Willpower Was Never Our Problem — It’s Lack of Another Kind of Power – Bill C.

My name is Mike Strauss, and welcome.
I remember the first Marietta Roundup when it was at the old Marietta Convention Center in 1990, I think it was.
In 1991, I got transferred from Atlanta, I got sober here in Marietta, up to Charlotte, North Carolina.
I knew nobody there. I had met one guy, Harry W., through a friend of mine here, and that was a treat.
And I got up to Charlotte, and it was a little different there.
However, most of the meetings were speaker meetings.
I went to a speaker meeting one night at a place called Queen City Group,
and I heard a guy speak who I said, I think I'll ask him to be my sponsor.
He was the exact opposite of my sponsor, who many of you remember Norm here.
This guy was quiet, composed, and calm, everything that I'm not.
And I said, I think I could learn something from this guy.
And he gave me a couple of rules.
One was, you should go to speaker meetings.
Big book meetings and step meetings, that's where the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is.
For the next five years, I cheated a little bit, but that's what I did.
He also told me about meditation.
When I told him I couldn't do it, he said, well, get a professional to teach you.
I still haven't learned to do it ten years later.
And I've enjoyed the time that I had with Bill up there.
He came down here one time when I moved back here in 1996 to speak at the Bishop Lake Group.
And I haven't seen Bill.
I haven't seen Bill since about 1997 or 1998.
The neat thing is he hasn't changed one bit.
I think you're really all going to enjoy his message.
Thank you.
I'm Bill Crawford, and I'm an alcoholic.
And that was – thank you, Mike.
I hadn't – as he said, I sponsored Mike.
And as he said, it was ten years ago.
And I'm a big fan of Bill Crawford.
I'm a big fan of Bill Crawford.
And I'm a big fan of Bill Crawford.
And I'm a big fan of Bill Crawford.
I didn't know Bill five years ago, and I've about over it.
But I appreciate the comments.
I'm also grateful more than I can describe to be invited to this fine occasion, this
Marietta Roundup.
And I've heard a lot about it, and I know it's a good one.
And you're privileged to speak at this conference.
So thank you for that.
I want to thank Joe for picking me up at that.
the airport, and I want to thank Carol and Ross and the other Joe and Mike and Cindy
for having dinner with me tonight. It was a delight. Raised by the River, something
like that. It was great. So with all the thanks out of the way, I just can't think of another
thing to say. And I've run into several old friends who've heard me before, and maybe
more than once before, and I'm especially grateful to them for being willing to listen
to me again. And so it just, I'm comfortable here, and I just feel good. And there's other
speakers, particularly Clancy, who's been a hero of mine for years. I don't even think
he's here listening to me, really. I mean, but he did at least say hello. But I'll buy
it. I'll buy it. I'll buy it. I'll buy it. I'll buy it. I'll buy it. I'll buy it. I'll
be here listening to him tomorrow night. When we're doing this, my assignment tonight, I
know exactly what it is, is to tell my story. And when we do this, we're relating that miracle
that occurs in our lives. And there's nothing short of that. It's a big deal. It's not a
little deal. I didn't develop character or get smart or discover my inner child or anything.
What has happened to me? There's Clancy. I'm sorry I said that. I'm sorry. I really, I really
apologize. That was not me that said those things. I'm in trouble now. None of those things happen.
A miracle, I believe, has occurred in my life, as it has yours. If you have found this thing we call
recovering the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, many of us think, certainly the people
who surround us, those bosses and wives and husbands and parents and whatever, think that we
lack willpower. And that's not the case at all. We've got too much willpower. There are people in
this room that have gotten up and gone to work and worked all day that if a normal person felt half
that bad, they'd be in intensive care.
Lack of willpower is not our problem. It's lack of another kind of power. And hopefully I can talk a little bit about that or at least describe in a way that's understood how that
powerlessness applied to me. Now, I came up in a home that we had. Y'all come in. I'll start over. And I know these good folks had a lot to say about that. But I'm going to start over.
I had a good reason. Well, anyway, I came up in a home with a dual problem. We had alcoholism and
Southern Baptism right there in the same room. And as many of you know, you don't get over either one of those.
Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Once a Southern Baptist, always a Southern Baptist. Once whatever you are. If you were born and raised a Roman Catholic or whatever,
I hate to quote Clancy, but I remember one of the first talks I ever heard him talk,
he was talking about what Hitler's method was.
If they could teach you Nazism in the first seven years of your life,
there would be a little bit of Nazi in you for the rest of your life.
And sometimes we laugh and make sport of those good Christian homes that produce so many of us,
but I believe that what many of us have learned at our mother's knee
whether we turned away from it or not, helped us maybe get this here, laid a kind of a foundation.
Certainly it made it so that it was difficult for me to live inside my own skin with what I knew,
the morals that had been imposed on me.
And I came up knowing that alcohol, beverage alcohol was bad because of my religious training
and because of what I witnessed in my home.
And I knew, I guess...
I guess at some level, always, that I'd never drink.
It was just, we're not doing it.
Because the only drinking I knew about was the kind that happened in our house
and then a friend of mine up the street who had two alcoholic parents
and it wasn't, it was not attractive by any means.
But I was having trouble adjusting early.
I was having trouble satisfying the authorities
and getting in the rhythm of the system.
I had a difficult time.
And that was back before they diagnosed you.
You know, now they do that to kids.
And they give them letters, you know, A-D-A-H and H-D and A-D-D.
And the way I put it is, I came along before Ritalin.
I came along during paddling.
.
Which...
Which was the drug used for kids like me back then.
And they tried to adjust me in that way.
And I would determine not to be bad.
I would determine to keep my mouth shut in school.
And I couldn't do it.
And I just, you know, that part in the big book where Bill says we sought lower companionship.
I was doing that in the second grade.
I was...
.
.
Trying to...
.
Maybe unconsciously.
But nevertheless trying to find those folks that were like me.
And as I began to come up...
.
These are the ones who smoked the Lucky Strikes.
And I became a cat, which many young people don't know what a cat was.
But it was with the long ducktails and the squared off...
.
...you know, and the draped pants.
And you wore the pants real low.
And I just...
.
while. I had a period where I hung around with the boys in front of Man's Hoes at Henry Drugstore,
the rebels. And back then, what drug was available to us was alcohol. I knew very little about
anything else. And I began to drink simply because they were drinking. Now, I learned later that's
called peer pressure. That's something we do to be included in a group among people that we want
to be included. And I began to use alcohol for that reason. And I think I had what you would call
a true social drinking period there. And I think it was about six weeks that I was a social drinker.
Where I had a sip of this and a half a can of that. And then one night, and I'm 50 and a half
years old, I ingested enough cheap wine to no intoxication. And anything like social drinking,
anything like drinking with
impunity, anything like okay drinking was gone that night. Because it did something for me that
the experts say it only does for 10% of the people who experiment with alcohol. It does, it made me
comfortable in a world that for me, for the most part, was uncomfortable. It made me okay. It made
me enough. It filled a hole that I didn't even know was there.
Until I felt that feeling. Now that's something that's hard to describe to people who are not in
rooms like this. They can't understand that. They are the 90% who waste every drop they drink.
We all know them. They're everywhere. They outnumber us nine to one.
We marry them. We go to work for them. Bosses are, it's epidemically non-alcoholic. And they don't
understand us and we don't understand them. But that special feeling, that special response to
alcohol happened to me. And it's like my good friend, and this is the last time I'm going to quote Clancy,
but as he says,
Clancy says,
Clancy says,
If it doesn't do anything for you, it'll never do anything to you. And that's the deal. And I believe it's what it does for us that gets us in trouble. And it's what it does to us that hopefully gets us here. Or to some form of help.
And I, my drunk-a-log is not a particularly exciting drunk-a-log. A lot of people say that, but mine is a fairly boring drunk-a-log. And it doesn't mean I was a functioning drunk.
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a,
I was a drunk.
I mean, I, I didn't function at all, but I didn't do anything exciting. You know, I didn't get on a plane and fly to Moscow or something on a drunk. I just, I was just a drunk. Now, what happened to me is what happened to you, I believe, if you're alcoholic.
Now, I love Dr. Silkworth's chapter, and lately, in recent times, when I've had the opportunity to do this, I talk a lot about that, because I think Dr. Silkworth was there on the firing line, a front-line observer.
If you will, to us. Now, he didn't set out to do a scientific study of alcoholism or us, but he had empirical knowledge. In other words, he was running a hospital where he treated thousands of us.
And he noticed certain commonalities, certain similarities with us. And I think they're pretty true. Now, sometimes, if we're new, we hear differences, and we filter out the similarities.
Sometimes. And you may be sitting there and say, well, I may drink too much, but I'm not like that old guy up at the podium. But if you listen, if we listen, if we open our ears and hearts long enough, we'll find that the similarities are so great, it's almost uncanny.
We're so much alike, it's almost uncanny.
And in the beginning, I think the absolute doorway, the precursor, the first requirement of alcoholism.
Alcoholism is that special thing it does for us.
Silkworth talks about that, too. He says, no matter what folks say, men and women drink because they like the effect. That's why they drink.
They can say they like a martini, or they can, you know, I drink because my dog died, or whatever.
But what they like is the effect produced by alcohol, and that's why I drink.
He talks about, he didn't know what else to call it.
He said these people are not only...
different in their minds, they're different physically.
They have a physiological difference.
And I don't know what to call it, he said, except an allergy.
They respond to this alcohol in a different way physically.
If they take a drink, they have something he called the phenomenon of craving.
Something that happens physically that doesn't happen to other folks.
You ever been out drinking with somebody, be it some convention or something with business,
and somebody switches to coffee or something?
You ever done that?
Just a terrible thing.
You know, because when I knew about the phenomenon of craving way back,
not the term, but I knew that response to alcohol.
I knew that I had been in a situation young, in my teens,
where I would refuse a drink when I knew that that's all I was going to get.
I would refuse a drink when I wanted to drink very badly.
Because I knew if I took a drink...
I would refuse a drink when I wanted to drink very badly.
Or a couple of drinks, the agitation, the discomfort, the craving would manifest,
and I would feel worse than if I didn't have any at all.
I knew about the phenomenon of craving.
Unique to our class.
Another thing the experts say is these amnesia spells that we call blackouts.
Peculiar to our class, the 10%.
These 9 in 10 don't have that.
Now, we're not the only ones that become...
can become intoxicated.
Non-alcoholics can become intoxicated, and often do.
We're heading into the 4th of July.
We just passed the Christmas and New Year's season
when non-alcoholics will take a drink or two or three or four or five or six.
And they'll go to parties and they will ingest enough alcohol to feel it.
And they'll be out there on the road like New Year's Eve.
Nothing.
Nothing more dangerous than a non-alcoholic
with a blood alcohol count of about a .06
all over the road.
There are people in this room that have been blowing a .30
driving straight as an arrow
because of the training.
Now, we've learned things.
They don't know, like this.
They don't know that.
That's a conditioned reflex.
You get those lines down to what?
Straight as an arrow.
Might be going 17 miles an hour.
But we're going straight because of the training.
Might have our head out the window.
But that non-alcoholic who's intoxicated,
no matter to what extent, will remember everything.
That peculiarity of amnesia or blackout
doesn't happen to him.
I'm like a friend of mine.
I had them when they first came out.
I had them when I was young.
And I would get reports of what I did
and who I was with and what I said
and this kind of thing.
And I began to realize that I hadn't remembered this.
And I was walking and talking and functioning.
Some people didn't even know I was intoxicated.
And I could not remember.
I'm peculiar to our class.
That happened to me very early in the drinking.
And I began to lose control of the amount I drank.
That's alcoholism.
Non-alcoholics don't do that.
Or if they do it, they do it once.
And most importantly, I began to lose control
of the prediction of my behavior.
How I was going to act.
And my behavior became not only unpredictable
but more antisocial and more unpredictable.
And all of this didn't happen the first week,
but it happened pretty quick with me.
My whole drinking career was probably
not a day or two over 14 years.
I started drinking when I was 15 years old
and I came into the program of Alcoholics Anonymous
by the grace of God when I was 29.
And by the grace of God, through this moment,
I hadn't had a drink since I came to Alcoholics Anonymous
that first time.
And I'll talk a little bit about that.
I tried everything that we tried.
Alcoholics do.
I would try to drink only beer
because that's always, I think,
what alcoholics do.
I've heard many of them say to me
since I've tried to do the 12-step work
in this program,
I only drink beer.
If I'm an alcoholic, I couldn't be a bad one.
I only drink beer.
And I would try that.
And I would drink beer for long periods of time.
And beer was also my detox medication too.
If I was to have been on a drunk,
I know we all enjoy those commercials,
especially when you're doing the sports season and everything,
the beer commercials, the Silver Bullet,
the Budweiser.
And they're either funny
or they've got the good-looking people drinking that beer
and having such a good time.
And the women are beautiful and the men are strong.
Which didn't...
That commercial was never shot at my house.
Right?
And...
And if you're new,
and you say,
I need to maybe quit drinking
and I maybe need to enjoy these folks,
but I'll never have any fun again.
I'll come in here and I'll just...
I'll drink coffee and eat cake and all that stuff,
but I'll never have any fun again.
Let me tell you about my fun beer drinking.
The antithesis of those commercials.
I'd get up in the morning,
you know how you are in the morning,
the afternoon,
the afternoon,
whenever you come to
and I'd have that...
that feeling that only can be described as
the one who is allergic to this substance
and that hangover,
withdrawal from this thing.
And I would try to drink that beer down
to put out the fire
and to get the nerves calm.
And I would get as much beer down.
I never was standing in the right place
when I did this.
I'd be near the refrigerator
instead of near the toilet
when I do this.
And I do...
And I do...
I'd get that beer down
and that gag reflex would hit me.
It would get down about that far
and it would come back up
and I'd grab my mouth
and I would blow it out my nose.
Now you missed that
when you come to LA.
So I've often thought
as sort of a counter,
maybe some agency could run
some government grant
to run a counter ad
to the tug-of-war out on the beach
drinking the silver bullet
and have a pretty girl blow one out her nose
to show...
to show there's another side
to the beer drinking.
And this was my fun beer drinking
toward the end.
And I had from drinking
where I couldn't stop drinking,
where I couldn't stop drinking,
where I couldn't stop as I've described
and my behavior becoming antisocial, unpredictable.
And of course as we say,
I discovered the morning drink
which means I got into bender binge drinking.
And as you've already heard me say,
this is somebody in his 20s,
not in his 60s like I am now
or 50s, 40s or even 30s,
but a young man
who was drinking around the clock,
drinking for oblivion,
drinking in the bed,
drinking just to get out of the world.
And I would determine at this time
when I'd come off these drunks,
I would determine I'm not going to do it anymore.
And I'd make that promise.
It's the emptiest promise in the world,
but say I didn't know it.
When the alcoholic says to me
when I'm trying to help somebody,
you know, this was so bad.
I got so sick.
I did so much damage.
I've hurt them enough.
I've humiliated myself enough.
I'll never do this again.
I know the lie is not to me.
The lie is to him or to her.
The lie was never really,
or most of the time,
it was never to them.
It was to me.
I meant it.
And when that boss would rehire me
or when my wife Kay would forgive me
and my parents would make it be okay again,
I would set out on those fresh starts
to not drink.
And sometimes it'd last a week
and sometimes it'd last two weeks
and one time it lasted a month.
But I would go back in
to buy some more of that poison,
one more time,
because nothing else filled the hole.
I didn't have anything else
to come in and do it.
And so I'd repeat that thing
over and over again
as many of us do.
I was powerless over alcohol.
I couldn't drink.
And I don't mean I couldn't
bend my elbow and swallow.
I couldn't drink successfully.
I couldn't drink without getting sick.
I couldn't drink without hurting me and others.
I couldn't drink without damage being done.
I couldn't drink and stop.
But more importantly,
what we're celebrating here,
what we're about in this room
is I could not drink.
There's nothing that can be done
about that part of me that can't drink.
That's always there.
If I'm sober a hundred years,
I'm just a hundred years worse off
to be able to tolerate alcohol
than I was when I quit.
But what I have overcome
with God's help and yours help
is that part of me that can't not drink.
That's what happened to Bill Wilson.
I love Bill's story
in the big book.
Bill's story is my story.
Your story too, I guess.
Bill was in, as we know,
in that famous hotel lobby
which I had the privilege of visiting
a couple of years ago
when he was returned into a museum
at the Mayflower Hotel in Akron.
And he had been sober for six months.
That was a long time for Bill.
He'd not only been sober six months,
he'd had a super colossal spiritual experience.
I mean, almost out-of-body deal.
Not only that,
but he had had insight given to him
because he'd been working with a therapist.
He had self-knowledge.
And beyond that,
he'd even gone out
and tried to help some other drunk.
A lot going for him.
And as you heard the story
or read the story so many times,
he paced that lobby.
And he looked at the cockpit.
He looked at the hotel lounge.
And he said,
first, I'm just going in there
and get some friends
because I feel so bad
this business deal has fallen through.
And I'm all alone.
And if you ever know what it's like
as an alcoholic sober
coming to maybe sober in a strange town,
a strange place,
you don't know anything.
There's no loneliness,
a loneliness even like it.
And then he said,
no, I'll go in and just have a few drinks.
And then a panic hit him.
It's the way I understand the story.
And maybe the first time a panic
had ever hit a drunk
as far as we know,
as far as recorded,
when that crazy thinking started.
And through divine intervention,
I think most of us believe
he realized that this was the same craziness
that had gotten him
started drinking time after time before.
And that's when he got on the phone
and dialed the phone
and dialed the phone
and dialed the phone
until he got a hold of the right minister.
And then through some other,
things he was able to be in the company
of Dr. Bob
and that's what started Alcoholics Anonymous.
And so in the middle of July of 1966,
I'm working for this crooked company,
pretty crooked company.
It was the old bait and switch.
I don't know if you know what a bait and switch is,
but this was the old bait and switch deal
where you put storm windows on the house
for $5.55 each.
And you have it.
You put siding on the house for $279,
the whole house.
And you go out and sell these people
siding for $279.
And you say,
by the way,
have you seen that siding you bought
after they signed the mortgage on the house?
And most of the time they'd say no
because they hadn't been to any showroom.
We didn't have a showroom.
And you bring in this piece of junk
and you say,
this is a siding you bought.
Now you need to wax that every other week
or it'll fall off your house.
And then we'd go out and get the good stuff
and after they'd bought the bad stuff
that really didn't exist
and switch them over to the good stuff.
And this is where I was working.
This and everything else I was doing
was totally against every moral teaching
that I'd ever experienced.
Totally against anything my conscience might dictate
if there was any conscience left.
And that's where I was
and that's the kind of deal I was in.
And I later got into selling cars
and this kind of thing
and that can be crooked too.
Not all cars sell as many cars.
But I was working for this crooked company
when I came home from St. Louis.
They sent me up to St. Louis for a couple of weeks.
By then I was in management.
And I'd been drunk up there for two weeks
and I came back and I was...
Kay picked me up at the airport.
And I was in the airport tapering off.
And this is what...
Some of you heard me talk about this before.
This is an art.
This is self-detox.
And I wasn't always perfect at it.
And my wife would confuse tapering off with drinking.
It looks a lot alike.
I'd have to explain it to her
time and time again.
No, I quit drinking yesterday.
Today.
I'm just tapering off.
Now what would add to her confusion is
sometimes I'd get drunk tapering off.
I would just...
And then I'd just start over.
And I was standing in the airport lounge tapering off
because it had been a bad two weeks
drinking some beer.
And I guess on the way home when she picked me up
it was a hot July day.
We stopped and got some more beer.
And I came in there and got into my drinking lounging clothes,
my underwear.
My underwear.
That's what I did most of my drinking.
I was a charming drunk.
And oftentimes dirty underwear
because I didn't bathe and I didn't eat.
And so I was standing there
and for whatever reason
I called Alcoholics Anonymous.
Now I hadn't got time
and you hadn't got the patience
to listen to all the stuff I'd done prior to this.
I'd done all kinds of stuff.
I'd been in psychiatric treatment.
When I was in...
I mean, I worked in a psychiatric ward.
I was a neuropsychiatric technician.
And I was...
It was all about me anyway.
And I was hypochondriacal
and it was selfish.
And I would think every disease I'd hear about
I'd get the symptoms.
And when you're working in a psychiatric ward
and they're teaching you about the mental ill disease
and you're an alcoholic,
it'll really screw with your head.
I mean, they'd teach me about...
schizophrenia or something.
I'd say, my God, I've got that.
And I'd have that fear
that somebody was going to discover
what was going on inside of here
or I was going to fly apart or something.
And they'd take me out of those white clothes
and take away my keys
and put me in those blue pajamas.
Since I hadn't said this lately,
that just reminds me.
If you want a quick degree
on alcoholism,
if you're thinking about going into the field
and working for it,
I can save you some school, I think.
Because they've studied us a lot.
You know, they've...
Grants.
Great minds have studied us.
And I don't object to that.
This is, I think, a true illness,
a true disease,
as the American Medical Association said in 1956
and other professional organizations
have owned up to that too.
So I don't object to that.
But not one penny has been spent
or not one great brain has been devoted
to the study of those non-alcoholics.
And that's a confusing bunch of people.
Now, what I've done without benefit of grant,
I've studied my wife Kay.
Just over the years.
Kind of a control group.
She's right there.
And she's probably one of the worst cases
of non-alcoholism you've ever seen.
Now, like on our anniversary,
if we go out and eat or something,
she'll drink a glass of white wine or something.
Once a year.
Twice a year.
But back in the past,
when we were dating in our early marriage,
she had more than maybe a handful of occasions.
Times when she drank enough to feel it.
You know what she does?
I hate for the newcomers to hear this.
She stops.
When she gets the...
Now, let me say that again
because I know it's not a word.
She gets the pilot lit.
And she stops.
Now, that demands research.
So I've said,
why do you do that?
More than once I've asked her,
why do you do that?
And she's told me more than once,
well, when I start to feel it,
I feel as if I'm losing control
and I don't particularly like that feeling,
so I stop.
Isn't that interesting?
The only thing that ever gave me
any semblance of control
was that feeling.
The only thing that came close
to my having my hands around this deal
was that feeling.
And so the irresistible urge
to continue drinking,
was irresistible.
So that's all I need to know
between the difference in us and them.
I don't need to know anymore.
They don't need to get another rat drunk
or any of that other stuff.
I'm satisfied with that much knowledge.
So anyway, back to...
I go home and I call Alcoholics Anonymous.
I've done all kinds of things.
I'd gone to counseling.
I considered myself an agnostic.
I'd even been in counseling with a minister.
Marriage counseling with the same minister.
And all he would say repeatedly,
he tried to help,
but his mantra was,
let me call somebody in AA.
Because he thought my problem was drinking.
And I would say,
no, not yet.
Let's work some other things out.
So anyway,
I reached Alcoholics Anonymous.
I'm going to hurry this thing up
and sit down so we can eat ice.
That ice cream's high, isn't it?
The tapes are about the biggest bargain I've heard.
They're $5 most places,
but the ice cream's high.
I guess make it up with the ice cream, I guess.
But anyway, that's why...
I called Alcoholics Anonymous.
Looked it up in the phone directory.
Standing there in my underwear, tapering off.
Kay and the kids were out of the room.
I mean, out of the house.
And I reached a man through the answering service.
At that time,
AA worked through an answering service.
They answered for two doctors
in an old company in AA.
That kind of answering service.
And I got Bill Norman.
Some of you may have known Bill Norman.
He was...
a member of Alcoholics Anonymous
and died as a member in good standing
about four years ago.
He called me.
And he began to talk to me.
And he began to realize that I was drinking.
No matter...
And I sort of told him,
no, I'm just tapering off.
I figured he would understand
if he was calling from the ANA headquarters.
And he wanted to call me back.
And he wanted to talk with me
when I wasn't drinking.
But I got his name and I got his number
and promised to call him back.
And when Kay came home,
I put that name and number in her face
before she could say a word.
You know, hush.
I've turned myself into AA.
Yeah.
He and I agree.
I'm not ready.
I'm not ready yet.
But I'm going to call him when I am.
Now, I believe, you know,
with all the baloney that was inside of me,
all the lies that I live by,
I'm not saying there was any sincerity
or motivation in that call,
but I believe it was desperation.
You know, we don't do the 12-step work
that we used to do
and it's kind of a pity.
But, you know, you learn after a while,
you know, fooling with those drunks.
Not many of them meet you at the door
and say, you've got some steps I can start working.
So, mental health counselors
don't find many of us motivated
or sincere or this kind of thing.
They put on our charts confabulation.
You know what that means?
Lies.
But it was desperation.
So I had to name a number
and I said I'm going to call him back.
Because I promised them I'd call him back
and I didn't.
And I didn't call him back
and I didn't call him back
and I didn't call him back.
And some months passed.
And Kay called him.
And she put that name and number in a safe place.
And she called him
and I know now that what had happened,
she got a strange man,
a strange voice,
someone she didn't know on the phone.
She'd been out trying to get help too.
She'd been going to places
and getting littered to her
and reaching out to people.
She'd been out and all kinds of things
like spouses, loved ones do.
The people are still there and still care.
But she was talking to a man that time
she realized pretty quick
that not only understood,
but who offered a solution.
And he said hold the phone
after he listened to her sympathetically
and he went and got Lib.
And Lib came on the phone
and told Kay about Al-Anon.
Can you talk in the speaker a little closer?
You're not hearing me?
No.
Okay.
I'll start up.
I'm Bill Crawford.
You didn't miss at all, did you?
Okay.
Were you missing me too?
Is that better?
I was lowering my voice for effect.
And I'm...
But she...
Well, you've heard me say this.
Some of you have heard me say this before.
If you are drinking alcoholically
and your spouse or your loved one,
the one who's still there and still cares,
get into Al-Anon
and start practicing those principles.
It probably will not cure your drinking.
That's not what it's designed to do,
but it will break your rhythm.
I'll guarantee you that.
Now you see,
I'm a great believer.
That somebody in that mess
needs to start getting well,
and that's what happened.
And she would say,
and she does right much of this kind of work
from the podium too,
and she'll tell you that just an inch at a time,
a little bit at a time,
slowly,
she started getting better.
And getting better in that situation
means that the power of my disease
began to lose its power over her.
Just by a little bit,
by a little bit,
by a little bit.
And so I credit Al-Anon,
Al-Anon as much as anything
for my getting to the doorway of alcoholics and all.
It was on June 2nd of 1967,
which through this moment,
thank God,
is my sobriety date,
that she looked at me
and I'm coming off a drunk number 150, 200, whatever.
It's just another drunk.
And it's damage done
and I'm scared to answer the phone
and I'm scared to go to the front door
and I'm hiding
and all that kind of stuff
that I did at the end of my drunks.
And she looked at me and said,
can we call Bill?
Oh, I knew who she was talking about
because I knew about Bill.
She would tell me
about the Wednesday night meeting she would go to
and she'd tell me about Bill
and she'd tell me about Lib.
And she'd even tell me a little bit
about the things they said
and I would listen.
And she was treating me better
so I didn't argue.
And I said, yeah.
Yes.
Because, you know,
back in July of 66,
that 10 months or whatever before,
10 or 11 months before,
so I was almost out of schemes and plans.
I was almost empty of my bag of tricks.
I was almost run out of options in my mind.
But that night I'd hit the wall.
And there was another lie in me
that there was another delay tactic.
It was anything that anybody, including me,
could believe for a minute.
I'd probably used it,
but I was out.
Good place for an alcoholic to be,
run out.
And I said, yeah.
And that was back,
some of you young folks don't know about this,
but that was back when you had holes in the phone
and you had to dial it like that.
And she'd been to enough Al-Anon
to know that I was supposed to do things for myself,
but she knew coming off that drunk,
I couldn't run that thing around seven times.
She dialed her phone for me.
And Bill said,
are you about ready to throw in the towel now?
When he came to the phone.
So he knew about me.
He didn't know about alcoholism
and alcoholic drinking anyway,
but he knew specifically about me
because Kay would tell him.
She'd report on me.
And I said, I sure am,
because I sure was.
And he said, let me come see you in the morning.
And this was a fairly late hour on a Friday night.
And that Saturday morning, June the 3rd,
he came to see me.
And sat in the living room in that little house
that I was about to lose.
The payments were $100 a month
and Cameron Brown Mortgage was going to foreclose on it
because I hadn't made payments in a long time.
And he sat in the big shot's living room
and he was generous with himself
like hopefully we all are
when we call on that drunk.
And he acted as if he cared about me.
But more important than anything,
he asked me if I would agree to two things.
To not drink for the rest of that day
and go with him to Alcoholics Anonymous that night
and I agreed to do it.
Now I didn't want him picking me up.
You know how we are.
I want my own getaway.
So I'll meet you there.
Now I was really too sick to go.
I needed to go tomorrow, the next day
when I felt better.
But Kay had heard that deal.
So nothing to do but us to go over there.
I had me a non-repossessable Mercury.
I don't know if you've ever had one like that.
And if you plan to do any more drinking,
I'll give you this little hint.
If you get a car,
you still owe money on.
And you can wreck it just enough
the bank doesn't really want it back.
But it'll still drive.
You get a little leeway.
You get a little latitude on that.
We went over in the old Mercury
and I came to...
Mike was talking about speaker meetings.
Thank God for speaker meetings.
If you don't have enough around Marietta,
start some because thank God for them.
Nothing better for that new person,
I don't think,
than to come.
Come and hear somebody's story.
And I came at that time in Greensboro.
There were 11 meetings in the whole town.
Nine groups, 11 meetings.
Central met three times a week
and all of them but two were speaker meetings.
So when I came to the Strongmount group,
which is to this day,
with some break because I moved away
from Greensboro for a while,
but is this day my home group,
I came in and listened
to people having a meeting.
Now I felt like you do
if you knew probably.
I figured everybody's looking at me,
wondering why I'm there.
You know?
That's the dumbest thought you can have
in any room full of alcoholics.
I don't care if it's the Moose Club,
the Red Rooster Lounge,
or Alcoholics Anonymous.
Alcoholics Anonymous only pay attention
to themselves, alcoholics.
Everybody's checking themselves out.
Nobody's looking.
You can come in with two heads.
But I thought everybody was wondering,
you know, yeah, how it is.
And I sat down and listened to the reading,
which meant nothing to me.
The same reading you heard tonight.
And a guy bellied up to the podium
like I'm doing tonight
and there was about 19, 20 people
out there in front of him.
Now Strongmount has 150 to 200 people.
Clancy's talked there on Saturday night.
And I listened to this man
do what I'm doing tonight.
And I was, you know what it's like
to be sober one day.
Your attention spans a little short.
And I wasn't assimilating everything.
I could not have repeated a sentence he said
after that meeting, I'm sure.
But two miracles occurred that night.
Number one, I understood his message.
And that was a big miracle.
Not details, but I understood
that he was telling me
and he was telling us
that he had drunk alcohol hopelessly.
Just like me.
And then he'd come here
and he hadn't been drinking.
I can't even remember how long that was.
And life was good.
I understood that.
Miracle number two was I believed him.
I hadn't believed anything, anybody in a long time.
Didn't even believe in God, so I told myself.
But I believed him.
Now maybe that could be explained by desperation.
I didn't have any other place to go
and I was reaching so hard.
Maybe, I don't know.
Maybe it can be explained
like we usually explain things like that
by the grace of God.
And after that meeting,
I go over to the...
At that time,
Starmount met in a smaller room,
the ladies' study or whatever it was.
We went over to the fellowship hall
and I watched the alcoholics drink coffee
and eat cake.
That's an amazing thing.
What an amazing thing that is
to someone who has been kicked out for life
from the bamboo lounge.
Now, I've been kicked out of several places.
But I'm right proud of the bamboo lounge
because the bamboo lounge is where you go
when you couldn't go anyplace else.
And I couldn't even go back there.
And here I am in these people
acting as if they cared so much about me
and coming up to reach out to me
and watching that amazing thing
of eating that cake.
I hadn't eaten cake in a long time.
I thought I'd outgrown my taste for sweets.
I learned by hanging around with y'all
that my blood sugar jacked up so high
I couldn't stand to be in the same room with a pie,
but I thought it was just kind of my...
And a drink of coffee,
cake crumbs spitting out of their mouth,
hugging each other and laughing.
Now, I couldn't figure things out real good,
but I knew somehow that these people,
they were better off than me.
And I knew they were better off
than the people at the bamboo lounge
at the Varsity Grill or Ham's
or any of those other places I'd been haunting.
And I wanted to be like them.
I was powerless over alcohol
and my life was unmanageable.
I could not manage my affairs.
I could not live life as a normal,
productive, decent human being.
And there was some corner of my mind
that remembered what a normal,
decent, productive human being was.
And these people looked like that.
Now, I'm going to tell you
the people that surrounded me,
the winners.
They surrounded me
and they did the things that winners do.
Winners, you know,
if you've been around here a couple of weeks,
no old-timer has to get you to side
and say, let me tell you
who the winners and the losers are.
They're winners and those guys are losers.
You can tell.
You can tell who has that thing that you want,
who's successful in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
There's no secret.
And you can tell the people who don't have
what you want.
And the winners surrounded me
and that's that 12-step stuff I was talking about.
We'd go up and down the road
making talks at other towns
and we'd go call on drunks at all situations,
take them to the hospital
and back then the doctors in the emergency room
would give them a shot in the butt
if he was a good doctor.
And Peraldehyde.
Now, most of you new people
have never heard of Peraldehyde.
Wonder drug.
Anytime something works,
they quit using it.
You could take somebody
that was between D and T.
I mean, they were just getting ready to go into it.
You could give them a shot of Peraldehyde.
This is true.
This is chloroform in alcohol.
You give them a shot of Peraldehyde
and they'd be eating.
They'd get an appetite.
Two shots of Peraldehyde,
you'd tell them to lie in a spot
that they'd want to be in
for a long time.
Wonder drug.
And also it stunk to you.
Peraldehyde.
You couldn't lose him.
You know, wherever he went.
Wherever he went,
you could smell that.
Anyway.
Winners do the same thing.
If you've been around this program a while,
what you'll discover, I think,
that this is a pretty good ride.
And you'll see people in on this ride
and you'll want to get on board.
Hopefully.
I did.
Because I knew they were better than me.
And you'll see people in on this ride.
And you'll see people in on this ride.
And you'll see that being on board
with these people is better than it was.
And then much better.
And then much better.
And then much better.
And if you hang around a little while,
I believe I can bet you what'll happen.
You'll realize
that the people pulling their wagon
are doing better than the people
that are just riding in the wagon.
And the people who are the winners
are the people that are pulling the wagon.
They're not just along for the ride.
They're involved.
And I did the thing,
I did the things that we do
in Alcoholics Anonymous to be well.
I went to the meetings.
I said yes to AA requests
because I was told to do
and made the coffee
and cleaned the ashtrays
back when you could smoke and all that.
Went to the prisons and shared.
Went on 12-step calls
and this kind of thing.
And Bill said,
and I'm going to shut up here
in about six minutes.
Bill said,
I want you to go to all these meetings
but do not go to the Sunday night
discussion meeting.
It will confuse you.
It will confuse you.
There are a couple,
a couple of screwballs up there
that will confuse you.
Stay away from that.
Of course, I could not wait.
And I started going
to Sunday night discussion meeting.
It wasn't hard to tell
who those screwballs were too.
One came to a very tragic end
not too much longer after that.
He tried to kill his wife,
tried to kill himself.
The other one,
we don't know what happened to her.
But I was an agnostic
and had a lot to say
so I shifted that meeting
from a two screwball meeting
to a three screwball meeting.
And I would share some of my opinions
and,
people would tell me
sometime in the group
or sometime after the meeting,
they would tell me,
you know,
I used to be like you.
And you know what I would do?
I'd get up,
someone would say,
I'd get up in the morning
and even though I didn't believe,
I'd ask this God
that I wasn't sure
really existed
for a day of sobriety
without a drink.
And if that worked,
I'd say thank you.
And I wanted this thing so bad
that I even began to do that,
this old agnostic.
That's how I came to believe.
He came to that third step prayer
that we do.
And did that inventory.
First time it wasn't much.
But the next time
it was a little bit better
and I was able to put
those grudges down.
I didn't write an autobiography
or any of that stuff.
I put the inventory down
like it says in the big book.
I sponsored a guy.
He's still a friend of mine
and we still see each other
right off by the name of Robert.
He's the meanest little guy
I've ever known.
He was the type of guy
to get in a fight
and bite your ear off.
That kind of guy.
And he had trouble
starting on his inventory.
I said, listen,
I tell you what,
get the Greensboro phone directory.
And mark out any name
you don't know.
The rest you hate.
That's your grudge list.
And did those things
to gain that insight
that would get in the program.
And to learn about me.
And to sit down
and I've done this more than once
to sit down and tell somebody
my whole life story.
And I know you're afraid of that
if you're new.
There's a couple of things
I ain't telling.
And I know how you do.
Some of you may have heard
say this before
but I'm going to tell you.
Now you read the big book.
They say go to your lawyer,
your doctor,
your priest or whatever
and give the fifth step.
You don't have to do that anymore.
You can do it right
with your AA sponsor.
Someone you trust.
And let me tell you
a little secret
in case you hadn't found it out.
AA members,
sponsors
are shock proof.
So I don't care
how big the secret is.
You're not going to shock them.
And if you do,
they will never admit it.
The only thing they'll do
is their mind churning
and say how can I top this?
Now I tell people
a lot of times from the podium
if you want to test this,
think of the worst thing
that you could possibly think of.
Whether you did it or not.
Just think of the worst act
you could think of.
Find you a couple of old timers
over at the coffee pot.
Maybe a half a dozen.
And just walk up
and break it on them.
Just say I ate a live rat one time.
They'll nod.
A couple of them say
I used to do that.
The greatest relief
you'll ever experience
is the dumping that.
The sharing of that.
My story.
My secrets.
There are people who say
around AA
and I believe it nowadays
you're as sick as your secrets.
Anyway,
I'm going to sit down
and show it up.
This is how we gain the insight.
This is how we gain the knowledge.
This is how we get
the connection
with this program in God.
And you make the amends
and I know how,
you know,
to be free,
to do steps,
four through nine.
To send that money off
where I owe it.
To make that,
fix that with that person
that I can't face anymore.
It gives me the greatest freedom
in the world.
Now I can answer the phone.
Now I can go to the front door.
Now I can walk down
any side of any street,
anywhere,
and I don't have to change
sides of the street
no matter who's coming.
What a freedom.
And I learned to pray right here.
I'd been raised in a church,
but I learned to pray here.
And I learned the four things
I need to watch for.
Every day.
Every minute of my life.
If I'm out of whack,
is it anger?
Is it fear?
Is it dishonesty?
Is it selfishness?
What's happening to me?
And then I get the greatest gift
I think that Alcoholics Anonymous gives us.
It's the gift of giving this thing away.
Because I've been taught way early
to be generous with my time,
my energy,
myself,
with people who are hurting worse than me.
And I found myself in that situation one time.
And a wonderful feeling overcame me.
A feeling that was new,
unrecognizable.
I recognized in retrospect
that what had happened to me
for just a few seconds
that I cared more about someone else
than I did me.
That had never happened to me.
That meant I was different.
I'm different now than I was a year ago.
I'm much different than I was ten years ago.
For the better.
I'm not wonderful.
I'm not good.
I'm not developed some outstanding character
or any of these things.
I'm just different in that way.
The next time I had that feeling longer,
the next time the feeling lasted a little bit longer,
now I can have that feeling anytime I want it,
anytime I need it.
To get out of me.
To get out of the discomfort of living
in this selfishness,
self-centeredness,
self-absorbed inside of me.
And to go through the actions enough
where I care a little bit more
and a little bit more
about someone else
more than I do me.
And for that and all the things
that have happened to me.
And they're too innumerable to mention,
the good things.
I'm as grateful as I'm capable of being.
Thank you.
Applause