd he went with his sponsor to Alcoholics Anonymous\nand he did what you told him to do\nand he didn't have to drink from that day\nuntil the day he died in 1981.\nMy dad listened to you.\nNow, I did not see him offering me a drink\nas an act of unconditional love.\nI mean, him not drinking with me\nas an act of unconditional love,\nbut I saw the fact that he wasn't drinking.\nI saw that he didn't want to drink with me,\nthat he wasn't my friend.\nAnd I thought to myself, I looked at my watch\nand thought to myself, how soon can I be away\nfrom these people, meet my friends, and drink?\nWhen you talk to me about selfishness\nand self-centeredness being the root\nof my problem, I have no trouble\nat all accepting it.\nAll I have to do is look at my life.\nAnd I got away from these people\nand met my friends and I drank.\nAnd I woke up the next morning the same way\nI woke up the last time I drank.\nSame fear, same not remembering\nwhat happened the night before.\nSame mess.\nI told you my career in the Navy\nwas not that long.\nFive months and 29 days after I went in,\nI was in front of a board.\nThe last thing I remembered, I was on a ship\ncalled the USS Antietam.\nIt was an aircraft carrier in Pensacola, Florida.\nAnd I'd come ashore on a pass\nand that was the last time I remembered.\nAnd I woke up inside a room,\nand it was much smaller than this,\nbut it was a big room and it had big screens\non the inside of the windows\nthat you couldn't get through.\nAnd it was a nut ward of the Naval Hospital\nin Pensacola, Florida.\nIf I signed it, I'd get an honorable discharge.\nIf I didn't sign it, I'd be court-martialed\nand dishonorably discharged.\nEasy decision, I signed the paper.\nThen I asked them what it was.\nAnd they said it was a guarantee.\nI'd never attempt to re-enlist\nin any of the armed forces as long as I lived.\nI was a lousy sailor.\nWell, I can tell you this,\nthat was 47 years ago\nand I have kept my word.\nI ain't been back.\nThey told me,\nI was a lousy sailor,\nand they said I had what they would term\nto be acute alcoholism.\nThey said by that we mean\nwhen you drink, you get in trouble.\nLike that was a real news flash to me.\nI knew I got in trouble when I drank,\nbut see, they didn't understand.\nThey didn't know why.\nThey thought drinking got me in trouble,\nand drinking didn't get me in trouble,\nyou got me in trouble.\nIf you wouldn't pick on me,\nif you wouldn't say that to me,\nif you'd give me a break,\nthat wasn't the cause of it.\nYou were the cause of it.\nI was the kind of guy who could sit in a bar,\nand I remember doing it.\nI'd go into a bar and I'd sit there\nand I'd sit by the jukebox.\nI love country music, always have.\nIt's always got a message to it for a drunk, you know.\nGreat songs.\nI've heard so many good songs.\nThere's one from a number of years ago.\nEvery once in a while I still think of it.\nIt's just a great song.\nNever heard it drunk, but I heard it sober,\nand it's a great song.\nIf you listen to that song,\nit makes sense,\nif you be alcoholic.\nBut anyhow, I'd be sitting there in a bar\njust listening to that music and thinking\nand, you know, worrying,\nbecause you can think and worry and cry a little bit\nand drink, and just me and the bartender.\nAnd all of a sudden I'd look up,\nand back in the corner there'd be two of them,\nand they'd be talking about me.\nI knew they were.\nSee, when you talk about selfishness and self-centeredness,\nI understand.\nI thought they were, and because I thought they were,\nthey had to be.\nAnd I'd go back to do something about it,\nand I'd get beat up.\nI'd always been a fighter.\nI'd never been a winner, you know.\nAnd I'd get back to the ship beat up,\nwake up next morning bloody and bruised,\nand I didn't want it to be that way.\nBut anyhow, these guys told me that if I quit then,\nI'd have a good life ahead of me,\nand if I continued, it wouldn't be long,\nand I'd be chronic.\nI ain't even quite 18 yet, and they're telling me that.\nChronic.\nI see my parents for what was to be,\nto stay with them for what was to be the last time.\nI bought a car when I got up there,\ngot my very first driver's license on my 18th birthday,\nand got a car, an old Studebaker,\nand I remember going out to celebrate my birthday.\nAnd I woke up the next morning the same way\nI woke up when I drank,\nwoke up in that mess, woke up with that fear.\nMy surroundings were a little different now, though,\nbecause there were bars on the door.\nI hadn't been in jail before.\nAnd they had given me eight traffic violations,\nstarting with drunk driving\nand ending with hitting an officer.\nIt seems like they accuse little guys of hitting cops.\nBig guys they never accuse.\nAll of those small guys get picked on.\nBut they gave me all these tickets,\nand they let me out of jail on my own recognizance,\nbecause my mother was clerk of courts in that suburb.\nAnd I went over to her house, went to her house,\nand as I walked in, God, I felt terrible.\nAs I walked in, she was sitting there crying.\nAnd my sister was sitting with her.\nMy younger sister was sitting with her.\nAnd my mother was crying, and I said,\nwhat's wrong? Because the thought in my mind,\nwhy is she crying? I'm the one who just got out of jail.\nI ought to be crying.\nAnd she looked at me,\nand by then my dad had been sober,\nI can, about nine months,\nand my mother said,\nI'm pregnant.\nAnd I'm crying because I'm afraid\nthis child inside of me will be a boy.\nAnd I would rather have it\nbe born dead\nthan be another boy like you.\nYou know, I always thought to myself,\nand would tell people,\nthe only one I'm hurting is me.\nI was 18 then, and I was to say,\nI'm only hurting myself.\nI'm not hurting no one else.\nI said that until I got here.\nSaid it for a while after I got here.\nBut if I look at my life,\nunder the magnifier of truth,\nI know that I've hurt everyone with whom I've come in contact.\nAnyhow, I left her house,\nand I didn't know what to do,\nso I went in a merchant marine.\nThey said I was a lousy sailor.\nWhen you tell me I can't do something, I do it.\nI had an injury that took me out of it.\nAnd I got on my first ship, and it was heaven.\nI was around these guys that knew everything,\nabout everything, and we went over to Japan,\nand I went ashore, and I took a drink,\nand they came and got me three days later out of jail.\nCaptain brought me back to the ship, and he logged me.\nThat's a disciplinary action.\nI was real upset about it. I thought it was really bad news.\nBut he put it in the logbook, and he said I was fired.\nAnd that doesn't mean a hell of a lot,\nbecause you ain't gonna walk home from Japan.\nAnd these guys on the ship explained to me\nwhat all that was. They said,\nit don't make no difference. We usually all get fired,\nand the ones that don't quit anyhow.\nIt's just a tramp freighter.\nAt that time, we had about 300 ships under union agreement,\nand every ship was a separate entity.\nThat meant if I got fired from one,\nanother one couldn't refuse me.\nYou know, I wasn't in no responsible position there.\nSo I thought to myself, did the math real quick.\nNormal voyage, three or four months.\n300 ships, 1,200 working.\nHell, I won't live long enough to run out of ships.\nAnd you got paid an awful lot of money.\nNow, they didn't pay you very much money per hour back then,\nbut they didn't give it to you when you earned it.\nYou didn't get it until the end of the voyage.\nAnd then they give it to you in $100 bills.\nNow, that's good for an alcoholic ego, I'll tell you that.\nI'd go out and buy me a nice suit,\nand go on Skid Row, and I'd drink,\nand I was better than the people I was drinking with.\nAnd when I'd run out of money, I'd ship out again.\nAnd that was to be a way of life for a while.\nAnd I wanted things to be different.\nI wanted it to improve.\nSo I stopped drinking for a short period of time,\nand I read a lot of books, and I was able to pass the test\nof becoming that licensed engineer in the merchant marine.\nI was able to pass that test, and my drinking resumed.\nAnd I thought that that would make things different.\nIt didn't. Things kept getting worse.\nAnd then I thought to myself one day, I said,\nwell, you know, if I got married, things would be better.\nMarried people never have the problems that I have.\nSo if I get married, things will be all right.\nSo I was sitting in a bar one day,\nshopping for a wife, and she walked in.\nAt that stage in my life,\nall I ever did was drink and go to sea.\nSo I'm sitting there, and she walked in,\nsat down next to me, a little bitty old redhead,\nfirst human being.\nI'd seen smaller than me.\nSat down in a chair next to me,\nand by God, she was mad.\nI looked over at her, and I said,\ncan I buy you a drink?\nI recognized that anger.\nShe said, no, I don't drink.\nWell, it was true love right from the get-go.\nI could not afford another drinker. I knew that.\nShe got a Coca-Cola,\nand I hauled them $100 bills out of my pocket\nand sort of spread them all out.\nAnd I began to lie, and she began to listen.\nAnd after a lengthy courtship, I proposed to her.\nNow, if she were here and you were able to ask her,\nshe'd tell you it was about 10 minutes.\nI personally think it was 20 minutes.\nI think alcoholics take a long time\nwith heavy decisions.\nWe don't rush into things.\nBut anyhow, I found out why she was mad.\nShe was mad because she hated men.\nShe had a husband that had beaten her\nand abused her very severely.\nShe had a baby just a few months old,\nanother one four years old.\nShe hated men, she hated drinking, she hated life.\nNow, there's a challenge.\nAnd I began to court her.\nAnd after a lengthy courtship, we got married.\nShe got divorced on October 14th of 1965,\nand we got married on October 15th.\nWhen I got married to her, you know,\nI told you I didn't drink off and on.\nAnd because of these off and on periods,\nI didn't think I was an alcoholic.\nI thought to be an alcoholic, you had to drink every day.\nAnd yet there was a period of time in my life\nwhen I didn't drink every day.\nIf I didn't take the first drink, I just didn't drink for a while.\nAnd if something was important, getting married, getting a license,\nsomething was important, I just didn't drink.\nThat was to leave as time progressed.\nMy alcoholism progressed, and time went by.\nThat seeming, and it isn't really ability,\nbut it seemed like ability to not drink for periods.\nAnyhow, that went away as time went on,\nbut it was there right then, and I'd had to quit drinking\nfor a while before we got married,\nbecause she didn't want to be married to a drinker,\nand we got married, and I remember the wedding.\nI went to the farmer's market, and I got our rings,\nand I went over, across the street\nto the candlelight flower shop on Congress Avenue\nin West Palm Beach, Florida.\nAnd I remember as I went in and negotiated the wedding,\nI'd been off the ship a while, didn't have much money,\nand they were going to have the daughter of the woman,\nthe Justice of Peace, was going to play the organ,\nand she was going to give my wife a corsage,\nand we had witnesses there,\nand I got her down for a lot less money.\nThe bond got one rose, a sort of lousy old rose,\nand they hummed, Here Comes the Bride.\nIt just wasn't much of a wedding, you know.\nAnd I say it in a humorous way,\nand it wasn't a humorous thing for me then.\nIt was real serious.\nYou see, I didn't know what the word divorce was.\nNone of my family had ever been divorced.\nI never knew anyone who was divorced.\nYou know, I'd hear about somebody.\nSo divorce, I just thought when you got married,\nyou got married and you stayed married.\nThat's not a pitch for that.\nIt's just the way I thought then.\nSo, you know, we got married, and I'm thinking about the marriage,\nand I'm going to be these things to her she's never had.\nI'm going to be this husband that's faithful to her\nand that supports her and that gives her\nall the things that she's not had.\nI'm going to be a daddy to these kids.\nI never had a daddy.\nI'm going to be their daddy.\nThat little boy, Ricky, hanging onto my leg,\ncrying and saying, Please be my daddy.\nGod, I wanted to be his daddy.\nHolding Kim in my arms,\nI was going to be this little girl's daddy,\nand I was going to be all the things to her\nthat daddies are to little girls.\nAnd if you'd have told me that alcoholism\nwould keep me from it, I'd have said you're crazy.\nI thought my wanting to do it was enough.\nI thought my will, my want,\nwas able to make me do it.\nI didn't know that I had lack of power in that area.\nJust didn't know it.\nDidn't know when I took a drink.\nI had no choice.\nAnd now we left that little ceremony,\nwent over to her aunt's house, and they had a reception.\nReception wasn't much.\nIt was just family people there.\nNone of my family, of course, was all hers.\nAnd it was down the floor, and they had this little reception.\nAnd I walked in, and they gave me a glass,\nand I took a drink.\nAnd it was punch.\nI hate punch.\nI'd been to weddings a long time before I got married.\nI didn't know who got married.\nI'd just look in the paper.\nYou go to Baltimore or Cleveland,\nI'm serious, dress about like I am now,\nlook halfway decent, and you walk in,\nand you can drink all night,\nas long as you don't throw up or hit anybody.\nThey're huge.\nPolish and Italian weddings are the very best.\nThey're huge.\nYeah, I'm with them. Nobody knows.\nBut I'm at my own wedding,\nand I heard nothing to drink.\nThey gave me this punch, and I got mad.\nSo I got mad, and I grabbed my new wife,\nand I left the wedding.\nWent off on our two-day honeymoon to Miami.\nWe're driving, and I stopped at a liquor store,\nand I got a bottle to celebrate my wedding.\nNow, she didn't drink, and I did.\nAnd I wanted to celebrate with somebody,\nso I picked someone up who was a bum on the side of the road.\nHe got in the car, and we passed the bottle back and forth\nacross my new wife.\nAnd I woke up the next morning the same way\nI woke up in every time I drank by then.\nI woke up in a mess, and it was mine.\nWoke up with that fear inside of me,\nnot remembering what happened the night before.\nAnd she was laying there next to me crying.\nAnd I'm going to talk about the crying.\nIt's that deep down sobbing.\nEveryone in here has either heard it or done it.\nAnd you know how badly you want to stop it when you hear it.\nAnd there's nothing I could do,\nand I felt so helpless and powerless with it.\nAnd I looked at her, and I said,\nI'm sorry.\nI said, what did I do? And I'm sorry.\nAnd she told me what I had done.\nAnd she told me, she said,\nI'll not live this way anymore.\nI lived this way before, and I will not live this way again.\nAnd then I took a vow.\nI swore to her\nthat if she'd give me just one more chance,\nI would never behave that way again.\nAnd she believed me.\nAnd she gave me a chance.\nAnd she was to give me that chance\nover and over and over again\nuntil March the 8th, 1974.\nI cannot tell you\nhow many times.\nI can't tell you\nhow that marriage stayed together.\nI can only guess.\nI can guess because when I'd be gone,\nand I'd be gone for three months or six months,\none time in that period, I was gone for a year.\nAnd I would write her letters and tell her that I loved her\nand tell her that I needed her and that I wanted her\nand that I'd be good to her.\nAnd I meant what I wrote. They weren't fairy tales.\nIt was truth. And I'd write every single day.\nAnd even though we couldn't send mail every day,\nshe'd get a big flocks of it at a time.\nShe'd read this, and she would believe it\nbecause it would be the truth.\nAnd yet, when I'd go to the ship to get in,\nwherever it got into, and I'd fly home,\nshe'd see me coming off the plane, and she'd have the kids with her.\nShe'd be smiling and happy\nand she got close enough to where she could smell me.\nBecause I was drunk.\nAnd the hope would go out of her eyes\nas though you hit her with a bucket of ice water.\nAnd I didn't want it to be that way.\nAnd things got worse.\nI can't tell you the horrors that went on over those next years,\nbut it was absolutely terrible.\nIt was a nightmare for everybody involved.\nA son was born to this marriage in 1968.\nHe's a spitting image of me at any given age.\nSo I know that he's mine.\nYet I remember nothing at all about his birth\nor the first few years of his life.\nAnd that's how my alcoholism progressed.\nIn 1973, I was blackballed out of the industry that I thought,\nthe business, the work that I did,\nthat I thought I could never lose that job.\nThey blackballed me out of it for chronic alcoholism.\nThey labeled me a performer.\nThey didn't want to say alcoholic.\nThey thought it'd affect their union contracts\nwhere they got guys running ships that are drunk.\nSo they just said performer.\nThat meant lack of performance.\nThey never knew if I was coming, when I was coming,\nwhat I'd do when I got there.\nThey just knew it'd be different, it wouldn't be good.\nI couldn't come back in unless I proved I could stay sober.\nThat was in 1973.\nMarch the 7th of 1974,\nI found myself knocking on a man's back door\nwho lived 1,200 miles away from where we lived.\nAnd when he answered the door,\nthe first words out of my mouth were,\nI think I have a problem drinking.\nI'd never said that to anybody at any time in my life.\nI don't know where it came from.\nAnd he laughed.\nWhat a gift laughter is.\nHe laughed and he invited me into his house,\nsat me down on a couch in his study,\nread the book Alcoholics Anonymous.\nHe had me open it up and on the fly leaf\nthere were words written in ink that said,\nif you want what we have and are willing to go to any length\nto get it, God will help.\nAnd it was signed, Love, Dad.\nMy dad had been an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous\nas my alcoholism progressed.\nAnd he wanted to say something to me\nand he wanted to interfere with me.\nAnd you people told him, don't.\nYou said, leave him alone, let him go where he's got to go\nand do what he's got to do.\nDon't say anything because he will not hear you.\nHe hasn't listened to you before.\nDo it now and you might kill him.\nAnd I'm glad my dad listened to you.\nHad he not, had he tried to intervene or interfere,\nyou'd have another speaker this morning\nbecause I believe I'd never heard the message.\nI had a door to knock on and I knocked on\nand he asked me to come with him that night to a meeting.\nBut I wouldn't go because I was drunk\nand he tried to encourage me to go but I wouldn't go.\nSo he wrote two numbers down on a piece of paper\nand he said, put them in your billfold.\nHe said, tomorrow morning, he said, when you wake up,\ncall one of those numbers before you take a drink\nand then meet me tomorrow night and we'll go to a meeting.\nAnd I went out that night and I drank\nand I don't know where I went or what I drank.\nYou just know I drank because that's all I did by then was drink.\nDrink, pass out, go to sleep, whatever, wake up, drink.\nThat was all I did.\nAnd I woke up the next morning the same way\nI had always been waking up then.\nAnd there was a drink next to me\nbecause there was always a drink next to me.\nBut something was different.\nAs badly as I wanted to drink,\nI didn't want to drink just a little bit more.\nIn our meeting rooms, we see the slogans.\nAnd there's one that has particular importance to me\nand that's, but for the grace of God.\nI know what grace means.\nGrace comes from a Latin word that means gift.\nAnd I believe God's unasked for gift that morning\nwas that desire not to drink\nthat was stronger than the desire to drink.\nI had not said, God help me.\nI had said, help me to a man.\nAnd through him spoke God.\nThat came in the form of a desire,\nthe same desire that every single alcoholic in this room has.\nIt was given to me with a responsibility.\nA responsibility that I do everything I can to keep it\nor I would lose it.\nThe same responsibility that I have today.\nToday, I am able to do far more than I could then.\nThat first day, I couldn't do much.\nI just didn't drink and I was sick and I was shaking\nand I needed a drink and I wanted a drink, but I didn't drink.\nAnd she took me to the hospital.\nMy wife took me to the hospital and gave me a shot.\nBack then, the shots they gave you were vitamin B12.\nAnd to my knowledge, the needle was about,\noh, about that long.\nIt was square and I'm firmly convinced\nthat we have a tattooed spot on our left buttock\nwhere the nurse hits the needle.\nAnd they use that same spot every time just to get you.\nThey told me B12 would help me.\nI don't know if it did or not, but I didn't have to drink.\nAnd then they told me to give them honey and orange juice.\nWe had a terrible marriage at that time.\nDidn't get along and she wasn't happy.\nShe got K-Rose syrup and orange juice.\nNow, K-Rose syrup and orange juice in Ohio in March\nis sort of like frozen road tar.\nIt will cut your throat when you swallow it.\nThey said that that stuff would help me,\nthat it would help do the same thing that alcohol,\nthat the sugar and alcohol do,\nthat that sugar would help me and help my system.\nDon't know if it did or not, but it must have\nbecause I didn't drink.\nAnd then they told her, they said every time\nhe opens his mouth, if he acts a little grouchy,\nhe'd put hard candy in it.\nWell, she did. Sour balls.\nMy mouth was sucked in so bad,\nso if you're working with a new person,\nget him chocolate or something sweet.\nBe nice.\nStudy that.\nLove and tolerance is our code.\nShe hadn't heard about that, I guess.\nI don't know if it helped.\nIt must have. I didn't drink.\nAnd then that night I met my dad and we went to a meeting.\nIt was a meeting filled with people just like you.\nWe come in the back door and there's a guy standing there\nwith a baseball cap on and he stuck his hand out\nand grabbed mine and my father said,\nthat's Jimmy and he's your sponsor.\nMy father took off and I got this yo-yo\nout of my hand.\nI never want to forget his hand.\nI never want to forget it.\nJimmy gave me Alcoholics Anonymous.\nHe said, my name's Jimmy and I'm glad to meet you.\nAnd I can refill his hand today.\nAnd I knew that he was.\nAnd then he did something nobody else had ever done.\nHe began to talk to me about Alcoholics Anonymous\nin his life.\nHe told me how he drank and where it took him\nand what he did and how it got worse.\nAnd as he talked to me, while we should not have\ngotten along on any level.\nHe lived, he was from West Virginia.\nHe lived in Ohio, worked in an auto factory.\nWe had nothing in common. Absolutely nothing.\nBut as he talked to me about his alcoholism,\nwe had everything in common.\nAnd then some guy told his story.\nAnd I don't know what the guy said.\nIt was a speaker meeting. I don't know what he said.\nIt had to be funny because I remember laughing.\nBut it certainly wasn't a seminar. I know that.\nI found laughter is the greatest thing that's ever happened\nin Alcoholics Anonymous.\nYou know laughing is super. You can't be mad when you laugh.\nWhen you laugh, you can't even think.\nThere's people that put stuff in their body\nto make what happens when we laugh.\nWhen we laugh, endorphins get loose.\nI didn't know that. I thought endorphins were something weird.\nEndorphins get loose. I like it.\nRunners run for miles to get that feeling of endorphins.\nWe can laugh and get it.\nSo laughing is good, especially if you're thinking\nstart laughing. It'll stop bad things happening.\nI don't know. I read the book.\nI've never seen a chapter into thinking.\nI don't know. Maybe you have.\nBut anyhow, this meeting was over and Jimmy talked to me some more.\nAnd he introduced me to the winners in Alcoholics Anonymous.\nAnd the winners was everybody there.\nThey'd stick their hand out and they'd say,\nKeep coming, kid. You'll be all right.\nKeep coming, kid. You'll be all right.\nJimmy gave me Alcoholics Anonymous.\nAnd then Jimmy asked me how I felt and I told him.\nI told him I was sick and I was scared.\nAnd he said, I understand.\nAnd I knew that he did.\nFor the very first time in my life, I knew that somebody understood.\nAnd I have had that feeling from then till now\nfrom members of Alcoholics Anonymous that you understand.\nAnd he told me, he said, Jay, I'm going to make you a promise.\nI'll guarantee it.\nYou will never have to come off another drunk\nif you do three things on a daily basis.\nWill you do them? And I said, Sure. What are they?\nHe said, Number one, when you get up in the morning,\nsay, God, help me not take another drink.\nNumber two, if you can, go to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.\nAnd number three, when you go to bed,\nsay, Thank you, God, for a sober day.\nWill you do it?\nAnd I said, Jimmy, I can't.\nI can go to meetings when I can,\nbut I can't do the other because I can't pray.\nI'd had a God in my childhood.\nI'd believed in a God. I'd never had a faith,\nbut I had a belief in a God.\nI might have had a knowledge of a God.\nThen I just couldn't pray. I couldn't bring myself to it\nbecause I didn't know if God was or wasn't.\nI just didn't know. And he laughed.\nAnd he said, That's all right.\nYou don't have to pray.\nYou don't have to believe them.\nYou don't have to mean them. Just mouth them.\nI could do that.\nAnd I began to do that.\nI remember the next day, and don't get nervous.\nI'm not taking you through 28 years.\nIt's a day at a time.\nBut I'm going to take you a little bit here.\nThe very next day, we're on our way to a meeting.\nAnd it wasn't like he said, Do you want to go to a meeting?\nHe said, I'm picking you up, and we're going.\nThat's how they did it back then.\nSo he picked me up, and we're going to a meeting.\nAnd he said, Have you had a drink since last night?\nI said, Of course not.\nI've never been asked.\nHe didn't drop me off until 2 o'clock in the morning.\nI went to sleep.\nI got up at 6, and he called.\nMake sure I was going to the hospital.\nCalled me at 8 to make sure I got back from the hospital.\nGet another one of those shots.\nCalled me at 12, called me at 4, got me at 7.\nWhen did I have time to drink?\nI didn't tell him that.\nI just said, Of course not.\nAnd he said, Man, that's fantastic.\nI thought he was nuts.\nHe said, No, that's great.\nHe said, You know, you've just stayed sober.\nThis is the absolute longest period of time\nyou ever have to stay sober.\nIs he crazy?\nNo.\nHe said, One day is all we've got.\nWe only do this deal one day at a time,\nand you've just stayed sober for one day,\nand you never have to stay sober longer than that.\nAnd with that statement, he took away\nevery excuse for drinking.\nAll I've got to do is look at the history.\nIf I stayed sober one day, do what I do the next day.\nI don't have to drink.\nAnd I've only got to do it today.\nBut I ain't never got here.\nStill ain't never got here.\nStill just today.\nTwo weeks into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous,\nwe're coming home from a meeting,\njust before I went back to Florida.\nAnd I looked over at Jimmy, and I said,\nJimmy, I still don't believe in this God business.\nAnd he looked at me, and he asked me a series of questions.\nHe said, Jay, have you been doing what I told you\nto do every morning and every night?\nAnd I said, Yes, I have.\nI don't believe what I'm saying, but I'm saying it.\nI feel like a hypocrite when I'm saying it.\nThere's times that I've said,\nHelp me not take a drink, and I'd think about drinking.\nHe said, That's right. Thinking ain't drinking.\nYou've been doing it every day, haven't you?\nI said, Yes, I have.\nAnd it wasn't a question about going to meetings.\nHell, he'd been there every night.\nI went to a meeting every night.\nBy the time I knew I had a choice and didn't have none,\nI was already trapped into the rhythm.\nAnd there were never meetings of my convenience,\nyou know, so I could get Monday night football.\nNo, hell no.\nThey were always at 8 o'clock to break the rhythm.\n8 o'clock meetings are great.\nThey break the rhythm of a day worker, you know.\nJust about the time you're going to fight with her,\nyou're at a meeting. You're screwed.\nSo he said to me,\nBut you've been doing that every morning and every night?\nAnd I said, Yes, I have.\nHe said, Man, that's great.\nHe said, How long has it been?\nAnd I told him, I knew then 12 days or 14 days.\nI knew exactly, believe me.\nAnd I told him, He said, Man, that's fantastic.\nAnd they said, When was the last time\nyou've been this long a day at a time\nwithout taking a drink?\nAnd an awareness came over me\nthat I could only share with you\nwas the knowledge\nthat God was personal.\nThere was a power in my life\nthat was personal\nthat had allowed me not to drink\na day at a time\nfor that fantastically long period\nof 14 or 13 days, whatever it was.\nAnd from that awareness\nhas grown a relationship\nthat would take me 28 years\nto tell you about.\nAnd it's been absolutely fantastic.\nI didn't jump into the steps\nI told you that.\nIt was a year and a half before\nI was able to apply the steps\nthe way they're written in the book\nwith the help of a sponsor.\nBut once applied, things began to happen.\nWe started an inventory on Tuesday\nafter I left his house.\nBy Friday, I'm making amends.\nThe book says things like at once and next.\nIt doesn't say, Well, check with your sponsor\nin three months.\nBelieve me, I'm not here\nto ever take pot shots.\nI'm here for you.\nThen try something.\nThen just try what you see other people doing\nthat has worked for them.\nTry it.\nMy sponsor told me, he said,\nJay, if it ain't in the book, don't do it.\nNo matter what I tell you,\nwhat I suggest to you, he said,\nif it is not in the big book\nof Alcoholics Anonymous, do not do it.\nMany of the people that wrote the book\nor part of the book being written died sober.\nHe said people might tell you things\nnot in the book that can kill you.\nKeep me sober and keep me sober.\nWhat is Alcoholics Anonymous?\nBill talks about it in the 12 and 12.\nHe said Alcoholics Anonymous is a set of principles\nspiritual in their nature which,\nif practiced as a way of life,\ncan relieve the sufferer from the obsession to drink\nand enable him to become happily and usefully whole.\nThat is powerful.\nWhat's happened since I've been sober?\nEverything.\nWent back to sea, worked on the biggest ship\never built in the United States,\nwas in charge of it, had an injury, got knocked out of it,\nwent into sales, did well at that,\nwent bankrupt this year.\nFantastic life.\nMy kids and I get along great.\nMy oldest boy is 42.\nHe called me this morning at 7.15 from Puerto Rico.\nHe's on a tow boat over there\nto wish me Happy Father's Day.\nMy little girl called me.\nShe's 38 now.\nShe called me from Alabama on Friday before I left\nto wish me Happy Father's Day\nbecause she didn't know if she'd find me today.\nThe guy is 34. He's in Mexico.\nHe's married in Mexico. He's got a nice job.\nHe's coming back, but he called me\nand said, I'll be calling you Sunday.\nYou gave me that.\nMy wife and I had a fantastic marriage,\nhad good days and bad days,\ndays we wanted to be married,\ndays we wanted to be divorced.\nIt was just normal.\nI was able to learn how to become the husband I wanted to become,\nto be faithful and to be honorable\nand to give her the life that she wanted,\nto give her security.\nYou gave me the steps to do it.\nIn 1994, my wife had a stroke.\nIt took six years for my wife to die.\nShe was to have many, many strokes.\nThey found a disease inside of her, a blood disease\nthat was to kill her in six years.\nAnd she died six years later,\nand it was just a horrible time for her.\nShe wound up with breasts.\nShe wound up with a lot of different things in that six years.\nAnd yet I never heard that woman moan about it,\ncomplain about it.\nWe prayed together every morning.\nAnd we thanked God for the day that we had.\nWe'd ask him to help us to look through the windshield\nand not look in the rearview mirror.\nGrateful for what we have.\nShe died on July 12th of the year 2000.\nThe last words from her mouth to my ear were,\nI love you.\nAnd the last words from my mouth to her were,\nI love you.\nAnd I loved her.\nAnd I still love her.\nAnd it's a healthy love and a good love.\nAnd a friend of mine called me shortly after her death\nand he said,\nshe's dead.\nAnd she'll be just as dead in ten years as she is now.\nAnd you're not.\nAnd it helped me to accept her death.\nIt wasn't said in a cold way.\nIt was said in a loving way.\nI was surrounded by you people in Alcoholics Anonymous.\nEarlier this year I got married.\nAnd I'm able to be a husband\nbecause of what you have given me in Alcoholics Anonymous.\nBecause what she had given me,\nI know how to be a husband today.\nMy life has been fantastic.\nRelationship with my mom,\nthe woman that prayed the child inside of her\nwould be born dead rather than be a boy.\nOn that Sunday when I started taking that inventory,\nit started on Tuesday,\non that Sunday I called my mother for the very first time\nin many years.\nAnd my words to her were,\nhi mom, this is Jay.\nAnd she said, hi son.\nI said, it's been a while.\nShe said, yes it has.\nAnd I said, I gotta go.\nI'll call you next week.\nAnd I began to repair that relationship,\nwork that amend step in that relationship.\nAnd I began to be the son that I was supposed to be.\nAnd I would talk to her\nand I learned how to communicate with her.\nAnd by the time she died in 1999,\nthat relationship was whole and complete.\nShe lived in Ohio and I lived in South Carolina\nand I was going back and forth to see her\nevery time she got sick or she had diabetes\nit was just terrible near the end.\nAnd I remember that my sister called and said,\nwould you please come up, mom wants to see you.\nAnd she's really on her way out.\nAnd I flew up and I walk into the hospital room that evening\nand the nurses are hovering there and the doctors\nand my sisters are there.\nAnd my mother's laying there\nin the bed and as I walked in her face lit up\nas though a spotlight was there.\nJust lit up.\nAnd the nurse said, this must be your son\nthat you were talking about.\nAnd my mom said, yeah, that's my son Jay.\nAnd you know he's a member of Alcoholics Anonymous\nand he'll be sober 25 years this March\nif he doesn't drink.\nAnd he's the very best son a mom could ever have.\nYou gave me that by telling me\nhow to practice these steps as a way of life.\nBy telling me, don't say I'm sorry.\nBut repair the damage.\nMy dad, dad died in 1981.\nWhen dad died, my dad and I never had that fuzzy warm relationship\nthat I'd always wanted.\nMy dad was a very intellectually cold man.\nHe was an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous\nbut he was not the kind of guy that would ever hug a person.\nBut I did what I thought I could do\nand I talked to my sponsor.\nMy sponsor at the time, Brian.\nAnd I'd say, what can I do?\nMy dad was dying of cancer and it was a drawn out deal.\nAnd I'd say, what can I do?\nAnd he'd say, do what a loving son's supposed to do.\nAnd I said, what's that?\nAnd he said, if you're a loving son, you'll know.\nAnd I did what I was supposed to do\nand I left my dad die with dignity\nand I didn't try to interfere.\nAnd he died shortly after my 7th AA birthday.\nBut on my AA birthday, I received a card from my dad.\nAnd I couldn't read it.\nIt was all scribbles.\nIt was his loved dad.\nAnd a letter fell out from my mom.\nAnd the letter explained the card and it said\nyour dad wanted to communicate with you on your birthday.\nAnd he took himself off all his medication\nand he tried to write and he couldn't write.\nAnd she said she'd write.\nAnd it just didn't work.\nAnd at that point, he had accepted his coming death.\nHe told her, he said, Reid, I'm a sick man.\nI know I'm going to die.\nAnd my mom said, it's important you know\nwhat he was trying to say.\nShe said, congratulations, son.\nOn your AA birthday.\nWhat a glorious and wonderful day.\nAnd how can we ever be grateful enough,\nhe said,\nto the program of Alcoholics Anonymous\nand for all that it's given us.\nFor it's given us a loving God\nwho's returned a lost son\nand rediscovered a lost father.\nI knew then that everything was okay\nbetween me and dad and God.\nAnd I draw on that many, many times\nwhen things go on in my life.\nMy wife died when I, you know,\nthe money went away when things go on.\nI thought about that many, many times\nover the last 20, 21 years now.\nSince I got that card.\nHow can I be grateful enough to this deal\nwe call Alcoholics Anonymous?\nAnd I came to some conclusions.\nAnd I will close with the conclusions.\nI believe that Alcoholics Anonymous\nis a set of principles spiritual in their nature.\nI believe they were laid out in a book\nwe call Alcoholics Anonymous.\nAnd I believe that those principles\nwere given to Bill and Bob and the others\nthrough divine intervention.\nThey got them in the book\nand they passed those principles\nand the program on to other people\nwho gave it to other people,\nwho gave it to you, who gave it to me.\nEach and every one of us in that chain\ncharged with the same responsibility\nthat we do nothing to weaken it.\nWe do nothing to water it down.\nNothing to tweak it and make it better.\nBut to leave it just exactly\nthe way it was when we got it.\nAlcoholics Anonymous.\nSo there is a place for a guy or gal like you\nor a guy like me to go\nwho's got absolutely nowhere else to go.\nI will never be able to tell you\nhow grateful I am\nfor what you've given me with my God\nthrough Alcoholics Anonymous.\nThank you.