Working With Newcomers Is What Makes a Long-Timer Remember Why He Got Sober — Moses D.
About This Speaker Tape
Moses celebrates 28 years and 10 months sober, opening with a vivid memory of his last drink at an Atlanta Chapter of the Grammys after-party at the Eastlake Golf Club ballroom on a December night — open bar, Smirnoff vodka flowing, his name 'on the crib of gold.' He tells the room that if anyone is thinking about doing a slip, to come back and tell him how that Smirnoff tastes — a recurring tease that frames the whole talk in gratitude.
Born the ninth of ten children in a small Alabama town fifty miles from Selma, Moses grew up under strong Southern Baptist roots — a deacon father, a piano-playing mother — but learned early how to balance a double life. He watched what alcohol did to grown men like David Crockett, who walked the road one step forward and two steps back, foaming at the mouth and singing in blackout, and to Uncle Bull next door who sold homebrew in little jars to a line of cars that ran Monday through Sunday. By high school Moses was an entrepreneur with cash from selling candy door-to-door in Shaker Heights, two cars, and a 1959 GTO with an 850 Holley dual-line carb — plenty of money to keep girls in his hot rod and Hopping Gator in their cups.
He moved through Tuskegee Institute, sat on the Ignorant Bench, landed on academic probation freshman year, then went to Concordia Lutheran Seminary in Fort Wayne where his Russian professor Dr. Kurt Morkos showed up at his dorm at 10 p.m. with bottles of straight vodka and Russian sausages. Moses landed in Atlanta in 1979, started his own music production company, and watched his tolerance climb as cocaine entered the picture alongside the liquor — admitting from the start that his real problem was never alcohol but control.
The talk centers on what AA's first 200 words gave him — Steps Three, Seven, and Eleven, what he calls '3-7-11' — and on the Fourth Step as a flush you do not reach back into. He honors Bill W. and the founders, credits his Higher Power for getting him through, and points repeatedly to the newcomer and to AA's unbroken 88-year unity as proof that the program works while every other movement around it has split.
Discussion
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