Vince Y. from Upland, CA at Orange County AA Convention, Costa Mesa, CA

Hi, my name is Vince and I'm an alcoholic

and I am most happy to be here this morning. And I want to thank you for inviting us down here. I want to thank Lynn and anyone else, Roy, anyone else on the committee who is responsible for inviting Pat and I down to this convention. It's been a pleasure to be here. It is always an honor and a privilege to get to do this. And I don't want to forget that. It's not a chore, it's a it's an honor. And so thank you for inviting us.

It's been a great convention and we've had a great time up until now.

I don't know what the rest will be like, but this thus far it's been good. This was I was going to start off by saying good morning, but

it may be evening, I don't know,

but it's good to be here and we've had the countdown was wonderful people with over 50 years of sobriety and the new people and it is to you. I will talk this morning. You are new. Welcome to Alcoholics Anonymous.

And that's where you are this morning. If you didn't know,

you're in a A, which is a hell of a thing, isn't it? Not really what you intended. But this is where you are. You're in a A, and you'll find this confusing. If you're anything at all like I was when I was new. None of this will make any sense. It's all illogical. A A is not based on logic.

Believe me, you'll find it's fraught with paradox.

For example,

you are in a room of about 2000 people,

none of whom can manage their own lives.

But we'll be delighted to take yours on

and hopefully you will allow them to do that because that seems to be the prescription here is to be utterly convinced that you are have no answers about what is good for you and to be desperate enough to accept almost. And I'll tell you if you're new here, anybody here is knows more about what you ought to do than you.

Almost anybody here is judgment is better than yours.

So

it's good if you just simply do what they say you will be far better off. I know that that certainly my first day a meeting which was I'll start out there I think today, which was a long time ago now. It was in November of 1965.

I know, girls I know who think he cannot be that old.

And you're right, I was only 11 at that meeting,

but it was up the freeway here in Long Beach, in the Los Altos section of Long Beach, in the Presbyterian Church on a Friday night. And it was a great a meeting. It was a big meeting. It was a speaker meeting and it was dynamic. And all of the AA community in Long Beach went to that meeting on Friday. That's where they went. And they all dressed up. The ladies were the dresses and the men wore coats and ties and they looked good and they sounded good and they were tightly wrapped.

The overwhelming characteristic of that meeting was that nobody looked like an alcoholic.

They look good and they sounded good and they all seem as though they had well ordered lives. And if you were to wander into that room on any given Friday night and you were to look around that room and someone were to say to you pick out the Alcoholics,

he would have picked no one except on that first night that I was there, he would have picked me. You could. You could have definitely identified me. I had on a ripped T-shirt and a dirty pair of jeans, and I had not shaved or bathed in over a week. And I had spent the previous five days in the Long Beach City jail

due to a series of unfortunate circumstances that were

clearly not my fault.

The Police Department in Long Beach is fascist.

I don't know if you know that. And they had abused my civil rights

on a regular basis in those days. And that was the latest of those occasions. And I ended up in the basement of that Presbyterian Church. And I don't ever want to forget why I was there. And if you are new, this may be helpful. I was not there because I was in search of sobriety,

nor was I particularly interested in serenity

or Peace of Mind. Or I was 23.

If you are here and you are in your 20s and you're interested in serenity, get some therapy.

You know that That's not

I wanted girls in a convertible, you know not.

So my motives were not the best. And if you were here new this morning and your motivation is less than noble, I have excellent news for you. We do not evaluate you as to your motivation here.

If we did, this would be a lot smaller meeting.

I will tell you that does not matter why you're here. It only matters that you are here. And I sat in the back of the room, up against the wall, a concrete wall in the back of the basement of this church. And I should also tell you I'm Irish and I'm Catholic. That's funny.

And I'm from New Jersey.

Now that's funny.

And I have great difficulty with people from Texas.

We seem to have a chemistry problem,

something I guess we don't. And I sat next to this guy who was about 6 foot five, and he had on cowboy boots and a cowboy hat in his lap, and his name was Tex.

And Tex wanted to help me. And he told me, he said, boy, I'm going to help you.

And you know, I remember thinking, why don't you go hit somebody else? Leave me the hell alone.

But he was going to help me. And the first thing he did was he repeated to me in rapid succession all of the AA cliches, one after another, which are really dreary, aren't they? God might. They're really grim. I mean, you think easy does. What the hell are you talking? Finally he draped his arm around my shoulder and he said, ah, keep it simple.

And I thought I'll bet you do, Tex.

I clearly have no argument with that. Let me tell you.

And the meeting continued and it began in much the same way we began here this morning. They read essentially what is our program and if you are new and you wonder what it is we have, that's what we have. And if you are to recover here, it is required that you take those 12 steps. It is not suggested.

That's a lie.

It is required. If you take them, you recover. If you do not take them, you do not recover, and moreover, you get worse

while you sit sober in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I think if you're new, we owe you that information.

You ought to have it today.

Now, I know this by personal experience. It's not a theory.

I listen to those 12 steps, read at that first a a meeting, and I don't know about you, but I didn't hear anything new.

I'm the end product of eight years of Dominican nuns and four years of Jesuit priests.

And I want to tell you this is not new. None of this is new. It is really. I know all about these principles. I've lived within the framework of this ethic all my life. And I'll tell you what, if there's one thing I know about all of it, I am sure it has nothing to do with the way that I drink. Because if it did, I certainly would not have to go to a Presbyterian Church

on a Friday night to search for the answer.

As a matter of fact, if you ask me, this is really superficial. It's really, really very fundamental, broad brush stuff. I mean really, you know, And I could see though it might help you

if you are Protestant or not educated, this would be very good for you.

But my case is clearly different. It simply does not apply to me.

So I sat in the back of that room and somewhere in my subconscious I dismissed these 12 steps.

I said my case is different,

they don't really apply to me. And the meeting continued, and it was a good meeting, and several people participated.

And I don't really remember what most of them said except that it was innocuous and inapplicable to my life, as near as I could tell. But they were really nice people, clearly. And at the end of the meeting, if I had any doubts as to whether I belong there or not, they were cured. They had birthday parties. I mean, good God, you know, birthday parties for a room full of middle-aged people

singing Happy Birthday to some moron who didn't have a drink for a year and they had a cake with a candle on it. I mean,

God, it's like something should take place at a mental institution, isn't it?

In the day room, you know,

right before dance therapy, you know,

birthday party for the Alcoholics. And they had several of these birthday parties, and one in particular for this woman who was about 110

and she was sober forever. She had a fire on top of this cave. And she came down the aisle and she blew the candles out. And she got up here and she said her name was Phoebe and that she was an alcoholic. And then she said something about did I want what she had?

Not tonight, Phoebe.

And that was my first day a meeting.

And I think you could safely say that I did not have a spiritual awakening.

But I'll tell you what I did. I stayed sober for the next 3 1/2 years right in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous,

and during that period of time I did everything there was to do in AAI, participated in Alcoholics Anonymous on every level. I was involved in meetings, I set up chairs, I washed cups. I did everything there was to do in AA

except one thing.

I did not take these steps

and as a result, my alcoholism got worse. And it got worse while I stayed sober in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I knew it was getting worse. And there are people here today in a meeting this big that are precisely in that state of mind and body. You've been here some appreciable length of time, and you're very busy in AA and you're all involved, except you're not involved in these steps. And you're getting worse. And you know you're getting worse because you are surrounded by people who are getting better.

And you can watch them get better. You know they're getting better. Something happens to people who recover here, doesn't it? You can see it all over them. They, they, their eyes change, their persona changes. They have a sense of purpose about their life. They're going somewhere. They have direction. And you are a loser.

You are consumed with resentment and you are arrogant

and even since you arrived here, you've accumulated a whole new set of resentments.

And they are the people who are getting better.

And that's the way that I live in Alcoholics Anonymous. Now, on the outside, wonderful things happen to me. I, I got in on it. I, I was in, on the ground floor of a new profession in, in medicine. I should tell you, I, I'm Irish and Catholic and I come from a huge Irish family in New Jersey, none of whom are alcoholic, just me. The rest of them are

disgustingly normal.

They have nothing wrong with them. They are kind, loving, warm, successful, well adjusted human beings,

All of them. I am the fifth child in a family of five children. I have four older sisters.

My youngest sister is 11 years older than I am.

My father was 50 and my mother was 45 when I was born in 1940

and that was really a big deal. It was this big Irish family with all of these girls and along came this boy.

The Prince had arrived.

My sisters fought over who would get to babysit for me. They was during the war. They dressed me in soldier suits and sailor suits. I had pictures saluting the flag, which really it's nausea. It would make you throw up.

But they love me. My father adored me. My father just the sun rose and set on me. He loved me so much. He had this boy after all of these girls. And and I'll tell you, it was just, I don't think my father never said a crossword to me until the day he died. He he just never did. He loved me so much. My earliest recollections of Christmas are are my father in the in my bedroom in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, kneeling down beside the bed. And he would wake me up and he would say things like,

I just saw the sleigh leave,

let's go downstairs. And the entire family would get up at 4:00 in the morning and go downstairs and celebrate Christmas because my father couldn't wait.

So I was loved and I was cared for and I was nurtured and I was not abused. And he was the vice president of a railroad. So we were privileged. We were affluent. And we I had all privileges known to a human being. And I like to talk about that in a, a meetings because I have been present in a meetings and I've heard people describe the way that they had to grow up. That is unspeakable

that I can't believe it. I can't believe human beings have had lived like that and have managed to make it here and and I have literally wept listening to the horrible way that people have had to grow up. None of that is my experience. It is completely the opposite. And it tells me about alcoholism, that it doesn't matter where you come from or what's happened to you. It has nothing to do with anything.

We just represent one out of 10 people who who for some reason can't drink alcohol.

That's why we're here. We come from all different places and I,

my parents died within one week of each other when I was 12.

My father had a massive heart attack on July, January the 3rd, 1953 and he died and my mother died a week later. She'd had congestive heart failure and she was quite ill for some period of time. And a week later she just kind of gave up and she died. And we had these two big Irish wakes and funerals in the space of a week. And it was a tough thing on me, there's no question about that. The 12 year old kid, it was hard, that is undeniable. But I was surrounded by this loving family, these sisters who are now had all grown up and completed their education and

and married great guys and had wonderful families and all of them surrounded me and it was just I was loved and cared for always. I ended up, however, going to live with an uncle, a bachelor uncle who was 65 years old.

He was my mother's brother and he decided I should go live with him because he was, well, he was a very powerful man. He was a politician in New Jersey. He was mayor of Jersey City for 20 consecutive years

and he was state chairman of the Democratic Party. He was a boss is what he was, and I went to live with my uncle and he was to see to it that I was educated in the right. Things happened to me and now we had a communications problem.

I was 12 and he was 65.

And we ate at opposite ends of a long dinner table,

talked about politics,

which was the mother's milk of our family. And that's what we did. And I began to get in trouble. Now, I'm a very good student in school. I get As, but I am what is known as a behavior problem. I don't know if anyone here understands that I get in trouble. And I'm in Catholic schools and I'm in a lot of trouble all the time. And I get in high school and I'm in Jesuit prep schools, four of them, one every year.

And that is because I'm thrown out of the one I'm in

and my family has to get me in another one the following year. And they always manage to do that. And I my senior year, I was valedictorian of my senior class. I had the highest grades in the class. I was number one in the class and due to give the address at graduation, except I did not get to attend graduation. Graduation was in June. In May, I stole a priest's car and got drunk and went joyriding. So I did not get to go to graduation. And they told me

if we ever have a reunion,

don't come,

stay away. And that's the way that I went through school. Now, if you grew up in the environment that I grew up in and you were time to go to college, there was only one school you wanted to go to, and that was University of Notre Dame. That's where everyone wanted to go to school in my bailiwick.

Unfortunately, my family felt that that would be a bad idea for me.

Notre Dame at that time was at all male institution with strict lights were out at 10:00 and if you got caught drinking they threw you out of school. Clearly not a wise choice for me. So my family insisted I go to school in New York, and I went to a very fine university in upstate New York and spent every semester on disciplinary probation in the 60s.

I don't know if you know how difficult that was to do. That was not an easy thing to do and

in the middle of my senior year I got an argument with my family over money

and I quit school and joined the Navy as an enlisted man. Now, I left an Ivy League university in the middle of my senior year with a 3.8 GPA in biochemistry to join the Navy as an enlisted man.

It's a very bright kid

and I sobered up in Great Lakes, IL

in boot camp and I remember telling the the the they ain't called them drill instructors there. They call them some something else. But I remember telling this to Chief,

we've made a mistake here. I have a paper due next month and I really have to go back to school. And he said, well, you're in the Navy now, kid. And they gave me a battery of tests and I do well in tests and I score very well. And they decided to send me to Albuquerque, NM, to a guided missile program

to make me a nuclear weapons expert. And then they gave me some psychological tests

and decided that that was a very bad idea.

And since I was a chemistry major and on track to go to medical school, they sent me to hospital core school to make me a Navy corpsman. And I went to that school and I did very well. And they sent me to a more advanced school where they trained Corman to go on destroyers that don't have physicians on them. And it's a more sophisticated medical. And I went to that school and I did very well. And then they sent me to medical administration school and then

off to Newport, RI, to OCS and commissioned me an officer. And now I was in Ensign. And they assigned me to the Third Marine Division in Okinawa as a medical administrative officer. And I got to Okinawa and they didn't have a job for me and couldn't figure out what to do with me. So they put me in an officer's club at the northern end of Okinawa and forgot about me.

And quite frankly, I forgot about them. The mutual agreement and my duty consisted of getting up around noon and reporting to the cocktail lounge of this officer's club

and drinking Haggen Hague Pinch $0.60 a pop, which is not bad, I will tell you that. Yeah. And that's what I did. And pretty soon they put another guy up there. He was a surgeon out of Temple University. Who was

they did he was a bad had a bad drinking problem. They did not want him around Patience, so they put him up in this officers club and he and I bonded

spiritual brothers, and we both got up every day about noon,

went reported to the officers club and drank it. And nobody bothered us and we didn't bother anybody and we kind of forgot we were in the military After a while. We grew beards and wore shorts and

at one point had lost all our uniforms. They didn't know what the hell happened. Kind of gone, you know, But we didn't. We just did fine. We didn't bother anyone. And we expected people not to bother us, quite frankly. We, that's the way you get along in life. And but the regimental commander of the 5th Marines had this dinner party, this bird Colonel, and he insisted that all the officers in his command show up to this party. And so we had to shave and find uniforms and go to the colonel's dinner party. And we showed up and he looked around the room and he looked at us and he said that who the hell are those guys? You know, He said, hey,

two officers in his command, he had never met. And he said, what do they do? And somebody said, well, one of them is a doctor, I don't know what the other one does, he said. And he says give them a job.

So they gave us your job. They put us in charge of an aerial Disease Control for the island of working out.

And our job was, see, the Marines would get hideous venereal disease. They would get lymphogranuloma, venereal and gonorrhea and syphilis, diseases you only saw in textbooks and in Marines

the only two places they ever existed, I think. And,

and our job, they would, our job was to go out into the villages, to the bars where they, and find the young ladies in question and make sure they were, you know, it's very tawdry, isn't it, for a Sunday morning, But it's not. But now it's evening anyway, so what's the difference?

We our job was to go around to these bars and find these young ladies. And so we wrote it in a Jeep all around Okinawa from bar to bark. And we had this power to quarantine these bars. So when they saw us coming, they would just set up the Chavez Regal in the. So Needless to say, we never quarantined 1 bar. It was just really,

but you had to be careful. You didn't want to drink too much in these bars because you want these girls to start looking good to you. I mean, you knew why you were there,

so you're off kind of a fine line, but that's

we did. And pretty soon our naval career was over and we came back to the States and he went back to Temple and he completed his residency and cardiovascular surgery and he's a cardiovascular surgeon in Philadelphia today. And as far as I know, he's not yet gone to AAP.

If you need a bypass, I'd stay the hell out of Philadelphia.

Marvel that story.

I went back up to Cornell and I finished my undergraduate degree and I had applied to several different medical schools and was tentatively accepted at a couple in the

they felt I had social problems

and was not quite material to go to the medical school at that time. So I did the next best thing. I got married.

You remember when you were at loose ends and you didn't know what the hell was wrong with you, but something was wrong with you? Remember that point in your life and you. And the remedy for that is always to get married. I mean, just that will fix it. And I got married and I married a girl that I'd known in the Navy and a Navy nurse, and we came to Southern California, the idea being I would apply to SC or UCLA, to medical school. And we moved in with her parents

in Orange County, here in Santa Ana. And I got a stopgap job as a bartender for the summer, which and she immediately got pregnant.

You notice how men always say that she got pregnant? You know, they always say, but she did.

And

we moved in with her parents and I went to work as a bartender. And that was a, you can imagine how that worked out. I'd come home at 4:00 in the morning in various stages of undress, were drunk, and they threw me out. And I ended up on Bolsa Ave. out here in Santa Ana with a lot of Samsonite luggage and no money. And I got a job for the rest of that summer as an ambulance driver

in Orange County.

And I drove and I'm a blackout drinker.

So some of these ambulance calls were really colorful. I will tell you I I've been on ambulance calls with the lights and the sirens going, and I'd have to turn to the guy next to me and say,

where are we going,

which would unnerve him. I will tell you. And one night I right here in this lovely city of Costa Mesa, I

got stuck in a cul-de-sac. I don't know. You know,

we had the lights going on top of the ambulance, and we were, I came out of a blackout going around a circle in this cul-de-sac. It's very slowly, you know, how you lock onto something and you can't quite get out of it, you know, And we're just going around the circle. And everybody was coming out on their porch in their pajamas, in their bathrobe, watching the sand dunes go around in circle and cul-de-sac. And they finally sent a police car in to lead me out of the culprit,

and they did. And I lost my job as a result of that.

And I lost my drive. My drivers license got revoked forever in the state of California as a result of that. And that's what I brought to Alcoholics Anonymous

to that first a a meeting. And as a result of staying sober, a new profession had concurrently opened up in civilian medicine.

It was called a physician's assistant program,

Pas, and a lot of you know what that is today. But in those days it was brand new, it was embryonic and it was a new concept in medicine. And the reason for it was that in, in those days in the late 60s and early 70s, the, all of the guys getting out of medical schools all went into residencies to specialize and there were not enough physicians doing primary medicine in the emergency rooms. So they, that was the genesis of this profession. That's why they created it.

And the first Pas were people such as myself who had this sophisticated medical training in the military, and we were the first PAS. I was the 3rd licensed PA in the state of California and I went to work in an emergency room in East LA Nights

and I, I don't know, it was really a hell of a job. It was it paid a lot of money and it was rewarding both from us and psychologically and in every way because I loved what I was doing and it was a a new concept in medicine and I was in on the ground floor of a new profession.

I was in AAI was sober. I met a beautiful girl, the daughter of a long time sober, a a member and we fell in love and we got married and she went to Al Anon and we were just too precious is what we were. We were really, I mean, I had this wonderful job. She was beautiful and we had such a bright future.

Except I had not taken these steps

and there was no recovery. And I would go into this emergency room at night

and pretty soon I'd get depressed and I'd get at loose ends and I'd get inadequate and not up to the task. And I have no program and there is no recovery. But I have an excellent medical education,

so I know how to take care of depression.

I use Decadry

15 milligrams. Spanchels work best

and by the time I'm through with those, I'm taking six or seven of them a day.

And if you know anything about amphetamine abuse, you will understand that has you moving right along.

Whatever you're doing, it will be in a hurry.

The problem with that is long about the 5th or 6th day when you have not slept nor eaten and your eyes dilate out here like this and your hair stands up on end.

And I used to get this white crud that would come down here like this, and I'd show up in the emergency room to help the sick.

And the guy I was relieving would never want to go home. You know, they would look at me and they'd say, Vince, Vince, you need sleep, get something to eat.

But thank God for medical science. There is an anecdote for that,

and that is a drug called Demerol.

Now Demerol is a, this is an, a, a I'm going to say this. We need to talk about this. Demerol is an, it's not a narcotic, it's a synthetic. I bet you didn't know that. Don't worry. You never know the difference. You don't have to worry about it.

It's purely an academic

narcotics,

morphine, heroin, Dilaudid are all the same drug. Did you know that? They all come from opium, they're opiates, they all come from the same place. It's all really essentially the same drug. And they're addictive, all of them. And they're addictive for everybody. Doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter. You don't even need an addictive personality.

You have a syringe and a needle and heroin and you'll be addicted. Period.

That is not true with alcohol.

Alcoholism and narcotic addiction are different.

Alcoholism,

alcohol We represent only one out of 10 people. 9 out of 10 people drink alcohol with impunity.

They don't ever come to a A. They don't lose jobs, they don't. They don't wreck cars, they don't go to jail. They drink. They are social drinkers. Cliff talked about them last night. And I'm like him. I don't like them

and I certainly don't understand them, but they drink with impunity. They say things like

no more for me,

I'm driving right

or I'd love to have another,

but my wife S waiting dinner going home.

Well, not me. I'm going to Las Vegas.

So are you,

but that that's what social drinkers do. They and they represent 9 out of 10 people who drink alcohol. We represent only one out of 10. On the other hand, I have never met a social heroine user.

They don't exist. The dynamic is different and it just is. And I don't know why and I don't know but it is. It's different. Alcoholism and narcotic addiction are not the same. Now many of us here have experience with both. I mean, we have all kinds of things wrong with us. And but to function here

in Alcoholics Anonymous, you must be an alcoholic. That's who you have to be. Now, it doesn't matter what the hell else you did. As a matter of fact, it's kind of an extra added benefit if you can write down it. So it doesn't matter, but you must be an alcoholic. And the other problem with Demerol is that people care about where it is. You know, I tell you,

you go in in the emergency room in the morning when the shift changes and they start to count the narcotics and they open the drawer and they say things like Vince,

then all the dope is gone. You know, I mean, where the hell is the Demerol? And I'd say I don't know.

And it was always a bad, bad morning.

And the end result was that was the the people who care the most about Demol. I'll tell you who they are. The Medical Quality Assurance Board of the State of California have a

absolute obsession with narcotics. They really do.

And I ended up in that emergency room one night inspecting the narcotic logs. And the result of that was I was placed under arrest for appropriating narcotics for my own youth and taken to the LA County jail. And they believe me, in those days, they had no program for impaired physicians.

The program was the LA County Jail. That was the program. And I was charged with a felony, which subsequently reduced to a misdemeanor. And I didn't have to go to jail, but I lost my medical license

and I ended up spending the summer of 1972 living in an apartment by the airport in Englewood drinking 1/2 gallon of vodka a day.

And I have to tell you about that. You know all about that. And I'll tell you, if you drink 1/2 gallon of vodka a day, you are an alcoholic. Social drinkers don't drink 1/2 gallon of vodka today. None of them. And if you do, your experience is the same. The experience is uniform. You vomit vile. You lose 35 lbs over that summer and you don't eat and you don't sleep and you're in blackouts. And if you look at a clock, it says 9:00. Is that AM or PM? You don't know.

Your wife leaves you and they take the furniture in the car and the drapes and the Jesus. They take everything when they leave me. I've got to tell you,

and I end up walking to

Alpha Beta Market to buy Alpha Beta brand vodka, the kind in the wire cage. You'd buy the cash register at 7 dollars 1/2 gallon to take it back to the apartment in Englewood and drink it hot.

Cliff Roach likes hot vodka.

He has no class.

I drank hot vodka because I had to, Cliff.

And I remember sitting in the middle of that dreary apartment with all of the furniture gone, with a four day growth of beard and a filthy Turkish bathrobe on and that. And I remember the doorbell rang 1 morning and the guy had come in to take the telephone out and he looked around that apartment and he looked at me and he said, God, I could see the pity in his face. He said your family left you, didn't they? I said no, we're redecorating them.

Really.

And that's the way it ended for me. Now I I'm in and out of blackouts and I came out of a blackout in Newport Beach sitting on a bench by the Balboa Peninsula in early September 1972. And I don't remember how I got there. I became cognizant of where I was sitting on a bench by the Balboa Peninsula in a three piece wool suit in a white shirt and a tie, and the temperature was about 110.

And I had a suitcase next to me with some clothes in it. And I don't know how I got there. I don't remember going there. But I became cognizant of where I was sitting on that bench and I knew that I needed a job. And I went and I got an Orange County newspaper and I looked through the ads and I found the job as an apprentice in Balmer for mortician right here in Costa Mesa.

And it, believe me. Well, if you're new and you need a job,

don't do this. Bad choice.

But I went to work for this mortician over here on by Newport Blvd. and as an apprentice and bomber, and it was a dreadful the, the, the job paid $85 a week. And a fringe benefit was this bachelor apartment over the room where they kept the caskets so you'd get to walk through the casket room every morning with a hangover which had set you free.

And I didn't like the undertaker and he didn't like me. And we got in a fight, and I got drunk, and I stole his hearse.

And on September the 20th, 1972, I came out of what I hope is my last blackout, driving the wrong way on Pacific Coast Highway in Newport Beach in a stolen hearse with a young lady next to me who I did not recall meeting, oddly enough, who was screaming at the top of her lungs. And I remember thinking, you know, I'll tell you what's wrong with me. I really have a character flaw.

I always choose neurotic women.

All of the women in my life end up like this.

You know, I tell you, if you have a date with me, I'll tell you how it's going to end

about 2:00 in the morning. I'm going to look at you and your eye makeup is going to be running down your face like that, you know? And I always know the date's over. Then it's always a clue. And she was screaming. And I remember telling her, you know, you're really unstable. You should

get some counseling. Maybe you'd do better. That was September the 20th, 1972.

Now I have not had a drink of alcohol nor have I used any mood altering chemical whatsoever from that date to this

and well, that's that's you got people 50 years over here clapped within.

I ended up taking the guy's hearse back to him, and he was upset.

He had thrown all my clothes out the window of the bachelor apartment. And I found myself with a cardboard box in the blacktop parking lot of this parking lot of this Mortuary in Costa Mesa with no money, no car, no job, and picking up my clothes and putting them in this box. And, and I thought, my God, what am I going to do? And I don't know about you, but every time I get in that kind of shape, I go to a A.

So I reported to the Costa Mesa Alano Club over here on Placentia, which was a God awful, dreadful. Jesus,

It was grim.

And I reported there for duty and I sat at the coffee bar and I had a cup of coffee and they had an AA meeting there that noon. And it was, it was just dreadful. 6 out of work Texas plumbers sitting around it

coffee table talking about putting a plug in the jug. Jesus, right, I thought, God Almighty. And they had another meeting there that evening and it was worse. And the manager let me sleep on the sofa and

and in the morning I got up and got in a gin rummy game and won some money and rented a room on Federal Ave. in Costa Mesa for $11.00 a week.

And if you want to know what that was like, just use your imagination. Those rooms are generic. You'll be corrected. They're all the same as a dreadful, disgusting Hubble. And I moved in there and I thought, good God, I can't, I have to live here for several weeks and I don't think I can live here that long. I've never had to live in a place like this. How will I ever?

And I don't think I can live there three weeks. Two years later, when I moved out of that room,

it didn't look that bad. For some reason. I spent my first two years of sobriety right here with you in southern Orange County. And I want to tell you about those two years. They were the most significant two years of my life because what happened to me during that period of time changed me eventually. But I also want to tell you that I did not know that at the time.

So if you are relatively new here

and someone asks you how you're doing, tell them you don't know

because you don't.

Don't tell them how you feel,

that is irrelevant. We don't care how you feel if you're new,

we only care what you do.

This is about action.

And so I spent my first two years here and if you would have asked me at any given time during that two year period of time, how are you, I would have told you, my God, it's awful. It's just awful. My life is terrible. I lost jobs that were unbelievable. I lost a job as a gas station attendant for being incompetent.