Capitol City Conference in Des Moines, IA

Good morning, everybody. My name is Jack. Hi, Jack. I'm a grateful, active, enthusiastic member the Al Anon family groups, and I love my mother-in-law. Especially since she's become a member of the Almon family groups also.

Alright. I'm really glad to be here. I wanna thank the committee for their invitation to come and spend a little time with you folks and for your very kind hospitality. Everybody's been very nice. I'm really excited to be here this weekend.

I've you know, I have enough trouble with my ego already without walking into a room to do a talk with sold out signs on every day. It'll take a while to get over that. I'll go back and tell my home group about it, and they'll say, were you gone? So it's okay. And, I'm here in the company of some people I greatly admire in AA and Alamo, some terrific speakers.

Matter of fact, if you're staying the weekend, I'm gonna get here all the speakers you're going at some point this weekend, you'll get to hear my all time favorite AA speaker. And, there are 4 of them here, and if they're in the room now, each one of them is sure that they're the one I'm talking about. And so, you know, I'm not all well. I'm gonna tell you right now before the weekend's over, I will tell each one of them in secret that they're the one. Some great folks.

My wife is, is an Omaha native, and, we took this opportunity to come in a couple of days early. We flew into Omaha and spent a couple of days with her family and lunch around the pool and went and did some stuff and had a good time. And we're gonna stay a few days after the conference and head over to a meeting that we're particularly fond of in Bellevue on Tuesday night. And, we're driving across country from Omaha yesterday, and I'm admiring the scenery and this beautiful green pastures and foliage and and everything that I pointed out to my wife. She explained to me how each one of those things was better back across the bridge on the Nebraska side.

And, well, that meant the cattle, the corn, the drivers, everything that we covered, basically, about a little bit is the back when she drank and drove, which she was the designated driver and a blackout drinker, so she didn't think that counted, was that when she traveled on the Iowa side, that the police cars over here are unmarked with little secret lights in the grill, and she kept getting popped because she couldn't see them coming. So we got to the base as I got to be of service and help her get to the bottom of an institutional resentment. Those are the hardest ones to deal with. So that's what it was really. It wasn't about you very kind folks in Iowa.

It was unless any of you are unmarked police car drivers, and you can line up after the meeting to for her to personally make amends to you all. This is this is a lot of fun. I've I've we have more fun after this is over. My favorite thing is stand at a microphone. It's sitting in the front row taking notes because that's where I figure I need to be, but, people keep asking me to step up here and do a little bit of talk and tell you where I came from.

I I think it's it's partially important because I'm a minority in Al Anon. I'm a man in Al Anon, And, there are not many of us. I don't know why it is that I got here and got to stay here. I don't know why it is that my ego was was able to be, put down just enough enough that I could come here and hear some similarities rather than decide that I was better than or that I didn't need what you folks had or that I was too different to get any benefit because I got to come and stay at Al Anon. Part of it probably has to do with some of the story I'm about to tell you.

I'll tell you a little bit about where I came from and what happened and how I got here. First, I wanna tell you that because of the grace of God and good sponsorship and the 12 steps that AA so graciously lent to the Al Anon family groups, that it has been unnecessary for me to bring my drunken wife my drunken girlfriend home to meet the wife since February 19, 19 90. And nobody in this room is happier about that than my beautiful wife, Leslie, who's accompanying me. And I'd like to introduce you to her. She's standing she's here in the front row.

Will you stand up, Slick? Here we are. I like bringing her along because after you get a look at her, you understand maybe why I went through some of the insanity to get here. You know? She's my visual aid in the front row, but she also doesn't look as dangerous as she turned out to be, eventually.

She was the alcoholic that got me here, and it wasn't her drinking. It was her sobriety that did it. Drinking couldn't have got me here. I grew up in a pretty wild and wooly family with a lot of adventures. We, grew up in an area where gang fights and gun fights were just a customary pastime during the weekend, and that was just inside the family.

And there's an adventure I'll share with you that's kind of a favorite story of mine about when I was when I finally got moved to move out of that house. Both of my folks, by the way, I did not grow up in an alcoholic home. I very much appreciated what Johnny had to say about the the disease of alcoholism. He talked about the family disease of alcoholism when he was describing growing up in that alcoholic home last night. He did a terrific job of it.

I grew up in a home very similar to that with the possible exception of the fact that my parents didn't have the decency to drink and allow me to later explain some of my behaviors, parents that I came to you folks just sick and crazy and insane with my hat on backwards and my hair on fire for the very same reason that I grew up in a house that very much resembled what Johnny talked about last night, with with, all of the behaviors that go along with the disease of alcoholism and not the presence of the liquid alcohol. And one of the things that I took out of that home, I'll share with you after I'd gotten old enough to move out of the insanity that was that home, and I won't bore you with the stories because I could do that for the whole hour. I went to have a great time. We wouldn't get to any recovery. Because I got a call one time in the middle of the night, and it was from my stepmom.

And she said, your brother has been in a fight at the bar. That was nothing new. And she said that, you need to go find him, which was nothing new. I just jumped up, found the phone booth, and changed into my suit with a red s on my chest and went out into the world. And I I said, okay.

I'll go get him. I climbed out of bed and I got in my car and I went down. I found him in about 5 minutes at the local watering hole. And it was about 3 o'clock in the morning. In California, they have, laws that close all of the bars at 2, so he was the only one in the parking lot outside of the bar there.

He was sitting in his van and he had picked up a shotgun at home which is why she called me and it was laying against the windowsill sticking out into the air where the glass used to be because the glass had been smashed out of his van in the altercation he'd been in earlier. And I went and found him and I did what I always did. I took the gun away and I defuse the situation. I put the gun in the trunk and, you know, he was there waiting for him to come back. I didn't want to tell him that the bars had closed.

They weren't coming back till tomorrow, but he thought that made perfect sense. And I said about leaving. Well, on my way out of the parking lot, we all had CB radios in our cars, and he called me on the radio. He said, well, I'm gonna go find him. I said, yeah.

Yeah. Good. I'll find. You have a nice night, and I'm headed home. Well, I didn't quite get out of the driveway when the radio piped up again and said, I found them there around the back.

Oh, okay. So I turned the car around and headed back around. This bar happened to be in a big shopping center and around the back was a huge parking lot acres of asphalt with some light standards in it and really nobody there. And as I rounded the corner on this side and he's around the corner on that side, there were sure enough there's about 3 or 4 cars in the middle of this parking lot. He'd had an altercation with about 6 or 8, young Hispanic gentlemen and he figured this was them and he called me up on the radio again.

He said, I'm going in. Now for those of you who do not speak, let me translate that for you. That translates to we're going in. So he started in from his side and I started in my side. We've got all 8 of them surrounded.

And I've gotta come up with a plan. You see, there's 8 of them over there. He's been at the bar drinking all night. And I'm trying to figure out how I'm gonna deal with my 7. So the plan I came up with was I decided what I would do is I'd take the car in there at a pretty good rate of speed.

I've been racing cars and motorcycles since I've been a little kid, and I get that car going sideways. And if I figured if I slid in there sideways where a bunch of them are standing, I might be able to go side to side with one of those cars and pin maybe 4 of them and give me a chance to get out of the car, which was a critical moment in a gang fight, getting in or out of the car. Daddy taught me that. He also taught me to marry early and often. So I got in there and got a pretty good head of steam up, and I'm I'm boring right down on these guys, and they're watching me.

They haven't seen brother coming from the other side yet. I got to the point of getting this car turned sideways and sliding it on in there when the just about the point of no return when the radio pipes up just one more time, and it says, I don't think that's them. I gathered that car up, and I went by those guys still traveling a pretty good clip. I thought it would be ill advised to stop and discuss my behavior with them on the way through and kept on going, which is a great and wild and wooly story. I I told that story in the presence of my friend Dick over here a couple of years ago, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads.

And after a moment, he said, why didn't you just drink? I didn't drink because drinking didn't do for me what it did for my eventually it was to do for my brothers and for my current wife and a lot of other people in my life. I didn't like that feeling of being out of control. I just drinking didn't work for me. I became the designated driver from the time I was a little kid and the designated go to guy to get him out of jail, get him out of gang fights and gun fights, and that's where I fit in my family and in my circle of friends, and that's what I did.

That's a cute little story except that I need to share with you that I wasn't a 17 year old kid, you know, still in high school doing something that was irresponsible. I wasn't a fellow who didn't have any responsibilities in his life. I'd gotten out of that bed as a 22 year old young man after being 4 years in the Marine Corps where I'd gotten out as a sergeant during the Vietnam era. And I got out of that bed with a wife and the 2 little kids in that house for whom I was the sole form of support. And it never occurred to me that if I ran in there that one of those guys are probably dark, I'd have killed Nick.

And that I'd have gone to jail and that family would have lost their only means of support. And my my see, my priorities are upside down. I've come out of that family where blood is thicker than water and we got the story about Boys Town oddly enough about, you know, carrying a boy and he and Heather, he's my brother and mixed in with, from my mom. He may be an axe murderer, but he's my son kind of mentality that, you know, everything for the family and keep the family secret and stuff. And I don't know when my priorities got upside down.

It happened sometime growing up in that home with that with all that behavior. I went out into the world and behaved, and that was nothing new. We did lots of that stuff. I met my first wife at a gang fight. As luck would have, but I was at my dad's house after having been in a gang fight the week before.

My mother had sent me up there to get a lecture about getting in the fights. What she failed to put together was that in the previous gang fight I was being lectured about, not only was my dad there, but he had driven us to the gang fight along with my my then mother's husband and to be in the fight. And I was going to get a lecture, and that time, the doors swung open and my brother and and my 2 brothers are walking down the street with a couple of girls and he'd gotten in a fight with them. His magic number was 8. There was 8 guys and they got in a fight with 8 guys and they're beating the crap out of them up the street.

And the other brother came running in in the middle of my lecture and said, John's in a fight down the street. Gotta go get him. So we me and my dad, our gang, both of us. That's the way it went. Went down the street, and I pulled in and pinned all 8 of them.

I've I've looked at the logic of that in recent years, and it doesn't make nearly as much sense to me now as it did then that I should trap 8 guys and then we would have them. We got them right where we want them. We had a heck of a fight, and my future ex wife to be stood across the street and watched us do a crowbar and bumper jack melee. I've always thought it was unfair that my brother started that fight and I had to marry her. Makes sense to you?

It didn't make sense to me. I went off in the Marine Corps and had a couple of kids, and I'll share an incident with you and I'll move on about about my mindset. One of the pieces one of the biggest pieces of baggage I dragged through the doors of Al Anon has to do with the with the, with my little girl. I had a little girl named Jessica. She was, in 1978 at the age of 1 while I was had come out the marine corps.

Right around the time I've done that whole deal with the parking lot with my brother, there was an incident in which my little girl drowned in a little foot and a half deep kid pool in the backyard of our house in the care of the babysitter. And, she lay in a coma for a year before her death and we had brought her home to take care of her. And, I'd like to tell you that I took care of that child, but I was not emotionally or even physically capable of taking care of that little girl who required constant care around the clock. She required physical therapy and care of her trach tubes and she was fed through a tube in her stomach and all of the things that went on with that. Somehow or another, I learned this lesson as a kid that your feelings are your enemy, that you can't ever let them out and if they ever got out, my life would spin out of control.

I believe that with every fiber of my being and I would regularly have panic attacks getting out of my bed. Between the time I could get out of that bed and get out of the house, I just couldn't I get my heart sounded like a like a jet plane engine and I couldn't stay there and I had to go. What I'm describing to you is something that I've heard described from podiums in AA many times and I have had the the, I don't know if it's the dubious privilege of witnessing is called a panic attack. I've seen it in my brothers. One of them in particular when my father lay on his death bed and my brother walked in presumably to see possibly my father for the last time, and he's one of those brothers of mine whose drinking has bothered me over the years.

And I watched that panic attack sit in at his feet and roll up his body until I got to about his neck and he had to flee the room where he would probably never see my dad again. And he was absolutely powerless before the onslaught of the fear that overcame him. Today, I understand that. I understand that that's what was happening to me. But when she passed away, having not benefited from my being able to take care of her and having put that entire load on that first wife, I put that piece of baggage back in the back of my head and I carried it for for what probably would have been for the rest of my life had I not found you folks.

And, went on about creating a lot of wreckage in my life. My father is one of those people who my biggest resentment in life was against my dad because he was a womanizer. He had, at the time of his death, you know, I used to I used to be terrified that he would die. And I wasn't terrified of losing him. I was terrified because I was the oldest responsible child.

No. So I said responsible. They would probably have to do his eulogy, and I knew I'd get up there and tell you what a son of a bitch he was. And I was afraid that he would die because I'd have to get up there and tell you the truth about it. And I had tremendous resentments about him because of the way he treated my mother and all of his wives and girlfriends and stuff.

When he passed away, I was executor of his estate. We had to do a head count of his children because nobody knew. And there were 11 of us for sure and 2 possible. My father was a very charming man. And I hated him I hated him because of the way he treated all those people.

Now I need to tell you that I went out into the world particularly after the incident with my daughter and I behaved exactly the same as my father. It's stuff that I'm not proud of today. It's stuff that I had to deal with in a rigorous inventory and an amend step. It's stuff that, one day at a time, I do not participate in today because I didn't like the way I lived back then and I really like the way I live today, so I don't do that. But, one of the things that I did was I went out into the world and I dated just like I was single.

And, I spent as much time away from the home as I could, particularly when my daughter was still alive. I work in the movie business and I just stayed gone all the time. It was convenient. It was easy in our business. We'd work regularly 16, 18, 20 hour days.

It was no big deal, and they might get rid of me, you know, after 12 hours and say, you know, because I'm a specialist. We don't need you anymore. You can go home. And I'd say, okay. And I stayed till everybody clocked out because I couldn't go home.

And, I went out in the world and I created a lot of wreckage. And I was on a location in Arizona working on a picture, and, I was to meet the lady who was to change my life. And I met her on my way to the from the coffee pot one morning. I'd see I'm a morning person. I'm the best I'm gonna be all day right out of bed first thing in the morning.

I'm cute, I'm clever, and I'm witty, and I'm bright and shiny, and I'm a tremendous irritation to any alcoholics in the vicinity. They don't appreciate that near as much as you folks do, and I was my usual sunny self coming from the coffee pond, and my beautiful wife, Leslie, was coming the other way. And I said something cheery like good morning, and she growled at me. I filed it away. A couple of days later, we're playing Frisbee.

We're very busy in the movie business. Big a lot of job responsibility, a lot of things to do. We're throwing this big old heavy Frisbee around. My friend, Clarence, flung this frisbee at me and it went over my head. Clarence was 7 feet tall.

He must have thought I was 7 feet tall because I missed it by about 2 feet and I was heading for this van. There was a there was a van load of extras getting ready to work on this movie, getting out with big hair and tight jeans and looking pretty good, you know. We like to keep them around for crew morale. And I howled, look out, which is the only direction my wife has ever taken for me in 15 years that I've known her. She looked out and that Frisbee hit her right between the eyes and knocked her out cold.

I ran over there. Did anybody see a theme in this? I ran over and picked her up and I started apologizing for a Frisbee I didn't throw. And I apologized up and down, offered to get her the medic, get her an ice bag, and then it hit her right between the eyes and stuff, and actually, I was irritating her. It was morning.

I was just irritating her. And finally, I said, is there anything I can do? And she said, you could buy me a drink some time. Hello? Glad to be here.

You know, my friend, Clarence, hit her on the head with a Frisbee and I had to marry her. Do you think that's fair? I was thinking about that yesterday. Anyway, we, I was out. I was dating on that location like I did a lot of locations, and I happened to be dating her best friend, which she found me particularly attractive because she knew I was married and I was dating her best friend, and she decided that we needed to meet, and she put the moves on me one night.

And I was out with her girlfriend at a bar, and she took me on the dance floor and tried to seduce me. I said, I'm with somebody. She says, I know I really like that. I like a girl shows initiative. So I tracked down her unlisted phone number and I called her up.

She thought that merit that much work merited a date. We went out. Out. We saw each other a little bit. I left location, went to another one, and she came to visit me.

And then my wife came to visit, and she was flying in as the other one was flying out. Why make 2 trips to the airport? I asked. So they're crossed in the air there. My wife all my Leslie thought that was all very exciting.

I was just making a mess of my life and a lot of other people's lives. Eventually, I we finished that movie, went back to California, and Leslie, if she ever gets to tell you her story, she was a 6 month wonder. She would go someplace and just do great for 3 months, get fired for the last 3, and then move. And she was in a series of geographics for Omaha, Nebraska headed west until she ran out of ground, which happened to be in Los Angeles where I live, and she had just finished up 6 months in Page, Arizona. I met her and decided California would be good, and she moved on out there.

She called me up and we saw each other a couple of times. Our first real date in California, I went to go pick her up and got lost. She'd given me directions while she was drunk. I couldn't find her. So I'm calling her up saying, what you said you're going straight.

It's a t intersection. There is another straight. She's trying to tell me where to go, and she doesn't know where she is. She's out of town. She's drunk, and she's lost.

So I cross back over the freeway about 10 minutes later and come across this horrific car accident. There's this little Honda car buried in the grille of this Oldsmobile, and the Honda has obviously lost the encounter. The person in it is this beautiful blonde lady, I'll explain that in a minute, who's not breathing. And there's police and ambulances and fire trucks, and they got hydraulic jaws out there peeling the car open to get her out. I hear the officer saying, we don't know who she is.

She doesn't have any IDs. She's got out of state plates on her little Honda car. That was the only part that was straight enough to read was the back license plate. And I said, well, I know who she is and I gave him her name and we all went out to the hospital. And in the hospital there, I was sitting with her while we're waiting and that was my beautiful wife, Leslie, by the way.

In the hospital there, I was sitting with her on the on the table waiting for them to come and treat her broken bones and her trauma. She had a crushed neck pipe and had suffered come running in with the crash carts and they jumped come running in with the crash carts and they jumped around on her for a couple of minutes and got her going again. And when she she came up again, she rolled her she rolled her head over towards me on a gurney and looked straight at me with these great big eyes, looked right at me and she said, let me go. She said, let me go, which I dismissed because I know everything as delirium. You know, maybe they've given her some drugs, maybe a wreck or whatever.

She was completely delirious. The reason I tell you about that today is because I understand that what little I know about the disease of alcoholism because I am not an alcoholic and my wife's first AA sponsor assured me that that was the case and that I would never know what an alcoholic knows is I got a momentary glimpse into other the other side of what it must be like to live on the active disease of alcoholism. And years later, when I came to you folks and I heard sober members of Alcoholics Anonymous and and members of the family group share from podiums like this about the disease of alcoholism, I began to understand the significance of what I had seen that day. What I had seen was somebody whose life was so miserable behind the active disease that they would rather have died than paid the price for 1 more car wreck, for, for one more debacle, for having one more person. She knew the police were out there and take her away after this is over.

She'd been drunk and she'd hit this woman on her own side of the street. She'd run through a red light to do it and, she would rather die than pay that price. The hospital determined she didn't have any insurance. It was a little hospital with a little emergency ward and they just didn't have the financial resources to take in strays, unlike me, and, they took they threw her out. They didn't treat any of her broken bones.

They put a neck brace on her, loaded her in her chair, and took her out to my car. They loaded her in the car and and she can't talk. She can hardly move. And the nurse says, I hope you're near near a hospital because she doesn't she's not doing real well. I said, thanks for sharing.

So now we're in the car and we're debating where to take her. You see, I haven't yet found the place where she's living, which is some phantom uncle whose existence we debate to this day. I have not seen him. She has an imaginary friend here somewhere too. Is Connie in the room?

I'm I figured she made her up too. We have a running bander for 15 years about her friend Connie that I have yet to meet. And we she can't find the uncle's house anymore either, so we don't know what to do with her. She whispers to me, I guess you can take me to a hotel. I thought about that for 8 seconds.

I know today that what I what I figured then was probably the right thing. I knew if I took her to a hotel, I'd have been checking the paper every day to see when they found this dead blonde in a hotel room because she'd expired abandoned in a hotel room. And I said, no. I got a better idea. I'll just take you home.

Did y'all wanna think about that a little while? Because you you forget I got a wife at home and a family. And I did. I I called on the phone. I told my first wife I have a friend who's been in a wreck.

I'm bringing her home. If you came in late, this is an Al Anon meeting just so you don't This is not a drunkalog. It's the other side of the drunkalog. And, my first wife met us in the driveway and we carried her in the door. And my wife has shared from many podiums in AA that I dropped her coming through the door into my house.

With all of her injuries, I dropped her on the floor. And I don't might have been a little nervous. She describes that time. She lived with us for about 6 months. We laid her on the bed there and waited her for her to die for about 3 days.

I really didn't think she was gonna make She pulled through, and we managed to get her to a doctor and get her some medical care and get some of her broken bones set, some of her get her some painkillers. She needed them painkillers. It turns out, we found out that she needed them real bad because she couldn't drink during that time. Painkillers was all she had. She describes that 6 months or so that we all lived together as some of the happiest days of her life up until then.

She had a new mommy and a new daddy. A new brother, a new sister, a new dog. Life was good. We I made a wheelchair out of a kitchen kitchen chair and put wheels on so I could fit her through the doorways, and we wheeled her around the house. We showered together and went to the bathroom together.

I'd hold her up and wash her. I'd spin her around. My wife would wash the other side. We put her in. It's very romantic.

It didn't get deeply complicated until she got well enough to start getting around, and my first wife began setting her up on double dates with us. And we'd go out to dinner. I'd be sitting next to my wife and my girlfriend with her date to be rubbing my leg under the table, and I became really confused. So when she said she had was starting to get some job interviews and she wanted to go to go off to Texas to take a job, I thought that was a great idea and I sent her off Texas. I didn't think I'd ever see her again.

I finally set about doing something that I hadn't had the courage to do prior to that time. I initiated some divorce proceedings and separated from that wife. Leslie and I kept in touch, and she was down there. Guess how long she was in Texas? Anybody guess?

1 month. Very good. 6 months went by, and she called out and said, I wanna come back to California. So I jumped in my truck with one of my other brothers, one of my foster brothers, and we drove straight through to Houston, Texas and packed her lock stock barrel and cat into the trailer I had and drove straight home to live happily ever after. Yeehaw.

I got to spend the last year and a half of my wife's drinking with her, and I got an education about the disease of alcoholism that I hope I never forget. And, a lot of stuff went on during that year. I wasn't sure what was going on. Oddly enough, we checked into the hotel last night. There was a movie on TV that happened to be a movie I was working on when she had when she'd been with me for just about a year.

And, we're up in Washington or Oregon someplace and at the wrap party for that location, she misbehaved as she often did behind her alcoholism. By the way, she was blackout drinker. I thought she just was a lightweight. She'd have a couple of glasses of wine and fall asleep and I'd carry her to bed. It was wonderful.

She'd wake up every morning and crawl over to my side and get a good look at my mug to see who I was and go, because she really had no idea. And then she had to wait until I got up and around to see how I was behaving to determine how she had behaved the night before. If I was happy and joyous and free, she thought she'd done okay. If I was mad, she'd go, oh, well, he'll get over it. It was a running theme in our relationship.

But on that movie at that rock party, she staggered over to the director's table, a nationally renowned a world renowned director, and leaned over him to explain to him a few finer points about directing movies that she thought he should have, and spilled his wine in in in his lap. And I thought that that'd be a bad career move for me, so I whisked her out of there, took her back to our room, and and I grounded her. I confined her to her room. We had a we had a daddy daughter thing going on. Anybody catching that?

On the way home from that trip, she confided me for the first time that she believed that she had a problem with alcohol and I had an interesting answer for that. I said, no, you don't. I said, no, you don't. I said, you just have a couple of glasses of wine a day. Just stop.

Because I never saw her drink more than that. She'd be drunker than $50 when I got home and she'd have to maintain until I was there for a little while and wash her, consume a glass or 2 of wine, and then she could loosen up and be drunk and pass out. I just thought she was a cheap drunk. When I asked her how come I never knew she was drunk all the time, she says, that's why. Because you never saw me sober.

You had nothing to compare it to. During that year, we fought like cats and dogs. We after She told me she had a problem with alcohol. I began helping her get sober. I was checking her breast.

She was working at the restaurant at night. Well, thank God, they let her drink for free or we'd still be doing financial amends 15 years later. They were more than happy to have her drink and hang around there and do the books and stuff. I haven't figured that out yet. She finally, series of circumstances happened and it was just getting uglier and uglier in our home and I it was just she was evil, mean, and nasty all the time.

I finally came home from another location. I was done. I was gonna throw her out. She knew that. Prior to my getting home, she decided she needed to get some help and she first laid in bed and she drank, trying to drink herself to death.

She drank until she passed out and she'd wake up alive again. She tried again. For 3 days, she did that. She couldn't wake up. She couldn't kill herself with alcohol.

That's what she was trying to do. So she called the recovery center and checked herself in. I got home about a week later, about a week early, because she was planning to be 2 weeks sober when I got home and be wonderful and it would all be better. And she still had the shakes and and, I asked her for a glass of wine and she dropped it 3 times and ran out of the house hysterical crying because I would have a glass of wine and I had to drink half of it. Maybe leave some.

I was just a little gobbled about this big and she run out of crying and it was not the new. She behaved like that all the time. I didn't really take any particular notice of it. She came back in and she said I had to get some help from my alcoholism. She believed that if she had gone and gotten help after she told me the first time and I said, you don't have a problem, that I've thrown her out for getting help.

I didn't say that, but that's what she heard and I think she still believes that today. Maybe it was true. I don't know. So, she's in this recovery place and they and AA started a couple of things happened with AA. An AAH and I panel came in there with a little guy whose eyes glowed with that with that glowing sobriety thing, that light that you get that comes on back in your eyes after you get sober for a little while and you start carrying the message to other people and she started to get a little bit of hope.

Another panel came in which is really to change both of our lives. It was 2 men and a woman. It was raining and nasty outside and and, all three of those people, my wife pretty much to this day, will tell you that they didn't wanna go on that panel that night. They didn't wanna be there. They had better things to do and they went anyway.

And one of those women who didn't wanna be there that night who went because she was being of service in AA, gave my wife her card, was to become her first sponsor. A woman who I dearly loved. I call her AA's answer to Lizzie Borden. If you guys were all chatting amongst yourself before the meeting when she walked through the back door back there, you'd all stop. She's very stoic, really sober woman.

We're walking to the room very serious, and you would all stop and look. And she scared the hell out of everybody. She didn't scare me. I liked her right out of the box Yeah. Because she was mean to Leslie.

She gave Leslie her card, and Leslie started calling her. If she didn't have any other options, she'd call her up and had to hang up on her and stuff. She'd get in a conversation with Leslie and say, well, I know such and such, and Pat had to hang up on her. She called back and said, why'd you hang up? She just said, you know.

We have nothing else to talk about. She didn't know she could hang up on Pat. Pat told her she says, you know, for a year, her check-in with Pat was everyday she called Pat's machine, she get the machine, say, hi. This is Leslie just checking in. Didn't have a drink today.

I think it's gonna be alright. If I just get rid of that son of a bitch, I'll call you tomorrow. She couldn't share that with me until I've been in Al Anon a little while. And the response said, we don't make any major decisions in AA in our 1st year. You are extra sick.

It's 3 years. Wouldn't let her leave. Well, we decided if Pat met me, I was out there, folks. You already heard some of it. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

She thought if Pat met me, she'd give her permission to get rid of me, so she invited over for dinner. She's coming up on a year sober and I work, man, at Saturday night at the fights. Everything's the same as when she drank except now she never sleeps. I'm not getting a break from it anytime. She at least she had a decency to be passed out and slobbering on herself when she drank.

She's sober. She's awake all the time, and we're not doing well. So Pat comes over for dinner. We have this nice dinner. She asked my opinion about a few things, which I was known to give freely.

And they got all done and went in the kitchen and they're doing dishes and stuff, and she leaned over. She said, what do you think? That says, I don't like him either. But you made him your god. You live with him.

I wouldn't let her leave. About about a year later, she invited Pat over for dinner again after Leslie was was, had been sober for a while, and I think I had started going to Al Anon. During dinner, Pat looked over at me and said, I don't think you should have to live like this. I believe you should throw her out. I loved Pat.

Wasn't quite biting her to dinner. That woman saved the life of the woman who I have come to love with every fiber of my being and who I admire as probably the finest member of Alcoholics Anonymous that I will ever know based on the fact that and I know a lot of people in AA, and I hear a lot of people talk about their recovery in AA and around AA, is that every night I go home with her and I watch her walk, the walk that she talks from a podium and take those 12 step calls from central office and go out in the middle of the night and pick those girls up and do the things that she does that she talks about from a podium. I watch her live that everyday, and I someday, I hope to grow up to be just like her. And that's not the person I described to you during her drinking. I didn't think I would ever learn anything from her, and I have the greatest admiration for Alcoholics Anonymous and for people who walk the line of sobriety in AA.