Mitch S. from Tulsa OK, at Broken Bow, OK October 1997

Hello,

I'm Mr. Evans and I'm an alcoholic and y'all are something else. I had no idea what to expect when I was coming down here. That I've never been. I'm not from here. I'm from Tulsa. If you don't know what that is, that's a town north of Antlers and I've never been down here before. I didn't know what a beaver's bend was.

And as I drove down here and I started to see the trees changing and it was raining and it seemed the longer I drove, the quieter it got. And I just, I didn't, I need to tell you that months ago when, when Paul asked me to come here, I didn't know that I was going to need this at this time, but God knew. And I say yes as often as I can. And, and I'm grateful that I did because I needed to be here today and be with you. And so thanks for having me and inviting me and putting

together and I can't wait to find out what I'm going to say.

I, I'm an alcoholic that really should not be here. I really should not be anywhere after what I've been through. I should not be alive. And I mean that most literally. And you're going to find that out very soon. And so I'm really glad to be anywhere at all,

but particularly in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, surrounded by people that understand me, who want the best for me.

There is nothing left for me to wish for than to be here with you and to be sober and in my right mind with all my clothes on.

I in 1984, I was living in Norman, OK, And I was living in this house that I have a picture in my mind right here that I can see just as clearly as I can see you sitting right there. And I hope I never lose this picture. It was a little White House on South Chautauqua and Norman. And maybe you've seen one of these houses like this, where the weeds are grown up halfway the height of the house, you know,

and the grass on both sides of the driveway almost meet in the middle. And if you would come in that house, you would have smelled me, and you would have smelled waste because there was no running water. And if it was dark outside, it was dark inside because there was no electricity and it was cold outside. It was cold inside because there was no natural gas. Everything was cut off, and everyone had left. And I was there. And I can still see myself laying on that long yellow couch

living room and all of the furniture and all the curtains and all the carpet are covered in blood and puke and urine. And I'm laying on that yellow couch hanging my head off the side of the couch backwards and spraying Hairspray on the roof of my mouth. Let the alcohol trickle down my throat and soak indirectly off the the blood vessels in my throat. Because I couldn't drink alcohol anymore and get drunk at all. Because anything I put in my stomach came right back out. My stomach was totally shot and I could not drink

and use that as the way to get alcohol in me. And so the only way that I could get alcohol was to put it on the soft tissues in my lips and in my throat. And I used to drink that Hairspray and it was a guaranteed puke every time. And my only, my only hope was just to hold off puke and long enough to get the slightest little buzz. And I would put alcohol in a, in a little eye dropper. I would use vanilla extract and fill the eye dropper up and put vanilla extract in my eyes to get alcohol and the soft tissues in my eyes.

And I can remember thinking that I could quit anytime I wanted to.

And so I know that I'm dealing with something that is way more powerful than me,

way more powerful than me. And so if I'm going to have any recovery from this thing, it's got to be because I find a power outside of myself that is way more powerful than me. That allows me not only to get to bed at night without a drink, but also to know some peace while I do that. And that's what you've given me in Alcoholics Anonymous. Between the time that I came in here in September 15th of 1984,

you gave me a program

that if I applied it in my life, I would get the results that you got, which was a conscious contact with this power greater than myself

that allows me not to lay on that yellow couch anymore and allows me to get to bed every night without a drink.

But more than that, to no peace while I do that.

I've received so many things back in my life. My family, my health, my homework, all that stuff has come back to me over the years. But out of all that stuff, the greatest gift I think you've ever given me is this. When I go to bed tonight, I'm going to go right to sleep and I'm going to sleep all night long. And when I wake up tomorrow, I'm going to be rested and I'm going to be ready to to do another day

with God and with you. And I've tried over and over to tell people what it's like to know

that God is with me because it says in the big book why we tell our stories. You know, it says we tell we share our experience, strength, and hope. But it also says why we do that. It says the reason we tell our stories is to describe to other people what it is we know of a conscious contact with a power greater than ourselves. And I've tried and tried and tried to tell you what it's like, tell you what it feels like to know that God knows my address and is with me now

and is as close to me as my breath. And I've never come up with the words to really describe that.

But if you're new and you don't know what we're talking about, just believe that I believe.

And if you can believe that I believe it. I guarantee you if you come back and do these things, you will get

what we got. I didn't set out to end up in Norman, OK laying on a yellow couch drinking Harris Square. That's not where I set out to go. I was raised better than that. I grew up in Tulsa, OK. I'm from the right side of town. We lived in the right house. I had the right parents, but they were both there. We had about just about the most normal alcoholic life you could have. My father was drinking alcoholically, but there were two parents in the house. I had some brothers and some sisters and there was nothing like the violence that I

you sometimes see an alcoholic homes. We were just a normal alcoholic home. My father was drinking and my mother suffered from whatever you call the illness before you go to al Anon. She had that. And my father seemed to have this endless, this endless train of chaos that he could bring on. And my mother had this endless list of plans to deal with the chaos that my father provided. And so it was this constant battle in our house all the time.

My dad came home in the middle of the night one time with the back of our white 1962 Ford station wagon full of stolen television sets, and he had no idea where he had gotten them. He didn't know, you know, if he was the getaway car driver or if he was the fence man or if he'd gone into the houses and carried out TV sets. He had no idea. Now, my father was the president of the Bar Association and the head of his own law firm, so this was really strange.

But my mother had a plan

and the plan was she got all four of those kids up in the middle of the night one more time. And we put our coats on top of our pajamas and we drove that car out into like 50 6th St. North in Peoria and dropped down the tailgate of that that station wagon. And with our legs, we pushed those TV's out in the middle of the road, closed up the car, went back home, went back to bed and never mentioned it again. There was a strong message. Those are Alamout that are laughing now. There's a strong message if you're not supposed to talk about this stuff. And so we just didn't.

My father was constantly bringing home this kind of chaos and my mother constantly had a plan. And so living in this atmosphere, you can imagine the social skills that I had when I was about 15 years old. Now, we grew up middle class Catholics in the 60s, but we weren't really Catholic. I have to tell you that right off the start because I know there are Catholic people that are very devoted and and very religious people. And we just weren't. This was just one more of my mother's plans to sober up my father

was that we were going to become Catholic and then say he'd have to go to confession and confess all this stuff that he was doing.

And so he'd stop, right? The only thing my father ever quit was going to confession. And so this plan never really worked,

but I can remember sitting in that Catholic Church when I'm a little bit kid, I mean, a little bitty kid, like three years old and I should be in Sunday school, but I've already been kicked out of there because I punched a kid out and that.

And so I'm sitting in the big cathedral with the parents and in this Catholic Church, a beautiful cathedral in Tulsa, beautiful cathedral called Holy Family downtown. And there's this enormous, enormous, I mean, four times life-size likeness of Christ on the cross up at the front of this cathedral. And it was not, it was not artistic or subtle at all. It was brutal. You could see the agony in the man's body. You could see the terror It was,

it was, it was an arcane, brutal thing. And I can remember that they looked at it when they prayed and that we would turn to it and we would bow and, and, and I thought that was God. And I can remember thinking, you know, what if it falls, I mean, where we going to be then? And I, I looked at that guy hanging on that cross and I said, I do not want what he has. And so when I'm three years old and I have the faculties of a three-year old, I made an important decision. I parted ways with God that day

and I was not to look back for 20 years because with just what I had three years old, I was, I was making important, important decisions that I carried with me into my adulthood. Incredible what I and it was not right away when I got sober that I was able to let go of this stuff.

My mother was always trying to sober up my father and it never really worked. So there was this atmospheric chaos that I grew up in and, and I can remember thinking that I was never in the right place at the right time when I was a kid. No matter where I was, I just wasn't comfortable.

I thought that everybody had something that I didn't have, or everybody knew something that I didn't know. I felt like I'd been absent on the day they handed out the rules, you know? And everybody knew how to do it, and I didn't know how to do it. Men knew how to be men. Students knew how to be students. Sons. They knew how to be sons. And I didn't know any of this stuff. And I looked at you guys and you looked like you knew what you were doing, and I never felt the way you looked.

And because I didn't feel the way I thought that you looked,

I closed up inside myself and walked around that way for the 1st 15 years of my life until I found a solution that worked for me. And it was at a New Year's Eve party when I was 15 years old. I went over to a friends house and the parents were having a party. A big party was a big house. And all the kids had migrated down into this like basement that had been converted into a family room, you know, and there's a wet bar down there because they watch football down there and there's no liquor. But, you know, when you're 15 years old, you can't buy

alcohol, not easily anyway. So it's just whatever you can come up with. You know, whatever you steal, it's like you do a little sleight of hand and we have this liquid potluck and we're down in the basement on that New Year's Eve. And we had stolen from the parents party upstairs

a three gallon bottle of Chivas Regal Scotch, like the novelty size that they put in the window of the liquor store. His his parents had bought one for the centerpiece of the bar and it turned up missing. And all these,

we're down in the basement, all these two dozen teenagers and we've got 3 gallons of Scotch and one six pack of coke.

And I have always been a leader, you know, so

I'm very resourceful, you know. So I take a look at that 6 pack of coke and that 3 gallons of Scotch. And I did a little quick math in my head and I figured out we're going to go really easy on that coke if we're going to make this work. See, right from the very beginning

it never crossed my mind there would be anything leftover. Now I haven't even had a drink yet in my entire life

and already I'm trying to figure out how to get rid of all the Scotch and all the mixture. And we nearly died trying to do it. So we, within this family room, so they got these huge tumblers and we had, so I, you know, I did it right from the very start. We're mixing Scotch and coke in these these big, big tumblers, and we're filling them like 2/3 of the way full with Scotch and your ration of the ice cube and then a little bit of coke on top.

And when somebody put one of those things in front of me,

I don't know how I knew this, but somehow I knew that I was moments away from a new freedom and a new happiness,

and that I was about to be rocketed into a fourth dimension that I'd only dreamt of until this time. And so I took that thing and I lifted it up to my face and I smelled it. And I can standing right here, I can still smell

exactly what it smelled like when I smelled it. It was without a doubt the foulest, most vile, hideous smell that I'd ever ever registered in my senses before. So I drank it. I, I took a took a big mouthful, you know, and I leaned forward and then leaned back and take a deep breath. And you did it, you know, and I had to, I had that, that first warm sensation that, that, that, that I can still feel when I think about what I felt that going down, my

burned, it burned as it went down my throat. And I could, and the first time I'd ever felt like I could feel a thing that was on the inside of my body and it was burning as it went down, as hit, hit my stomach like a bomb and started to explode like, you know, and felt like it was rotating. And pretty soon I, I, I, I could feel it all the way out to the tips of my fingers and all the way down to the bottom of my toes.

And something happened to me that night.

I felt like you looked.

All of a sudden now this is all I've ever wanted out of life is just to feel like you look.

Would you look like you had it together? And you look like you knew where you were going and you understood where you'd been.

And I didn't have any of that. And I wanted to feel like you look. And I later found out you didn't feel like you looked either. But I didn't know it at the time. You know, at the time, I compared the inside of me with outside of you. And I lose. And for the first time in my life that night after I finished that drink, I felt the way you look. I was able to talk to people. I could talk to the girls. I could talk to the guys. I could look the men in the eyes. And

dance. We did the twist like we did last summer.

And I, I danced and I talked and I drank. And that started a pattern for me that I was loyal to until it absolutely did not work for me anymore. That was the first night I ever had a drink. And it was the first night I ever got drunk too. And it was the first time I blacked out. And it was the first time I, you know, I had to be taken home and

next morning couldn't remember. And I woke up with one of those headaches,

you know, where you can feel your hair growing and your cells dividing and you just want to die. And I said for the first time in my life that very first day, I will never do that again.

And did you know that 3:00 that afternoon, that was the first time that I said, let's do that again Because already I could not, I could not bring it to my mind with sufficient force that it says in our book with a memory of the suffering and humiliation of just a few hours ago.

And I was raring to go again. So I guess I drank alcoholically from the very start that for me there was number transition from social drinking into alcoholic drinking. I drank alcoholically right from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, I have never in my life had one drink. I've, I've never done that. And frankly, I cannot think of one single reason why anybody would add 1 drink where I come. That's called alcohol abuse.

I've never had one. I've been embarrassed to have one drink.

I started off drinking 3-4 in these tumblers and, you know, before I'm even old enough to buy the stuff, I'm not even counting the drinks anymore. And I'm drinking out of bottles and drinking cheap liquor and then grain alcohol and finally mouthwash, you know, and Nyquil and, and Hairspray and vanilla extract. And so I guess I drank alcoholically from the very start, but that doesn't mean that it didn't get worse

because it did get worse.

But the things that got worse for me were not, there were not how much I drank or even how drunk I got. The things that for me got worse, what I was willing to give up in order to have that drink. The things that got worse for me was what I was willing to give up in order to feel like you look or try. So in the beginning I, you know, I was holding it together and I was living at home and I certainly had my family and I was going to school and I was playing basketball and

I was doing well and I was living a normal life. And I would limit it to certain times and nothing was interfered with and I might not drink for two months and then I would just drink all weekend long sometime. But I could control when I was going to drink. Now, once I took the first drink, I had no control over whatsoever. It was, it was not over until it was over. But in the beginning I could choose when I took the first drink.

But as my life went on and it became more and more important for me to be able to just feel the way you look

or to try all these things like my family and playing basketball that were so important to me started to lose a notch of importance. You know, just a notch at a time. And and that since the bees and comfort that I got by taking that drink started gaining in importance until pretty soon everything that really had any chance of making my life worth living was was totally eclipsed and totally secondary and was gone.

And I was living to drink and drinking to live. I was living in Norman, OK and I was going to the University of Oklahoma,

haha. I mean, I wasn't really going, you know, I would enroll but then never go. I was a professional enroller and I was living in Norman. I was working in Oklahoma City and I had one of those jobs that requires you to drink. I was a waiter and I would drink on the job and before the job, after the job, I drank really all the time. But we used to close this restaurant down on South Meridian in Oklahoma City. It was an expensive restaurant. We made really good cash tips

and took our money down the street to the photo finished lounge in the Hilton Inn on South Meridian. Raise your hands, liars. Get those hands up. This is it says. We sought out lower environments and this was one of mine. We went there every single night for years and closed that place down every single night. And one night, about 2:00 in the morning, my friends started,

you know, to go through what by this time was just the nightly

agenda. And that was to find Mitch, because I turned up missing a lot. And they found me this night outside, laying in a ditch outside of the bar. And I've been in a fight with two guys and I had not won. And I, I was laying in this ditch and I had a cut that went from about the middle of my forehead down over this eyebrow and across the top of this eye down to about right here. And it was bleeding and there was blood in my eye. My eye was swollen shut. And I had a fat lip. And.

They picked me up and I'm I'm covered in mud and dead grass clippings because it was about the fall of the year. It'd be like getting out there right now and just rolling around in it

and they throw me in this car and they take me back to Norman, to Brenda,

who was a girl that I lived with at the time. And Brenda had not discovered the miracle of the Al Anon family groups.

And so she was at the assigned post of the designated time. You know, it's 2:00 in the morning and she's standing at that front door and she's in that Al Anon pose, you know, and she's standing there just tapping her foot to where her whole body moves like this, you know, And my friends come down the street and they're scared of her, so they just slow the car down long enough to push me out the door. And

I start rolling up that driveway and I'm crawling up the driveway because I'm tired of falling.

And I crawl through that big oil spot, you know the one, because I had one of those cars, because that's, that's the way our cars do. They bleed oil. And so I've crawled through that oil slick and she standed there at the front door and I'm covered in mud and dead grass clippings and oil and I,

I'm just trying, you know, to not be noticed and get in. And she sees me and

she says to me the strangest thing,

she looks down at me and she says,

if you can't control yourself when you start to drink,

why did you even drink it all?

Have you ever heard of such bullshit? Is this? I mean, what

what I think about that today? That seems like a really good question,

but back then she might as well have been speaking Portuguese. I had no idea what she was talking about. So laying there on the floor with this gash that goes from here to here, and it's ice full and shut in a fat lip, I said I drink because it's fun.

But the thing I really want you to know is I meant this. I was totally serious.

That was as much as I knew. Drinking had been fun for me for a time,

but there'd come a time when it had changed, and that was all lost to me. And so I know exactly what it means in the doctor's opinion, in our book, when it says that we can't differentiate the true from the false anymore because our alcoholic life seems the only normal one. Because by that time, I was very adept at surrounding myself with people that drank just the way I did, so I didn't have to seem abnormal. See, I might have thought a lot of this stuff was strange, if I would have thought about it at all. But that's what I didn't do. I surrounded myself

of these people. If you did not drink the way I drank, you were not around me. We had a word for it back then. We called it cool,

remember that? It's cool. Yeah. That means he's just a big loser, as we are, and he can come in. He's not going to tell anybody what we got in here.

So I back then it was also when I used to wake up in my car all the time. And that's, you know, I thought everybody woke up in their car from time to time.

I just thought that was when, you know, you got had a good time. You woke up in your car today. I know dozens of people who have never woken up in their car. And I didn't even know they existed before. But I woke up in my car this one day. And I, you know, when you wake up in your car, it's always for the same reason, right? It's because it's getting hot in there. And I was perfect. I see those nodding heads. It was. I was perfectly comfortable when I went to sleep.

And now it's getting hot in there. And

all of a sudden you go

like that

and you realize you've got that taste in your mouth again. And I don't know where I am. And I look around and the procedure for waking up in your car is you got to get out of the car and check for damage, you know, and small animals embedded in the grill. Find the keys to the car, get in the car, drive around till you see something you recognize

and go home. No problem.

And this is a good day for me

when I wake up in my car really. Because, you know, another day I just have to wake up and go look for my car. And so I figured if I woke up in my car hours, hours ahead.

So I wake up in my car this day and I, I go through the procedure and I start driving around and I do not see anything that I recognize. And I'm starting to get scared. So I pull over this filling station and I asked this guy, how do you get back to I-35? Now I-35 runs right through the middle of Oklahoma City.

Everybody in Oklahoma City knows how to get back to I-35. This guy did not know how to get back to Idaho. Wait, you're getting ahead of me.

So he goes in this filling station and they have this enormous map that covers the whole wall of the filling station and he looks at that thing for like 5 minutes and he comes back out to me. He's looking at me now like I'm turning into a werewolf or something. And he says to me, okay, you got to go up here and go left and then go right and then go up here and then get on I-40 and drive for 20 hours.

So I'm cool, you know.

So I says to this guy

who said that? I said to this guy, Where am I?

And he said Phoenix AZ and I have no idea. I have no idea how I got Phoenix AZ, why I went to Phoenix, AZ, what I did, where I slept, what I ate, if I ate. I have none of those moments. Not one single moment has come back to me,

and I think that blackouts are God's way of saying you really don't want to know.

And because I'm

great faith in God, I know there's a special place in hell reserved for those people to wake up the next day and go. Just want to know what you did last night.

I go no,

leave it there.

So I get back in my car that day and I drive 20 hours back to I35. And I don't think that's strange because I don't think about it at all.

And when I got back to the house that walked in the kitchen and there's an answering machine in the kitchen, the lights just going like this, just blinking like this, you know. And I figured out by this time that I've been gone for five days, 5 days, and have no memory of any of it. And that answer machine light is going like this. And I walk over and I punch the button. And one of the first messages is from my brother Matt. And Matt lived in New York City.

I was in Norman and he was calling me from Tulsa, which was strange.

And he said, Mitch, that's had a stroke and he's in the hospital and you have to come home right now.

And I stood there and I listened to that message and I was, I just started to shake. I was terrified because by the time I figured out that I've been gone for five days and I didn't know how long that message had been there.

And I listened to a couple more messages and then it's my brother Matt again. And he says, Mitch, what's the matter? Did didn't you get my message?

Listen, that Dad is in the hospital and you come home

and then a few more messages go by and it's my brother Matt again. And he says, look, Mitch, I know what's going on. But you, you have to pull it together this time. This is really, really important.

And I stood there and I'm shaking to where you can see me shake, and I don't know what's going to come next. And I know that as I stood there waiting for the next message, I tottered back and forth

to where I was so terrified and so unable to live through the moment that was coming that I know that I could have taken one step that way and never come back. Never come back.

And the next message is from my brother Matt. And he said, look, just stay away.

Just stay away.

And he was a Goodman for doing it, for protecting my mother and the rest of my family in that way. Because no matter what, no matter what was going on, I could only make it worse.

And my father walked out of the hospital that time. And so I was very lucky or very blessed or something,

but I was so embarrassed and so ashamed that I didn't talk to anybody in my family for the next three years until after I got sober.

And I went on doing what I had to do until I couldn't do it anymore. I tried everything that I could in order to solve this problem. And I remember thinking that the problem must be that I was living in the wrong place. So I moved

and then I got evicted from the place that I moved to. There was going to be the solution in my problems

and so I I figured out, you know, I needed, I needed to change schools. So I did that and

and I got kicked out of the University of Oklahoma. Now that is almost impossible.

I needed a new car, so I got a new car. I knew that was going to fix it. And then that car got repossessed. And all these things that I'm trying to use to solve what's going on with me are not only not solving it, they're falling away or walking away or being taken away, or I'm being sent away. And there came a time when all my scorecards read zero, as it says in the book. And I had one of those moments

that I think you might only get one of, I don't know, maybe you get 2. I don't know. I'm going to let this one be enough for me,

but there's a lady in the story section that describes it best when she says the walls crumbled and the light streamed in. And I had a moment like that sitting there one night. And I can tell you that an hour before I could not have told you that alcohol was related to my problem. But when it when I knew, I knew

and I also knew where the solution was

because I had moved, I'd moved back to Tulsa and I was living with my parents because it was the only thing that I could do. And my father was sober now 13 years in Alcoholics tonight. And my mother was this 14 year black belt al Anon, and there was no shucking and jiving going on in that house.

So I'm living with this picture of sobriety and serenity, you know, And I'm drinking Hairspray around the clock. And so the contrast was pretty big

so that when the time came, I knew I knew where to go for the solution.

And I was by myself and I was sitting there and there was nobody else home. And I picked up the phone that night and I dialed that 627-2224. And in northeast Oklahoma, that's Alcoholics Anonymous. And we have a really good there because that phone is always answered by an alcoholic. There's no answering machines. There's no service 24 hours a day, all year long. It's answered by an alcoholic

and I'm so glad that I didn't get an answering machine because I don't know if I would have called back or left a message. But that night,

it seemed like it rang 100 times until this voice came on the other end and said hello.

And I said, is this Alcoholics Anonymous? And he said, yes,

that's great.

And I said, well, I think I might have a drinking problem. And this guy says, wait, I found a solution that works for me. And it's all about a daily reprieve that's contingent on my maintenance of aerial program, I think. Who is this guy?

A daily reprieve contingent on my maintenance of a spiritual program. What's that?

How do you not take a drink? I said, and he says, well, I think you need to go to a meeting. There's one tonight

and I said well I can't go tonight, I've got things to do now.

And when I came to Outlaws Anonymous in 1984 I was 6 feet tall just like I am right now and right now weigh 200 lbs. Back then I weighed 128 lbs. So 1/3 of me is gone. You can put your middle finger in your thumb around my arm, up at the shoulder and it goes all the way around. My skin is Gray and my eyes are so yellow they look orange. I can't see

because of all that vanilla extract I've been putting in my eyes. It looks like I'm looking through wax paper because I got this goop in my eyes. It's just sort of always there, never goes away.

I am shaking visibly.

I don't mean that I am trembling. I mean, you don't even have to be sitting next to me to see that I am moving. You know, I would just be sitting there and all of a sudden I'd go,

we used to call it the whips and jangles because, yeah, you would flip like this and the change in your pocket would jangle, you know, and the whips and jangles. I had the whips and jangles.

What did I have to do?

I didn't know it at the time, but I was already suffering from my very first ego trip inside Alcoholics Anonymous. Because I didn't want to come to your meeting looking the way that I looked, because I thought you wouldn't like me.

And I wanted to have a few days to sober up before I came here.

Little did I know it only got worse for the first few days. So he says to me, well, when do you think you could squeeze it in?

And I said, I think Monday would be about the quickest I could get around to it. This is not a Thursday. So I show up at Alcoholics Anonymous three days past my last drink with no program of action

going on in my life. I look like Frankenstein in a hurry. I'm like, I just shook and I my head, my head would twitch and I couldn't see. And I bumped into things and he told me to go to this meeting. He said, I'll meet you at the door. And I get there and, you know, I walked right past him. I didn't know who he was. And he later told me he knew exactly who I was. But I went right in this meeting. And I, before I even get to a chair, somebody says to me

everything I remember from my first meeting. And I want to tell you what it is. This, this is everything I remember from my first meeting. They said

our coffee is over here and you can sit by me.

That's everything I remember from that meeting. I'm so glad there was somebody there to do that because I don't know if I'd even gotten to it. Share

I was terrified. And, you know, I think that's the most important work we do

is at the door of our group when we look for the people that we don't recognize. And you say

our coffee is over here and you can sit by me. I think that's the most important work we do. And I've been a chairman of a conference. I'm the chairman for Area 57, the state of Oklahoma. I've sponsored dozens of men. And the most important work I do is at my group on Tuesday and Thursday night. If you're there and I don't know you, I'm going to get your coffee and you're going to sit by me. And no matter how new you are, I don't think there's anybody that can't do that.

And if you can do that, you've done the most important work we do.

No matter how new you are, you can still do that. Just let them sit there and say welcome home and don't worry that you don't have anything to say to them because they're not listening anyway.

But let him dead by you,

Somebody said keep coming back. And so I did, you know, one like I had a lot of places to go and

I kept coming back and I kept coming back and somewhere in there it would suggest to me that I should get a sponsor. And so I did. I got that guy that answered the phone that night to be my sponsor.

I went up to him and I said Jane, would you be my sponsor? And he said yes, and more was revealed to him.

Jane sponsored me from A-Z. From A-Z he told me the simplest things and the heaviest things.

Gene taught me how to pray and he taught me how to shave. I didn't know nothing. I was living like an animal.

He told me that I could have anything I wanted out of life as long as I was willing to provide it to myself.

I remember the first time Gene asked me to go out to his house. He lived outside of outside of town, in fact outside a small town outside of Tulsa near Leonard. And it was really quiet out there where he lived. And there was a lake in the backyard. And I remember the first time that I went to his house, I knocked on the door and he came to the door. And when he opened the door, he asked me to come to the inside of his house.

And I looked to see if there was somebody else there

because nobody asked me to come to work. To me, that alone would have changed my life.

But he did talk to me, of course, and told me things that I've never forgotten and things that are part of me today. Gene told me that there was nobody anywhere who had anything in here or in here that I didn't have. And I did not believe him,

but I believe that he believed it. And I kept coming back to hear it because it was so much nicer than anything else anyone was saying to me.

And I kept coming back and he told me these things and he was so active. He took me everywhere. And we went to conferences and we went to speakers and we went early. I, I think I was two years sober before I ever went to a meeting any less than 45 minutes early. We were always 45 minutes early. We're always setting up the chairs and we weren't signed up. We just did it. And we always stayed after and we washed the ashtrays when we weren't signed up to do that either. We just did it. That's what he did. He was so active