Don B. from Pleasant Hill, CA speaking in Oyster Point, CA

My name is Don Brown. I'm an alcoholic. Good afternoon, Don. By the grace of God in the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, I've not found it necessary to drink in quite some time. I don't know how you drank.

I never know what I'm gonna say. Oh, they got a watch up here. That's good. Feller told me to speak till 8:15. Don't get worried.

That that was that's a lie. I was just, I I they asked to give a little history and and I suppose I could do a little bit of that for you. I love history and, I like looking back. There's a lot of good books out. Lots of good books.

I've been very fortunate to meet some people that made history and record them at this place called Sea View. God provides a place for this thing to happen. I don't have a lot of money. Don't seem like I need a lot. Somebody asked me, I sponsor lots of people.

A lot of them got lots money and some of them don't have any. But they ain't none of them happier than me, which I think is kind of important, you know. It's a pretty good life I have. I guess I'll start out. I certainly welcome all the newcomers here tonight.

This is a remarkable place. It's a special place. There's not any other place like this place. I'll tell you. If you just hang with us for a little while, you'll find that out.

I'm a veteran for the veterans that are here. I drank my way from 1954 to 1957. I got out with an honorable discharge. I do not know how. What what I was doing.

Oh, my. I'll tell you, it was those were rough days. I thought drinking and puking went together. You know? It didn't seem to bother me any.

It it, you know, it was like natural. You know, that's what you do. You drink and then you puke, you know. And I got good at puking. I could projectile vomit without even getting my clothes dirty, you know.

But it was, you know, you would think that that would be a warning sign that there's something wrong, you know. But when it came to alcohol, man, I the first time I ever drank, that's the way it was. Big Book Alcoholics Anonymous came to I won't give you any dates because I'm probably wrong. Came to San Francisco through a lady by the name of missus Orum. Missus Orum was not an alcoholic.

She was newly married to a young man and who was a contractor along with his brother. And they had rented an upstairs floor of a huge building that's still there. And if you go to the archives, he'll tell you where that building is located. And it's still up there. And then the second floor had a bunch of bedrooms on it.

And being a very, good wife with the depression years not too far behind them, trying to make ends meet, she rented rooms to people. And one of the rooms she rented was a guy named Ted c. And Ted c was an alcoholic, and he was a periodic. And Ted c kinda held the record for being into mental institutions. But when he was sober, he did well.

He did alright, so he's a salesman for a living. And they had a meeting. The first meeting of Alcoholics and Knobs was in her kitchen. And what had happened to her, she used to listen to a guy named Gabriel Heater. I imagine some of you people might know who that guy was years ago if you're old enough.

He had that very fast, snappy kind of talk. You know, he'd give you a quick quick story. And they they were looking for ways to to publicize this big book and sell big books. They weren't doing too well. And they had a guy by the name of Morgan Ryan, who was a red headed young fella who had been sober for a few days.

And he said, I know Gabriel Heater, and I think I can get on that that radio show with him and and maybe he'll interview me about my alcoholism and get sobered up and and maybe make a plug for the book and and maybe that'll help us some because they were dead broke. Things were not going well. There's a great, a great tape out with Bill Wilson talking about the early days of this program and this book should have never got here. God inspired program, I believe. Anyway, they she's on there and she hears this thing and it's got this box number and she sent and got the book to give it to Ted, who she knew he's an alcoholic, and she wanted to help him.

So they had their first meeting. And in that first meeting, there was a guy named Fred c there. And there was another guy, Ted was there, and the 2 brothers were there and missus Orum. Now they're not alcoholics, but they're there. And, and one other guy that Fred said faded.

It's kind of an interesting story because Fred and another guy named John See, an old Irishman, he called him a blockhead, an old tough guy, had, gotten this meeting. They're working on getting people in, and and they had 16 people. They had one meeting a week on Tuesday night. One meeting. Look at us today.

Jesus. You can hardly go around the block without finding a meeting of some kind, you know. If you don't like AA, try something else. I mean, they got all kind of 12 set meetings out there. They had one meeting a week.

And they went down one night, this guy Fred and, John. And they got there and 14 members had gone out and got drunk. And John's mad. And he's telling Fred. He says, Fred, these people don't want this program.

He said, we're wasting our time here. I'm gonna stay sober. You're gonna stay sober. And so Fred began to argue with him and he said, I don't know about that. He said, I'm pretty sure you're gonna stay sober, but I'm not too sure that I can do this by myself.

I just I don't think I can do it. And John, you're gonna leave here and and that'll be the way it is. And then he got tired of being mad at him, so he kinda made amends to him, put out his hand to shake his hand. And he said, John, I got no choice. I'm gonna be here next Tuesday night.

Whether I have to sit alone, I'll be here. And I'll be here the next Tuesday night. And maybe, maybe one of those guys will come back. Because I need them as much as they need me. And I may cry a little tonight.

I get tearful about things like that. That's what some of your forefathers are made of. And John, he put out his hand and John, the old tough guy, slapped his hand aside and put his arm around him and said, oh, shut up. I'll be here. And the meeting stayed.

And the meeting stayed. He said it was very strange because the only 2 sober alcoholics in Alcoholics Anonymous were arguing about the 14 that were out drinking. We have great concern for each other. There's amazing stories here. I love the stories of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I love the stories of recovery. Every one of you has got a story of recovery. Every one of you. I know some of you pretty good. Everyone and that story is so important.

It's so important. Your story is as important as any I don't care how long you've been here. I've been here a long time. You can tell by looking at me I've been somewhere a long time, you know. And it's, you know, it's okay to laugh.

It's alright. Everything is not serious. You know, and and that's the way it got started here. In the meanwhile down south, they were really funny. They had some people, a lady who'd come in by the name of Kay Miller.

She was married to an alcoholic back east and was divorced. And she knew Bill Wilson. She started to try she's a non alcoholic, but she tries to start a a down in the Los Angeles Basin. And it didn't take. And Bill called it a flickering candle.

It would just almost go out and something would happen. And a guy came along by the name of Josephson. And he was a stockbroker coming out of Denver, and he ended up holed up in Palm Springs, California. In which he had a big book in his beliefs, but he was so drunk he couldn't go on. And he had heard about this meeting that these people in California and he was trying to find them.

There's no meetings in Palm Springs. There's no meetings anywhere. Think about it for a minute. And he had a big book in his beliefs and drunk he read it And it got sober on that book and he made it over to Los Angeles and he found her. And so she had a bunch of referrals that came out of the GSO office in New York.

And he said, he asked her, I said where are you going? She said I'm packing to go to Hawaii. It didn't work. Nobody wanted to come. But he said, do you still have the referrals?

She said, yeah. They're they're in the wastebasket. Think about that for a minute. Wilson said that sometimes our sobriety hinges on inches and seconds. Life is hinges on inches and seconds.

And had he not been there just exactly what he got there, he may have not got those referrals. And he took those referrals out of the basket and he started out knocking on all the doors she had knocked on. And they started a group, it was called the mother's group. Now before that, we didn't have any, traditions. So the mother group got started and a guy named Frank came over from, a real nut came over from, Phoenix, Arizona.

He sponsored some pretty famous people named Norm Alpi. Some of you might have known about Norm Alpi, who sponsored a guy named Johnny Harris. You can figure out these lines if you stay with it long enough. And they incorporated AA. All of California was you couldn't start a meeting here without their without their okay.

Now that's a little ridiculous, isn't it? There was a lady named Sybil, the first lady who was sober in AA and remained that way for the rest of her life. I tried a quite a girl. Her her daughter gets over not too long ago. I know her.

She's been sober quite a while now. I knew her sponsor, a lady named Vivian Hinton, who's long gone now. Used to ride around in a wheelchair smoking cigarettes and taking in oxygen. And she was probably 40 years sober. And Vivian Hennen was a go getter.

Let me tell you. She was a go getter. Her sponsor was a guy named Tex, Sybil's brother. Tex was responsible because this big this mother group meeting was kind of an uptown group of people that some of them are Hollywood starlets and they all dressed real nice and text didn't come from that kind of background. And he came from he started a thing called hole in the wall.

Hole in the ground, excuse me. And these poor people would come there. Many, many fantastic recoveries. And then Cliff Walker came in because Mort Josephson knocked on his door while he was drinking and invited him to a meeting. And he stayed, Became a trustee of this organization.

The stories of the amazing alcoholics. One of the things I think I wanna go back just a little bit and I've kind of wound up and started to pitch. I got a little joke for you. I heard the other day. You might have heard it.

There's a guy who's drinking and driving and he's got his future Al Anon wife with him. And, and a cop pulls him over. And, the cop pulls him over and says to him, sir, you're speeding. And she says before the guy opened his mouth up, he goes, well I couldn't have been speeding. I have my car on on this set control and I know I couldn't been speeding.

She turns to him and says, he's a lion. I told him to slow down. 5 miles ago he was going to get a ticket. He says, shut up. I'll I'll I'll deal with you when I get home.

So he said, and besides that, sir, he said, do you have a taillight out? He said, well, it must have just happened. I checked. He said, I've been telling him about that taillight for the last 6 months. I said, shut up.

I'll deal with you when I get home. So pretty soon the cops, he's writing the ticket. He turns in, he looks at her and he says, lady, does he talk to you that all the way, all the time? Said, only when he's drinking. Well, I'll tell you, I've known a few like that.

I interviewed doctor Bob Sun one time, Junior. He was quite a guy. And he put up your hand if you've ever heard him speak. He spoke for Al Anon for years. Yeah.

He's a great speaker, great guy. He was 82 years old. He died at 84 from a bad heart. Just a wonderful man. He was 17 years old when his dad got sober.

And their house changed overnight. That's part of the specialty I was telling you about this place. This is a special place. Things happen here. And I said, did you ever invite children to your home, your friends, when dad was drinking?

He said, no. Said my mother had gone lost part of her eyesight in one eye and they were afraid to try surgery on the other one and she had to, you know, she was always in depression and she was always in tears. My my dad wasn't a mean man, he said. He was just a drunk. And you never knew when he was coming home.

You never knew what was gonna happen. And he said, we just didn't have anybody in the house. It's too embarrassing. And that's my experience. I was raised in a world of alcoholism.

I've never I've been in alcohol all my life. You people are very normal to me. Let me tell you. I was raised by insane people who did insane things. My mother would, I'll tell you a little bit about my life.

Anyway, he was talking and I said, well, how was it after they did that? See, in those days, they didn't have any detoxes. They didn't have they couldn't put them in the hospital yet. They didn't get that started yet, where Sister Tenacious came into play. And so they they would bring them home with them.

And they were they were they had his dad had joined the Oxford groups. Two and a half years, Bill Wilson had been with them for about 6 months. I think that's a story worth telling. And, he said that, anyway, I'm ahead of myself a little bit. Wilson went to Akron, Ohio on a business deal.

He was 6 months sober. He was trying to get it all back. And I don't think that that's why he went there. I think that's what he thought he went there for. You know, a lot of people in this room, I'm sure, have had that experience.

I think I know what I'm doing. But before I do it, it don't turn out that way. God's got another plan. I get up with a plan every day about what I think I ought to do that day. And oftentimes, that phone rings and my plan is changed immediately because there's an alcoholic on the other end of the line.

And we start talking about whatever we're talking about and whatever my little plan is, it ain't worth much. Anyway, they, his dad had joined the Presbyterian Church, which is about 2 blocks down because the Oxford group told him to. And their whole family was trying to go to church. But Wilson came and Wilson is in a business deal. Some of you probably heard this deal.

And he's losing. He doesn't have enough money to pay his hotel bill. He's got to stay over to Monday. It's Mother's Day. And he's walking the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, and he wants to drink.

And he wants to drink bad. He's irritable, restless and discontented, full of shame, guilt, fear, remorse, resentful, depression. And he can hear the the laughter and the gayety from the bar. And the mind starts out by saying, well, I'll go in there and I'll I'll get a little seltzer water and drink that. No.

That'll look funny. I'll drink 1, but no more than 3. And the first drink is on him. And so he decided to to do something a little different because he'd had some experience for 6 months trying to help other alcoholics. None of them had gotten sober.

So he but he had tried. Now 10 years later as he traveled the country, there was about 77 of them and, 68 of them were in AA. He had planted the seed. They just weren't ready when he told them about it. And that happens a lot here.

He ended up then calling around and trying to find another alcoholic to talk to because that's all he knew. That's that's one of the first things we knew about staying sober. I can try to help you whether you get sober or not, I'll probably stay sober. That's all he knew. Didn't have a book.

Didn't have a lot of experience other than his own experience. And so he started calling around and he got a hold of a preacher, an Episcopal pagan preacher. Honey asked him, he said I'm a rum ham from New York and I need to find another alcoholic to talk to. Do you know of anybody? And the guy gave him the name of this woman.

A woman named Henrietta Stibling. And 2 weeks before that, and if this is not the hand of God, it's certainly the finger of God. 2 weeks before that, doctor Bob had been invited to an Oxford group meeting. And she told him we're gonna share something that is costly. This in this meeting, all of us is gonna share something that is costly.

That'll hurt your ego. That will will make you look bad in front of other people. And for the first time in his life, doctor Bob said I'm an alcoholic and I can't stop drinking. And they asked him, would you would you like prayer? He said, yes.

And they got on their knees and prayed that God would send somebody from somewhere, somehow, that could help doctor Bob. 2 weeks later, a man calls on the phone and says, my name is Bill Wilson. And I'm a rum ham from New York. That's what he used to call himself. I haven't had a drink in 6 months and I need desperately to find an alcoholic to talk to.

See, this is a we program. I could have never made it without you. Never. I'm so glad you were here when I got here. I'm so glad that groups like this all over the world today were here when my youngest son crawled up underneath the bridges in Martinez, California and came to the loving arms of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and hadn't found it necessary to drink for 10 years.

I feel so good about the fact that my daughter, who called me a no good so and so, don't you never come back here ever again, Is now sober 9 years because of you people. You might not think you're worth much. I think you're worth everything. You're the most fantastic people I've ever met in my life. Not that I've known too many great ones.

Anyway, he calls him and doctor Bob couldn't come that night. She immediately calls Anne Smith her friend and says, bring doctor Bob over. We got a man here that that hasn't found it necessary to drink for 6 months and he thinks he can help him. He wants to talk to him. And she arranged for him because he had no money.

She arranged for him through some rich friends, because he's a very rich woman, at least married to a lot of money. And ends up calling on, this guy to give him this guy a room for a little while out of a country club. And the miracles began to happen in the lives of these 2 men. And they came over. And they they were he said, doctor Bob was one of these real he had 5 languages.

He's a very smart guy. And Wilson says to him rather than I'm the big shot, he said, Bob, this is what this is what doctor Silkworth says is wrong with us, that we have a physical allergy and a mental obsession. And the old doctor, because of that medical background, could put that together. He said that makes sense. He'd been to 12 dry out farms.

He thought he was done. He thought he would never be able to quit drinking. He would die drinking. He had the same step work that Bill had. He wouldn't do his night step work and as soon as he did, he finished forever.

15 years of sobriety. He was a a cancer colon specialist, a proctologist. That's what he died from. In the first 10 years that he was sober, where most of this work took place, he helped 5,000 alcoholics. He makes me look like a piker.

He hospitalized them, detoxed them, By this time, they got the hospital going. But I wanna go back to their home. Young Smith said that my dad, because there was no place else and the Akron people in general, the recovering people in Akron, all kept people in their homes. And when the news got out that there was a doctor in Akron who had found a way to help alcoholics, they began to show up, invited or uninvited. They were brought by loving and unloving relatives.

And sometimes they said, there's the house on Ardmore. Don't you come back to your sober. And they would take them in the house and he would knock them out for about 3 or 4 days. And he said when they came home, him and his sister, and they came home and they smelled that pryldehyde, he said they knew that she was going to the couch and he was going to the attic. And I said, well, how was that in your house?

He said, it was the happiest times of our lives. You would think it'd be miserable. He said, we were so happy. My mother worked like crazy cleaning up after them and cooking for them. My dad worked with them.

Service. And they found a way of life that I tell you, there's there's nothing like it. There's nothing like it. So we're still here, almost 70 years later. We are the longest lasting program that's ever been on the face of the earth for the alcoholic.

We are the only program that was ever started by alcoholics for alcoholics, to give to alcoholics. It was always somebody else trying to tell us how to get sober. And if you go through the history of alcoholism and treatment and you took the problem, mister Wilson said that he he had learned by going to an electrical engineering school, he had learned how to solve a problem. And he said, you gotta know what the problem is. And that's what he got from doctor Silkworth.

Physical allergy and mental obsession. And he went on to say, if you know what the solution is, the the problem is and you can develop a solution. Step 2, came to believe that a power greater myself could restore me to sanity. Wonderful stuff. And 3, make a decision to go on a planned program of action that he took from the Oxford Groups.

First time in history of the world that had ever existed in one place. Many, many organizations, Washingtonians, Oxford group people tried to help. The great prohibition era, and they wanted to shut it all down. That didn't do any good. That didn't slow an alcoholic down.

We'll we'll go to great lengths to get alcohol, I guarantee you. Think about your old life a little bit, you know. And these people stayed in there, and if it weren't for them, I'm not too sure where I'd be today. I wanna tell you a little bit more before I start my own story about a guy, this guy Ted See. Ted See did a lot of good things.

Just like Edbie Thatcher did a lot of good things. Just because he doesn't maintain his sobriety does not mean he hasn't done something worthwhile. And they both made great contributions. Ted c ended up on skid row. He got rolled, got hit in the head, and died from a from a brain hemorrhage.

But he did some good things. And that's, you know, that's that's our legacy that's been left to us and it's our responsibility to continue on. That's the deal I made with God. When I got here, I was 50 years old. I had a string of wreckage behind me that I dared not look at.

My first wife, I had 4 children, we'd call her a normal woman. 3 of my children were alcoholic, once never drank. I wasn't a violent man at home, I was just drunk. I worked. My kids all had braces on their teeth, that kind of thing.

And, but I wasn't dependable. You're supposed to pick up the kids at church. Oh, was that? What what time is it? They've been waiting an hour and a half.

Oh, I'm going right now. Don't worry about a thing. You know? You couldn't depend on me very much. Because of this program, today, I can tell you it's a long walk from the girl that calls you a no good SOB, and I never wanna see you again.

To daddy, I'm gonna have a baby and I want you to be here. Those are the kind of things that's happened in my life. I actually I came to I wanna start, I guess, with a little when I came to I'm a little ahead of myself. My mother was a valid Victorian of her class. There were 9 children.

My grandmother had 11 children, 2 died when they were little. We are Okies, poor Okies. Some of my family came out here just like, John Steinbeck wrote about in, Grapes of Raft. They lost everything they had in the dust bowl. Grandma hung on to her farm.

My grandfather killed himself in 1933. He had a brain tumor. In those days, they didn't operate on brain tumors and the pressure of the brain tumor was so great. It took him blind. And he also knows days farmers all had big hernias and they used to put straps around them and pull them up and it was pretty tough.

And and he decided he was pulling the family down and he went down in a field and killed himself. It had nothing to do with alcohol. Out of that group of people, that 9 children that survived, my mother and one brother, definitely alcoholics. And I was fortunate enough to have one for a mother. When I was 6 years old, she married a man who was an alcoholic, and we begin to live a life of hell.

I've seen my mother beaten many, many times. Until I was 19 years old. I'm not gonna bore you with a long string of those stories. And when I was 19 years old, I'd grown to be a pretty big guy and I was about 6 5 and a half and I weighed a £155. He was old, fat, and ugly.

And I was young and I'm I'm snake mean by this time. And he went to slap her at the dinner table and I reached out and grabbed his hand. We had a little power struggle. He got outpowered and knew it. I said don't look at me old man.

I'm gonna kill you. I sponsor lots of convicts. I could have been right with them. All I had to do was turn left instead of right. There's a butcher knife laying on the table.

He's looking at it and I'm looking at it. And I said I'm quicker than you. Don't make a move. And, I would have killed him. That's how angry I was.

And the whole place just came apart. My sister cried and screamed and my mother went to tears, and nobody knew what to do. And finally, my mother reached out and grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him out of the chair and took him into the to the room put their room and locked the door behind us. And I'm sitting there going, what am I doing here? She's taking the enemy in there with her.

She's taking the guy that abuses her in there with her. So I went down and joined the United States Navy, and I was out of town the next day. Now he tried to make a demands to me. I wanna be real real honest about it all. Like most alcoholics, he wasn't all always all wrong.

My dad, Jean, one time had a nervous breakdown. They want to put her in the state institution called, Benito, Oklahoma, it's a snake pit. And he had some money and he said, no. He said, I'll put up the money and we'll put her in a private institution. She's well today.

I hope because of some of the help he gave her. You know, they pay they paid it back. That part it was done. So I can't tell you that everything he did was wrong. As far as I was concerned, my biggest resentment here, if you've ever done an inventory, was my mother.

It took me three and a half years to find that out. And then my mother's family. Anyway, I, I joined the United States Navy and came to California in 1954. It wasn't the first time I'd ever run off from home. I ran off when I was 10.

I ran from Dallas, Texas to Oklahoma City on my own. I got in the chief they picked me up, police department did. I wouldn't tell them who I was and they put me in the Sunshine's Children's Home. I liked it at the Sunshine's Children's Home. It was a good place.

Yeah. It sounds strange, I guess, but I liked it. Didn't nobody beating anybody up. Nobody calling bad names and, you know, wash a few dishes and run, baby carriages around. But they finally found out who I was and came and got me about 38 days later.

This time when I got ready to leave home, home and I are done. I've always been on my own. I knew there's no there's no going home. That's not gonna happen. And, so I joined the Navy.

Sometime in the neighborhood of December of 1954, the kid that left home that said, I will never be like my folks. I will never drink. I know I know all about alcohol, man. I know all about it. Let that court bottle get down about that far.

We used to call it shoot out the lights and call the law because it's on. Something's gonna happen and it ain't gonna be nice. I could not bring a human being to my home. I would not allow you to come to my home. I know right from wrong.

My folks are embarrassing. Can you imagine me bringing some little girlfriend? You know, when you meet your first girlfriend, you know, you bring her home with you, you know, introduce you to her folks or they take you there. Can you imagine what that'd look like at my house? I peeked through the door.

He's got her by the throat. He's beating the hell out of her. I said, well, come on in, Mary. It's okay. Don't worry about it.

Maybe alright in a minute. They'll go off in the bedroom a little while, then they'll come out. We'll have some pie. You know? Give me a break.

Give me a break. Didn't lend itself much to anything. I've been working all my life. He would sit when he was drunk and he would say, you part of the baggage here, boy. What he's saying is if your mama wasn't here, you wouldn't be here.

I understood that loud and clear. I'm not mad at him. He's just a sick man. We, in 1954, I made my first mistake. And because of social pressure from 15 young men, we got together.

We're what to call advanced, boot camp. We're getting ready to we're graduating from the beginning to the next level. I don't have any other friends with these people. And they said, we're chipping in $5 a piece, Don. They're gonna let us out at noon on Saturday, and we gotta be back by midnight.

And we're gonna rent a motel, and we're gonna get some booze, and we're gonna drink. Now I don't know what girls do when they drink, but I do know what boys do, young boys, boys anyway. I know what old boys do too. We talk a lot about a lot of things we don't know nothing about. You know what I mean?

So 15 of us kicked in $5 a piece. We had a 300 pound guy, young fella, and he went with some old sauce we we picked up off the street because we wasn't old enough to buy it. And they went and got this booze. And we were sitting in this motel. I can remember it.

It was like yesterday. And I can bet you, you could remember your first drink. In fact, it was yesterday. I could tell you the brand, Jack Daniels. I have never it must have been a very important event for me because I have never forgotten it.

I've forgotten lots of stuff in my lifetime. I've slept with pretty girls, can't call their name, but I can remember Jack Daniels. You know? And I I I didn't know. I didn't know I was alcoholic.

And the boys are drinking and cutting up. And the more they drank, the more they cut up. And the more they talked about all kinds of stuff and they got around to sex. Now they and the girl in in sight. That tells you how much they know.

Took me a while to figure that out. If they really knew anything about sex and girls, they'd have been out with 1. Right? No. No.

They're in a room with 15 guys. And of course, you wanna talk about how tough you are. You know? And you wanna start doing that arm. I call it billy goat.

Get that arm wrestling going like butting the head, you know, playing around, telling stories, just bullshit. All lies. But I I think it's pretty clever. You know? Guy comes by and said, say, how come you don't drink?

I wouldn't tell him what I just told you. In those days, I lied a lot. My stepdad's a big time banker back in Oklahoma City. My mother's at Eastern Star with the Masonic organization. She has a big education as a teacher.

I'm going to get a Ford, convertible when I graduate from boot camp. I'm not like you people. And I I lied that way all my life. Do you know that story kinda brings up a part. Do you know that a man or a woman can go to a printer and have anything put on that card he wants?

You can be a banker. You can be a brain surgeon. And let me tell you when I use those cards at the top of the mark. And I used to get a bunch of money, and I'd roll some 100 in there and some twenties, and I'd look like I had a bunch of dough and I'd be dressed to the nines and I'd go in there and I'd start talking and I'm over when you're trying to get over. You know what I mean?

One of them good looking girls that you think, you know, she's Oh boy. Tricky world out there. I'd live that way. I went to Paris Without Partners one time. It was partially true that I didn't have a partner.

I had a wife and 4 children. But, but, I was out of the house as you know how that happens to some people, we're thrown out. And I I had heard about Parents Without Partners and I assumed because I was thrown out of the house, I qualified. And you talk about lying, cheating, and see I'm perfect for it. And I go in there and I see, see I'm a I'm a liar, cheating, a thief, and I've been for a long long time.

Getting over was my game At anybody's cost. It didn't make any difference. It didn't make any difference. I didn't care about your spiritual, mental, emotional, or physical being. I just wanted to have my instincts fulfilled, whether it cost you or not.

And that was a place full of very sick people, very hurt people, and easily took advantage of by a guy like me. So I had this big lie. First of all, I carried a very small bottle in with me. I would not want anybody to think I drank. And I didn't have 4 children, I had 2.

And they'd come around and say, oh, why are you here? Well, I'm a parent without partner. My wife, I'm a widower. See, it's much better to be a widower than it is a divorce man. First of all, if you're a widower you still have something.

And I said, you know it's been terrible. It's taken me 2 years to come here. As if I really had somebody that I cared that much about. And I couldn't leave it alone. You know, the kind of guys that like that, you just can't leave it alone, you know.

I said, I have a nice job and a nice home. My kids are well behaved. And, you know, we just do pretty good, but there's something missing in their life. I I think they need a mother. Oh, boy.

He's got a house and he's got a job, you know. He's widowed. He's not divorced. Oh, this is a good catch. Let's get him.

I said, you know something else that's bad? And they said, what's that? And I said, the insurance money didn't help either. I just couldn't leave it alone. I just had to keep working the game.

Keep working the game. Alcohol destroyed everything around me. Like I said, I had a list of wreckages. I came into sobriety. I came into sobriety.

I took it as far as I could take it. Someone said, tell them the airplane story. I didn't come in broke. I had a I had a, second wife. I sent 2 women to Al Anon before I ever got here.

I was I was doing my part, you know. I mean, I didn't know I was doing my part, but I was. They didn't stay, but I did. I, found bottom on January 15, 1985. And I don't know how you drank, but I can tell you how I drank.

I had become useless. I had money. I had a 36 foot Owens boat. I had a 1800 square foot floating home. We were called the mayor.

Everybody called me the mayor of this harbor where I lived. We drove Cadillacs. Had a wife making quite a bit of money. Had a statewide corporation. No money in it, but I had a statewide corporation.

Some more of this show. And, I had, I found myself when I read the big book and I was reading, this just came later, but I was reading the part where it says quicksand stretched around me in all directions. I had met my match. I've been overwhelmed. Alcohol was my master.

And I knew that. I don't know how you drank. I drank in the latter days of this disease. I had no idea about detoxes. I just drank until I would pass out.

My life was so painful. I was so useless. I was useless to you. I was useless to her. I was useless to my children.

I was absolutely useless. And you gave me a reason to live when I found you. Because you said I need you. They said, Don, stay with us. We need you.

And on that particular day, my Al Anon wife, the second one, they all have the same story after they've been to Al Anon for a while. She's on her way to the store and I said, hey, how about, picking up a half a gallon of vodka for me? I'm running a little low. I got 2 half gallons waiting on me, but I that's low for me. And in the end, I could only drink beer.

Anything else, beer and vodka, and white wine. Anything else would come up immediately. And I would have to sit. And I don't know if you ever drank that way, but I would have to sit until I got some down. I had a puke bucket ready to go.

This isn't normal. In case you haven't recognized that. And, she said, no. She said, I I can't do that anymore. That's the out and on word, and she's pointing her finger.

If you want, you have to go get it yourself. Well, by this time, for me to go get it took planning. Because I drink until I pass out. And I'm out about 5 and a half to 6 hours. And when I come to, the fight is on again, whether I'm gonna drink or not.

And I always lost the fight. And it went like this. I would usually drink ice cold beer, and if it would stay then I'd move to vodka. And I thought I had a vodka problem. And so I would drink ice cold beer to see if it'd stay and the mind would always say, Don, beer's not drinking.

I said, you're right, but I'm not having none of that damn vodka today. And I'd go get the beer. I'd have to go downstairs to get it out of this thing and get it nice cold beer and I would sip it. My hands are shaking. You hear that it shakes?

Maybe some of you know about that. And I'm trying to light cigarettes. It's a little hard to do sometimes, chasing a cigarette around. And, burn your eyebrows once in a while. And I'd sit there and look at the screen because it just had that flaky stuff on.

It didn't seem like it made any difference what was on there. I just whatever was there, you know. And, I get the first beer down and it says, see there Don. The disease would say, see there, you feel better. I said, you're right.

I do feel better. Little hair of the dog that bit you, any alcoholic knows that. How many people in this room know how to stop a bed from spinning before you puke? Put your foot on the floor. In case you go back out sometime, I wanna help you out a little bit.