Jerry J. from Dallas TX at a London Conference

For me, would you help me welcome Jerry Jay from Dallas, TX.

So is this really it's not working, is it? This works. That does. All right. If I can hold it up for an hour, I guess I can do it. If y'all stand up in the back.

My name is Jerry Jones and I'm an alcoholic.

By the grace of God and because this program works, I've been sold since January, the first of 1973, for which I'm very grateful. I'm also very grateful to be asked to come to your country and to share with you. It's really a privilege and an honor to be with you and have an opportunity to tell you something about myself. I've been very well treated since I've been here.

Ernie called me regularly trying to find out when I was coming and how got me at the airport and everything's been good, just really good. Since I I've arrived. I've had a great met a lot of you and I've enjoyed it very much. I special weekend for me, special weekend for me. This is my Al Anon and my 35th wedding anniversary.

I had to bring her this time because I didn't want you to think I hit her.

And believe me, I am smart enough not to hit an Eleanor.

Aye, and not only an alcoholic,

but I and the adult spouse of an Al Anon.

I have suffered from Al Anon brutality

when I was drinking. One night I was alone while she had gone to one of those meetings

along with my dog,

and as I sat there in the solitude of my den was my bottle

thinking about my life and those who had harmed me.

A great proof came to me, great truth came to me and when my wife came in I said I have just come upon a great truth.

And the truth is there's only one thing in the world that loves me, and that is this dog.

And I said it's not fair. It is not right or fair because everyone should have at least two

things are people to love.

A tear began to trickle slowly down much easier, and she looked at me with those

steamy blue al Anon eyes.

She said I'm going to talk to my sponsor

and she went to phone and called her sponsor and she came back in just a few minutes and said my sponsor says you're right, we're going to get you another dog.

She hasn't softened a lot in the intervening years. Just recently I was talking to her and I said, Billy, I've had a fair amount of success in life and made some money and and we're pretty comfortable.

But I wonder would you love me if I didn't have any money

and if I were drunk? And she looked at me and she said, Jerry, certainly I would love you. I would miss you, but I would love you

'LL see a little while as we talk. She really was an instrument of the power that we seek. That really saved me. I think very highly about it on. I didn't like to hear out on speakers when I got here because I like to think that I hadn't heard anyone but myself.

But I had, and that was a part of the disease of alcoholism and I had to come to,

I told you I

about two things. I am being the spouse of an alumni and an alcoholic, and I'm also a lawyer. I'm a Texan.

I'm from a different country than you. And as I go along and tell you things about me, then I began to with, if I'm not careful to withdraw, to get further and further away from you. We become different the more things I give you. Now there might be a few people that can say, well, I'm a lawyer to or I come from Texas or I'm an American or United United States of American citizen. I could say some of those things and you might identify with some of those. I could say I'm a man. Many of you could identify with that, but

we have a tendency that to compartmentalize ourselves and the more we compartmentalize ourselves, the more we become isolated and lonely. And that's what I was when I got here. I think loneliness is probably one of the most common symptoms of the alcoholic and I'm probably that's true of the alumin as well.

Nobody knows. Nobody knows. We don't think anybody knows,

and Alcoholics Anonymous does away with that. When I tell you I'm an alcoholic,

we can right away begin to identify whether you're out Anon alatin or alcoholic. We've all shared

the experience of a common disease. We've all been there together. Our book says

that we not only share a common problem, but we share a common solution,

and I'm going to have to talk about the problem so we can communicate

well enough to talk about the solution. The solution is a power.

Lack of power was our dilemma.

The solution is the way we make contact with that power, the way we enlist the aid of a power greater than ourselves.

Our book tells us that in this search we are all equal.

It says that if what we learn and feel

and no means anything at all,

it is that we are all children of a living Creator, no matter what our race, color, our creed,

and that each of us can form a relationship with that creator if we have the willingness and the honesty enough to try. And what I'd like to do is says we can form that relationship on simple and understandable terms if we try that way. So in as simple a way as I can, I would like to share with you my search for that power and my

success or lack of success in that endeavor.

When it came to Alcoholics Anonymous, I knew absolutely nothing about alcoholism. I suppose if you had asked me to define an alcoholic, I would have given you some kind of picture

of some guy standing in the soup line somewhere in an overcoat, carried a brown bag, that kind of person. That's what I guess I really, really thought I've heard people described as Alcoholics, but they were people that didn't seem to be much like me. And so I had resistance to the to the word alcoholism.

I didn't want to say when I first went to the meetings where we went around in circles and said our name and said I'm an alcoholic. Gosh, it's stuck right in my throat. Had a terrible time spitting that word out. I did not want to be an alcohol.

I didn't know what it was. I didn't believe it was a disease. That was a cop out the way I saw it until later on. I came to understand a little bit about the fact that alcohol is is a disease.

Alcoholism is a disease because it has certain

common symptoms among his sufferers. We all react to this disease in certain ways. For example, it has a physical side. It has a physical side that when I take a drink as an alcoholic, something happens to me.

Something in my body, a biochemical reaction or something sends a signal to my brain and it the signal it always sends to my brain is mine. That was good.

I think we'll have another one of those and we have another one of those and another one of those until we've had too many of those. Now I've got another part of it and that's mental. Basically. It's called the obsession. An obsession is a big thought,

so vague it pushes all the other thoughts you might have out of your mind. And it is for me. A drink would make it better. I don't care what it is, a drink would make it better. It could be a wedding, it could be a funeral, it could be whatever, you know, happy day, good day, bad day, whatever. Just a drink would make it better. And that got very deep seated in my mind.

I found alcohol was my solution to life.

The solution to alcoholism seems to be seems to be not to drink. Lots of people led me to believe that I would be a better man, lawyer, family man, whatever, if I just didn't drink as much as I drink.

So it seemed to me that what I needed to do was learn how to control my drinking,

and I tried to control my drinking style. I didn't have much luck, but I tried. Never occurred to me. I didn't really understand the underlying problem of this.

Alcoholics Anonymous has got another interesting

sidelight. You hear people talk from this podium all time and they think of all sorts of things in their past that help them remember and, and illustrate the truth of this program. And I, I learned about alcoholism one night when I was sitting in a meeting listening somebody talk and I remembered my dog. I was raised out in West TX on a farm and we had a dog. My dog's name was Patrick's. He was mostly an English bulldog.

He was a hell of a dog. He was good with kids,

he was a good watchdog. He was brave, he was courageous, he was a good fighter. A couple of weeks before this story happened, he found a a badger up in the field and the badger weighed 1 LB more than he did. We know that because after two hours of fighting, Patches finally killed him and we weighed them both just to give you a little insight into Patrick's character. Every day for a week after he'd killed that old badger, he'd go up in the field and find the carcass and pick it up and

fell out of, just in case he happened to have come back.

On this day, you know, he was a hero. He's with the manager. He was laying around the house, no problems. He had no problems. He was well fed, He was well loved. His ears had been scratched that morning. Everything was good about life.

And into our yard came a boar hog, A big other boar Hulk.

He got out of a neighbor's pen and came down to our house, and he had his long yellow tusks sticking up, you know, from his jaw. And Patchy has made a decision to go out and get hold of the Hulk. Now Bulldogs don't make casual decisions.

He went out and he got a hold of the hog and when he gets hold of hogs, they hang on the hogs and it created a problem in our barnyard.

Dog was barking. The hog was queen. My dad came running out of barn to see what was going on and he'd right away got in the middle of both of them. He was kicking hogs and dogs and cussing and trying to get this thing broken up. I saw my dog in a lot of trouble. I saw those tests. I got out there and was trying to keep my dad from kicking the dog and keep the hog off the dog. My mother saw her kid running into the middle of this spray out there and she came, charged me out of the house

and it was chaos. It was absolute chaos.

Everybody there knew there was a problem and we all knew the solution to the problem. Patchers turn lers to that hole turning loose, but he didn't turn him loose. But he came off, and as he came off, that old hog wheeled around and cut his throat and we caught it and shut him down.

Helping stopped him, cool him off, gave him first aid,

thought we had solved the problem. Returning loose, he went right back and got hold that hole again, same deeper.

God, there was squeals and barks and growls and cussing and kicking and meals out there trying to get in the middle of that deal. And my mother was out there wringing her hands trying to Get Me Out of the fight. And it was chaos. And once again, everyone knew the solution to property

hard Knew it. We knew it. Everybody knew it. Patches turn loose. The damn hawk, turn him loose. Well, it came off again. This time we recognized. We recognized that Patches was not himself.

I think Bob, the professionals would say that his emotional nature was on top of his intellect

and it was. It was obvious that we were going to have to commit patches for a little while and we committed him by tying him up to the water. Hyderabad

and we isolated him from the problem. We sent the hog away

and I guess I was his counselor and for a couple hours I sat there with Patches and we thought about his life. We inventory things like, you know, did you ever have a good day when you get ahold of hulks? Anyone in your family enjoys when you get hold of hogs?

Are you successful as a hog catcher?

Do they taste good? You know, all this stuff

and in two hours, no more than two hours, it was pretty obvious that that the

I've got to do something about that strain there. Couple hours. It was pretty, pretty evident that he was well. And the way you could tell it was because his attitude had changed. He had that little smile dogs get on their face. You know, his tongue was lying a little bit and his little stub of a tail was wagging back and forth. And he, you know, obviously he was OK. So I went and talked to the warden who was my father, and I said passage as well. He came and looked and said, I think you're right. Slowly turning loose,

he had to go 2 miles to find the hog this time.

Now, can you identify with that story?

One of the first Haagen Dazs in West TX, I'll tell you that. But later on I could identify with the dog, you know,

same way it seemed like getting hold of hog was the problem. But you see it wasn't, It wasn't. The bigger problem was why did he go the first time and what sent him back. Turned out it wasn't hogs at all. Couple weeks later he just made the same decision about a cattle truck and as in the package just one shot of that.

But you see that's what I'll call it. Alcoholism is like the secret is to

not take the first drink, but even the greater secret is to stay stopped, to find the underlying, underlying causes and conditions of our failure to change the way we think.

And as we change the way we think, as we make this kind of a change. It's brought about not by our own power, and not by the power of any living human being. It's brought about by a power greater than ourselves, something you and I cannot see directly,

but we can experience it. We can see the effect of the past. It exists in this room. It is present whenever Alcoholics Anonymous is being practiced the way it's described in the book Alcoholic Anonymous. And it's to that end that we devote our search. First thing you got to do in this search is decide whether you have. You almost always have to have a common. You have to have a failure.

Anybody in here that doesn't have failure, We've had some colossal failures in this rhythm. I'll tell you,

we've messed up about as good as you can mess it up.

And that seems to be necessary at some level because when we messed it up, we're open minded just for a little while.

When we've run out of excuses and run out of people to blame and that sort of thing. Finally, we sometimes open up and say maybe maybe I ought to try something else. Maybe something else ought to work. And if we're really lucky, we'll have an opportunity to meet someone in our Thoughts Anonymous who can describe this program for us and and get us on the way.

I took me a long time to recognize I was powerless over alcohol. I like alcohol. I thought I was drinking what I wanted to drink.

I wondered sometimes why I wanted to drink as much as I drank, but it seemed like I was doing what I wanted to do

and I didn't mind being a heavy drinker. I kind of like this, how I was kind of a lover and a fighter and a wild horse rider, you know, I just, I didn't want to be too sweet and nice. I was trial lawyer. Hell, I didn't care what you liked, what I did or not much, just both the right way when the judge gave you the charge, that's all it was the lacquer way I saw and I and heavy drinkers were common among trial lawyers and it been that way from the time I started. I remember when I first went to college, I didn't have anything to drink. Oh, maybe a beer or something like that. Got kind of got up inside my nose. Didn't care much about it

athlete. But the world got bigger and more complicated for me when I went to college. Came from a little old bitty town and I was trying to play athletics in college and gosh, I never saw guys as big as they had in college. They were just monsters. I used to think I if I could ever get I was a basketball player. I thought if I could ever quit playing guard and get to playing forward where I get down there in that bucket, I mean, I'd show them how to put some points on the board by God. And I started out trying to do that in college and I never saw such guys. I mean, I quit giving shooting quick shots altogether because they'd stuff the ball

every time I left the floor, couldn't wait, get back out to guard. And even the world was complicated. And they weren't. They were different kind of clothes than I wore. They ate different kind of food. They had different. They were smarter than I was. And then one night I was invited to a fraternity party and they had beer

and they had guys who liked to drink here. They had guys who didn't give a damn about anything.

They I was had always felt so responsible. They were totally irresponsible.

And I started kind of perking up. This had a little bit of attraction to me

and I was attracted into drinking and it wasn't very long so I just could get Plumb excited

about the prospect of getting drunk a week from now. Next Friday night we are going to get drunk.

We're going to save our money, get somebody to go to the liquor store for us and buy us a car load of food. It will be all kinds of boots, some we've never even tasted before. And we're going to get in that car and start drinking that booze. And there is absolutely no telling where we'll wind up the next morning or what we will have done the night before.

And I just, oh boy, oh boy, I can't hardly wait.

And I did it over and over again and I liked it. I liked the places we drank. I like the things we did most of the time. I like getting up the next morning and sitting around and saying what did we do?

Where were we?

Do you remember? No, but I remember this. And we gradually get the damn story pieced together. We thank God. That's great. Let's do it again. What do you think?

And I wouldn't give that up man. I like that. That took all the load off my shoulders.

I could just let that. I could let the responsibility and the feelings that I had about life just slide off when I got to drinking and it became my solution. When life got a little too tough, when the feelings, good or bad, got a little too strong, I just got a bottle

and I live my life that way. My wife, God lover, I tried to get her. I tried to get her to be a drinker,

Mark, I couldn't, couldn't get her to go that she'd take that first drink. She didn't go to Montreal on the 1st drink. She just got sick and wouldn't drink anymore.

She was a complete wet like I wanted. I just get something started running with a bunch of people one time to have a bunch of good looking wives and most of them were stewardesses and Billy have got us out of that group almost before I got us in. I couldn't understand if I was wrong.

But she didn't like me staying, unlike drinking. She didn't like me raising him. And I was responsible and I loved my kids. So basically what I did is I gave that kind of life up very early and I became a medicinal drinker, a solitary drinker. If I couldn't go out and drink, I could find God, drink at home, and I could drink what I wanted and when I wanted to drink it. And it was not open to debate.

It's my bottle and my body

and I'm going to mix those two up any way I want to. And we got, we had a lot of arguments about this, but that was my basic posture. And I began to drink. And you see, I didn't think, I didn't think I was powerless over uncle never even occurred to me that I was powerless over alcohol. And I went through law school and early practice of law and all the things that come along with having families and buying houses and doing all this kind of stuff. And I was doing OK. I kept getting

jobs and make it a little more money and buy a little nicer house and have a little more. I was always out looking for more. I was. I was never satisfied. I had a hole in me that you couldn't feel. I tried to fill it with everything. I tried to fill it with money and I made more money as I went along. I tried to fill it with position and I got to be a senior partner in the largest law firm in Dallas.

I tried to fill it with wives and kids and that kind of stuff. And I was a Little League coach

and I was having two nice kids and a lovely wife and didn't see anyone who had anything that I wanted any better than mine. I was happy with that. I recognized somewhere along the line that I couldn't fill the hole making money and doing that sort of thing, and I went out and began to try to do something like charity work.

I worked, spent a couple of years down the ghetto in Dallas

drinking Ripple wine with the brothers and let him do all that handshakes, you know, And we didn't do high fives then, but we did everything else, you know, this kind of stuff. And they ultimately asked me to go back to my home and stay there because I was messing up their lives

and I was in the hell out of I took up art. I decided I'd become maybe it was all great artists are misunderstood. It seemed to me like Van Gogh cuts off his ear. I thought about cutting off my ear, but I said they just try something a little simpler first. So I took up, you know, painting and welding and sculpting with, with a welding torch and had a little problem there because it's hard to remember when you're drunk. What's the hot piece of that?

That's really difficult, but I solved that problem. What you do is you get large glass and you fill it with ice cubes and pour whiskey all over the top of it, all the way to the top, and then you start welding. When you pick up the wrong piece of meth, you can tell you have this really acute sense of pain in your hand,

much like this. And I'll reach out and grab that glass full of ice and I pick up all the ice I can hold it and just hold it in my hand for a minute. And I drink the whiskey

no problem. Put it all back together, pour some whiskey on it and fire up again. And that's the way I will. I don't know why I didn't burn down the house and everybody else, but that's what I tried ultimately. And nothing was working. So I just quit doing anything. I just went to work and worked as long as I could, or until I got through and came home. I didn't drink at work because I didn't want anybody to know I was a drunk. I came home and and drank what I wanted to drink

and by this time I was drinking about 40 day. My day consisted of coming home from work and I drink a half 1/5 of BC 1/2 a quart of Beefeater's gin. When I got home, that was called Martini Tank.

Then I would eat a little mashed potatoes or whatever it was Billy they're trying to get me to eat for about an hour. And then I would

drink Brandy with a little splash of soap the rest of the evening until somebody put me to bed or whatever. And that was my life. And I was willing to settle for that. I just didn't want to lose any more than I had lost. Yeah, there was been some clients that had fired me. Yeah. Some of my partners weren't sending me work anymore.

Yeah, I was having some adversity in my life. It wasn't good, but it was as good as I could get it. It wasn't going to get any better. I tried everything I knew to try everything I saw you do, You being the world at large that was supposed to make people happy. I tried, and it didn't work for me. It didn't work for me. And so I recognized that I was just one of those people who was never going to get it,

and I was just going to have to scratch it out until whatever happened, happened.

And I was just leaving it out. Only you can't. You can't quit,

you can't set it. It always gets worse and worse and worse, and every day you die a little more,

and every day you sink deeper into that depression and that dark hole. It's called alcoholism,

and that's what happened to me. I just kept sinking deeper and deep and I kept having more and more trouble

and one of the biggest problems that I had, let me tell you the biggest problem I had right there in that red blouse,

This girl wouldn't give it up. She sent off her papers for me to take tests.

She was always doing something. She was always stirring it around. I couldn't give her to lead alone.

One night I asked my daughter where her mother was

and she said I don't know daddy, she's gone to some kind of a family meeting.

And I said,

that doesn't sound very good to me. Tell me what that meeting is. She didn't know. See, we decided by that time that we were going to try it for six more months, and then we're cashing it in. We tried everything to marriage. Well, nobody's happy there. We just go checking in. But if she's out talking about family meetings, I better have a representative present the way I saw

saw when she came home. I cross examined

30 years, I've been a trial lawyer, I've run across some real doozies to cross examine, but I never got anybody that can touch the lady in the red restaurant.

She conduct questions better than any human being I ever saw. Where have you been, Alex?

What have you been doing? All visiting with friends. Who are they? You wouldn't know.

What were you talking about? Are we just sharing our experience, strength and hope?

And it began to go. You know, I just can't. Just kept closing doors and trying to nail her down. Like trying to stab a snake with an ice pick, you know, I just couldn't get it narrowed down. Finally, I got a word out of her.

The word was al Anon.

Al Anon. What would be,

and now

as near as I could figure, it had to be some kind of an aluminum kitchen.

21

It was a lot worse than that. I thought if she got a job going to work or something. Hell, I've been trying to get that to happen for years. But no, I wasn't that. It was a group of people

that anyone, anyone was welcome to go to their meetings. If you had a friend or family member who had a problem with alcohol,

I'll tell you what, it didn't take me but a minute to know that I was the only candidate for the person with the alcohol problem and her wife, and she was going to public meetings discussing my property. And this ain't something that any trial lawyer really wants to have happen. Many of you have needed

salt the assistance of attorneys. I assume you have Yellow Pages in Canada where you have listings of her attorneys.

Did you ever notice anybody say in their alcoholic attorneys

they don't list that way because nobody wants one.

Not only did not even drugs wants alcoholic attorney

here. I am trying to hold my damn life together, trying to preserve what I can of what we've had. And she's going out to public meetings to talk to people about my property. Well, I know it's just a question of time until a judge or a judge's wife or some lawyer or one of my partners or his wife or a jeweler or a witness or my God, there are thousands of people in Dallas, TX who may stumble into one of those meetings.

And the moment they stumble in those meetings and see my wife,

they know she's not a drunk.

I'm the only candidate and I am tried and convicted of being an alcoholic. And I don't even know there's a trial going on. It's chaotic. And then what's going to happen is the words going to get back downtown to my partners. And I know what they're going to do. I know because we already got a couple of Alcoholics in my firm. That's what they say they are.

They get drunk, don't show up at court. They go on trips and we have to go find them. That kind of stuff, you know? And these guys were important people. I mean, they represent big clients. They got some stroke in the community. Not like me. I'm just scuffing and scratching and trying to get there. There. Are you there? And we've been talking about what we're going to do with that. And what we're going to do with that by consensus is get rid of them just as soon as we can.

Well, when they hear about me, I know what they're going to do. They're going to call me in and I'm going to be gone that afternoon.

I'm sure they're going to tell me. We don't have any openings for alcoholic closures right now. It's awful.

Now I explained this to my wife.

I explained to her in the most simple, basic terms, You can explain anything to anyone.

I explained to her that I am the only one in this family who's working,

only one who makes any money. We have a mortgage on it. If we don't pay the mortgage, they come and get the house, the cars, the furniture, whatever it is they come and get. They don't let you use it anymore when you're not paying for it. And

when I stopped murdering money, they're going to come get all that stuff. We're going to be on the street,

me, my wife and my two kids in the cold,

hungry, all because she persists in going to these damn meetings. And it's obvious anyone that she's got stopped, will you stop? And she said I need to go. I said please don't go to any more of those meetings. She said I think I'm going

and then I abandoned reason and said I'll kill you if you ever voted.

She said I'm going If they get them for just a little while, let me tell you, they'll brainwash it and they'll hang in there. Anything. It's scary.

She kept going. I couldn't leave it alone. I absolutely could not leave it alone. Every time I saw her, I thought about it. I think fights by the thousands over that subject. I think fights all kinds of ways. One night I decided that's going to pick a fight. Sometimes I kind of ooch up on it. I just kind of casually start to fight, you know? You know, walk in and say, how's your day?

Good day, kids. OK, yeah, kids are fine. What we having for dinner? Oh yeah, good. Looks good.

I've been thinking,

you think I am an alcoholic. I see I need to establish this to win my argument. Later on I'm just kind of going to ease in and Get the facts I need to win the argument and then we'll really go after it. But right now I'm kind of playing along. You think I'm an alcoholic and she says I don't know whether you are or not.

I said, well that's damn funny you've been calling me and I'll call it all these years. And she said

yes, but I was wrong.

It's really very difficult to get a fight started from,

I said,

she said. Jerry. Doesn't matter what I think.

It doesn't matter what I think. It matters only what you think,

and I don't know when you are or not. That's up for you to decide. If you decide you are and want some help, there's ways to get help.

But until you make that decision, nothing that I say, your partner say, the doctors say, anybody says is going to make a nickel's worth of difference to you.

Now this really had me thrown off that

here I am thinking I've got things going my way, I'm going to start a fight. I've got the 1st 2 answers I know that come back to me the wrong answers. I never heard of this kind of stuff before and I make a mistake that no decent trial lawyer ever makes. I ask another question when I ain't got a goose's idea of what the answer is.

I say, well, if I want to find out if I was an alcoholic, how would I do it?

Man, you talking about stepping off in the swamp? I was there,

she said. Well, Jerry, they tell me that if you try some controlled drinking, if you would just drink 2 drinks every day for six months, no more, no less. If you can do that, you're probably not an alcoholic,

I said. Let me understand this.

You've been trying to get me to stop drinking for years. Is it my understanding that you want me to continue drinking for six more months? She said. That's right.

And I realized that I was dealing with a very sick woman.

We weren't talking since things were going up. I didn't understand what was happening. So I got the hell out of what I did. I just left and gotten my green chair in the den and began to drink my whiskey and think about this thing. And over the next couple weeks, I realized that someone was going to have to make sacrifice to save our family and me. And it was going to have to be me. I was going to have to pass that damn test to save our family and our home and

do all she's to say obviously to help us out here. Now I didn't tell her that I was going to take the test and actually I had to make a few little changes in the test.

Oh wait, you don't understand. 2 drinks didn't do me any good, but three

drinks would do. I have pretty good sized glass and I thought if I could have two big martinis before dinner and a big Brandy after dinner, nobody could fault me for that. Goodness, nobody was saying anything about a man drinking that way, would they? Unless they were some kind of prohibition, which is what I secretly suspected all along.

So I decided I would quietly take the test. I would just do it for a while. So she discovered she watched like a hawk and she'd see and maybe a month or two months at the outside

doing great and she would come to me and say I have made a mistake. I need to get out of our line. I need to get let you get on with your life. And so I started trying to take the test

here. I learned something.

If you don't, learn another thing from me tonight. If you're an alcoholic or think you might be in this room,

learn this fact. Try control drinking.

I would have a drink, the care of the world and begin to slip off my shoulders, not get loosened up a little bit, you know? Then I'd have another drink and then I would have a thought

and the thought would be something like what are you doing?

What are you doing? Are you over 21?

Are you a man who supports all the damn people in this house?

Are you going to let a bunch of little ladies in tennis shoes tell you how to drink whiskey?

And the answer was always hell no. And I got up to the bar and drank what I wanted to drink,

generally the court.

Now, some days I went to the bar and I've had a bad day. I just had a bad day. They'd been after me all day long and I'd walk in and walk up to the bar and I'd think about OK, two martinis and 1 Brandy.

I said hell with it, I ain't gonna take

and I Drake the bottles.

Then I had another real cute trick. I could go say for a couple of weeks and forget I was supposed to be taking the test at all.

Now when I remembered the test, when I forgot the test, or when I decided not to take it. So the result was the same. I always drank about the box. Didn't get dog drunk every day but I got pretty well along the way and always I woke up in the morning.

It always, always remembered the damn test in the morning.

My wife sponsor

into this day of time stuff one day at a time stuff she had she even tied it together with a little Bible quote and like she told my wife say that out loud at the moment she awakened in the morning and it would go like this is the day the Lord has made rejoiced. Now, if you haven't heard that reported to you after you've had a quart of whiskey and I have a quartet,

when your iron head was stuck shut, your tongue's about that thick and got hair all over it.

Your heart just going ever beat us. You feel right up in your head. You know when you when that's happened to you, you're pretty sure that you're not going to do a lot of rejoicing that day.

I came to know that in my mind had to do with those thoughts.

I came to know that when I put alcohol in my system,

it was like foreign gasoline on fire. There was number stopping it. He just accelerated. And then Billy began to quit covering up for me. She would answer the telephone, and when my clients called and I was drunk, she'd let me talk to him. Hello, Jerry.

The next thing I said, what was wrong with you last night? I don't know. I had the flu, you know, bad cold. Anyway,

what happened to me, Ultimately, I took that test. Well, I gave it a fair run. I didn't want it, you know, that's what was fully tested. I didn't want to accept the result. I ran it a year and a half,

never passed her once.

At the end of that year and a half, all I could think about most of my day was alcohol. Wish I had a drink. Wish I hadn't had a drink. Wish you'd never heard of the damn cast. What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me?

It is illogical for a person who's disciplined himself the way I had in life to do the kind of things I needed to do to be unable to decide I'm going to have three drinks today. That's all. I'm going to have just three drinks. Why can't you do that? Something is wrong with you.

I must be some kind of a moral letter. Something's wrong with me and myself. Esteem myself. Confidence