A Long Way from Rock Bottom: AA Speaker – David T. – Spartanburg, SC
AA speaker David T. from Spartanburg, SC shares his journey from violent drunk to sobriety through step work, service, and finding a higher power in recovery.
David T. from Spartanburg, SC got sober in 1992 after years of violence, failed relationships, and multiple attempts at sobriety that never stuck. In this AA speaker tape, he walks through how he went from being a daily drunk who couldn’t make it past a few days sober to finding lasting recovery through working the steps with a sponsor, doing service work, and learning to trust a higher power he didn’t initially believe in.
This AA speaker meeting features David T. sharing how he overcame years of unsuccessful attempts at sobriety by working the Big Book with sponsors and getting involved in service work. David describes his progression from social drinking at 12 to daily drinking by 19, multiple failed quit attempts using doctors and counselors, and finally finding recovery through step work and sponsorship. He emphasizes how service work at detox centers and starting a literature-based AA group helped him maintain sobriety and carry the message to others.
Episode Summary
David T. opens his talk by admitting he’s nervous and has forgotten his whole story while sitting in the audience. He’s been sober since March 9th, 1992, and is a member of the Primary Purpose group in Spartanburg, which he describes as “one of the greatest group of alcoholics I’ve ever spent time with.” What makes David’s story particularly striking is how he came to the program as an atheist who “did not want to find a higher power” but was eventually left with no choice.
Growing up in South Carolina, David describes feeling uncomfortable everywhere he went, “basically walking into a room feeling like I had a booger on my nose and my fly down.” He found early relief through church service projects and Boy Scouts, discovering that helping others made him feel better about himself and closer to God. But when these activities brought unwanted attention at school and embarrassed him, he dropped everything—the service work, God, the whole thing—and shortly after found alcohol.
His first drunk came at age 12 or 13 on malt duck at a middle school dance. From that very first night, he experienced what the Doctor’s Opinion describes as the first part of alcoholism—when he drank enough to feel it, he got a craving for more of the same. “I didn’t drink my way into alcoholism. From the first drink I got a craving for more.” While the other kids got drunk and got in trouble, David got drunk and got comfortable for the first time in his life.
By high school, David was drinking at least four times a week, setting up his life around alcohol—working with alcoholics who would let him drink, learning to paint with an alcoholic artist where he could drink. Because he was an honor student, one of the “good kids,” he got away with a lot. Even when he became one of the first people kicked out of the South Carolina Governor School for the Arts due to alcoholism, they reinstated him because of his academic promise.
College changed everything. Without anyone to answer to, David began daily drinking by age 19. He started experiencing morning shakes and sweating, discovering that a drink in the morning would settle him down. But taking a drink in the morning meant getting a craving for more, leading to drinking most of the day. This pattern of morning drink, lunchtime drink, then drinking until he fell asleep became his daily routine.
David’s first contact with AA came at age 20 when a friend gave him a card with the phone number. The person who answered told him they didn’t have anyone as young as him in their group, reinforcing David’s belief that “alcoholics are usually pretty old, you know, like at least 30.” He thanked the man and hung up, staying away from AA for several more years.
His attempts to quit drinking without AA were numerous and creative. He went to doctors who prescribed Xanax, which only created more cravings. He tried Antabuse but spent his time “social drinking”—sipping beer until he turned bright red, started sweating, and felt like someone stabbed him in the head, then backing off until the feeling subsided. Eventually, the embarrassment of sitting bright red at the end of the table while friends drank normally led him to stop taking the Antabuse altogether.
After his first wife left him, David got involved with a bartender, thinking she’d understand his drinking since she’d been serving him alcohol. Instead, he found someone “just as angry and just as violent as I was without drinking,” creating explosive fights while her 12-year-old daughter listened from the back room. Just like when he’d hit his first wife, David couldn’t wake up feeling that traumatizing a child was acceptable.
Out of solutions—having tried doctors, counselors, ministers, exercise programs, and everything else he could think of—David describes how his higher power began working in his life by putting the right people in the right place at the right time. A coworker named Ron, a sober AA member, had planted seeds during David’s Antabuse period. Years later, when David had lost track of Ron completely, he happened to drive by just as David was getting the morning paper. “I could have missed this guy by 10 seconds, you know, either way.”
When David asked Ron what they did at AA meetings, Ron’s answer wasn’t profound or filled with AA slogans. He simply asked, “David, why do you go to bars?” When David answered that he went to be around people he had something in common with, Ron replied, “David, that’s all we do in AA. We just don’t drink while we’re doing it.”
David’s early AA experience was disappointing. He walked into “a group full of crazy people” run by “crazy people and newcomers.” Pathological liars offered him jobs when they weren’t working themselves. One guy moved into his house, ate everything in his fridge, and brought his dog to sleep on David. Another called him down to meet at a bar where he was drinking while claiming to be picking up a 90-day chip the next day.
After about six months, his girlfriend—who had initially wanted him to go to AA—decided she didn’t want him going anymore after meeting some of the members. David stopped attending and spent another 6-9 months drinking, but it was different this time. “It wasn’t the kind of drinking you do cuz you want to drink. It’s the kind of drinking you do when you got to drink. You can’t stop.”
The drinking escalated rapidly until David experienced something new—DTs. He spent a night “shaking and jerking and crawling around on the floor hearing sirens and ambulances trying to get to a phone.” This scared him enough to call AA again, reaching Joe, who had given him a business card at his first meeting. Remarkably, Joe was still sober—a miracle David didn’t appreciate at the time, not understanding AA’s turnover rate or that Joe had only been sober 90 days when they first met.
What followed was a year and a half of picking up white chips and relapsing repeatedly. David would make it three days and drink, then a week and drink, then 30 days before getting cocky and drinking on the way home from sharing at a meeting. The meetings he attended told him to “choose not to drink today” and “make a decision not to drink today,” but he didn’t realize he couldn’t. They told him to remember his last drunk, but as the Big Book warns, there came times when he forgot how bad it was.
The turning point came when David was supposed to chair a Friday night speaker meeting and showed up drunk. His girlfriend had had enough, his friends were giving up, and he went home miserable. When his mother was coming to visit the next day, all he wanted was to stay sober long enough so she wouldn’t know how bad things were. “And I was drunk by 10:00 that morning. And what happened was something in me broke… that thing in me that thought I could avoid taking the next drink was gone.”
David told his mother he needed help and called his sponsor Joe, saying he didn’t care if he lost his job, his house, or couldn’t patch things up with his girlfriend—he just didn’t want to drink anymore. Joe had been waiting a year and a half to hear this surrender. His mother packed him up and took him to Alabama, not to the nice treatment center he would have preferred, but to a psych ward where “people had problems far greater than mine.”
In that psych ward, David met people whose lives had been destroyed by alcoholism—including their own and others’. He met a 15-year-old girl with fetal alcohol syndrome who looked seven and would always live in institutions. He met a girl who’d just come out of a body cast after being thrown down stairs by her alcoholic father. He met women abused by alcoholic husbands. “I saw exactly what I needed to see… people abused by other people’s drinking, abused by people doing what I was doing when I drank.”
David also met a man who’d been sober 25 years in AA but had quit going to meetings after moving, and when his wife died, started drinking again. They rolled him in on a wheelchair. “He knew a lot of slogans but he wasn’t walking.” This taught David that sobriety wasn’t about what he knew but what he did, and he’d have to do it for a long time.
Returning to Spartanburg convinced he was going to die drunk, David got with sponsors Stitch and Hilton, whom he describes as “militantly sober” and scary. These men would talk to him when he called drunk, never once telling him to call when he was sober because “they knew I wasn’t drinking cuz I wanted to be. They knew I was drinking cuz I had to and I couldn’t quit.”
Working with Stitch, David went through the Big Book from the beginning, learning what being powerless over alcohol really meant—that he’d lost the power of choice in drink and it wasn’t coming back. They listened to Joe and Charlie tapes that explained the problem, the solution, and the practical program of action in terms David could understand.
Though he came to AA as an atheist, David found he didn’t need belief to start—just “a simple willingness to believe in a power greater than myself.” He did his Third Step on his knees with a sponsor he chose not because he understood God, but because this man had more faith than anyone in the room. He made his Fourth Step inventory of resentments, fears, and harms, shared it completely in his Fifth Step, and became willing to change everything about himself.
David’s amends process was thorough and specific. With his mother, he established a routine of calling every Sunday at 6:00 PM without fail, letting her know when he’d be out of town and involving her in his AA activities so she’d know he was okay. With his father, the basic amends didn’t feel sufficient, so on Father’s Day he wrote a letter focusing not on what his dad had done wrong, but on everything he’d done right—working his way off a Mississippi farm to give David better opportunities than he’d had.
Service work became crucial to David’s recovery, connecting back to those early positive experiences with church service projects. Starting with cleaning and maintenance at the clubhouse, he found himself able to go straight there after work without stopping at liquor stores that had previously been impossible to pass. This work became so consuming and helpful that he ended up remodeling the entire building over a year’s time, staying sober throughout.
David’s involvement in service expanded as he became willing to do anything AA asked of him. When told he’d be group treasurer despite protesting he was no good with money, an older member told him, “David, this is how you become good at it.” Through service positions, David discovered he was far more capable, competent, and responsible than he’d ever known.
His work at Spartanburg Detox became particularly meaningful, going twice a week for years to carry meetings and spending off-hours in the smoking room just talking with detox patients. David paid attention to their experiences with AA—what they’d found or not found, what had driven them away. Common complaints included meetings that were nothing but “griping and moaning and complaining” or women feeling like meetings were “like being in a bar without alcohol” due to unwanted advances.
This led David and others to start the Primary Purpose group, designed to ensure that anyone walking in would hear the problem, the solution, and the program of action every time. Monday nights feature literature-based discussions from conference-approved books, while Friday nights involve page-by-page Big Book study. “We don’t ask, ‘Does anybody have a problem?’ We assume if you’re in AA, you got a problem. What you need is a solution and that’s what we talk about.”
David emphasizes that many people in recovery discuss step work timing, but his view is practical: “If I’ve been shot, I’m not going to wait till I feel better a year from now to go to hospital. I’m going to do this work now and maybe recover from alcoholism… not just get a relief, but actually recover from this thing, be relieved of that obsession with alcohol so that I can get on with life.”
The transformation in David’s family relationships exemplifies his recovery’s fruits. The father he once fought with in the driveway now waits for his Sunday phone calls, fighting his mother for the phone and telling David he’s proud of him and loves him. His mother no longer cries from worry about what might happen to David but simply because she’ll miss her son when visits end.
David closes by acknowledging that sobriety doesn’t provide “a pass from the normal problems that everybody has to experience in life.” Recent months have brought times when he’s “hurt worse than I’ve ever hurt in life, not just in sobriety.” But he’s learned from his sponsor Bob, who died of leukemia, that “by practicing what we do in Alcoholics Anonymous, we can meet any condition with some dignity, some courage, and some faith.”
When David prays simply, “God, I don’t know what’s happening next. Please help me,” friends like George and John K. call to check on him or invite him to meetings and lunch. Going to the prison to carry meetings reminds him how fortunate he is. His message is about trust: “All I got to do is trust he’s there. Practice a few simple principles of this thing and do my very best to share this with other people that don’t know yet and do that on a regular basis and I’ll be all right.”
David’s story demonstrates how AA speaker talks on hitting bottom and early sobriety often emphasize the importance of complete surrender before recovery becomes possible. His experience with making comprehensive amends, particularly to family members, mirrors the detailed work described in Jerry J.’s talk about cleaning your side of the street. The emphasis on literature-based meetings and working with sponsors connects to the structured approach found in AA speaker talks on step work and making amends.
Notable Quotes
I didn’t drink my way into alcoholism. From the first drink I got a craving for more.
What happened was something in me broke. That thing in me that thought I could avoid taking the next drink was gone.
David, that’s all we do in AA. We just don’t drink while we’re doing it.
If I’ve been shot, I’m not going to wait till I feel better a year from now to go to hospital. I’m going to do this work now and maybe recover from alcoholism.
All I got to do is trust he’s there. Practice a few simple principles of this thing and do my very best to share this with other people that don’t know yet.
Steps 8 & 9 – Making Amends
Sponsorship
Big Book Study
Service Work
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Full Transcript
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# Sober Sunrise Speaker Meeting Transcript
[music] [singing] 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. We hope to always remain an ad-free [music] podcast. So, if you'd like to help us remain self-supporting, please visit our website at [music] 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. [music]I'm David Thatch and I'm an alcoholic and I've been sober since March 9th, 1992. I'm a member of the Primary Purpose group up in Spartanburg. One of the greatest groups of alcoholics I've ever spent time with. And I hope at the end of this I get to tell you a little bit about them. I try to do that anytime I can.
Before I get started, I want to tell you one thing. This is scary. I forgot my whole story sitting over there while they were reading. I'm told I'm supposed to tell you in a general way what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now. So that means I'm not going to do a fifth step. That means I'm going to try to keep it general and try to get to what it's like now because that's important. I'm told I'm supposed to do that in order to tell you how I came to find a relationship with a higher power that allows me to stay sober today. And I'm going to do my best. I'm getting better at that.
In the beginning, it was difficult. I came to this thing as an atheist and did not want to find a higher power and was finally left with no choice but to find a higher power. So it's kind of hard for me to tell you how that happened sometimes. But I'll get on with my story and see if we can figure that out.
I was born in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Shortly thereafter, my family moved to South Carolina. By the time I was about three, I'd been in South Carolina basically my whole life except for school and Spartanburg most of that time. Growing up around my house, you know, about five or maybe ten years ago, I'd have told you I was brought up in an abusive home and all these awful things that happened. But I've listened to a lot of stuff since I've been in this program and I've learned that a lot of people had it really bad. I was very fortunate. I was very fortunate to grow up as I did.
But there was a lot of yelling and screaming, and I was being told I was lazy or I was stupid or things like that. Things that left me basically feeling like I was lazy and stupid and didn't really measure up anywhere I was. And that's the thing I remember most about childhood was being uncomfortable wherever I was. Feeling like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, being embarrassed, basically walking into a room feeling like I had a booger on my nose and my fly down. I feel like that right now, but that's how it was for me.
So by the time I found alcohol, I was ready for a solution. Prior to finding alcohol though, I'd found a solution. I'd gotten real involved with my church, real involved with God and real involved with Boy Scouts. What was so helpful to me was the service projects that we did for underprivileged kids and things like that. What I found was when I help you, it makes me feel better about me, makes me feel closer to God and closer to you. And I found that to be my solution today, too.
But what happened with all that was I was a shy little embarrassed kid. At some point, some little project I did for the children's unit hospital downtown got attention and was announced in my school. It wasn't cool. I was really embarrassed and I just dropped all that. I dropped the service things, I dropped God, I dropped the whole thing. Shortly after that, I found alcohol.
To be honest with you, I need to tell you my story as it is. The first thing I found was marijuana. The first thing I got into was drugs. They were illegal, so they were a lot easier for a little kid to get than alcohol. That's what I got into first. And throughout my story, drugs are there. I'm not going to talk to you about it for a couple of reasons. One, this is Alcoholics Anonymous. I understand and respect our single purpose. And number two, I'm not an addict. I walked in and had a lot of people try to convince me otherwise. But what I found in looking back at my story was that I quit all that by a simple decision to stop doing it and not hang around with the same people. I didn't ever work with alcohol. A simple decision to quit was not enough or I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be here tonight.
So that's about enough of that. Shortly after that though, I found alcohol. We pursued alcohol. It wasn't something I found by accident. We heard it worked. We sought out somebody to get something for us. It was a friend's sister and we were going to a little middle school dance. We were little kids, twelve, thirteen, and she bought what she thought little kids could drink. So I had my first drunk on Malt Duck. Awful stuff. You all laugh, so you must know what it is.
What happened that night is what I read later in the Doctor's Opinion. The first part of what makes me an alcoholic is when I drank enough to feel it, I got a craving for more of the same. That happened from day one with me. I didn't drink my way into alcoholism. From the first drink I got a craving for more. And I drank all I had. The kids with me drank what they could. They also aren't in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting tonight, but they drank what they could. I drank all I had.
They got drunk and got in a lot of trouble. What happened with me when I got drunk was I got comfortable. It was about the first time in my life where I felt okay. We were at a little dance and I'm a shy kid, scared of girls, scared of everything. And I was immediately comfortable and okay. I pursued that with a vengeance after that. I'd have been foolish not to. Anything that worked that quick, I pursued alcohol from then on.
Early on, I wasn't drinking every day or anything like that. I'm still a small kid and it's hard to get. But by the time I got to high school, I was a pretty regular drunk. Not every day, not all day, but at least four times a week. What I did was set things up so that I had a job with alcoholics. We could drink. I had ways of getting out of the house. I was an artist learning to paint, working with an artist who was an alcoholic. We could drink there. I set things up a lot around drinking.
Also, I got away with it pretty easily because I was an honor student. I was one of the kids that they expected to succeed. Whenever anything in my behavior was questionable, they kind of excused it for me because I was one of the kids they thought would do well. So I didn't get in a lot of trouble through high school. I mean, I was one of the first people kicked out of the South Carolina Governor School for the Arts based on alcoholism. But then what happened? Because I was one of those good kids, they also came back and reinstated me.
I always kind of got away with things early on, not for real long, but I think that's where my drinking changed. When I went to college, I got down there and I didn't have anybody to answer to. I got away from the family, which was good to get away from since things were bad at home. I didn't have anybody to answer to and I could drink when I wanted to. So I got to doing daily drinking.
The same thing happened down there. I got a lot of excuses for my drinking. I was a scholarship student. I was one of those they expected to do well. I was an art student at the University of Georgia and art students were supposed to be kind of goofy. I was really goofy. I could get away with drinking. That was all part of the thing. I could drink in class. I could do whatever. I could get away with it and really didn't have a lot of people question that for a while.
I think my drinking probably changed by the time I was about nineteen. What happened when I was nineteen is I started getting waking up in the morning with the shakes, sweating, vibrating. I found that if I took a drink in the morning, then things would be okay. It would settle down. But when I take a drink in the mornings, I get a craving for more of the same. I found myself drinking most of the day.
It started like that. I was a daily drunk. I wasn't drinking twenty-four hours out of the day, but I'd get up in the morning, take enough to be okay, get on to class, at lunch go drink enough to be okay, and then in the evening, drink till I fell asleep. I did that daily.
My drinking career isn't that long before I got to needing to quit. By the time I was twenty years old, that was taking its toll. This kid they expected to succeed couldn't show up to class. I was having a lot of trouble. I had my first contact with Alcoholics Anonymous by the time I was about twenty years old.
I hadn't been getting to class. I'd been having a lot of trouble. One of the best friends I had in the world came to me and said, "David, I don't know what to do and I don't know how to help, and maybe these people can." She gave me a little card where she had written Alcoholics Anonymous and put the phone number of their answering service down on it.
I looked at that and drank on that a little while and contemplated it. I don't know how long it was. It may have been a day. It may have been two or three. I called and God bless this guy that answered the phone. He was doing everything he knew how to do to the best of his ability. We got talking and I said, "What do they do at those meetings?" He said, "Well, we drink coffee and talk." I said, "Well, okay, that's all right." We talked a little more and he said, "You know, we really don't have anyone as young as you in our group."
I thought about that and I said, "Well, you know, that's right. Alcoholics are usually pretty old, you know, at least thirty." I thanked him and I hung up the phone. That was my last contact with Alcoholics Anonymous for a little while.
I managed to get through school doing okay. Grades were good. Behavior was awful. I went on to graduate school and the game changed up there for me. Down in Athens, Georgia, it was all right to be a goofy art student, to be drunk. I could get away with a lot down there. I got to Eastern North Carolina and that was a conservative bunch of folks. I'm a graduate assistant and I'm moving a refrigerator to keep my beer in into the studio. They didn't look too kindly on that. They started questioning what they had there.
What happened up there in Eastern North Carolina for me was the reason alcohol became so important before then was it allowed me to do things I couldn't do. It allowed me to talk in front of other people. Stuff like this scared me to death. I've always been scared of talking in front of people. It let me do the things I need to do.
Well, I got to East Carolina and the thing that had always been my solution became the problem. It kept me from being able to do what I needed to do and kept me from fulfilling obligations. They were paying me to be there and I couldn't do it. I did the best I knew how for a while and then I had to start looking for a solution. I found a solution. I decided I'd quit school with good grades and come back to Spartanburg and marry this girl I'd been dating. That would solve it. I got married. Everything would be all right. Everything wasn't all right. Not at all.
Because I brought that drinking and behavior back. I wasn't really working. I was doing some work and doing that kind of thing. She was working all the time to help support this cause. What happened within three or four months of that was alcohol turned on me in a way that I didn't expect. I became everything I ever hated. I became a violent, angry drunk just about every time I drank. Not every time, but nearly. Violent, angry, verbally abusive to this girl, and all she wanted to do was love me and marry me.
What happened to begin to change things for me was during this time. We did a lot of arguing. I did a lot of hollering and screaming, but at some point during this thing, I hit her. It might not be the worst thing a lot of people sitting around here could think of doing, but for me, that was the worst thing I could think of doing. Hitting this little ninety-five pound, five-foot tall girl who I said I loved.
I woke up the next morning and what it was was in the past. I'd do a lot of stuff while drinking and excuse it away by saying, "Well, I was drunk. It won't happen again," or make something up. There wasn't any excuse for this. I couldn't say, "Well, I was drinking. It'll be all right." It wasn't all right. There wasn't really any way for me to look in the mirror without wanting to vomit. I had to do something about my drinking. I was making some promises to do some things.
So I went and sat outside an AA meeting and watched you all come in and go and couldn't go in. But I did start a career of trying not to drink.
I didn't find AA real easy. I didn't say, "Well, I need to stop drinking. Let's go to Alcoholics Anonymous." I began first by going to my doctor. I talked to him about what had been going on. I think I was a little bit honest with him. I told him what my drinking was like and told him I needed to quit. He agreed. He said, "Yeah, I think you do." And he wrote me a prescription to help me not drink. He wrote me a prescription for Xanax to keep me calm while I'm not drinking.
I wasn't honest enough to tell him I'd been taking that anyway. I took that home and I'm trying not to drink, taking my Xanax, and it did what it always did. It created a craving for drink just like drinking did with me. It wasn't long till I was drinking again. I got just as violent and angry and nasty again and had to stop.
I went back to this doctor and said, "You know, don't you have something that would make me sick if I drink? I really need to stop drinking." He agreed I need to stop drinking. He said, "Yeah, we do have something. It's called Antabuse." He told me to read this. He threw some stuff at me that bottom line when you read it says, "If you take a drink on this, it's going to make you really sick and you might die." I read that and I was like, "Well, I don't want to drink. And dying might be good. So yeah, give me that."
I started taking my Antabuse and drinking coffee and trying to do what you're supposed to do when you're not drinking. What happened—I don't know how long it was into that. Two weeks, a month, something like that—what happened to me is what the book tells me my real problem is. The book tells me about the squiggly writing in Chapter Three. What happened was I'm taking my Antabuse because I don't want to drink, and it might kill me if I drink on it. I start thinking, "Well, now I wonder how much you'd have to drink on that before it killed you."
So I proceed with a period of really social drinking. My only period of social drinking. Sipping on a beer until I turn beat red and start sweating and feel like somebody stabbed me in the head and start breathing real heavy, and ease back off a little bit. When that gets a little better, sip on that beer again until I feel like somebody stabbed me in the head. I don't mean guzzling beer. I mean sipping at it until you feel it.
I'm doing social drinking. I'm hanging around with friends. My friends weren't alcoholic. They were regular folks that may overdrink a time or two or go out and plan to overdrink, but they planned it. They could go home when they wanted to. I'm sitting around doing my interviews drinking with these guys. They're drinking what they want and I'm beat red over at the end of the table corner.
After a while, that got embarrassing. It got real uncomfortable. I start thinking again. I started thinking, "Well, this Antabuse is going to kill me if I continue to drink on it. So I quit taking Antabuse."
That's what my problem is. That's my real problem. That I'm really not wanting to drink, starting out in the morning, don't want to take a drink. I'm taking something to hopefully make me sick if I take a drink. By the end of the day, I'm trying to figure out how I can drink on it. That seemed okay. It says in the book, alcohol to the alcoholic—his life's the only normal one. That was it. It seemed normal to me.
What happened when I quit taking Antabuse and just continued on drinking was that my wife got bright and she quit taking any of that. She left. I realized, well, she was a problem anyway. Most of the trouble I've had around drinking involved her. I probably can drink.
It wasn't real long after that the law picked me up again and they said, "No, you can't drink. Or at least son, you're not driving on the streets when you do." I needed a solution again. It was time to stop drinking. I'm in trouble again. I'm back living with Mom and Dad, trying to drink in the basement and all that. Living down there like a troll.
So I'm trying not to drink and I get the idea I'm going to go to a counselor. That's going to help me. I'm real nervous talking to folks, especially if they want to talk about me. I'm not comfortable. So I drink about a six-pack and I'd go talk to the counselor about not drinking. I did this twice a week, week after week, for I don't know how long. Drink a six-pack and go talk to this guy about not drinking because I don't want to drink. I'm paying him to help me not drink and drinking on the way to go talk to him about not drinking. That made sense. Maybe not to him, but to me.
I think what was going on during that time was what happened with me later in Alcoholics Anonymous. I thought he was going to say something magic. He was going to give me some answer where all of a sudden I'm not going to want to drink again. I'm going to drink my way on until he gives me that thing. I was thinking a little self-knowledge might fix it. If I knew enough about me or this thing or something, I wouldn't drink anymore.
My six turned into some more and I forgot to go. So I left that off. I was willing to go to any lengths though. I looked up a minister and that didn't work any better. I went drinking, talking to him. It didn't stop me from drinking.
It just got strange and things were getting really bad at home. I was living in the basement like a troll with my family. Things got worse around my house than I ever thought they could. When I started drinking, it was bad growing up, but I started reacting and shooting my mouth off and that made it worse.
What happened down there was on my twenty-fifth birthday, we celebrated by me and my dad beating each other up in the driveway. That was how it was. That was another one of those things I just couldn't believe had happened. It was like that. I wanted another solution and I thought I found one. I need another woman. This one was a bartender. I figured, well, she'd understand. She's been serving me all this stuff. She's not going to suddenly tell me, "You drink too much." She'd been giving me this stuff. She didn't understand.
What happened was she was just as angry and just as violent as I was without drinking. That didn't make for a good combination at all. What would happen though was while we were out there screaming and yelling, knocking each other down, cussing, throwing things, her little twelve-year-old girl was laying back in the back listening to all that.
Just like back when I hit that wife, I couldn't get up the next morning and feel like that was all right. That little girl had to lay there and worry and listen and hear that kind of thing night after night. I really needed to quit drinking. I've been fighting with my dad. I've been fighting with the girl. Nothing's okay in my life. Nothing's all right. I needed a solution.
I've used up the doctors and the counselors and the minister and what I knew from reading books about not drinking and any kind of thing I could think of. I tried the exercise program. I tried everything. I was out of solutions.
I'm told I was going to try and tell you how I came to a belief in God in this thing. It wasn't real easy. I think I've come to a belief in a higher power by looking back at my life and seeing that he was there when I wasn't paying any attention. Mostly, the people I needed were at the place I needed when I was ready, each time.
What happened was I was getting ready. Back when I was doing this Antabuse drinking, I'd met a guy I was working with. He introduced himself to me, let me know he was a sober member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was working with this guy. He never told me I needed to go. He knew I was doing the Antabuse thing and he was just laughing. He loved that. But he never told me I had to go. He said, "I just find this works for me."
What happened was, leaving that job and some of this stuff I was talking about going on, I lost track of him. I didn't know where he was. I think he had moved and I'd moved and we wouldn't have known how to find each other if we had to. I was going one morning down to get the paper and he just happened to drive by. He stopped. I could have missed this guy by ten seconds either way. He was just right there.
I didn't walk up to him and say, "I'm ready to quit drinking." It wasn't like that. He just put him where he needed to be. I got him a job where I worked and he just put him where he needed to be.
Then a lot of this stuff happened. I got ready and I just said, "Hey, what do you all do at those meetings?" I asked my question when I'm going to go to AA. What do you all do at those meetings?
He gave me an answer that wasn't profound. It wasn't the Big Book. It wasn't big twelve-step work. Well, it was for me, but it wasn't anything special. He just said, "David, why do you go to bars?" I said, "Well, to be around people I have something in common with, just so I don't have to be by myself and have people to talk to." He said, "David, that's all we do in AA. We just don't drink while we're doing it."
Nothing profound. I agreed to go and he came down the next day and picked me up and took me to one of those meetings. My first AA meeting.
I couldn't tell you—I'd like to tell you I walked into that thing and heard the message and got struck sober and all that. I don't remember what went on. I know my head hurt. I was sweating and I stunk and I was shaking. It was bright. I think the building was yellow at that time. Made it even worse. It was yelling bright.
I picked up one of those chips when they offered them at the end. I think it was only because Ron leaned over and went, "Come on." But what happened was the next day I wanted to go again. I guess I sensed there was some sort of answer there. I didn't know what was going on there, but I think I sensed that was my only choice. I wanted to go again.
I'd like to tell you that was it and I got sober. It wasn't like that for me. Another number of years before I got sober. The truth was, I walked into a group full of crazy people. I walked into a group run by crazy people and newcomers. All the crazy people came up and offered me help.
I met pathological liars that would come up and offer me a job when I needed work when they weren't working themselves. Couldn't find one if they needed it. Another one that moved himself into my house and ate everything I had in the fridge, brought his dog with him to sleep on me. Another guy who—I was trying to stay sober. I couldn't make it more than a day or two, but I called him. He said, "Well, I'm down at this address. Come meet me." I go down there. It's a little bar. I go in there to see him. I don't know. Some of you all must hang out there. I don't know.
I went in and he's drinking and telling me he's picking up a ninety-day chip tomorrow. I know that's not right. I know they mean in a row, you know, ninety days in a row. I don't want to drink. I'm not drinking because I want to drink. I don't want to drink. I know that's not right.
What happened during this summer of Alcoholics Anonymous was that girl that I'd been fighting with who really wanted me to go to AA decided she didn't want me to go to AA anymore. She'd been meeting some of them and she didn't want me to have what they had because they kept threatening to give me what they got. She gave me permission to stop going to AA and I stopped.
I went on drinking for about another six, maybe nine months. Drinking was different this time. It wasn't the kind of drinking you do because you want to drink. It's the kind of drinking you do when you got to drink. You can't stop. It just grew worse and worse, faster and faster than I thought it could.
What happened—at some point I experienced something I'd never experienced before in alcoholism. I'd been through morning jitters and shakes and vomiting and arrests and violence and all that, but I experienced something I had not experienced before, which was DTs. As I found out, if I quit drinking too quickly, stuff happened. I spent a night of just shaking and jerking and crawling around on the floor, hearing sirens and ambulances, trying to get to a phone. If I could have dialed, I'd have done it and got somebody over there to pick me up and take me somewhere.
I got up sometime the next day or so and realized I need to call AA again. Part of having the right people where I need them at the right time was this too. I called a man from my first meeting. The guy introduced me to another man in the program and this guy gave me a business card. I put it in my wallet and I kept it that whole time. I knew where it was and I called the number on that card and Joe was there.
Joe was still sober in Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn't realize at that time what a miracle that was for me because I didn't realize the turnover rate we got in Alcoholics Anonymous. Joe wasn't sober but ninety days when he gave me that business card. When I called him up, he was just shy of a year. But I didn't realize how few people sitting in these meetings all across the country tonight aren't going to be here next year when we are.
It was an absolute miracle he was there. I asked him, "Can I come back?" I didn't know if you all let people come back when they quit. He said, "Yeah, yeah. I'll meet you there." He became my first sponsor.
I'd like to say I came into AA and I got sober and here we are tonight. It wasn't like that for me. It was at least a year and a half before I stopped drinking. I'd try. I'd made some efforts at some steps. I'd try and do the steps. I'd try and do things they told me. I'd make it like three days and I'd drink. Then I'd make it a week and then I'd drink. I'd make it another two days and I'd drink.
I kept picking up those white chips. Then I'd make it thirty days and all of a sudden get smart and know how to stay sober and just start sharing and get struck drunk on the way home. It just happened like that for me. I picked up white chips till they stopped clapping. And then I realized, "Well, this is a day-at-a-time thing and I don't need to be picking up those chips because they're obviously the problem. Thinking about that chip, I'd take a drink again."
It just happened like that for me. I'd just take a drink. That was what it was like for me.
I think what the problem was is I didn't know what the problem was. The meetings I was sitting in, they were telling me, "Choose not to drink today." I didn't realize I couldn't. They were telling me, "Make a decision not to drink today." I didn't realize that didn't matter. It didn't have anything to do with whether or not I drank that afternoon.
I was hearing, "Remember your last drunk." I didn't know what the book tells me is there's a time and place where that ain't going to happen. That's a good tool when it works. But if I rely on it for sobriety, I'm going to find myself struck drunk again because a time and place is going to come where I'm going to forget how bad it was. I'm going to forget about hitting that wife. I'm going to forget about fighting in front of that little girl. I'm going to forget all that and take a drink again.
When I'm ready to drink, there's no tape in the machine. I often find myself drunk without even planning to take a drink an hour before that. I didn't realize that no willpower-based solution was going to be a solution for me.
So I just kept picking up those chips. I even made one grandstand move. I got an AA girlfriend. She was staying sober. Maybe that'd work. She was staying sober. I wouldn't. I tried everything I knew. Tried talking and tried not talking. I just went on with it.
What happened, I went through this for about a year and a half. Occasionally I'd get to ninety days a couple times and be so smart they'd let me chair a meeting and I'd take a drink on the way home again.
What happened was at some point I just got miserable. I'd made some really good friends in Alcoholics Anonymous. Some people that cared about me and I cared about them. They were staying sober and I wasn't. I'd cut out on the drinking buddies. I mean, all I had was me and you all. You all were doing okay and I wasn't. That's a lonely place to be. It's a really lonely place to be.
So somewhere around March 9th of '92, I was supposed to chair a speaker meeting, chairing the Friday night speaker meeting at my home group. I showed up drunk and chaired the meeting. They let me chair it. My girlfriend had enough of me. My friends were giving up. They just didn't know what else to do.
I go back home just miserable, sitting on the couch like I'm the only person in the world. My mother's going to come into town that next day. I want to stay sober just long enough so that she thinks I'm all right. I don't want her to know how it is with me. All I need to do is stay sober that day. I was drunk by ten o'clock that morning.
What happened was something in me broke. Something in me broke. It wasn't anything you guys could have given me. That thing in me that thought I could avoid taking the next drink was gone. I knew I was going to die drunk. I was positive that there was nothing that could be done. I was going to die drunk.
Mom showed up and I just said, "I need some help. I need some help." I'd been resisting going somewhere. My sponsor had suggested a time or two that it might be a good idea to take a little sobriety vacation. I'd been resisting going anywhere because I had important things to tend to, work or something like that. Well, at this point, nothing mattered.
I called my sponsor Joe and got him over. He sat on the couch with me and I said, "Joe, I don't care if I lose my job and lose my house. I don't care if I can't stick around and patch things up with Beth because I don't care. If I could just not drink and had to be living under a bridge, I'd be all right with me. I just don't want to drink anymore." He said, "David, I've been waiting a year and a half to hear this."
My mom packed me up in the car and took me on off to Alabama. I'd like to tell you I went to a treatment center. If I'd have had my way, I'd have been in a nice treatment center where they fed you well and we talked about our issues and I found somebody to blame for my drinking and we'd all be happy. But I found myself in a psych ward down in Alabama where people had problems far greater than mine.
God gave me what I needed, not what I wanted. What happened was God put before me people I needed to meet once again. It wasn't longtime sober alcoholics preaching me. It was people like—I met a little girl with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, little girl named Natalie. She was about fifteen, looked like she was about seven. She was always going to live in places like that. That was alcoholism. That wasn't her fault.
I met another little girl that really got to me. She had just come out of a body cast being thrown down a flight of stairs by her alcoholic father. She looked a lot like that daughter of that girl I mentioned earlier. It really got to me.
I met a couple other women abused by alcoholic husbands that ended up there. I saw exactly what I needed to see. I saw a lot of people abused by other people's drinking, abused by people doing what I was doing when I drank. They had no fault in it at all. I paid attention. It got to me. I began to understand a few things.
Fortunately, before I got out of there, I met another guy. They brought him in on a wheelchair. He got talking. He had all kind of AA slogans. Sounded good in discussion meetings, I'm sure, but he was in there with me. I got talking to him and found out he'd been sober twenty-five years in Alcoholics Anonymous. He'd moved down that way, decided he didn't like how they did it, so he quit going. Being older, his wife passed on and he began drinking. They rolled him in on a wheelchair. He wasn't even walking.