[singing] [music] Welcome to Sober Sunrise, a podcast bringing you AA speaker meetings with stories [music] of experience, strength, and hope from around the world. We bring you several new speakers weekly, so be sure to subscribe. [music] We hope to always remain an ad-free podcast, so if you'd like to help us remain self-supporting, please visit our website [music] at sober-sunrise.com. Whether you join us in the morning or at night, [music] there's nothing better than a sober sunrise. We hope that you enjoy today's speaker. For the first time, this is a workshop that's going to be going on for the next several months. It's a workshop which is a repeat workshop from a workshop that Chris and Peter M did up in Vermont at the Wilson House. Last week we started off with Peter M. This week we are fortunate enough to have Chris. So I'll turn the meeting over to Chris.

>> Good evening everybody. My name is Chris. I'm an alcoholic.

>> It's really nice to be here. Thank you all for coming. Thank you Bill for doing the taping and the sound. It's near impossible to hear in this room without some type of sound system. The acoustics are just bizarrely whacked out. We really do appreciate it when he comes in with his sound. I want to thank Peter, who's not here tonight, for agreeing to do this both at the Wilson House and here in Burnersville. I had a lot of fun at that workshop.

The topic tonight is my experience finding recovery in the fellowship. As probably happens so many times with workshops like this, you end up preaching to the choir. The people that need to hear this stuff are usually not the ones that are in the rooms. But sobriety and recovery are really two different things. The way I define it is sobriety is staying away from alcohol, staying separated from alcohol. But if you're anything like me, just staying separated from alcohol becomes untenable after a period of time. My emotional state can't take sobriety for long periods of time without some type of recovery.

Let me start at the beginning with my story. I was doing an inventory several years ago and one of the instructions in that inventory with the person that I was going through the steps with at the time asked me to go back to the earliest recollection of every single fear I inventoried. I remember going back to my fear of people. One of the promises is that fear of people will disappear. It has for me, which is a great thing. But I used to be completely repressed by crowds or having to do any kind of public speaking. It was crippling for me. It was so emotionally painful.

My first and earliest recollection was being dropped off for kindergarten as a kid. I hadn't gotten out much on my own at this period of time, so I wasn't really used to being tossed out of the car. I remember my mother opening the door and saying, "There's the building, there's your class, see you later." I remember standing up on the hill looking down at kids running around playing tag and kickball, and they're already having a blast together. They'd already integrated. I remember standing up on the hill looking and just feeling, how am I going to do this? How am I going to go down there and be friends with all these people? What if they don't like me? What if I get in a fight? What if I do something stupid and they mock me the rest of my life? What if I get ostracized? I'm thinking like all this stuff. I'm five and I know right away that there's something wrong with me because all these kids are having a blast. They obviously don't have that same self-centered fear that I have.

I remember from that moment on I had to start acting as if everything was okay. Does anybody in here remember acting as if everything's okay and inside you're just falling apart? So I began my educational experience pretending I wasn't flipped out and trying to do the things that I thought I needed to do to get along and to not be made an outcast.

My problem at that time was, well, let me tell you what the solution would have been for that kindergartener. A couple of shots of whiskey and I would have been the kindergarten kid. You know what I'm saying? I'd have been able to step out and do the things the other kids were doing. The thing was they weren't serving five-year-olds whiskey in kindergarten in those days. I don't know if they've become more progressive, but they certainly weren't doing it when I was there.

That would have been a solution. It might not have been a functional solution, but it would have been a solution for me. For the next seven years, I had to act as if I was okay and I wasn't suffering from anxiety and everything else. One day, a couple of my friends and I decided to cut school, go home to my house, take a bottle of whiskey down and get drunk. None of us had ever gotten drunk before. It sounded like a cool thing to do. It was better than rolling hubcaps down the road or whatever you did at like twelve years old.

We went to my house and I remember pulling a bottle of Four Roses whiskey out of the closet. Now, I don't come from an alcoholic family. I certainly feel for the people in this room that come from those hellacious, dysfunctional alcoholic families. I grew up in a Cape Cod house in Basking Ridge—a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, like everything was calm. There were no arguments, everything was just like typical boring suburbia. So where did my alcoholism come from? You know, I don't even really care about that answer today. But I will tell you that after I blew the dust off that bottle and brought it out, I didn't know anything about drinking at that time except for what I had seen in John Wayne movies. You remember the John Wayne movies where he'd bust through the saloon door. He'd go up and say, "Bartender, whiskey." The bartender would get like a dirty water glass and a bottle of whiskey and fill it up. John would just shoot that whole glass down, grab the bottle and go back to the table to play cards or whatever.

So I guess that's how you drink. I filled up three water glasses with warm Four Roses Canadian whiskey. Oh my god. I didn't know anything about ice or mixers or letting it breathe. I started drinking and my buddies started drinking. We had two completely different reactions to alcohol. Here's what happened to them. They had about two-thirds of their glass and they'd had enough. You ever drink with people that have enough? Is that the most obnoxious thing in the world? "Sorry, I've had two. Going home to the wife, got to have dinner." You know, I mean, that's how I drank. I always wanted more from alcohol. But they had two-thirds of the glass and they'd had enough.

I drank my glass, what was left of their glass, and as much of the rest of the bottle as I could, and I went into a blackout. It was my first experience with a blackout. Those are fun, aren't they? A whole section of time disappears on you where you don't know what you did. You can do some crazy things in blackouts like travel. You ever wake up like in Topeka with one shoe wondering what the hell you're doing there? Of course you got to act like you wanted to be there because you can't look stupid.

But anyway, I had a blackout and I trashed the house. I made a complete fool of myself and I passed out in a field. I remember waking up in a field and having one of those nuclear hangovers, you know, where you have to stay horizontal for like two days. You're just poisoned, you know what I mean? I'm twelve or thirteen and it made me unbelievably ill.

But I slowly started to forget how ill alcohol made me and I started to remember what it did for me. Somewhere into that first glass of whiskey, that scared kindergartener that I was—trapped in bondage to that scared kindergartener—that disappeared. This alcohol freed me from that. All of a sudden, all the fear, all the anxiety, all the self-esteem issues, all that stuff disappeared and I was larger than life. I was the funniest guy. I was worth being around. Hell, there were dancing lessons in that Four Roses whiskey. You know what I mean? I now felt like I thought all of you felt all the time, you know, when you were running around playing tag and kickball.

I mean, I thought I had found a solution to my social problems, my assimilation problems. So I didn't start drinking every single day, but I started to become preoccupied with alcohol. I started to think about where I was going to get it, who I was going to drink it with. I was like thirteen and the drinking age was twenty-one. So there were some logistical things that had to be surmounted. But the alcoholic is very resourceful and I managed to always get alcohol when I wanted it.

I come from a very smart family. My brother and sister are both PhD college professors and my mother and father were both Phi Beta Kappa educators—just way overeducated beyond their intelligence. As I started drinking, my academics started to slip. You know what I mean? It's just not that important to get good grades. I'm worried about where I'm going to go and who I'm going to be drinking with and all that stuff. So I ended up graduating high school the second stupidest kid in the graduating class.

>> You got to work for that. That's like a D-minus minus. You got to be careful not to slip too low.

>> But I got out of there and the whole time, somewhere along the line my drinking went from preoccupation—I was interested in doing it and planning on doing it—and I went from beer and wine instead of the Four Roses and every once in a while vodka. It started to become a part of my life.

The book Alcoholics Anonymous talks about crossing a line. It says a lot of times you cross the line before you really want to stop. The line is the difference between being preoccupied and being obsessed with alcohol. I slipped into the obsession of the mind. What that really is is I'm hooked so deep into alcohol that my own unaided will is not enough to overcome it. I can manage short periods of sobriety but I always put alcohol back in my body.

Somewhere I crossed that line and that's where I became seriously, actively alcoholic. I believe it was somewhere in high school but I don't know. Anyway, here I am. I'm an alcoholic and as we all know alcoholism is progressive. It gets worse over any given period of time. It did for me. It's slow though. If it would have happened overnight, it would have caught my attention. But it's slow and almost imperceptible. You get worse and worse as the years go by and you hardly notice it because that's the way you're used to living.

In the beginning, I had a lot of fun with drinking. You remember the high school parties where the rock and roll is on and there's fights and people drinking and people crashing cars and you're just having a good time. I don't know about anybody in here, but I come from a period of time where friends let friends drive drunk. Those were the early seventies and that's just the way it was. I totaled nine cars in drunken blackouts. Could you imagine doing that today? You'd be in like maximum security or something, you know? But you know, I was always the final owner of every vehicle I ever had. I got sober and it was time to sell a car. I didn't even know how to do it. What do you mean I got to sign a title? What is that? I didn't know. But they always had the cops tow them away every time.

I wasn't really paying a big price. I was having a lot of fun and slowly I had some fun and then I started to pay some prices. One of the car accidents I got killed in, I went through a telephone pole and when the police got there, they had to bring me back with CPR and shock paddles. I went out again in the ambulance. This is so alcoholic. Listen to this. I have just been killed and brought back to life from drinking and driving. Guess what I did the day I got released from the hospital with bandages on my head, my ribs taped up? I went to the liquor store, got two six-packs of beer, drove down to the park, and started drinking, waiting for everybody to show up.

It didn't even cross my mind that there was a pathological problem. I was very much caught in it. As alcoholics, we all know we'll do anything to protect our alcohol consumption. We lose families that we love very much to protect our alcohol consumption. It's truly a type of insanity.

I'll skip ahead to get to the topic, but I will tell you about my last drunk. I'd gotten worse and worse and worse. I'd started a family, had a child, lost that family. I'd lost about ten or so jobs. I became near unemployable. Really just living a pathetic life. I was living in a room in my mother's house and she just didn't have it in her to throw me out on the streets like she should have. And here I was, up in that room having a relationship with the bottle. You ever talk to the bottle? You know, it's just you and me, kid. Nobody understands us. We're just too special for this world.

Just having that relationship with the bottle and meanwhile my life got more and more pathetic. I wasn't really allowed to see my daughter. It got really bad. The final straw was I was an electrician. I became an electrician somewhere in this mix. Can you imagine? Me showing up after drinking like a quarter of whiskey. I'm here to wire your house. Oh my god. His hair is sticking straight up. Where'd you get this guy?

I did stuff like drill down from the attic into people's closets and pull their suits up into the ceiling. One time I wired a kitchen addition to the wrong panel and it was a timer panel for the hot water heater. So the kitchen would come on at eight o'clock at night and go off at six in the morning. People called up my boss and said, "Listen, we eat at six. This is unacceptable." I mean, I could go on and on. I was a menace.

I'm looking at Bob here. I wired half of his house. [laughter] He's wondering when he caught me in my career. But anyway, my life had gotten very, very pathetic. This one day I remember this kid Tony was my boss. He was nineteen years old. I'm thirty-three. The boss puts Tony, the nineteen-year-old kid, in charge of me at work. That's how much confidence he had in me. It was a good day if I didn't lose the van or something.

So this one day I'm putting a ground screw in a ceiling fixture box and I'm shaking so bad from the night before. I keep dropping the screw with the screwdriver and I keep dropping the screw. I look over and he's looking at me. When you're alcoholic and you're detoxing, you can hear people think at you. I knew exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking, "You pathetic, good for nothing, sorry ass, no account."

I couldn't take that. I'd lost a family. I'd gone through the front window of a car, the passenger window. I got thrown out of the back window of a car one time, got back in, tried to drive home. I had three flat tires. The car was bent like a boomerang. There was no windows left in the car. It could go about a mile and a half an hour. I'm going home. I'm in Pittstown and I've only got twenty-seven miles to go. The cops get me. Where are you going? Home. Where was the accident? What accident? I've got glass sticking out of my head. There's no accident. Have you been drinking? I had two. Two beers. Just two. I'll tell you what, if you admit to more than two beers, you're not an alcoholic. That's not in the Big Book, but it should be right there in the chapter "To Wives." [laughter]

Does your husband admit to only drinking two beers? Check him in. So he's looking at me and I just can't take it. I feel such shame. That night I get drunk and I call up and I sign myself into a rehab. It's a rehab that's kind of defunct so I can talk bad about it. It was the one down in Marstown. I signed myself in for twenty-eight days.

What was unusual about me being in there was I really was the only person that wasn't remanded in there. I was not in there because of a DWI. I was not in there because of an intervention. I wasn't in there because of a judge. I really was the only person in there that volunteered to go in. And you know how alcoholics are. I thought I was better than you because I admitted I was sick or something. You know how we are. We can think that because we're worse we're better. Well, I crashed ten cars. You know? I'm so sick.

But I go in there and they start to do their thing as rehabs will. I can remember some of it, not a lot of it. I remember getting the Big Book and reading it kind of like a novel. The only experience I had with it was that every once in a while I'd go, "Ooh, you know that happens to me." And that was my first exposure to the book. I had a little bit of identification going on. But basically they had a lot of strange ways of helping you, of treating your alcoholism.

I remember group. Anybody in here ever go to group like in rehab or aftercare? You sit around in a circle and you talk about your stuff and they're calling on people or they're going around the circle and you know what you're thinking to yourself? Boy, doesn't that shut up. I want to talk. He's hogging the time. And I would just think that why don't you drink, you know, I'd think it for these people. And finally they would get to me and I could talk about my stuff.

And today I understand why there's really bad discussion meetings and where that comes from. Let me tell you about Aunt Fanny and Uncle Fud and the snooty tennis bro. You know what I mean? That stuff never helped me. It just kind of separated me because it gave me a lot of stuff to say I am not like you.

There were some other things that they did. I remember wallet-making class. That was special. I think I still have that wallet. The stitches are a little off, you know what I mean? I remember they asked me to write my life story. I got to do a life story and then I got to present it in front of my group sitting on the hot seat. You might as well put a dunce cap on me.

I remember reading my life story. I pulled it out not too long ago when I was throwing away some stuff and I found it. I had about forty pages of stuff on like one page. My writing was like an eighth of an inch tall. I crammed all this stuff. I must have been so mentally ill at this time. They want me to do a life story. I couldn't read it.

But all of these things really had little or nothing to do with any kind of recovery. I found out later. But I went through it. What it did was separate me from the booze for twenty-eight days and it gave me some knowledge about alcoholism. I got to watch the Father Martin movies and I got to tell you, my first inventory resentment number one was Father Martin. Good god, I had to watch so many of those chalk talk movies. I wanted to just jump through the projector and strangle that guy.

I was a long way from serenity and peace of mind at that time. Anyway, I get out of rehab and listen, I am serious about this separating from alcohol stuff. I'm really, really serious. I signed myself into a rehab. After the rehab, they suggested aftercare. I'm going and I'm paying like sixty-five dollars a night, two nights a week, to listen to the muttonheads talk about their stuff in a group, waiting for my turn to share. That's how serious I was about separating from alcohol. I thought that's what I was supposed to do and that's how I was supposed to do this thing.

They suggested two AA meetings and I went to two Basking Ridge meetings—a Monday and a Wednesday night Basking Ridge meeting. But I got to tell you, I thought going there and sitting in the chair was going to do the trick. Here's what I thought Alcoholics Anonymous was like and here's what I thought alcoholism was.

I thought alcoholism was forgetting how bad alcohol treats you. If you could only remember how bad alcohol treats you, you won't drink it anymore and you'll be fine. And what I thought AA was, I thought AA was a pep rally. Yay, yay, we don't drink today. When we were holding our hands saying the Lord's Prayer, I thought it was like a football huddle. All right, everybody. We're going to one day at a time. We're going to keep it simple. Well, first things first, okay, see you tomorrow, break.

That's what I thought AA was. One day I was on my way to an AA meeting and the thought crossed my mind that it had been almost ninety days since I'd been drunk. I don't even really remember what it's like to be drunk. And you know, they're saying some things. I'm not really fitting into this AA subculture. You know what I should probably do? I should probably drink. I should buy a gallon of vodka, drink it, and it'll solve two problems. One is remembering what it's like to be drunk. The other is I'll feel so bad I'll push back into AA and I'll do everything that I need to do. So in effect, I drank a gallon of vodka to improve my sobriety. [laughter]

Now I didn't have a sponsor at that time. Now imagine passing that one by a sponsor. Here's, I got a plan. Anybody in here sponsor? And you know, the sponsor is coming up to you and going, "Hey, I've got a plan." Well, like, "Okay, hold it right there. Tell us your plan. We need to know the plan." Because you know as a sponsor that it's the worst plan in the world and you're going to help them to modify that plan as a sponsor.

Anyway, I got really drunk. And instead of rushing back to AA as was my plan, I found it very, very difficult. As a matter of fact, I drank nonstop for five months. My last drink was Christmas at the Schroers in 1989. My mother was there, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cats, the whole thing. It was Christmas. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care and the Christmas tree was up and there were candles and mistletoe and Yuletide tidings and everything. And I go into a drunken, raging blackout where I threaten all their lives. I'm going to kill all of you. You're all going to die. This is all your fault. And that wasn't really the festive type of atmosphere that they were all looking for. They really didn't want to see me drink myself to death because this was a bad one. This was a bad tear. So they picked up and they moved their Christmas to upstate New York. Thank you.

I come out of this blackout and there's a pile of vodka bottles in the sink I don't even remember buying. I must have been staggering because I used to buy a bottle at a time. Any smokers in here buy one pack at a time because you're going to quit tomorrow? Well, that was me with the booze. I should have been buying it by the tandem load to save money. But I'd always buy one bottle at a time. I must have staggered up town thirty times buying these bottles. That must have been a pretty sight.

But anyway, I come out of this blackout and it's the jumping off point that it talks about in this book. I couldn't imagine living life without alcohol, but I couldn't imagine continuing to put it in my body. And I wished for the end. I remember saying a prayer, "God, either kill me or allow me to get sober. I can't live like this one more day. I can't. This is more than a human being should be forced to endure."

After saying that prayer, that was the last drink really. So I am certainly one that believes in prayer. I started going to AA meetings. I would switch groups a lot because I would get a resentment against a person or persons. Anybody in here ever do that in a meeting? You ever say to yourself that horse's ass is going to share? He's got his hand up. God damn it. I'm going to have to listen to that hypocritical bastard. You know, I can't believe it. I guess nobody else in here has ever done that. I'm certainly unique. But anyway, I would have to change groups because I would resent myself out of a group because I had no tools. I hadn't been exposed to the steps yet.

What I was doing was I was meeting dependent. I'm not critical of that. I'm just saying some of us are meeting dependent before we can experience recovery. That's a good thing. The bad thing is if you're stuck in meeting dependency and you're not exposed to recovery, you can suffer in these rooms. You can go insane in these rooms going to a meeting a day for eight years. I mean, it happens. We chirp like squirrels without recovery if we're just trying to do it by not drinking.

So here I'm in the groups. I'm going to well, I shouldn't name the groups should I if I'm going to be critical of them. You know, places like that. They're really more about sharing. Let's share. You get a lot of wisdom teaching. You get a lot of good information and there are really, really good people and there's really, really good sobrieties in those meetings. The problem is if you're a sick alcoholic, it's going to be very difficult to pick out the good from the bad.

I listen to a lot of people who really didn't have a clue early on. And luckily, I had a decent sponsor and he would pull me out of the ditch quite often. But the fact of the matter is I wasn't really being exposed to the steps. Back at this period of time, you could experience something like this. I remember asking in a meeting in a step meeting, "Well, how exactly do you do the fourth step? Because I couldn't figure it out from the step book. I was just going to step meetings. I wasn't going to any Big Book meetings. I remember going, "How exactly do you go about actually doing the fourth step?"

And I remember a guy going, "You do a fourth step with a pencil." I'm like, "Well, thank you for that." I learned later on that he didn't have any idea how to do a fourth step or else he wouldn't have said something like that. But so I got my pencil and I opened up the step book and somebody mentioned something about a big book. I opened that up. I tried to do a fourth step because it was being suggested to me by a sponsor. That particular sponsor wasn't showing me how to do it. He was suggesting that I do it.

So I put together this hodgepodge of stuff. It was another attempt at putting together a life story. It was a list of dirty rotten things that I had done that I had never told anybody. It was a list of character defects that I had recognized in myself. Can you imagine a really sick alcoholic deciding all those things for himself? I put it all together in this thing that I hid underneath the spare tire in the trunk of my car for like three months until I got a chance to do a fifth step.

I went and I did a fifth step. I got a whole lot of relief. I got the relief from that exercise. It was confessional. It was not a fourth step. It was confessional. And I got the relief that you get from something that's confessional. It gave me a shot in the arm.

Now I'm struggling. I got to tell you, that scared kindergartener? He's all over me. I'm in AA going anywhere from seven to twelve meetings a week because I had times in between jobs. You know how that is when you're in early sobriety. You have those times between jobs and you're going to noon meetings and night meetings. I was doing that a little bit here and a little bit there. I was going to a lot of meetings now. I was a secretary at this meeting. I was making coffee over there. I was a no-show GSR over here. Anybody take the no-show GSR position for a while? I said that at a group one time and this DCM came up and just reamed me out. But I'm in District Eighteen. What can I tell you?

But anyway, I'm doing all these things. I'm going to the rehab that I was at and I'm picking up the rehab people and driving them to meetings. I'm doing everything I can do. I'm cooking shellfish at the rehab picnic until my eyes are sweating from the smoke and I'm doing all these things that I really find uncomfortable because I'm really, really willing to stay separated from alcohol. I'm desperate to not put that stuff in my body again. Just tell me what to do.

Now I had this friend, Radio Shack Mike. A lot of people had nicknames back when I was getting sober. In an inventory, I found out why they had nicknames. It's because I was nicknaming them. You know, Radio Shack Mike hasn't worked at Radio Shack in sixteen years and he's still being called Radio Shack Mike. Anyway, poor bastard. Did I ever make amends for that? I don't know. I better.

Anyway, I'm doing everything that I'm being asked to do, but this guy, Radio Shack Mike, he's one of those guys that listens to tapes. He gave me a set of tapes from a couple of guys from Arkansas. I don't know about anybody else, but I hate people from Arkansas. I mean, this is my prejudice at that time. Arkansas. What is somebody from Arkansas going to teach me? People from New Jersey do more thinking before nine o'clock than an Arkansan does all day for God's sake.

I was really skeptical about these tapes because he had given me some tapes before. He gave me some affirmation tapes. They were tapes that said, you know, repeat fifty times in front of a mirror until you actually believe it. Chris, you're a wonderful guy. So I tried it one time. I'm like, "Chris, you're a wonderful guy. Chris, you're a wonderful guy. I get it." I throw the tape machine on the floor. I mean, I'm an alcoholic. Trying to treat alcoholism with affirmations is like trying to stop a semi with a cobweb. You know what I mean?

So I was distrustful at this point in time. But I had a long ride to work. So I got the Joe and Charlie tapes out and I started to listen to them. I'm unreovered at this time. I'm sober, but I have untreated alcoholism coming out my ears. It's very, very difficult for me.

We do a set-aside prayer at the beginning of this meeting. That's not in the Big Book, but where it comes from is there's a number of places in the book Alcoholics Anonymous where it says things like, "We beg of you to lay aside any prejudices you may have. Several lifelong conceptions might need to be thrown out the window. Contempt prior to investigation can keep you in everlasting ignorance." There are areas in the book that really suggest that we need to become open-minded on certain things—spiritual matters—and the set-aside prayer, which is really a living document. Each group can do it. It's not set in stone. Each group or each person is free to interpret it however they want to, but it's an important concept.

I was slowly becoming open-minded with these Joe and Charlie tapes. The first resentment I got was this. This is the message that they gave me. Chris, you do not have a program. You're in the fellowship. All the things that you're doing is fellowship and you're doing some kind of service, but you're certainly not carrying the message. You're bringing the boobies from the hatch to the meetings, but you're not bringing them to the message. You're not carrying the message to them. You don't have a program. All the stuff you have is a fellowship.

And you know what? The program is in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. If you don't follow the instructions in the book Alcoholics Anonymous, you don't have an AA program. So when you drink, please don't tell anybody that AA didn't work because you did not work AA. This was kind of the message that I got from this.

Obviously, I got a resentment. Column number one: Joe and Charlie. Column number two: know-it-alls. But it haunted me. This message haunted me. I immediately threw it aside because the meetings I was going to at that time, nobody was pounding the Big Book who wasn't looked at like they were a circus clown or something. There were a couple of guys coming into meetings and somebody would say, "Hey, there's what's his name and he's got the Big Book with him. Better stay away from him like you're a leper or something." So there really wasn't anything like that going on at this time.

But the message haunted me because the truth will haunt you as an alcoholic. I was going through some rough times. There were some things that came up in my life that caused me a great deal of emotional stress and I knew I was getting very, very close to a drink. That alcoholic clock was ticking in me and I just knew that I wasn't going to be able to take the emotional pain much longer.

What I did was I took these tapes back out. They'd been on the shelf for about three months while I was resenting them. I took them back off the shelf. I opened up the book Alcoholics Anonymous and I started listening to these Joe and Charlie tapes and I started to do the exercises. I started to do things the way they said to do it very mechanically. Not like, "Well, there's as many programs as there are people in AA. You take it cafeteria style." The problem with cafeteria style is all I ever wanted was the brownie à la mode. I didn't want the vegetables.

So what I did was I said, "Okay, I'm going to try this." I found out a number of things that were significant. That scared kindergartener started to dissipate. Those emotional feelings—I found out some of the promises. There are many promises in this book. Some of the promises really started to take place in my life.

I was sponsoring by this time because I gave good share. You know what I mean? You ever see somebody whose recovery is like in the toilet, but they're good to listen to? That was me. I gave good share. Sometimes the tugboats that blow the most