vol 289. Outside Issues with David R.

SPEAKER_00 0:01 We believe that alcoholism is a disease, and that Alcoholics Anonymous is one solution to that disease. I'm here to bring you the voices of its members. Everyone that comes on the show, including myself, is an active member and has found recovery in the rooms of AA. As you listen, please take what works for you and leave the rest.

SPEAKER_01 0:26 My name's David, and I'm an alcoholic. I grew up in an alcoholic household. I'll start with that as far as going into some of the background of my childhood, which I think predicates to my alcoholism in some way, shape, or form. Like I said, I grew up in an alcoholic household.

My mother was the alcoholic. My father was what we call a normie. My family history is riddled with alcoholism. It's in both sides of my family.

Both my father's family and my mother's family is riddled with alcoholism. And my siblings are also alcoholic as well. My older sister and older brother are members of Alcoholics Anonymous. And so is my mother.

My mother now has 55 years of sobriety. Growing up, we grew up in a sleepy little beach town called Regondo Beach back in the 60s, which was kind of like a white trash beach neighborhood. It wasn't very prominent. It was lower middle class at best.

And um, that's what I grew up in. We grew up on the ocean on the beach, and uh we grew up feral, basically. We're feral little kids. We had no direction, and uh uh we grew up free willing and as children, just no direction.

My father, unfortunately, he couldn't stick around due to the fact of the death of the oldest boy in the family. He died at eight years of age, he drowned off the Redondo Beach Pier the day of his birthday party, and he couldn't stick around after that. So he had to divorce my mother after all the stuff they went through and all the trauma and damage and wreckage that took place there in that relationship. And after that, the wheels came off because there was no guardrails after my father left.

And I grew up in a home of alcoholism with violence and abuse, physical and some sexual abuse, not a lot, but some. And that was the environment we grew up in. I would climb out the window in the middle of the night, somewhere around midnight or one in the morning, and I would run the streets, vandalize and break an enry and do all kinds of things as an eight-year-old to 10, 11-year-old. And I did these things.

And that's why I say we grew up feral. There's no direction, there is no discipline, there is nothing. I would sleep in school, so my education suffered and my development suffered. I started drinking and drugging at when I was 10 years old.

The first time I got drunk, I drank a 40-ounce of Colt 45. And a guy had a bag of uh Mexican brown weed. Um, that was the old days when it was a $10 lid and it was a four-finger lid for 10 bucks. And it was mostly stems and seeds, and um, it made me feel better.

Made me feel like I fit inside my skin after drinking the 40 and and smoking the dope. It did. It just made me feel like I fit in my own skin. It gave me that ease and comfort that we look for and that nervous disposition that we have when we're kids.

I say it as what when I was a child, it's difficult to think of that because when my daughter was 10 years old, it struck me that for as young as she was, that I didn't feel that young when I was 10 years old. I didn't feel like I had a childhood. I felt like I just I missed out on a lot of a lot of things for a childhood. So I grew up rather quickly.

And with the abuse and everything else, I learned about um sex early. It's amazing what happens to you. The way we the way I processed information. And the drugs and the alcohol helped me process it to a place where I was comfortable with it.

I lived with my mom until I was 13 years of age. She remarried. After my father, she married another man who was another alcoholic, and he came in the home, and I used to watch them beat the hell out of each other and create this violence. I remember standing in the kitchen one time, and I watched my mom take a 12-inch cast iron skillet and crack it over his head.

And she broke the handle off of the skillet. She hit him so hard she broke the handle off of it, and it rang like a bell. And I remember that sound of that bone when it hit his head, and he fell backwards and he hit the floor and bounced. And the frying pan hit the floor and rang out again.

And I screamed, and I was probably eight years old at the time. And he jumped up and he looked at me and he says, I'm okay. And he turned around and looked at my mom, and then they went right back at it, and they were fist fighting and punching and doing their deal, doing the dance. And I tell a story called Bonding with Mom.

When I was young, she had him cornered in their bedroom, and I'm cheering her on, and I'm bonding with mom. This is this is me developing a relationship with my mom that had some connection for me, cheering her on, and I'm telling her, get that guy, get him, get him. And and she's kicking the door in, and she's she turns around, looking at me, she goes, Give me something to throw through the window. So I grab a bunch of plastic army men in a in a in a wonderbred bag, and she threw it through the window of the bedroom, and it and it just shattered the window, and everything went out flying all over inside the bedroom, and he busted out the bedroom door and started running out of the house, and she ran after him with a kitchen knife.

And I ran after her, yelling, get him, mom, get him, mom! And that was bonding with mom. That's the type of relationships we had in that household at that time. Christmas was a challenge.

We never knew what was going to happen. We never had any idea of what was going to take place. I knew there were Christmas trees. I knew that much.

I knew that a couple of them didn't survive the Christmas holiday. They didn't make it to Christmas. I remember that growing up, we were the house on the block that uh people would tell their kids don't play with those kids. Don't go over to that house.

That's the house I grew up in. It was the house that nobody was allowed to come over to. I used to say that we were the neighborhood entertainment because we would have the police department, the fire department, or paramedics, or any combination thereof at our house weekly, if not almost bi-weekly. I mean, it was crazy.

My mom tells a story, and I remember this. There's a time when this second husband was in the house and he said he was going to kill her, and she didn't have anywhere to go. So what she did is she punched the cop so that she would get arrested and get taken to jail so she would be safe. But what she also did is she left us in the house with that man.

And so we all had to fend for ourselves and we all had a scatter. So that's the kind of environment I was growing up in. It was chaos, it was chaotic, it was crazy. And people think, you know, that's insane.

And the thing I also know is that my mother loved us to the best of her ability, that there was some sense of something there, and uh, as demented as it was and as um distorted. And as I was growing up in that mismatch of emotions and things like that, I wasn't ill-equipped to be an emotional person. I became very angry, I was very agitated and just not a nice, nice person. I knew how to manipulate people.

I learned how to manipulate people very early in my age. So I that's what I grew up with. And my mom divorced that man, and she married another man who she met in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. So now I'm on stepdad two, and he was in the service and all that crazy stuff, and he tried his best, and she tried her best with her sobriety.

Um and the funny thing is, is she got sober when I was 10, and that's when I started drinking and drugging. She started trying to get sober when I was eight, and she finally got sober when I was 10. And that's when I started. And so with that, I got a resentment towards Alcoholics Anonymous because the drugs and alcohol took her away from us, and then AA took us away from us because she had to immerse herself in her recovery to find her way.

And then I've gotten real clear with that, and I've gotten okay with that through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. I ended up getting sober when I was 23 years of age. So I had 13 years of drinking and drugging, and that my poor father, he got a hold of me when I was 13. I finally had enough of my mom's stuff with all that craziness and everything.

And so at 13, I moved in with my father. I got permission by my mom that it was okay. And I moved in with my dad, and my dad was relieved to find it, finally get us away from her before she killed another one of his kids, as he was prone to say. Unbeknownst to him, I was already a full-blown alcoholic.

I was drinking as often as I could, as much as I could, whenever I could. And same thing with drugs. Drugs is a big part of my story. And I um I had tried a lot of different drugs by the time I was 15 years old.

I had done quite a bit of various things. And basically, the reason why I identify as an alcoholic is it started with alcohol and it ended with alcohol, and then there's a whole mismash of stuff in the middle. And my disease always has been based off if I start drinking, I do everything else, and I finish drinking. So at 13 years of age, I go live with my father, and he's an LA County fireman, and he's stationed in in Venice, California.

So I'm in Venice, California. I live over on the west side in a little town called Mar Vista, and I'm going to uh junior high school there, and I start doing things. I find my lower common denominator, and I start finding people I can run with. And I used to go sit out in front of the junior high school and smoke pot before I'd go to school.

So I would do that kind of stuff, and he had to pull me out of jail probably seven or eight times. Out of those times, the police department finally realized who my father was. They quit taking me into the old Venice police station and they would just ship me over to the firehouse that was right next door. So the embarrassment and the humiliation that I put my father through, I had no idea at the time I was doing these things.

And he would have to go to the firehouse, and he was the captain, and he'd have to walk in there and pick up his loaded and drunken son in front of all the other firemen. And that was my gift to my father, being his child. He didn't know what to do with me, he didn't know how to discipline me because nothing worked. I just didn't care.

I didn't have the capacity to understand, or I didn't know what compassion was at that time in my life. I just didn't know. I knew I was doing something wrong, but it seemed normal. It seemed like that's what we do, that's the normalcy.

That chaos and the creating all that that just the catastrophes that we create seemed normal. That was life. That's how we live life. And unfortunately, you know, he he did his best with what he could with me.

And then my father, his background on him a little bit, his father was an extremely violent alcoholic and beat his mother, beat his brothers and him, damn near killed two of my uncles in different situations, damn near killed my father in drunken rages. And my father swore he would never be like that man, so he just didn't drink out of bitterness. I mean, I've seen him drunk a couple times, but he would not be that guy. So my father kind of broke the chain on that.

He beat me a little bit when I was really young because he didn't know any better. And when he realized what he was doing, by the time I was seven, he realized what he was doing. He swore to me that he would never hit me again, and he kept that word, he kept that promise. And he never hit me again.

He never laid a hand on me after that again. I was 16 one time, he caught me in the neighbor's backyard smoking dope and drinking alcohol, and he got so upset. He was just so devastated with my behaviors and what I was doing. He told me later on in life that if he would have hit me at that point when he got me back in his backyard, that he would have killed me.

He wouldn't have he wouldn't have been able to stop himself. And I think that's probably where I get some of my anger from, is from the anger my father was was feeling from his childhood. So from there, I went to high school. I went to Venice High School, and my police record started growing a little bit with the different arrests.

I got taken off a Venice High School campus in handcuffs twice. And I I graduated barely, but I did graduate. And when I was coming up on 18, my father was gonna tell you, you know, said, I'm done. You're you're 18, you're on your own, get out, you're finished.

I've done my deal, I've done my obligation to you. You're 18, hit the bricks. So I sat down and I figured out my my budget, and I figured out what rent, gas for my truck, and things like that were gonna cost me, and I didn't have any money for partying. I was like, this is ridiculous.

How do I afford my drugs and alcohol? So I did what all smart guys do. I went in the service, I joined the Coast Guard. I went in the United States Coast Guard at 18 years of age in 1980.

No, 1978. I joined the Coast Guard in 1978. Spent a year up in Alaska. Drinking age was 18.

I loved it. I could go into bars and drink like normal. And I I loved it. It was great.

I learned how to drink in bars and stuff like that at 18. I come back home. I got stationed up in Seattle, Washington for three years, and I was involved in a couple different situations in Seattle. I was dealing drugs while I was in the service, and I was doing some very illegal things in the service that would have should have put me in prison.

And um, my father had a gentleman that was at his firehouse that was in the United States Coast Guard intelligence as a reserve Coast Guardman. And he asked him, he goes, Hey, my son's up in Seattle. Can you check on him and see how he's doing? The guy never got back to him.

He never never responded to my dad after he talked to him. So my dad ran into him on another shift and said, Hey, you never got back to me about my son. And he turned around, looked at him, and says, You never asked me about your son. Forget about it.

You never asked. So my dad had to drop it. He tells me this after after years later, he told me this story. And so while I'm up there, I'm I'm dealing drugs and I'm drinking and I'm running ragged.

And I would answer my phone and I would hear a click, and I would get done with the conversation on the phone, and I'd hear another click. So years later, I realized my phone was tapped. And I was coming up for reenlistment. My my tour duty was coming to an end of April 82.

And they put you at a desk and they give you your reenlistment papers and they give you your discharge papers, and you can sign either one. And so I signed my discharge papers. But before I signed those papers, the warrant officer came by me and he was he was a real good stand-up kind of guy. And he looked at me and he goes, Whoa, whoa, whoa, which which ones are you signing here?

Are you re-enlisting or are you going for discharge? And I looked at him, I said, I'm going for discharge. And he goes, Good. He goes, those are the right papers for you to sign.

So I signed the discharge papers. I left the service and I got out. Later I found out that if I would have signed the re-enlistment papers, they were going to throw me in prison. They allowed me to get out.

They figured it was easier for them to allow me to take my discharge and get out of the service and move on. So that's what that so God did for me what I could not do for myself on that one. I don't know how or why I dodged a bullet on going to prison. Even when I was 17, 18, doing the things I was doing, I'm it amazes me that I didn't do any prison time.

So I got discharged. Where do all big tough guys go? They go back home to mommy. Now my mom's been sober for a while.

And I go back into the South Bay, and she's living in Hermosa Beach at this time. So I'm back there and um she she checks with her now her fourth husband. And she asked him if it was okay. He said, sure, he's sober, he's got a good program.

And um, so they let me move into the to the guest room. And I'm in this guest room with another alcoholic who's trying to sober up as well. And they're running a sober home. Their home is a sober home, and their front door is never locked, it's never closed.

There's always people of sobriety in the rooms. It's it's comical. Just there's there's all this love and compassion in this house. These people are caring for one another, they're present for one another, and they're supporting one another.

And here comes this alcoholic kid. You know, I'm 22 at the time, and I'm drinking, and I'm partying, and I'm finding my lower companions, and I'm running around, and and they're allowing me to be exactly who I am. There's no judgment. There's they're not telling me I'm an alcoholic, they're not saying anything to me.

They're just laughing at me when I come into the house and I'm drunk and I'm loaded, and um, all the sober people are just sitting there and they just smile and nod and they let me be exactly who I am. Meanwhile, my older brother had gotten sober while I was in the service, and he starts 12-stepping me with all these other guys. There's about eight of them. Eight of these guys started 12-stepping me, and I didn't know what they were doing, I had no clue.

And they just started loving on me. They started taking me surfing, and I grew up surfing, and I always surfed, and the ocean was my refuge. And these guys started taking me surfing with them all the time, and they'd come pick me up and I'd be all hung over, but I'd have to man up because that's what you do, right? You man up, and they'd drag me out in the ocean and I'd go out there with them and stuff, and they just started loving on me.

They'd never once criticize, they never once said anything bad to me. They would give me hugs and I'd bristle, I'd get all pissy, and you know, real men don't do that, and they would laugh and they would just have fun, and they'd just tell me it's okay, you're all right. And they showed me compassion that I was unfamiliar with. And they gave me this gift that I was unaware of that they were giving to me.

And one day before I got sober, I'm sitting out in the water, and it was a beautiful summer day. It was probably July 2nd or 3rd, probably the second, I think, somewhere around there. And these two goofballs come paddling out behind everybody else, and they got a Ziploc baggie, and in the baggie, they got a firecracker, a book of matches, and a dishcloth. And they're laughing and they're giggling and they're just smiling, and their eyes are alive and sparkling.

And I'm like going, what the heck is going on here? And they unzip this this baggie and they try to light this firecracker. They're trying to dry their hands, trying to light the match, and they're sitting in the water on surfboards and they just can't get it done. They can't even light a match, and they're just laughing.

And something inside of me realized that this was just joy. This was just happiness. Even in the failure of what they were trying to do, there was great, great joy, and it stunned me. It just didn't make sense to me.

In the eyes, the the just a sparkle in their eyes. So the next night I go out drinking, doing what I'm doing, and it's not working for me. They succeeded. They planted that mustard seed in me, and it took root.

And they succeeded in disrupting my alcoholism to a point where I would pause and take a moment. And that night I came home to my mom's house, and her husband was sitting there, and and uh he looked at me and he says, David, you're drunk. And I said, I know. And I started crying.

And I said, I think I'm an alcoholic. And he says, Call your brother. So I take the phone and I call my brother, and he gets on the phone, he goes, Yay, and I and I'm crying, and I go, I think I'm an alcoholic. And he goes, Good.

He goes, There's a morning, there's a morning meeting at eight o'clock, be there tomorrow morning, eight o'clock. And he hung up the phone. And I was like, what the hell? So I went to bed and I set an alarm.

I got up and I went to that meeting at eight o'clock in the morning. I was at that meeting. And one of the guys that was doing the firecracker routine was there, and his name was Dan, and he became my very first monster. So I went to that morning meeting, and we're standing outside after the meeting, and I'm like, I don't know what to do.

And he put his arm around me and he said to me, He goes, I got you. You're okay. I got you. You're you're good, man.

He goes, You're gonna spend the day with me. We're gonna go have fun. We're gonna go to barbecues and we're gonna have a good time. And this is the 4th of July of 1983.

And he took me around to all these different houses and homes and barbecues and potlocks and all this stuff, and it was unbelievable. I'm gonna backtrack just a little bit. When he came up to me and told me he had me and he was gonna take me to all these places, I told him, I go, wait a minute, I got to go to my car. And I had this broken down old beater, you know, the yeah, just a drunken car.

And I went over to this thing and I pulled out my fifth, I had a fifth of black velvet underneath the uh driver's seat, and it was about maybe an inch or so, two fingers left in the bottom of the bottle. And I went over to a trash can and I opened it up and I poured it out and I dropped that in the trash can. And I can sit here today and say that that was the last time I've ever had any alcohol was that night before. And I haven't touched anything since.

And it's been 42 years to this day that I've been sober, clean and sober. And that was the beginning of my journey into sobriety with this man, Dan. And in the first 18 months of sobriety, he took me through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And we did all 12 steps.

Um, when I did my first four step, Dan was pretty smart. He he allowed me to do my four step, and I did my whole four step, I shared everything with him. I felt like this big relief, and I was like, Oh, so this is great. And I did my fifth step, and oh, isn't this wonderful?

And he turned around and he looked at me and he says, Yeah, he goes, You did really good taking everybody else's inventory. Where's yours? And he had me rewrite it. He had me take accountability for my actions, he had me look at what I really had done and what my motives were behind the things that I had done.

He made sure that I was clear on who I was at that time. SPEAKER_03 24:35 He walked me through that, makes me cry. I love that man. He saved my life.

He gave me the privilege. SPEAKER_01 24:47 Walt 12 got for me to be exactly who I was, and he gave me the opportunity in sobriety to become more. He allowed me to become a better man. And I owe him a great deal.

And the real sad part of the story is that Dan went out when he had 18 months of sobriety. And when he went out, he couldn't come back into the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous because this was 1984, and he couldn't share about what was going on for him in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous because it wasn't appropriate to talk about drug addiction at that time in AA meetings. And it's and it it killed me. I watched that man sit in meetings and suffer in silence.

And I tried to carry the message he carried to me. I tried to get him to go to go to dinner or go to lunch or or go to another meeting or or do these things and he couldn't do it. He and he ended up committing suicide behind his disease. He ended up dying because he couldn't share appropriately inside of an AA meeting.

And that's one of the hottest buttons for me today is is the fact that the hypocrisy that we have about this. Where's your spirituality if you can't sit there for five minutes and allow somebody to share something to save their life? And then after the meeting, take that love and compassion that Alcoholics Anonymous talks about and talk to this person and give them love and support and share with them that there are other ways of recovery, that there's NA, CA, ACA, all that stuff, and or share in a general way. But let them know that they have support and some compassion.

It amazes me that we can be so hypocritical sometimes because people don't share appropriately. And I'll say this if you're telling me that all I can talk about is alcoholism, right? All I can do is talk about alcoholism and that everything else is an outside issue, then that means your cancer, your job, your wife, or your husband, your significant other, your family, they're all outside issues. But what the big book Alcoholics Anonymous tells me is that it's a new way of living life.

It's a new way of dealing with life on life's terms. And life on life's terms has all of that in it. So why are we shutting people down? Because they share inappropriately.

And I do understand that some people share things in too much detail, and that definitely is should be off limits. We share in a general way, is what the book tells me. And if somebody shares in a general way what's going on with them, do I not have the love and the compassion and the spirituality to give them five minutes of my time to allow them the dignity that I was allowed? I need to be that's a big thing for me.

And when I'm in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, that's what I found. Yeah, and the old timers were rough and tough, and they would throw you $2 and tell you to go get done if you're not done, quit taking up somebody else's seat and all that. There was all that, too. But there's a lot of fun about it, also.

There's a lot of humor and and stuff. So I moved on to my second sponsor, and he was a book Nazi. He was so into the book and so much about the book. And he took me through the big book again, and I redid all my steps again, and then he took me through the 12 and 12, and we fine-tuned everything about the 12 and 12, and then he made me become a GSR so I would find out about the traditions.

And I fell in love with the 12 and 12 because of the traditions. I fell in love with Alcoholics Anonymous because of the traditions, and because it would tell me how I'm supposed to conduct myself inside of meetings and how AA is it functions as a as a society. And it gave me great direction, it gave me great support and allowed me to support meetings in a way that I never knew I could, and to carry the message. So Robert got real busy with his life.

He he was married and he his father was ill, and he took over his father's business, and he had two boys, and he just his life got real busy, and so he hadn't had didn't have much time for me anymore. Like I wanted. And so there's this third gentleman I ran into who had everything I thought I thought I wanted. He had money, marbles, and chalk, right?

He had the prestige and all that stuff. He had all this stuff going for himself that I thought, oh wow, I'd like that. And so I went to him and I was running the show with him. I said, okay, so we're gonna do the steps, right?

And he's a yeah, yeah, sure, kid. And I go, okay, and I'll do an inventory. Yeah, yeah, sure, kid. And I did an inventory.

And when I sat down with him and I did my fifth step, I got done doing my fifth step with him. And I turned around, looked at him and said, Okay, so now I got to look at six and seven and make a list of people I need to make amends to, right? And he goes, eh, fuck those people. And all of a sudden I went, Whoa, wait a minute.

Wait a minute. This is not the AAI. I'm in trouble. I'm in big trouble here.

And when that happened, I had to put the brakes on, and I was at a loss. So immediately dropped him as a sponsor. My wife and I, by this time, I'll get to the part about the my wife. Um, we were moving to out of the South Bay area over to Long Beach, where I live now.

And in that process, I spent six years away from Alcoholics Anonymous from 12 years of sobriety to 18 years of sobriety. I didn't work much of a program. And the 12 years is where I lost this the guy as a sponsor and stuff. And so I kind of ran on my own scheme thinking I knew better.

And the insanity, the chaos, everything returned tenfold. The only thing I did right is I didn't drink or drug. Let me backtrack a little bit to the relationship with my wife. I met my wife when I had three days of sobriety.

I was detoxing at my mom's house and I was shaking and baking and had the heebie jeebies and all that going on. And uh walked out in my mom's living room after this one other guy who was not sober at the time, I was got angry at. And I walked in my mom's living room and threw a fit. And my mom told me to go back in the room, put a shirt on because I was I was just angry.

And then she looked at Claudia and told her, she goes, take him for a walk down on the beach, make sure he doesn't go into any bars and just bring him back sober. She said, Well, okay. So I walk out and my mom says, This she's gonna take you for a walk. And all of a sudden I was like, Oh, I calmed down quite a bit, and we went for a walk, and that is how I met Claudia.

So we talked and we got down towards where the bars were by their most appear, and she turned me around and walked me back to the house. And we became friends. We started meeting up all the time at the beach and hanging out. I was on unemployment because I was unemployable, and she was working nights, so we had the days together at the beach, and we became very good friends.

Two months later, we started dating. Two years later, we got married, and we've been married ever since. We just celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. We've had a wonderful life.

It has not been easy. We have a 31-year-old daughter who's never seen either one of us drunk or loaded. My daughter has never seen any violence in her home. My daughter had a childhood with two loving, caring, compassionate parents.

She was supported, she was loved, she was protected. I had the opportunity to become a wonderful, I'll say this, a wonderful father. She might say different, but I got to support my daughter and help her do things in her life. And she has the ability to know that she's loved and she's safe and that she has our support no matter what.

With all the things she's gone through her life, we've always had her back and she's known it. And we made certain that she knew we had her back and that she was protected. And I'm truly grateful for what Alcoholics Anonymous allowed me to do was to give my daughter the childhood that I didn't have. That her childhood was full of love and compassion, discipline, and there was discipline, and um that she she knew she was supported and that she was okay, and that she would she didn't have to want for anything.

See, through Alcoholics Anonymous, I became very employable and I had a very good career um with an aerospace company. And I worked for Aerospace Company for 28 years, and I retired from that company and I worked for myself for five years. My wife and I are successful. We have good lives.

We're both retired and we live well. My daughter's 31 years old. She's engaged to be married, and she is a Long Beach City school teacher, and she's a wonderful human being, and as a direct result of Alcoholics Anonymous, I can't give Alcoholics Anonymous enough credit for these gifts, for these wonderful things that they've done for us. And the root, what recovery has done for me to make me somebody who has compassion and understanding and empathy, and who can love somebody unconditionally without regard for want or reward.

So my wife and I left Hermosa Beach, moved to Long Beach. I went insane for six years, and uh the company I was working for at the time was shipping me over to uh the UK for a project that I was gonna support and work with. So I'm in a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean and I'm romancing the drink. And this is at 18 years of sobriety.

I'm romancing the drink, and um a thought comes through the back of my head, and I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why. But the thought, clear as a bell, came through my head, you're an alcoholic, you're crazy. I realize that okay, I need to find a meeting when I land. And when I get when I get there, I need to find an A meeting.

So I get there and they take me over to the hotel I'm gonna be living at for a while, and I get on the phone and I get an operator and I said, Hey, I'm looking for Alcoholics Anonymous, and they have zero tolerance for that kind of stuff, they're not warm and fuzzy about it, and she rattled this number off super fast, and I didn't understand half of it, and I asked her if she could slow it down so I could write it down so I would have it, and she said it again, and I asked a third time, and she said it again and hung up, and I still didn't have the number, and so I'm struggling. I'm struggling with this this trying to get this phone number for Alcoholics Anonymous in London. So I called the operator again and I get the same operator. And fortunately for me, what she did, I said very clearly, I said, I'm super sorry, I'm really sorry, but I can you give me each number individually so I can write it down, please?

And she did that. She gave me each number one at a time, and then she hung up. And fortunately, I dialed that number and it was the right number, and I got a hold of somebody, and I started going to meetings again. I got involved in Alcoholics Anonymous again.

And when I was I was in the UK for 90 days, and I was by myself, my wife and daughter were home, and I was um going to meetings every night. Every night I would go to a meeting. I would go work and I would go to meetings, and that's what I did for 90 days. And when I came home, I went, I went, I started going to meetings again, and I re-immersed myself into my program of recovery, and that was at 18 years of sobriety.

And I started sponsoring guys again, and I started working steps again, and I started going through the steps again, and I got a sponsor. I've had the same sponsor since that day. I got it back and I started started scoping out a new sponsor. Within 30 days, I had a new sponsor, and he's been my sponsor since.

And he knows who I am, he knows what I am, he knows my family. I've done, oh man, I've done inventories, amazing inventories. I want to talk about my dad a little bit because this is one of the biggest gifts for me in sobriety, is my father. Because when my father told me to leave his home, he told me he never wanted to see me again.

He was done. And because of the type of person I was at that time, I didn't blame him. So I did these inventories and all these things, and I had about five years of sobriety one time. And I was up at my father's home in Northern California, and nobody was around.

And it was just him and I. And it was like the perfect opportunity. And my sponsor, Robert, at the time told me, he goes, You're gonna sit on your hands and you're gonna open your ears and you're gonna shut your mouth and you're gonna allow that man to say what he needs to say when you make your amends to him. And I said, Okay.

And I literally, I asked him if I asked my father, I go, can we sit down for a minute? I'd like to talk to you for a minute. And he goes, Yeah, sure. Because we had already kind of made amends a little bit, but I'd never made my direct amends to him until then.

And we sat down at his dining room table and I said, I want to apologize to you for all the things that I had done. And I'm really, I'm deeply sorry for what I had done. And he looked at me, and I, and as soon as he looked at me, I sat on my hands. Literally, I sat on my hands, and I looked directly at him and he says, You have no idea what you have done.

And I go, You're right. I don't. And he goes, Well, let me tell you. And that man unloaded all the bio.

He unloaded all the all the stuff that was that went on for him while I was living with him from 13 to 18 years of age, five years of torture. And some of the things he told me was this he was an LA County fireman out of the Venice Firehouse. My brother and I were drinking and drugging at that time, and we're running the streets of Venice, California, and we're doing some dastardly things. Little did I know that my father would get the DOA calls when he was on duty, and they would go out and they would find the overdoses inside the flea bag apartment buildings and hotels where people would party and they would have to bag and tag these bodies.

And every time my father went out on one of those calls, his thought was which one of my boys am I putting in a bag tonight? He had already lost one son the day of his son's birthday party, his namesake, when that boy was eight years old. And at that time I was four. So now he's looking at his two sons that are out there running and gunning.

And what kind of emotional wreckage am I putting that man through? The pain that I'm that I'm putting him through. That's on me. And then he told me he would lay in bed at night when he wasn't at work.

He would be at home and he'd wait to hear the side gate open and close and know that I made it home, that I was okay. That's emotional blackmail, that's torture. And I put that man through that. You know, I did that to him.

That's on me. So my amends to him, when I made that amends to him, was to sit there and allow him to say whatever it was he said to find the peace that he got to say it out loud to me directly. And I've heard through my family that he still talks about that day on occasion. He will share that moment.

And the thing he said to me at the very end of it all was if you're really sorry, if you really mean what you mean, you will never drink or do drugs again. And I said, You got it. So when a beer looks really good, or a pot looks really good, or some drink looks really good, the thing that I see is my father. And I see the wreckage and the pain that those things created in my life.

And it reminds me that I don't have any business drinking or drugging. Because when I do, I destroy everything around me without remorse and without guilt. And that's horrific. And that's not who I am today.

That's not who I want to be today. I've found out that for me, recovery means more than just going to meetings and just sharing and doing things like that. What it means for me is to participate in life on life's terms, to suit up, show up, and do the things that I'm required to do to make the life better for the people around me, to support my wife and the things that she's doing, and then let her know that she's loved and supported, and that I care for her. I do a thing for my wife.

My sponsor and I figured out one of the things I need to do so my wife knows that she's loved unconditionally, is that she really enjoys being able to get up in the morning and just turn the coffee pot on and have it percolate and it's all done. And I would and I started doing that for her a few years ago. This is a while back. I started doing this, and I started making the coffee for her every morning.

Now, granted, there are times I'm standing there at that coffee pot and I go, She don't deserve anything. I why am I doing that? And I'm making that coffee because it's unconditional. And that anger and that expression that I'm that I'm saying is on me.

It's about me. It's my reaction, it's my expectations. It has nothing to do with her. And I'll tell you this I've done thousands, uh hundreds of inventories on my wife, and you know what?

Not one of those inventories had anything to do with her. It was all about me. Nothing to do with her. It had to do with my my unsolicited expectations.

All those, oh, just the insanity of it. What I get to do today is I get to look at my wife with love and compassion and understanding most of the time. If I can get out of my own way, I'm good. You know, and I get to do the same thing with my daughter.

You know, I I continue to do inventories, I continue to do the things that I'm doing because it gives me a life beyond my wildest dreams. And I don't mean money-wise or materialistically, I mean the peace and freedom that I find in my spirit and my soul, the ease and comfort that I was looking for in the drugs and alcohol that I have today in my life. I get to laugh, I get to find humor, I get to find love in my life today. I get to see the glory and the beauty in the world as it is.

You know, and I don't have to force anything or or create something that isn't there. And I get I get peace in my life today, and I can't, I can't. I can't buy it, I can't sell it, but I can work for it. And I get to work for it through my recovery and Alcoholics Anonymous.

It always end with this. I don't have my recovery without the help of Alcoholics Anonymous and the people in the rooms of AA. And I want to thank everybody that I've ever encountered and those I haven't yet. Thank you for my sobriety and my life today.

That's it. SPEAKER_00 45:21 Thank you, David. SPEAKER_01 45:23 Was that long enough? SPEAKER_00 45:25 That was perfect.

Thank you for your service. I even though you were having bad behavior while you were in the service, I appreciate your courage and bravery. SPEAKER_01 45:36 Thank you. I do do some good stuff, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:41 Well, I don't know. I mean, 1978, I just finished watching the turning point Vietnam War yesterday because I was in bed sick all day. And it's the second time I've watched it. It I can't imagine what it looked like in 1978 going into the military.

SPEAKER_01 46:05 Um, it was it was crazy, but I I would never went over. Well, I went to Alaska and Seattle, so but I did a lot of search and rescue work, is what I did. And so I got to save some lives and do some good things, which is pretty crazy when I think about it. I think deep down I was a decent human being even when I wasn't.

I just didn't know it. SPEAKER_00 46:31 I find that there's a lot of really good people in the rooms. The some of the best people I know are in the rooms. We just had happen to have addiction, and we also happen to have the miracle of recovery, or we're working on experiencing the miracle.

SPEAKER_01 46:51 Some of the scariest men that I know in recovery are phenomenal human beings when they're not drinking and drugging. I mean, I sponsored a guy who he was sworn into a couple life sentences in prison. He spent most of his life in prisons, and he came out of prison and he got sober and he became one of the biggest, nicest guys. He'd pick my daughter up from high school and take her to swim practice for us.

SPEAKER_00 47:15 Oh God. SPEAKER_01 47:16 Yeah. Yeah. He was, he was, he, and he loved that girl.

He loved my daughter, and he he would do anything for her. And even when we talked, and he's in prison again. He's back in prison because he drank again. But he's getting sober in prison, you know, and I'm praying for him, I'm hoping for him.

And we still talk. You know, he'll call me every now and again, and we still talk. I never turn my back on him. We talked even when he was drinking.

That's one of the things that I've learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't give up on anybody. I've had a number of guys I've sponsored drink and drug again, and I've stayed their friend. My friend is not conditional.

It can't be. SPEAKER_00 48:01 I remember when I had a little bit of time. This gentleman came into the my home group who had just gotten out of jail, and he shared that this other old timer in the room would call him about once a year and always take his calls and just be the little piece of AA that stayed with him through his, I don't know, what seems like a hundred years now, some long sentence that this man had just gotten out of has stayed with me. So I imagine you are somebody's steady drumbeat of AA.

SPEAKER_01 48:41 I try to be. SPEAKER_00 48:44 Yeah. unknown 48:45 Yeah. SPEAKER_00 48:45 After 42 years, I mean, you must collect a lot of them.

SPEAKER_01 48:51 I got a couple. There's a couple. Yeah, there is. There's some guys that don't that that I've lost contact with because I'd call them and then um they wouldn't respond, and I'd call them again and they wouldn't respond, and then I'd I'd give them three shots, or or I'd get a phone no longer in service, kind of thing.

So I would lose contact that way. You know, but for the most part, I still still give them a call and talk to them and stuff and see how they're doing. SPEAKER_00 49:22 What about your family? You have two siblings, and you said your I think you said your mom has 50 or 55 years.

Is that is that right? SPEAKER_01 49:33 Yeah, my mom has 55 years. She was a big-time circuit speaker for a lot of years. You might have heard of her Franny Smith or Franny S.

SPEAKER_00 49:42 Okay. That's your mom. SPEAKER_01 49:45 That's my mom. So if you ever find a uh tape of her or something, she tells the story about Buddy's death, my brother's death off of Redondo Pier, and and her take on it.

SPEAKER_00 49:56 Hmm. SPEAKER_01 49:57 It's pretty wild. SPEAKER_00 49:59 So your mother's still alive. SPEAKER_01 50:03 Yes, both my parents are still alive.

My father's 95 and my mother's 91. SPEAKER_00 50:10 That is amazing. SPEAKER_01 50:12 Yeah, I know. I know.

There are people, you know, that are my age and their parents have been long gone. And I still have both of them. SPEAKER_00 50:22 Well, that bodes well for your longevity. SPEAKER_01 50:25 We'll see.

SPEAKER_00 50:27 But what is this like? Having, I mean, it's really a family affair. SPEAKER_01 50:32 Mm-hmm. My older sister's got 14 years.

My brother, he would have, he had um, he went out with 15 years, struggled, and bounced around, tried different groups, tried the Pacific Group, tried uh Roxbury and all these other groups he went through. And he's living next door to my sister in Northern California. And he, I think he's got 11 or not sure how much time he has. SPEAKER_00 51:00 Say that again, 11 or 12?

SPEAKER_01 51:03 Yeah, somewhere around there, I think. Yeah. SPEAKER_00 51:06 Oh, okay. SPEAKER_01 51:07 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:09 That's great. And your mom is down there with you? SPEAKER_01 51:14 Yeah, my mom lives in Garden, and her husband is my sponsor. Her fourth husband is my sponsor.

SPEAKER_00 51:24 Okay, wait a minute. Let me go back to my notes here. SPEAKER_01 51:30 Yeah. SPEAKER_00 51:31 I never you move back home after the military, right?

SPEAKER_01 51:37 Yes. SPEAKER_00 51:38 She's on her fourth husband. SPEAKER_01 51:40 Yes. You move into the guest room.

SPEAKER_00 51:42 You happen. Okay, she's still married to him. He's still alive, too. This is this is crazy.

And then you happen to go on a walk with your wife. SPEAKER_01 51:52 Yes. Three days sober. SPEAKER_00 51:56 And then and then your mother's husband becomes your sponsor.

SPEAKER_01 52:02 Yes, when I had 18 years of sobriety. SPEAKER_00 52:06 So he knows you very well. SPEAKER_01 52:09 Oh, he saw my last drunk. He was sitting there when I was drunk.

He saw he's the one who told me to call my brother. He saw my last drunk. I still have friends that used to be in that house that would watch me walk in drunk. One of my wife's best friends knew me before I knew Claudia, and Claudia knew her before she knew me.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's it's it's so crazy. It's it's uh yeah, it's wild. My wife just celebrated 43 years of sobriety.

She's got nine more months than I do. SPEAKER_00 52:46 I think I have three more questions. What does step 11 look like with 42 years of sobriety? SPEAKER_01 52:56 I find God in all the things I see.

For me, it's a it's a moment. It's I can't it's like a moment of gratitude for me. I I can be sitting in my backyard and just see a butterfly, or just not even see anything, just be in the backyard and just get that feeling of of appreciation and gratitude, and have that feeling of peace and serenity, or I can even be walking my dogs and see something that puts a smile on my face that makes me say, Yeah, the world's right. It's it's also being able to turn around and acknowledge the fact that I'm not in charge.

I have no control over what's going on other than my reaction to it. You know what I mean? Yeah, there's a sense of just just release and and do the best I can without doing any harm. Yeah, it's and there's you know, that's it's kind of like I'll walk around and and something will something will happen, and my prayer is thank you.

Because there are moments that are sublime and there are moments that are chaotic. And in the middle of that chaos, my sponsor and I talk about the eye of the storm. Find the eye, be in the eye. In the midst of the chaos and all that craziness, be in the eye, you know, be the calm.

SPEAKER_00 54:27 That's a very good answer. You said my sponsor, and I wanted to interrupt and make a joke and say, you mean your stepdad? SPEAKER_01 54:35 Yes, yes, I do. SPEAKER_00 54:40 Uh pausing and not making dumb jokes is what I'm oh no, that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 54:47 You can make dumb jokes, it's okay. I love it. SPEAKER_00 54:50 You are a dad, so the bar's low. SPEAKER_01 54:53 That's right.

I got dad jokes. SPEAKER_00 54:55 That's right, that's right. Um, okay, so let's pause for a minute and see if anything surfaces, if there's anything that you left out or anything that you would like to share. SPEAKER_01 55:10 I visited my brother's grave recently.

And being that my dad's 95 years old, and my father knows he's at the end of his time as well as I do, and I visited my father recently, and we sat and talked for six hours. I hung out with my dad, just him and I. And when I visited my brother's grave site, as the biggest loss from my father, he still hasn't gotten over the death of his son. I told Buddy at his gravesite, I go, make sure you say hi to Pop when you see him and give him a hug for me.

And uh that doesn't come from not having faith. That comes from having faith and trust in a power greater than myself that I was unwilling to accept as a child in the Catholic Church because of the my perception of a power of a power greater than myself at that time when I was a child was a punishing, unjust God. And today that's not the word, that's not my that's not my God today. You know, my God, I see him in the people that in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.

My God is love and compassion. SPEAKER_03 56:34 That's that's what I that's the goal here, right? SPEAKER_00 56:39 Yeah. That's a very sweet story and heartbreaking to hear at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 56:48 Yeah, it's it's life. You know, it's life on life's terms, it's the reality that none of us are gonna get out of this game alive. You know, we we get to we get to do what we do and and hopefully we leave it better than we found it. SPEAKER_03 57:06 Yeah.

That's the hope. SPEAKER_00 57:13 Okay, David, final question for the listener who is suffering. What message would you like to leave them with? SPEAKER_01 57:24 Don't give up.

Don't give up, don't give into it. Don't hang in there and fight. Fight for your life. SPEAKER_00 57:33 For more information, read the first 164 pages of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous or visit keepcoming back.net.