The 10th annual NCWSA Conference in San Ramon, CA

You know, like Mark Twain, I'm very embarrassed when people compliment me. I think they're not saying enough. Before I tell you my name, I read some place that it says the intelligence of a group is measured by how well they pronounce a foreign name. My name is Ajit. Ajit.

I'm sitting at the crowd in here. That's great. I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony. I don't know where to begin. So I guess I'll start with the preliminaries.

I wanna thank Charlie for, inviting me to this conference and then picking me up at the airport and being a wonderful host. And for the committee for sanctioning that, thank you. Dottie and Marilyn and the rest, I found out that Marilyn has an affinity for young boys. She calls herself missus Robinson. I've noticed most of the Alatine guys have been staying away from her.

No. It's been a wonderful week weekend. Our speakers have been phenomenal, starting with Luisa. God, she was exerting that serenity she was describing as tranquility. I felt very tranquil watching that wonderful smile of her as I envy you.

You're her husband. That's wonderful. And the morning, Susie. Wow. And followed by Lyle and then, of course, last night, Marge.

I mean, it shows the indomitable spirit that this program gives gives us. Yeah. She's like the phoenix last night. I couldn't believe the stuff I was hearing from Marge. I said, god almighty.

I would have, called an by that time. We called a feng shui expert. Something moved out of that town. Oh, my heart goes out to you. That's great.

So it's good to be here. Thank you. I I do wanna welcome all my Al Anon friends. Hello. If there's any members of AA in here, I welcome you too.

Are those, dubious double winners or dual members? How do you do it if you're an alcoholic, also a member of Al Anon? Do you obsess over yourself and try and stay away from booze? Must be funny. I tell you, I can tell you.

My my name is of Indian extraction, not the feathered kind with the turban kind, although I've worn neither. So I'll dispel all stereotypes when it comes to Indians. I do not wear my spikes on the inside of my golf shoes. I don't sleep on a bed and nails. I don't wear turbans.

I don't wear loincloths, and I don't toss my head around every time I say something. And I say, yes, I do this, not this, not this. I'll tell you in a second what my problem is. You'll recognize that I can't remember exactly when I walked into Al Anon. It was circa 1980, but I can tell you to the moment when she walked into AA.

May 25, 1983, 8:0:2 PM. University United Methodist Church in Irvine, California. And my other problem is something called image management. I may feel like shit, but I have to look just right. And that's not enough.

The person next to me has to be right enough because all of you out there judging me based on the company I keep. I heard doctor Paul say, he says, I'm not much, but that's all I think about. In my case. Not only am I thinking about me, but I think all of you have no life, so you're all thinking about me. And you're constantly judging me.

I asked all insanity, and I didn't know it. So, anyway, this is I'll just tell you how it was, what happened, and how it is today. Keep it very simple. How it was I grew up. And first, it was ironic that I've been asked to be a Sunday morning speaker.

Those of you who heard my tape, refuse to let me speak on a Sunday morning. So you did and you see or missus Robinson? Yeah. You like that. I like to do this stuff.

Little different. I want you teasing. You know that. But, anyway, I, grew up in in, in the wonderful city of Bombay, India. Left the shores of India in 1974 at the tender age of 22, which makes me just a tad over 50 and a half.

Anyway and, you know, I never come across this disease called alcoholism. Now that's called really being in deep denial because we lost an uncle to this crazy disease of alcoholism. He died of the cirrhosis of the liver, blind in both eyes, barely able to move. I recall I was told that his wife literally dropped him off and almost stopped the vehicle outside another uncle's store. I guess she was practicing the art of detachment.

Well, it's geographic distancing. Out of sight, out of mind. I don't wanna deal with this guy. But we never attributed what he had to alcoholism. We thought he was morally decrepit, that he lacked in will power because he had a few other things happening about him.

He lived in the wrong part of town. God forgive him for that. He hung around with the wrong element of women. He smoked a lot, gambled a lot, and he drank a lot. So if his addictions come in clusters, he had them all.

And we never saw it was a disease. And, actually, I was in my 6th grade, we call them here, and I found out that my headmaster, the vice principal of my school, had founded the first chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in Bombay, Bombay, India and asked a friend of mine and said, what the heck is AA? He says, oh, they get drunks off the street and get them sober. Literally, I mean, I'm I was, you know, ironically, AA came to my rescue at least figuratively in getting my now former spouse off, the so called street and getting her sober. And, was married 17 years.

She was drunk the first three and a half years. And I'll tell you that story as we go along, what happened. Anyway, I left Bombay, India after I graduated. I walked up the proverbial mountain to my guru. I said, oh, great one, I seek serenity.

He said, go to Detroit, Michigan and join Al Anon. The bastard neglected to tell me I had to marry an alcoholic in the process. I'm kidding. There's no guru. None of that stuff.

But as I left India, I was warned by well meaning friends and family. They said, do not get involved with American women. Canadians are okay. And I said, why? And they said, oh, they drink and smoke in the open like men.

Translation, American woman drank the fact that the American woman drank because it says drinking I mean, candy is dandy, but liquor is thicker. It made my progress in an evening extremely cost effective and expedient. I identified with the MASH character, Ellen Alder. Ellen Alder, MASH is my kind of woman drunk. I like that.

And that's what happened. I lived in Southfield, Michigan at the time, actually, Troy. And I had, finished up with, Wayne State in Detroit, and I was working for Xerox, and I was a part time lecturer at Wayne State. And I used to hang around these meat markets in the suburbs of Detroit, and I used to lure the women from the suburbs to downtown Detroit because it was quite an adventure to come down to downtown Detroit. And downtown Detroit had a place called Greektown.

I don't know if you've been to the the Detroit area. Greektown is an extremely safe place. It's because it's policed by the Greek mafia, and so you're very safe at 4 in the morning. But what was nice about Greektown is you could bring these ladies over for dinner, and dinner in those days back in the seventies at Greektown was, like, 25, $30 for a 4 course meal that included something called Rodidus wine. And Rodidus wine had this quality of transforming an absolute stranger into the best of friends over the course of an evening, and I loved it.

Drink some more. Please have fun. Oopah, you know, you know, that stuff. You know, I told my wife when I married her and she found out she was an alcoholic after she married me. I drove her to drink.

Some of her friends and family said, Susie never did that till you married her. Yeah. I drove her to drink. But I told my wife, I said, God, you know, I was in these relationships. And you know, first of all, I want to put a caveat here.

I was a cat, somewhat of a cat. I'm less of a cat today. I was an arrogant, banal, narcissistic, self centered human being at the time. I'm less so today. So I wanna put that up front.

Some of the story some of the women recall, oh, god. What a prick. Yes. I was. I was.

I didn't know that at the time. I was, and I'm less so today. And I'm painfully aware of it, but the prick shows up every now and then. So I'm standing there, and I said I told my wife, said, jeez. I went out with all these ladies, and I had these relationships.

Now relationships in those days for me is really taking the expression to its ultimate. A week and a half was about the extent of my relationships. And I said, you know what? We, Al Anon, carry a little beam in our head. Alcoholic, no.

Don't waste your time. She doesn't need taken care of. Alcoholic, no. Move on. Move on.

Move on. Move on. I said, when I met you, my bean took off, and your bean took off, and we got married. She said, nonsense. If you'd married 1 of them, you would have driven them to drink 2 like you did me.

So this keeps going on and on. So, anyway, image management is what created my situation. You know, I said, my god's a god of irony. It's a god of humor. And I'd come to seek sovereignty in Detroit, Michigan by George.

I was gonna find it. And I remember my boss at the time at Xerox is having a party, and I was dating this one woman who did not fit the image I wanted to present at this party. So I was seeking the right image. And I walk into this little, student hangout called Traffic Jam, and this woman is working her way through nursing school, comes and wait waits at our table. She fits the image.

I wanna ask to this party. My beam takes off. Her beam takes off. I ask her out, and she says yes. And she tells me in my ego, lets me believe it when she said, oh, you're the first patron that I've ever gone out with.

So I asked her out to this party. Before we go to the party, we're gonna get to know each other a bit, so we stop for dinner. Now this is where all the signs came in, and god was just sending me all kinds of signals. Run. Run.

Run because you're gonna be in trouble here. But, no, we sit to eat. And, normally, when I ate with a woman, I listened with an open mind in one ear out the other. Because that's I'm I'm strategizing. Right?

See, the guys get identified and the women are nodding. Yes. We know. In this case, I was actually indulging in intellectual intercourse. I'm talking to this woman and listening and retaining what she's saying, and I'm involved in a conversation.

I should have left her at the dinner table, got in my car, driven away. But, no, I was gonna find this thing called serenity, and we find it at this party. The second warning comes in the form of George. A buddy of mine, he walks up and he says, oh, you and Susan look so comfortable together. How long have you been going out?

7, 8, 9 years? I said, George, I met this woman last week. This is our 1st day. He says, man, you look very comfortable together. Must be a pus like thing.

Had to put that stereotypical stuff in there. I should have lifted the party and driven away, but, no, we continued to now get into a relationship. About 4 months into our relationship, there was a knock on the door on a weekday evening. It was about 10 o'clock, I believe. I opened the door and out stands this woman with a lump on her head.

And I said, what happened? She said, my mother struck me in an alcoholic rage. Now the knight in me, the shining armor in me, the in it the the knight in shining armor in me, the father. If I mean, I could have been like Mick Jagger in Emotional Rescue. You know, you will not go back to that woman I said you will move in with me.

Now a Hindu from Bombay, India does not ask a Polish Catholic girl to move in. Now I was in the scary part. The scary part was watching her God fearing, very Catholic mother who disavowed sinful relationships in terms of living together without the benefit of marriage actually helping her daughter move in with me. That should have been a a clue that something was awry in Michigan. When you watch mother and daughter moving this furniture up into my house, into my apartment, I should have left mother and daughter in my apartment driven away.

But, no, for god's sake, I was gonna find this thing called serenity. Now, you know, the strange thing started to happen. Now you might say that I was in denial. For me, denial is actually a progression. I was clueless, then you get into some sort of awareness, then you get into denial, then you get into more awareness and the acceptance.

So I was really in a state of cluelessness. And the reason for that I've recognized retrospectively is that I lacked any depth to my personality. I was sociopathic to some extent. You're only in my life if you made some if you were of some use to me. I didn't know all of this stuff while I'm in the midst of it because, of course, I'm clueless.

I'm so outwardly focused that I have no sense of what's going on inside of me, and I'll give you an example of that. When I came to Al Anon and I was at my men's tag group and the men were talking about feelings, that was very scary to begin with. And I'm sitting listening to this thing called feelings. I've never experienced a feeling. And one day, I'm driving in my car after a meeting.

I'm sipping on a soda, and I start to feel a welling in my chest. I said, oh god. I'm experiencing a feeling. And I said, am I happy? Yeah.

I'm happy, but it's not overwhelming. So why am I feeling the sense of overwhelmingness? And he says, are you feeling sad? No. There's nothing sad going on.

So I don't and all of a sudden, I feel the carbon dioxide escape, and the, you know, the wellingness is gone. And I said, oh god. It wasn't a feeling. It was just a little bit of gas in there. This is how disconnected this person was sitting in that place in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Symptoms of symptoms of a disease that's in the process of happening, I have no clue. I have absolutely no clue. So we're having problems here and there. We decided the only way to solve problems is to take the next step, which is to get married. We did.

We moved to this wonderful condo in a town called Warren, Michigan. And if you're from Warren, Michigan, of course, be grateful unless you're from Saskatchewan. Oh, jeez. I'm giving Maja a hell of a time this weekend. She still took my card for some reason.

I guess she's gonna send me a letter bomb or something. And, you know, clues came galore in this little townhome. We have this little half bathroom, and I'd go into the half bathroom, open up the cabinet, 6 or 7 empty cans of beer would top a lie. And I'd walk up to my wife and say, what are those empty cans of beer doing all I'd walk up to my wife and say, what are those empty cans of beer doing all strewn about in the cabinet? She said, oh, aunt Bunny came over and had a few beers.

I never questioned her why aunt Bunny would come to the bathroom with a 6 pack. Was she eliminating a middle man? I don't know. And I swear to you, I have not gotten an answer to this. A friend of mine comes over.

I said, would you have a would you like a glass of wine? He said, sure. I reach into the cabinet to pull out this bottle of wine. It's got the coke in it. It's got this wrap it around.

It's got the red seal in it, but it's empty. Do this there are special stores for alcoholics to mess with Al Anon minds saying, here's a syringe. Just pull the wine out so many cc's at a time and blow their mind. So one day, image management again came to my rescue. My family had moved into the area, and Sue happened to be the white sheep of the family, and I was gonna introduce her for the first time.

And I'm driving with her to visit this family, and all of a sudden, she gets into this rip roaring royal spat with me, and I smelled something. I still hadn't developed my Al Anon nose at that time. And so I said, I can't take you in this condition. I'm gonna drop you back off at home. So we drove back to the house.

I she goes inside, and I go to the kitchen for a reason. I'm passing this half bathroom, and she's trying to shut the door to this cabinet. And they say it's a disease of perception because I glanced into that cabinet, and it was a 55 gallon drum of Gallo wine. It was actually a half a gallon shot. And all my cluelessness, all my denial, all my lack of awareness sort of dissipate in one cataclysmic moment.

I just stood there quietly, and a little voice just jumped into my head and said, your wife's an alcoholic. Your wife's an alcoholic. Your wife's an alcoholic. Because see, all the stuff that I'd been saying, that I'd been pretending hadn't happened or not even pretending unaware it was happening, all of it just came and another voice said, you know what? Now we don't need one of you because you will think her thoughts.

You will feel her feelings. You will experience her emotions. You're gonna have conversations with her. She's gonna respond. You're gonna talk back to her.

All this is gonna happen, but she's not gonna be there because it's all gonna happen here. They say the mind is a place of its own making hell of heaven and heaven of hell. Mine was just I mean, Milton could have written Paradise Lost in Paradise games and everything else in here, and I would have said it's okay because it's all happening in my head. All these conversations, all these fights. And if if I had been able to morph God into a human form, said, God, you're full of you know what?

That's not gonna happen to me because I'm individuated. I'm not so pun the psychobabble term, enmeshed into this woman. That's never going to happen. I was wrong because that's exactly what happened for the next three and a half years. And this is a strange thing.

This is really, shows how illogical and insane mind thinking was at the time and still can be. I I've seen the shick shackle commercials. Because, see, the first time I recognized my wife had a drinking problem, the voice that popped into my head after all this other stuff that came in said, I'll figure this out and we'll straighten it out. And I've been watching these shikshaider commercials. I don't know if you have them up here.

They used to have them in Detroit. And the shick shackle commercial was a wife goes up to her husband. She says, sweetheart, you have a drinking problem. And he looks and he says, darling, you're so right. And then they go off to get treated.

So this kid believed in the truth in advertising clause. So I walked up to my wife, said, sweetheart, you have a drinking problem. She said, you're an idiot. I don't. I had no plan b.

And plan b was something called I said, logic. Now that's a male myth. Logic. I think that's been forced upon us by you women who manipulate us into believing we have logic, and you control us that way. So I figured if I catch her in the act, then she'll know I'll know, and she'll be confronted with the facts, and so she'll have to stop drinking.

So if you're new to Al Anon, you've got a drunk in your life by the way, why do we call them practicing? Mine had perfected the art. I don't use the word active alcoholic either. There's nothing active about this woman. She was either sedentary.

Sat there on the couch and made my life miserable because I stood there and watched her sit on the couch and get drunk. Anyway, so I figured if I catch her in the act, she'll stop and and and it'll all happen. So I used to sit on this couch. I didn't have much of a life and a lot of time on my hands. I'd sit on the couch pretending to do the crossword.

What's a 5 letter word for boredom? Annewi, e n n u I. Some of you are experiencing it right now. And I'm watching this reflection on a blank television set. It's not on, so I can see what's going on in the kitchen.

How smart. Very smart. So watch your pour of booze, which is something alcoholics do rather well, at least the active ones. And I make this Archimedean exclamation, like I've discovered a new law in physics. She's pouring booze, and I'm finding the theory of gravity or something here.

And and and and I say, now I know what to do. And she'd crawl up with some semblance of dignity. Her nose held high as she did it. I'm exaggerating it. I had, of course, was down.

And I'd get up and I'd move the bottles around thinking that now she'll know when she gets up for a 2 o'clock feed time that he knows. So 2 o'clock, I'd sit up with her because it's now feed time for the baby. She comes down, and I hear this clang clang going on again. And I'm saying, ah, now she knows. I didn't realize that alcoholics in good standing have the booze in 16,000 places.

But if they forget, they know, you know, stretch your hand this so you'll find it. Stretch your hand that way. And she'd come and beat the crap out of me, and I'd be pretending to be asleep. What a way to live. Then I walked up to her.

I said, you know what? You really have a drinking problem. She said, no. We have a marriage problem. I'm Polish Catholic, and you're not.

I said, very profound observation. I would never have come to that conclusion. Sarcastic was another weapon of mine that I used quite frequently, and I have made amends for it since you just say sarcasm is to tear flesh because that's the weapon I used. I wasn't physical or violent. Physically, you know, I'm sure she would have hoped I was because my tongue I had the command of the language, I could strip it down one side to the other with my sarcasm.

This is just an ugly, ugly thing that I did. You're telling the spirit of a person I've made amends since. And that's you know, even though I miss sometimes having that witty repotting, it's just so obvious when someone comes at you and opens the door for something really and I know it just damages me more than it does the other. So I kinda cut that out of my life, and I'm great. It's just been removed more.

Most of it has been removed. But anyway, going back to the thing, she said, we need to see a marriage counselor. I said, I'll get one. Wanna be in control. So I called the guy up who's a marriage not a marriage counselor so much as he is an alcohol treatment guy.

And I go through this litany of what she's been doing over the last x number of months, and I said, I'm gonna bring her in. And you take one look at her, and you say, you're an alcoholic. And you strap her to the bed post, and you put whatever stuff you put down their throats to get them sold. See, I didn't know the meaning of it was sobriety. To me, she needed to drink only 2 glasses of white wine, specifically Chardonnay.

When she exceeded that, it made life miserable for me. It made me it made it very embarrassing for me. They say you can spot the behavior for an of an alcoholic. You can spot an alcoholic from the behavior of the person next to them. I'd be sitting in a restaurant with mo what's my problem?

She's got mozzarella dripping down her chin. She's got pepperoni on her eyebrows. And you're asking me what my problem is. He said, no. She's having a great time.

And she was. This is the idiot who's sitting there so focused on this person and I didn't know that I had choices and I had options and I had ways to lead my life without being so engulfed with this disease. So here I am. I call this counselor up. We go see this counselor.

And despite all my instruction to him, I guess they teach them one question. It's like one zero one that they have to use for the rest of their lives. He said, so what's the problem? In my mind, I said, you're a moron. I trained you over the phone 30 minutes.

So instead, I said, oh, she drinks too much. And he's making notes. She's crying. To make a long story short, he lets us go on an outpatient basis. She said, I'll find a counselor.

We go see another counselor who'd been to school with the 1st counselor because we're walking in. He says, so what's the problem? I said, my wife drinks too much. So he says, so what's the problem? And I thought he had a problem with my accent, so I spoke loud and slower like he's deaf and stupid.

So he said, so what's the problem? Meaning, what's the problem with that? And I swear to you, if you turn the lights off in that room, his nose shone so red, he could have served as a beacon on the dark ocean guiding ships. I mean, Rudolph won't have Boro's nose. I looked at her.

I said, oh my god. He's one of you. She said, oh, no. He understands. And he did.

For the last next 3 weeks, he understood and then never showed up again. He disappeared, and I'm sure he disappeared into a blackout someplace. Maybe he wasn't even a therapist. I don't know. So that didn't work.

So I said, you know what? I have an option here. I have choices. I can leave. I don't have to be in this marriage.

So I packed up my worldly belongings into a polka dotted little cloth, put it on a stick, and like Porky Pigga is gonna move the house. I'm leaving. And she said, if you leave, I will commit suicide. I said, that I wanna watch so you don't botch it up. So I follow her from the door to the kitchen, which is only about 15 nanoseconds in a little townhome, and her intentions changed from suicide to homicide.

I don't know how that happened. So I'm here, and she's about there in the kitchen. And I'm here, and there's a TV set behind me. And all of a sudden, here come the dishes flying at me at 90 miles an hour. I mean, this woman, mister Colling, she should have been a Major League Baseball pitch or someplace because these things are flying at about 95 miles an hour.

And this image conscious idiot is tossing the dishes instead of running out of the house. Why don't I run out of the house? Because I don't want our neighbors to find out that I have a drunk at home. That brings me to the question, why do alcoholics become anonymous after they get sober? You know?

If you're anonymous when you're drinking, no problem. Just stay home in a dark dark room, get drunk, pass out, die. I don't care. But don't make my life miserable because my neighbors are going to think that I'm the idiot. But I am the idiot.

See, I just don't want to accept the fact I'm an idiot. That didn't work, so I figured she has fatal attraction. So I'm gonna take the next course of action. I'm gonna kill her. I come from the land of Gandhi.

Right? You're supposed to you're supposed to starve yourself in front of the other person. They say if Gandhi had been in Italy, India would still be under the influence of the British. Italian food is hard to pass, you know, give up. You say Parmesan, forget it.

Let let let the British stay. I'm reading this. This is all happening in nanoseconds in my head. I'm reading this English magazine called Argosy. And, Alfred Hitchcock has story and it describes the perfect murder weapon.

I see a few people kind of straining forward. And it's an icicle. It disappears in the deepest of all the talisman just disappears. So I figured this February, the icicle's dangling on. I'm gonna take it.

I'm gonna kill her. I'm going to go to the basement, dig it up, pour fresh cement. This is all happening in 15 nanoseconds. And then it occurred to me that my wife's car is parked outside in the carport. Her mother my mother-in-law lives about a mile and a half, 2 miles away.

She'll come off. She'll find dust on the sky. She'll call the police. And I did not come to the United States to befriend some guy named Bubba in Michigan prison. Being traded for cigarettes is not an option.

So I'm really now I'm guilty, feeling guilty for even contemplating this heinous thing. And I shared about this in my Friday night meeting one time in Irvine, and a woman walked up to me and she said, oh, I'm so glad you you shared your story because I've been so guilty about this. And I said, why? She said, my husband was passed out on the couch, and I was gonna take a pillow and snuff him out. And I said, why did you not follow through with your with your thought?

And she said, in her thinking, she said, god, that's a terrible thing to even contemplate or it's a heinous thing to do. Instead, she said, oh, they would have found cotton in his nose and they would have known I've done it. And we refer to the alcoholic with the problem. Finally, the twins came to my rescue. I'm not talking to the Norwegian bobsled team or anything like that.

It was dear Abby and Anne Landis. I'm a man of the eighties nineties. God. Al Anon has developed my feminine side in me so much that I'm not dating myself. I don't need a woman in my life.

I snuggle with myself and actually listen to myself. That's so sick. So it says, you mother or father or whatever of an alcoholic, go to Algonquin. I said, finally, finally, finally, someone's gonna tell me how to get this woman sober. So say it's a disease of perceptions.

I've walked into my first Al Anon meeting in Warren, Michigan. It was brightly lit as this, but in my mind, it was a dark, dingy room. There were 6 women in there, average age deceased. That was my perception. They're about as old as I am.

Beautiful women. But at that time, I was in my twenties. I'm looking at this and, oh my god. So I walk up to the deadest of them all because she looked like she had the most authority in her. And I said, how does this bloody thing work?

And she was just she wouldn't even get up to give me a hug. She said, go to that table. It was a literature table, and there's a pamphlet there. And you pick up that pamphlet and you read it. And that's how we work this program.

So I walk up to this thing and I pick up this pamphlet. My logical pseudo logical mind says, oh, 12 steps. And there's an escape pause at the top. It says, these steps have been taken from Alcoholics Anonymous. We change one word in the 12th step.

We say others. So some apply to me, some don't. Click click. Step 13, she gets over. Now I know what step 13 is.

I didn't know the time. So I sit down and I'm reading first step. Admitted we were powerless over alcohol, lives are manageable. Don't go around critiquing your drunk's choice of alcohol from what they find in the garbage can. You come home and your wife is laying on the floor.

There's stuff coming out of her mouth. A kid from across the neighborhood can say, man, that woman is drunk as I smell booze. But, no, this idiot actually is propelled to the garbage can not pulling out and saying, Kmart champagne. How gauche. And she's pulled out red wine and it's got a screwtorp.

She didn't let it breathe. How could she drink this stuff? How snobbish can you get? Your wife's passed out and you and I talked to my sponsor and said, oh, god, Don. I was pursuing a degree in garmology.

And my sponsor, I guess, they send them to 1 upmanship school. He said, oh, that is nothing. I said, oh, that's nothing. He says, man, I used to work in the army with a flashlight in my mouth. I used to fix jeeps in the night because it was all dark, and that trade came in real handy.

I could put a flashlight in my mouth and go through 2 garbage cans at the same I didn't have the heart to tell him you could go to an industrial supply shop with a helmet. You know? Took the second step, came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to Santi. In my case, introduction would have been the appropriate term, but I said, I'm the sane one. She's the insane one.

Sane people don't go about contemplating homicide. I didn't see that that way. See? Step 3, made a decision to turn our lives now and our wills over to the care of God as we understood him. I said, I went to 12 years of Catholic school.

They told me God helps those who help themselves. And why give to him that which he's given to us in the first place? That would make God an Indian giver. I can say that. So I took a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself in god.

I qualified for sainthood. No defects or character. That's called denial. No. That's pure denial.

Step 5, admit it to god, to ourselves, and to another human being. That step goes against the credo of image management. 1, there was nothing wrong. 2, if there was something wrong with me, and if god didn't know what kind of a god wants that, and if there was something wrong with me, you were never gonna find out. Are you nuts?

What you don't know cannot hurt you. Move on. Step 6, made a list of all my defects of character. There were none to make. Step 7, humbly asked him.

I was so humble. I was proud of it. There was really humility. It was a foreign concept. Step 8, lay the list of persons I'd harmed.

They deserved it. 9, I'm still waiting waiting for her to make amends to me. I continued to take personal inventory. My head was hurting because the halo was fitting too tight, and the gossamer wings were starting to sprout. So I looked at the lady, and I looked at step 11, saw through prayer and meditation.

I was making deals with god all the time. God get it killed. 6 Hail Marys. Make sure no one else is killed. That's 12 Hail Marys.

I go home crying every day to my God. Oh God, I hope she's passed out. Oh God, I hope she passed out. Oh, god. I hope she's passed out.

I get home. She's passed out. I said, damn it. She's passed out. Then I get into my car and drive where?

To a single spa. Why? I got a drunk at home. Why am I shopping for more? I don't know.

I go to the bar. I order a drink. I have a cigar in my hands that smells so wicked no woman in a 30 mile radius wants to come close to me. I cussed the drink, cussed the cigar, cussed the place, cussed everyone, go home crying. I hope she's passed out.

What a bloody white alert. And I looked at this woman and I said, now what? I'm spiritually awakened. 3 and a half minutes. That's a record.

What do I do? And she said those 3 words that I hated for the long time longest time. She said, keep coming back. I said, why? She said, because you're sick.

And she said, with such a fast emphasis, she just spit the word out. I said, I'm not sick. The sick one's at home. She said, no. You're sick.

You better come back. So I did every 6 weeks. You're gonna embark on a program, literally, that's gonna get to the psyche of your the core of your psyche. There's a little little screw in there that distorts perceptions unless it's set right. So it's gonna now this program is gonna get into a deep deep psyche.

It's gonna turn that screw just enough so your perception starts to get altered. So your attitudes start to change. Your behavior starts to change. You're gonna become a different person, if you will, and your actions are gonna demonstrate that. And you're gonna do this by going to class every 6 weeks.

And, you know, Al Anon messed me up in my thinking. Say, I'm a pseudo intellectual. I got about 15,000 thoughts swirling at any time into my head, trying to find answers to questions that don't even need to be answered. And you messed it up. You said alcoholism is like a disease, and that disease is like cancer.

So don't leave her because she has cancer. Would you leave? You know that pamphlet we read, the alcoholic speaks to his family? Personally, I think it's the biggest piece of fiction. Have you ever heard your alcoholic say those things to you?

Never. The same thing I say he said, it's a disease like cancer. It's a disease like diabetes. And my head, you know, the second thought jumps up and says, there's other body in there. This I mean, this committee going on says, if it's like cancer, why isn't she seeking chemotherapy?

If it's like diabetes, why not insulin therapy? There's all this noise going on. And no one explained to me that this disease transcends the concepts of physiological and physical definitions of disease and enters the realms of I mean, psychological and spiritual realms of disease. It wasn't until I was transferred to Chicago. I went to a meeting in Schaumburg, Illinois.

And please, I'm not suggesting you do this at your meetings. I was chastised in one conference they've been suggesting this is my story. This is what they did to me in Schaumburg, Illinois at an Al Anon meeting. And I was talking about this disease and said I don't accept this disease concept. I don't know what the hell is it.

And they said, you wanna know what this disease is all about? Go to the text. And in an Al Anon meeting, they had the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous. So I walked up and they had me read that book and we'd have discussions on this thing called disease. Today, if you walk up to me and say, is alcoholism a disease?

I say, I don't know and I don't care because that's not my problem. My problem is obsessing with the behavior of the person because when the booze was removed, I found myself obsessing over other stuff. I'm the kind of guy I'm exaggerating this a tad. It gives you a glimpse into my nature, the my potential, if you will, because it's dormant now. And we're on a date with a beautiful woman.

She could be drop dead gorgeous sitting across from me, but god help her if she's got a piece of lettuce stuck in a tooth. The woman disappears, and this lettuce now is my friend. I wanna take a toothpick, and I wanna take a, you know, floss. Alcohol had literally dominated my perception. This woman had disappeared.

She was a wonderful artist, a terrific cook, a beautiful human being. She disappeared. All that stood in front of me with this big bottle of booze. I'm in my shower recently. I'm showering not I shower every day, but this this story is about something recent.

It's got a big white, tiles on the wall. And on the wall is a little tiny black ant that was stuck to the tile. And I swear to you, within so many minutes, I'm I'm standing and the wall disappeared and this ant's in. I'm saying, how did the ant get stuck? And I'm tossing water.

It says, what kind of protein comes out of this that causes it to adhere to the surface so tight? It's like the problem has now dominated my thinking that the solutions have completely eluded me. The wall had disappeared. All stood in front of me is this little black little black ant. That's the way I think.

And I call alcoholism a disease. I I don't know. It's really not my problem if it's a disease or not a disease. I'm the guy who wants to drive 4 cars on the freeway at times. The idiot in front of me is only doing a 100.

The fool behind me wants to ride in my back seat, and the guy in the blind spot doesn't let me cut in front of the guy in front of me. And then I question myself why my life is unmanageable, not because the alcoholic drinks. It's because of the way I think and the way I perceive life and the way I create my reality and the way I does not mean that the program got a hold of me. Because, you see, I'm the does not mean that the program got a hold of me. Because, you see, I'm the kind of person who, when he reads something, thinks he knows it.