Why the Spiritual Malady Is a Deadlier Disease Than the Bottle – Mickey M.

I hate this sound. Sorry, Rusty. I don't know at which point I'm supposed to get overwhelmed, but it's right here. My name is Mickey. I'm an alcoholic. so it's what a long strange journey it's been to uh to get here to talk to you tonight um the reason i'm hesitating is because i've been in this for actually on february 12 45 years I thought when I came to Alcoholics Anonymous if I could get two weeks of sobriety that's all I came for, I promise you if I Could Get Two Weeks Sober and I Wouldn't Hurt That Bad and I wouldn't be so sick and my hands wouldn't be curled up when I woke up in the morning I would be grateful to you and I would go back out and get on the train that carried me here since I was five years old. I drank from the time I was 5 until I was 27 and came to you and washed up in 1311 York Street. But that two weeks, the reason I said I wanted two weeks wasn't because I was thirsty. I didn't want to drink anymore, truly. How would you like a good glass of sulfuric acid? No thank you. No thankyou. But I didn't think it was possible to be alive and not drink. I've never been able to do it. And it's not like, you know, I was hanging out in the gin mills at five years old. I grew up in Europe. And in Europe they give children, you know, wine cut back with water for the evening meal. And so they wet down an alcoholic. I didn' t know it. They didn' d know it, and here we went. and they're very liberal in Europe about children drinking and I got nailed to the cross. I got nail to the Cross then. So I guess I'll just start at the moment of getting sober, not the moment of getting silver but the moment of going to 1311 york street and starting this journey now what we were like what i was like was i was a shell i wasa chameleon i would be anything i thought you wanted me to be just so you would accept me and there's a i think it actually is in the big book they talk about you don't want to have the two or three groups that you've been hanging with ever meet each other because you've got a whole different persona in each one. That was me. And I came in here, and they took me through York Street, and they said, you know, this is DPR, and I would see all the old men sitting on their chairs. The meetings were upstairs. This was a fabulous Victorian mansion in Denver that had been somehow purchased by or donated to or whatever it was for a club and it was like the downtown Club and it was where those of us who were in severe need washed up so DPR was dead blank row I'll let you figure it out maybe someone can tell you and though then don't go here Mickey if you don't work a program you're going to end up on DPR okay and I had a red badge and the red badge had my name on it and the Red Badge meant please tell this guy where the bathroom is I was starting out in a new life and I started to go to meetings and then and I went to York Street for about three years I hung on to it like you know I would I would come there after work I ate a lot of navy bean soup and you know and then I would be there when the cabbies came in because I did I was afraid to leave and if you'd have told me to stack bb's over in the corner standing on my head and that's what it took to be sober i would have done it because i wanted nothing i wanted out i want it out uh it was not pleasant it was like somebody reached into a tank and grabbed a great big fish and threw it on the sidewalk and that's how i felt i had no connection with not being lit up one way or another and i didn't take drugs I smoked grass five times in as many years and it was like you know you take a hit and pretty soon I'm hearing rain on the roof and it isn't raining and I'm paranoid and I started that way and it Was not good but I was sober now I was sober now and you know my wife is sitting right in front of me I'm one of the luckiest men in the world and we've been together for 48 years um and that's a good deal uh but god had to put that together because i was just fractured i was fractured and i was a chameleon and i was i was fighting for my life before i got to york street i can remember going out of my mind one night just screaming and crying and banging on the door of a rectory of a catholic parish near me and just begging the priest to help me i just helped me i'm disintegrating and so what happens is i ran into a group of guys that were not at york street and so they were very very tough and they had this thing and i referred to them earlier maybe yesterday and I picked my sponsor out of of these guys and I I picked him because I thought he wasn't so tough and as I shared he had just come back from three tours in Vietnam as a Navy medic attached to the Marines and he was tough as anything in the world and he gay and I had never been around a gay person and um and the reason i tell you that is because i had a lot of ignorance about what gay meant okay and um george was gay and so why that was important was because i was afraid i was gay okay and i'll tell you why i thought i was gay is because i don't want to hit anybody i get violent in words only and only when you know i get out of my head emotionally whatever but i'm not so much anymore but i thought that um i was emotional i was very sensitive I was all those things and I thought gay meant sissy and if you know anything about gay you know that it absolutely does not mean sissy okay so I'm there now why that's important what I was like and this is the progression out of what I thought I was I was carrying this weight I'm married three years but I was afraid I was gay because i told you i had those characteristics so i tell george you know i think i'm gay and george goes okay and so we just talked and um george had lost 100 pounds in weight watchers and he had a big picture of him up uh in his utilities in uniform where he weighed like 100 pounds more and so george would give me weight watcher's ice cream and cookies when i would visit him. And he said, it's okay, Mickey, there's vitamins in them. I was six foot three and I weighed 145 pounds. So I look like an antenna and I'm eating Weight Watchers cookies and ice cream and it's OK. It's got vitamins in it. Thank you, George. So as we get to talking and everything, I'm trying to communicate with George about this burden I'm carrying of being gay. And George looks And he said, Mickey, you're not gay. Like, what does he know? And nothing George could say to me would move me from being gay. I did not want to be gay. But I got this thing sized up. Now, I'm introducing you to the concrete bunker I carry on my shoulders. That's why it's so difficult for me to learn, especially then. You can't penetrate that concrete. and I'm caring. Don't you understand? I'm suffering because I'm gay. Mickey, you're not gay. So we went through that. Now it made a big deal of difference because I come from an all military family. My father went to West Point. My oldest brother was in the Marine Corps in Vietnam. My other brother was a Navy pilot, excuse me, a naval aviator in Vietnam and I'm you know mister, I got kicked out of every school I went to until I got to high school. I'm like Ronway Hannigan in this all military family and I am gay. So I'm having problems and George had like really as I mentioned yesterday, he had had all the war he wanted and he was studying to be a Methodist minister and so I would go over and visit George and so on down the line. Now after a while and George was very patient with me. He was very, very loving and what George was doing back in the States now too, he was also teaching English to the Vietnam Vietnamese immigrants that were coming over and he's helping them to get settled and I just love George and George used to tell me he said Mickey it's it's always darkest before the dawn I was really having a lot of trouble and I would call George up on the phone and I would say George is it almost dawn yet and so after a while to to put a cap on this phase of the deal George one day looks at me And he said, Mickey, I'm going to put in your imagination a picture of a naked woman in front of you and a naked man. Which one do you choose? And I'm like, I choose the woman. He said, Mikey, you're not gay. Okay, so there's one burden lifted. I could go home without sweating. We got it all good now. It's all good. You're not gray. Okay, thank you, George and God. it's okay if you're gay you're gay I just don't happen to be gay then the second one was I had survivor's guilt from the Vietnam war and I'd never had a shot fired at me because I come from an all military family and they went and I didn't it took me 27 years to get over Vietnam anybody who tells me that stopping drinking is enough to cruise on through life well I just don't agree okay and our wounds are deep we're not kidding these wounds are deep and somebody can address them and say hey it's okay buddy you know blah blah and I there I had bad knees and and it was congenital and I'd had two operations at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital because I wasn't you know a military dependent, and I'd been with those guys. I was in a 40-bed orthopedic ward at Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver, and there were 39 combat casualties in me. And I had a hip-to-toe cast because they had really done a lot of architecture and carpentry in my left knee. And I'm laying in bed, and this is an aside, but I'm laying in bed and I start hurting and pretty soon I start screaming and I'm cussing and I am out of my mind and they sent the chaplain in and he said these guys have fought a war you don't deserve to even blah blah blah and they put me in a solitary room and my foot was turning purple and what happened is they put the cast on too tight from the hip to my toes and I was in agony and finally somebody came in and they split that you know what those funny vibrator things they they cut the cast down both sides they'd been hitting me with demerol vistaril i remember this nurse bless nurses i mean it she put her face down real close to mine if she said kid we've given you enough whatever it is painkillers to knock a horse out why aren't you're gone and they split that thing and I turned to my brother Gus and I said would you light me a cigarette and that was the last thing I remember and that's the only time I really thought god drugs are good I mean seriously drugs are good and I'm very very drug intolerant and I'd seen the movie Dr. Zhivago before I went into that ward and in the middle of they're giving me something to sleep and i'm in the middle of the night and i'M punching the button for the corpsman and i say we got to bury this guy now all of that he's hearing is from the vietnam side of things it was in the movie i had to bury that guy in the snow because the ground was frozen i am the biggest admirer of vets you ever will meet in your life um and thank you for your service if you're in this room tonight So how do I get over survivor's guilt when I couldn't fight? And there came George. And for two years, he walked me out of that valley. And he gave me some hope that, you know, I wasn't called to that. It's okay. And I started working on that. Those two burdens were putting my lights out. And then I started to try to work on this. Whoopsie. we were having trouble with personal relationships. I'd been kicked out of bloody, I mean it's just like, and when I got kicked out, kicked out a school, it wasn't we need to have a parent teacher meeting. It was like get the hints. Don't come back. You know, and I don't see myself that way. I don' t see myself being such a problem in a classroom that we can't talk about it. I had a little nun pick my desk up right in the middle of the classroom, turn it upside down and throw me on the floor. I got beaten with her rosary. I had an old lady and a principal. I had another Catholic school lock me up in her office and she came in every half hour and beat me and I came out of that thing with a face and a head like a tomato and you know what I said inside of myself there's something wrong with you there's nothing wrong with my church there is something wrong with you and they couldn't beat my religion out of me this is my faith and you ain't going to beat it out of you and they kicked me out of the schools and I probably deserved it Not that treatment, you understand, but I was angry. What was going on in my house, incidentally, was my parents would argue, and they argued a lot. My parents were not alcoholic, but they drank buku. And I got so scared that my big brother would come in. I would try to go to sleep, and he would come and he'd hold me while I shook, while they were screaming. And I went into AA, and I couldn't understand why I couldn' fall asleep. And then I remembered that. So I had to make a decision that I was going to go to sleep now. It was too scary because you'd wake up in World War III. We couldn't control our emotional natures. Like our speaker last night, I'm indicating a shrug with my... Never mind. We were a prey to misery and depression. I am still a prey to misery and depression You know what I mean? it's like I'm riding high in April and 15 minutes later I'm shot down in May. And I don't know where it comes from. All of a sudden I'm seized by fear. Or, or, or. Notice while I'm reading these, please do a little gut check while we're in the room together if you care to. Join with me. And you notice it says, it doesn't say in here some of us had this. Some of us had this or when we were drinking or when we were hungover. This to me is a partial laundry list of the disease, of symptoms of the disease of alcoholism. What I'm reading is alcoholism, do other people have this? Yeah but I wonder what they do with the full list. We couldn't make a living, well that certainly worked. When I was in school if a teacher said something and I didn't like it I'd tell them stand up in this classroom and tell the teacher what I thought of them. Maybe that's why I got kicked out. We couldn't make a living I had that same response at a job and you lean on me and I'll show you, I'll ruin my life We had a feeling of uselessness. The only reason I states that I even gave a darn about my drinking or stayed sober was for Marie. I wanted out, but I couldn't hurt Marie. I didn't want to hurt Marie." We were full of fear. Now, I think that let's like... We could throw all of the rest of these out for a moment. We'll just ask an earth person, how do you react to that statement? Right? For us, every time I read that with somebody I'm working with or whatever, they go, yeah, I'm sure you got it. I wonder what an earth person would do that full of fear. What the heck are you talking about? Right? But, like, I get up afraid. I got to go to work. And then I got a check in with God and get the power and, you know, to be able to advance into the day. We were unhappy. That doesn't sound like much, does it? We were happy. What's unhappy look like? I used to ask people when I first got in AA, did you have hangovers? And I'd look in their eyes, and for some of them, I knew they did not know what I was talking about. Are you unhappy? We couldn't seem to be of real help to other people. Well, when you're as self-centered as I am, who cares about other people? I mean, really. You helped me. I wish that I know it's funny but I wish it wasn't true when I was growing up really I felt like I was under a spotlight the spotlight was on me and it cast a very narrow illumination around my feet and if you stood real close to me I would notice you and if not if you didn't I couldn't care less unless you were pretty when i was in the eighth grade i moved up to rapid city south dakota with my father we were living in denver and he got a job in rapid city and so we moved up there and i went to a catholic grade school up there in the 8th grade and i was a new kid in town and you know how awkward that It could be, you know, you want to be liked and da-da-da. And I was elected class president. Right? Mr. Moonlight. And so it came time for show and tell. There was going to be a big show and tale deal. Thank you. And so I had been, I had grown up in Europe. I walked all the battlefields of Europe, man. I mean, I was clued in. And the flea market in Paris, if you've ever seen pictures of Fifth Avenue in New York and I have the big racks of clothes and they're running around in the garment district delivering these things, well, imagine those same racks full of German uniforms. Imagine a table full of every kind of sword and dagger and anything you've seen with the swastika on it and all of that. And I collected that because they were, and I was fascinated with that. So comes show and tell at cathedral grade school. And I want to bring my Nazi memorabilia. They want to know who I was. So I'm telling you, my Nazi memorabilia to the show and tell. I don't know what the other kids were bringing. And I never had a chance to find out either. And they said ixnay on the swastika A. So in those days, nurses wore these white shoes and white uniforms and caps and all that. And they would have shoe polish, liquid shoe polish in a bottle with a cotton dauber on the end that they could keep their shoes looking nice. So I got one of those and I put swastikas this big in every window of the cathedral grade school on a Saturday night. Tell me no. Maybe this is why I got kicked out of the schools. This is your class president. This is like I'm talking, well it's really not like I am talking about a stranger. I was there. Anyway, and come Monday morning and the swastikas are still there on the windows as everybody troops into school. And so Dan, my friend Dan, lived right behind the school and he was my cohort and my co-conspirator in this thing in pulling off this assignment and the principal came and called dan out into the hallway dan didn't come back then the next person she calls is me and i got out of the hallway i said i didn't do it she says you didn't do what i said I didn't put the dan got called out into the hallway because he was going home for lunch and i got called out there because I was going, without permission, to Dan's house to have lunch. And in the eighth grade, in 1960, when you graduated from the eighth grade, you had your first dance, and you got dressed up, and the girls got dressed up in their pretty dresses, and you could go to your first dance. Well, needless to say, they didn't include me. I was standing across the street in a vinyl motorcycle jacket drinking grain belt beer and smoking old gold cigarettes into hell with you and when I got kicked out the day that they discovered that I went home and I couldn't find any booze and I drank a bottle of creme de menthe well it's better than Listerine not much better who let this guy in right so if we're going to tell the truth across the board here and i have been telling the truth i had a deep love for god i was a an altar boy and a vandal right and i can remember going into the cathedral like bill wilson did when he was over in england in winchester cathedral i think it was and he stood before the altar and he knew that there was a god and one warm day after i'd gotten kicked out and i knew i was not going to graduate with the class i walked into that cathedral right next to the to the school and i stood in front of the altar and I knew there was a God I knew that there was a God, I could feel him and I stood there and I was washed in that feeling but I knew the train was waiting outside the door and I had to get on the train and I did now that's that's a little boy and a young adolescent boy who is wounded if I could find him today I'd put my arms around him, I'd wash his tongue out with soap and I'd do everything I could for him and I know he wouldn't listen right? He would not listen so to come into Alcoholics Anonymous there was this progression and it went like that I guess I'm going to just tell the whole bloody thing. And when I was eight years old, I was sexually molested by one of my oldest brothers. He was seven years older than me and one of his friends sexually molestered me. And I told you, I was a chameleon. I would have done anything if you would accept me. And apparently I did that. Now, I was sexualized. I was 8 years old and now I am sexualized and that went on in my life and it was like I had no idea that when you're hurt like that that's what happens to you so I thought I was scum I got into pornography it was just I grew up like that that's certainly not who I am that is certainly not who I'm but God without Alcoholics Anonymous I would have died like that. I would've died like that. So, I didn't drink today and I'm a winner. It's just a little hollow and shy of the mark for me. You know, I mean, there's nothing please, if I drink, I'm not diminishing alcohol. I am deadly affected by alcohol. I'll give you an example. I didn'T know there was something that they called non-alcoholic beer. And so I was like 15, 17 years sober and I applied for a job at this company and we had lunch and I looked at the menu and they said they had Moussi, non- alcoholic beer. I said, God, I haven't had a beer in 17 years or whatever it was. And so, I ordered a beer and I poured it in my glass and I started drinking my beer. I felt a little lightheaded, and I felt just like a little spacey or something, you know? And I thought, well, Marie, if I give Marie alcohol, her face gets bright red. So she's my, you now, seeing eye person. So I called her and I said, I'm doing this and I'm bringing home... Well, first my reaction was, this stuff is great. I'm going to get a case of it. how much alcohol is in a non-alcoholic beer whatever the designation is less than one half of one percent alcohol is in that bottle and it lit my disease up going up like an infield fly man and i brought her home to marie and we opened our bottles of beer and i drank and she drank and her face turned red and i go Oh, boy. That's the kind of alcoholic I am. I cannot be around it. I don't eat Mother Murphy's rum balls. I don' t do anything that has alcohol in it. But the question I would like to ask you is where does it hurt? Where does it hurts? Somebody is going to ask me, I'm going to go ahead and ask you, where does this hurt? What might you say? met a wonderful man seven years ago who came up after I talked and he said man it hurts in my soul bingo when the spiritual maladies overcome you know we straighten out mentally and physically I've never seen anybody outrun alcoholism you know I've ever seen anybody at work alcoholism this is not an intellectual issue it's a physical spiritual issue and it's deadly Bart you asked me to talk about the fellowship of the Spirit and I'm gonna I'm going to do it when you put the sign up here for five minutes I want to spend a few minutes and just talk a little bit about the origins of fellowship of the Spirit because you asked okay but I tripped into Mickey here and so so I started out on this path and Marie is like Marie has never once threatened to leave me in 48 years and I can't even count the times that I've threatened to leave her you know what I mean because if I get cornered I run to the end of my ability to cope very quickly you know and I go from here to H bomb and she stayed with me and she's my best friend I Marie and I talk about the fact that we only have to say goodbye once. Now, we've been married 48 years with six weeks off for bad behavior. I moved out and got myself some fleabag place to live and I couldn't work the heater and I'm laying there in an army raincoat freezing my butt off but i'm free i'm out of that house man we hit a place where we could no longer meld into each other and you know we couldn't work it out and at the last minute we talked to each other and said, we'll give it another shot. I was with my kids, our three children. We have a daughter and two sons. And I was in that flea-bitten doodah that I was living in. Oh, but I have to tell you, you'll love this. This is for the Al-Anon ladies in the house or men. I moved into that house and Maria came over and set it up for me. She brought the silverware. Absolutely, you know what I mean? And the thought of having another woman in my life or in my house, it was just no-go. It was just a matter of time. It was no-no-go, so anyway, thank you god we got back together during that time while we were separated i didn't know what to do with myself so i went over and started working out for one time in my life i put two and a half inches on each arm i was i was buff you want to see the body that loneliness built and I came back to Marie and moved back in with her and I'm walking to the front of the house and he across the neighbor it's called street neighbor yelled something and I couldn't believe it I thought he was yo gonad he said Conan I was pissed I came back in with a resentment come on man what are you talking about anyway the muscles are all gone and they're never coming back so where does it hurt i didn't really know where it hurt and i started going down this road with alcoholics anonymous and it went like this i was sitting in a meeting and i wanted to kill myself again and i thought i know you spilled more on your tie than I drank and I get it, we're very competitive we're human and you want to tell me how you're better and I'm flunking AA like I flunked all the rest of it and I thought where do I go for help I'm scared I'm going to do this and I don't know how to get help because if I started to talk really and those days they called it psychobabble if i talked about my feelings in a discussion meeting they told you to shut up and whatever right a lot of help and they were doing the best they had i guess so i got a book and it was not uh you know it was and it was outside book and is written by this monk and i just started reading it and i read four or five chapters in that book. Now, what I did is I went through the chain of command in this very tough group I was in to talk to the head high guy and I probably talked about this yesterday but anyway, and he was very imposing. He was a great big guy and I tell him what was going on with me and I thought now he's going to hit me with the wand and someone's goingto give here and he looks at me and says, I don't know man, maybe you're going to drink. this is my life this is my life so I went back and I started reading this book and in the book they talked about suffering they talked about how difficult it is to be transformed and they talked about all the darkness that people can encounter on this road of faith and what they what this monk was describing was that a massive spiritual experience and I was right in the middle of it so you may think that's a little horse patootie who gives a damn about some Catholic monk I don't care about the Catholic monk, I want the truth so if that doesn't mean anything to you what i said let's go and look at the caterpillar here comes this ugly squish bug you hardly can locomote going down the sidewalk with about i guess a jillion feet maybe there's some insect anonymous around us but anyway and he's going down to the thing and he crawls up in a tree and he starts to spin a chrysalis or she starts to spin a chrystalis and that animal gets pulled completely out of every joint possible in the dark and emerges as one of God's most glorious creatures does that make any more sense about what this monk was writing about? And I held on to him and i held on to that and i thought my god and i talked to george and i said george my sponsor if god will allow i will never stop talking about the second half of the first step as long as i live because if we're dry and we've followed all the rules and we dance to the tune and we you know follow the yellow brick road and we're desperate and lonely and broke and can't see our way out of anything is it possible that we may want to take a look at the fact that the disease of alcoholism doesn't exist in a bottle of alcohol now think about the mormon community the morman people i guess in bulk or a majority they don't drink but one out of 10 people the common wisdom in the world has the disease of alcoholism now here they are they got alcoholism they have no idea what the heck's wrong with them and I use that booze to treat my disease and to try to stay to get some kind of a life so now I started paying attention to this now this is not a poor me statement but I couldn't talk to anybody in AA where I was about what I had discovered I've got this great discovery and they don't care and they're down here it I guess they were having a different experience or or it was sufficient you know never mistake activity for productivity we'll just go out there I'm gonna be in service I'm going to be in service I am going to BE IN SERVICE and I noticed in my junior time in AA that I I would look at all the state chairmen and they were all divorced. They were all divorced. And you can ask some of the kids in our families, how do you feel about Alcoholics Anonymous? And they say, I hate it because it took my mom and dad away from me. But anyway, they couldn't sustain it and I could hardly live. So Alcoholics Anonymous to me reached down into me and said, take a look at these things and when we saw it says was not a basic solution of these bedevilments more important than whether we should see news reels of lunar flight solution of these bedewelments what we're going to get a solution to the things I just read you when we thought others solve that here comes the most important plural word I ever read in my life when we saw others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the spirit of the universe we had to stop doubting the power of God our ideas did not work but the God idea did can somebody please help me I am really suffering I'm dying in here and I had a loaded 32 automatic in the top drawer of our dresser and it was there for two years three years and Marie didn't ever know if she went to work that day or went out whether she was going to come back and see me with dead and that gun to me represented if this doesn't work because I'm not kidding I'm this isn't Miss Gloria's day school you know if this doesn't work I'm putting my brains on the wall and then one day I took the gun and put it away now my love for Alan on you just can't know how much I love Alan on think about it an f4 fighter phantom you have the pilot and they write books about the pilot and the pilots so heroic and he is heroic he's out there doing his job but they have a wizard weapons officer riding behind him and the weapons officer doesn't get a vote about where we're going that was Marie I did not give her a vote about that gun I just said this is the way it is and God bent down and had mercy on us I'm not the worst alcoholic who ever came in here but how do you want to measure it do you want to measure it about I drank for 95 years under a truck and a garbage depot is that now do we make you president of Alcoholics Anonymous and I thought I was too young at 27 to be an alcoholic and then I walked into York Street one day and there was a 14 year old girl in there for her first meeting and I had to take a total revision of how bad does it hurt. It just has to hurt bad enough for us to say, Uncle, I want out. Now, we are a community How much time do I have? Okay. We have a community of people just in this room that can change the world and we are changing the world. I'll give you a simple example of changing the word. I sponsor a guy in Brooklyn and that guy took us talking seriously and reading the book seriously I met him at a retreat in at Mount Manresa in Staten Island and and so I said you know I have to make amends for all the things that we've done and so he goes to a newsstand in Brooklyn and says I stole a comic when I was a kid and they want to pay back for it and you know New Yorkers can be very skeptical And he probably thought my buddy was stupid. But my buddy wasn't stupid. And I sponsor another guy in Philadelphia. And when we started working together, he told me he was an armed robber. And I thought, okay. Because I know what the book says about how we're going to have to make amends here. And I loved him and I didn't want to have to say it but he'd been trying to get sober for 20 years and he was doing it and he was doing the do so I told him one day I said man you're going to have to go back and make restitution for the money that you stole and I'll just tell you one story so he had he had robbed a Tibetan store you know with all the bells and whistles he robbed that Tibetan store and he went back in there and he had done it with a baseball bat and the clerk in there this young woman was being threatened with serious damage to fork up the money and he calculated that he owed $300 and so he said now the owner of the store is in there so he goes up to him and he said do you remember a couple of years back, whatever it was, that your store was robbed? And the man said yes. And he said, well, I'm the man who robbed you. And I came to pay back the money I stole from you. And he calculated at $300 and said, I came to pay you. And the Tibetan owner of the store looked at him and he says, do you meditate? And my guy says, yes, I do. and he reached into the case and he put a tape or a disc on the counter and he said this may help you meditate I don't want your money just help restore my karma the grace of a loving God and that man today is one of my best friends and friends to a lot of other people who love him let's see this 45 years is like I'm not bragging on that it's like I just didn't die but there's so many stories that are coming in it was a really good story too but it's gone it's done it's been gone it's gone so the people I got to work with I told my mom now my mom was desperately ashamed of the fact I said mom I've discovered I'm an alcoholic Mickey don't say that my mother was from Memphis Tennessee honey and she didn't want to hear about it you know her baby Mickey it cannot be flawed we're not going to hear about this and I just tried to tell her and I said well you know we went to help this guy the other night she said well you always wanted to be a missionary and then she always watched these soap operas and in one of her soap operas they had a character who copped to being alcoholic now my mom's all down for it man my son's the president of AA thank you for the soap operAS You never know when you're going to get a saving hand here. Going down this road is hard. It's very, very hard. Alcoholism is a deadly disease. When it makes a move, you're gonna know it. So I went down the road and we had some good times, we had som e bad times and I ran into a situation. No, it wasn't a situation, I just tiptoed off the reservation. And for, I'm guessing, and Lord please help me to not lie, I did 10 years or maybe 15, 10 years without a sponsor. I mean, I communed with my brother wizards. I'm making a joke out of it now, but it's the truth. I'd be, you know, what do you got? And I would tell what I have. And it's like, whatever. And where that ended, and I would have bet anything in the world that this would never, ever happen to me. Where that ended was me laying on the floor in an office that I did not pay rent on under a telephone that never rang with a business that was busted and Marie's dealing with the creditors. And I collapsed. I fell out of my chair I was sitting there by myself I fell on my chair onto the floor and I pulled a knife out and I thought this is it, I'm getting out of here and I spent four hours on the floor in hell and if you define hell as the absence of God that's where I was it was the blackest, darkest place I ever encountered and I hope nobody ever goes there and I knew how to cut my wrist because we get that information right and I thought if I cut myself on this floor and it was like astroturf carpet it was really not great if I got myself on this floor I'm going to make oh my goodness I'm gonna make a big mess so I got to crawl out the back door and I couldn't finish it real quickly and so I couldn t kill myself thank God I called somebody I had met a woman in Minneapolis from Minneapolis and she told me about a guy in St. Paul that she really thought the world of and I wanted to get in touch with him so I could get somebody to help me so I called her when I was going down and failing and failing in my life I only said two things to God, I said God I can't breathe and would you please give me a cookie I just wanted one thing that was sweet in this misery darkness that I was in so I called this woman I told her the situation five minutes, I know I didn't even get to chapter two anyway I called her and I told her my situation and she broke out the Alcoholics Anonymous literature in her lap and she's 12 stepping me and I'm listening to her and it's everything I need to hear and I asked her if she'd be my sponsor and she said oh no you know boys with boys, girls with girls and I am dying and I didn't even get that guy's number and I said please will you be my sponsor and I knew she was a woman, she had less sobriety me i couldn't have cared less i was like 23 years sober and um and so um she said okay i'll work with you until you find a male sponsor and i said okay and she saved my life and she stayed with me for four years and her name was Cookie. Bidden or unbidden, God is here. Bidden or unbedden, God is here that I found this profession that I have is a story that I would love to tell you but I can't because I ran out of time I put this talk in God's hands I hope it went somewhere that was of use I could not with these hands drive a nail with a hammer and I do nothing but precision work all day long in making cowboy boots and I make beautiful boots not because I'm any damn good but because God is good and I never thought anybody would ever buy a pair of cowboy boots from me and I was desperate and Marie and I went into $158,000 worth of debt trying to build that business and we paid it off. Don't turn your back on the beast. Don't kid yourself that you can't be laying on the floor with a knife at your wrist. Don't think that you're so got it made that you are like smooth as mayonnaise because you might end up grease. I have separation anxiety I'm going to hang on to you as long as I possibly can right now I don't want to let you go, I don' t know how you felt about this talk, I dont know how you feel about any of my opinions or what happened to me but I love you and I can't let you go so I'm just until she blows me off this stage and i didn't honor it bart i'm so sorry oh my god i can share it she said okay all right fellowship of the spirit so a bunch of us were had been going around the country talking at various places on the circuit and we'd go to go to towns and they had more intimate a more intimate collection of a number of people and and we had like the state convention and the state prevention was 1500 people with breakout rooms and video feeds and all this kind of stuff and i just wanted us to have one that was more intimate and so through a series of talking with gary b and mike l and people in indianapolis and talking with um don p don pritz marie and i said okay we will go get a venue we'll get a hotel let's do it in the mountains so we can show off our mountains and be proud of them and and uh we'll get the we'll get the hotel and you provide the man and woman power and so that's how we started fellowship of the spirit now we had to talk about a variety of things and i can tell you you talk about tears oh my god you get a collection of us in a room and we're going to make a single decision with any little wrinkle and we it's mayhem i thought they were going to shoot arrows in me in my own living room it was but we stuck to our guns because we'd gotten some advice from people about certain things and we did that and we got this thing put together and it was called the breckenridge conference because we went into breckenrich colorado with it and we had 225 people show up now what um who was talking about it being the uh con film festival you were so what happened is Joe Hawk went out and he talked to a lot of people that said come be with us come be with us because Don Prince was involved in this thing and Joe Hawk was out beating the drum we had 225 people show up okay 225 people from 25 states from 25 States they came to be in Colorado with us seeking God now I wanted to have it where you have five speakers and then plenty of time for people to enjoy the mountains and be with their families or whatnot and Don said well no let's have step workshops I fought against it I'm smart that way and and so what we are doing what we've been doing here is thanks to Don Pritz and what went from what I thought was let's Have a lot of air in this thing went to what we have here you can't turn around before your butt's back in a seat and you're growing spiritually thank you and i totally subscribe to this now what happens is we we started having like people the folks from santa fe would bring up you know mexican food and the and the boo i mean the folks from louisiana they would bring a shrimp etouffee and you know and all this kind of stuff and we And we'd go room to room and we'd share meals with each other. And I noticed, I walked into one of the rooms and there was a girl from New York sitting next to a guy from Louisiana. And she said, now where's that fourth column in the resentment inventory? And he's leaning over talking to her and we got Louisiana and New York talking to each other and I went out for a break just to look at the mountains and there were people there and there as a young man standing out on the little patio thing with me and I looked over at him I didn't know him and the tears were just slowly running down his cheeks and I said are you okay and he said yeah and I say would you mind if I ask you why you're crying and he says there are four of us in Muscatine, Iowa around our big book and he say I've never seen so many people work out of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous our text what's that yeah so I'm with you Rodney thank you so anyway but the point is I'm seeing people learning about a fullness of an approach to getting and staying well right in front of us, and I'm seeing people rely on the big book instead of my sponsor says. My sponsor says this, and I'm sure you have a great sponsor, but I need what's in this book. This is my bullshit sifter. That's what they told me, and if it's not in here, Mickey, you don't have to pay attention to it. You don't have to do it. So this is the one imagine how many strong personalities are in this room tonight you know we have we'll tell you what it is right this is our referee can we not agree to come together here and that's what we've been expressing in this weekend so now there's fellowship of the spirit Ukraine there's fellowship ofthe spirit Moscow there's scholarship ofthe Spirit Johannesburg South Africa I talked on Skype to them I've got goosebumps running all the way up from my legs we've got it all around the world Iceland Australia Texas no everywhere whoa it's really big now incidentally I have this factoid. I'm throwing it in since I got this for a minute. Brooklyn is so big. At one time, they were thinking of making it a state. That's how big Brooklyn is. Isn't that amazing? Right, Devin? Where are you? There you go. Anyway, so it's around the world. It's aroundthe world. And here's what happens. Fellowship of the Spirit is a family, okay? We have known Tom and Juanita for 25, 26 years. I've got in my pocket a key to their house and we can go down there when they're not there we let them know and Tom says can you get it back from him no our son is a Catholic priest our baby Peter is a catholic priest and he married Nate and Lindsay I mean you know what I'm saying and I've talked to Nikki on the phone and just think she's absolutely out of this world and we met heart to heart on the phone calls that we've had and that's what this is it's heart to hard okay we all are individuals our fingerprints prove it we're all individuals but there's a difference I'm trying to find out how to express it for years there's an experience there's difference with fellowship of the spirit in this way I can't summarize it but here's as close as I can get we're not mechanics we are really working with your heart and my heart, our souls because when the spiritual malady is overcome we straighten out mentally and physically I didn't know I had a soul until I came in here and it started getting fed if you talk to my head we're done because there's a man who used to say he's rubber minded I can take any thought and twist it around and come out a loser but if we talk heart to heart we'll come together you like that one Scott if we talk to each other heart to heart and stay in this book we're going to stay alive and we're going to grow one person can change the world one person can change the world Marie and I and the people that joined us we've changed the world and there's another wave coming and that is to be even deeper into working in the heart thank you so much for inviting me for having Maria and I come and be with you you are a family we love you and God bless you you didn't get it done at all