San Antonio's 60th Anniversary Weekend in San Antonio, TX

I'm a grateful, enthusiastic, and very, very active member of the Al Anon family groups, and my name is Jack Carpenter. Hi, Jack. Good morning, San Antonio. I'm really delighted to be here. I wanna thank you for your hospitality.

I I love coming to Texas. I it's been my privilege to come down here a few times, for work and a few times for service commitments. I love coming down here. I love the way that your programs honor each other and and cooperate with each other. And, I I don't see that everywhere that I go, but I see it in Texas and some other places.

And it's a privilege and honor that you guys asked me to come down here and be with you this weekend. I've been treated very well. I wanna thank Bob for picking me up at the airport, and he's, he's an Al Anon like I'm an Al Anon. He's in all the way. I, and he needs to be.

You know, we were getting ready to go to dinner last night, and I get to come to a few of these and usually I'm at the mercy of the AA committee and they wanna have dinner before the meeting and, you know, I'm an Al Anon. I gotta get there, get done, get here early, check out, you know, survey the room, make sure the alcoholics have set it up right and, you know, see where the exits are and just get all my ducks in a row and, you know, they'll come and say the meetings at 7:30. We'll pick you up for dinner at 6:45, you know. And I'm going, oh my god. So he's, what time you wanna go to dinner?

I said, well, I'm pushing my luck a little bit. I said, how about 6 o'clock? He said, how about 5:30? I said, I'm home. I'm in good hands.

He's got my back. I'm good to go. And I wanna thank Vanjie for asking me to come and, be with you. I haven't met Vanjie yet. Vanjie, are you here?

Put a hand up. Hi, Vanjie. Vanjie, I don't remember if we talked on the phone or if it was an email or something, but I just come back from Florida. And I I think it was an email. I got an email that said, I just listened to your tape from Florida.

You just spoke in Florida, and we're really excited to have you come out. We'd love you to come to Texas and speak at SA. And I'm I'm thinking sex addicts anonymous because I've been ratted out to SA and I've got to join another 12 step group and the next thing in my head is I really got to tone down my talk. I'm not doing that in a general way thing very well if they're inviting me to speak at SA. And I sent her an email and she's always it's, SA San Antonio.

I guess, in California, you'd say LA. You know it's Los Angeles. And in Texas, I guess, everyone knows it's SA. But when you call them folks in California, give them a little heads up, will you? Because they may start start running.

And then I corresponded with Bob via email. I knew right away that I had a soul mate, Bob, that we were gonna get on fine. He's involved in service like I am. I continue to be I told him very, very active, and that's exactly what I am. I still have commitments.

I don't believe in giving all the commitments to the newcomers because when you do, the old timers don't have anything to do and they wander off. I make sure I've got my job first and I'll drag some of them along with me. And I I've had a, you know, I've had the Alabus since about my 2nd year in Al Anon. Big enough for me and about 6 of my because when I get a commitment, we all get a commitment. We go out to convention planning meetings and stuff.

And, you know, it's and it's kept me here and kept me involved and and kept me on the road that I need to be on. And and I've been to San Antonio several times before, a couple of times for work, once before and once after recovery. I'm sure if there's long timers in the room, if you saw me going by, recovery. I'm sure if there's long timers in the room, if you saw me going by, you were saving me a seat already going, oh, there's a sick one. We're gonna get him eventually.

Because I did some pretty sick living towards the end. And the the first trip that I made down here, I was work I'm working the motion picture business and I was staying over at the Saint Anthony's InterContinental. I guess it's still named that. And Travis Park's right out front. And when I had gotten there, Travis Park was like a lawn and some trees and no shrubs.

I guess they were trying to chase the homeless folks out of there. They'd had an indigent problem or something and we were all fascinated by the fact that there was a police officer out there 24 hours a day. He just stood in a park, an armed police officer. And I'm thinking, well, that that that guy did something. He got caught doing something with the chief's wife or something.

He had he had a raw deal. We kinda noticed him and one day I was walking. I went over to Denny's over here for breakfast and I was walking back and and then walking down the street. I work on mostly action movies and I see somebody come running around the corner, dive across the hood of a car, and do a little roll on the ground. People are running and diving through doorways and over cars and stuff and it's just like work.

I'm thinking, wow. They started shooting without me. I wonder if I'm late for work. A A guy had had armed himself with a couple of guns and put a dust on and called a cab and took him downtown and shot up the town. And there was a running gun battle going down the street.

Now this is how sick Al Anon and I am. This is the I adrenaline doesn't even happen with me anymore where I came from. I'm watching pit the peace police are running and speed loading their guns and shooting, and he's shooting back. And nobody's hitting anybody. I I guess the guy shot a couple of people and he ran around the corner and a park ranger shot him right in the ass.

Down he went. Now I don't know if alcohol was involved in that story but in my fantasy world it was. And and if that guy is an AA, he'd be the one sitting on one butt cheek, you know. So, but the other thing that was memorable about this and listen very carefully to this is that I got a phone call while I was here working on that movie. It was from my wife and it was her one phone call from jail.

And she's called up. She was in California. She says, I'm in jail. And I said, you know, they'll probably let you out tomorrow. Why don't you try and get a good night sleep?

And hung up the phone. Now that sounds like a guy working an Al Anon program which I did not have in my possession at that time and I can prove it because the next phone call was to my family who promptly went and got her out of jail and they went and had a party and got drunk to celebrate her getting out of jail. So, she wasn't done. I wasn't done. There were still some wreckage to do.

I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the family that I came from. I came from a family that was deeply affected by the disease of alcoholism. And you wouldn't have if you looked at my family, even in the light of recovery, you would notice something very very peculiar right away and that is that my parents were not alcoholic. They didn't drink alcoholically. They actually didn't drink very often.

When they did, they didn't do it very well but they didn't drink very often. But alcoholism was in and around, surrounded all of the activities in my home. Ours was the party house. Ours was a house that everybody came to. Saturday morning, first thing, people start showing up, and they just sat around watching and waiting for fun to break out because it would.

It might be a rodeo. It might be a water fight in the house with the hose and everything. It might be, a gang fight. It might be the police show. There's always something going on.

And if you missed a weekend, next week weekend you're gonna have to hear about last weekend. So everybody just showed up and waited. You know? Skip phone's gonna break out here any minute. And then when they did have a party, there were huge bash as we would do up for Halloween.

We'd dig a graveyard in the front yard with headstones for everybody we knew. And you'd come down the driveway, and Dracula and Frankenstein would swing out of the trees and land on the hood of your car. And you just couldn't afford to miss any time at our house. And, the people that came, by and large, all of them were alcoholic. Most of them were my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my relatives, all around the family but not my parents.

And I had to come to you and Al Anon for a little while to begin to understand I'm sitting in Al Anon meetings. I'm listening. I'm going, yeah. That that happened in my house and that happened. And I'm listening to people talking about growing up in the disease of alcoholism but I can't put that that's a round peg square hole problem.

I can't put my parents in that. And then one day, it occurred to me that both of my parents were adult children of alcoholics. And another you know, one more gear clicked into place and I began to understand that I was affected by alcoholism 2 generations down. I was affected by the presence of the alcoholics and the behavior of the alcoholics and and, it was a house that had secrets. We had, you know there were plots going on and secret alliances and it was way before it was popular on TV, you know.

You know, mom checking on dad and checking his genes to see if he really had money because he didn't have any and her plotting with her girlfriends and my dad's sneaking around behind her back or we'd go to the motorcycle races and we'd drop mom off and kiss her goodbye and go down and pick dad's girlfriend up the street and go to the motorcycle racing for the weekend. We got a garage full of motorcycles. I'm racing motorcycles from the time I'm very young. We've got a backyard full of horses, and we've got no money to put food on the table. There were all of these contradictions that happened in that house and I was very confused there for a long time.

What I I'm gonna describe to you how I was when I came out of there. I got to be 16, old enough to get a job and get a car and get out, and I left because the pressure of the things going going on there got to be too much for me. I went out in the world and became immediately self supporting. I was living in a house supporting my girlfriend and her alcoholic mom and I was out in the world. It was a better place than I thought I'd come from.

And, here's who I was. I I'll tell you a couple of stories that that you can maybe relate to. First, I'm gonna tell you about my my problem resolution skills. There were times when there were great scary fights in our house. And then one particular, my stepmom my dad had many wives.

My the wife after my mom and him got in a big fight. And she went and got the gun, his 45 caliber automatic, to shoot him. And she came into the kitchen, a long narrow kitchen. She pointed it at him and they screamed a couple more times and she pulled the trigger and gun gun didn't go off. She says, this thing's broke.

My dad says, let me see that. Snaps the safety off, squeezes around into that wall which goes through into the neighbor's house and goes, no. It's working fine. Hands it back to her. Conflict resolution skills were big in our house, you know.

Fortunately, they did what you did. They had a good laugh about it. They had a big laugh and everybody had a good time. They put the gun away in for another time. There was times they were gonna shoot the horse or shoot each other and, you know, mom was I've heard this described at Al Anon but it was it was kinda what my my mom and my dad's other wives were.

They were they were half naked nightie hood jumpers. You know, when he's heading down the driveway and they're on the hood and they're nightgown trying to stop him from going trying to bulldog the car to a stop. There was a lot of that going on. So I had I had skills. And the guy that I came out of that house is I can describe to you in a couple of stories.

One of them I always tell, and it has pertinence that I'll get to in a minute. And that is that after a while, like, you know, I'm out living on my own. I'm still the guy that the family calls to come and get them when they're in trouble. You know, when they get in over their head, we better call Jack. Jack will fix it or he'll have the answer.

I'm the answer man. I get a phone call in the middle of the night. It's about 2:30 in the morning. It's not unusual. Pick up the phone.

No boundaries here. Just pick up the phone. There's been a fight at the bar. Your brother's been in a fight. Some guy's crashed a window out of his van and tried to pull his girlfriend out.

And he came home and got the shotgun and went back to the bar. And you need to go find him. And I do. Of course, I do. It's what I do.

It's my value as a human being is that I couldn't drink with them. I figured that early on. I tried. I couldn't do the things that they did. My brothers, my uncles would get drunk, get 7 feet tall, win the fight, get the girl and forget, and we'd have to tell them tomorrow all of their heroics that they did.

I would drink and get dumb and stupid and throw up and pass out and and remember everything which was awful. You guys don't know what a gift blackouts were. If you suffer from blackouts, you had a gift that I can't I envy you greatly. So drinking didn't happen for me but I could drive them. I could get them out of jail.

I could go wait into the fight and get them out. And I god help me. I did an awful lot of that. I jumped out of bed of course, I did. It wasn't even a question.

Got in the car, went out. I have skills, stocking skills. Actually, I found him in 5 minutes. First watering hole I checked, it was a pizza place that he went and drank at. And And he's sitting in a parking lot, this empty parking lot in his van.

He's got the shotgun popped up on the window and all the windows have gone out of his van. There's not another car in sight. I pull up and I'm thinking, this is gonna be an easy night in the hero business. There's no no enemy close by. We probably would get through the night without being bruised up too much.

And I said, what are you doing? He says, I'm waiting for him to come back. Bars don't open for about 4 more hours. I think I'm still alright. So I take the gun away and I get him calmed down.

I unload the gun and put it in the trunk and I'm getting ready to go home. And, as I'm heading out, he says, well, I'm gonna go find them. And And I said, oh, well, you go with God. And he's off gonna go find these guys. And on the way out of the driveway, we've got CB radios in our cars and the CB radio pipes up and he says, I found them.

They're around the back. Okay. So, I turned my little Mustang around and I went around this side of this big shopping center. The pizza place was in the middle and he'd gone around that side so I went around this side. And sure enough, we came around the backside and in the middle of this parking lot, there's 3 cars.

There's about 6 or 8 young gentlemen having a 3 o'clock in the morning after the bar is closed, beer under one of these big light standards and our radio pipes up and it says, I'm going in. If you are new to Al Anon or don't actually speak Al Anon, that translates to we're going in. Here he comes from outside. Here I go from my side. Now I'm studying mathematics at the university.

I was pretty good with mathematics. And as I'm racing towards the scene of the soon to be crime, I'm trying to figure out what I you know, brother's drunk. And and I'm trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with my 7 guys, you know. He's gonna get out and get one guy real busy and I'm gonna have 7 more to contend with and I haven't yet administered any anesthetic to me. He's drunk.

He won't remember tomorrow. I go, I get all these bruises. You know, I have to tell him. So I come up with a plan to survive. I'm a big planner.

That's what I do. I plan. Got a plan for everything. And as I'm racing in there, I decide that if I get that car going sideways fast enough and I slide in there broadside and hit one of those cars, then I might pin 3 or 4 of those guys between the chassis and give me a chance to get out of the car. Because daddy taught me the most important time in any gang fight is when you're getting into or out of the car.

We had values. And, I went across that parking lot, my little Mustang, a little 69 Mustang going pretty good and I got it turned sideways. I've been racing motorcycles since I was 8. I raced my 1st automobile. I was quarter midraced when I was 4.

I make my living doing this today, doing driving doing really silly things with cars. I got that car pretty much turned sideways and was on my way in there to do what I was gonna do. My radio piped up one more time and said, I don't think that's them. Wahoo, man. Windows in that little car filled up full elbows.

I was driving my butt off trying not to run over anybody. I went by those guys with their beer going, What was that? And I kept going because I didn't really want to discuss my behavior with them at that particular moment and I went on home. And you know, I talked about this for a couple of reasons. One of them is it wasn't many years ago up in Berkeley, California, there was a guy got in a fight or something was going on.

And he jumped the curb and he ran down a bunch of people in Berkeley. He killed a couple of them. Them. And, he was in the press for a long time after that. There was a big trial with him and stuff.

I'm gonna tell you right now, if I'd have done what I intended to do and I fully intended to do what I just said, the likelihood is somebody to deduct, somebody to trip, I just lived in there and killed them. And they and that occurred to me on the way in, and it did not stop me because I've got that blood is thicker than water mentality that the, you know, the family comes first. And he may be an axe murderer, but he's my axe murderer mentality. And I would've done exactly that. And I'm and I'm standing before you today instead of sitting in a prison somewhere because of that exact just the seconds and inches that we've heard about in AA.

And, I went out that driveway and I went home. The second reason that that is important is this, is that I wasn't a 17 year old kid devoid of any responsibility making stupid stupid choices out there. I wish that I could tell you that I was. I I was a 22 year old young man, veteran, 4 years, the United States Marine Corps where I was promoted, multiple times and meritoriously. I was I was very handy to have around for drunken drill instructors and commanding officers because I fix it and I make them look good.

And I got promoted a lot and did very well there. I got out of that bed with a family. I had a wife and I had 2 little children, and I was a sole form of support for that house. And I cannot tell you today to this day because I don't really remember exactly, but the time frame is probably right that I walked around the crib next to my bed, wherein lie my daughter who was in a full arrest coma from a drowning accident, who had tubes sticking out of every part of her body, breathing monitor, heart monitor required feeding through a tube in her stomach, trach tube care, and all the things 24 hours a day. And I walked past that bed and out of that house with all those responsibilities and never gave those a thought when I went to go take those actions because my head is my priorities are upside down.

The other thing that's, and I'll talk about this for just a second is that the biggest guilt and shame that I've ever had in my life was that during the year that my daughter lay in a coma, she passed away after a year. I'm a guy that's just described to you, I'm waiting into the fight. I'm I'm front row of the motorcycle race. I'm in the race car. I'm do I do silly stuff for a living that would horrify most of you that they pay me for and I'm that I'm good at.

That I'm this macho, brave guy that you should, you know, you should be afraid of. You should recognize him as macho guy. That I couldn't be in the house with my daughter with those tubes sticking out of her body. I couldn't do it. I would have a panic attack and remove myself from the house.

For the year that my daughter lived in a coma, by my side of the bed, I vacated that house at every opportunity and stayed gone. For work, for whatever, I stayed gone. I'd go to work. They'd be done with me and say you can go home and I would stay till they were done because they cannot go to my home. You can't fix the guilt that comes with a problem.

I can't cannot be fixed by any method I've ever encountered in my life except for the method contained in the 12 steps about Alcoholics Anonymous which were so generously given to Al Anon. It's not possible. That was a secret that that was one of those ones that was not gonna go to a sponsor in the 4th step, was gonna go to the grave. You can't fix it, so why should I tell you about it? And that's not true because it's I've been healed on that area in in a ways I can't even don't even have time to tell you, but, I'll do as much of it as I can.

That marriage wasn't, didn't do too well. I stayed gone even after my child was was, had passed away, and I didn't go to the graveside. I didn't acknowledge her death. I didn't do the grief thing. I put it off.

I just protect the, denial thing is very, very potent and very strong. Unfortunately, with things like grief, they never go away. They wait. And I had to do that grief process in recovery years later, and I did it with with your help because it wasn't possible for me to do by myself. I went out in the world and I did some things that I used to judge my father harshly for.

I shared with you a little bit about my dad. I went out and I did a lot of womanizing, a lot of tearing it up, a lot of acting like I was single. I'd go on movie locations, and I, you know, I was there for the game and for the chase chase and for having a good time, and I couldn't go home and didn't wanna go home. And I created a lot of wreckage. And I met a lady in Page, Arizona that, was to change all of that eventually.

It was my beautiful wife, Leslie, who sends you her greetings. She's at home with the with the children this weekend. And I am here at her good graces. People thank me for coming this weekend. The gratitude, if you owe it to anybody, you owe it to my family because we got a lot of stuff going on right now that they still allow me to come and do my commitments even though they really need me home.

And I really, really rather be there. I come and do this because this is what you guys have taught me to do all these years since I've come to Al Anon. And, Leslie and I met on location, and, it was kind of a wild and wooly fiery romance. I knocked her out with a Frisbee. Well, I didn't I No.

This is this isn't Al Anon. A guy and I were playing frisbee. Very busy in the movie business. Important stuff we're doing. We're throwing a 185 gram professional Frisbee around base camp, and Clarence throws it at me and goes way over my head and is heading for the door of this van.

About that time, the door of the van swings open and all these extras are getting out with big hair and tight jeans. It was a real high class movie, you know. And, I hollered, look out. And it you know what? To this day, that's the only direction my wife has ever taken for me because she did.

She looked out and that Frisbee hit her right there, Knocked her back into the van, prone on the seat out cold. She was hungover when it hit her. It didn't take much to push her back over the edge. And I went over and apologized for a Frisbee I didn't throw. I'm you know, are you alright?

Can I get you an ice bag? Can I get the medic? Are you sure you're alright? She's gone, no. No.

No. She's hungover, you know, not happy. No. Leave me alone. I said, is there anything I can do?

She said, maybe you can buy me a drink someday. It's my beautiful wife, Leslie. God was working in my life a long time before I was listening, do you think? So one thing led to another. We changed location.

She went with me and then my my wife my real life flew in and she was flying out. So I went to the airport, dropped Leslie off and picked the wife up. I figured why make 2 trips to the airport and Leslie, you know, seconds and inches making it work for me. I went back to California. Leslie was on a series of geographics coming from Omaha, Nebraska on her way to California and she moved to California.

We saw each other. We're actually on our first date in California. It was to the emergency ward. She called me up. My wife was out of town.

I was on my way up to meet her and got lost and called her and got lost again and doubling back to go figure out where I got lost at and there's this big wreck in this intersection. And there's a Honda car buried in the grill of a full size automobile. It was a head on collision in an intersection up in Palmdale, California. And they got their man, there's ambulances and fire trucks and is very busy. This blonde is in this car.

He's not breathing in her car park to get her out. And there's and I hear the officer saying, we don't know who she is. She doesn't have any ID. And I knew who she was. It was Leslie.

And I went off with her to the hospital, and she quit breathing in the hospital. Now she's died once in the car. She dies in the hospital. I run out and get a nurse. They bring the crash carts in to get her going again.

And, when they got her heart started, she comes. Her eyes opened up. She rolled her head over on the gurney. She looked straight at me and she said, let me go. Can you imagine that?

I could not wrap my mind around that for many years after that what I had seen. I know because of you and because I regularly attend open AA meetings that what I was seeing was a little slice in the door opening of what it's like the pain that it must be to be an active alcoholic in your disease. That she would rather die than pay the price for one more. One more car wreck, one more mistake, one more problem, one more rescue from her dad who was a rescuer for for most of her life. That dying looked good to her and opening her eyes and seeing me was not good news.

That was to become a theme in our relationship later on. They figured out in this little hospital that she doesn't have any insurance and they asked her to leave. She's died twice. Her windpipe is crushed. She's got broken bones.

They set none of her bones. They put a neck brace on her which was very nice of them, I thought. Put her in a wheelchair and loaded her in my car. They said, we hope you live near a hospital because she's not doing very well. I said, oh, thank you for sharing.

Now, she was living with this phantom uncle. We still debate whether or not he was real or not. I don't know where he is. She's drunk and hurt and she doesn't know where he is either. We're discussing our options.

Well, what are we gonna do? She says, maybe you can take me to a hotel. I thought about that for about 5, 8 seconds. I said, nah. Pat it on her hand.

She's never forgot that. Pat it on hand. I said, honey, it'll be alright. I'll just take you home. You all forget I got a wife and family at home?

You know, think about that and get back to me? Called the wife up, said, I got a friend in a car wreck, bringing her home. She met us in the driveway. She grabbed Leslie's ankles. I got her by the armpits and we carried her in.

Leslie's been sharing for 17 years at AA that I dropped her coming through door into the house that first time. I might have. I was a little nervous bringing a girlfriend home to meet the wife and the kids. If you just came in late, I am not the AA speaker. Y'all didn't see a girl on the program, thought there was no Al Anon speaker this weekend, didn't you?

Now you can't get out and do it gracefully so you're stuck. Brought her in, laid her on the bed in bad shape, really thought she might not live. We watched her for a couple of days and she started coming around, got her to the doctor and they started setting her bones and treating her for her injuries and stuff. It set up 6 months of some very interesting living at my house. Big happy family, Leslie called it.

She had a new mom and a new dad. That would be me. New brother, new sister, new dogs. Everything is good. After about a week, she starts drinking again after we'd had an argument about her being able to drink on medication.

She had such a, I'm having a little glass of wine. I might have a goblet, half of it, and leave some, but she still just snarls when she thinks about that. It's a terrible waste of alcohol. She said, I'll be having some of that. I said, no.

You won't. Says right here on your medication you can't drink when you're doing this. My girlfriend has such a tantrum in front of my wife that I gave her the whole bottle. She was so well behaved that my wife and I both made sure she had her own bottle every night at dinner. It was the only time during her drinking career that she actually stopped for any length of time when she was on heavy meds which got her bomb.

And, after a while, it's you know, my wife is confiding in her. There may be problems in our marriage, and my girlfriend is giving my wife pointers on how to put the marriage back together and I'm telling my girlfriend to stay out. I'm still okay with this. This is just drama like I grew up in. I can I deal with this?

It got a little more complicated and we started going on double blind dates together. My wife would find some guy or call some friend of ours and we'd all go out to dinner at a nice restaurant and we got tablecloths there and we're all sitting around having a glass of wine and somebody just kicked their shoe off and got their foot up my pant leg rubbing my leg. And my highest ambition in life is is not the other guy because I don't have a clue which one's doing it. Just smiling and making special eye contact with everybody going on, man. So, Texas comes into the story about this time again.

And, Leslie got a job offer. She got one off to go find some work and she got a job offer in California, one in Texas. And we decided Texas would be okay. And she actually moved to Houston for about 6 months to do, she was in a restaurant and hotel business, and she went down to Bennigan's to to study DB management at Bennigan's. Her story is that she'd go somewhere for 6 months.

She'd do good for 3 months, bad for 3 months, and they we'd either fire her or promote her and move her on. And she got to the end of 6 months down here. Well, while she was gone, that, we finally set about dissolving that marriage and my wife and I separated. And Leslie was calling me up at night. And she finally called and asked if she could come back to California.

And I drove straight to Houston, Texas from California with my foster brother and picked picked her up and drove her straight home to live happily ever after. Yahoo. My wife had been a ballroom drinker and a blackout drinker. Every single night at the bar, every single night a blackout, every morning woke up someplace new with somebody new doing something new. For For some reason, when she came to me, she decided that she didn't wanna do that, that her meal ticket would disappear or whatever, and she moved her drinking into the kitchen.

And I got to be I had the privilege of being with my wife during the last year and a half of her active drink. And I really didn't know what I was confronted with. I just thought I'd really made a terrible mistake, you know. I come home from weeks or months on the road, the conquering hero, and come through the door and there's hellfire and brimstone at my house. I'm only I'm not even 4 feet inside the door, and I'm Hitler.

You know? I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And what she will tell you, if you ever had the privilege of hearing her her do her a talk, is that when I was gone, she could drink the way she wanted to and needed to. She could drink on the bathroom floor where the tile was cool, where it was crawling distance to the necessities. She didn't have to look good or be good or put on any kind of a front.

And when I got home, she had to maintain some act of that being normally, you know, relatively sober until we could have I could see her consume a couple glasses of wine and then she would pass out and blackout and I'd carry it a bin. It went on for a long time that way. And, towards the end, she did tell me that she had a problem. It was actually she embarrassed me on a movie that I was on. She poured the director's wine in his lap while she was pointing out to him the finer points of directing a movie, this big movie director.

My wife, the catering director, is telling the movie director how to do his job. Thought that was I grounded her, Send her to our room. And, we set about playing bottle tag for a few months after that and I went off on location and she finally got done. You know, she wasn't done until she got done. It wasn't her time until the day that it was her time.

And she began she tried to commit suicide by consuming alcohol. She tried to drink enough to not wake up and she kept drink enough to not wake up and she kept waking up pissed off that she hadn't died and she finally called, a recovery place and checked herself in as an outpatient while I was gone. And I came back back to find her new in recovery. And, there was a lot that went on with that. I went down there to find out what they were telling her because now I've been trying to help her get sober for about 6 months now in earnest and it's not working.

And she's going to this place, you know, 3, 4 nights a week and she's not drinking and I can't figure it out. I'm giving her the kiss the kiss sniff test that just to check and she's not drinking. I checked her every night to come home from the restaurant. I give her the give her the test. And I'm I'm just starting to get my first resentment in in sobriety is that she's doing it.

So I went down there and I sat in about half of one of their meetings and they're talking about stuff and I really got PO ed because I'm listening to them talking around the room. And they're all telling her the same stuff I was telling her. Yeah. Yeah. Sucks, And she can do it because they're telling her because they have something in common with her that I do not.

And I began to learn a lesson that it was later to be solidified when I came to Al Anon that of all of the people in the world that could help my wife and her sobriety, I was the only one who could of all of my family who I dearly love, who are out there today as we speak, I believe dying of the disease of alcoholism. There are many people on the planet that can give them experience, strength, and hope and can help them. I am the only one that cannot because I am too close. I've had 2 brothers come briefly to AA. My older one has now disappeared.

We have no idea where he is. He he showed up at my Al Anon meeting, newly sober in AA. He's from my father's first marriage and I had never met him until he was even 18 and I barely knew him. And I walked into my men's stag island meeting on speaker night and he was there with his wife. And he went briefly to some meetings and then stopped going to meetings.

He went with us for a while and and now nobody knows where he is. My huge family can't find him for weddings, funerals, or whatever. I didn't I have no idea if he's even alive or not. A very talented musician, a terrific man, and dying of alcoholism. My other brother came briefly.

And and, you know, my wife's new in sobriety. I'm new in recovery. We started trying to 12 Step the Family which really just pushed them away hard. They began to hide their drinking from us at family functions and stuff. It got to be a lot of pressure that that I put on because I went to step 12 before step 1.

I don't recommend that. And, years later after I quit that, one of my brothers actually came to AA with us after my dad died. And he said one night at coffee after the meeting, he said, do you know why I want to come to AA? And I says, I haven't got a clue. He said, because I want what you have.

Because I stopped pushing him. I stopped trying to show him. I stopped trying to tell him about his disease. For god's sake, he's an alcoholic. He knows he's an alcoholic.

He knows what alcohol does to him. He doesn't need me, a non alcoholic, to point that out to him. He's very well aware. I've heard that in enough AA meetings that I learned that lesson. And I today, I just love them the way they are.

I don't make I don't go into business with them, and I don't make myself a victim to them. If we go to family functions away from home, I've got a hotel nearby that my wife and I can go to or escape and go to a meeting. And I can and I get along with them fine. I love I love my brothers and my sisters. And I have had this fantasy for all of my recovery that one day, one of them is gonna accidentally fall to the doors of AA, maybe a nudge from the judge Maybe something and just screw it up for all the rest of them, you know, because they're very very close.

And it occurred to me one day that, you know, the way I came to Al Anon was done. I mean, I came to Al Anon done. I came in willing to do whatever lame thing you told me to do and I did a lot of lame stuff. It was sounded really stupid to me and I did it anyway. Like, you know, when your group does a skit, if you're the only guy at the Al Anon meeting, guess what part you're gonna play?

You're gonna be the alcoholic in the skit. Aren't you? They're gonna you're gonna be the alcoholic. And it was the lamest thing I ever saw and I did it because I had no other answers. I don't have a way to live my life.

I'm done trying to fix it. I have one more answer, I'm still out there. And, I did those things but and I realized one day that if one of them got sober and came to AA, they could do like I see a lot of people do in AA and Al Anon. They might come and hang around the edge. They might be back in the inventory section.