AA - Alcoholics Anonymous
July 5, 2024
(0:11 – 0:53)
My name is Howard and I am an alcoholic. I want to thank Mike. We are new friends.
Actually, for a long, long time we’ve been friends. We just never met each other and
we’ve met now and it’s as good as I thought it was going to be. I get nervous when I’m
going to talk.
I’ve done this before, but the thing that you get nervous about is that you’re going to
remember everybody’s name that you have to thank. And it isn’t that, you know, you’re
grateful. You’re grateful and you would like to express that and you’d like to express it to
the people that are going to make a difference about getting you invited back.
(0:55 – 1:12)
And it puts on a lot of pressure. And I was bragging to DJ, actually it’s BJ, about what a
great memory I have. But I don’t have it when I get up to thank people.
(1:12 – 1:28)
But I know I want to thank Alex for being part of who invited me and BJ for being part of
that and everybody else. Anybody else. Dick, if you had anything to do with it, thanks.
(1:30 – 1:40)
He says he didn’t. I believe him. But it’s an honor to be here and I’m glad that Pat came
with me.
(1:40 – 2:52)
One of the first conventions or roundups that I spoke at that was a big one was the
Kansas State Convention in Salina years ago. I remember some of you from it. I certainly
remember Tom Gray where he and I struck up a friendship that’s been going on ever
since.
He invited us to come back one time and speak at his home group the week that was.
And Topeka. And I love Tom and he loves me.
And we don’t get to talk very much but we’ve got that thing. And whenever I think of
Tom I feel good. Anyway, this is a big deal.
I want to thank the other speakers. Mari gave a great talk last night and I just love her.
I’ve met her before.
Judy, I was… So you may go to sleep during my talk. I’ll understand. But I was out of it by
10 o’clock last night, I’m telling you.
(2:52 – 6:47)
And Pat, Pat P., who spoke with the Al-Anon this morning, she did a tremendous job, I
thought, in her talk. She gave me very little to defend that is defensible. And the thing
about Pat’s Al-Anon is it amazes me.
When I first came to AA I would make funny jokes. If I heard a funny Al-Anon joke I
couldn’t wait to tell it. And I made up some pretty good ones on my own.
But as Pat got more and more active in Al-Anon and I got where I could see in a little bit
how much good that was doing for her and me. Because through Al-Anon she was finding
strength to effectively stand up to me and say, no, I’m not going to do that. And not do
it, you know, if it was a fight and it was anger, I can get as angry as… But it’s soft like
that, it works.
And she couldn’t have learned that any place else in our whole culture than the Al-Anon
program. So I stopped, I don’t think, I don’t know any funny jokes about Al-Anon
anymore. And I haven’t heard any AA’s tell a funny joke about Al-Anon in a long time.
I’ve heard some but not many funny ones. Anyway, I love you Pat and thank you, you
gave a great talk. And so will the other people that are coming up.
Mark and I have… Mark from Florida, he sounds like from New England. Mark and I have
met several times but I’ve never heard his talk so I’m looking forward to that tonight.
Anyway, and so now I will, while I’m talking, look at my watch.
I won’t be looking at my watch to see what time it is. I’ll be looking at my watch to give
those of you that are worried about it a sense of optimism. That I even care what time it
is.
Now I know what time it is now. I don’t know what time I got up here. I don’t know what
time the tape started.
But that wasn’t my time. Now is when my time starts. And when I’m talking, one of the
things I learned in AA that’s still very fundamental to me is that speakers are not
authorities.
Speakers each just share their opinion. Now I happen to have opinions that I think are
right. Why would you have an opinion you thought was wrong? You wouldn’t, would you?
No, but we just share our opinions.
And our experience strengthens hope. The real authority about alcoholism and about our
program of recovery is the book Alcoholics Anonymous. And I know that.
And so when I’m asked to speak, I make up stuff and say that it’s in the big book in order
to add credibility to my talk. I make up page numbers. Nobody ever checks.
(6:49 – 8:00)
After I get through, they say, well, he wasn’t much of a speaker, but by golly, he sure
knew that big book. On page 45 in the big book, it says lack of power is our dilemma.
And lack of power is my dilemma.
And it’s a much bigger lack of power than I thought to start with. But one lack of power
that I’m very familiar with and have been familiar with all my life but couldn’t articulate it
was I lacked the power to feel good in and of myself. I could never feel good.
I wanted to feel good. And I tried to do the things that I was told that if I would do, I
would feel good. I tried to do those, but they didn’t work.
(8:01 – 8:38)
One of the things, the first home I remember was a kind of a three-bedroom apartment
behind the barber shop and the shoe shop rooms in this building on Main Street in Milan,
Kansas. And my dad was the barber and the shoe repairman, and I was born in 1932. Oh,
well, I won’t say Pat was born in 1932 either because she didn’t want to say how old she
was.
(8:42 – 9:00)
But I went to the Methodist Church there in Milan. You see, Milan is in the Bible Belt. And
we knew some Catholics, but they didn’t live in Milan, and we didn’t have no Milan
Catholic Church.
(9:00 – 10:13)
We had Protestant churches and lots of them. Very few people, but lots of churches. And
I went to the Baptist Church where I do remember being told that I was separate from
God and about original sin and that how this came about and that I could be redeemed
by acknowledging that Jesus was crucified for my redemption, and then I would be saved
and forgiven for my sins, and I would feel good.
God and Jesus and I know I tried. I never felt good. I tried, and it didn’t work.
I was also not only told I was separate from God, but I was told if I lived the moral life, if I
lived by the Ten Commandments. Now, I didn’t covet anybody else’s wife, but I just
about did everything else by the time I was four. And I didn’t want to.
I just did it, you know, and hell, I’d forget and do it and then think, God, you know. And I
tried to make a deal. I was always making a deal with God.
(10:13 – 10:35)
I remember the first time, though, that I really made a deal with God. It was a summer
day, Sunday, in church, where as a community we prayed for it not to rain so that the
farmers could harvest their wheat crop. And I joined right in, and I gave it my best.
(10:37 – 13:33)
That afternoon, it rained. It hailed. The wind blew.
It destroyed all the wheat in Southern New County, Kansas. And while nobody pointed
the finger at me, I knew whose fault it was. I knew who wasn’t doing what you have to do
for God to answer the prayer, and it was me.
I assumed the rest of you guys was doing it. Now, if you’re four or five years old and
you’ve assumed the entire responsibility for wiping out the Kansas wheat crop, what you
have is an ego problem. Gee, I didn’t know it, but that’s what I had.
I had this ego problem where I had assumed more responsibility than I had the power to
fulfill. And if my sense of well-being is contingent upon me fulfilling my responsibility, I
ain’t gonna feel good. I met Pat, but I learned this before I met Pat, but Pat is probably
the one that was the most active recipient of this in me.
I loved her the moment I saw her in the seventh grade. That’s the truth. No, but I loved
her, and she didn’t love me, I don’t think.
But I’ve loved her, and I’ve loved her ever since, except for when I hated her. Boy, there
were times when I hated her, but except for that, I always loved her. And we were
boyfriend and girlfriend for a while, but very short, and then she went off with other
guys, and I always had that empty feeling all the way through high school, but I couldn’t
tell her.
I couldn’t tell her that I loved her. And so I had that going for me, never felt good. I drank
whiskey when I was 12 years old.
I’m telling you this, I felt good. That simple. Whiskey did it.
God did it to it. Whiskey did it. And I became less and less interested in turning to God to
feel good, and more and more interested in turning to whiskey.
And in the Methodist church, there is a black and there’s a white. There is no gray like
there is in the Catholic church. Lots of gray in the Catholic church.
(13:34 – 13:54)
Methodists are black and white. That’s at least my experience. And there’s zero whiskey
allowed.
No whiskey allowed. And I wanted some. I always just wanted some, but I wanted some,
and I was getting it pretty soon as to hell with the Methodist church, you know.
(13:57 – 14:33)
And I went ahead and went to the Navy, and I got in a fair amount of trouble. I was
always in trouble, but I made it through. And when I was in the Navy, I got word that
Patty Ingram and this fiance of hers had busted up.
I put in for leave. I did, honest to God, put in for leave for the sole purpose of coming
home and telling her that I loved her, I’ve always loved her, and I wanted her to know I
could have never threatened her. And I came home and I told her.
(14:33 – 14:54)
In the meantime, I’ve learned Shakespeare. I don’t know why I learned Shakespeare
when I was in the Navy, but I got where I liked Shakespeare. So I could say, did not the
heavenly rhetoric of thine eyes against whom all the world could not hold argument
persuade my heart to this? She fell for it like a ton of bricks.
(15:04 – 16:36)
I’m getting in trouble. So we got married when we were 20, and I loved her very much
and always loved her. I was always afraid, though.
I was afraid she wasn’t going to stay with me. I was afraid that I was going to get laid off.
When the book talks about this corrosive thread of fear, man, I had it.
And the only way I could modify it was drinking whiskey. And I did good. I did good for a
long, long time.
We moved to San Diego, had a great time, as Pat said, made great friends. All of our
friends drank. And Pat would say to me, you know, drinking isn’t bad.
Jerry and the other guys drink, but you drink more than they do. Why don’t you just
watch and drink with them? Well, I did. One night, until I saw these guys drink too damn
slow, and I started having a shot from the bar on the way to the restroom in order to kind
of keep my heart beating while I’m waiting on these guys.
That’s hard work. But it was fun, and it was good, and it was working. And I was a
toolmaker for about six years, and then I become an entry-level engineer at General
Dynamics Astronautics in San Diego.
(16:36 – 17:22)
And there was a lot of things as an analyst that I was good at, but one of the things we
had to do was write technical reports, and somehow I couldn’t write the technical report.
I couldn’t get it organized in my mind what the heck to write about, let alone what to
write. You know, how to write, but what to write about.
And the more I would be blocked by this, the more anxious I would be. And my boss was
critical of that. I actually, in my work, had identified some significant problems and how
to fix them.
(17:22 – 19:48)
And they got fixed, and so I was looking good. It was that they wanted to report so that
we could all look good. And I couldn’t, anyway, that was a deal on that.
And I was criticized for my report writing, and one Wednesday night, I hadn’t even
started on my report. And when work was over, I took the stuff to write the report home.
I’d never done that before.
And I sat down, and I just kind of was freezing up like I always did, you know, gradually
becoming totally immobilized. And I was kind of inspired to go look in the refrigerator,
and there was a hat. Now mostly, I’m a beer drinker.
I’m the captain of the patio party. It’s my responsibility, kind of the logistic support
analyst, to make sure that the supplies are there. But it was mostly beer.
Now Bandy, the Navy chief that lived on my back fence, didn’t like beer. He liked beer,
but he knew liquor was quicker. And he brought in a pint of booze and left with about
half of it still there.
Pat put it in the refrigerator, going to give it back to him. I look in there, and I see that
whiskey, and I never drink during the week. I’m a weekend guy.
And I drink, well, sometimes during the week, but never when I’m working, because I
never worked at home before. And anyway, I got the half a pint of whiskey, and I poured
myself a neat shot, and I drank it. And I went over and sat down again, and all at once in
my head, a voice said, why don’t you start out with an introduction to describe how you
came to do this analysis? And then, why don’t you briefly describe the significant
findings that you discovered in this analysis? And you could wrap this up with a little
conclusion of recommendations based on the, and I went over and got the whiskey, and I
drank the rest of it.
(19:48 – 20:25)
I sat down, and no kidding, I know some of you have had this happen. I discovered a
technical vocabulary I didn’t know I had. It just, I mean, it was articulate, it was good.
I wrote it out, and I knew this was a great report. And I took it into work. They typed it
up, distributed it Friday morning, and probably Tuesday of the next day, my boss’s boss
comes out, and he’s got this thing in his hand, and he comes up and says, did you write
this report? I said, yes.
(20:27 – 20:51)
He said, we knew you could do it if you just give us the effort. I remember thinking,
effort? It wasn’t effort, it was whiskey. But I knew not to tell him that.
Let him think it was effort. They’ll give you a raise for effort. They won’t give you
anything for whiskey.
(20:52 – 23:30)
The important thing is, I knew it was whiskey. And whiskey it was. Changed my life in a
lot of ways.
Because gradually, I learned, and maybe some of you did, that you don’t have to wait till
Wednesday night to start this process. You can start it any night. You can start it any day
at lunch.
You can start it any time of any day. It’s lunchtime someplace. And pretty soon, it’s just
the way it is.
I can’t do anything. And it was a period of years. I went from a process analyst to an
engineer to a senior engineer.
I went to Culver City as kind of a senior, senior engineer, and then an engineering
manager. And that’s not setting the world on fire, but that’s a steady series of
progressive promotions that I got because I drank whiskey. And there’s no getting
around it.
That was it. And as Pat mentioned, after a little while, she didn’t know exactly what was
happening, but what was happening was I got to the place where I had to drink so much
whiskey before I was pregnant that my speech was slurred. And if you didn’t know
better, you’d think I was drunk.
My boss thought I was drunk, you know, and I was hearing it from him. I’m just a little
short of brilliant, you know. And I discovered benzidrine.
Bini. And you just take a little, take a bini, and it’ll keep you right awake. Take three or
four of them for days, and it’ll keep you awake.
It’ll help you in every area of your life except controlling your bowels, but don’t worry
about that. Pat frowned, but I’ll tell you why she frowned. We were in bed together,
wasn’t I, Adam? I just did that once in our life.
We got twin beds right after that. I’ve been in AA sober for over 31 years, and we still
have twin beds. We have twin beds in the hotel.
They say, do you have any special requirements? She said, yes, twin beds. It’s like I did
this every night of my life. I did it.
(23:32 – 24:28)
She treats me that way. I’ll tell you, she released me that night. Anyway, my boss found
no humor in my drinking, and in 1972 he demoted me.
He had warned me, he had done everything, and I got him in trouble. He said, what I got
him in trouble was with the people that worked for me, and I had a mess going on there,
and they were bad-mouthing me, and I’m not going over my head to the boss. He
demoted me and said I’d lost credibility with him as a manager, with the people that I
was managing, and that he wasn’t going to fire me, but I better get my act together.
(24:29 – 25:20)
Pat, for the 978th time in our married life, was in the process of leaving me and taking
the kids, and I said, don’t go. I’ll quit drinking forever, but please don’t go. I’m telling you,
I knew that life without her was, I knew what it was like, you know, when I didn’t have
her, my life was empty.
My heart was broken, and so I told her to stay, and I stopped drinking. After a few days, I
went to her and said, Pat, I love you, and I don’t want you to leave, but if I can’t drink
anything at all, I guess you gotta go. Some people are born to drink, and I’m one of
them, and all I’m going to do is drink a half a pint a day.
(25:22 – 25:35)
Another half a pint guy over here. Half a pint a day, just to keep my heart going, keep
my mind working, to be creative, have some ingenuity. I need a half a pint a day, but I
don’t need any more than that.
(25:35 – 29:17)
She said, okay, and she stayed, and after that, this half a pint a day, I was getting drunk
every day, I had convulsive seizures, a doctor diagnosed me as being acutely intoxicated
with probable alcoholic neuropathy, when in fact, I told him I wasn’t drinking at all, and I
was hopelessly in debt, and I had an opportunity to sell some equipment that I didn’t
own. Equipment that I found right before Hughes lost it, and I gave it to a fence, he was
going to sell it, we were going to split the money 50-50. I never got a dime for that
equipment, but 10 days later, I’m back in the tattletale, which is my watering hole, trying
to make some other equipment sales without the middleman involved in it, and it was
the next morning, it was July the 23rd, 1972, and I came to, right out of page 8 in the big
book, where it talks about no words can express the bitter morass and loneliness that I
experienced in self-pity, and quicksand stretches all around in every direction, and that
was exactly the way it was.
It was quicksand. That was my bottom, was when there was no bottom. I hit a bottom
when I got demoted, but she gave me a bottom, and hell, I can drink on that, you know?
And if Pat was going to leave, but she didn’t.
I know I’m on thin ice, but here she is, and so I can drink on that, and right on down, but
now I’ve stolen equipment, which is not owned by Hughes, it’s owned by the federal
government, and its value exceeds the amount that will ultimately result in investigation
by the federal bureau of investigators, and I wake up thinking, I’ve got to stop drinking
until this blows over. And Pat had gone to a lawyer, and anyway, he had said, and she
had come home and said, why don’t you go to AA, and I thought, boy, if I go to AA, I can
hide out there until this blows over, and Pat will be pleased. And I’ve got to stop drinking,
and I could see that this insane stuff I was doing, I only did when I was drinking, that
parallel with this insane thinking was some rational way of living my life, but I couldn’t
drink and do it, and I knew it.
I didn’t know I was an alcoholic, but I knew Kenny Sixpack, well, he was Kenny Sixpack
when we drank in the Tattletail together. We lost him in the Tattletail, and he went out
and became the president of Alcoholics Anonymous worldwide, and had his name
changed to Kenny XS, but I called him, and I said, you still in AA? Well, I drank a pint of
whiskey, half a pint, drank a half a pint of whiskey, and I called him and said, you still in
AA? And he said yes, and I said, would you take me to an AA meeting? He said yes, are
you drinking now? I said no, I wasn’t, I had finished a half a pint. He said, well, try not to
drink any more, and I drank two more, or three more half a pint.
(29:18 – 31:00)
So it was 6.30, and taking a legal dose had been it, and so by 6.30, I didn’t know why I
had called AA, it didn’t sound that bad, I hope this guy don’t come, but he came. First
thing I said to him was, I am not an alcoholic. He smiled and said, I think we’re going to
the right place, Howard.
And he took me in, and I’ll just tell you, I could talk forever about a guy named Frank
Giroux, who was the guy that I was introduced to. Frank was a retired machinist from
Hughes, and Kenny was a machinist that was working, and I was an engineer, and I’m
still working, so I could get a hold of Frank, because he was retired, so he wasn’t my
sponsor, but he was my savior, I’ll tell you that, and became a great friend to me. And
passed away, but that was just the caliber of people they had there at that, and it was a
beginners meeting, and they had kind of a patent microteam set that they had used for
years, so that if somebody, part of the format said, is anybody here in their first meeting,
and if somebody’s hand went up, then they went to plan A, which was the beginners, the
newcomers, beginners meeting, and they’d call on different people who had the deck
stacked, so that they’d hit you with the, you know, they’d talk about the obsession that
somehow, someway, this time it’s going to be different, that you’ll stop by the bar to
have two drinks, three at the most, next thing you know, it’s last call for alcohol.
(31:00 – 31:23)
You know, they’re telling this stuff, you know, they’re just saying they’re doing it, he’s
saying what he did, and I’m thinking, man, I’m just like that. Then he described it as an
obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body, and a phenomenon of
craving, and I’m thinking, I never craved a drink. Craving? Hell, I never craved a drink.
(31:23 – 31:58)
At the break, I told Kenny, I identified with everything except the craving, and he said,
well, what time did you start drinking? I said, about six in the morning. Had me at work
at seven. He said, why did you start so early? I said, to get rid of the hangover.
He said, how much does it take to get over a hangover? I said, a couple doubles, maybe
a half of a pint. He said, okay, then did you keep drinking? I said, yes. He said, why? I
said, because I wanted another drink, but I didn’t crave it.
(32:00 – 32:24)
And he said, Howard, if when you want another drink, if you don’t take it, that wanting
one goes up a notch and becomes a craving. There’s a whole bunch of us here who just
never let that go up. We just kept slugging them down so fast that the craving didn’t
have an opportunity to set in.
(32:24 – 32:52)
I thought, that’s exactly, that’s me, that’s me. And then we started the second half of the
meeting. And they read from page 93, at the top of 93, or the bottom of 93, where it
said, if your protege, and says, if he wonders how you got well, let him ask you that
question.
(32:52 – 34:11)
And in responding, emphasized the spiritual feature freely. They read that, and they
read, let him know that whatever conception of God he has will work for him, provided it
makes sense to him. Well, I had a conception of God that made sense to me.
When I was going to college, and had become an atheist, briefly, and had told somebody
who was a member of the Church of Christ that I was an atheist, she said, that’s because
you’re studying science. All scientists are atheists. Look at Dr. Einstein.
Well, back then, and even today, I don’t know what it was scientifically that Einstein
knew. I do know this. You can’t know it.
Not out of the clear blue sky. And there was not that much going on for him to build what
was going on. I mean, he’d come up with this stuff, pure thought, a lot of it.
(34:12 – 34:45)
And so, and at that time, you know, one of his deals was the greater concentration of
gravity, the slower time is. And they were flying Celsius clocks up into the sky where
gravity is weaker, and they were going faster. The time was going faster.
Anyway, they were doing this stuff, and I was amazed. And now, Dr. Einstein’s an atheist.
Hell, I don’t need a better authority to support me being an atheist than Albert Einstein.
(34:45 – 35:37)
So I get this little book, and in the book, one of the things Dr. Einstein said is, the most
beautiful, this is about what he said, the most beautiful thing I have experienced is the
mysterious. For mystery stands at the cradle of true art and true science. The knowledge
of the existence of something which the mind cannot penetrate.
The manifestation of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty which are
accessible to the human mind in their most elementary form. The knowledge of this
something and the emotion associated with it is the true religious attitude. And in this
sense, in this alone, I’m a deeply religious man.
(35:40 – 36:16)
And I thought, well, if he ain’t an atheist, I ain’t. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
But if he ain’t, I ain’t.
And if he is, I am. It was that simple. And I worked me out a definition as time went on.
There was a fraternal organization I wanted to be a member of, and I thought they would
ask me what I believed about God, and so I satisfied myself. I come up with a belief
about God that made sense to me. And so when you read in the big book, when you first
met God, I said, I’m out of here.
(36:20 – 37:09)
The first thing was when you guys read, remember that we deal with alcohol, cunning,
baffling, and powerful. And my mind said, cunning is not an attribute that you can assign
to an inanimate substance such as alcohol. Cunning requires intellect.
Alcohol has no intellect. That is wrong. A couple sentences later, but there is one who
has all power.
That one is God. Maybe you find him now. My head said, God? I don’t even use the word
God in AA.
They say I have power. I must be in some strange cultist branch of AA. But then my mind
goes on to say, they just said alcohol is powerful.
(37:09 – 38:09)
Now they say God has all power. Well, if God has all power, alcohol has no power. And if
alcohol has power, God doesn’t have all power.
He just has all power. The fatal flaw in that thinking is that when you’re doing it, you’re
missing stuff that could save your life. And that’s the way I was.
I was that way every time. Anyway, God is Einstein. So when you said, whatever God
makes sense to me will work.
Heck, I had a God that made sense. So I fit in. But then in thinking about it, my God
didn’t fit in the steps.
(38:09 – 39:57)
Because my God is immutable law. The immutable laws of nature. And they don’t change
because you pray.
Inherent in the immutable law is unlimited intelligence and power so that things happen
in accordance with the requirements of the law. And you can pray, which is fine. It may
make you feel good.
But it’s going to rain in accordance with the law. That lets you off the hook to start with
for wiping out the weed crop, you know. And there’s another stuff that goes on.
So you build your little defenses and you can live with it as long as you keep drinking.
Anyway, I know that’s insane, but I was insane. And I told Kenny after the meeting, I
said, well, I’m an alcoholic, but AA won’t work for me because my God don’t fit in your
steps.
The God in your steps hears prayers and changes things because people pray. It’s
implied that if you make a confession of your sins, that somehow God must give you
forgiveness or something. And so you’ve got to put all that stuff and make them in.
God isn’t going to change anything because I take any course of action. God is
immutable law and nothing’s going to change. And he said, that’s wonderful, Howard.
You’re going to be able to help me with God. But can you stop drinking? I said, yes, I can
stop drinking. He said, God, stop taking Benny’s too.
(39:57 – 42:11)
You know, he hit me there because I wasn’t sure I could do both of them. But I don’t
know how he knew I took Benny’s unless he noticed that I said the same things over and
over real fast. I explained to him this philosophy that I had, and it was a made up
philosophy.
I kind of made it up. Einstein and I. But man had evolved through the immutable laws of
nature to a level where man’s intelligence could discern the principles, God’s principles
in the universe, and man in a feeble way through technology learned to apply those
principles in their lives and our lives. So we built a civilization with cars that don’t work
good and airplanes that don’t work good and a whole bunch of things.
But we’ve created it, God hasn’t. And God ain’t going to change any of that because we
created our own civilization and it kind of stinks. But he’s done good.
We’ve just done bad with what he gave us. And Kenny said, that’s wonderful. I said, I’ve
got to make my own life work.
I want to live in culture and I’ve got to make it work. And he said, I understand how. And
he said, I knew that when I came to AA.
And I didn’t stay sober for a while, but I still believed it when I got sober. And what I
discovered and what I learned to work for me was that the people in AA, I found people
like Frank Giroux and like Chuck Ennis and he named some other guys. And he said,
these guys know how to make their life work.
They’re doing something that’s making their life work. And I knew of some of them when
they were drunk and they’re sober and their life’s working. So I came to AA not drinking
and not using and not listening to what they had to say.
(42:12 – 42:34)
And he said, if you’re going to approach it like that, you’ve got to go to a lot of meetings
because 95% of the stuff you hear is stupid. It won’t work. But he said, you’ve got to
have that 5%.
And that was the way I came in. And you see, he was really saying in his own way, let’s
make the group your higher power. Let’s make AA your higher power.
(42:35 – 43:03)
This is what you’re going to learn. This is how you’re going to help run your own life. I
stopped drinking on the 4th of August, 1972.
Stopped taking pennies on the 4th of August, 1972. And I came to meetings and I
listened. And I heard Tommy O’Meara say, if you make one mistake and then brood
about having made that mistake, you’ve made two mistakes.
(43:06 – 43:20)
Now I don’t even know that’s a problem until I hear his solution in my head says, hey,
that would make my life better. And so I tried that. Now I’m hearing a bunch of dumb
stuff, but that was pretty smart.
(43:20 – 43:37)
Then I heard Steve from San Diego say, I was 36 years and learning that all the people
that I hated didn’t need it. I was 39. I was 39 and I just learned it right then.
(43:38 – 44:29)
And that was, you know, that’s the answer. And I said, how do you stop hating people? I
asked at the next meeting and Patty Hicks, I got 40 answers if there were 40 people
there, but Patty Hicks said, you can’t be hateful and grateful at the same time. And if
you’re a sober alcoholic, an alcoholic economist, there’s a basis for feeling grateful.
But you’ve got to work for it because you’re not going to feel grateful if you don’t. And I
remembered that. And I went to meetings.
I didn’t drink. And I was learning. Every day was a bad day, you know, but I’d show up at
a meeting.
Maybe Norm Alte was the speaker. Norm Alte, in my opinion, I’m sure Dick has a tape of
it, a bunch of tapes. Norm was a great speaker.
(44:29 – 44:43)
The great AA, very great AA. And Norm says, when I came to AA, I wasn’t a giver. I was a
taker.
I was a taker of things and a user of people. I was a loser. I was a taker, taker’s a loser.
(44:44 – 45:24)
And when he said I was a taker of things and a user of people, my head said, that’s me
exactly. That’s the best description I’ve heard of me. I had no popping off to do about
that.
You know, and later I realized, all my life people have told me I was a taker and a loser.
And it couldn’t help me by telling me I’m a taker and a loser. I don’t like you then.
You have no prejudice. Get the hell away from me. But Norm didn’t say I was that way.
He said he was and I saw me. You know, the one drunk saying he’s that way meets
seeing me in him. And I’m different when that’s over and that’s happening.
(45:24 – 45:42)
And I go home and Pat and I don’t fight that night. She comes home from Al-Anon and I
come home from AA. It’s sweetness and light.
It’s when I come home from work that we have the main event. We no longer have
preliminary vows. We just go right into the main event.
(45:44 – 47:22)
Right with the juggler. Two stallion rattlesnakes going to straighten this mess out once
and for all. And she’s leaving and I’m glad.
Don’t go. Don’t go. I’m pushing the lawnmower one day, one Saturday, and it hit a tree.
We have an old lawnmower. Everything we have is a wreck because we don’t have any
money. And this lawnmower has a bolt sticking out of the top of it.
The reel hits the root, stops the mower. I walked into that bolt with my chest bone. It
hurt.
Man, it hurt. My first thing my mind said was, damn hurt anyway. Because that’s what
my mind always said.
Damn hurt. And then it was damn AA. AA don’t work.
If AA worked with my chest hurt, I don’t think so. I’m not going to those meetings and
grin like a baboon and say isn’t this wonderful. It’s not wonderful.
It’s not ever going to be wonderful. I ain’t drinking, but I ain’t going to those meetings.
That night a guy came and got me and took me to the Malibu meeting because I’d
forgotten I wasn’t going to go.
Halfway to the Malibu meeting I’m grinning like a baboon saying isn’t this wonderful
because it was wonderful all once again. I got to AA and Jack Bailey saw me. Jack Bailey,
many of you never heard of Jack Bailey, but he was a big, big man in my day.
Queen for a day. He was a great radio MC and he had 30 years sobriety back then. He
passed away.
(47:25 – 47:38)
He was nice to me. Not very long ago, one of his sponsors, the wife of one of his
sponsors, we were talking and she said, you know, Jack Bailey really loved you. I said I
know and I don’t know why, but he did.
(47:38 – 48:47)
You go to the Malibu meeting and he’s nice to you, very nice. You feel good. The speaker
that night was a guy named Don G. A-P-E-S.
Don said if you’re new in AA and you’re not working the steps, AA will stop being fun and
you’ll decide that AA isn’t going to work for you and you’ll decide you’re not coming to
AA anymore. You’re not going to drink, but you’re not coming to AA. He said you don’t
drink for a while and you don’t come to meetings, you’re going to come to the bar and
order a drink and if you do that and the bartender says what’s the matter? I thought you
was going to AA, don’t AA work? He said if you’re not working the steps, be honest with
him and tell him you don’t know if it works or not because you wouldn’t try AA.
Right. There was nothing in me to pop off about that. My head popped off about a lot of
stuff, but that was in the 5% that changed my life and I decided to do the steps.
(48:47 – 49:05)
I thought I’d already done the first step. I thought the second step was just believing in
God and I believed in God. The third step was I was trying to live my life better and I did
a fourth step and when I finished the fourth step an amazing thing happened.
(49:05 – 50:28)
I was a battered child in Milan and Argonia, Kansas. My dad was a German, a Nazi. Not
literally, but he sure as hell wasn’t no happy-go-lucky Bavarian beer garden German.
He was a Prussian and I got a lot of beatings. I never got where I liked it. I understand
some people in California get what they like being beaten, but I’m not one of them.
Anyway, I did that first inventory and it came to me my dad isn’t my problem. My dad
had been my problem until I did the inventory and then it’s just like magic. I knew dad
died in 1951.
This is 1973. Can I be the problem? I’m the problem. I saw that.
It’s an amazing thing and it changed my life. It gave me a new direction to go. I took the
equipment or I did the steps.
I was doing the steps. Kenny helped me take the equipment back. He helped me go get
the equipment and then I took it back and they let me off the hook.
(50:28 – 51:56)
The guy who was responsible for the equipment said, if it was really stolen I wouldn’t
have it and I have it, but don’t tell anybody and I have it. I don’t accept anybody who
would listen. By the way, I told that story in an AA meeting and there were a few people
lined up to thank me for talking.
I noticed this one guy who obviously wanted to be the last so we could talk and I’ll just
tell you the short form of that story. He turned out to be the FBI agent that was assigned
to Hughes Helicopters in 1972 and he said when he gave me his identification that I’m
glad you took it back yourself because when you were drunk in the Tattletail, I was drunk
in Dear John and I wasn’t catching anybody with anything. But I think that’s an amazing
thing.
This guy has 15 years in sobriety. There’s a thing called synchronicity. It’s a word that
Carl Jung made up and he roughly defined it as a series of meaningful coincidences
which apparently move life forward.
(51:56 – 52:34)
In an orderly way. And there is such a thing in my life. I don’t have it, but there is.
I went to a meeting, I went to a Thursday, I’m running out of time, but I’m going to tell
this anyway. To hell with it. I went to a Thursday meeting and a guy named Ken S.,
different than the first Ken S., Ken Sholoff said, he had just read this article and in this
article it had said basically that alcohol doesn’t produce a good feeling when you drink it.
(52:35 – 54:43)
Alcohol is a sedative drug. One of a family in the aliphatic sedatives that sedate a
mechanism in your central nervous system which causes a response to a perception of
threat, anxiety. When you see a threat or perceive one, it triggers this mechanism to
release chemicals for fight or flight.
This mechanism in the alcoholic kind of idles fast at least. It’s a little out of calibration.
So that when there is in fact no threat to perceive, we’re in kind of a state of low grade
alert.
And we live that way all the time. Alcohol sedates that, puts it to sleep and you have that
sense of ease and comfort. But that ease and comfort is there all the time.
Alcohol exposes you to it. It’s there all the time. You have to stop the anxiety.
And that made sense to me, it didn’t change anything. But the synchronicity is, the
series of coincidences is, the next Tuesday I had an anxiety attack that would stop an
elephant. And I mean it was terrible.
And my whole, my career, my career was jeopardized. And I was going to look bad. And I
was going to look bad for a long, long time.
God, you know. And I called Frank Jerome. And he knew what I said about prayer.
He knew it from when I first knew him. And he said, what I’ll do is say the serenity prayer
with you. And I said, Frank, you know what I think about prayer.
You know God doesn’t, you know. And he said, I said, why do you want to say the
prayer? And he said, because you’re trying to live up to your life’s responsibilities. And it
requires a lot of help.
(54:43 – 56:52)
Help from your family, help from the program, help from your friends, help from your
boss, the people that work for you. But there’s an indispensable ingredient is a sense of
ease and comfort, a sense of well-being within yourself. It’s an inside job, Howard.
And you can’t drink to get that anymore. And what we do in AA is what you’re doing, but
we also pray. And I’ll say the serenity prayer with you.
We said, I said with my mouth, God, plant me the serenity. My head said, God ain’t going
to change nothing because I pray. That’s what my head always said.
God ain’t going to change anything. And then another voice within me said, nothing has
to be changed to give you serenity. You were given serenity at the very start.
You’re just tapped into anxiety. Nothing needs to be changed to give you courage. You
were given courage at the very start.
You’re just tapped into anger. And when the prayer was over, I was different. And I knew
the difference.
Now, how does that stuff happen? So that Ken Shumaw says this, and I start to believe
that I have this good feeling in me. And then Frank gets me to say the prayer. Nobody
else could have got me to say the prayer.
Just a series of meaningful questions. Pat said, we’re never ever going to threaten to
leave. We’re going to stay together.
We’re going to fight it out, but we’re going to stay together. I’m never going to leave you
again. I said, I’m never going to think about it.
And we haven’t. And not after, just very quickly, somebody sent me a book. And in the
book, there’s this little page that says, until one is committed, they’re unsure of
themselves, hesitant, afraid, always willing to back out.
(56:53 – 57:26)
But once one really makes a commitment, then Providence joins with you. Then God is
with you and plays the part to help you into achieving this thing you’re committed to. So
another meaningful coincidence that moves my life forward.
I can’t go anyplace else for this kind of stuff to happen. When I’m nine years sober, Pat
and I have a great life. And I have made my life great.
(57:29 – 58:04)
I’ve come a long way spiritually. I know I have, or I wouldn’t have been, or what
happened wouldn’t have happened. But I got my promotion to my career goal.
I was the manager of a technical section in the helicopter design division. He’s had a
couple. It’s a very, very good job.
My career goal. And then, within three days, my boss came in to give me a dreadful
assignment. I was full of dread about having to do this job that you wouldn’t have had to
do if you hadn’t taken the promotion.
(58:05 – 58:17)
Now, I could either give that up, or I could fall flat on my face. Anyway you looked at it,
there was no good option here. And I started meditating years and years ago.
(58:17 – 59:32)
In 1974, first of October 1974, I made a commitment that I would meditate every day of
my life for 30 minutes, bringing into my consciousness the truth of the goodness that AA
brought into my life. And I was good at it. I was doing it.
I was very, very relentless about it. But, on bad times, you need to have a lot of things
going for you in addition to meditation. Or rather than meditate, you’ll just obsess on the
dreadfulness.
And that’s what I did that day. I obsessed on the dreadfulness. That’s what I did the next
day.
And then the next day, halfway through the obsession, I meditated. And at the end of the
meditation, I felt better. I had a good feeling.
And my head said, as it examined the good feeling, why can’t I feel this way when I first
wake up? Why do I have to meditate first? And I had a fantasy. If there weren’t
newcomers here, I’d say it was a vision. But, in my fantasy, in my vision, in my mind’s
eye with my eyes closed, I saw a frozen lake.
(59:35 – 59:50)
I didn’t know why I was seeing a frozen lake. It was very clear, the frozen lake was. And
then there was something in my mind said, that lake, the ice on that lake is as thick as
the laws of physics that allow ice to get.
(59:50 – 1:00:46)
I don’t know why I’m thinking that, but I know you could drive a Sherman tank on that ice
and it wouldn’t sink. And then I had another thought that walking across that lake a step
at a time is a pretty good metaphor for living my life a day at a time. And with each step,
be careful, because it’s slippery, you know, there could be some trouble.
But if you don’t know that the ice is thick enough to support you, you’re going to dread
every step of the way. And that took me. And then I had had, you know, I’ve had a
number of experiences where I would think, and when I would share the meeting, I’d say,
I thought this, and then I thought that.
(1:00:47 – 1:01:23)
Well, this stuck to where I thought that was brilliant. You know, it changed my life when I
went with it. And that happens, and happens, and happens.
And then I had this vision. And I’m telling you, I want to have faith. And I was one of
those guys that was stuck into reason.
And it describes me, and I think we’re each described in there. And I want to have faith,
and so I make a commitment that I’m going to believe. I’m going to believe.
(1:01:23 – 1:01:57)
A belief is an emotional commitment, an emotional conviction that something is true. I
think belief is more than hope. I think belief is more than faith.
A belief is to know with certainty that the ice is going to support me. And in the big book,
after the ABCs, it says, being convinced, not being hopeful, not being faithful, being
convinced, we are at step three. So I set about becoming convinced, and I re-read the
book.
(1:01:57 – 1:03:35)
And I came to the place in the book where, talking about the prosaic steel girder with
electrons whirling around at incredible speeds and in accordance with precise law,
science tells us so, and we have no reason to doubt it. Every time I had read that, my
head had said, well, electrons don’t really whirl around each other. Oh, they do
something similar to that.
Basically, we think of electrons whirling around neutrons and the nucleus. And yes, there
are these forces, but Bill Wilson don’t seem to understand them. And what Bill Wilson
says, and you know, when I read it this time, I see, for the first time, what I’m doing.
I did not know I was doing that. And I saw I was doing that, and I backed off from it, and I
re-read it. It’s a, I don’t know, it’s a metaphor or whatever it is.
It’s just a little introduction to the idea that the perfectly logical assumption is that
underneath the material world and life as we see it, there’s an all-powerful, guiding,
creative intelligence, and that all of that conforms to precise law. Now, if we would have
said the immutable laws of nature, we would have been saying the same thing that I
thought I was thinking all the time. Except, for me, it was under the material world, not
life as we see it.
(1:03:36 – 1:04:15)
I decided to believe. That’s faith. I just decided to believe that it’s under life as we see it.
And then I went about convincing myself that it is life as I see it. But even before I
become strongly convinced of that, my life got easy. The dreadful assignment came
together like magic, and I looked like a genius and had nothing to do with it other than
be in divine order so that I had the opportunity to make this presentation.
(1:04:16 – 1:05:25)
After that, a problem came out of the presentation that one of the guys that worked for
me changed the state of the art. He had a perfect answer for that. You know, and my life
has been working that way.
I can just, and I don’t mean that I don’t get frightened in that, but I will tell you,
fundamentally, and Pat said it too, we have a great life. We get to do wonderful things.
And it’s stuff you can’t make happen.
You cannot make it happen. No way. We made an investment.
Let’s say we invested $200. Ever since we invested that $200, the least we’ve gotten
back a year is $500. That’s two, at least we’ve gotten back two and a half times our
initial investment.
I say to the guys I sponsor who are investors, make that happen. You know, if you’re
going to make your life work, do that. I don’t know how this stuff happens, but since I do
know, I do know my life is in divine order.
(1:05:25 – 1:06:24)
My perfectly logical assumption is that underneath the material world and life as we see
it, the circumstances and events of my life, the character and quality of my life, there’s
an all powerful guiding creative intelligence. And if I want to feel good, if I want to wrest
satisfaction and happiness out of this world, I must first have that conviction in my
consciousness. Then I need to manage well.
But if I only manage well, I’ll never get that good feeling. But if I have that sense of wellbeing, I’m telling you, it’s going to work. All I’ve got to do is participate in order to be
there when it happens.
It’s a hell of a deal I have because you’ve given it to me. For fun and for free, you’ve
given it to me. And you love me and I love you.
(1:06:26 – 1:06:48)
Joseph Campbell says, and this started for me in the seventh grade, kindred spirits,
there’s a spirit of the universe underlying the totality of things. Kindred spirits are in us.
And when my spirit resonates with your spirit, that feeling I get is called love.
(1:06:49 – 1:07:12)
That’s what happened with Pat and I, what happened to me when we were in the
seventh grade. And our spirits have always resonated. The Twelve Steps says, as we all
know, having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we practice these
principles in all our affairs.
(1:07:12 – 1:07:31)
Joseph Campbell says, there’s this spirit within me that is reality. And when the actions I
take in my life resonate with my innermost being, I feel the rapture of being alive. Thank
you guys, I love you.
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