Why Knowledge of AA Is Useless Without Self-Knowledge – Vince Y.

Good evening, my name is Vince and I'm an alcoholic. I'd like to thank Suzy for asking me to talk. It's a privilege and an honor to speak here, as it is to speak anywhere, I guess especially here. And I'm glad I'm here tonight, and I're glad I am sober, and glad that I'm part of AA. I suppose I should tell you my medical story to start out with I want to get in the groove here, I want to be a part of. As always somebody like Rita Beam always outshines me I did not have, I was not fortunate enough to have gallbladder surgery last week. However I had my annual physical, which is as bad as gallbladder surgery if you're like me. I guess I'm approaching midlife crisis because I'm terrified of my annual physical. I seem to do well in earthquakes and other things that happen, but I don't do well with my annual fiscal. I'm utterly convinced that the internist is going to discover a fatal illness and I'm going to die next week. and my worst fears were realized this week I went for my physical and he drew some blood and I did the blood work and then he examined me and while the bloodwork was coming back on his physical examination he felt a mass in my abdomen and he got that frown on his face that all good internists get and he said hmm and in the interim the blood worked came back and my red blood cell count was down real low and it seemed as though I was bleeding and I immediately made the diagnosis. I had colon cancer and was not really going to live much longer. And what I'd like you to know about that is especially, maybe if you're not so new, is all of the sobriety and all ofthe knowledge of how Alcoholics Anonymous works is utterly useless at that moment. Now, what is useful, however, and remains useful, and I always want to remember it, and I guess if you're new or relatively new and you're going through any experience you go through, it reminds me once again that the actions I took at one year and two years of sobriety are absolutely the same actions I take today. Knowledge of what is wrong with me or what may not be wrong with my life with me or knowledge of how I got to where I was, all of that has never served me at all. Only have I ever found relief, whether it be from alcoholism or from fear of colon cancer, the only way I've ever found belief is to take action. And I've managed to do that over the last several days, although not very easily. It was difficult. I had a lot of fear, and as it turns out, incidentally, the blood test was wrong. They redid it in the lab, and I have a good red blood cell count, and I went and was examined today with a more sophisticated examination. I don't have colon cancer, which is good for me, but doesn't make the talk as interesting. So I survive and remain with you. But I had bad couple of days, and it was just like being new. It was much like being brand new in Alcoholics Anonymous in as much as that I was utterly convinced that everything we do in AA would not work for this. I mean, it was fine for everything else and it is certainly okay for you, especially if I sponsor you. But this is different. This is not like that. This is Not That AA Crap. This is real life. and all that simple stuff like getting involved with others and it's not going to work for this and I would like to have really gotten into this last night and I really would like to have worried about it but I had 250 people in my living room and it wasn't easy to worry about because I was involved with other people and as a result it really did work and I got through it and I feel better so whatever that's worth I thought it was important I tell you about it tonight it was an important thing it was very important for me if there are new people here tonight, I want to welcome you to AA. I'm glad that you're here. I hope that you stay. I can tell you, regardless of what you may or may not be thinking, you really don't have anywhere else to go. This is it. This isn't the end of the line for you. This is the only place left for you, there isn't anywhere else. And we also want you to know that you're welcome here and that we want you here, which may be strange to you now. I mean, you may not have heard many statements like that recently. If you're anything at all like I was when I was newer, most of us, we weren't hearing that people wanted us. When we got here, I wasn't by the time I got here. So we're rather unique in as much as we not only want you to be welcome here, we want you to stay. Not only are you allowed to stay here, but we want your presence. We want you. And I don't know about you, but that was very good news to me in November of 1965 at my first day evening. There was no one at that time that was inviting me to stay anywhere. And I was glad that they invited me to say that night. I'm not sure how sincere they were that night, but they did invite me and I stayed. If you are new tonight, you are an anomaly in Alcoholics Anonymous. You're a very strange alcoholic. The time to come to AA is not December 23rd. It's January the 12th. You haven't even had time for the checks to bounce yet, you know. But if you are here tonight, it really is a good time. And Christmas is a time of hope, and that hope is available to you tonight. You can have it. It's all yours. I came in November of 1965 to my first AA meeting, and it was in Long Beach and itwas in a section of Long Beach called the Los Altos section which is a very nice upper middle class bedroom community and the people in that community are very nice people and the ppl at that AA meeting were certainly very nice ppl they were all dentists and insurance salesmen who when they got a little drinking problem went to the Presbyterian church in the Los Alto section of Long Beach and they were nice, tightly wrapped people. They all had coats and ties and they were very soft-spoken and they all married pretty blonde Al-Anon women who sat in the front row of the meeting and did needlepoint. They were not like me. My case was different. If you were to look around that room that evening and if you were trying to pick out an alcoholic, you wouldn't find one. Nobody looked like an alcoholic there except me. I was the exception you could pick me right away I was obvious I was clearly an alcoholic I sat in the back of the room and I had on a torn t-shirt and ripped jeans and I did not shave nor bathe in well over a week and I spent the previous five days in the Long Beach City Jail for a series of things that were not my fault and I ended up in the basement of that church for one reason and one reason only and it was not because I was motivated to search for sobriety or serenity, which was a lovely word when I was 24 and new in AA. Who the hell wants serenety? I wanted action. I was not interested in quiet heart, especially. I was primarily interested in a place to sit down and not be arrested. That was clear. I had no job, no car, no money, and no place to live. And I wasnot impressed with that AA meeting. nothing was said there that night that moved me that said to me that I found an answer I had I said I'm Irish I'm Catholic and I'm from the east and as many of you have heard me before I don't I have trouble with folks from Texas and I sat in the back of the room next to a guy who was about 6 foot 5 and he had on cowboy boots and a 10 gallon hat in his lap and his name was Tex and he was a real jerk is what he was He kept telling me he wanted to hit me, and he repeated it often. And I told him, I don't really want you to hit my text. Why don't you go hit somebody else? And he would not take that for an answer. And he repeated to me in rapid succession all of the AA cliches. And they're dreary and grim and overused and useless and all the things that if you knew, you'd think about them today. They were, you know, easy does what. And he put his arm around my back and said, I keep it simple, which I was sure that he did. I had no quarrel with that whatsoever. And he gave me pamphlets and a card with the questions on it. And it was just a dreary experience. It was not inspiring. It didn't mean much to me. And they began the meeting the same way we began here tonight. they read that portion of chapter 5 they read our steps they read the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and I don't know about you if you're new but when I first heard these steps read I heard nothing new there was nothing new there to me at all there was no evangelism in the 12 Steps of Alcoholic Anonymous I am the end product of 8 years of Dominican nuns and 4 years of Jesuit priests and there's not much new in these rather superficial spiritual concepts. Well, everybody does that. I mean, I was exposed to all of these values all of my life. And the only thing I can really tell you for sure about them is they don't have much to do with the way that I drink alcohol. So if I sit here tonight and I'm looking for an answer a way to quit drinking what the hell does making a searching and fearless moral inventory have to do with that? You know what that means? You know, it's searching and fearless more. That is a Protestant way of saying examination of conscience to me. That's what that is. And I know all about that concept. And I knew all about admitting to God and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs. That's a sacrament in my religion. It's called the sacrament of penance or confession. And I known how to do that. And I did it in a valid way for most of my life. Certainly every Saturday afternoon from the time I was seven through the time I was 18, I suppose. And it never seemed to make a difference to me. It never seemed to matter. It may matter in a life thereafter somewhere, but it doesn't matter today. It doesn't seem to have much of a significance with the way that I live my life. And so when you read these things in the basement of a Presbyterian church I was not profoundly impressed. I guess on a subconscious level I dismissed those steps and the meeting was a very routine garden variety upper orange county AA meeting a lot of dentists in suits got up and said innocuous things about their pretty blonde Al-Anon wives and how grateful they all were to be there and I did not fit in and my case was different and at the end of that meeting they had birthday parties which I thought were bizarre. Middle-aged people who sat in a basement of a church and sang happy birthday to some jerk who went a year or two years or three years or four without drinking any alcohol and they had a cake with candles on it that they brought down the aisle. It was really very, very Camarillo, wasn't it? I mean, it's like something you would do right after dance therapy or before wallet-working time, you know. And they had a series of these birthday parties and the last in particular was most ridiculous. It was for a woman who seemed like she was 110 and she came down the aisle and they brought down this... She was sober forever. They had a cake with bonfire on top of the damn thing about. And they got the candles down and she huffed and she puffed and she got up here and she said her name was Phoebe and she was an alcoholic. And then she said something about, did I want what she had? And even in my rather unfortunate circumstances, the answer was no, I didn't want what Phoebe had under any conditions. And what you should know if you're new is that I stayed sober with that attitude and from that meeting forward for three years, three and a half years. And I didn't take these steps. And as a result, I had no recovery because oddly enough, as it turns out, what you must do here if you're new or relatively new is you must take those 12 steps. They are mandatory. You have to take them. They're not optional. And if you don't take them, you don' t recover. If you do take them you do recover. It's a very black and white issue here. It' s real simple. Take the steps you get better. Don' t take the steps, you get worse. And you get worst regardless of the number of AA meetings you go to. Your alcoholism gets worse. I didn' t tak e those steps. Three years I sat in Alcoholics Anonymous, I did not take those steps. And my alcoholism got worse. All the things inside of me that created the madness in which I lived got worse on the outside. However, my life got better. I have a good education. I Have an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from a good university in the east and I went to Navy and they sent me to one advanced medical training program one after another, and I came out of the Navy with some rather unique medical training. And the timing was perfect because in 1966 a new profession opened up in civilian medicine where they took people such as myself who had this medical training in the service and they licensed us to actually go into emergency rooms out here in civilian medicine and we worked nights and we saw patients and we functioned essentially as physicians in the emergency rooms, which might be a difficult concept for you understand, especially if you're sick tonight and have to go to the emergency room. But you can rest easy. The people that are doing that work are well-trained, and they do it well. I was one of them. And I went to work in an emergency room down in the industrial complex in Los Angeles in the Huntington Park area, and I worked nights. I became one of the very first licensed physician's assistants, incidentally, in the state of California. Even before they had a civilian program, based on my military experience. They gave me a test, and then I passed it. I'm very good at passing tests. And so I passed this test, and I got a license, and I went to work in this emergency room. And it was a very good job. It was rewarding in many ways, both professionally and certainly monetarily. I made a lot of money, especially for those days. I met and married a beautiful girl that I'd met in AA. She was not an alcoholic, but she was the daughter of a long-time sober AA member. And we were kind of a, it's not so rare these days in AA, but in those days it was kind of rare. We were a young couple that looked good. You know, our lives looked good, I mean if you looked at us, we were an AA poster couple, okay? She was an incipient Al-Anon and I was an obviously blossoming, recovering AA. I had this good job and this new profession and we seemed to have this lovely relationship and it all looked very good except there wasn't any recovery nothing happened to me I didn't change my life changed because it changed on the outside and I would go into that emergency room at night and pretty soon strange things began to happen to me emotionally and spiritually I began to feel awfully bad I was inadequate and I was all the things that Clancy talks about and articulates so well all of the things that are wrong with an alcoholic who really doesn't have a program and as a result I began to have bad depressions in that emergency room and although I had no program I have a good medical education so I know how to take care of depression I used Exadrine 15 milligram spanchels for better than anything I know before I was through with those I was taking 8 or 9 of them a day which people here who have abused amphetamines know what that's all about you do it in a hurry when you take that kind of amphetamine whatever you do boy I'll tell you it's very quick the problem with it is you don't 4 or 5 days later you have not slept nor eaten you really get weird your eyes dilate right out to here and your hair every hair on your head stands absolutely straight up like that and when you show up in the emergency room and they say things to you like would you like to see that you know there's a patient in room B would you go see them please you say okay right now where and the patient gets nervous when you walk in. So it looks real bad but there's a remedy to that and it's a drug called Demerol. And Demeril, as everybody knows, is a narcotic and it is addictive and it isn't addictive for everybody incidentally. There aren't any social Demeral users nor are there any social morphine users or heroin users which incidentally if you're new here and you come here duly addicted whatever the hell that is I'm going to tell you There's a difference between being addicted to drugs like Demerol and morphine and heroin and being an alcoholic. There are nine out of ten people who drink alcohol, do it successfully and socially and never end up in places like this on Wednesday night. I've never met anybody who successfully injected Demeril or morphine. Everybody gets addicted. Everybody I've ever seen go around again. I certainly got addicted, and it was not my intention. But I got addicted. And the other things that are wrong with drugs like Demerol and Morphine are they aren't what you call controlled substances, which means people care about Demerrol and Morophine. They care about what happens to it. As a matter of fact, there's a whole class of human beings whose entire lives are dedicated to measuring Demeroll vials. They look at the CCs, levels of the CCS, and you have to account for that. You really have to say where it went. And they like you to be right when you said where it went, right? And the problem with it was that all of these people got on my case is what they did. Every time I would do the shift in that emergency room, the Demerol would be funny. The vial would be wrong. And finally, the people from the state narcotics board came in and inspected all the logs and all the narcotics and I was arrested in that emergency room and I said what are you clapping for it's not funny and I was taken downtown and I was charged with a felony appropriating narcotics for my own use and that was subsequently reduced to a misdemeanor and I didn't have to go to jail but I got placed on probation and I lost my medical license and I became virtually unemployable And the end of the line was, so I can get into some recovery, it was we spent, this girl and I spent the summer of 1972 living in an apartment in Englewood out by the airport. And we spent July and August of that year with my drinking one half gallon of vodka a day and she watched. That's what we did in July and August of 1972. And I think that kind of drinking is axiomatic. When you drink a half gallon of vodka a day, you don't have to worry about being diagnosed as an alcoholic. It is inevitable. Things will happen to you. If you drink half a gallon of vodka a day you will vomit bile. You will have little seizures. You'll be in and out of blackouts. You don't know what time it is. You don' t eat and you don' d sleep. It's never daytime and it's never night. Because if you look at a clock and it says 6 o'clock, that might be 6 a.m. or it might be 6 p.m., you don't know you don' t work, you don''t do anything if you drink a half gallon of vodka a day that is all you do, it takes everything you have to get it done, it's a full time job and that's the way that we lived in July and August of 1972 and pretty soon the time came in September that her family came and got her and pulled her out of there because it was just such a deplorable place to be and they took the furniture and the car and they left just me and I found myself in that apartment with some money left, not much and I would go to back to that liquor store one or two more times and I'd get one more half gallon of vodka and Iwould bring it home and I don't remember whether I was awake or asleep or in a blackout or out of a blackouts I just knew that's the way that I functioned and pretty soon I ran out of money and I came out of the blackout in Newport Beach and I dont remember how I got there I just know it was mid September of 1972, and I had on a three-piece suit and a white shirt and a tie, and the temperature was about 110. And I found myself on a park bench on the Balboa Peninsula going through an Orange County newspaper looking for a job. And I found a job that day, too, as an apprentice embalmer for a mortician in Costa Mesa, which was a god-awful thing to do. If you're new, don't do that. If I'm your sponsor, you'll never have to do it. I'll tell you that. It was a god-awful job. And the undertaker was a ghoul. He looked like somebody who ought to be guarding a gate somewhere. You know, he drug his right foot when he walked. He really did. And a job paid $80 a week and a fringe benefit was an apartment over the casket room, which was really a nice way to start the morning with a hangover. walked through the casket room I'll tell you it will set you free and I lasted with him about three or four days and I got in a fight with him I got drunk and stole his hearse and on September the 20th 1972 I come out of the last blackout I hope I ever had driving the wrong way on Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach in a stolen hearse and with a young lady next to me who I did not recall meeting who was screaming hysterically and I remember thinking you know I really tend to get involved with neurotic women they always end up screaming it seems and I told this gal, you know you're unstable you really are, you really overreact you carry on way beyond what's necessary this broad continued to scream when I got this car going in the right direction she still yelped which proved my point that was September the 20th 1972 now I haven't had a drink of alcohol nor have I used any mind-affecting chemical from that date to this. And that's great, but it's not the most significant thing. I guess if you could have told me, if you would have materialized in that hearse, and you could've told me then, it would have been great news, but I don't know whether it would've been as surprising as the fact of how I arrived at 15 years without drinking any alcohol or using any drugs. That's what's even more amazing because you would have then had to tell me my experience over the next 15 years. That would have truly amazed me because you Would have told me, for instance, that for the next 16 years not only are you not going to drink any alcohol or use any kind of drugs but you are going to become desperate enough over a long enough period of time to become willing to take a series of actions that have nothing to do with what you think is wrong with you and I was confronted with that proposition on September the 20th, 1972 and isn't it odd because my life hasn't changed I was confident with the same proposition last Tuesday I had to take a series of actions that seemingly would afford me no relief from what I thought was wrong with me. But you know what? They worked last Tuesday as well as they started to work on September 20, 1972. And what I did was I brought the guy's hearse back to him and he was upset and he Was throwing my clothes out the window of the apartment or the casket room. And I ended up in the Costa Mesa Olano Club. And it was just a dreadful place. It was all there was in September of 1972. There wasn't anywhere else to go. It was not odd I would be there. I mean, if you're broke and you don't have a job and you don't Have a car, you always go to AA. So that's not a big deal. You know, where else do you go? You go to AAA. And that's where I went. And I had a cup of coffee. They had a meeting there. And it Was nothing profound in that AA meeting, I'll tell you. It was just a dreary, noontime, Alano Club AA meeting. And if you've been to many of them lately, you know precisely what I'm talking about. They are grim and dreary. They had the same seven Texans I'd left sitting around there clutching coffee cups and it was just awful. And I stayed sober in Orange County for two years and I went to meetings in the Newport Beach, Orange Coast and Mesa area and at one point I was so desperate that I finally began to pray I asked God for help. My experience was dreadful. I got lost a series of jobs that were, oh, they were awful jobs. It was almost, they Were the kind of jobs, you know, when you're new, I know newcomers will identify with this, when you are new and you have a terrible job, as terrible as it is, you have to keep it anyway, right? And then you lose it. And the fact that you've lost it is horrible, but secretly you feel a sense of relief. You know, Christ, the job was so bad that, you Know, that it's too bad you couldn't keep it, but it's good you lost it. And I lost a job as a gas station attendant for being incompetent. I lost the job as $1.87 an hour drill press operator for being a lousy drill press operating company. Which is a real hard thing to do. It's not easy to be a bad drill press operation. Being a drill press operative consists of pulling a handle on a drill. And you really have to, to do that wrong, you have to find a way. I did. I found a way in it. and it seemed that people from Texas were always firing me every time I turned around some jackass from Dallas would be telling me that I wasn't bright enough to be a goddamn gas station attendant and it was just a dreadful way to live and that's the way that my life went and when I was two years sober I seemed to have felt a little better because Clancy talked about it the other night out at West Covina I had moments in that two year period when it had occurred to me that I was really going to be alright I had said a prayer and I'd had a spiritual experience and I kind of knew somehow I sensed that I didn't have to drink and I didn' t have to use drugs but I needed some desperately needed help with my life my life was absolutely not well I didn''t have a life it was dreadful I was so I got I asked Clancy to be my sponsor I moved up to West LA well I did move up to West LA I moved up to LA I didn ''t get west quite yet It took a while to get west. But I had acquired some material possessions there. I had a 1964 red Chevrolet convertible with a hole in the top and no brakes. And I drove that up to Los Angeles to the mission where Clancy worked to talk to him. And I went in there, and we had a conversation. The first conversation we had, I asked him to help me. And he told me that he would. He said, I will help you if you can accept the simple proposition that your best judgment about your life is terrible and that my judgment about your life is infinitely better than yours now if you're new I hope that somebody says that to you real soon because I believe that to be the ingredient to recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous and I hope that when somebody does say it to you you are desperate because that day in Clancy's office in the midnight mission in November of 1974, I was desperate. Desperate enough to make the unholy pact with the devil. Because that's what I did. I agreed to let this guy run my life. What there was of it. And the first thing he said to me was that car you're driving out there he says does it have insurance on it? Well I hadn't had a driver's license in three years how the hell would I have insurance? So I told him that. And he said he wanted the keys to the car. And I said, you don't understand. That's my car. Why should I give you the keys? And he says, you should give me the keys because law-abiding citizens such as myself have a right to drive in the city streets and be protected from morons like you. He took my car and I watched my car leave the midnight mission there was a guy Ed Mutum who most of you remember he's seven foot tall and he called Ed Mutim down to drive my car away and Ed Mutem got in my car his head stuck out through the hole in the top and I could see my car with this goofy Ed Mutom and his head sticking out the hole on the top driving down Los Angeles street and he was yelling there's no brakes on this car it wasn't much but it was my car I mean it was all I had and Clancy told me he said what we'll do with that car is we'll park it in front of my house in Venice and when you get a job and you get money to get insurance and a driver's license why you'll have a car and you can visit it every Saturday every Saturday morning because we come up and we play baseball and softball and we have the yard and you can come up and see it and my recovery wasn't as quick as we all would have liked because I visited that car for many, many weeks it turned out and it got very depressing because the car what happened to that car is it decomposed on Lake Street which a car will do if you leave it on Lake St. at any rate at the time it'll just decompose and it was much like my life it was going nowhere I'll tell you and every Saturday morning I'd come and I'd see that car and there'd be something less there. One Saturday, the whole top was gone. It was ripped and just gone off the car. And somebody had thrown some kind of cheap plastic over it, which was kind of insulting. And then one Saturday, I went up there and the wheel, the real wheel was gone on one side. It was just tilting on an axle. kind of and then another time the entire steering column of the automobile was missing somebody took what the hell I would want with a steering column in a 19 I don't know but the entire thing was out there was just this empty shell which was just the state my life was in I mean I was just because I wasn't doing well I'm going to tell you what I was doing in a minute but it wasn't I was not successful and then one Saturday I got up there and it was nothing but an oil spot which was kind of the end and that seemed to be the way that my life was now when I got Clancy for a sponsor and I agreed to do what he said he told me he said here's what I want you to do I want your name I want to ask you to live in the mission here on Skid Row and I said you don't understand I'm looking for upward mobility I don't want to live on a mission and he said well do you have a better idea and I says not really so I moved into that mission and he said I'll tell you what I want you to do I want você to come down to my office every day and I'm going to give you eight dollars and I want you to take that eight dollars and go outside and get some bus transfers on the 83 bus that runs up Wilshire Boulevard and I want you to ride that bus up Wilshire Boulevard and get off periodically along the way between downtown L.A. and the San Fernando Valley and I want you to go into the hospitals and the medical practices and I want you to tell the people there that you're sober two years and alcoholic synonymous and that you need help in getting your medical license restored and that you need a job I thought that was the most preposterous thing I had ever heard I knew it would never work but I didn't have a better idea so I took direction from this guy and I did what he said and I took the eight bucks and we're outside and I rode that 83 bus up Wilshire Boulevard And I lived in the Midnight Mission on Skid Row for eight months. And I rode the 83 bus up Wilshire Boulevard every day for eight months. At the end of the day, I'd end up on the west side of town. I'd go to one of our meetings and I would then take a bus back down to the mission. And that began in November of 1974 and right through the holiday season of 74, right through 75, the early part of 1975. And I remember my first holiday season in the Pacific Group. And it was grim. It was not pleasant. But yet there was enough here that allowed me to survive. There was enough fellowship and enough warmth and enough feeling that people wanted me, that allowed мне to survive And I want to tell you that I didn't get a job. People were willing to listen to what I had to say, but they could do nothing about getting my license back and I could certainly not hire me. And one day in May of 1975, on a Friday, I got on that bus one more time and the first thing I did when I got out is I sat down in a big wad of chewing gum and I got it all over the back of my pants and it was a disgusting mess and I get off the bus on Western and I went into a 76 station and I tried to clean the gum off my trousers with wet paper towels. I don't know if you've ever tried that but it turned out to ran all the way down my leg and I put my pants back on it was the most depressed I'd ever been I mean I was such a loser I had never met a bigger loser than me you know what I was I was two years and eight months sober in AA I lived on a mission on Skid Row I had no job no car no money and no hope and gum all over the back of my pants and I managed to get to the old mall in Santa Monica and I went through the line to a cafeteria I went to get a tray of food and I sat down outside to get a newspaper but it was not my day I'll tell you, the busboy came by and took my food. I was buying a newspaper. And I walked over to Westwood Village. And I had six bucks left. And I went over, walked up by the UCLA campus to the Bruin Theater to go to the movie. And I stood in that line. And while I was standing in that lane to buy a ticket, somebody called my name. And I turned around. It was the administrator of the medical center which I had been arrested in for stealing narcotics. And he said, where have you been? And I said, I'm sober two years in AA. and he said my God that's great he was profoundly impressed he put his arms around me and he started to cry he said you look great he said your eyes are clear and you just look marvelous he said we have a urologist who's joined our practice and he's a member of the medical quality assurance board why don't you come down tomorrow and have lunch perhaps he can write some letters and get your license back and if he can how would you like a job and I'd like you to know that I went down and I met with that urologist the next day he wrote some letters within 60 days my medical license was restored in the state of California I went back to work in that same emergency room and I worked there for the following two and a half years and during that period of time my life flourished I had taken the first three steps I had learned and it may be helpful to you if you're new I don't know whether you know how to formally take the third step in Alcoholics Anonymous but I know when I formally took it. I took it when I agreed to do what Clancy said in 1974 in November, sitting in that mission. Now your sponsor is not God. But if you're new and you're willing to make that kind of an act, to make the right decision to make a surrender, I think maybe you've taken the third step. I was able to see that in retrospect. I didn't know that then. But during that period of time I wrote an inventory and my life flourished and I got better and the rest is a great success story, as you all know. But what you should know if you're new is that you make mistakes here. Everybody makes mistakes here, no matter how long you're sober, no matter however successful you are, no matter of how many people you sponsor, no matter who you are. Alcoholics make mistakes. It is their nature. And the very good news for you is that no one ever gets drunk from making mistakes here. They will never get you drunk only if you try to lie and defend them. And I have been able not to do that enough to stay sober. You all know the story of a marriage I had and I married this gal well what happened is we got divorced before we got married and I had gone down and told Clancy I wanted to marry this gal and we set a big wedding date but we decided that was too long so we eloped and by the time the wedding date came around I had to go down and tell him that we were getting divorced which was, you know but I survived that I didn't run away and I stayed here and Pat and I met and her husband had lung cancer and he was dying and he finally passed away and we began to be friends and we started to date and we got married and we have a marvelous, loving marriage and relationship. One that I'm not capable of having because in addition to loving each other, we like each other. And I think that's a tremendous thing and a marvelous gift. I've been blessed. As all of you know who were in our house last night, it's a great life that we have. It's absolutely amazing. And if you are new tonight, all this can be yours. It's for anybody here. And you probably don't like us if you're new. You probably look at us and say, I'm not like them. I'm Not Like Him. I can never be like him. I can Never Have What He Has. You know what the secret is? I felt the same way. And if you are new and you feel that way, I know precisely how you feel. And the secret ist, Don't be like us. Act like it. Just act like it! Because that's what I did. I could never be likethese people. And I decided what I was going to do is I was going to try to act like him. And I acted like him so long I turned around and became one of them. And if you're new here tonight, just start acting like us. Thank you.