Karl M. from Covina, CA friday evening speaker at Road to Recovery Convention, Reykjavik Iceland

Oh, Nestor Air Kartham Kurzweil.

Good evening. My name is Carl. I'm an alcoholic.

I would really, really like to thank Thor for all the work he has done to to bring this about and to to give me the honor of being here. And I'm sure Mickey and Michael feel the same way.

This is a huge honor in my life.

It's an honor to be brought with Mickey and Michael. It's an honor to be in Iceland,

you know, in Los Angeles quite often at coffee, at coffee shops, you people that may talk a little bit in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous may often sort of throw out. Well, I, I got the honor of I got to speak at the rodeo Dr. meeting. I got to speak at the Pacific group or every once in a while somebody say, well, I got to go to Texas. Well, for the next number of months we will be able to top that story because

because Iceland in in the United States is regarded as a very exotic place,

really is mystical almost. I, I am Icelandic by heritage also.

And in viewing out in the audience here and seeing all of the sober Alcoholics, which of course is a small percentage of obviously the drinking Alcoholics, I now know where my alcoholism came from.

And I do have to say, this is my second time in Iceland.

There is no place else other in the world that I can get off an airplane and look around and feel like I'm with every with my relatives. There is no place else in the world with more blonde haired people that are not questioning why I am blonde like this.

But I wouldn't want to put any kind of blame of alcoholism because actually alcoholism has become the greatest gift in my life,

It really has. And so I would want to thank Iceland for my alcoholism.

And if you're new, you may not understand that except I could, I could maybe hopefully make you understand right now, if I were not alcoholic, I would not to get to be standing here right now. And that is an incredible, incredible gift in my life. So I'm going to rifle right into my story.

I didn't start drinking drinking till later on in my life. I did not start drinking till I was 11 years old.

It's looks like that might be late in this room. I've been meeting people that are 16 years old with four years of sobriety here,

and they have one hell of a story going on already. It's,

but I didn't know it at the time, but I believe it now and that I believe I was an alcoholic right from the gate. And I believe this because of what happened to me within the 12 hours after taking my first drink. I was 11 years old and my parents were out of town for the weekend and I stole a bottle of wine from my father and I locked myself in his study and I proceeded to drink. And halfway through that first bottle of wine, notice I said first bottle of wine. I got this feeling that was just overwhelming. Well, I don't even need to describe it.

Eating of Alcoholics Anonymous, You guys know the feeling. If I were maybe we're down at at well, I don't know what you would call your Rotary Club or your businessman's club. I might have to describe it further, but you guys know this feeling. I remember just halfway through that first bottle of wine, taking this big deep breath just

now. I didn't know that I'd been short of breath for the 1st 11 years of my life. I, I did not know that.

And that's the last thing that I remember of that night was that feeling. The next thing that I remember is that I came to in my bedroom the next morning and there was vomit everywhere, all over the walls, all over the floor, in my pillowcase. It was in my underwear, I mean everywhere. And I knew I was going to have to vomit again. And I made it into the bathroom. I realized I'd vomited or puked all over the bathroom floor. And I, I slipped on the bathroom floor and I hit my head on the toilet bowl going down. And as I crawled back up to get my head back in the toilet bowl, I felt that wonderful

feeling that I would feel many times later my life. And that is how nice and cold that porcelain feels on the side of your face.

Love that feeling.

It's nothing better than being naked on a tile floor when you're when you're drunk.

And I started to heave again and I'd made it into the dry heave stage. You know the part where nothing's coming out but Flamini just right?

I've made it that far and all of a sudden my mind started to talk to me, and this is what my mind said in between dry heaves. It's going and my mind says this is all right, we're going to do this again.

So right there, within 12 hours of taking my first drink, everything that makes me alcoholic, it happened halfway through that first bottle of wine, I got an abnormal, the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous calls it an allergic reaction to alcohol. And the phenomenon of craving kicked in and I lost control over the over the amount that I drank.

I had only meant to experiment and to taste alcohol and just to see sort of what it was a little bit about and why people drank it. I had no intention of drinking 2 bottles of wine at 11 years old. The best way I can describe this phenomenon of craving, this bizarre reaction that my body has to alcohol, is that I seem to get thirstier the more I drink. Now Thor was nice enough to give me this glass of water that I will probably finish most of while I'm speaking with you. However, I can promise you that

after I get done speaking and finish this glass of water, I will not go out into town to buy 20 cases of water. I won't be doing that,

I can absolutely guarantee you that. But if it were alcohol, I'd get thirstier the more I drink.

But if that's all there was to be an alcoholic was this reaction that I get when I drink,

well then our one of our ex presidents wives, Nancy Reagan, when she came out and said just say no. All of us would have gone

and and we certainly would not have to have a conference like this. Maybe once a year you would get people would band together and say remember just say no. And we would all go back to our lives and be successful, wouldn't we?

But there's this other thing that makes me alcoholic and this thinking. And this thinking kicked right in as I was vomiting and paying a price for my drinking the night before. Now this thinking that I have that will take me back to the first drink at all cost. This thing they call the mental obsession,

it was always able to rationalize and justify anything in my life to make it OK to drink again. Now there at 11 years old, I'm only paying a small price for my drinking. Just a little vomiting. This is no big deal, but by the time I made it to Alcoholics Anonymous, my mind would be able to rationalize and justify handcuffs as being a minor and temporary inconvenience.

Now, the truth about handcuffs are that they are a symbol from our society that they do not even trust us with our own hands. That's the truth about handcuffs. But I would not be able to signify that. So right there. At 11 years old, I I drank as often as I could, as much as I could. Well, before I started drinking, I was kind of a goofy little kid, short hair, playing violin, doing really well in school, loved my family. Once I started drinking, everything changed. Out went the violin,

heavy metal guitar, wanted to grow my hair down to my ass. School became a very secondary issue, and my parents became the enemy immediately. Black lights went up in my room, posters went up, my gods became Jimmy Page and Richie Blackmore and I was back behind that locked door going WOW and my parents were going wow.

Two very different Wows to the same situation. Now this was a summer we lived in Seattle, WA in the northwestern corner of the United States at this time

and

in 7th grade, a typical morning in school for me would be I'd show up early for school, not for study hall or anything, but to meet my new friends at the very edge of the school property. I now refer to it as losers corner where everybody hangs out and smokes and and there would always be about 5 or six of us that were drinking and we would always have this jar full of the parents liquor cabinet mixture, right? It would always be some child, some other kids assignment to go raid the parents liquor cabinet and pour whatever he could into a jar and bring it to school. Now there would be whiskey, vodka, cream de mint, vermouth,

equal amounts of all of this in one jar. There'd be green things floating around in it and you can imagine a four or 511 and 12 year olds handing this around and trying to choke this down. And of course it was the early 70s, so we were smoking that commercial pot. Anybody remember that stuff? Four finger lids, $10 a bag, seeds and stems in the whole bit. Anybody remember that Here in Iceland it was even before zip lock days when it would just be regular glad bags. And as we'd roll that glad bag up, there'd be about nine people spit on it.

We pack all those seeds and stems and leaves into a homemade pipe, may be made out of plumbing fittings and a screen. Or if we're really desperate that morning, it would be a toilet paper roll with with aluminum foil and pin holes in it. And we'd hit that lighter on those seeds and stems and the seeds and stems would be popping. We'd be burning holes in our clothes. And then we'd look at each other and go, do we go to school today? The answer was never yes. We are late. That was never the answer. Now it's quite often in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Many people that speak in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous

at this point often interrupt themselves and say something like this. I don't mean to offend anybody, but drugs are part of my story.

I think it's a bizarre thing for Alcoholics to apologize to other Alcoholics for doing drugs while drinking or in between drunks.

Now, I understand apologizing to police officers and judges and parents and things, but I don't understand apologizing to each other. In fact, the most bizarre example I've ever seen of that was a few years ago. I was in a speaker meeting much like this and the speaker was up just giving one of the ugliest heinous blow by blow Drunkologs I've ever heard. And I got to tell you, when I'm in a speaker meeting on the drunken law gets ugly. The uglier it gets, the more excited I get. And at one point in this ugliest and at one point in this

story, this fellow said, you know, I had four DUI's that's driving under the influence. And the judge told me that if I got one more DU I, I was gonna go to prison for sure. And sure enough, 2 weeks later I'm on the freeway and I, I was drunk in a blackout and I hit a family of four. They all wound up in, in the hospital and I wound up in prison. And in prison I sodomized men. I was sodomizing. Then he said, I don't mean to offend anybody, but I did some drugs too.

I was the only one that thought that was strange that night.

So now by the time I was 14, I was a neighborhood drunk in the neighborhood drug dealer. And I forgot to mention, but my father was a neighborhood Lutheran minister.

Yes, he, he, there was lots of whispering going on in the family.

The but my parents were very, very good people and they saw that I was withering away in front of their eyes. It was no secret that all of a sudden I was, you know, before I started drinking, I had a vocabulary. School was very important. Music and sports were important. By the time I was 14, none of that was in my life anymore. And my vocabulary, by this time, my hair was down in front of my eyes and my vocabulary was, wow,

whoa, man. I would call my mother man. That's what I would do.

But they always blame my problems on people, places and things. They always thought if we can get them away from that group of kids he's hanging out with, things to get better. They thought if we can get him out of that public school system into a private school, things that get better. But you see, I'm an alcoholic. My problems are not based upon people, places and things. My problems are based upon my physical and mental relationship to alcohol. All that happens if you change the people placed in things in somebody's life, like mine, is that I'm loaded with different people in different places,

many different things. That's all that happens.

So by the time I was 17 or 18, I barely scraped out of the public school system there in Seattle. And my parents decided that Seattle was the problem. If we can get them out of Seattle, things to get better. So they sent me 300 miles away to a university on the other side of the state, and they thought maybe this will straighten him out. Well, I spent three years at that university on my parents money, and I gained about 10 credits in three years. At any given time, my grade point average matched my blood alcohol content about a .25.

I did nothing at that school by the time I was 22. This little story I'm about to tell you, We'll let you know exactly what I stood with my family.

Now, my father was Swedish. My mother is Icelandic. Therefore I, well, you know now. That's why I look the way I do now. And I don't know whether this customer I'm about to tell you about is Scandinavian or whether it's Lutheran. I don't know. But at Christmas time, my parents would not just send out Christmas cards. They would send out a big long Christmas letter that that said everything the family had been doing that year. And when I was about 22, I got a hold of one of these letters that have been sent out the previous Christmas. And as I read it, it let me know exactly where I stood with my family.

The first paragraph talked about what my parents had been doing that year,

and the second paragraph talked about what the Morris children had been doing that year, and that paragraph went something like this.

Our oldest daughter, Christina, just graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY with a master's degree in marketing. She's now working for a large pharmaceutical company in the Midwest as a marketing director. She traveled to Europe this summer. She saw this. She saw that her hobbies are this, this, and this, and she's a very happy young woman. We're very proud of her. Our oldest son, Eric, just graduated from Western Washington State University with a degree in advertising. He's now working for a large advertising firm here in Seattle. He loves the golf. He loves to travel. He's engaged to be married to this wonderful woman named Mary Lou. This was a while ago, mind you,

a wonderful woman named Mary Lou who works for a very small company here in Seattle named Microsoft.

It was small at one time, and they loved to golf together. They loved to travel together. He's a very happy young man. We're very proud of him. Our youngest son, Carl, just turned 22.

That was,

it's about the same time that it was one more wrecked car, one more time in jail. And my parents have said, you know what? We've tried to help you again and again and again. And all you've ever done is spit in our face. If you're going to live that way, go ahead, but not around here. Just leave. And I remember packing my car up and I was going to head South from Seattle. Now, my cars, I'd had a lot of cars ever since I'd been 16 years old. And they always started out as a perfectly good used car, but they would die of alcoholism along the way. I don't know if your car's did that or not,

but mine did, and this will tell you exactly why I drank if I were physically sober on any given morning. Meaning I just haven't had a drink yet that day.

And I come out of wherever I happen to be living at the time, whether it be my parents basement or a public park, you know, depending on what part of my life we're talking about. And I come up to a car that I've owned for a while and I haven't had a drink yet that day. And I'm wrestler serial and discontent, just generally mad at the world. And I walk up to a car that I'd owned for a while and I'd see the dent and the broken windows and I, man, I deserve better than that. And I would get in and I would smell the rancid smell of stale alcohol on the carpets. And I would see the cigarette and hot box burns on the seat.

And then I would turn the key and it's only hitting on one or two cylinders. And I'd be driving down the road with the rear view mirror hanging off and a cracked windshield. And I'd be driving down the road and I'd get madder by the 2nd and some young guy in a nice car would blaze by and honk at me like I'm in his way. And I'd say to myself, damn it, right, Just a little edgy here. And all I would have to do is go drink for a couple of hours. And now after drinking for a couple of hours, I would walk up to that very same car.

Now, after drinking for a couple of hours, I'd walk up to that same car and I'd say to myself,

62 Dodge Coronet is a classic.

And I would get in and it wouldn't smell bad anymore. And then the most miraculous thing I ever experienced prior to coming Alcoholics Anonymous would happen when I would turn the key. Now, after drinking, I would turn that key. And as far as I was concerned, it was like, it's like a mechanic had been working on my car while I'd been drinking. Now, I didn't know that the ability for alcohol to totally change my perception of my reality around me was going to actually gives ME3 choices. Jails, insanity, death, or here. And I do have to tell you

that 11 year at 11 years old, when I reacted to alcohol physically and mentally in the way that I did, my choices were jails, insanity, death, or Alcoholics Anonymous. Right now I am 14 1/2 years clean and sober and Alcoholics Anonymous and my choices have not changed. My choices are still jails, insanity, death or Alcoholics Anonymous. And that's also why I'm so glad that Thor did the work and the other people that did did a lot of the work here,

because the unity of Alcoholics Anonymous is very, very important. And I'm so glad that all of you have supported this

because we all know that if we don't stand together, we will die alone. We really will. And every country needs to be able to get their members of Alcoholics Anonymous need to gather on a regular basis and reconfirm that they are standing together in this, in this disease. And so I'm very proud that you guys have, have done this. I, I, at that time, I, I headed South towards, towards California in that car. I lived at beaches. I showered out of my car. The words are demoralizing. That's the only words to use the

about a year and a half later, I was back up in the Seattle area and a drug deal went very, very badly. And it went so badly that I joined the United States Navy. It went that badly.

What I'm about to tell you should scare the daylights out of you. But on my way into the Navy, I passed a potential test. It's called the ASVAP test. It measures your potential of what you could do if you show up in the same place every day. And what I what I'm about to tell you should scare the daylights out of you. But

this potential test qualified me to become a nuclear engineer in the Navy.

That should scare the daylights out of you that the United States Navy would even think, think maybe, possibly, or even remotely think. It's a good idea to put somebody like me near anything nuclear.

However, they made me take another test when I showed up at that base and I could not pass that particular test. It's called a urinalysis test is what it's called. I could not pass that one.

So I was immediately transferred out of this nuclear engineering group and kicked out of that and then kicked and put into this group that they affectionately called nuclear waste is what they called this little group of people. Now, I'll never forget the day I was in the boot camp, been there for a couple of weeks and the list came in of all the people who had gone positive on the first year analysis who are now in jeopardy of being kicked out because they had lied about their drug use on before entering the Navy supposed to be kicked out. I'll never forget when that the what they call

Master at arms, it's like a military police would walk in with that list and all the ones that that knew our name were on the list. We knew our names were on that list and we all kind of looked at each other and he came in and read that the names off that list and sure enough, my name was on there. They marched us out of our boot camp company, put us in a van and took us over to this other building on the other side of the Navy base. Then they read off everybody's name except mine, told me to sit in the van, and they marched the other men into this into these this building and they.

The master Arms came back and the driver drove me to another building. The building where the commanding officer of the whole base is called Great Lakes Naval Station. It's one of the largest naval stations in the United States. Training basis took me right into the commanding officer's office. Now I'm getting a little worried here. Why would they be taking me here? They marched me into this big office, very plush carpeting, pictures of naval vessels all along the side of big giant oak desk. And this man sitting behind with all this gold

on very impressive uniform and they marched me in front of this man. And the man asks me my name. I tell him my name and then he pushes. He has a telephone on his desk and he pushes the speakerphone button and he says into the telephone, Walter is my father's name. Now my father, other than being the Lutheran minister, was also a Navy chaplain, reservist for 40 years, ever since World War 2.

The man who was the commanding officer of the Great Lakes Naval Station the time was an old war friend of my father's.

And because of this sort of different spelling of my last name, it triggered a memory in him. He looked in my records, realized it was I was my father's son. So he pushed it. I'm standing there in front of him and he says, Walt, I have your son here. He's gone positive for the first year analysis test for cocaine. Technically, we should kick him out of the Navy. What do you think we ought to do with him? I'm calling you because you're an old friend,

I hear my father's voice over the over the speaker say. It is none of my concern.

Click, dial tone. Now, I knew I had been embarrassing my family in the North End of Seattle for many, many years, but now I'm embarrassing my father at a national level. If I could have just slithered out of that room under that carpet, I would have. They kept me in the Navy anyway, and they took away this nuclear status and they made me a what they call a conventional electrician. And for many years, they would not even let me stand watch on a light switch.

Two years later, I was a lower rank than when I first came in.

Well, you know,

this is how that would happen. See, when I was out on that ship, I would be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a big Gray ship with a with 300 other men all in the same uniform. It's hard to deny the fact that I was in the United States Navy. I could not deny that. However, when the ship would pull into a port, I would leave that ship and I would take a drink and I would totally forget that I was in the Navy, and I would come back to where I had last seen the ship

when the drunk was over. And sometimes the ship would not be there. It's a very lonely feeling in a foreign country on a big long pier looking for a big Navy ship that's not there anymore and trying to figure out what day it is. Then how am I going to explain this to my superiors?

Well, after I'd been in the Navy approximately 2 years, this one morning I was, I was already in a lot of trouble and I was driving my car into the Navy base.

And at every Navy base there is a guard shack where a Marine will stand duty. And if you, if you want to park your car on the base, you have to pull up to this guard check. He will check the sticker on your car, he will check your military ID if everything's in order, he will flag you forward and you will be able to go on to the base. This particular morning, I guess that I had a bottle between my legs. I had been drinking all weekend and I was late and I, I guess there was a depth perception problem going on. They say it was on my part. I'm not really sure about that. But all of a sudden I could see the whites of the Marines eyes

and I looked down at my speedometer and I was going 35 or 40 miles an hour, approximately 50 kilometers per hour. And I and I, I tried to swerve the car and the car hit this median on the right hand side. It flipped up on, on its side and went right through the guard shack. I can still see that Marine doing this big dive out of there

now. The most significant thing that happened that morning is that they put the Navy doctors. After patching me up, the Marine was OK.

He survived this. I survived it. The most significant thing is that the Navy doctors put me on Medical Sciences. Best shot at the alcoholic. It's called an abuse. They prescribed this Ant abuse for me. The doctors gave me a little warning about drinking on top of anti abuse. I filed that information for future reference. They sent this prescription for an abuse back to the ship's doctor and every morning I would have to show up at the at the sick Bay and the corpsman would put this little white pill on my tongue and make me sit there for 1/2 an hour.

Over the next few days I started to experience the most cunning, baffling and powerful side of this disease called alcoholism, and that is that I had developed a spiritual malady which made it impossible for me not to drink. I remember counting those days on that antibuse, just

it's been about four days and

I'm on an abuse.

Now it's been 6 days

and I'm on an abuse.

It's been 8 days,

six hours

and 15 minutes

and I'm on an abuse.

I started to look around that ship and the other men. They're talking behind my back,

all 300 of them.

Do you ever feel that way in a A?

The only difference is that in AAA we are talking behind your back. But I'm sure only with love and tolerance in Iceland, you know,

on about the 10th day on this end of use, I snapped and I went AWOL from my ship. I left the ship without authorization simply because my division officer had asked me to do a very legitimate task, and I could not believe that he had asked me to do this lowly task. So I let the division officer know how I felt. Military officers are very concerned with their subordinate feelings.

So I said to him, you obviously don't know who I am, do you?

And I'll never forget this. He turned on his heels and he stared me down. And he said, all right, who are you?

And I stood there like

to this day that I stand before you. That's the most embarrassing question I had ever been asked in my life.

So I left the ship and I went down to downtown San Diego where the the ship was was in in dock there. And I have checked into this little fleabag hotel called the Plaza Hotel. I bottled, I got a bottle of vodka and a shot glass. And I sat in this little hotel on the edge of the bed with this little night stand in the bottle of vodka and the shot glass in front of me. And I remembered the warning that the Navy doctors had given me about drinking on top of antivirus. They had said, son, if you drink on top of an abuse, you'll get one of two reactions.

One reaction is you will get violently I'll. The other reaction is you might die. I remember thinking, well, I wonder which reaction I'm going to get,

and I took one shot and nothing happened. I figured authority had lied to me again. As far as I was concerned, I waited about two minutes just to make sure, and I took another shot.

All of a sudden I felt tingly in the face, so I looked in this cracked little mirror that was in this hotel room and I was bright red, blotchy and purple in places.

Took another shot. All of a sudden I could feel my heart going. I looked at my shirt. I was drenched in sweat, and then all of a sudden I was like

hyperventilating.

We're doing all right so far.

I have to tell you, this is a very sick group. If you think that's funny,

non non Alcoholics do not find this to be humorous.

In fact, I have proof of that

about 12 years ago when I was about two years sober and I got out of the Navy. One of the amends that I had to make is I owed my parents either the money back for the bachelor's degree they had paid for or I had to go get what they paid for on my own. I chosen to do that, do the second one to go get the bachelor's degree that they had paid for as part of my immense. And so I got out of the Navy and I signed up for school when I was about two years sober and in order to get some of the basic credits out of the way, I took a speech class. And in the beginning of the speech class, in the first few days, the instructor just

pointed at some of the students and threw them up in front of the group, set a topic and just to see how they did so he could get a feel for how the classroom was. Well, after about five or six of the students, he pointed at me, got me up there. And from the corner of the classroom, the instructor said talk about a bizarre situation in your life.

So I told him about drinking on top of an abuse.

They did not react the way you did. They were like,

it took me months to get any friends in that class after that.

So I'm back in the hotel room, hyperventilating, sweating. I take another shot

and up it came. My late sponsor Eddie CI missed that man. He just died 2 1/2 years ago and I miss him very much. But he used to say that this next thing that happened to me he would call projectile regurgitation just up and out. Just thank God this hotel room I was in had the toilet in the same room as the bed.

Now, this type of vomiting and throwing up was different than what I was used to because one of the tools for living that I had gotten out there is what I call socially throwing up. That's where you can have a little good buzz on going and you can be anywhere. I mean, you can be at a party, you can be in a park, you can be driving, you can be in front of your grandmother and you get that little warning, little sour taste in the back of your throat. Maybe a little bit comes up. That's the alcoholic warning that you have anywhere from 10 seconds to two minutes

to find a place to puke.

Now, you know, Or if there's a bathroom handy, we of course use that. If we're driving, we just attempt to get the window down.

If there's no other place, a friend shoe might be the right place. You know it is whatever,

but here on this an abuse. There was number warning, it says.

But I found the magic of drinking on top of an abuse that if you don't die, remember that. If you don't die and you hang in there,

that's the secret. You got to hang in there and not die,

got to get those two things going at the same time. It's a little bit of a juggling act, but

but I found that if I hung in there after and I would drink and I would puke and I would drink and I would puke for somewhere between one to two hours.

And enough of the antibiotics would kick out of my system and I would quit throwing up. And then I would just be left with a red face, hyperventilating and sweating.

And I already told you I'm alright with that. It's alright,

I drank on top of an abuse for approximately 7 months.

My second to the my last drunk I was left for dead in a motel parking lot after I I was wandering around drunk out of my mind. Apparently I was looking for some crack cocaine. It seemed like a good idea at the time and three men jumped me for my money and my military ID and and the next thing I knew I had I had woken up. I came to and there was and we all know this. They're always signs that we look for

as to whether things are all right or things are not.

One of the things that would always signal to me that things were not all right is when there were all these bright lights, the surgical lights shining down on you and men and women with masks and tools in their hands. This was always a sign that things had gone badly the night before.

And this is the way I came to that morning and they were doing reconstructive surgery on my face. They had to reset my jaw, wire it shut, 26 stitches in my face,

and they had to do some minor plastic surgery after that. I'm very grateful that they actually were able to get my face back in order.

I remember after I had been in the hospital and my face was was my jaw was still wired shut, I was in the hospital and fully medically detox. Now, this is an example of my alcoholic mind, not my alcoholic body, because I had been detoxed with Ivs and everything that that hospital had to offer. And it was a good five to seven days later that I was being LED down the steps of the hospital with my jaw wired shut, crouched over like I was about 90 years old,

being helped down some stairs. And this is what my mind said to me as I was being helped down those stairs.

I said to the man from my ship that was helping me down those stairs. I said if there's any time I need a drink, it's now.

For now, this man was a good Navy man and he agreed with me,

got me a bottle of vodka and a straw. That's what I needed,

my last drunk. A few months later, I was left. I was coming out of the San Diego jail and handcuffs being brought back to the ship. And the orders had already been processed on the ship the night before and the orders had dead. The orders on the ship had said we will not accept him back on this ship. The orders are 90 days in the Brig, bad conduct discharge or. And I remember as I was standing there in handcuffs, it was one of those days where the neck muscles weren't working quite right and the handcuffs. And I hated those mornings when you're in handcuffs and you can't quite think straight

and there's all these authoritative type people making decisions about what to do with you. Just hated those mornings. I've often looked back and wondered what would have happened if I could have gotten my neck muscles to work and pop up and say, would you like my opinion?

After they read the part of 90 days in the big bad conduct discharge, the office of the Deck then read this part and he got this disgusted look on his face as he read this, like he couldn't believe the words he was reading. He said 90 days in the Brig, bad conduct discharge. Or apparently, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, we have to offer this man treatment first before he gets discharged.

Now that changed a few years later. But the decision was not made for me at that. I, I, I was not at a standing at, I was not standing there in handcuffs saying this is a good day to get sober.

Oh, I see my life is really at its at its end and that I now need to get sober. The decision was made for me. I was turned around and thrown back in the shore patrol van, the military police and taken up to a treatment center And until the doors were locked behind me, the handcuffs were not taken off. And I showed up at this treatment center and everybody that showed up at this treatment center in the same week, we were all going to do this 45 day thing together.

And we were in this sort of group therapy type setting. And on about the second or third day, this one man from another base raises his hand to talk. Nobody's talking.

Everybody's just looking at the floor. I don't remember anybody being that happy to be there. And there's one fellow raised his hand and says, I hear that if I'm going to stay sober, I need to be rigorously honest with you. And now his name was Paco. I didn't had never met him before. And he said I need to be rigorously honest with you. Paco is not my real name. Paco is just a street name I've had ever since I've been a young boy. And my real name is Randy. I want to be honest with you guys. My name is Randy. Were you guys call me Randy from now on?

Well, none of us were that impressed with it and we just sort of looked up from the floor enough time to say great, nice to meet you Randy and look back down at the floor. But apparently the facilitators of this of this place got very excited about Randy's honesty. Later that afternoon, they paraded Randy right in front of the rest of us. They slapped a gold name tag on him that said Randy. And then we were all informed that whenever staff was not around Randy's in charge,

we loved him. Oh, we just loved him.

On about the 7th day in this place, they took us all to our first meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, I'd never been to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous before. I had no prior opinion as to what Alcoholics Anonymous was or was not.

All I know is that they read off a bunch of names and told us which van to get into. And they drove us out into town. And the next thing I know, I'm sitting in a room much like this and they start doing some reading and then people get up and share for three to five minutes each. And I didn't know that it was a participation meeting, didn't know that there were different types of meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, that there were speaker meetings or step study workshops or or regular participation. I didn't know any of that. All I know is that in a blur I sat in the back and I heard them do some reading and then it probably 10 to 12 people

got up and talked for a few minutes each. And all I know is that as I sat there and listened to them read and when they shared that, I got this feeling in my gut of Oh my God, they know.

They know.

Now, I'm not sure what it is that they know that I think I know, but they know.