Woke Up Naked in Four-Point Restraints and for Just a Second Thought I Might Have Missed Something Really Cool 🥴 – Kip C.
About This Speaker Tape
Kip Collins shares his story at a Central Florida men's workshop with 22 years of sobriety. Born to an Irish-Sioux father and Irish-Cherokee-Choctaw mother in a violent household, he grew up terrified — the only white kid in a Hispanic neighborhood, caught between warring worlds inside and outside his home. At 12, he drank port wine for the first time and experienced his "first spiritual awakening" — a peace he had never known. By 14 he was dealing drugs internationally with his friend Balto, and at 16 was arrested in Mexico with 200 kilos and sentenced to 25 years in La Mesa Federal Penitentiary.
After getting out, he married a woman who bailed him out of jail three times, had two children, and tried to go straight. Then his seven-year-old son was run over by a truck while Kip had left to buy a six-pack. The boy survived with catastrophic brain damage, never developing past age four. His brother Bill, his only trusted ally, developed schizophrenia and shot himself three days after Kip left town on a drug deal. Kip's psyche "snapped in half" and he plunged into full alcoholic destruction — losing his wife, dragging his young daughter through five states living like animals, and eventually choosing wine over food for his hungry child at a bus station.
After his mother rescued his daughter, Kip lived for three years in a bamboo patch near a septic tank, panhandling for wine. He cycled in and out of AA for six years, told to "just go to meetings and don't drink," but without working the steps he went progressively insane. He shot himself in the chest and survived. On May 12, 1984, alcohol stopped working entirely, and lying on his bed he finally understood powerlessness — that he would steal food from his own daughter's mouth to drink. He surrendered completely, went to old-timer Charlie Tuck's house, and Charlie detoxed him, taught him to pray on his knees in a public park, and put him in the back seat of a car going from meeting to meeting. The men of AA saved his life.
Kip's story is a raw testament to the disease concept, the insufficiency of meeting attendance alone without step work, and the power of one person — an old woman who kissed a filthy street drunk, an old-timer who saw through the tough-guy mask — reaching out at the right moment. He credits the men of AA with teaching him how to be what he never knew how to be.
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