Stay Until You Hear the Music: AA Speaker – Doug R. – Helena, MT
AA speaker Doug R. from Helena, MT shares his 8-month journey of going to meetings while drinking, until a desperate prayer changed everything.
Doug R. from Tujunga, California went to AA meetings for eight months while drinking every day, thinking he was smarter than the program. In this AA speaker meeting recorded in Helena, MT, Doug walks through his moment of surrender on his bedroom floor and the spiritual awakening that followed when AA people started appearing everywhere he went.
This AA speaker meeting features Doug R. sharing his story of attending meetings for eight months while continuing to drink daily. Doug describes his moment of hitting bottom when he found himself sucking whiskey out of his bedspread and praying desperately for help. After that prayer, he experienced what he calls “hearing the music” of Alcoholics Anonymous when AA members began appearing everywhere in his life, leading to his spiritual awakening and understanding of the program.
Episode Summary
Doug R. brings both humor and raw honesty to this powerful share about learning to “hear the music” of Alcoholics Anonymous. A retired television prop master who worked on The Price is Right for seven years, Doug opens with stories from his entertainment industry background before diving into his circuitous path to sobriety.
Doug’s journey to AA began with deep skepticism. Raised with a Pentecostal grandmother who ran a Skid Row mission, he assumed AA was the “secular way to get sober” – until he walked into his first meeting and saw all the God talk. He spent eight months going to meetings while drinking every day, convinced he was too smart to need daily attendance like Ruth, the woman celebrating 18 years who went to a meeting every single day.
During those eight months, Doug collected chips he hadn’t earned and remained detached from the program. He describes himself as someone who “never fit anywhere” – not with the jocks, surfers, or bikers, despite participating in all those worlds. He had no idea he’d walked into “the biggest organization of misfits the world’s ever seen.”
The turning point came on his bedroom floor at 3 AM. After passing out drunk watching TV, Doug woke up, crawled to his bedroom with his bottle, and spilled most of his remaining whiskey on the bed. In desperation, he began sucking the alcohol out of his bedspread. A voice in his head said “that ain’t right,” and in that moment of complete surrender, he prayed: “God, if you’re there, please help me.”
What happened next was what Doug calls his spiritual awakening. AA speaker talks on spiritual awakening often describe miraculous coincidences, and Doug’s experience fits perfectly. Suddenly, AA members appeared everywhere – behind the counter at his liquor store, serving him at restaurants, shopping in the grocery store. When he threw an empty bottle out his car window one morning and saw an AA member driving toward him, Doug realized he was “a victim of miracles.”
This was the moment Doug “came to believe” and started hearing “the music” of Alcoholics Anonymous. He explains that before this awakening, the program’s language made no sense – phrases like “surrender to win” and “give it away to keep it” seemed like riddles. But once he heard the music, the words became clear. Even when different people gave him contradictory advice (one saying “hang on,” another saying “let go”), Doug understood they were both expressing the same underlying truth.
Doug’s sponsor, Jim, played a crucial role in his recovery, particularly around step work. When Doug thought he’d discovered his “deeper underlying cause and condition” in his performing career in the musical Hair, Jim pointed out that most normal people don’t take unidentified drugs before job interviews. This insight helped Doug realize he was looking for complex explanations for what was simply alcoholism.
The most moving part of Doug’s story involves his ninth step with his father. What he thought was a $3,000 debt turned out to be over $7,200. Doug spent three years sending weekly payments with personal notes, never missing a Friday. When his father died, Doug discovered his dad had saved every single note, telling Doug’s mother “I know Doug loves me – I got it in his own handwriting.” Similar spiritual experiences in recovery show how step work creates unexpected gifts.
Doug emphasizes that “every single step comes with a personalized gift from God, great or small,” but you don’t know what the gift is until you do the step. His relationship with his daughter was also restored through his recovery, after her stepfather had asked him not to come around drunk anymore.
Throughout his talk, Doug demonstrates the humor that’s essential to his recovery while never minimizing the seriousness of alcoholism. His stories range from mooning the bride’s mother at a wedding (earning him the nickname “Doug Scusting”) to being disinvited from another wedding entirely. Yet these moments of painful honesty serve to illustrate how far his life had spiraled before he found the program.
Doug concludes with his signature message: “If you’re new here in Alcoholics Anonymous, please stay until you hear the music.” He explains there’s a rhythm, harmony, and melody that runs through the program that makes all the confusing words finally make sense. Once you catch that rhythm, even the apparent contradictions resolve into a beautiful, coherent whole.
His story resonates because it captures the experience of many who come to AA intellectually before surrendering spiritually. Doug’s transformation from skeptic to believer shows that the program works even for those convinced they’re too smart, too different, or too lost to fit in.
Notable Quotes
I had no idea that I just walked into the biggest organization of misfits the world’s ever seen.
God, if you’re there, please help me.” – And I just surrendered. I went to bed. I went to sleep.
I’m a victim of miracles. I asked for help. I got help just like they say.
When you start to hear the music, then that’s when the words start to make sense.
Every single step comes with a personalized gift from God, great or small. You don’t know what it is until you do the step and then you get the gift.
Hitting Bottom
Steps 8 & 9 – Making Amends
Fellowship & Meetings
Surrender
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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.
# SOBER SUNRISE — AA SPEAKER MEETING TRANSCRIPT
[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. [applause]Hi everybody. My name is Doug R and I'm a grateful alcoholic.
I'm delighted to be here. I want to thank the committee for inviting me. Want to thank Richard for calling me, Deborah for emailing me, and Don for picking me up in his badass truck and driving me around today. I also want to thank the people who had to do with putting on this skit. I'm from Tahunga, California. Don thought he was pretty slick getting away with saying Southern California. He actually could have said LA and it would have been pretty close. But Tahunga is in the San Fernando Valley, and every year the San Fernando Valley puts on a show—a musical comedy—because we're in LA and we've got all this talent down there. It's easy to guilt them into it. You know, "Can't you give something for your sobriety?" We get all these professional musicians, singers, dancers, and stage hands, and we put on these shows. So I appreciate the show and I appreciate what it takes to put on something like this.
Besides that, I'm recently retired. Well, not recent—a year and a half retired from working in television. The last seven years I was a propman on the Price is Right. [laughter]
I'll tell you something else about LA. There's a lot of sober people in LA. There are 2,400 meetings a week in Los Angeles, and there's every kind of meeting. There are some meetings where you're expected to wear a tie and a jacket if you're going to be at the podium, and other meetings where you're expected to park your motorcycle inside the room.
A lot of people work in the business in LA. Around the country the business means different things, but in LA it means show biz. There's a lot of people working in show business and a lot of sober alcoholics. I spent 25 years working in that business, and the last seven years on the Price is Right, there was a guy or woman on my crew who was sober about two years behind me. We had the art director who had about a year of sobriety at that point in the story I'm going to tell you. And there was the scenic artist who had 17 years of sobriety. There was a lot of us around there, and sometimes the meeting would just be you walking through the hallway doing your job, going, "One day at a time, keep it simple," something like that—"Easy does it."
But occasionally we'd have a little coffee break and get together, and it'd be like a real meeting all of a sudden, right in the middle of work. One time the art director, who was fairly new—a year sober compared to the rest of us—had a stress job. He said to us, "Tell me something, you guys. How do you keep from getting frazzled from this thing? How do you let the stress go?" And the scenic artist said, "What stress?"
He said, "You know, how long does it take you to leave this stuff behind you when you go home?" And I said, "I don't take this home with me. I'm usually okay by the time I get to my car." [laughter]
He said, "How do you do that? How do you do that?" And at that time CBS was in West Hollywood at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly, and there was one wall that was all window. You could look out at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly and see the world out there. So I took him over to the window. "Come here. Okay, here's the deal. This is a game show and life is the commercial break." [laughter]
The thing is, he thought it was clever. I thought it was clever too when I heard myself say it. But it's one of those things that your sponsor says to you or you hear yourself saying to somebody you sponsor, because some of that stuff that we say that has the ring of wisdom really doesn't come from us. I've had to use that myself on a number of occasions since then. When I get stressed out over something, I go, "Oh wait a minute. This is one of those life game show deals." It's a good metaphor for me to keep things straight.
Anyway, I don't even know why I brought that up. Oh yeah, because of your skit with the game show. Okay, so we're done with the game show portion of this.
I love doing this. It just tickles me to no end that somebody can call me from Montana and say, "Hi, you don't know me, but would you like to come to Montana and talk about yourself for an hour?" Yeah. YES. YES, I would.
How much is it going to cost? Oh no, we'll pay all your expenses. And usually when you arrive, somebody meets you and says, "Can we get you anything? Are you hungry? We've got you a nice hotel room." And I want to say, you know, I didn't invent anything. I just spent a long time in my life hurting everybody who ever cared about me—falling down, breaking things, and losing things.
So I'll do it. Yet I know some people in Alcoholics Anonymous who are very good speakers who hate doing it. They hate being asked, but they do it anyway. I'm not like that. I don't even know if I'm a good speaker and I couldn't care less. But I love doing it. I wanted to be the speaker at the first meeting I ever went to, but they didn't ask. I was a little drunk that night, and it's pretty rare that they ever go, "Hey, let's get the drunk guy to talk." [laughter]
But I remember some stuff about that meeting. When I went to my first AA meeting, I was a little embarrassed for you all. My grandmother was a Pentecostal minister and she ran a Skid Row mission in San Pedro down on the docks of Los Angeles Harbor on Beacon Street, a real tough area. My grandmother ran the Skid Row mission down there and she helped drunks get sober by feeding them soup and Jesus. So I knew you could get sober on soup and Jesus. It just never seemed worth it to me.
Of course, I had friends who got sober in AA, and they never said anything about that God thing to me. So I thought AA was like the secular way to get sober—the way that the smart people got sober without God. I just assumed that. Nobody ever told me. It just seemed like that to me.
So when I went to AA and I saw all the stuff about God as you understand him, higher power, power greater than yourself, trust God, clean house, help—oh my gosh. I thought, "Oh man, oh no." But I stayed anyway.
I didn't sit down. It was a meeting of about 50 or 60 people with empty chairs around the room and places I could sit, but I didn't. It seemed like if I sat down it would be like, "Oh yeah, I'm joining up." I'm not a joiner. I never fit any place in my life. I knew I wouldn't fit here.
I didn't fit in school. I didn't fit in the workplace. I didn't fit in my own family. I just didn't fit. When I was in school, I played football. I loved playing football, but I wasn't a jock and I knew it. The jocks knew it too.
I surfed. I liked surfing. I used to go down and surf all the time with the surfers, but I wasn't a surfer. The surfers knew I wasn't a surfer.
I liked to ride motorcycles and build motorcycles. I did that since I was 15 years old. It was an obsession with me. But I wasn't a biker and I knew it. The bikers knew it.
So when I came here, I knew I wouldn't fit because I never fit any place in my life. I was used to not fitting and I liked not fitting, to tell the truth. I had no idea that I just walked into the biggest organization of misfits the world's ever seen. Because you didn't appear to be misfits. You all appeared to be people who used to drink, but now you don't drink anymore, and you're real happy about that. In fact, you're just delighted about it.
I wasn't like that, so I didn't want to sit down. I kind of leaned against the wall in the back, crossed my arms. There was another guy leaned against the wall back there. It was the cool section.
But at that meeting, you all did some stuff that was very lame. In Southern California, we have birthday cakes. My home group is called the Winner's Attitude Adjustment Group. It's a one-hour meeting. We meet at 7:00 a.m. every day of the year in the Little Brown Church in Studio City.
And you can come to our meeting, walk in there, and nobody's ever seen you before. We don't even know if you're sober or an alcoholic, and you can say, "I'd like to take a cake." The secretary will bring out a cake and put candles in it, we'll sing to you, and then you can talk for as long as you feel like you need to talk. You might talk 15 minutes into a one-hour book study, and then we say, "Thank you. Keep coming back."
But at my first meeting in Southern California, I didn't know about the birthday thing. Nobody told me. They said, "Ruth is celebrating 18 years tonight." I'm looking around for some 18-year-old tiny honey, thinking, "Oh, that's nice. Ruth's having a birthday." And this woman got up. Ruth was 50 if she was a day. I thought, "She's 18? She ought to stop drinking. It's not working for her."
But then I realized what it was. Oh my god. This woman has not had a drink in 18 years. While I'm soaking that up, they start singing happy birthday and I'm looking around and everybody's into it. I'm in the cool section, you know. And she blew out the candles and I'm thinking, this is some level of lameness that I could not have imagined.
Ruth gets up and says, "I'm Ruth. I'm an alcoholic." "Hi, Ruth." And she said, "I want you to know that over this last 18 years of sobriety, I have attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous every single day." Somebody said, "Wow." A lot of people in that room said, "Wow."
But I thought, "Well, you kind of dumb, ain't you? You're a little slow, ain't you, honey?" Because I'm a quick study. I'm like a "hum a few bars and I'll fake it" kind of guy. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get this thing, but I know that it's not going to take every day for 18 years. I'm just convinced of that.
But I'm back there leaning against the wall in the cool section. And this other guy who's leaning against the wall—I thought he was cool, but he wasn't cool. He was a newcomer catcher. He comes over and nudges me. "Hey, I tell you what. You stay sober a year, we'll give you one of them cakes." Really? "Well, just don't drink for a year, huh? Can I get a cake?"
No. I'm not a big pastry eater, and if I wanted one, I'd just stop at Safeway on the way home. I mean, actually, I'm going to stop and get a six-pack. It wouldn't even be out of my way. But thanks.
I knew he meant well and I was happy for all of them. But there was a couple of things that happened at that first meeting that stuck in my mind. At the coffee break, three separate people—three individuals, not together, two men and a woman—came up to me. Not like walking by going, "Hey, how you doing, dude?" They came up to me. "Hi. Uh, put out their hand and said, "You're new." It wasn't a question. They said, "You're new." And I said, "Yeah." And they said, "Keep coming back."
Three separate people came up to me, put out their hand, and told me to keep coming back. We were talking about that tonight at dinner. You remember people who do that to you. And yet we do that to people. Sometimes we're not even listening. I might be saying, "Hey, listen. It's good to have you here. Keep coming back," meanwhile, I'm looking at cookies over here going, "What kind of cookies they got? Those Oreos and chocolate chips?" But the person I'm saying "keep coming back" to may remember years later that I welcomed him to Alcoholics Anonymous.
It's always good to put out your hand. But nobody was telling me to keep coming back. People who genuinely cared about me were saying, "Stay away from here. Don't come over here, Doug."
It's like, "Hi, it's Doug. You guys going to be home for a while? No. Uh, no, we're not. Doug, we just caught you. We were just going out the door. We're not going to be here for a long, long time. Okay then. Love you, Mom."
Maybe this will give you the picture. I was uninvited to a wedding. I was disinvited. I had been invited. I RSVPed. I bought a wedding present. The wedding was a few days away and my friend Bob called and said, "Doug, Carol and I have been talking about it and we decided to ask you not to come to the wedding."
Most people would say, "Oh, why is that, Bob? Something I did, or did you just overbook?" But it didn't even occur to me to ask him. I just said, "Okay," because I knew why. Whenever there's a function where there's drinking around, my behavior is not predictable. They didn't want me screwing up the most important day of their life.
We had been at a wedding the weekend before. Long story short, I mooned the bride's mother. It's considered a social faux pas in some circles. I didn't go there to moon the bride's mother, I'm sure. It just happened. I was drinking and everybody was having a good time and I thought, "Wouldn't it be funny to show my ass? Why, you know, people will say, 'Man, that Doug is crazy.'" Of course they did.
But it didn't have the connotation I was hoping for. People came up to me saying, "What's wrong with you? How could you moon the bride's mother?" I said, "Sorry. You know, I thought it was the groom's mother. No, come on. Hey, lighten up. It wasn't at the ceremony. It was at the reception. Am I an animal?"
That's when I got the nickname Doug Disgusting, and that stuck for a while.
So for three strangers to tell me to keep coming back—I remember thinking, these people see my potential. The secretary of that meeting said, "If you're new here tonight, don't leave here without this book." So I left with the book. I bought it and took it home.
I read—well, I didn't read it—but I poured a drink and sat down and thumbed through it. I have this ability to look at the title of any chapter in any book and know everything that's in the chapter. It's a gift I have.
So I'm looking through this book. Doctor's opinion. "Like I never have one of those. Yeah, you ought to not drink so much. Okay, I know what's in there." Bill's story, chapter one. "Who cares?" There's a solution. "Oh, I know what that is. That's a sales pitch. 'Hey, there's a solution to your problem, young man.' Okay, I know what's all that." More about alcoholism. "I'm sure that's fascinating for a later read."
And then I got to chapter four, We Agnostics. My alcoholic brain perceived, "Ah, here's how the smart people got sober without God." So I read that chapter and I got done and I thought I must have spaced out because I totally missed the whole smart people stay sober without God thing. So I poured another drink and read it again. I did this about half a dozen times.
Evidently I missed the first paragraph where it says, "If when you honestly want to, you find you can't stop drinking entirely, or once you start you have little control over the amount you take, then you're probably an alcoholic. And if this be the case, you may be suffering from a disease which only a spiritual experience will conquer. Where's the smart people thing?" But I read that chapter several times that night and some stuff started to leak in, started to soak into my brain.
The fifth or sixth time I read it, I saw this subtle little sentence that I think is so subtle that most of us miss it, at least on the first read. It says, "We have found that God doesn't make too hard terms on those who seek him." Isn't that an interesting thing? It's real subtle, isn't it?
Evidently the finding is in the seeking, because this is not what I heard at my grandmother's mission. My Pentecostal grandmother indicated to me—and anything I say about organized religion is not an indictment of organized religion. I'm talking about my alcoholic drunken perception of what organized religion was.
But it seemed to me that my grandmother's church said, "If you want God to even hear your prayers, you must be baptized. You must be baptized. Oh yes. And not sprinkled like some damn Methodist either. No, no, no. I'm talking about soaked. I'm talking about dunked. Talking about washed in the blood of the lamb, coming up shaking your head. Somebody better give me a towel." [laughter]
But here was Alcoholics Anonymous saying God doesn't make too hard terms. I had a girlfriend who was Catholic and it seemed to me that she had to go to communion and confession and a whole bunch of other things just to not even talk to God. She still couldn't talk to God. She could just like talk to his mom. You know, "Hello, hello, Mrs. God. It's Patty. Tell him I love him."
My friend Michael was Jewish. I had an eclectic religious upbringing. Michael and I would go out to lunch and he would order a BLT. Hold the bacon, please. And I'd say, "Dude, you just ordered a salad on toast. I don't know what that is." "Well, I don't want to get God pissed off at me." It's like, so, you know.
And then besides, there were Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims. Oh my. And it just seemed like everybody had a different way that you had to approach God. Over the years it just seemed like I had way too much education in LSD to believe in God or anything the least bit mystical. I made no distinction between Mother Teresa and Osama bin Laden. If it was mystical, I don't want anything to do with it.
If anybody is offended that I mention drugs—which I just did in an AA meeting—my apology. It's just that it's part of my story and I didn't know what my story was going to be or where I was going to use it. If I had known those first times somebody said, "Hey man, try this," I would have said, "Thanks, but I'm going to be speaking at an AA meeting in 30 years and I don't want to piss anybody off." I only used every drug I ever heard of except for ones that I've heard of since I got sober. And I'm curious about Ecstasy. That's a nice name, isn't it? That sounds like something I would have liked.
But that's why we have newcomers. It's good to talk to newcomers. "Did you ever try that Ecstasy stuff?" "Yes, I did." "How was it?" "Well, I'm here." Okay. All right. That's all I need to know.
Here was Alcoholics Anonymous in the Big Book, chapter four, saying, "We have found that God doesn't make too hard terms on those who seek him." That got my interest a little bit. Then I read one of my favorite sentences in the book—written about me, I'm sure, before I was born—and it says, "To be doomed to an alcoholic death or to live life on a spiritual basis are not easy alternatives to face."
This is a sentence designed for alcoholics to read because when we do, we go, "That's right. That's a pretty hard decision to make. All right. Alcoholic death or a spiritual life?"
Now, I have yet to meet an Earth person who has a hard time with this decision. Here's one you can test. Get yourself a clipboard and go stand in front of a Walmart. Stop people when they're coming out. "Excuse me. I'm taking a survey. Would you rather die an alcoholic death or live a spiritual life?"
See what the normies have to say about it, because they generally don't have a hard time. The very curious normie might say something like, "Now, when you say alcoholic death, you mean the one where you puff up and turn yellow and choke to death on your own blood and vomit? Your esophagus erupts?" [laughter]
"Well, yeah. But not right away, you know." "Yeah. No, you got to lose everything first. You got to hurt everybody you ever cared about. But yeah, that's the yellow puff-up thing later on. What do you think?"
They'll all get in the long line. If you do this survey and somebody asks, "Alcoholic death, spiritual life?" and they go [pauses with confusion], "Are you going to be here tomorrow? You know, you're on our team. Yeah. Tell me, what are you doing on Saturday night? You want to go someplace with me Saturday?"
This got my attention. This got my attention, reading chapter four over and over and over. But I didn't stop drinking. I went to AA for eight months. I didn't have a home group. I didn't want to get really too close to anybody, but I started falling in love with AA because I started to realize that I do fit.
I remember once when I was still drinking, I went to AA and people were sharing. I identified with everything everybody said in the room and I thought, "God, I'm in a room full of Doug. Oh no. Oh no. I'm joining up." [laughter]
I was going to meetings, but I didn't want to get really close and I didn't have a home group and I didn't have a sponsor. I didn't read the Big Book except for occasionally chapter four looking for loopholes. I didn't have a commitment. I didn't take the steps. I was drinking every day, but other than that I had a pretty good program.
I went home one night from a meeting. Very often I would stop and buy a bottle of whiskey on the way to a meeting. It's not a good thing to do, I guess. I would think, "Okay, if it's a good meeting, then I won't drink it." I'd leave it sealed under the seat and go to the meeting. But there wasn't any good meetings in 1986. Fortunately, because then I would have had to throw away a perfectly good bottle of whiskey. So I would go home and drink this bottle of whiskey, and I did this on a regular basis.
I went home one night after I'd been going to AA for eight months. But actually, before I came to AA, somebody had told me that if you don't drink for three days, all the alcohol is out of your system in case you have to have some kind of test. So I thought, "Oh, well, that would be an interesting thing to try and see if I could go three days without a drink."
I never tried it. I like drinking. But at midnight one day, I decided, "Okay, starting midnight, I'm going to go three days without a drink." So I went to bed pretty early that night. I got up the next morning, I made my coffee, and I started to get out the whiskey to pour in the coffee. "Oh, that's right. Three days without drinking. I'm going to be sober."
So I just drank my coffee and I went to work. At coffee break, I really wanted to get a beer or a half-pint or something, but I didn't. I just had coffee and talked to the guys. At lunch, guys were drinking beer, but I didn't. I just drank soda and ate my lunch and went back to work. We were done working at 4:00 and I started home thinking, "Oh, my god. I haven't had a drink since midnight. Midnight to noon is 12 hours, and then to 4 is what—16 hours? Almost 18 hours. 18 hours is 3/4 of a day, and 3/4 of a day is almost a day. And if I can go one day, I can go three days. So I might as well just get something and drink it."
That was the only time I ever went actually three days without drinking. It lasted 16 hours. So that probably had something to do with why I was a little skeptical about stopping drinking. I really didn't care for it.
But this one night I went home and I had my fifth of whiskey and I was laying on the floor drinking and watching TV and I passed out. That happened all the time. I woke up about 3:00 in the morning, turned off the TV, got my half bottle of whiskey, crawled on my hands and knees across the living room through the hallway into the bedroom to go to bed. When I got in there, I stood up to take off my clothes and I had this bottle in my hand and I lost my balance and I fell on my knees next to the bed and I spilled this whiskey. I picked up the bottle real quick. There was about this much left in the bottom, but most of it was spilled on the bed and it was making its little puddle—its little whiskey lake in the middle of my bed.
I set the bottle down in a safe place and grabbed the bedspread and I started sucking the whiskey out of it. Just sucking for all I was worth. And a voice in my head said, "Hey man, that ain't right." I said, "Yeah, that's true. There's whiskey in the bottle, man. Are you thirsty? I'm not thirsty. I'm, you know, frugal."
I saw myself sucking this whiskey out of the bedspread and I just felt wrong about it and I felt alone and lost. I thought, "I've been going to AA for eight months and I have not learned how to not suck whiskey out of a bedspread. I'm not paying attention." I felt absolutely lost.
I did something that I don't even think was very smart. I said, "God, if you're there, please help me." And I meant it. I absolutely meant it. I didn't think there was anybody listening. It's not like all of a sudden I came to believe. I just didn't know what else to do. It was a prayer of desperation and I can't even say for sure if I knew it was a prayer when I said it.
I just surrendered. I went to bed. I went to sleep. I didn't quit drinking. The next day, I got up and I went to work. I went to my favorite liquor store—my neighborhood liquor store—on the way home from work and I went in to get a half-pint. And there was a guy from AA behind the counter of the liquor store. That couldn't happen. I knew everybody that was ever behind the counter of that liquor store, but there was an AA guy behind the counter.
"Hey, what are you doing here?" He said, "What are you doing here?" And I was in a restaurant a couple days later and I started to order a drink in a part of town I wasn't used to being in. And the waitress was somebody I knew from AA. I'm in the market in the liquor department reaching up for a bottle to put in my shopping cart. And there's a gal from AA pushing a cart towards me. "Hey, one day at a time, keep it simple. Isn't it a beautiful life?"
These kind of things were happening every day. Every day for a couple of weeks, there'd be these AA people. One day after a couple of weeks of this, I was on the way to work about 6:15. I just killed a half-pint of whiskey and I don't keep empty bottles in the car—they're illegal in California and useless too. So I roll down the window and there's a guy from AA driving towards me at 6:15 in the morning. He waves and I throw a bottle out the window and I thought, "What? Where are these people coming from?"
Everywhere I go, there's these AA people. They're like cockroaches. They just come at you like the sun comes up. You know, it's like those miracles that they talk about in meetings. As soon as I thought the word "miracle," it was sort of like I could hear God laughing. "Uhoh." I remembered that I had been on my knees and said, "God, if you're there, please help me." I thought, "I'm a victim of miracles. I asked for help. I got help, just like they say."
It's the moment that I came to believe. I can't express it any differently than that. It's the moment that I started to hear the music of Alcoholics Anonymous. I like to talk about the music of Alcoholics Anonymous because the lyrics are very confusing.
When you're new, the lyrics—the words—are just the words. You know, all those regular things they tell you: "You got to surrender to win." It's like, "Okay." "You got to give it away to keep it." I know what that means. That means put some money in the basket. "The road gets narrower." So I asked this one guy, "What is that road gets narrower thing? Is that a good thing? I mean, it seems like it would be inconvenient."
He said, "No, no. You know, here's an example. When I first got sober I used to smoke and I would be driving down the street and I'd throw my cigarette butts out the window. I did it all the time. And then one day it just hit me. I don't know if it was from God or what, but I just realized I could start a fire throwing cigarettes. I need to be responsible about throwing them out the window. And then I realized I'm also littering. Okay, it's just a cigarette butt, but it's contributing to the litter of the world. So I started putting them in the ashtray and I dumped my ashtray in a trash can. And eventually I even quit smoking."
So I started walking around AA going, "Well, the road gets narrower. You want to know what that means?" But when Bob used to smoke…
One day I said there was a guy, he wasn't even talking to me. He was talking to some guys he sponsored. He said, "You know, I'll tell you what, Alcoholics Anonymous is full of beautiful women. Beautiful in every way. They're beautiful in the way they dress, the way they look, the way they act, the way they talk. They're smart, funny women, sexy women, but I don't play. I leave them alone. I'm a married man and I don't play."
I said, "The road gets narrower." And he said, "Excuse me?" "The road gets narrower, huh?" "Where'd you get that?"
Well, he was talking to other guys and I shouldn't have even been in the conversation, but I thought he'd be happy for my input. "Where'd you get that?" "In the Big Book."
Well, I didn't, but I heard a lot of people get away with a lot of crap saying it came out of the Big Book. So I said, "The Big Book." And he knew the book. So I shouldn't have said that. He said, "You know, isn't that interesting? Because my book doesn't say anything about the road getting narrower. I thought we got the same book. Maybe you got a different one. Because my book, on page 55, it says, 'Why don't you come and join us on the broad highway?' Not the narrow road—the broad highway. And then on 75 it says you're going to feel like you're walking hand in hand with the spirit of the universe. Guess where? On the broad highway. Yeah. Don't say nothing about no road getting narrower. Where'd you get that, son?"
I said, "You know, I was just trying to help." I was embarrassed and guys were laughing at me. But I hadn't started to hear the music. Once I started to hear the music, the words started to make sense. I could dig the lyrics.
When I took my first honest 30-day chip, I don't know if they have chips here. They give chips to help you feel good about 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months, 9 months. I had taken a lot of different chips. One time I took a chip at a group I'd never been at before because I heard a girl at the coffee talking to her friend saying, "Uh, my sponsor says I can't have sex for 6 months." So I took a six-month chip at that meeting just in case I might get lucky. I wish I had a picture of me at that meeting. I couldn't have got lucky in a women's prison with a pocket full of pardons. [laughter] But just in case.
By the time I got sober, I had enough chips to open a casino. But when I actually had 30 days and got up at the Burbank group to take my first honest 30-day chip and they said, "Anybody for that sober 30 days?" I got up and I took the chip and I said, "My name's Doug. I'm an alcoholic." "Hi, Doug."
I felt like part of Alcoholics Anonymous. I felt like part of Alcoholics Anonymous the first time. I sat down and I was just glowing. I remember feeling just as happy about this guy I didn't care for taking a nine-month chip as I was about my own 30-day chip. I thought, "What's that? What is that?"