I Didn’t Know I Was an Alcoholic Until I Heard My Own Story: AA Speaker – Wes H. – Denver, CO
AA speaker Wes H. from Denver shares how hearing his own story in another person’s share led to his spiritual awakening and 16 years of sobriety.
Wes H. from Denver, Colorado got his first taste of AA through a chance encounter in a Beverly Hills dental office. In this AA speaker tape, he walks through how a famous songwriter’s phone call led him to a log cabin meeting in Los Angeles where he finally heard his own story reflected in another alcoholic’s share.
This AA speaker meeting features Wes H. discussing how his moment of recognition came not from reading the Big Book but from hearing another alcoholic describe the exact same emotional experience. He covers his journey from Texas drinking culture through corporate success while secretly drinking at lunch, to opening a recording studio and eventually hitting bottom in Los Angeles. Wes emphasizes working all 12 steps daily and shares practical tools for maintaining spiritual connection in long-term sobriety.
Episode Summary
Wes H. opens with characteristic humor about his Texas origins, immediately establishing the tone that defines his share — honest, self-aware, and refreshingly direct. Born in Austin in the late 1950s, he grew up in a family where alcohol was the primary coping mechanism and silence was survival. The family rule was simple: say nothing, avoid trouble, don’t get hit. This environment taught him what he calls “mind reading” — the exhausting skill of constantly figuring out who he needed to be for others to avoid pain.
His drinking began legitimately at 18 when Texas law allowed it, marked by a family ritual where his father took him out to get “properly” drunk as a rite of passage into manhood. The hangover that followed would not be his last. Living in a tiny apartment furnished with beer cases covered by cloth, Wes embodied the classic young alcoholic — no food in the refrigerator, but plenty of long-neck beer.
Despite his internal chaos, Wes’s external life appeared remarkably successful. By 24, he was vice president of a $10 million company with 150 people reporting to him. But success only amplified his terror. His solution was maintenance drinking — three pitchers of beer at lunch every day just to make it through managing the company. This period illustrates what many AA speaker talks on hitting bottom and early sobriety describe: the gap between outside appearances and internal devastation.
Escaping corporate life, Wes opened a recording studio in Austin, a career choice he now recognizes as particularly insane for someone desperately seeking approval. The entertainment business, built on hearing “no” accompanied by “you suck,” was hardly therapeutic for someone born without emotional skin. When he lost the lease, he convinced himself that Austin simply didn’t appreciate his genius. The solution seemed obvious: move to Los Angeles, where surely he would stand out among 11 million people.
The move to LA marked his complete descent. Living in Korea Town with everything they owned strapped to a van, Wes discovered Trader Joe’s and their 14 bottles of wine for $8. While his wife Victoria worked as a dental assistant in Beverly Hills, he retreated into complete isolation, too frightened to share his music with anyone. His alcoholic logic was perfect: if nobody sees your work, you can’t be rejected, but you also can’t make a living.
The turning point came through what Wes calls “the magic of Alcoholics Anonymous sneaking up.” Victoria was working on a patient wearing a circle-and-triangle earring. When she identified it as “the sacred teas,” the patient — famous songwriter Paul W. — explained it was actually an AA symbol. The conversation that followed would change everything, though Wes wasn’t even in the room when it happened.
Paul asked Victoria a direct question: “Do you have a drinking problem?” Her honest answer: “No, but my husband does.” This moment demonstrates how recovery often begins through connections we never see coming. Paul listened to one of Wes’s song demos and asked for their phone number.
Three hours later, the phone rang. Paul W.’s first words were equally direct: “I hear you’re trying to stop drinking.” Wes had been cycling through what he calls “sobriety binges” — periods of 3-8 weeks without drinking where he was miserable, angry, and constantly thinking about alcohol. He has a name for this state: “sobriety” — not drinking but not really sober, a dangerous place many people experience early in recovery.
Paul told him about a meeting at the Log Cabin on Robertson Boulevard in West Los Angeles — an actual log cabin that hosted AA meetings five mornings a week. When Paul said he was leaving town for 30 days and wanted to know how Wes stayed sober without meetings, it was a setup. Wes decided not to drink for those 30 days, which became “the 30 longest, darkest days of my life.”
His decision to attend that first meeting came after a particularly ungracious exchange with Victoria, who suggested he try one of Paul’s meetings. His spiritual response: “If it’ll get you off my ass, I’ll go.” Walking up the steps with shaking knees, Wes planned to stick his nose in the door, leave, and claim he’d attended.
But a tall, skinny man with barely four and a half minutes of sobriety reached down the steps, stuck out his hand, and said “Welcome.” That simple gesture pulled him into a room of 120 people at 7:30 AM, all laughing and cutting up. What happened next illustrates the core magic of AA that AA speaker talks on spiritual awakening often describe.
The speaker was a 6’3″ Vietnam veteran from Compton — obviously not Wes’s demographic. But when this man talked about feeling born without that extra layer of skin, about sensitivity to the world, about how alcohol made everything manageable, Wes heard his own story. “He was me and that saved my life. That is Alcoholics Anonymous. One drunk talking to another drunk coming straight from the heart.”
True to his alcoholic nature, Wes immediately tried to outsmart the program. He read the first 164 pages of the Big Book that same day, determined to have it figured out by his second meeting so he wouldn’t have to be vulnerable or ask for help. This attempted shortcut reflects his lifelong pattern of staying “one step ahead” to avoid being hurt, which inevitably left him exactly where he feared most: scared and alone.
Paul became his sponsor, and they began working the steps. Sixteen years later, Wes has developed what he calls “living in the steps” — a daily practice where he works all 12 steps every morning as part of his meditation. This concept came from a speaker who pointed to the 12th step and asked, “What do we have?” The answer: “Having had (past tense) a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps.” If sobriety is one day at a time, then the steps must be worked daily.
Wes describes his morning routine of moving through all 12 steps before leaving the house. He starts with powerlessness and unmanageability, acknowledges his belief in a higher power, and makes the daily decision to turn his will over — but this time to the right higher power, not alcohol. He realized he’d been doing Step 3 for years, just with the wrong power source.
His relationship with his higher power is casual but deep. After being adopted by Navajo spiritual teachers and spending eight years in Native American ceremonies, he learned that “spirituality is big, and the 12 steps give you a way to live in it, not just pay lip service to it.” The most important insight from his years of sobriety: “I am only one thought away from my higher power, and nothing changes faster than a thought.”
This leads to his practical approach to the 10th step, which he calls “the pay attention step.” When he drifts from being the person he set out to be that morning, he stops immediately and reconnects through prayer and inventory. He’s learned that when feeling disconnected, the solution is identifying the thought blocking him from his higher power.
Wes is passionate about celebrating sobriety rather than what he calls “Eeyore sobriety” — the grim “I don’t drink no matter what” approach. He’s had fabulous failures in sobriety, including putting Culture Club, Human League, and Howard Jones on tour together in 1998, discovering that yes, they really did want to hurt him. But AA didn’t care about the failure — they were just glad he stayed sober through it.
His core message centers on safety. “There is no healing without safety,” he emphasizes. AA provided the safe space he needed to walk around with “all that raw skin exposed” while learning to be human. This safety must be protected in meetings because it’s literally life or death for newcomers who need what he found in that log cabin.
The talk concludes with a Native American prayer about “walking in beauty” — staying centered in the four elements of mind, emotions, body, and spirit. Like a wheel, when the hub stays centered, life rolls smoothly. Move off center, and everything wobbles. Peter M.’s story of finding balance after hitting bottom echoes this same theme of discovering centeredness through the program.
Wes’s story demonstrates that spiritual awakening often comes not through dramatic visions but through the simple recognition of shared experience. In hearing another alcoholic tell the truth about their heart, he found his own truth reflected back. That moment of recognition, that sense of “he was me,” remains the foundation of his recovery and his approach to helping others find their way to the same life-saving rooms.
Notable Quotes
He was me and that saved my life. That is Alcoholics Anonymous. One drunk talking to another drunk coming straight from the heart.
I am only one thought away from my higher power, and nothing changes faster than a thought.
My alcoholic version of safe gets me the result I’m most afraid of getting — scared and alone.
There is no healing without safety. We have to keep these rooms safe.
I firmly believe that if Humpty Dumpty had found Alcoholics Anonymous, they would have been able to put him back together.
Spiritual Awakening
Step 11 – Prayer & Meditation
Daily Inventory
Acceptance
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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.
Hi, my name is Wes. I am an alcoholic.
Victoria told my story, so I guess I'm done. But you know, some details. Yeah, it did all start in Texas. He hangs his head in mock shame. It started in Texas. Yeah, I started in Texas. I was born in Austin, Texas. I was actually a couple of weeks premature, and I just made up for lost time. You know, back in those days, I was born barely in the tail end of the 50s, and back in those days there were baby books for women who were pregnant that said the occasional cocktail wasn't a bad idea during pregnancy. I think my mother took that occasionally as occasionally. How many times a day is occasionally? And so I think I just came out of the shoot ready for alcohol. And well, I was from Texas. I mean, it's a rodeo, right? So anyway, I grew up in a family full of alcohol. That's what we did. We drank. It was very much our way of life. Our coping skills as a family consisted of say nothing. The less you said the better off you were. The less trouble you ended up in. The less times you got hit. The less times bad things happened to you. And so I developed a skill that was to serve me well in my alcoholic life. That mind-reading skill, you know, where you just figure out in advance the lay of the land. Who is it that I need to be for you? Who is it that I need to be in this family? Who is it I need to be in the world? What version of me do I need to sell so I don't get hit, hurt, or otherwise abused? I learned that early on. It set me up perfect for drinking.
I drank a couple of times before I was 18, but the consequences of stepping out of line were pretty severe. I didn't want to get smacked. So I stayed pretty much in line until I was 18 years old. And in Texas in those days, you could drink at 18. And man, when I turned 18, it was legit. And I was off and running. My family sent me a not so subtle hint around my senior year in high school. They moved into a place that had my brother and sister, my mother and father, my brother, sister, and myself. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment. They gave a bedroom to my brother and sister. They had a room for themselves, and they said, "We're not sure where you're going to sleep here." So my bedroom for the last half of my senior year was this little walk-in closet, which worked great for somebody who liked to isolate, you know, and could get dark in a hurry, fit my mood on many an occasion. And so I moved out basically. I got the hint—you need to go get your own place. So I moved out, and right after I graduated from high school, shortly after that, within a few months of moving out, I met Victoria. The year was 1977, the very year our speaker last night got sober, which is just awesome and amazing to me.
And by the way, the speakers here have been—I have laughed, I have cried, they have been great. I want to say this committee has done a great job, and I've heard a lot of great sobriety here. You guys have done awesome. And I know this is a lot of work. So thank you for having me here.
Here I am. I've moved up from my walk-in closet to my little tiny apartment. I have it properly furnished. By properly furnished, I mean there is my guitar in the corner, an essential. My bed, and then my furniture consisted of long neck beer bottle cases with cloth thrown over them, because that's how I furnished my life. No food in the refrigerator, but lots of long neck beer. And that was the deal, man. Long neck beer. It was cheap. It was the nectar of the gods. It was what I was raised on. Literally, water was for washing your car. It wasn't for drinking the way I grew up. We had this theory when I grew up. My father had this theory. When I was 18, he takes me out and I get that right of passage into manhood in Texas in those days. And he said, "Son, you're buying drinks for the whole family tonight. The whole family." It was kind of a group thing. And so we go up and I get to buy the drinks. I just got ripped on my 18th birthday. And my dad was proud of me for that, man. That was the deal. I was in the club. I was a real man in Texas. I was 18. I spent the morning after my 18th birthday with one of those class A hangovers, and it would not be my last.
So what happened to me was this. I grew up in this environment where the theory had always been: if you wanted a beer, you didn't have to sneak off and get beer. You could just go get one from the refrigerator. I could be 14, 15, it didn't matter. The theory being that if I didn't sneak around, I wouldn't become an alcoholic. Granted, this was alcoholics who were having this theory and proposing it, but the logic was a little twisted. But you know, it was go get a beer anytime you want, but you better not drink my beer. Okay, so I stayed out of the beer refrigerator mostly until I could buy my own. And I met Victoria, and within a few months we were living together, and alcohol was the deal, and off I went.
I want to tell you about kind of how the outside of my life looked. At 18, I move out. I get my own place. I'm supporting myself on my own job. I'm supporting Victoria. I'm going to college and I'm working a full-time job so I can pay for rent and of course the furniture, the beer furniture. And so I'm doing this, and by the time I'm 24 years old, I'm the vice president of a $10 million company. Okay? So it's still working. Okay? But this is how I'm having to deal with it. I'm really driven. I'm go, go, go. That's me. I'm the Energizer Bunny. Especially in those days.
I am one of those alcoholics who did a few other things than just alcohol. Me and Dr. Bob would have got along well. You know, we mixed other things with our alcohol. He mixed other things with his alcohol. I mixed other things like crystal meth and cocaine and a little recreational marijuana with my alcohol. But as it so happened, I actually quit doing all of that stuff long before I got sober.
So what happens is this. I'm 24. I'm the vice president of this company. There are 150 people that report to me, and I am terrified. Absolutely terrified. I know I am in over my head. I know I don't know what I'm doing. This is what my head's telling me. And the only way I've got to deal with that is my coping skill, which has been my coping skill from certainly 18 on, having discovered early in life that I seem to have been born without this layer of skin that everybody else seemed to have. And everything that came at me in the world just felt like pins and needles. Just extremely sensitive. Man, the wind's blowing the wrong way and it's going to screw up my psyche. And alcohol took that away. In this respect, I just didn't notice it so much anymore. It didn't matter which way the wind was blowing. Alcohol actually was a spiritual awakening for me. It was the wrong kind of spirit. It was distilled spirits, but it was a spiritual awakening. It just came in the bottle.
So what happens is I'm 24. I am getting plastered at lunch every day. Drinking three pictures of beer was my standard lunch. That was maintenance drinking. I would go get drunk and then I would come back and make it through the rest of the day trying to manage this company.
And about this time I decided corporate life sucked. My opinion hasn't changed a whole lot in the ensuing years. I left the corporate world and opened a recording studio in Austin, Texas, which is perfect because, talk about drinking on the job, it just kind of was like, "Well, doesn't everybody?" So I opened up this little recording studio in Austin, Texas by the University of Texas and proceeded to drink, drink, drink, drink. Like the sign it says in a lot of the meetings: think. My motto was drink, drink, drink.
We did have some very innovative concepts to deal with public intoxication, though. MAD was just getting started back in those days, and we were playing all the clubs. MAD is Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. We came up with DAD, which was Drunks Against Drunk Drivers. The theory being that when you and your buddies were really getting drunk, you just keep them drinking till they pass out and then take their keys, and they weren't going to hurt anybody. We were very proud of this. This DAD thing didn't catch on, but you know, we thought we were clever.
So what happened is I had a recording studio. Everything's rolling along, you know, eking out a living, you know, putting bands on the radio, doing this kind of stuff. And I lost the lease on my recording studio and couldn't find another one. So now my way of making a living was gone. And I wasn't too thrilled with Austin anyway. And I decided, you know, the problem with Austin is they just don't appreciate the genius that is me. They just don't get me. And so I'm going to take all this amazing talent and I'm going to move to a city of like 11 million people where surely I will stand out.
And so we packed up our little tent. It was the Grapes of Wrath, man. Everything I could not ship via UPS to a little apartment we found in an area called Koreatown of Los Angeles. Later to be the scene of people standing on rooftops with semi-automatic weapons because the Rodney King riots broke out about a year after we moved there. So we picked a great neighborhood to move into. Anyway, it's like everything we own packed and strapped on top of a van. Off we go to the promised land, Los Angeles, California.
You know, get to Los Angeles, California. I'm still drinking. Los Angeles is a pretty good place to drink. Started going to all the music business parties, which is just a parallel universe that doesn't really have much bearing to our own. It's a place where people do a lot of drugs, drink a lot, tell a lot of interesting stories to each other that nobody remembers the next Monday when you call to have that business conversation with your new best friend you'd made last Friday night. Come to think of it, that's just like the bars I drank in in Texas, actually. So maybe it's not so different.
So anyway, I go out there and get involved in the music business, sort of meaning I go to music business parties. I'm not really doing anything. My wife in the meantime goes out and gets a job. Now, she hadn't had a job in years. God bless this woman. She went out, she held down a job. And that job was to prove incredibly important in me getting sober. The magic of Alcoholics Anonymous was sneaking up on me and I didn't know it.
Now, back in Texas, I had had a pretty important thing happen to me. I'd gone into a recording studio with this guy. And by the way, you know, think about this for a minute. This is a measure of the insanity of someone like me. I am so raw and terrified of the world. I just want everybody to love me, right? And so what do I pick to do for a living? I'm going to go stand in front of people and try to entertain them. Where in a business where the entertainment business is all about hearing the word no, usually accompanied by you suck. Okay. And so why I picked that to go heal me—now I know why I picked that. I've done lots of inventory since then. But you know, I was going to make the whole world love me for what I thought I needed to be. Remember that mind-reading thing I was talking about earlier? It's that thing inside of me that said, I've got to spin up some version of me to sell to you that you're going to find acceptable. And please give me just enough clues with the way you look at me or something you say to me that I can stay one step ahead of you and figure it out, because I'm just a sentence away from falling apart here. Man, you got to give me just enough feedback so that I can know who I'm supposed to be so you'll care about me. Man, that is my alcoholism full-blown. And no wonder I had to drink to deal with that. That's a miserable way to go through the world. Talk about living inside out. That's what I was doing.
So I'm out there in LA. My wife's got this job. She's working as a dental assistant in Beverly Hills where all the fancy people go get their teeth fixed. And she's out there, and in the meantime, alcoholism had swallowed me whole. I was living in this little apartment in this questionable area. Let's just say none of the street signs were in English, so I couldn't read the local language. I don't read Korean. So I discovered this store called Trader Joe's. It's a store they have out in California. Trader Joe's was perfect for an alcoholic. At the time, they sold like 14 bottles of wine for $8. I was home, you know, and I got my wine and my beer and I just lived inside the bottle. And I was still doing work, but nobody was hearing it because I became too frightened to go out in the world. And you know, if you're going to do any kind of creative art for a living, if nobody sees it or hears it, you're going to have a hard time making a living. Just a tip for anybody considering that.
And so I wasn't going very well because nobody was here understanding what I was doing. I was locked in this apartment. So my wife is working, and this is the what happened part of the story. She goes in, she's in this dental chair, and this guy is laying down in the dental chair, and he's got an earring in his ear, and it's a circle with a triangle inside of it. And my wife and I, being students of all things metaphysical, but especially my wife, goes, "I know what that is." And this guy goes, "Really? You know what that is?" And she goes, "Yes, I know what that is." And he's like, "And?" And she goes, "That's the sacred teas." And he's like, "The what?" And he goes, "Yeah, it's the sacred teas."
Which in fact it is. You know, they say in the music business, amateurs borrow and professionals steal. So AA is another in the long line of societies and people seeking spirituality who have made use of that fine circle and triangle notion. And the notion behind it, which actually fits the conference just great, is that that triangle pointing up into that circle is man seeking unity with God.
And this guy who happened to be this really famous songwriter—I'd grown up seeing him on TV—his name was Paul. Paul W. And so Paul says to her, "Well, you know, it's the sacred teas, but to me it's the symbol of this society that I belong to, this fellowship where we just help people stay sober and we don't drink one day at a time." And then he asked a question, and I was not in the room for this question. Now, this is an important part of the story, because all in our lives out there, there are things going on that are changing our lives and we don't even know about it. And one of these days it's going to walk through the door and hit us. And that's what I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, Bill and Bob got together, that changed my life before my life even got started, because it was waiting for me when I got here.
And she was sitting there, and this guy asked her a question, and I was not in the room. And that question changed my life. And that question was directed at her. And by the way, she was like Karen Allen in the original Indiana Jones. You know, where in the beginning of the movie Karen Allen drinks the bad guys under the table. She could go shot for shot with me or anybody. And so this guy says to her, "Do you have a drinking problem?" And God bless her. She answered, "No, but my husband does." She wasn't lying.
And then she did something else. She played him a little cassette tape of this song demo I had worked up. And that proved to be very important about three hours later, because he asked for our home phone number. And so he leaves and she calls me and says, "Hey, I met this guy Paul, you know, Paul W. And God, he's such a nice guy. And he listened to your music and he really liked it." And he's like, "Um, and he wants to talk to you about something." You guys know what's coming, right?
So the phone rings in my little apartment about three hours later, and I pick it up and I hear this voice. "Hi, this is Paul. Paul W." And my first reaction was to be a smartass. You know, I'm going like, "Yeah, right. I'm Johnny Carson." Why is this guy calling me? But then I think it's a hoax. I think it's a joke that somebody's pulling. And this guy sings me a couple of the lines from that song that I'd written. And I knew that no one had heard that song except for my wife and now this one person that she said she'd played it for. And so I knew it was really who she said it was.
And he goes, "I hear you're trying to stop drinking." He got right to it. He wasted no time. "I hear you're trying to stop drinking." And I answered very honestly, "Well, I've stopped," because I had for that moment.
See, I skip past this part, but about four or five years before I find myself in this room talking to this guy on the phone, I had started getting an inkling that something was terribly wrong with me. And I had tried to moderate and control my drinking like it talks about in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had tried that. I used to call them sobriety binges. I'd go, you know, three weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, I wouldn't drink. And when I wasn't drinking, I was thinking about drinking. And when I wasn't drinking, I was a miserable, angry, short-tempered, unpleasant human being. Okay, I have a name for that, you know, not drinking and not really sober state. I call it sodity. You can get into that in recovery. I have experienced it—not working steps, not going to meetings, not reaching out to other people, not being engaged actively, having my heart open to sobriety, living in the process of recovery. I'm in sodity, and it is not a nice place to be.
So I'd had my little sodity bouts, and I wasn't drinking. And he said, "Well, you go into meetings." And I go, "What meetings? I didn't know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous." And he told me about these meetings. And he said, "Well, there's these meetings, and I'll tell you where one is. There's one over here on Robertson Boulevard. It's in a place called the Log Cabin. And it's a log cabin."
Now, I know here in Colorado, it's like, what's the big deal about a log cabin? You know what I mean? It's like every nine dirt roads there's a log cabin. But in Los Angeles, log cabins are pretty rare. Okay, trust me on that one. Very rare. Only log cabin I know of is over here in West Los Angeles. It is an honest to God real log cabin. And it has been an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for 20-some-odd years. If you're ever in West Los Angeles, 7:30 in the morning, five days a week, there is a meeting of a bunch of drunks gathering in a log cabin in Los Angeles, California, Monday through Friday. Just look for the log cabin on Robertson Boulevard, and you will be in the right place.
So he tells me about this log cabin meeting, and he says, "You know, I got to go out of town. But I said, I'm not going to meetings." He goes, "Well, if you're staying sober and you're not going to meetings, I want to know." It was a trick. The guy tricked me. He goes, "I want to know how you're staying sober and not going to meetings." So, I'll tell you what, I'm going out of town for 30 days, and when I get back, let's meet. I'm thinking, "Wow, I get to meet this guy." And for some reason, I decided I would not drink for those 30 days. Those were the 30 longest, darkest days of my life. No alcohol. No meetings, no program, no clue that even such a thing existed. So dryy there I was, so dryy.
And so what happens is I don't drink for 30 days, and I am a lunatic, and I have a moment that I'm not particularly proud of. But in the interest of really being honest and so I never forget where I came from, I got to tell you this little bit of this story. My dear wife, who'd seen me through thick and thin, you know, we'd been together since 1977. This is 1991 now. She looks at me and she says, "Why don't you go to one of those meetings Paul told you about?" And I sat there with no defensiveness in me, of course, and I said with my spiritual large, you know, spiritual giant I was well on my way to becoming. I said, "If it'll get you off my ass, I'll go." Pretty gracious answer, huh? Just a prince among princes there.
And so what happens is I get in my little beat-up van and I drive over to this place the next day, and I see all these people milling about with little Styrofoam cups and cigarettes, you know, the coffee and the whole deal. And I had made a deal with myself. You guys know about that deal-making stuff, I bet. I'd made a deal with myself that I would go up, stick my nose in the door, say I had been to the meeting, leave, and that would be that. And then that would settle this going to meetings nonsense.
So as I walk up to the steps, literally my knees were shaking. I was scared. Had no idea of what. I was just scared. Of course, that's how it usually goes, right? It's because it's what we don't have any idea about that seems to scare us so much. So I'm wobbling over to the front steps of the log cabin there in Los Angeles. And this tall, skinny guy, who I later came to learn had never gotten more than like four and a half minutes of continuous sobriety—this was in that four-minute range—he reached down the steps to me and stuck out his hand and he said, "Welcome." And it felt like he was pulling me up the steps of that meeting hall. And suddenly I'm standing in a room, and the room is about two-thirds this size. It's really big for a log cabin. I mean, I don't know how big the typical log cabin is, but you know, it was a pretty good-sized room, and there's about 120 people in it at 7:30 in the morning. So they're pretty serious about what they're doing, and they're all laughing and cutting up.
And I walk through the door, and of course immediately I think every eye in the room is looking at me. And I walk over and there's coffee, and thank God you didn't have to pay for it, because I had like eight cents in my pocket. And I get this cup of coffee and I go sit down, and the magic of Alcoholics Anonymous got me. And here's what happened. It wasn't the 12 steps. They read them because they read them at every meeting. But the 12 steps back in those first few hours and days of sobriety were like the Peanuts cartoons. You know how when the adults talk in the Peanuts cartoons, all you hear is walk, walk, walk, walk. Step two. I could just—none of it made any sense to me. Okay.
But there was this six-foot-three-inch tall, big, super buff black guy at the podium who had been a Vietnam veteran come out of Compton. Obviously my story. And he's talking about feeling like he'd been born without that extra layer of skin on him, and how sensitive he was to the world, and how scared everything made him, and how when he drank alcohol, it made that something he could deal with. And he told his story and he told the truth about his heart, and he was me, and that saved my life. That is Alcoholics Anonymous. One drunk talking to another drunk coming straight from the heart, like I heard at 12:30 today. And that saved me. That's what I wanted. I was like, "Man, this is great. I'm getting emotional just thinking back to it." I was like, "Wow, wow, these—this is amazing. I've never seen anything like this before."
So I got a book. They gave me one. They said, "Hey, you know, you don't have the money, just take the book. You can pay it back by coming back." And I'm like, deal. And I went home. And like the good alcoholic I am, I sat there. I heard him say the program is in the first 164 pages. I was listening. And I went home that very first day. And between the time I got home and the time I went to pick Victoria up from her job, I read those first 164 pages. I read them, man. I'm like, I'm going to get this thing now. Why? So I wouldn't have to ask anybody for help. That's the truth. I was going to read this thing, have it figured out. By the time I got to my second meeting, they were going to go, "Oh yeah, step seven." I was going to go, "I know all about step seven. Let me tell you about step seven." Because, see, that's my thing, you know. I don't want to be vulnerable. I don't want to show you my heart. I don't want to show you how broken I am. I don't want to be real. I'm supposed to be the mind-reader. I'm the guy that's got to stay a step ahead so you can't hurt me. See, because you can't hurt me, I do all the damage to myself. It's a preemptive strike. I got the situation under control.
I love the alcoholic's version of safety, you know. It's like, I don't want to let anybody in. They may hurt me. So I'm going to build up all these defenses, all these walls. Okay? Because if you hurt me, I'm gonna end up scared and alone. So once I get building all my fortress and all my perimeter, and I don't let you in, what do I end up? Scared and alone. Perfect. And that's my alcoholic thinking. My version of safe gets me the result I'm the most afraid of getting. Crazy, man.
So I was going to have it all figured out by the second meeting. Paul came back. I met this guy. He became my sponsor. And off we went on the journey of the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In the time I have left to speak tonight, I want to talk about my journey in recovery, because my life in recovery has been everything I dreamed about in life, though it looked nothing like any of the things I dreamed of. So when you hear people in recovery say to you, you know, if you make a list of all your dreams and X number of one day at a time down the road, you know, you'd have sold yourself short. That's my experience, but it's not my experience the way I thought it would be.
Here's my experience. I can be just about as grandiose as they come. I mean, I did move to LA to be in the music business. That's pretty—just that's a form of insanity unto itself. Okay, there's probably a program for it. But anyway, here's what I find now standing here in this room talking to you. I had a list of all these things I thought I needed for my life, for my life to be good. And what that list really was, was a list of all the things I thought I needed so that I could feel the way I needed to feel in this world—to feel safe, to feel whole, to feel a part of something. I had this list of things I thought I needed. And that list of things I thought I needed was wrong, because it was based on my alcoholic thinking. It was based on trying to pretend to be something that I thought I had to be in order to have you accept me.
And what Alcoholics Anonymous has given me—what I've been given—a life that feels on the inside like everything I dreamed about those outside things would bring. And the cool part of that is I don't have to worry about anybody taking that away. I don't have to worry about losing it. I can only forfeit it by going into sodity or relapse, rather than working my program. And I'm a big believer in the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm one of those people that likes to talk about the book. You know, where I got sober in LA, it was like a CC paw meeting, man. We chanted. I love that. That just rocks. I love the energy in your fellowship. I am so grateful to have been invited to come and experience this.
You know, where I got sober, that's what we did. We chanted, we cut up, we had our little posies, everybody hung together. I'm still hanging with those people. They've scattered all over the country and to Europe and to New Zealand and you name it. And I, hey, I have Skype. I mean, I see people online. I'm still face to face with people online that I got sober with 16 years ago. I was sitting in my hotel room Skyping with a guy that's still my sponsor in Los Angeles before I came over here. You know, technology is amazing. Technology, by the way—we wouldn't have AA if it wasn't for telephone. You know, Bill picked up a phone. So now email, Skype, video conference, you name it, it's all fair game to me. Any way I can connect to you, any way our fellowship can be in touch with each other, that's just an extension of that telephone, the one that Bill picked up and called and found another alcoholic with.
So here's how I'm doing in my program. I don't want to run along at a meeting. You just stir up a lot of bad feeling. I just don't want to do that. So I'm a big believer in living what I call living in the steps. And you hear all kinds of things in Alcoholics Anonymous. I've been around meetings where they say, "Yeah, I worked a step a year." Man, if I'd worked a step a year, I'd have been dead before I was 12 years sober. You know, I can't go that slow. I'm too sick.
You know, I do this thing called making movies. Let's see if anybody else in here makes movies. I start out the day. I'm feeling pretty good. I have a bad thought. Just comes into my head. I think something. Oh, I'm happy now. But if that bad thing happens, of course it hasn't, but I'm thinking it. Okay, it hasn't happened. Well, I could end up homeless now. I'm driving my car from my house to my job, but already I'm 14 blocks from home and I'm homeless in my head. Okay. I can go from perfectly serene, content, walking hand in hand with the Big Amigo to homeless in my head in 90 seconds making movies. They start out Bambi, they end up Amityville Horror. So I got to watch that movie-making thing.
The way I do that is I believe I had a great experience when I was about two years sober. In fact, two—if I can count. All right. And here's this: I'm sitting in a meeting in that very log cabin. And this guy comes in. He kind of talks like he's from Texas. He was not, but it made me feel like home, you know. And he said, "Okay. If you want what we have," and then he stopped. We were like, "That's a trick, right?" He goes, "If you want what we have," and then he said what I'm about to say to you. "What do we have?"
Same result basically that that room gave. We all just kind of were like, he's asking us a question. He said, "If you want what we have," and then he pointed at that meeting. They had the 12 steps hanging on the wall. And he pointed at the 12th step, which you read. And he read it, and I was paying attention to how you read that. He said, "Having had, past tense, a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps. That's what we have."
So he goes, "I'm going to start over. If you want what we have," he was on that path. He goes, "And you believe that sobriety is one day at a time, then you got to work all 12 steps every day." That just rocked my world, man. I'm sitting there two years sober. I had finished my amends, which had taken me quite a while. You know, amazing how few people were actually surprised to learn I was an alcoholic. It was a little disappointing.
So anyway, he goes, "You got to work all 12 steps every day. All 12 of them." He goes, "Now, some of you are going to say that's 10, 11, and 12, and I'm cool with that." He said, "But I think you ought to see if you can find a way to work all 12 steps every day." And I walked out of that meeting, my head was kind of spinning. I'm thinking, man, it took all these months to do the ninth step, and I'm not going to get a damn thing done with my day. I'm just going to be sitting there all day long trying to work these 12 steps. I mean, what about working for a living and stuff like that?
So you know, he just laughed, and he said, "Now, you know, let me know how that goes." And that set me on a mission. I have a little routine that I do where I start at step one every morning. And I do this little routine where I'm on the ninth step before I leave my house as part of my morning meditation.
And I sit there and I go, you know what, I am an alcoholic and my life is unmanageable. I'm real clear on that. And I go, you know, I do believe a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. See, I actually believed that back