Joe K. from Carmel, CA at San Leandro, CA February 11th 1995

Make that 32. I'm Joe class. Thank God I'm an alcoholic.

Well, let me think here. I've, I'm in my,

I'm in my 23rd year of OA, my 33rd year of sobriety, my, my 27th year of Al Anon and my 27th year of Narcotics Anonymous, my 39th year of Alcoholics Anonymous, my 48th year of marriage, and my 75th year of financial insecurity.

And I'm not sure.

I come from Carmela, land of the newlyweds and the nearly deads,

where people with power steering have trouble getting around corners.

We have a lot of meetings. Somebody asked me. We have a lot of meetings down there in the area. We have 120 meetings a week and in Carmel we have about

all 13 or 14, but we're only 20. We're, we're only a town of 4300 people,

so we do all right. Every place I've ever lived, I used to go to meetings here. I've gone to meetings all over around here. I, I got into a, a the second time around. I've had two first, second, third, 4th and 5th birthdays. I've had two of each of those. I'm not going to have 2:30 second birthdays, but I got into the program through the Five Cities Fellowship when I was living in Hayward and

so obviously I'm an old timer and people want to know what it's like to be an old timer. It's a near death experience.

There are people in this program

with more years of sobriety. I just can't believe people with 5055 years of sobriety. But we've got them now and there are people in this room. We're going to end up with 6070 years of sobriety.

That's out of the question for me. You know, I can't ever achieve that, but I'm going to beat you to whatever I get to.

I, I got into this fellowship the way we all do. I drank too much,

you know? Now I've got 32 years of sobriety and I owe it mostly to not drinking.

The truth of the matter is, I can't drink. The reason I can't drink is that I decided to do the steps forward and I do them forward.

There's two ways to do the steps backward and forward. Some people will say, oh, he's got 32 years of sobriety, but we're all only one drink away from a drunk,

right? Well, the truth of the matter is I'm a long way from a drink. That's what's important, not how how many drinks it takes, but how far away from a drink. Amy, I'm 12 steps away from a drink now. I practice the Trek steps so much. People used to call me a step Nazi and I didn't like that because I was a prisoner of war of the Germans for 25 months. And none of us like to be called any kind of Nazis, you know.

But I what I admit to being is a stepaholic. What it would do, what it would take for me to stop practicing the 12 steps is a program called Stepaholics Anonymous.

I could give up a a only if there were a program called Alcoholics Anonymous Anonymous. Now I go to a lot of other fellowships, as you can tell, and I'm eligible for just about everything except Ality.

I,

I, I, I've gone to fellowships that I don't go to anymore. I used to go to adult Children of Alcoholics, except it got to be kind of unbearable because I had six alcoholic children, you see, and I'm an adult Children of Alcoholics. Both of my parents were Alcoholics. We had a speaker the other night from Milwaukee and it suddenly hit me. I got drunk in Milwaukee when I was 13 years old. That was the year Prohibition was repealed in this country.

And I thought, no, that wasn't Milwaukee, that was Waukesha.

And then I got to thinking, But I went through the brewery in Milwaukee because my parents traveled a lot. We traveled an awful lot. And wherever I traveled with my parents, we went to the art museums, the zoo, and a tour of the brewery.

And I look back, I never thought of it before. I've been through the Budweiser brewery, the Pabst brewery, the Rainier brewery, the Olympia brewery, the Horlicks brewery. I've been through the the Pilsner brewery in in Czechoslovakia, the Hofbrau brewery, and

well, I told me I'd bring down the house tonight.

I said you can burp up here and get a standing ovation.

People say, are you nervous? Well, what for?

Well, obviously my parents were both Alcoholics and my grandfathers were both Alcoholics. I'm an alcoholic, my kids are Alcoholics. My wife is not an alcoholic. She's an Indian, American Indian, and black feet.

There's not an alcoholic member that we can trace on any on her side of the family in any generation. There's a myth about alcoholism. You know, a year and a half ago, a year ago, last August, I was in Russia. I was in Siberia with six other people from the fellowships of A A and Al Anon. And we helped organize, or let's put it this way, we helped

found five different A A groups and Al Anon groups in four cities in Siberia.

And then we went back to Moscow and we met the guy who was responsible for getting Alcoholics Anonymous into Russia. He's not an alcoholic. His name is Doctor Peter Shikarov. And what happened was Gorbachev was having a difficult time. One of his daughters had a drinking problem, and that's not unusual in Russia or anywhere else. And so he sent her to the program that had been going for about 12 or 13 years called

Society for Sobriety. And for that long, instead of sending people to prison, they were sending them to detox, then to

what they called, I forgot what they call it, but the house where they can live for a while or to a sort of a boot camp arrangement. And they try and teach them what they know about Alcoholics Anonymous, only they change the name to s s. And it wasn't working now. They tried every way they could think of to get people to stop drinking.

They invented a specialty of medicine called narcology. And so the doctors we were dealing with over there are called narcologists.

And, you know, it's kind of a funny program because they tried hypnosis and they found that they could program people not to drink for as much as up to two years

with the best hypnotists in Russia. It didn't usually last that long, but that was the record, 2 years. But then they drank again. They lined hospital rooms with slabs of salt because they did a scientific study that showed that the salt mine workers drank less than other people.

They tried putting amethyst under people's tongues because there was an old wives tale passed down generation after generation, and if you have an amethyst under your tongue, you can't drink alcohol.

They tried all kinds of things and it didn't work. They tried sponsorship, they tried meetings, they tried birthdays, they tried family groups. They tried going out to help other Alcoholics. They tried clubhouses for Alcoholics and for families of Alcoholics. They tried everything that we've tried.

And so Gorbachev called Doctor Shakiroff and he's who is the director of the US well, was the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Now it's the Russian Academy of Sciences. He's sort of a brain trust of all Russia. He's a real brain. He's he's like our we treated Einstein. That's the way they treat Schikarov. Not an alcoholic, but a great psychologist and scientist. A genius

and really is one.

And a hell of a scholar and a scientist. And so

Gorbachev says, why isn't S S working when it's exactly like a A which is working in a more than 120 other countries?

And Shikorov says, I don't know, Mr. Secretary, I'll make a study and see if I can find out what's wrong in Russia. And so he made a study for three months and he came back and he studied all the countries of the world and every study ever made in every country about alcoholism.

As Mr. Secretary. We do everything they do in a A except one thing. They have God and they do 12 steps that put their will in their lives into the care of God. She says I'm an atheist, I don't believe in God, but that's the only difference. Therefore, the one thing that must make it work in a A and make it not work in S S is that they have God and we don't.

Gorbachev says God,

That's the only difference.

And Shakur Off says yes, that's the only difference, Mr. Secretary

garbage Jeff, thanks for a minute, says all right. From now on, Alcoholics and drug addicts can have God, but no one else.

And for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, God became an an approved part of a communist government program.

So it wasn't the evangelist that got got into Russia was a bunch of drunks.

So they contacted our general service officers said can you come over here and organize our program? They wrote back and said we can't do that, there's too many traditions would be broken. We don't have professionals to do that. And we're all entirely self supporting. So we will pass the word around and if anybody wants to support themselves to go over. And since then there have been

by now it was, I think I was on the 29th

trip and there must be 35 by now.

Well, another curious thing happened. We met this man who is one of the two people that actually translated Jakarov, translated the big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous into Russian. And when we were there, he was translating the book Living Sober

into Russian. The 12 by 12 was already translated into Russian by somebody. And I went to a group in Moscow that started seven years before the very first group. And there were people in that group and it was a step study meeting. And there were people in that group that had seven years of sobriety.

So we're back and we're talking to this great man, Peter Shikorov. And one of our members, we're in a little teeny hotel room in the Interest hotel, little teeny room. There's two bunks in it. It's the best hotel and one of the best hotels in town, right off Red Square. And we're sitting on these bunks in a couple of chairs and somebody sitting on a window sill. And we're talking with Doctor Shikharov about these things. And one of the members says, is it true

that you have a higher percentage of alcoholism per capita in Russia than we have in the United States?

And drive? Shikharov says. Well, yes, he said. Our statistics show that we have 13%,

13 out of out of every hundred people is an alcoholic, and in your country only 3%. But, he said. In Russia, in your country, you wait until they admit it.

And in Russia, we diagnosed them. But he says we're both wrong. Because I've read every study ever made about this problem all over the world, and there's one statistic that is exactly the same in every culture, advanced or third world,

every race, every religion, every geographic location, every. It makes no difference. Every degree of civilization, every economic level, 20% of every society consumes 80% of its alcohol. Therefore, it's obvious that one out of every five people is an alcoholic.

Well, I thought that was damn interesting.

And I also believe it because he's the greatest scientist I've ever met that studied this subject. And I don't think we've got anybody that ever studied it that much. And he's not an alcoholic. He's got no access to grind. And so when I then I began to understand why my wife's family, a black feet Indians, had no Alcoholics in it. Only 20% of them are alcoholic

and only 20% of the black people are Alcoholics. When I was in Hong Kong,

I went to some a, a meetings. I got the wrong number the first time I looked it up in the book and I called and the recorded message was in Chinese. I'm trying to find out where the meeting is, you know. So I dialed the next number and I get English and I'm living a block away from what is it called, the Merchant Marines Club or something like that, where the meeting is. And I go over there and everybody in the room is

Caucasian.

And I said, where are all the Chinese people said, well, we've been running that for several years and we've never had a Chinese person call in for a meeting. Well, I was traveling with a Chinese guy and he was introducing me to all his friends and relatives in Hong Kong. And I wasn't socializing with anybody but Chinese, except at the a, a meeting where there were no Chinese.

And so in a conversation with the Chinese in Hong Kong,

very beautiful flat that cost several $1000 a month to rent,

I asked them, I said, you must not have any Alcoholics. And they said, what do you mean, of course we have Alcoholics. This is confidential. A little family gathering, you know, I said, well, we've been running a message in Chinese here for years and nobody's ever called, said, well, Chinese can't do that, so why not?

Since we are not permitted, it's a matter of honor. We cannot wash our linen in public,

I said. Well, what do you do with your Alcoholics then? Since we take care of them, we keep them in the backroom somewhere.

And I said, you mean that there is no a A? He says. I'm not saying that, but if there were such a thing as a A, it would be the Wong family group of a A or the Fong or the Qin family group of a A. There wouldn't only be members of the family in it. I said, is there such a group? He says. I can't tell you that,

so I don't know. I have no idea,

but now I know that one out of every five Chinese is an alcoholic.

I believe that.

So we don't know. I can remember when we didn't have any in this fellowship lots of years.

So if you are feeling sorry for yourself, some of you new people wondering why me, why am I an alcoholic? What's the matter? Why am I an alcoholic? Oh God, if only I weren't an alcoholic.

Only an alcoholic would worry about that.

Why? Because it prevents us from drinking? Maybe. Huh.

But the fact of the matter is, there's nothing special about being an alcoholic. One out of every five people on the planet is an alcohol.

What's special? What's really special

is the 3% who admit it

and the 50% of those who don't drink.

1 1/2 percent of the Alcoholics probably no longer drink, and that is really special.

So don't feel sorry for yourself.

Besides, I got a little verse. I've written a lot of verses. I hope I don't quote too many of them. I probably don't look so hot while squatting on my pity pot.

Am I an alcoholic? Well, of course I am. Did I belong in adult Children of alcoholic? Of course I am if it's a 12 step program. I'm an adult child of Alcoholics. But I kept hearing my generation being blamed for the problems of the younger generation,

and frankly, I was beginning to get pretty goddamn self-conscious about it.

And finally I stood up one night and I said, I'm sorry, I just can't come here any longer. What I need is a special program for people like me, which would be called Adult Children of Alcoholics who are also parents of Adult Alcoholic Children Anonymous.

And everyone of you people is going to be eligible

because your kids are going to be eligible for Adult Children of Alcoholics.

The first thing I ever heard at an AA meeting was 39 years ago this month, the 21st of this. Well, that that wasn't when I heard it. That's when I called Alcoholics Anonymous. I was I had a best selling book in the bookstores. I tried to go on tour with it and I only got to one town out of Seattle, Portland, OR. I got so sick from booze I had to go back home. I missed the whole national tour. I couldn't even sign books. My hands shook too much.

And that's what we write them for, you know, so we can sign them.

Nobody makes a living.

And so I'm, I took my family, we went down to Mexico and I, I was released from a hospital, told I had

some doctors say I couldn't have had cirrhosis because nobody used to have cirrhosis. I've met a lot of people in a, A who used to have cirrhosis, hundreds of people. I've never met anybody outside of a a that used to have cirrhosis.

So people that aren't Alcoholics that used to have cirrhosis have had it, I guess. But here there are people who are miraculously cured from that terminal illness and from many others, from many others. So I called Alcoholics Anonymous. Why did I call? I had a new job running a radio station. I'd been living in Mexico for six months and I ran out of money. So I came back to California and I got a job doing something I knew how to

do, which was run a radio station, and I wanted to introduce rock radio to California. There wasn't any I wanted. I thought it might work.

I thought it might work because I worked for one up in Seattle when I was diagnosed at Virginia Mason Hospital. And when I was in the hospital in Mexico, I heard it on a Mexican station with English lyrics. And I met the guy that owned the station and three others in the same town,

which was legal then and it's legal here now. And I asked him which one of his state. He had one station that had nothing but time signals and commercials for people that couldn't afford a watch.

But the station that had the biggest audience was the one that was playing the Top 40 American hit records in English. And so I figured it would work in Mexico, where they didn't even understand the lyrics. It might work up here where we pretend to understand the lyrics. And so I went all over Los Angeles. I was drinking, I was sick. And I went to every radio station that I could find in Los Angeles and none of them would let me put Top 40 radio on the air.

Los Angeles. They said Los Angeles citizens are much too sophisticated for that kind of music. So I got a guy out in San Bernardino to let me do it on a station called KC, and I'd have to look at my card, SBKCSB.

I changed the name to Casey Casey so I could remember it when I'm called on somebody.

I also got the Top 40 on. But I reported for duty and then I went out to survey the market, which meant to find out in all the bars how we were doing. You know, I got 17 tickets while I was sleeping in my own car.

I was throwing up 1820 times a day, and I'd been doing that ever since World War 2. The Veterans Administration was giving me 40% disability compensation. They said that this problem was caused by my horrible war experiences. I had esophagitis. I was throwing up blood from a ruptured esophagus.

I had pelagma, which is permanent nerve damage caused.

I forgot to shake permanent nerve damage caused by malnutrition. They said this is all due to the war, you know, and even then

I suspected it might have been because I celebrated the end of the war for 11 years.

I said to a Doctor Who was trying to weigh me, says, my God, you're shaking a lot. I can't weigh it. Bar won't stand still. I said maybe it's because I stayed up all night with a bank president and we drank a couple of bottles of brews. And he says, oh, hell no. Anybody that's been through what you've been through needs to have some alcohol or pills. He says go out and get a couple of snorts and come back steady so I can weigh you.

So I found out about the PA doctors.

So I did. And the truth of the matter is I hid out from the radio station for four days. I never even went to this new job I had because I shared an office with the owner and I didn't want him to know how much I was drinking. And I got away with it because he didn't want me to know how much he was drinking. And he wasn't going there either.

And I finally spun out my car a couple of times, driving back to my temporary house in Burbank, CA. And I went to bed without dry heaves and the coughing of blood and that wimwams and the shakes and the God awful terrible situation, the seizures, the whole works. And I stayed in a separate room because I knew it would be at least five days before I could get well enough to drink again.

And in the morning, my wife came in and said, you know, you're rather successful,

She said, it's you're going to die. The doctors have told you that. And it's too bad because we've had a lot of fun.

Have you ever thought of calling Alcoholics Anonymous? I said, no. She says, you know anything about it? I says, and I've heard of it, but I don't know anything about it. She says, why don't you call them? Maybe they might know of some way for you to live a little longer so we can have some more fun together. I said, OK, call me, Call him for me. And that's how my wife nagged me into Alcoholics Anonymous.

One suggestion,

any Al Anon's present, eat your heart's out.

Just a suggestion, and I took it.

It was such a passing thing that she doesn't remember that conversation. But I remember it because she suggested what I should do. And I went back and I was feeling terrible in a front bedroom, looking out through the window, waiting for somebody to come and who comes walking up. Now here I am a fighter pilot. That's what I was. I had been in the war. That's why I was a prisoner of war. I was a fighter pilot in the American Eagle Squadron of the Royal Air Force,

and then I transferred into the American Air Force when they needed pilots to fight a war over there. And when we needed, I should have said I still think of them as they and I was in the American Air Force for 28 years.

And So what happens is they send somebody out they know is going to nail me. I recognize him coming up the walk, one of the greatest American fighter pilots that ever lived, a man that was every fighter pilots idol and a famous alcoholic. He made Time magazine with his drinking. It was Pappy Boyington for God's sake. And he came up and he had a big book under his arm. And I went to the door because I couldn't wait to meet him, you know?

And he says hi, I'm Greg and I'm an alcoholic. He says if you want what I have and are willing to go to any links to get it maybe I can help you.

And when he told me he was an alcoholic, I wanted to be one.

He didn't take me to a meeting that day because he didn't have stretcher bearers with him. I was in no shape. The word detoxification had not yet been invented in any language. It didn't exist. There were no detoxification centers. There were no treatment centers. There were a couple of places that took in residences around the country but not many

and so

Alcoholics used to ride and take care of one another. He didn't stay and take care of me, just left me there. So if you manage not to drink till tomorrow,

I'll come back and I'll take you to a meeting. So the next day I couldn't drink. I threw up a lot more violent red blood. And then the next day he came and he led me out to his car. I think my wife helped him. They helped me into the car, drove me to a meeting a few blocks away in Burbank. And this meeting was a room about half the size of this, just filled with a Sunday morning. Everybody in beautiful suits, not very many women. There were few that look like maybe they forgot to bring their

so long. You know, in that time it was a disgrace to be an alcoholic synonymous. We really thought it was,

and that's why we were so goddamned anonymous then. We didn't want our relatives, anybody to know. And no women, women who had any reputation left at all, would even come close. Where I went to my first meeting. So there were very few. There was, there was none of this temptation beaming up at me when I went to my first meeting and they led me in, three guys quaking and shaking

and a guy looked at me and said

you have a job. I said I think so.

You got a wife and kids you live in with him. I said yeah, in the house. They said yeah, and he shook his head. He says you got a car. He said yeah, just how old are you?

I said. I'm 36.

This is well, for God's sake, you haven't lost enough and you're not old enough to be a real alcoholic. But fortunately, we have a new rule. The rule is that the only requirement for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is a desire, an honest desire to stop drinking. The word honest was in there, then

we had a drop it later because that we use that word to kick people out, you know? He said. He's not honest.

Get him out of here

and have an honest desire. So General Service Conference one year decided to take the word honest out so we couldn't pass judgment

and screw up our wonderful program, which we'll do it every chance, you know.

So that's how I got to my first meeting. And the guy up in front of the room,

he says, well, it was a movie tycoon who had drunk his way down to the Skid Row, a Main St. in Los Angeles, got into a a, got sober, got back in the movie business and was once again a giant in the industry. Now, God knew how to handle a guy with an ego like mine. You know

he sends me a guy with a Congressional Medal of Honor to take me to my first meeting and a movie studio tycoon to deliver the first message from the podium. How could I resist this program?

I even thought they were better than I was

for a little while.

The guy says I have a disease. It's just like any other disease. It's like leprosy or diabetes or heart disease or measles, except this is an incurable disease, he says. It's not my fault if I have heart disease or leprosy,

he says. It's not my fault. Nobody deliberately gets a disease. There's nobody here who deliberately got the disease of alcoholism. We have a disease.

The symptom of the disease is that we take one drink and it goes down. Thank you.

The one drink goes down to the stomach, sends a message through the nervous system to the brain. And the message is a command, a mandatory command that cannot be disobeyed, one I cannot disobey. I'm incapable of disobey the message of the first drink, the order it gives to the brain. And that irrevocable command is get more

so he says, Obviously the way to stay sober is don't take the first drink.

If we don't take the first drink, we can't get drunk.

So the way to keep from getting drunk is turn down the first drink. We only have to turn down one drink

one day at a time.

I thought, boy, that makes sense.

Makes a lot of sense

now. My sponsor

happened to be an atheist. He shot a Japanese plane down on Christmas Day in the Pacific when he was in the Flying Tigers way back then.

We shot 6 down in the Flying Tigers and 22 more

after he got back to the Marine Corps. So he shot this one guy down on Christmas Day and he flew down and he looked down into the cockpit of the falling Japanese plane. The guy was still trying to fly it and screaming his head off because he was on fire and burning alive.

And Greg said if there is such a thing as God, God wouldn't allow one man to do it this to another on Christmas. And that convinced him there was no God. And so we didn't have the 12 steps. Matter of fact, I don't think anybody was working the 12 steps. I never heard much about this. They weren't even being read and how it Works wasn't being read yet. Little later somebody started reading that accidentally in Long Beach. They lost the format. Somebody says how I open the meeting.

You know, some of the best things happen when we lose formats.

This is how I open the meeting. Somebody says we'll open up the big book and read whatever you hit. And they open it up. And it was Chapter 5. Bill came by a couple of days later. They decided to keep doing that. And Bill heard it. He wrote the book, so he spread the word. And today it's read almost every place at the beginning of every meeting. But then you never heard it. I looked at the steps and thought, I agree with those. And I just kept right on reading, you know,

boy, the promises. Where the hell were the promises?

They didn't even have numbers in front of them yet. You know, this is the paragraph in there. I read the book, but I got four years of Graduate School in English literature and creative writing. Man, I don't have to read things more than once,

and if I read the textbook I don't have to attend the lectures,

or if I go to the lecture, I don't have to read the book. I like the lectures better. They were funnier. So I read the book once

and I turned down the first drink. And three years later we had about 25 different reasons not to drink or we might get drunk. All we had to do is turn down this, that and the other thing nobody had figured out yet that you could spell halt with hungry, angry, lonely and tired. So we probably did those in a different order. You know, the big book doesn't say not to get hungry, angry, lonely and tired. Says we're vulnerable. Then that's when we

to practice our program. Doesn't say we can avoid having to practice our program by just not getting hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. Who the hell never got hungry? Who never got angry? What about not going out with the opposite sex for at least a year? You tell a guy not to get lonely and then tell him that

you say if you do, you're going to get drunk. Have you planted a seed for drunkenness or not?

Who the hell is going to wait a year for both of those things?

You know? So we had all these things. And I used to drive back from Hollywood, where I spent two or three days every week, and I would drive back toward San Bernardino, where I was managing this roaringly successful Top 40 radio stations, the only one in California. Can you imagine? And it went from last place to 1st place in one survey.

And I'm heading back and I'm thinking, what if we have another nuclear war?

And up ahead there's March Field and Norton Air Force Base and Air Force Systems Command, Missile Command, all of these places in one place. And that's a perfect target for the Russians. And what if I see the mushroom cloud go out up down the San Bernardino Freeway? And I realize that everyone I know, everyone that I know in the program, everyone I love

in my family, oh, are gone.

Would I drink again

or I'd be racing along that freeway in the rain? When it rains there, it really rains. Not often, but it really rains. And I think, what if I got into an automobile accident and I was pinned under a burning car? My left leg is pinned under the car and a doctor comes along and he's got to cut my leg off to get me away from this car

and the only anesthetic he's got is a quart of booze. Would I drink again

while he takes out his pocket knife?

Well, what if I'm sitting in front of an apartment house?

I've got time to kill and I'm just sitting in front of apartment house listening to a radio. Then a redhead comes out and comes down and says you look lonely, would you like to come in for a drink? Would I drink?

I had thousands of things like that dreamed up.

You know, one of them happened to me and I drank,

got both legs,

still got a wife, all those kids.

So I gave myself all kinds of reasons. Then I began to, when I came back into this program the second time around, it was up in this area. When I hit my 5th birthday, I thought I ought to really find an A meeting so some intellectuals like me, some real scholars could be told and proven standing before them. I could show them that it's not necessary to go to meetings to stay sober.

And I would have, except I didn't know where any meetings were.

So I didn't. And eight months later, I was drinking.

I got to that day when I couldn't turn down the first drink. That logical program. About six weeks ago, I heard Newt Gingrich wanting to remove any kind of drug and alcohol treatment from the crime bill. You know,

he wanted to cut the budget that much. And he says the the best and most effective program against drugs and alcohol ever invented doesn't cost anything. It's Nancy Reagan's. Just say no.

Hell, she didn't invent that.

That guy I heard at my first meeting might have invented it, and I don't think he invented it. We were trying to work that program instead of the 12 steps for years in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's amazing how long many of us stayed sober by just saying no,

it's better the other way. Work the steps.

When I came back into this program, I only got drunk once after five years and eight months. Otherwise I would have 39 years of sobriety in about a week.

So I only got drunk once for three months,

and I came back realizing I was powerless over alcohol, which got me through the first half of step one.

And three years later, I finally became convinced I couldn't manage my own life.

I found that out by watching all the best managers I knew in business, in politics, all over the world, the greatest managers we can select and watching how they fuck up all the time. And if they're going to do that, I can't do it either.

So my ego, let me admit I can't manage any better than the president or the head of Sears Roebuck or General Motors.

So I got through step one. It took nine years and one drunk for three months.

Two years later, I thought, isn't it great we have Step 2 for the nuts in this program,

you know, but people would have been in mental homes they can get it to. This program has a step for everyone,

even the certifiable.

And then two years after I admitted and was absolutely convinced. I don't recommend admitting I can't manage my own life. If I think I can, that's dishonest.

I gotta be convinced. And I was. And two years later I suddenly realized that even though I know it can't not be done, that it's impossible. There's no use trying. I'm still trying to manage it

and anybody that keeps on trying to do something they know can't be done is certifiable.

So I was eligible for Step 2.

Now I read very carefully. It didn't say God would restore me to sanity. It said, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity, That it might work.

Well, it might. If I can't do it, what have I got to lose? It might.

Another year later, 12 years after I first came to this program, I was driving down the freeway, down the Nimitz Freeway toward Hayward,

and I thought, what a hypocrite you are. You go to meetings and you say things like, I turn my problems over to God. All right, But only after I do what God gave me the talent and education and strength of character to do. After I have exhausted every possibility I can think of to solve the problem, then and only then can I turn it over to God.

That used to get a standing ovation. I must have said it differently.

I must have said it then like I meant it, because I did.

And so finally, I figured going down the Nimitz boy would a hypocrite you are.

You're going around speaking all the time and you haven't even taken Step 3

and you're six years sober the second time around.

And so I decided to do it while I was driving down the freeway. Actually, I was afraid if I did step three, He would make me do the rest of the steps

and I would get up to that one where I humbly ask God to remove my shortcomings.

Now I'm in the 60s for God's sake. And there were. I wasn't sure about what was a shortcoming and what wasn't, but there was some things that I had newly discovered I didn't want removed.

And then I thought about my Saint Bernard. I was telling somebody at dinner tonight about my Saint Bernard,

now my Saint Bernard, which I rescued from a couple of people in the program that had a real small little yard.

My Saint Bernard weighed 185 lbs and he bit people

and I had to get him fixed.

And when I got him fixed, he became the sweetest, most lovable Saint Bernard you ever saw. And everybody loved that dog and he was so gentle, especially with kids, you know?

And I thought, God, He doesn't seem to mind.

Maybe if I do step three, God will get me up to step 7, for God does to me. I won't care anymore.

And that would be a big problem solver, too.

And so driving on the Mimics at a good rate of speed. I look up as I'm driving and I say, OK, God, I know I said, OK, Buster, that's right. I had to be flipped,

you know? I got to be hip, slick and cool, as we used to say in H and I

Okay, God, Okay Buster, from now on, anything you say goes. I will accept whatever you do with me, take me away, I'm all yours. I will settle for whatever follows. Whatever happens is okay with me. Except that happened

and so I did it. Oh and I added even if you castrate me.

So I did it and he didn't.

And I learned to trust God.

I can do those steps in a real hurry now.

I think I can do them in somewhere between 45 seconds in a minute. Let me try it.

I'm powerless over everything and I can't manage anything. Step one. Step 2. Maybe God can run things better than I can. Step three. God take charge. Step 4. I'm all fucked up. Step 5I admit I'm all fucked up. Step six. Maybe God can straighten me out. Step 7. Okay, God straighten me out. Step 8. Make amends a list and make amends not step nine. Step 10.

I'm all fucked up again and I admit it. Step 11

OK God make me feel like doing what you want me to do. Step 12. I just did it.

Now if I do that,

I don't have to resist alcohol. Bill Royal We haven't even sworn off. The compulsion is lifted. It's yanked right out of us.

We no longer want it. We will recoil from it as from a flame. You don't have to resist pulling your hand out of a flame. You don't have to resist alcohol when it becomes repulsive to you,