I Didn’t Relapse—But I Was Losing the Program: AA Speaker – Charlie P. – Las Vegas, NV
AA speaker Charlie P. from Austin shares how self-will crept back into his 17-year sobriety, nearly costing him recovery until service work brought him back.
Charlie P. from Austin, Texas shares his story of nearly losing his recovery without ever picking up a drink. In this AA speaker meeting, Charlie walks through how self-will gradually took over his 17 years of sobriety until a spiritual awakening through service work brought him back to the program’s core principles.
This AA speaker meeting features Charlie P. discussing how he stayed sober for 17 years but gradually lost connection to the program through self-will and complacency. Charlie describes his drinking bottom involving stealing from family and multiple pawn shop visits before finding sobriety. His recovery took a dramatic turn when he began sponsoring newcomers and discovered service work, leading to what he calls his most significant spiritual awakening in sobriety.
Episode Summary
Charlie P. opens his talk at this Las Vegas AA meeting with characteristic humor, joking about how his suit makes him feel like he should be saying “no contest, your honor.” But beneath the laughs lies a profound story about nearly losing his recovery without ever taking a drink.
Growing up in Dallas as the only alcoholic in his family, Charlie always felt different. His older sister was perfect—national honor society, first chair flutist, drill team—while he struggled under the “burden of potential.” When he started drinking at 16, alcohol became his solution to that hole in his middle, that spiritual malady that separated him from others.
Charlie’s drinking career escalated predictably. He stole airplane tickets to come to Vegas, pawned family belongings multiple times, and hit his bottom in spectacular fashion. The story he tells about coming out of a five-day blackout to find $8 in his pocket and a “gangster wad of pawn tickets” captures the powerlessness perfectly. Having to spend all day with his father retrieving pawned items—deer rifles from one shop, a metal detector from another—all across Dallas, promising each time he’d never do it again, only to repeat the cycle days later.
What makes Charlie’s story unique isn’t his bottom, but what happened after he got sober. For the first 10½ months, he relied heavily on the fellowship of AA meetings but never worked the steps with a sponsor. He drank again, sobering up on March 22nd two different times before finding lasting recovery.
The heart of Charlie’s message centers on a dangerous period between his 4th and 17th year of sobriety. He had been reading the Big Book, attending meetings, and appeared to be working a solid program. But self-will had gradually crept back in. After back-to-back divorces and life disappointments, Charlie found himself thinking, “I tried it your way and I’m getting screwed here.”
During this flat period, Charlie describes becoming so self-centered he couldn’t even have genuine conversations. He’d force himself to ask “How are the kids?” while mentally checking out during the answer. He wasn’t drinking or even thinking about drinking, but he wasn’t growing spiritually either. This connects to many AA speaker talks on service work and sponsorship, where longtime members describe similar periods of spiritual stagnation.
The turning point came when his sponsor John Henry pressed him into service work at Austin Recovery’s ranch, working with men in detox and treatment. Charlie admits it didn’t sound like a good idea—”they’re going to want to talk about themselves and I want to talk about me.” But this reluctant service work became the catalyst for what he calls his most significant spiritual awakening with 17 years of sobriety.
Through sponsoring newcomers and getting back into the Big Book with fresh eyes, Charlie discovered he’d missed crucial elements of the program. He’d somehow overlooked the core message about selfishness being the root of the alcoholic’s problem. His first time through the steps, he’d understood his problem as alcohol, making the steps about feeling better about himself so he wouldn’t need to drink. The second time around, he grasped that alcohol was merely a symptom—his real problem was self-will and spiritual disconnection.
Charlie emphasizes the “set aside prayer” his sponsor taught him: “God, please help me set aside everything I think I know about this book and this process and help me see the truth.” This prayer opened up new understanding even after decades in the program. He’d find himself working with sponsees, reading familiar passages, when suddenly something would jump off the page that he’d never seen before.
The transformation through service work was profound. Charlie describes being “on fire with the program” for the past four to five years, learning more about recovery through teaching it to others than in his previous years of sobriety. Working with newcomers pressed him to actually practice what he preached—he refused to tell someone to do daily reading if he wasn’t doing it himself.
Charlie’s message particularly targets longtime members who might be experiencing that dangerous flat period. He warns about the members AA loses between three and eighteen years of sobriety—people who gradually back away from the program as self-will returns. The pattern is subtle: fewer meetings, no sponsoring, less reading, no service work, but still not thinking about drinking. Until life hands them a crisis, and suddenly they’re picking up after years of sobriety, wondering what happened.
His experience mirrors themes found in Don P.’s story of spiritual transformation, where another longtime member discovered that just staying sober wasn’t enough—true recovery required ongoing spiritual growth and service to others.
Charlie challenges common AA meeting clichés that bothered him over the years. He never found “this is a selfish program” anywhere in the Big Book, instead finding passages about “destruction of self” and the necessity of “work and self-sacrifice for others.” The slogan “put the plug in the jug” seemed useless—if he could just stop drinking through willpower, he wouldn’t need AA meetings for 22 years.
One of his strongest messages concerns sponsorship. Rather than expecting newcomers to “pick a sponsor”—when they can’t even find the water fountain on day one—Charlie advocates for experienced members to approach newcomers directly. “It’s too important a decision to leave up to a newcomer,” he argues, describing his practice of telling new people, “You’re going to need somebody to show you what we do around here, and I’ll be willing to do it.”
Charlie’s relationship with his now-wife Katie provides another dimension to his story. They were best friends for 20 years while she was married and he went through various relationships. Her husband’s death and Charlie’s plane crash in 2003—where he went underwater in Peconic Bay and barely survived—marked the beginning of his spiritual awakening and eventual marriage to Katie.
The plane crash shifted Charlie’s perspective dramatically. All the survivors “went a little crazy” afterward, and Charlie found himself examining his self-centeredness more honestly. This crisis led to the conversation with John Henry that pushed him into service work, ultimately saving his recovery.
Charlie’s story illustrates a crucial AA principle: recovery isn’t just about not drinking—it’s about continuous spiritual growth through working with others. His experience shows that even longtime members can lose their way spiritually while maintaining sobriety, and that service work often provides the path back to genuine recovery.
He closes with a passage from page 100 of the Big Book about walking daily in spiritual progress, emphasizing that “remarkable things will happen” when we put ourselves in God’s hands. For Charlie, those remarkable things came not in early sobriety, but after 17 years, when he finally understood that his recovery depended not on what he could get from the program, but on what he could give to others.
His message resonates with anyone who’s experienced that dangerous middle period of sobriety—sober enough to feel secure, but not growing spiritually. Charlie proves that it’s never too late to dive deeper into the program, and that our greatest spiritual awakenings often come through serving others rather than focusing on ourselves.
Notable Quotes
The fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous will keep me sober right up to the point that I get drunk.
Don’t let anybody read your Big Book for you.
If I could put the plug in the jug, I wouldn’t be parking my ass in these AA meetings for 22 years.
God, please help me set aside everything that I think I know about this book and this process and help me see the truth.
It’s too important of a decision to leave up to a newcomer” when talking about sponsorship.
Sponsorship
Service Work
Long-Term Sobriety
Self-Pity & Ego
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Full Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated and may contain minor errors. For the best experience, listen to the audio above.
Welcome to Sober Sunrise, a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories of experience, strength, and hope from around the world. We bring you several new speakers weekly, so be sure to subscribe. We hope to always remain an ad-free podcast, so if you'd like to help us remain self-supporting, please visit our website at sober-sunrise.com. Whether you join us in the morning or at night, there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker.
It's my pleasure to introduce our main speaker, Charlie from Austin, Texas. Hey everybody.
I'm Charlie Parker. I'm an alcoholic.
Wow, it's a good-looking bunch of folks. I wear a suit and tie when I get behind the podium out of respect for the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and the people that came before me and all the work that goes into putting something like this together. But every time I put it on, I always think about what I'm most comfortable with. I feel like standing there and going, "No contest, your honor." It's my experience. I never had much of a defense. No contest was my best angle.
I want to thank Bob for asking me to come talk. It's a real honor to be here. Katie and I come out here a lot, and we started coming to this group when a friend of mine introduced me. Bob and I like this meeting so much that we started coming on Thursday mornings instead of Friday mornings so we can make this meeting. Because really, if you get around, if you go to a lot of meetings, the more meetings you go to the more you appreciate what a hell of a fine AA group this is. It's just a real honor to speak here. I know how much work it takes to put something like this together every week. I can't imagine it. There are a lot of people that do it besides Bob, and I'm sure if it's anything like my group, there are a lot of people that don't do a damn thing but have a lot of ideas about how it could be done better. That's the way it is at my group. It's hard to get anything through sometimes.
I was authorized by group conscience to bring you greetings from the Primary Purpose Group in Austin, Texas. The vote was 40 to 22. But we got it through. I'm glad to be here tonight.
There are different theories about what we do when we get up here and what we talk about. A lot of people talk about how our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now. I'm also real fond of the definition on page 50, where it says: "In our personal stories, you will find a wide variation in the way each teller approaches and conceives of the power which is greater than himself. Whether we agree with the particular approach or conception seems to make little difference. Experience has taught us that these are matters about which for our purpose we need not be worried. There are questions for each individual to settle for himself. On one proposition, however, these men and women are strikingly agreed. Every one of them has gained access to and believes in a power greater than himself. This power has in each case accomplished the miraculous, the humanely impossible."
So here we are. My story. I grew up in Dallas, Texas. I grew up in a pretty normal family. A friend of mine likes to say that normal is a setting on a washing machine. I don't know exactly what normal is, but I've heard enough fifth steps over the years to know that there were a lot of guys that had it a lot worse than I had it growing up. I was the only alcoholic in my family. I'm still the only alcoholic in my family. But I always felt a little different.
When I say I grew up in a normal family, I should mention that my sister was perfect. I grew up behind a sister that was five years older than me, and she was National Honor Society, first chair flutist, drum majorette, drill team—you name it and she joined it. And then she had this thuggish little brother. My mother was a first grade teacher for 42 years, so I was well prepared for the first grade. I like to think I held it together pretty good through elementary school, even though it was a challenge.
I don't know if this happened to anybody else, but I kept hearing about potential when I was growing up. Did anybody else suffer under the burden of potential? And then, "Why can't you be like Charles across the street?" I'm thinking, "I'm really not holding back that much." I don't know if there's a whole lot of untapped resources here. But that's the way it went along.
I started drinking when I was 16. I used to think that was young, but now people are sobering up at like 8. You're chairing a meeting and a guy comes up and you're like, "Oh, who's your daddy?" And they're like, "No, I'm here for a 90-day chip." Welcome.
God love him, I'm not saying this critically. I was young when I got to this program. When I sobered up 22 years ago, 28 was pretty young to get sober. Katie was 26, and she had four and a half months on me and still does, and she'll never let me live it down. I've kept her sober a few times by telling her that if she drank, I'd sponsor her if she came back.
We were part of a young crew, but I'm talking about my drinking and it started at 16. It would make a pretty macho story to stand up here and say that I drank a bottle of whiskey every day from the day I was 16 until I sobered up. But that wouldn't be true. What is the truth for me is that from the day I took that first drink until I had to quit, I never turned down the opportunity to get loaded under any circumstances for any reason. There was never a time when I would say, "No, it's my mother's birthday. I really shouldn't." Or, "I need to be somewhere by November," or anything like that. I was an absolute devote. I was all about getting loaded.
I believe heavily in AA's singleness of purpose. We talk a lot about one drunk working with another one. There's an importance to that identification, that one drunk talking to another one. That's so important that out of the two or three hundred 12-step fellowships out there, really the only difference is the first half of the first step. That identification is that important. Because for me, if you drink like I do, people always want to talk to you about your drinking. They say really stupid stuff. If they don't understand—well, our book talks about it. One of us properly armed with the facts about himself can win the confidence of a new man in a couple of hours. But that's a pretty big deal because nobody else had ever done it.
I like to tell a story about being in a treatment center. We're talking about identification. It was Christmas time, and I was in treatment. It was Christmas day, and I'm a big boy now, but I was quite a bit bigger at that time. They had given us our turkey and dressing and everything, and I was pretty interested in the dinner. In walks this group of people from one of the local churches. They were a group of local do-gooders that were going to come sing to the heathen drunks.
This woman was going from person to person, bending over and talking to each one. When she got to me, she said, "Are you a patient here?"
I said, "Yes, I am."
She goes, "I know exactly what you're going through."
I thought, "Really?"
She said, "I was once addicted to caffeine."
I was like, "Ain't that a bitch?" Did you ever pawn your mom's sterling to get a can of Folgers? I mean, I feel you, sister. But bless her heart, she was trying to identify, but it just wasn't there.
That's why I think our singleness of purpose is so important. That's why it's so important for me to get with people that suffer from the same problem that I have. I qualify for a number of 12-step fellowships. But when I'm in AA, I like to try to talk about alcoholism. I really do believe in my heart of hearts that my problem always was alcoholism. My alcoholism led me to do a lot of things besides drink alcohol. It's a bit of a struggle for me to not talk about outside issues.
When you get here, there are a lot of terms that I didn't know. It felt like people were speaking a foreign language. They're talking about Mr. Bill and Dr. Bob and this step and that tradition, turn it over, don't judge anybody but stick with winners. I heard this term "drug of choice." I thought that was so cute. Did anybody talk like that on the street? I don't ever remember a time where you're going, "Oh, I'm sorry. That's not my particular drug of choice." My drug of choice was whatever you got.
I can sum it up with a few things. At one point, I had an apartment. I used to say I had an apartment, but really the truth was two guys had an apartment that they were paying the rent on, and I was staying there. One of them made his living off outside issues, and the other was my bartender. The short version of the story is that both of them thought I was getting too loaded. And when your dealer and your bartender are giving you shame, you know, maybe you have overshot the mark a little bit.
I know there are a lot of new people here tonight, and I want to welcome the new people. But does anybody need for me to explain how to drink to them? If not, let's just move on into a little recovery because I don't have time in 45 minutes to talk a whole lot about drinking.
I wrecked a few cars. I got a few DWIs. I lost jobs, houses, cars, girlfriends—all the stuff that happens to us. But I guess the key thing about my drinking was that I spent years in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Whenever it would be my turn, I would raise my hand and I'd say, "I'm Charlie. I'm an alcoholic." Looking back on it, I had no idea what that meant. I thought that I must be alcoholic because, for one thing, I drink every day. The other thing is I've had DWIs and gone to jail and lost jobs and houses and cars and girlfriends. I thought, well, I must be alcoholic.
Really, I'd been around quite a while before I truly understood what it means to be alcoholic. If you're new, I just want to take a second to touch on the physical allergy and the mental obsession because we are different from normal drinkers. I can't pour enough vodka into my sister to make her an alcoholic. I could pour enough vodka in her to get her a DWI or wreck the car, but that wouldn't make her an alcoholic.
What makes me an alcoholic is that I have a physical allergy to alcohol. The way that shows up in my life, the way it's described so well in the Doctor's Opinion and the first 43 pages of this book, is that my symptom of that allergy is this phenomenon of craving. The book is full of terms and phrases that I didn't feel when I read them. My sponsor likes to say that handing a new guy a big book and expecting him to get what's in there is like giving him a flight manual to an F-16 and saying, "And when you get through reading that, we've got one out here in the parking lot. Try not to hurt yourself or anybody else."
A lot of these terms didn't mean much to me. When it talked about the phenomenon of craving, I didn't really understand what that meant. But I did know what it meant to stop in for only two and get thrown out at the end of the night, or go missing for a few days. That's what happens when I take a drink of alcohol. It triggers a craving in me where I got no control over how much I'm going to drink or when I'm going to stop.
The book talks about that in the Doctor's Opinion—the first 22 pages. Then about page 23 or 24, it switches over and says that wouldn't mean anything. The weird thing is, if alcohol was my problem, I'd only have to stop drinking one time. My problem is that I can't stop starting. I have always been sober when I took the first drink. I make that decision sober. What my biggest problem is is what goes on in my brain when I'm not drinking.
There's another term in the book that never made much sense to me: "spiritual malady." The book describes a spiritual malady. It's a little fuzzy for me, but when you stand up at the podium of AA and talk about that hole in my middle—that hole I felt from elementary school, that feeling of separation, that feeling of being a little bit less than, of being not good enough, not smart enough, I can't do what regular people do—I think we can identify with that. That to me is the spiritual malady. I got that going on.
What happens is when people want to talk to me about my drinking, I'm thinking, you don't really know what you're talking about. Because if you understood what that drink does for me, it's the only thing I've ever found that will quiet that feeling of separation, that hole I got right here. And okay, sure, occasionally I overshoot the mark and I wreck the car and I lose the job or maybe I get kicked out of an apartment or people don't want to talk to me anymore. But I'll take that deal because of what that drink does for me.
And when somebody says you need to not drink, I'm thinking, if you understood what that drink does for me, you would know that alcohol is my solution. It's my problem. Because the thing that happens on the other side of what makes me alcoholic is that when I stop drinking, I don't get better. Our book says that we're restless, irritable, and discontented until I can again experience the ease and comfort that comes from taking a couple of drinks. That's the guy—when he's been dry for a while, people say, "For God's sakes, man, why don't you take a drink? You are one miserable bastard. You're more miserable sober than you are drunk."
What happens with me is that mental obsession. I don't feel better when I stop drinking. It starts rolling around up in my head. Bob said it one time when he was talking. He talks about being restless, irritable, and discontented. He said one time when I was listening to him, "He doesn't get discontented. He just starts to notice things."
And boy, that's me. I start to notice the people in traffic. I start to notice that son of a bitch in the express lane has got 14 items in his basket. I know because I counted them while we were standing here. And the guy at work is getting 50 cents an hour more than I do, and I'm doing all the work while the guy in the air-conditioned trailer is making all the money. And before long, I'm not getting my fair share.
And for God's sakes, Charlie, come on. Let's take you—let's take another run at it, man. It won't be like it was last time. We'll manage it better this time. And really if you think about it, last time wasn't that bad. You might have been a little hasty checking yourself into that treatment center for God's sake. It was just a bad weekend.
And eventually, that's what happens. Eventually my brain says, "By God, I think you're right." And that's what happens. I get stuck in that.
So to me, what it means to be alcoholic when I say my name's Charlie and I'm alcoholic is that I've got that physical allergy where I react funny to alcohol, and I've got a mental obsession that is eventually going to drive me back to drinking again. Driven by that spiritual malady, my mental obsession is eventually going to get me drunk every time. I cannot stop drinking on my own.
I spend a lot of time explaining that at a treatment center in Austin because I've always felt like if a guy goes to treatment and gets a full grasp of the first step, the treatment has been a success. I've seen plenty of times where people have done the first five steps as a matter of graduating from a treatment center but not really have step one.
To me, step one drives everything. The book says we had to admit to our innermost selves that we were alcoholic. To me, that means in here, not up here, but where I'm really going, "Oh, dude, I got it. I got what you're talking about. I am a garden variety drunk." I am going to drink until I have to get sober and then I will stay sober until I have to drink, and that cycle can go on for a long time.
That's what starts spiraling downhill though—in little ticks. I give up a little of my dignity. I compromise a little bit of my values. I'm willing to settle for a little bit less out of life. But it goes down like tick, tick, tick, tick, like this. Yesterday is never that much different from today. That's what the book's talking about when it says we get to where we can't differentiate the truth from the false. Our alcoholic life seems like the only one because it's a whole lot like yesterday was. I'm just doing what I got to do to get by.
I don't go from up here to down here overnight. But for me, what happened was it really started getting sloppy. After a while, I left the bar in a blackout one night and I rammed into a car. I was still rolling, so I abandoned the car and reported it stolen like any good drunk would.
As I'm running back to the bar in a blackout, I remember seeing two policemen looking at the car I'd run into. I thought, "Good grief, they got here fast." But I kept going.
The next day they said, "You're going to have to take a polygraph test to get your car back, Mr. Parker."
I said, "Why is that?"
They said, "Well, your car was involved in an accident before it was reported stolen."
I said, "You're kidding."
He said, "No. They ran into a parked police car."
I thought, "That explains how they got there so fast." But when you think about how things could have gone, man, I was in a complete blackout. If those cops had been standing there, you'd have a different speaker tonight. I mean, 22 years later, I might still be in the joint. But I was lucky enough. What I'm talking about was it started getting really sloppy.
I used to come out to Vegas a lot and I used stolen airplane tickets. I didn't get free airplane tickets. I used to steal them. We would come out here and sometimes I'd come out here with like a hundred bucks in my pocket back in the '70s. I remember I was telling Katie—now this is how cool I was when I got here.
Me and a buddy of mine were up at the Sahara, and we were staying down at the Marina where the MGM is now. I went broke. So I go over and I find Mitch and I go, "How you doing?"
He goes, "I'm tapped."
When we're talking about tapped, I mean, no credit cards, nothing. So here we are, six miles away, and we're walking from the Sahara at six in the morning. Right out in front of this place, I saw a bunch of lights and there was a guy throwing money in the air. I started kind of positioning to see if one of those hundreds blew by and I'm getting ready to make my move.
This guy goes, "Hey, hey, hey."
I look over and it was a set for that TV show Vegas. They were shooting a scene. I'm over there trying to figure out how I can get some of that. That's how cool I was.
But towards the end, I was really fond of the pawn shops. I like to tell this story for a number of reasons. I liked the way you could go in there and it was a very pure transaction. You just gave them whatever it was and they gave you the money. They never said, "Weren't you just in here?" or "What do you want with this money? What are you going to do with this money?" You just went in, you got out.
I would pull a scam. You had 90 days to get everything out, and in the 90-day period, I could usually come up with something to get everything out. But one day, I had pulled a little scam that netted enough money to get everything out. I came out of a five-day blackout. I'm talking five days—don't remember a thing.
I came out of this blackout sitting on the side of the bed. I should say that I was at my mother's house. I was so mistreated as a child that I ran away from home at 28 years old. But I was staying at my mom's house. I came out of this blackout and I had eight dollars in my pocket and I still had this gangster wad of pawn tickets. You've probably experienced mornings like that where you just go, "Oh, no." I shot my wad on this deal, and now I had to get up and go to my father.
I forgot to tell you the one downside of the pawn shop thing. I didn't own very much stuff. So I was pawning stuff that didn't belong to me. That creates hard feelings among your friends and family.
So on this morning, I had to go to my father and say, "Dad, if we act now, I can get you a really good deal on all your stuff. But if we wait till tomorrow, it's out of my hands."
I would do that, but the thing about it was Dallas was a big town. It wasn't just we're going to go to the pawn shop. We had to go to Buckner Boulevard and then Garland Road and then Harry Hines and then over to Oak Cliff. I left your deer rifle over here, and I left your metal detector out in G. The short version of the story is that it was all day in the car with me and my dad and all that shame.
The reason I like to tell this story is because most of us have experienced that kind of shame coming in here. The other thing that we've experienced is powerlessness. Because what I would do when I was in the car with my dad that day was I would say, "Dad, I swear to God, I will never do this again."
If I was lying to my father, I didn't know it. I meant it with every fiber of my being. I will never do this again. My dad was a good man and he didn't deserve the kind of treatment that he was getting from his son. Nobody had given him his stuff. He had worked for it and paid for it, and I'm in there stealing it and pawning it. I knew that was messed up.
But he gave me a couple of days and I would hit his house like a cat burglar. We made the rounds of the pawn shops three times, me and my father. That's how slick I was. That's how cool I was when I got here. I wasn't hanging with Puff Daddy or whatever he calls himself now, or Donald Trump. I was stealing stuff out of the back door of my family's house and just a real rotten bastard.
That's the guy that showed up here for the program about Alcoholics Anonymous. I sobered up that time and I was pretty serious about the program at that time. I mean, what I was real serious about was going to a lot of meetings. We're doing the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. When we used to have the circle and triangle on it in our books, it had three sides to that triangle. There are three sides to my recovery. Unity is what we're doing tonight. Service is what I do when I'm going out working with new guys, going to treatment centers and stuff like that. Recovery is working the 12 steps of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous with a sponsor—hopefully the way they're laid out in the Big Book.
But what I did in that first period of sobriety, and I bring this up because I think it's a dangerous thing that's been going on in our fellowship—we sobered up at a funny time. I've been sober well, today's 22 years. Thank you. That's a testament to the power of God and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. That's got very little to do with the power of Charlie.
But during this period of time, we got a shitload of AA meetings. I don't think when they wrote the book that they ever foresaw a time when a guy would be able to stay sober by just going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I don't think they ever dreamed that there would be a time when we would focus on the fellowship more than the recovery program. Because they were getting together maybe once a week or maybe they didn't have any meeting at all in their time. What they had was the Big Book and the program of recovery laid out in it.
What I saw with me was I would go to a meeting, get enough relief to get me to the next day, and just destroy the world with self-will in the meantime. Then I'd come into the meeting the next day and rock along. I would stay sober just on the fellowship.
Now, I'm not knocking the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. I love it. I love the fellowship of AA. I love drunks. I loved hanging out with them before I sobered up, after I sobered up. We go to conferences and a lot of stuff. I love it. But the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous will keep me sober right up to the point that I get drunk.
I drank with ten and a half months of sobriety. My sobriety has been March 22nd two different times—March 22nd of '84 and March 22nd of '85. I wasn't trying to do anything cute there. It just happened.
I got 20 minutes to talk about some of what's going on sober. When I talk, I like to talk to the guys that are new because if you drink like I do, there is a program here that really works. The simplest thing and the hardest thing to convince a new guy is how simple this program is. If you just do what a sponsor tells you to do—I don't even think you have to understand the process or approve of the process. It doesn't mean anything. I just have to understand the directions. Just go do this little piece of work and then come back and talk to my sponsor the next day, and he'll give me another piece of work. You look up at the end of it and it's better.
But what happened for me was going to all those meetings. My sponsor—I should mention my sponsor. Mark Houston is my sponsor, and he says a lot of things that I really like. One of the things he said was, "Don't let anybody read your Big Book for you."
What I was doing was sitting in those AA meetings and trying to get AA through what you people were saying in the meetings. The more I get in the book, the more I see how much bullshit is going on in the AA meetings. I hear stuff enough that I start thinking that it's AA. If I come to AA meetings 6, 8, 10, 20 times and I hear somebody say, "This is a selfish program," well, it must be AA. And then you start reading the book and I can't find it. I can't find anywhere where it says this is a selfish program.
I think it says on page 15—it's all about destruction of self. It says here: "My friend had emphasized the absolute necessity of demonstrating these principles in all my affairs. Particularly was it imperative to work with others as he had worked with me. Faith without works was dead, he said. And how appallingly true for the alcoholic. For if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others, he could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead."
That kind of stuff is all in the book. I don't find the part where it says this is a selfish program. Take what you need and leave the rest. That sort of thing.
I'm getting on a little soap box here. I got to watch myself.
The other one was "put the plug in the jug." I never did figure that one out. To me that's like this far from Nancy Reagan's "just say no." If I could put the plug in the jug, I wouldn't be parking my ass in these AA meetings for 22 years.
Another one that bugs me is when they talk about, "If you sober up a horse thief, you got a sober horse thief." Have you all heard that one? What the hell is that? I mean, I guarantee you the guy's not going to stay a sober horse thief for long. My program talks about change. If I stay the same creepy bastard that I was when I got here, I'm not going to be around for long, whether I'm going to three meetings a day or not.
I stayed sober this first time and I was kind of working the program a lot. We got 15 minutes left. This is good.
The other day I was talking and a buddy of mine was talking in Dallas at the same time. He called me the next morning. Tom Pickens. I said, "How'd you talk, Tom?"
He goes, "Oh God damn, I did it again."
He said that to me and I said, "I did it again."
He goes, "What?"
I said, "I looked up two-thirds of the way through my talk and I was still drunk."
He goes, "That's all right. Two-thirds of the way through my talk, I was 13."
So if I'm not careful, I'll talk about drinking the whole time and then I've got seven minutes to talk about 22 years of recovery.
What happened for me was I was pretty serious about reading the Big Book and going to Big Book meetings and hanging out with people that were fairly serious about this program. But what started happening that I didn't see happening—I started reading the book. I don't know about anybody else, but I like to read stuff that I agree with. You just read along and then you kind of glaze over the stuff that disagrees with you. Then some of it you go, "Oh, yeah. See, there it is. That's exactly what I said. I said that in the meeting yesterday."
But my sponsor talks about this thing and I want to share it with you. Some of you have probably heard of the set-aside prayer. It has helped me so much in recovery. We do this little prayer before we do the work, before we read the book, before I work with a sponsor. I just say, "God, please help me set aside everything that I think that I know about this book and this process and this way of life and help me see the truth."
It's amazing how I see new stuff on the page. I don't know what goes through these minds of these guys I'm sponsoring. We're sitting down with the book with their sponsor who has 20 years. We're doing the fourth step and we're reading along and I go, "Holy shit, look at that." It's like that's a prayer. Well, let's get down on our knees. I mean, I keep seeing new stuff in this book all the time.
I went through this flat period in my sobriety and I'm kind of dancing around that. But what happened for me was I thought I did it pretty hardcore for the first four and a half years. I'm just going to go ahead and say this because I don't have that much shame about it, but somehow in the book, I missed the whole selfishness piece. I don't know if this happened to anybody. If this only happened to me, praise God. But what happened for me was I went along and I kind of acted like my problem was alcohol.
I'm going to give you a run through the steps the way I understood them the first time. My problem was alcohol. I came to believe that this God that you guys talked about would have removed your problem with alcohol, so it might work for me. I made a decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of God. I had no idea what that means. I knew that I was kind of supposed to act like I'd turned my life over to God, but I didn't really. I missed the whole part about being convinced that any life run on self-will can hardly be a success.
The book takes a bizarre turn on page 60. If you're not paying attention, you'll just miss it. I did anyway. Because it spent all that time talking about my drinking and then it takes this hard right where it says selfishness, self-centeredness—we think is the root of our problem. The alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn't think so.
I kind of had this understanding that I was going to do a fourth step. I was going to write down all the stuff that made me feel bad about me because if I felt better about me, then I wouldn't need to drink, right? Then same thing in the fifth step—we're going to share this stuff. Then we get to six and seven and it was like not really getting it. But we rolled on to eight. I made a list of the people I'd harmed because making amends to these people was going to make me feel better about me. And then so I could be out in the world without worrying about getting my ass kicked. And so I'm going to make amends to these people.
Then in nine and then in ten or eleven, I'm going to try to clean up as I'm going along. And then in 11, I'm gonna keep trying to feel good about me. And then in the 12th step, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna talk to people about me. That was my understanding. It's a little oversimplified, but looking back on it, that's a lot of what my understanding was.
It was based on the thinking that my problem was alcohol, right? Because anything—it was all about getting me separated from alcohol. But what I was in was absolute self-will, self-centeredness, self-obsession, self-seeking. All those self-words.
Katie and I—I should say—have been best friends for 20 years. Her husband passed away. By the way, today's Katie's 49th birthday. We were best friends for 20 years. She was married and I was in a series of relationships, but we really were—she was the first woman friend I ever had. We spent 20 years together and there was never any innuendo or improper—well, one time when she said, "You know, your sobriety birthday is the same day as my naked birthday."
I said, "Well, you know, we should celebrate together. I'll stay sober."
She goes, "Charlie, you know—" but we've been dating for about a year. Her husband passed away, and I was in a plane crash in 2003. I wound up—everybody that was on that plane went a little crazy. We all survived but not by much. The short version of the story is we lost power flying from the East Hampton airport back to Manhattan and crashed into the Peconic Bay at night. Went underwater. The doors wouldn't open. It's pretty hairy. But we got out but