Hotlanta Roundup in Atlanta, GA

But the way I got to meet him was we me and Jason, basically, would run around listening to tapes all the time. I hear this one tape and I said, Jason, you gotta hear this tape. Jason, he has he says, find that guy, you know. So of course so, of course, it takes me at least 3 or 4 phone calls to get through and I didn't wanna tell him why I was calling because I thought he might say no. So I just kept saying, this is Pierre and I'm a friend of Bill w's and if you would give me a callback and he would call back and I wouldn't be there.

And we went back and forth and finally, I got in touch with him as soon as I asked him why we wanted him to come to Atlanta to speak. He said, no problem. Yes. And I was all happy. Then he said, well, this is you all's first one.

I said, yeah. He says, how is registration going? And I know it's an honest program. I'm thinking the last tape I heard from him, he's at the international AA with 60,000 people. It's a year and a half in into our program and we got 37 registrations, you know.

I'm like, well, we're doing pretty good, you know. I said we're expecting more though and, you know, he was so nice about it. Only thing he talked about was I know how hard it is to do that job. I know how hard it is to do a round up. I don't care how many people are there.

I wanna be there because you've asked and I need to be there. Then the next time I call back, only thing he talked about was he had went through treatment here in Atlanta before he got, you know, when he got sober here. And he set up a way that we could have people that were actually in treatment programs here. They would have come to the round up with a found you know, a little fun thing here so that they would be able to come if they didn't have money. And I thought that was so nice that here I was worried about if he would wanna come.

And not only did he wanna come, he didn't care who was here. He wanted to make sure that other people who didn't have opportunity to be at the roundup could come. So I thought that said a lot about him. And with that, I give you Michael. What?

Oh, I forget it. Really honest introduction, wasn't it? My name is Mike when I'm an alcoholic. And since, my sobriety was really born in Texas, I need to tell you my sobriety date right up front. There's a saying in Texas, if you don't give your sobriety date, you may not have one.

Mine is, September 26, 1988 and for that, I'm extremely grateful. This is a program of ego deflation in-depth, isn't it? That was fabulous. Thank you. I feel like I should have a long blue robe on, but, I don't have one.

I checked upstairs. But, if a big song comes on, I may just the rapture may just come over me and I don't I can't be, who knows what happens after that point. I wanna thank the committee for inviting me out here. Alcoholics Anonymous has never said no to me. Whenever I've needed them, they've been there.

And so because of that, when they ask me to do something, I try as much as I can to, help them back out. Because without y'all, I wouldn't be here at all. I also wanna tell you that I've gotten some wonderful southern hospitality while I've been down here. I wanna thank you all very much. I got southern hospitality and then some, and it's been great.

And thank you. Don't go there. Do not go there. You know, before I talk, I always like to, put in some disqualifiers and and and there's a couple of them. The first one I wanna tell you is that, there are some things I may say that are probably my opinion.

And if there's something that I say that you and your sponsor can't reconcile with the big book, Alcoholics Anonymous, it is my opinion. Please throw it away. Opinions can get people drunk. The second thing I need to tell you is my drug of choice is whatever you had the most of. If that was gin and tonic, that'd be fine.

If that was tequila and diet Doctor Pepper, that'd be okay. If that was cocaine, if that was morphine, if that was xktey, that was fine too. What I have learned though is that alcoholics anonymous is my treatment of choice. I get everything I need right here. My sponsor assures me that I could go to a 12 step program for every problem I have.

I would not have time to work because I'd be going to meetings all the time. I refuse to give up a few things. I'm not gonna give up caffeine. I'm not gonna give up shopping. And then there's one other thing.

I'm not gonna give that up either. The last thing I wanna say and probably the most important thing I'll say all night, at least for me, is that Alcoholics Anonymous has forever changed my life. It's given me a life I didn't know I wanted. And one that I I truly, most of the time, don't deserve. And I thank you for that.

You know, they say we're supposed to share in a general way what it used to be like, what happened, and what we're like now. And, I'll try to do that to the best of my ability. I was born in a small town in, Mid Eastern Ohio. And I was born to a group of parents, kinda like the parents we've heard about all weekend from the other speakers. My parents probably weren't ready for me then.

They're still not ready for me now most of the time. I feel like I was dropped in from another planet. What I remember about that household is it was partially Irish Catholics like Joe's and partially Italian Catholics. So, there was lots of alcohol in our house. It was funny, I I was probably in college before I realized that most families didn't buy 20 cases of rolling rock at a time.

And they didn't buy bourbon in, you know, half in cartons of half gallons. I mean, that's not not the way it happened. Alcohol is part of every part of our life. If there was a wedding, if there was a funeral, if there was something happening, there was alcohol involved. And I bring that up because I I don't know if my parents are alcoholics.

I know that there were some things that happened in that house that, alcoholism can explain, but there may be other explanations as well. What I know today is that my parents did the absolute best with what they knew. To believe otherwise, I would think they would have to wait till us kids go to bed and sit at the table and say, how can we fuck them up tomorrow? You know, I I know my parents didn't do that. My parents are, were then the age I am now.

Trying to raise, 4 kids, have a couple jobs, go out and have a good time every now and then. And, they really did the best they could. I mean, I know sometimes if I can't get a workout and manicure in the same day, I'm pissed off. And, you know, here they are trying to raise kids and I applaud them, their effort. I learned from an early age though to become a human doing instead of a human being.

I found out that when I did, positive things at home, I got positive reinforcement. And so because of that, I did as many things as I possibly could. If you were if I was in the summer reading book club, I would read 200 books and all the rest of the kids would read read, like, 8. And, if I was in, swimming class, I'd have to be at the top of my form. And I I would just do all those things because that's the only way I knew how to get attention with those other kids around.

Now, it's funny. That's the way I remember it. When I get to talk to my brothers and sisters now, which is a gift that the program has given me back. They remember it totally different. But, that's the way I remember it.

When I was 16 years old, I I decided to come out to my parents. And, that was not a very popular thing to do back then. I don't wanna make it sound like I was blazing a trail that actually happened to find some notes between me and my boyfriend that, left very little to the imagination. And, what happened and why I bring it up is because I need to tell you what happened to that family that I lived in. When you have a family that doesn't have a whole lot of other skills, and you put tragedy or you put, adversity into it, they react by going deeper into their alcoholism.

And I remember, we'd all drank a lot. It was a very painful and, unhappy time at home. The program of Alcoholics Anonymous has helped me with that because it's letting me know what happened. And then, what happened was simple fear. This young, bright, cheerful son of theirs was choosing a path that they knew nothing about except pain.

I mean, because the people that are in this room now, the gay people that we are today, is not the gay people that people used to be back then. And, you know, as a patriotic little kid, if I would've told them I was gonna go after the Vietnam war, they would be just as frightened and therefore, just as angry as they were. They did tell me something though then, at that time that, came back to become one of my mantras and what that was. You can do whatever you want, and I guess you can sleep with whoever you want to. But you'll make nothing of yourself.

Well, you don't give a budding alcoholic that kind of an idea, you know. I mean, of course, we're gonna have to do something with that. I drank at school. And the reason I drank at school is because, I it was a little painful to be at school, you know. I mean, you're kinda out and this is way back then.

I mean, this is in seventies and they were not very kind to people who were even a little bit effeminate. Let alone, like, buzzing back and forth across the rooms. And, and so I was the kid that they would knock their books out of their hand and lock me in my locker and stuff like that. And, you know, I had a I had a passkey to the high school and I would do things to get back, like, I would, I would break into the teacher's room and change the answers on their exams. Yeah.

Many of them did not get into the Ivy League colleges they wanted to because of that and that's a really difficult amends to make and I haven't quite figured out how to do it. But I, graduated from high school. Did very well. Went off to college. Before I went to college, I actually was an exchange student in Brazil for 6 months.

I don't remember hardly any of that. I remember one thing. They have this alcohol there called Tashasa. It's about a 140 proof. You drink it with ice and lemon.

That's all I knew. I mean, I met I did go to school one day and they had me read the Gettysburg address. That's, I think, all I remember of the entire time I was there, Which is unfortunate because it's a beautiful country and I'd like to go back some time and visit. But parts of my alcoholism have already started to take over parts of my life. I went off to college, and I decided to make my first geographic at that time just because I had to get out of that house.

House, and they wanted me out of there too. And off I went to, Cleveland, Ohio. I went to a school called Case Western Reserve. And I remember, freshman orientation, was another big drinking experience for me. I had, had a half gallon of, Jack Daniels and I drank most of that Jack Daniels and I smoked a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

And I woke up with a 300 pound woman on top of me naked. And it scared me to death and I haven't smoked Marlboro cigarettes since then. Scared me to death. Bless her heart. And then, she had the audacity to call me a fag around school.

I don't know what that was about. You know, college was, college was very fun. I did very well in college. Alcohol was still my friend. And I that's what I finally learned.

Alcohol was my friend. When I went to college, I, I was introduced to drugs other than alcohol. My favorite combination was, speed and marijuana, simply because if I did the marijuana fast. And, plus I drink well. You know, this this says the great obsession of every alcoholic is to find a way that they can drink without, any repercussions.

And that was it for me. I just take a lot of speed and I could drink all night. And I did that many times. I had some relationships during this time, by the way. Boyfriends, I think people call them.

And, they just didn't ever work out. Because, you know, when you drink like I used to drink, you know, you'd go to the party with 1, and in the middle of the party, you forget who you came with. And so you just found another one. And then the first one the next day would have this resentment. You know?

And I didn't know how to deal with that so I just kept moving on. And it was a very exciting way to live, put it that way. I, graduated from that school and actually, my, my degree was actually, I was a dance theater major and I applied to graduate school. And again, I had to do another geographic because I probably knew every drug dealer and most of them had in Cleveland. So So I had to move to another city.

And, I thought of going to Chicago, but I thought I would definitely fail out in Chicago. And I thought, well, I could go to Dayton, but that's going to any lengths for an education. I didn't do that. So I went to Columbus, Ohio. And I went to Ohio State.

Plus, Ohio State had a really great, enabler there called my sister. And she was wonderful. And she, helped me out when everybody else couldn't, you know, when you need a a 6 pack of beer, or a joint, or dinner, or something like that. And so I, I went down to graduate school in, at Ohio State. And it got better for a little while because I was out of the environment.

It's one of the reasons, I think, why they tell us early in sobriety to change our playmates and our play places. Because when you're out of that environment and you just don't know the places to go, you kinda behave a little bit for a while. But I'm alcoholic, and I'm a drug addict, and I have to eventually find those people. After my 1st year of school, I got, I say I got lonely, but I think it actually was a lower thing than that. I just hadn't met enough people, and I think it was kind of more like horny.

So I went out and I started meeting people in the only way I knew how. There was this group of guys that I always thought was kinda fun, so I decided I was gonna join the the little group. And I should have known that I had to go home with this guy three times before he remembered my name. And his name was Michael. He was pretty.

That's about all I can say for him. And again, they, started to introduce me to the people that I could find more drugs from and more alcohol from because we did something every weekend. Now, I'm still going to school all this time, and I'm doing actually a little less well than I did when I was in college. And, that didn't seem to bother me. The last 2 years of my program were in, actually, in the clinics of the university hospitals.

And if any of you have ever been in that, you know, all you really have to do is show up and be there and get your work done. And they're happy to have you. And, if you're a little drunk on Monday, they don't say too much about it. If you as long as you get your work done. And I could do that because I had lots of speed.

Drugs other than prescription drugs kinda started finding their way in, of course, too. You know, we did Ketamine so long ago. I mean, you guys who talk about special k, you don't even know. You do not even know. I mean, we did it back before it we called it academy.

We didn't even call it special k. I thought that was a breakfast cereal. You know what? We did what we had to do. Desperate people do desperate things.

To coin a phrase. I, graduated from graduate school, and and they gave me 2 pieces of paper that were very dangerous. The first is a, a license to practice medicine and surgery in the state of Ohio. And the second thing was a DEA number. And, I was like the kid in the candy store.

You know, we'd go flip admission. And, we just went ripping and tearing through it all. I, decided to change, places I lived again because, it had gotten too warm in Columbus. I had again I would do stupid things while I was there. You know, I had this thing for cheerleaders.

I don't know where that came from. And so I was dating 2 of the cheerleaders on the Ohio State cheerleading squad and you know they told each other. They did. And they both, you know, got mad at me. I I I would do things like I would, I remember we were coming home from a bar one night.

And, again, I had done that thing and I had forgotten who I'd gone with, and the person I'd gone would have to be my lover at the time. And he was doing lights or something. Because, you know, you always have to date a bartender, a DJ, or a light man. I mean, it's the only way you can do it because they get their drinks for free. And, and this is when alcohol had started changing a little bit because we were driving home when he was yelling at me about having my hand down some guy's pants or something.

I don't know what I was doing. And, he threw a cigarette at me. I was driving. So I reached out, threw the cigarette away and backhanded him across the car. So he got into my face.

Right here into my face. I just leaned out and nearly took off his lip with my teeth. 47 stitches, inside and outside. He had to go to my hospital and say, I I don't know how it happened. I got cut, or someone bit me.

I I can't remember who. So when I like to think about some of the fun things I did drinking, I also have to remember those times as well. Went off to, Dallas. And the reason I went to Dallas is I went to, do a couple months there in the early eighties. I don't know if any of you know much about Dallas in the early eighties, but it was booming.

The oil business was going strong, banking. I went I went down there for 2 months and fell in love. People drank like we did. They give you drinks in these great big tall glasses because in Ohio, there's these little tiny glasses, big tall glasses, 3 in ones and 4 in ones. It's like, yay.

These people don't know how to drink. It looked like someone's hand you a vase of flowers with alcohol in it. And the boys did lots of drugs, and they were pretty. These actually still are pretty. And, I said to all my friends, we're going to Texas.

And we loaded up. We looked like the Beverly Hills. We had everything but the rocking chair on the top of that car. And off we go to Texas. And, big caravan, 4 hostages, off we go.

When I came down to to to Dallas and, started living my life all over again. You know, you can pick alcoholics up and put them anywhere, but, wherever you go, there you are. And, I found that to be extremely true. Started, partying in a different city. Never really changed.

Never really got any better. If we couldn't find drugs, we would just drink all weekend. We could at least find a couple of half gallons of Jim Beam, which might get us through the weekend. I would do things like I would put on my scrubs on a night that I wasn't on call and go back to the hospital and steal Ketamine out of the medicine cabinet. That was kinda weird.

I mean, imagine now, somebody that you're at work and somebody comes in in the middle of the night to visit to get something from their locker and all of a sudden goes into the medicine cabinet and leaves, I would find that kind of strange. I didn't think so at the time. It just got to be the point where it was kind of sad. It was really sad. But I didn't know any better.

And, you know, none of the people I hung around with knew any better either. We were all in that same boat. We all drank the same way. We all passed out the same way. We all woke up with people we didn't know who they were in places we don't remember going with none of our clothes on.

That's just what we did. I, went out into private practice after I was on staff for a year at the at the medical center there. And people who understand the way health care is financed know that you don't make any money when you're a resident. But when you go out into practice, you start making in a month what you used to make in a or you're making in a yeah. Month what you used to make in a year.

And because of that, that just meant more money for drugs. And what was already getting to be pitiful and incomprehensible, more demoralization went a lot faster. And we started buying drugs in large quantities. It's so funny. We always did those little exit scenes where we'd go buy a 100 and then we're gonna make money.

And then you eat them all. And then you don't make money. And then you do it again next month. It just never worked out. The people in my life were starting to get they're just getting tired of me.

Know, you can only do it so long to so many people. No matter how much of the disease of alcohol and drug addiction they have or how much they don't have, they can only put up with so much. You can only buy them so many things, take them so many places until they go. It's not all that. It just isn't.

And, periodically, hostages would escape. I hate that when that happens. I was, it was 1987. My work had gotten very strange. Because, you know, you get really paranoid when you do a lot of drugs.

You think it's any day now, you're gonna come into work, and they're just gonna have a little bag packed for you and tell you it's time to go. I would get there, and I'd be really hungover. And I would have 2 of my nurses do most of the cases, and I'd sit up in my call room because it just got too bad. I would just be too hungover. In 1987, I was dating this fabulous guy, I can't remember his name.

And he escaped. He escaped because we had an argument that I really don't remember. You know, there's mornings when you wake up and you're alone in bed and you think, where'd they go? They're probably out there tricking with somebody. And you find them in the front bedroom with the door locked.

You bang on the door, and they finally open it, just peeking through the door. And they say those words you hate to hear. You don't even remember what you did last night, do you? You don't remember what you said. You don't remember what you threatened.

You don't even remember the knife, do you? And that's where he had taken me. And off he went. Most people don't have IV narcotics in their house. Now, I had some.

Now, let me explain this to you. It made perfect sense at the time. I knew it was only a matter of time before I developed the AIDS virus. So I thought, I'll just have my little suicide kit already. That way, I can be I can take care of this myself.

So I had this little suicide kit. It had an IV bag and a start kit, all the stuff. It had some sodium pentathol. It had some muscle relaxants. It had some narcotics.

It was a perfect little kit. Well, I just popped open that box. And I wish I've tried to go back, especially for my IV drug abuser friends, and try to figure out what happened what happened that day that didn't happen the day before or 2 weeks later. But I tied up that tourniquet like I was Billie Holiday, And I popped that through my vein, and I chased that for the next 6 months. To those of you who've never done IV drugs, I don't need to tell I can't tell you.

And to those of you who have, I don't need to tell you. When you add IV drugs to what I was doing, you go somewhere really, really fast. My My behavior got really bizarre. It got really bizarre. I did it around the clock.

And I played the little game that all addicts play. I'm not gonna do any today. I I am not gonna do any today. And it's 7 o'clock in the morning, and you're at work. And, okay, maybe I'll do just a little bit, but I'm not gonna do anymore until noon.

And at 7:15, you're doing it again. And at 7:40, you're doing it again. And you play the game all day. Then you go home, and you drink, and you add other drugs to them. Absolute strangeness started happening.

I lost some weight because, you know, when you do drugs, you don't really wanna do anything else. You don't wanna eat. You don't wanna sleep. You don't wanna have sex. You don't wanna do anything but more.

And so that's where I went. I kept doing more. I used to shoot up in the bathroom, I think most physicians do. That ubiquitous hospital bathroom, guardrail, toilet, sink, mirror. I'd stopped looking in the mirror a long time ago.

I really had. But I had tied up one day and getting ready to do all that, and, I was playing that little game. I can stop whenever I want to. I can stop whenever I want to. This is just a a game.

I'm just kinda using this for a short period of time. I can stop whenever I want to. And, I looked into the mirror that day playing that little game, and my eyes looked back and they said, no. You can't. You are mine.

You are mine, and I'm gonna take you all the way down with me. I don't know if that's the day I said that accidental prayer, The one my friend Marie calls the naked prayer of the alcoholic that just says, help me. Just help me. No causes. No conditions.

Just please. You know, when you ask for help from a higher power, as Cece related the other night, you get some help. It may not be the help you expected, but you get some help, and you get some help quick. Mhmm. The next day, I was putting some little girl to sleep for tubes in her ears.

She was probably 2. And, she turned really blue, and I didn't know what to do. I just walked to the back of the room and stood there. And one of my nurses came and took care of that, and the patient did fine. I had, the night before, realized that, they were gonna catch me eventually.

So I had track marks in my arm, and of course, the track mark is in the vein. I thought the track mark was in the skin. So I numbed up my arm and got a bone file, filed down through the tissues to the bone, dressed it, went back to sleep. The next day was Thanksgiving. That was a miserable day.

Went to a woman's house I've been going to for 15 years still. Put her family through absolute hell for a Thanksgiving dinner. And the day after that, well, God started doing for me what I couldn't do for myself. They called me in to do a c section because I was on call, and I was playing that poor pitiful me. I'm always on call.

I have to go back out to work. And being a good little controlling alcoholic, I had my cell phone. I called them, and I said to Stephanie, Stephanie, I need you to go ahead bring that patient back. I'll be there in a few minutes. And she said, there's no patient here, but there sure are a lot of people here.

And I walked in walked into an intervention at my own hospital. I don't know if any of you have ever been in an intervention or if you've ever constructed an intervention. Interventions work only by bringing in the people who agree with the way you wanna make the intervention go. So because of it, there was a doctor there and 2 nurses. That was it.

They couldn't invite my boyfriend even though they had no problems with me being gay. He didn't want the party to stop. Love my parents to death. He couldn't have invited my parents. They would have said, let's bring him back up to Ohio.

We'll love him. He'll be fine. We'll get him out of that environment. 3 people. Doctor Tom said to me, we're worried about, you may be using IV drugs.

You've lost a lot of wood. You look horrible. And I said, well, I've lost so much weight because I'm HIV positive. And he said, that may be true. However, could we still have a urine sample?

Well, the HIV came back negative. The urine sample came back with things I don't remember quite taking. It lit up like a Christmas tree. I was on everything but a skateboard. I'm so grateful that the next thing he said to me was actually a couple things.

He said, you're not gonna have to die, and you're not gonna have to do this by yourself. I'm gonna be there with you. And for the next 15 years, he's made that promise come true. He's still there. That's why I came here a little late on Friday, because I get to work with him every Friday, and I get to get to go have a big meeting all day long.

It's fabulous. He then said one question. Would you like to leave tonight or would you like to leave in the morning? I am so grateful to this day that that was the only question I got. I probably would have picked the 1 week with the 2 weekend follow ups.

Or I would have picked the 30 day outpatient program. But they didn't give me that option. They said, clear the stuff out of your locker and get on a plane. Now see, I thought the problem was really just this narcotic stuff. I didn't realize alcohol was a problem.

So I flew down to Atlanta, 1st class. Drank the whole way. When I got to Anchor Hospital and they said, when was your last drink? I looked at my watch. That probably kept me there another month just for that.

And although I can remember all the fun of Alcoholics Anonymous, it was not fun at that point at all. If I remember nothing else, I have to remember that 1st week, where I came down like every other junkie comes down. I had track marks up and down my arm. I had sores in my nose from all the crystal and cocaine I was snorting. I had ulcers in my esophagus from all the alcohol.

I looked horrible. I weighed a £131. I weigh a £180. Now I didn't get any taller. Okay?

You get the idea. Pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. That's what I was. You could ask the janitor in that place what I was, and he would have said it looks like a junkie to me. I sweat, and I vomited, and I shook, and I did that for 3 days.

And the people there just said, just keep taking some showers, and we'll just keep changing your bed clothes, and they were wonderful. And then one night, I got this knock on the door, and they said it's a come to Jesus meeting. That's interesting. And I met the people of Alcoholics Anonymous for the for the first time. And those of you who, do that service work, I need to thank you.

It's thankless work. But someone was there and they gave their story. And I didn't hear a whole lot of it. Actually, I didn't hear a whole lot for a while. I let the music of Alcoholics Anonymous worship just wash over me long before I heard the words, the laughter, and the rest.

I learned some stuff in that treatment center. I learned, about the disease concept that Cece talked about. It helps me because I was a health professional. It helped me realize that I just have a disease very much like diabetes. It's progressive.

It's fatal. It's treatable. And it's treatable in a lot of different ways. Some people change their diet. Some people take pills.

Some people have to take their blood sugar every 3 hours and adjust their insulin. And that's how we are. Some of us have to go to meetings every day. Some of us go once a week. Still the same disease.

Still kill me if I don't take care of it. I I got to go to a little club in Atlanta called Galano. We were working out yesterday, Jeff and I, and then somebody told us where to go. And off we go, down in Amsterdam Walk. And we're pulling down in there, and I'm thinking, this is really familiar.

And where that old shoe store is there is used to be the guano club. Just hit me. Couldn't talk. And that's some wonderful people there. I learned about KAA, whatever that is or is not.

I'll never know. I I remember the first time I wanted to talk at a straight club. I I said to my sponsor, should I tell them I'm gay? And he said, honey, they're gonna have to watch you walk up there. They're gonna know.

I mean, they're alcoholics. They're not stupid. I, got to meet people. I got to repopulate my life. That's the best thing treatment did.

It got me out of the situation I was in. I stayed there for 4 and a half, 5 months. I got to meet human beings again. I got to interact with them. I got to talk about things other than me.

You know, when you're an alcoholic and drug addict like I was, your boundaries are way out there if you have them at all. And one of the things they do is they put their boundaries in so close that you can touch them. They're like this. You can't even pee for the 1st 10 days by yourself. And that's exactly what I needed.

People say, well, they treat you like a baby. Well, I needed to be treated like a baby. I was one. It's the first time I was on a locked ward that I didn't have a key. Now I didn't truly get exactly where I was.

I, I kinda did something similar to what CEC did. I went there the second day, and I said to the nurse I was still a little shaky. And I said, excuse me. Is there some place around here a reputable dry cleaner so I can take my cashmere sweaters to? She didn't even look at me.

She looked at the nurse beside her and says, this kid has no idea where he is, does he? And I didn't. I got to learn about called the lie. I like to call it the lie because it's that thing that kept me out there for so long. It's especially prevalent for gay people.

You know, the lie that says if I don't drink, I'll never have sex again. I'll never get laid again. I'll never be funny again. I'll never get to go out again. I'll never get to dance again.

I'll never get to do all that stuff again. And it's a lie. I have done all of those things and much more since I've been sober. It's just a lie. I look at it, pawn it as such.

One of the other things they had me do, and I'm so grateful they had me do this, they had us do this little thing where we used to write out our first relapse. What does your first relapse look like? Well, you know, I know what mine looks like. It usually starts with a guy. It usually starts with a guy.

I don't know about the rest of you. My sponsor makes me talk to everybody who's had a relapse when they come back. We ask them to go into meetings. Have you been doing this? Have you been doing that?

And invariably, they talk about a person, a guy, a girl. Things started going great. You know, you get to treatment and you think, you know what? I'm not a fuck up. I'm just an alcoholic.

And about 2 years later, you meet him or her, and you get the car or the house or the job, and you start getting to this thing of, maybe I was just immature back then. I was in the wrong relationship, and I had a job that didn't appreciate me. And then next thing you know, you're back out there. So they've made us write ours down. Pretty young thing dancing around, reach over, grab the wrong drink, off I went.

So now when I'm in that situation, and there's a pretty young thing, and we're dancing around, I know exactly what I'm supposed to watch out for. And I watch out very diligently. When I left that treatment center, my counselor was a very good counselor. And she said, I need to talk to you, and I need to tell you something that's very important. You're young.

You're gay. You're wealthy. You're a physician, And an anesthesiologist in particular. Your chances of staying sober 5 years are less than 5%. The only thing that could make it worse is you could also be black.

I suggest you go back to Dallas and you find yourself a mean, nasty, dyke sponsor. All I could find was Jack. He fits most of it. You know, I went back home and I, started practicing medicine again. They let you do that once, by the way.

And people laugh about people who go back out of the treatment center, go back to bartending, or go back to being a waiter. I do that. Every day for each patient, I get this big box in narcotics, things I loved. I work with it every day. I remember the drug is for the patient, not for the doctor.

Yeah. I'm very, very careful about every kind of medication I take. I check it all out with another recovering alcoholic first who also happens to be a physician and a friend. I don't wanna get into the that gray area where I may end up taking something that then causes the desire to drink to come back. Because I have an allergy of the body and a compulsion of the mind, and I can't do anything else when it happens.

I met my sponsor actually at Roundup. He talks about it every now and then when he crashed and burned in Houston, Texas. He was supposed to meet this girl for dinner, and the girl happened to live across the street from me with her new girlfriend. And so when I got back from treatment and, you know, I was not the best neighbor, trust me, when I was drinking. I would see people in the house.

We'd have the police come over. We'd have parties, and we'd ride up and down the street on a motorcycle and drag. I mean, it it was just not the things you do to a small little neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. So they knew I had gotten back from treatment, and, they called Jack, and they said there's a friend of ours who's leaving right now to go to an AA meeting at a roundup, and he has on a blue shirt, and he may need your help. And I go to the meeting, and this little Yoda like figure walks up and says my name is Jack.

And if you need to help some help, if you need some guidance, call me. Again, I'm so grateful that he did. I I have a lot of education. I still could not get those steps off that wall and into my life without the help of somebody else. For those of you who sponsor people, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Because my sponsor does many things for me besides just that. He holds the yardstick of my progress. I can't see it. I can see the progress in you. I cannot see it in me.

I'm blind to that. It's not given to me. He sees that. So when I start going through some of my stuff again, he says, nope. Not as bad as it used to be.

Not even close. But if you want what we have, you have to go to ambulance to get it. And I have to remember that when I sponsor people. If you want what I have, I'm sorry. You're gonna have to do it my way.

I look upon it as people going from the East Coast to the West Coast in the 1800. You know, you hired a guide. There are 3 ways to go. You could go the northern route. You could go the middle route to Kansas City.

You could go the southern route to Fort Worth. And you hired a guide, and he took you. Well, if halfway through the middle route, you decide you wanted to go the southern route, that's fine. You'll get there. But you need a new guide, because that guy doesn't know how to go that way.