Ty W. from Santa Monica at Lemon Grove June 14th 1997

Here is Thai from Santa Monica.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Ty Wapato and I'm a real alcoholic.

I think it sounds like it's talking back to me.

I want to thank Virgil for inviting me down here to share my experience, strength, and hope with you tonight. For me, it's always a pleasure to be able to to come out and participate in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous because I I dearly love this program

and I'm so grateful to have been given a chance at this way of life.

And I am even more grateful when I get a chance to do something

because what you see up here tonight is not what I did with my life.

What you say up here tonight is what AA has done with the wreckage that I made of my life.

It's kind of like Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall and Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the King's horses and all the King's men,

but AA could put it back together again. And that's what's happened with me is that I I've had two chances at life and the first one I managed and it turned out just a total wreck. And this time around, I'm letting A, A and the higher power do the management and it's working out a hell of a lot better.

And I, I'm here tonight at 9:00 on her 830 on a Friday night

and I haven't had a drink all day today.

And that's a miracle. It's a miracle that's been happening now for 16 years and eight months in a week. But the real miracle is that I haven't had a drink all day today because by Friday, by 8:30 on Friday night, I should be out there with a bright lights are glowing.

And I said, we used to say be getting drunk and be somebody

because I wasn't nobody until I got that drink.

And, you know, I drank for 30 years and I drank for 30 years. And a lot of ignorance about what I was doing because I drank for the sole reason that it talks about in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, that I just love the way alcohol made me feel. I love the effect that it produced when I drank

and I love getting that. You know, before I drank, I just did not feel OK inside and I did not feel OK with you. I did not feel OK wherever I happened to be. I always felt like I was just just a little bit off

of being OK and I just couldn't quite get to that OK. And when I'd have two or three drinks, I'd get to the OK, it would just click and everything would be OK. And I never drank to get drunk. I didn't like to get drunk and get sloppy and get stupid and do all that kind of stuff. I just wanted to get that feeling and then just keep it as long as I could. You know, some days I could

keep that feeling going for hours and hours, and other days, for some reason, I just overshoot the money.

I just keep going along feeling good. And all of a sudden I would be past the mark and I would be doing stuff that I didn't really want to do. And like Roger, I was talking about, you know, waking up in those places with the rain pouring in the car. I knew something like that. I can remember having that feeling where everything was OK and I just fit in with everything all around me. And

me and a friend of mine were in this bar and we met a couple of girls and, you know, everything clicked and we just bit right in. And I remember we left the bar.

The next thing I remember I woke up in the back seat of the bar and my friend and this girl that he had found were gone and I was in the back seat with this other girl. And I had absolutely no idea where I was. 3:00 in the morning and drunk as I was. So I do the only thing I knew how to do, crawl into the front speed, start driving around in circles till I found out where I was,

somehow find my way home. And that's kind of stuff used to happen. You know, I never started out to have those things happening. It just happened to me

and but still for 30 years, I love the feeling that I got when I had a few drinks of alcohol and when I never knew was that alcohol doesn't affect everybody the way it affects me. I thought that anybody who drank alcohol got the same kind of reaction to the drinking that I got. And I had to get to this fellowship, into this program to find out that

alcohol only effects about 10%

of the entire population in the way that it affects me, and that 10% are known as Alcoholics.

I hear a lot of times in meetings people talk about those alcoholic feelings of selfishness and self obsession and feeling apart from and different. And no, those aren't necessarily alcoholic feelings. I mean, I know a lot of people who are not alcoholic who are out there today and they're just totally self obsessed, totally selfish or willing to step on anybody's feet, head or whatever else to get whatever they want to get.

So that's not an alcoholic thing. We just seem to be more a little bit more of that and we seem to be a little more sensitive about that than they are. But the main difference is is that they don't have anybody, anything that can fix that.

And the difference with me is I can have all of those feelings

in a couple of drinks. Fixes it.

It's either OK for me to be self obsessed and selfish or I can get interested in something else and not be self obsessed. The drinks will fix it for me. It will not fix it for those other poor guys out there who are doing the same things and don't have anything to fix it for them.

And I didn't know that that alcohol could fix me like that. And it doesn't fix other people. And I didn't know that this was part of my

powerlessness over alcohol, that it does things for me that it doesn't do for non Alcoholics. And that's why I'm so grateful to this program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Because you see, this has been happened in the human beings for as long as there have been human beings.

I suppose that somewhere back there when, when people were still living in caves and wearing animal skins for clothing, that some caveman probably found a pile of fruit that was just beginning to go rotten. And some of that fruit was starting to ferment a little bit. And he picked some of it up and ate it. And he got that little buzz. So he ate a little bit more of it. And then he went and tried to grab his wife, his friend's wife, and drag her off to his own cave.

And he probably just carried on to such a such an extent that they drove him right out

of their village, they drove them out of the caves. He probably woke up in the next morning with the sun burning down on his head, pounding like mad, and crawled right back to that pile of fruit and started all over again. And that's probably been going on as long as people have found that fermented fruit. And for thousands and thousands of years, Alcoholics have been among the most detested and despised people in the face of the earth. And the rest of the

they can just find ways to try to keep the alcoholic out and keep them as little trouble as possible. And for a long time, they just drive them out into the wilderness. And when they got a little more civilized, they just lock them up in jail. They'd lock them up, hide them away, do something with them to keep the alcohol from being too much of alcoholic, from being too much of a problem for them. And it's only been in the last 62 years

that there has been an effective door for the alcoholic

to come back into the mainstream of civilization. And that doorway is Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's why I'm grateful to have been able to live at this time when there is an effective doorway for somebody with my disease to come back in and be a productive and happy member of society. And you know, I never started out when I when I was a kid. I

guarantee you that Alcohol, Alcoholics Anonymous was nowhere on my life's itinerary.

This was not someplace that I wanted to be. And when I got into these rooms for the first time, I didn't come in and look around and see your bright, smiling faces and your shining eyes and give that big sigh of relief and say, ah, last time home, I didn't do that. I came in looking for the exit sign. Yeah. So how did I get out of here? What's the quickest layout? Because I did not want to be here. I knew that I'd never felt like I belonged to any place, but this was not

that I wanted to belong and that not wanting to belong or not feeling like I belong started when I was. Yeah. I don't know how old, you know, as soon as I throw his memories or feelings that, you know, other people seem to be OK and seem to be able to get along better. And I just felt like I was having a lot harder time of it than anybody else was. And I, I seem to have this awareness of things that I did that people weren't supposed

do. This awareness goes back again to my earliest memories. One of the earliest memories that I have my, of my childhood, I was probably about four or five years old somewhere in that neighborhood. And myself and another girl, little girl that was my age and her brother who was about a year older, were in this vacant house and we had all our clothes off.

And I I have no idea what we were doing in there with our clothes off, but I knew that we were doing something wrong

day. And I've been told since then that we sure as hell weren't doing whatever it was we thought we were doing.

But I was guilty and I was ashamed. And it was something that that I never told anybody else about until I wrote my 4th step in this fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous,

is something that inside I just felt so shameful about. And from that earliest memory of my childhood, there were things that just piled up that were shameful, that were shameful, that were shameful, that just made me feel different than I knew That I could never be like the rest of the people because I had all of this stuff in my head, all these things going on inside me that I couldn't talk to anybody about and couldn't tell anybody about. All these things that I knew that nobody else thought about or nobody else did except me.

Now, of course, now after 16 years in this fellowship, I've listened to enough inventories to know that, you know, a lot of my stuff was really garden variety stuff. But there is nothing remarkable at all about the things that I did. But but I came here thinking that I had become the most, you know, the most rotten and evil and vile person. And the fact that my father was a Baptist preacher didn't help any of that either. You know, if there are any recovering Baptist here, you know what I mean, that

that Baptist religion, they tell you that you don't look at a woman with lust in your eyes. You know, and I knew I was looking at women with lust in my eyes before I ever knew what lust was. And but I knew that I was looking at him the wrong way.

And they tell you in that church that if you even think about it, you're just as guilty as if you did it. And I was always a great thinker and what I thought about a lot about it a lot. And then later on I found out that they're doing with more fun than thinking. And so then I knew that I was just and I was going to go to hell. And

the book that my father preached out of told me that I was supposed to be a God fearing person and I was God fearing. All right. I was terrified of that God that he talked about.

And so as soon as I could, I started educating that God out of existence and I started finding myself something else to believe in so that I didn't have to walk around with all that guilt. And so I managed to do that. I managed to find enough philosophy books, so I managed to find enough the different types of reading to convince myself that you didn't have to believe in that God that he believed in. So by the time I got the alcoholic synonymous,

I was a stark raving evangelical agnostic.

And I have to convince everybody else of the righteousness of agnosticism and, and it's a hell of a way to go.

I basically, I, you know, I drank because I like the way drank. I said made me feel. I drank until I just couldn't drink anymore. Now I drank until there is no way that I could deny that alcohol was causing all kinds of problems in my life. I went through all those stages of of drinking to feel OK, then drinking because I couldn't feel OK without it, and then drinking just to maintain.

And it got in the way of my family life. I had along the way gotten married. I had a beautiful wife, had two beautiful children.

Alcohol can't do anything to you until it's done something for you. And alcohol did a lot for me because like I told you before, when I had a few drinks, I felt OK. I felt all right with the world. I got even. And when I drank alcohol, I felt like I'm with six feet, two inches tall

and I am,

I just never felt like it until I had a few drinks. And but I early on in my, in my working career, I got into work that involved a lot of sales. And all of my life I've been terrified of people. All of my life I've been terrified of anybody that's got any kind of authority. And then when I got into sales work and they told me that I had to go out on Wilshire Blvd. and go into those buildings and talk to the heads of these big companies to convince them that they

what I had. And I knew that if I went out there in the morning, I was going to stick a hand out. They were just going to be slopping wet and make a real impression on them.

So what I do is I'd stay in the office until about noon. At noon, it was socially acceptable to go up to the restaurant and have a couple of martinis for lunch. And after I had a couple of martinis for lunch, I could walk down that Blvd. and I could talk to anybody. And so alcohol did a lot for me, and it enabled me to start a fairly good career at that business. And still I didn't like the idea of going out and meeting all these people that are still terrified of. And So what I'd do is I'd hang around

office as much as I could, and I talked to the people who were newer at the job than I was, not telling how I was doing all this wonderful work that they never put enough pressure on me that I'd have to go out and do some of it. But the bosses thought that I was doing a great job of working with these new people until they started promoting me. And after about seven years, they promoted me until where I was managing their Southern California office and had a whole bunch of people working for me all the way from Santa Barbara to Newport Beach. And

my wife and I moved off up in the hills above La Crescenta and Castleminer area, and then we had a swimming pool in the backyard,

had the station wagon, the boats in the driveway, all that kind of stuff. And it looked like the Great American dream come true. And the only problem was that I didn't really have any of that stuff. It all had me. Because every time something new came along, it was something that I felt that they were going to take away from me sooner or later. And I had to do whatever I could to try and protect it in the meantime before they took it away.

But still down inside, I knew that sooner or later they were going to find out that I was only fooling them, that I didn't really know anything about all this stuff that I'd do. And as soon as they signed out, I didn't really know what I was doing, they're going to start taking it away. And I, my drinking just got worse and worse. And it got to the point where sometimes I'd stop in for a drink after work

and get home four or five days later

because I really reached that point where there is just no way of accurately predicting what my behavior was going to be once I took a drink. I might stop in and have a drink and drink for an hour or two and go home. Or I might stop in to have a drink and drink for three or four days when I get home. And my life, my, my wife lost patience with that very quickly. She thought that I was supposed to be there every night

and

one night

after I've been gone about 3 days and I came home and I walked through the kitchen to that house and the oven door was hanging a little bit open. I looked inside and there is a plate of roast beef and potatoes and some vegetables that she had left in there for me to eat. And I hadn't been home

for three or four days. And I sat down at the kitchen table and I had really had some compassion for her. And I wondered, you know, is she putting out food for me every night, not knowing where I've been, not knowing if I'm coming home, not knowing who I've been with or what I've been doing and if she believing food out like that. And I just stopped at that really just wasn't right. And so the next morning, after she had gone to work and the kids had gone off to school, I did the only thing that I could do

point in my life. I sat down with the dining room table and wrote her a note and told her that she wouldn't have to do things like leave food out for me and she wouldn't have to worry about what time I was going to be home or what I was doing because I just wasn't going to be coming home anymore. And I took my clothes and my things and threw them in the back seat of my car, and I ran away from home. And that was the end of that family as a family unit. We never did get back together.

We ended up getting divorced and she took her share of the profits that we made on the property

that we had bought and moved down to Orange County with the two kids and started a new life. And I took my share of the profits down on Wilshire Blvd. And I don't know what happened to it. It's down along Wilshire Blvd. somewhere. And that's the way an alcoholic like me is with money. And I and I did that because I thought that trying to keep up all that property and trying to keep up all those appearances in that neighborhood where I knew that everybody else belonged.

I was there on my all false pretenses. I knew that all that pressure was what was making me drink as much as that I drank. But what happened when I left that family was I found out that that family was one of the outside controls on my drinking. That helped to put a little bit of a check on my drinking. About a year and a half after that, I decided there was that high pressure job that I was working at that was making me drink so much. If I didn't have all of those people to worry about and only had myself to take care of, I wouldn't have to

so much. And so I quit that job that I've been at for almost 13 years and making good money. They did have no idea. My boss was in Chicago, IL and had no idea that I was getting to work. Some days, if I got to work at all, at at 9:00 or 10:00 and leaving by 11 or 12:00 because I had it set up so that somebody in that office knew how to do everything that I was supposed to do.

And I'd come in just long enough to give a few quick instructions and I'd be off to do whatever I wanted to do.

And I'm told today that's called management.

Then I thought it was just goofing off and but that's what I'd do. And the job got done and the people in my Home Office had no idea of how I was getting it done, that I wasn't spending that much time there. But still it took me 5 months to quit that job because they didn't want me to leave because we were making money for them. And so they gave me a fully paid leave of absence and told me to go on out. They knew I was getting divorced and they thought that that was probably what the problem was. So they said going out and take care of your personal life and you'll be ready to come back,

go to work again. Now if you want to kill an alcoholic, giving them a paycheck and tell them you don't have to come in and do anything for it is one good way to do it. Now they were mailing the paycheck to me and I had no place to go except to the bars or the golf course or whatever else. And so I drank around the clock for the five months that they continued doing that. And

after they were sending me the text for about about a month, they sent me the checks and never heard a word from me. After about a month, my boss called me and he said, well, how you feeling? He said, you ready to come back to work? And I told him, no, not yet.

And another month goes by and he called me again. He says, how are you doing? I said I'm not ready yet. And he waited again, called me after the third month. And after he called me the third time in three months, I started thinking, this guy putting a lot of pressure on me.

That's the way my head works. And after five months, he told me said that he said, fight. If you don't come back to work, we're going to have to stop paying. You know, I said, alright, I told you I wasn't coming back to work when I left there. And so they stopped the paychecks. And I'm the kind of alcoholic that, you know, I don't do a lot of planning for a rainy day when I'm out there in the bar impressing people I don't know with money that I don't really have.

And so I didn't have a whole big nest egg set aside to carry me through any rainy days. And I learned very quickly after they stopped paying me that I was willing to violate every moral and ethical principle that I ever had

to get enough to keep me going with what I needed. And I was willing to listen to any money making proposition that came down the road. And I wasn't concerned with the legalities of it because for me, there was only one sin left in the world and I was getting caught. So whatever proposition that came along, I would just have two things to consider. How much are we going to get and what's the chance of getting caught?

If that seemed to work out OK, you could count me in and

and I live like that for about two years.

Every now and then I'd try to get back into something a little more on the up and up and just couldn't quite keep off keep away from the drinking long enough to do it. And after two years, I finally realized that known as just about the time that I left that family that

that I came to my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Because just before not too long before I left that family, I managed to pull one of those things like the

that talks about in the book where he picked the absolutely worst possible time to get drunk. And I was supposed to host a meeting of that companies managers from all over the Western territory of the United States. And I was supposed to meet him out of at the Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, Studio City.

We're supposed to begin the meetings at around 7:00 on on a Monday morning. And So what I did on Sunday night, instead of going to the hotel I got supposed to do, I went out and got drunk.

I got home about 4:30 in the morning and I knew that there's no way in the world I was going to be able to get down to that hotel in any kind of shape by 6:00.

So I told my wife, I said, would you call down the hotel about 6:30 and get my boss on the phone and tell him that I'm sick, that I won't be able to come in. And the lady maybe about noon. And she says no tie. She says. I'm not going to lie for you anymore

now, to the best of my ability. She had never been to any aluminum meetings before. That sounded suspicious.

And she says if you want them to hear that lie, you're going to have to talk to him yourself. And so I had to wait till about 6:30 and muster up my courage and reach down the inside like I'm able to do when I really have to get on the phone and sound sick enough and straight enough to convince my boss that I'm sick and I can't come in. I said I'll try to make it by noon. And he says no. He says. He says if you're sick, he says stay home, take care of yourself,

maybe you'll be able to make it tomorrow. And sure enough, by Tuesday, I was able to wake up. But after I hung up the phone,

my wife says, now will you admit that you need some help?

And I thought, boy, isn't this a crock, You know,

20 minutes ago I asked her to help me out and call those people and she wouldn't do that. Then she turns around, said you need help, you know.

So she called the the number for Alcoholics Anonymous and incentive in Glendale. And they sent us down to the old Maryland club and got down there about noon. And some guy in the coffee shop handing me a cup of coffee and they had cups with trying to cup with saucers. And so I'm standing there with my coffee cup and he looks at me and says, when do you have your last drink?

And I said about 4:00 this morning, I think.

And he says, wow. He says, I couldn't have held a coffee cup like that on my first day. He said, I've been shaking too bad I couldn't hold it. And I said, see,

I don't belong here. I'm not like these people. So I went to a meeting for a couple of weeks and a couple of guys took me under their wings and really tried to get me into this program. And they shared with me. And one of them told me that he says, you know, he says I never went to to bed unless I had something in the house to wake up at 2:00 in the morning because I knew I was going to be shaking when I woke up in the morning. I was going to have to have something to get me started. And I said I don't drink in the morning.

Another guy says I can't go to bed at night. He says until I everything's currently as long as there's something left to drink. He said I'm going to stay at it till it's done. I got a bar in my house with 30 quarts of booze in there. There's no way I'm not like these people. And I did love some of the old timers now because this was 1976 and the group that was going to some of those guys had gotten sober back in

194041 in that era. And they had been

doing their drinking during the Depression. And some of those guides in the depression who are out roaming around the country, they really did some neat stuff and they're drinking, you know, I mean, they, they stole railroad trains and battleships and all that really neat kind of stuff, you know, and I've never done any of that kind of stuff. But see, I just knew that I wasn't like these people. And so I found the exit sign and I got out of there because a a had done what what I wanted it to do Anyway. I'd gone there to get my wife off my back. After two weeks

off my back, I would completely squirt away with the people at work. Alcoholics Anonymous work wonders. So I didn't need it anymore. And I didn't go to any more Alcoholic Anonymous meetings until I ended up in the hospital about 2 1/2 years later,

about 2 1/2 years later, after I quit that company that had wonderful health plan. And of course, I didn't bother to keep up the premiums on that. And I reached a point where I'd be walking down the street and my legs would just stop working.

I'll be walking down the streets. And next thing I know, I just kind of crumbled down into a mass. And I never knew when this was going to happen, you know? And I thought, well, maybe the drinking is doing something to it, but it got worse when I tried to stop drinking. So I didn't try to stop drinking. It just kept getting worse. And so finally one day it just got so bad that that the friend that I was living with and another guy took me out to General Hospital in Los Angeles.

And you know, General Hospital. But I think it had to be the worst place in the world to go to. The doctors out there don't know anything. You know, they, they teach at USC, but they don't know anything.

And so they spent about six or seven hours running around doing all kinds of tests on me, taking X-rays and

doing electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms and everything else. And finally, after running all those tests, they couldn't find anything from what was wrong, so they stuck me up in the alcohol ward

and I was convinced that they didn't know what they were doing. But actually what I had was something that's called alcoholic neuropathy.

It is where the nerve endings begin going dead. The alcohol kills them. You lose control of the muscles. And I ended up spending seven days in that hospital that got me back on my feet. I went to a a meetings for about a month and I didn't drink for about 3 months. And after three months of not drinking, I thought, hey, I'm getting along pretty good. I'm out playing golf, I'm walking the stairs. Everything is going OK,

not having any problems. I must not be an alcoholic. You know, Alcoholics have problems when they stop drinking.

And so I figured I could have a couple of beers on the golf course. And I had a couple of beers and nothing happened. And after about 3 weeks of having a couple beers on the golf course, I thought, well, there's nothing wrong with having a drink before dinner and maybe a little glass of wine with dinner and maybe a couple of shots after dinner. And, you know, within two months after the time that I had that first beer on the golf course, I was right back where I started from.

And instead of going to the hospital, I stopped drinking on my own and started coming back to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And for the next three years, I'd go in and out of these doors like there's some revolving or like you heard about.

And I didn't really get all that involved in what they told me to do. And I didn't get a sponsor.

I ain't got sponsor because I knew what a sponsor was. Really. I knew what you said the sponsor was, but I knew that a sponsor is really somebody who's gonna try to get into my shit.

And I had this big top secret staff right in the middle of my forehead that there and nobody's getting in there. And I knew that that was what a sponsor was gonna do, is he was gonna try to get in there and mess around with that stuff. And so I didn't get a sponsor.

I thought about it a couple of times because of when that urge had come to start drinking again. I'd think, well, maybe I'd better get a sponsor. And I think, I don't know, I can do this. You know, it's this time, it's going to be different anyhow. And so I didn't get a sponsor. I did take a lot of inventories during those three years, and unfortunately none of them were mine.

I took everybody else's. I didn't take mine. You know, I could and I could look around these rooms and they used to say a lot. They hear a lot in these rooms that, you know, some of us are sicker than others.

And I could look around. I could say, yeah, there's one over there. And that one over there, you know, it wasn't till I got here for real. But I stopped looking around when I heard him say some of us are sicker than others. Because I know that I'm just about the sickest 1 here. And that went on until, and the drinking got worse. The periods when I could drink with any kind of success at all got shorter and shorter. The drunks got longer

and I was just going down, down the hill and I

knew that I was never gonna have enough money to fix everything because I had this belief from as long as I could remember that if you got enough money, you can take care of anything. And I don't know how much that money that is because there are times that I walked around the streets with thousands of dollars in my pocket, but I still didn't have enough. So I still didn't know what enough was. I just knew that I was never going to have enough. I knew that a A wouldn't work for me because I'd been around here now for about 6 years and nothing had happened.

And so I decided that I could do like they told me in that hospital that if you keep on drinking the way that I was drinking, pretty soon you're going to have seizures or convulsions, you're going to die.

So I decided to drink myself to death. And I, I hold up in my apartment and for six weeks I did nothing but drink 100 proof vodka, Smirnoff Black label vodka.

And I buy it by the court and I drink it till I passed out. And as soon as I came to, I'd grab the bottle and start drinking again because I'd long since passed the time where I could shut off my head by drinking. The only way I could shut off my head would be to just knock myself completely and unconsciousness. And as soon as I woke up, that was my next goal was to get enough of that stuff down me again, to knock myself in unconsciousness again.

And I when I wake up in the bottle, it'd be anything less than half full. It was time to make that trip to the liquor store because I did not want that bottle to go empty

because I've gotten sober cold Turkey or stopped drinking cold Turkey enough time during those last four or five years. But I didn't want to do that again. I didn't think I could do it again because when I stopped drinking after drinking the way that I drink, 2-3 quarts of vodka day, within an hour, I'm just shaking all over inside and outside. And I'm throwing up everything that I put in my mouth and I'm crawling around on my hands and need because my legs won't work. And I can't go to sleep and I can't really be awake.

Stay there in kind of a twilight zone for four or five or six days until it finally passes and the shakes go off and I get enough strength back to be able to get out and and do something else. And I've done that enough times that I didn't want that bottle to go empty.

And the last day that I drank, which was March 7th in 1982, I was headed down to the liquor store to get that next bottle to make sure that that didn't happen because there's only about 3 inches left in that bottle that I had in my apartment. And I got halfway across the street in front of my house and

be from my apartment and all of a sudden I realized that I was going down. And, you know, it's one of those kind of slow motion realizations that you're falling, you know, and I couldn't do anything. I couldn't put my hands out. I couldn't do anything. Just kind of dumbly watch the pavement come up and hit me in the face, too.

And then my head said, you're down on the ground, get up, you know, And I try to get up and I fall down again. And I was completely aware of everything that was going on. And my body was just too drunk for me to be able to control it. And I tried three or four times to get back up, up on my feet. And I balled on every time. And finally I crawled out of the street of my hands and knees. And I was sitting on the curb looking back at the apartment where I live

and wondering, how did I get here?

How could this happen to me? This can't happen to me because I know too much. I've read too much, I'm too smart, I've been around too long. This happens to people down on Skid Row. This happens to other people. This can't happen to me.

There's a lady pulling a little shopping cart along the down the sidewalk and she saw me sitting there in the curb and my glasses had broke and had a little streak of blood running down the side of my face. And she took one look at me and she took her cart and just pulled it clear out in the intersection to get around me. You know, and I'm a sensitive guy, and when people avoid me like that, it hurts my feelings. She was treating me like just some kind of common drunk or something,

and that's what I was

are just a common drink. It didn't make any difference that my rent was paid on that apartment, that I had a car underneath there in the garage, that I had some clothes in the closet and I had some money in the bank. None of that meeting any different, but I still had some stuff because I was just a drunk down in the street

and I ended up crawling up a lamppost to get back on my feet. Tonight I got back across to my apartment, got in the elevator and got I lived on the 6th floor and walked into the kitchen at 3 inches of vodka was still adding in that bottle. And without anything thought at all, I took the cap off and I poured it down the sink.

And I think that that was my higher powers interference because given any thought on my own, because as soon as I stood there and my head kicked back in again, I said, my God, why did I do that? I might have been able to taper off a little bit. You know, guys, I'm a good taperer. I taper off, taper on

that stood there, that empty bottle. And I thought, you know, I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to happen here. And I walked into the living room and I sat down the slope and my big book had been laying on the coffee table all the time during that last drunk. And I picked it up and set it on its back and it opened almost to the same page that it's opened up here today. So the first page called a vision for you,

and on that page it says that for most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship, and colorful imagination.

It means a release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous to intimacy with the friends

and feeling that life is good.

It is not so for us in those last days of heavy drinking,

to the good old days were gone forever, that they're just the memory. They said there would be an insistent yearning to enjoy life like we once did, in a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control might enable us to do that. It said there would always be one more attempt and one more failure. It says that the less people tolerated us, the more we would withdraw from society and from life itself,

and in that pitiful vapor that is loneliness settles down on us and it thickens and becomes blacker. It says that some of us will seek out sordid places, hoping to find understanding, companionship and approval in the momentarily we could. But then would come oblivion and the awful awakening to face those hideous 4 horsemen of terror, bewilderment, frustration and despair.