You’ve Got Alcoholism Mixed Up with Gravity – Doug R.

About This Speaker Tape

A speaker with 28 years of sobriety shares his unlikely path to Alcoholics Anonymous with humor and raw honesty. He describes growing up in a non-alcoholic family in Garden Grove, California, where his first drink came as a teenager trying to impress a girl on a friend's advice. What started as a tool for social conquest quickly became his defining pursuit. He details a career as a prop man and stagehand in Hollywood television, where his drinking cost him multiple jobs, and a stint touring the country in the Broadway musical Hair, playing the lead role of Burger after a psychedelic-fueled audition in 1969.

The emotional center of the talk is a devastating scene with his daughter Star. Arriving drunk to pick up his 12-year-old for a weekend visit, her stepfather walked him to the porch and told him he was welcome anytime sober but to stop coming drunk because it was hard on Star. Driving away in tears, unable to see the road, he pulled into a parking lot, sobbed, then looked up, saw a liquor store sign, and bought a pint of whiskey. He uses this moment to illustrate the insanity of alcoholism that only other alcoholics can understand.

His physical bottom included breaking his shoulder skiing off a cliff while loaded on whiskey and cocaine, then falling 54 feet off a hospital parking structure while drunk, shattering his pelvis and foot. His friend Teddy got sober and challenged him directly, but he attended AA for eight months while still drinking daily, lying about sobriety dates at four different groups. The turning point came when he prayed for help and then encountered AA members everywhere he went for two straight weeks, blocking his path to alcohol. He pulled his car over one morning and came to believe a power greater than himself could restore him to sanity.

Now married to Carla, a fellow AA member, he reflects on losing his sister, his sponsor Dick Martin, and his mother in a single year without calling it a bad year. He closes by describing the music of AA as the laughter that heals people who thought they would never laugh again, calling it the treatment for a terminal illness that makes people weller than they were before they got sick.

Topics

Timestamps

• 0:00 Opens with gratitude for being an alcoholic and what that actually means to someone with 28 years sober
• 4:30 Talks about traveling to speak at the Hilton Head Midwinter Conference and flight cancellation drama getting rerouted through Dallas to Savannah
• 9:00 Describes his non-alcoholic family, his father's baffling ability to have one beer and stop, and his mother's reason for not drinking
• 14:00 Losing his sister to cancer, sponsor Dick Martin, and mother all in 2015, and why it was still a good year
• 18:00 First drink story with Rainier Ale by the railroad tracks on his friend Morris's advice about getting a home run
• 23:00 Showing up drunk to pick up daughter Star, stepfather's porch speech, crying in the car, then buying whiskey at the liquor store
• 30:00 Skiing off a cliff at Mammoth, then falling 54 feet off the hospital parking structure in Burbank
• 38:00 First AA meeting at Valley Presbyterian Hospital, refusing to sit down, the garage door opener pager, Ruth's 18-year birthday cake
• 48:00 Reading the Big Book drunk, discovering We Agnostics chapter, grandmother's Pentecostal mission on Skid Row
• 55:00 Eight months in AA still drinking, sucking whiskey from bedspread, praying for help, AA members appearing everywhere for 14 days straight, moment of belief on the side of the road