Recovery in the Rockies VI, Park City, UT

Hi. My name is Ronald. I'm an alcoholic and I hit the pipe a couple of times. Maybe more than a couple. But before I forget, I'd like to thank the committee of recovery in the rockies for having enough confidence in me and trust in me for asking me to come out and be the opening night speaker.

I cannot share with you or let you know how much of a privilege I I consider it to be able to speak at a meeting of cocaine anonymous in front of my brothers and sisters, my fellow recovering addicts. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart, what a privilege it is. Because growing up, I never would have thought that one night in September 1995, I'd be standing up in front of a group of folks in Utah. See they said I'm from Los Angeles. I'm from Watts, you see?

And, funny how God works And my sister-in-law Lisa and my wife that when I was just before they called me up here they looked at me and and they said, you nervous? And you know, anybody who's ever spoken to meeting, you know that feeling you get, that queasy feeling and your pictures running through your head and you refining it and you fine tuning it and you're thinking about that opening joke you're gonna tell and, you know, you you want people to like you so much because like most addicts, I still suffer from those conflicting feelings of low self esteem at times and then that grandiosity when I think that I'm the man, you know, and and those competing feelings that that are going on inside. Man, man, I'm telling you I'm terrified. And I'm really glad that they have a chapter in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which we in Cocaine Anonymous use as our textbook for recovery that lays it out for me so I don't have to play around with it. Because you see, I'm the kind of guy that I want you to think that my life was real exciting and interesting and some most of you guys didn't grow up with me.

My brother is here with me tonight so he knows I'd be lying but you know, I could, you know, I could throw in a couple of homicides, you know, a couple of prison stretches. You know, cause I'm a I look like a nerd, you know. I'm pretty much kind of a square looking guy and somebody's sitting in here and they're looking at me and I got this, you know, look at this, look at me. No. No.

Someone look me. I'm wearing this nice little double breasted suit and it fits. You know, it's not my pants aren't all hanging off of me. My my glasses don't have any tape on them, you know, matching shoes. If you pass by me, you may have smelled a nice fragrance.

Something called cool waters by Davidoff. You know, you might say, he don't look like an addict. I'd like to welcome our new friend, the young man who stood up as a newcomer and welcome you to cocaine anonymous. Let you know that the fellowship of cocaine anonymous works, and I know that it works because I've been clean and sober since July 14, 1986, One day at a time. In the chapter I referred to in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous is chapter 7.

It's a chapter entitled, Working with Others. The chapter is entirely devoted to our 12 step of recovery. The 12 step that says, having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs. And it says in that chapter that I should share in a general way what it used to be like, what I used to be like, what happened, and what it's like today. And I know it's been real fashionable.

I've I've gone to a lot of meetings. I go to a lot of meetings all the time, and I hear people talk about, I'm not gonna stay in my drug log a lot. You know, everybody know what it's like to get loaded. You know, I wanna get into some recovery. Well, I understand that I need to share what I used to be like because that new man might be sitting out there looking at Ronald thinking, what does he have to share that I can identify with?

Look at him. He look like he got it made. What does he know about the pain and suffering that I've been going through? What can he say that I can identify with? Let me think that maybe this time it'll work for me.

And I wish he could have seen me on July 13th 1986. In fact, on the morning of July 14th while I stood in the lobby of that recovery home called the Harbor Light Center run by the Salvation Army in downtown LA, not wearing no nice double breasted suit, wearing a pair of gray, dusty, corduroy pants that were hanging off of me. I'm thin now but imagine me 30, £35 lighter than I am now. Cheeks sunk in, kinda like a skeleton. Pants just hanging down on me.

You know how the little gangbangers have that style with the saggy? Well, that wasn't the fashion in 86 and I wasn't a gangbanger because my pants were hanging on me. And I remember I had this baseball cap on because I had stopped combing my hair. I you may see these little waves in my hair now. You know, I have a 100 strokes.

I brush it every night and put a little silk scarf on. You know, it wasn't no silk scarves back then. My hair was so it was kinda wavy, but I think they call it matted, you know, back then. And I wasn't wearing cool waters. I had that smell of that, you know, that 4 or 5 day old must you got on you when you've been wearing the same clothes and you haven't taken time to bathe.

And my glasses were these big black plastic. I call them county rims. They're the kind you get when you're on welfare. And they had a big white piece of adhesive tape holding them together right there in the corner where a guy pistol whooped me for not following directions. And I remember what nothing funny on the morning of July 14, 1986.

And I couldn't look anybody in the eye. That guy was giving me those intake questions, you know, when you go to the the recovery home and they wanna know, are you really, you know, are you really an alcoholic? Do you really have a disease? And, you know, and he was asking me, how much did you drink? And I couldn't even answer the questions looking in his face.

I was looking down at my dirty tennis shoe tops because I was so ashamed of the animal I had become. See, and I need to remember what it used to be like To know those days that I don't know if anybody can identify with this, but when I used to in the last days of my addiction, when I would get ready to cop and then you get go get something and then your stomach be churning and before you could get it see, and I'm a smoker, you know. So before I had to get my my hookup, my pipe and stuff, and before I could do it, my stomach is churning. I just have to take a dump, you know. And then and and by now, I don't have my own place and I you know, I'm smoking in garages and shit by now.

So now, I just shit on myself and then I go smoke before I can even clean myself up. See, and I need to remember that's the kind of guy I am when I smoke, when I use. I need to remember I'm that guy that walks the streets at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning after I got put out of the dope house for sweating people. You know, your money you spent your money a couple of hours ago and you telling people you got money on the way and by now they they kinda figured you were lying so they put you out. But they're addicts just like you so they let you stay just in case you got money coming.

I don't know how people can say we didn't have no hope out there. It's full of hope. And by now, they put me out. And I can't go back to mama's house because she's changed the locks because I've been stealing her food out of her refrigerator, cooking plates for people around the neighborhood, and I'm just walking the streets. I got nowhere to go just looking looking down at the ground wondering what happened to me, man.

Might see something white and pick it up and put it in my mouth. And it didn't start off like that for me. I was born and raised and and like I told you in Watts, with my mother and father and I have 5 brothers, 6 of us. And we stayed in one bedroom, the 6 of us. And my mother and father stayed in the other bedroom.

We were real poor family. And I remember my brother Ralph and my brother Willie, they were the oldest. They had it good. They got to sleep together in the the regular bed. And the other 4 of us had to get the bunk beds.

Right? You know, we have one set of bunk beds and I remember, I'm the 3rd when Reggie is the 4th one. So me and Reggie, we had our selection. We took the top bunk or the bunk bed and slept together. And Ricky and Rod slept in the bottom bunk.

You know, the top bunk was better than the bottom bunk because if you peed in the bed, you know, it went it kinda went down and you could always play it off, you know. Not me. We were a real close family. And I remember I grew up with my first real resentment. It was against my father because he was a drunk.

He was an alcoholic. I know since I've been in the fellowship they say we should only label ourselves. We really shouldn't call somebody else an alcoholic or an addict. But I suspect my father was an was an alcoholic because he always had these empty empty ripple bottles laying around the house. He always smelled like cheap wine.

He was always getting paid on Friday and would never come home till Sunday. And he was always broke when he came home. And I remember my mom would be crying and stuff asking me Ralph, how come you couldn't bring home any money? No money. We got all these boys to feed.

And he mumbled some silly answer that didn't make no sense. And I remember I grew up hating him for being such a weakling, for being this drunk. And I said, I bowed, I would never grow up to be like him. I would never grow up to be an alcoholic. And so I didn't drink or use anything for the 1st 18 years of my life straight square.

But you see even when I grew up, even in this family of all these brothers around me, I still felt different, somehow disconnected from what was going on around me. And you would have never thought that me and my brothers, we were tight. We all played together. We did things together. But they just don't know, man.

I put I grew up full of resentment against Ralph and my brother Willie. They seem to be good at sports. I was never good at sports. They seem to be taller than me. We all look pretty much alike, but we're all short.

But I seem to be the shortest out of all 6 of us. And, you know, I'm I'm 40 years old now. I guess I've hit the growth spurt. And, you know, I'm I'm finished doing my growing. You know, I'm 5, 4a half and I will net that's right.

A half. I'm a get it all. Like a half inch. It's still saying that. I always hated being this short.

I always hated being so thin. I always wanted to be like you burly guys I see in here. You know, I was I wanted to be buff, athletic and I was always this little thin rail guy with this bird chest and I always hated that about myself. I always hated being so so dark. You know, I don't mean I hated being black but even among black people we had classifications, you know.

And this was back in the sixties before black is beautiful. And, you know, and that they always used to call it, you know, you black so and so. I said, no, I'm brown, You know, and then the Latinos came and took that from me. You know, I couldn't even say that. I always wanted to be what they call high yellow.

I always hated I don't know. This may sound silly to some of you guys, but I always had this thing about my head. I have this hook in the back of my head. You can't see it now. I got a little hair in it.

But back then, we had this style of haircut called a covatus. And it's a close haircut and you could see every contour of my head and they used to call me long head, hook head. Headquarters was my father's nickname for me and I hated it. Now all of these things sound petty, silly. You would wonder, you know, if you knew, you may say, what does this have to do with addiction?

What does this have to do with staying sober? Well, these feelings that I had about myself, these feelings of self hatred, self loathing, these feelings of being not at ease with who I was, diseased with myself. These were the feelings that had me imprisoned when I grew up. They're the feelings that are described in the doctor's opinion of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous where it says that the alcoholic, the addict, suffers from feelings of being irritable, restless and discontented. And those are the feelings I grew up with.

And I had to find some way to escape from these feelings but I couldn't drink and I couldn't use because of the way my old man was. But I had to try to find something And what I found when I was growing up were books. I became addicted to reading. I became an addict to books. Ralph and Reggie and I, the 3 of us, we would go to the library every week and we would check out, I think, the maximum book is either 7 or 10 books apiece.

We'd check them out. We'd have 2 weeks to read. We'd read each other's we'd read all the books. Because you see, when I read, it seemed as if I were transported away from Watts. And all of a sudden, I was in foreign lands.

I was in Europe. I was in Paris. I was a spy. I knew karate. I was somebody saving the world.

I I love espionage and I love being the guy that was always undercover, somebody who knew me secret things. And I always loved that excitement because it made me feel like I was a part of something really big and important. I later progressed from novels to comic books. You see what I'm saying? Progression.

Because you see, that was a quicker fix. It was a longer thing to read a whole novel, but you could get a comic book and all of a sudden, in about 30 or 40 pages, I was in it immediately. And maybe you remember those DC Comics back in the sixties. Superman, Batman, The Flash, The Green Lantern. Justice League of America.

I know somebody in here remember that. The legion of superheroes. I was the hero named Mon El. He may not look black in the book, but he was. And I would tie I would tie a towel around my neck and fly around my neighborhood.

Now I don't know if you know anything about Watts, but, you know, back in the sixties with a towel around your neck, you know, it wasn't real cool. But you see, I'm an addict. And that stuff made me feel strong. It made me feel heroic. It made me feel important.

Later in the sixties, television gained popularity. We were a poor family, so it took us a while before we got one. We used to go to neighbor's houses, but eventually we got our own television, our little black and white. And I became addicted to television. And I would sit under the television and they had a nickname for me.

They called me the human TV guide because I memorized every show that was on television every day of the week. They could neighbors would come by the house and my brothers would play a game. They said, watch this. Ronnie, Wednesday, 8 o'clock, channel 2, Pecos Junction, channel, 4, the Andy Griffith Show, channel 5. And I could name what was on every channel, every night of the week by heart, from memory, a real addict.

And I didn't know. I'm serious. I am not I'm not kidding you. Because you see, this was my fix back then. And there was one television show I became addicted to that was popular in the sixties and I idolized this guy.

And when I share about him at a lot of CA meetings, some of the people who are younger in the crowd, they they wonder why would I idolize this particular person because he didn't he had television movies that were coming out lately, and he doesn't look very dashing or very heroic or very active. And maybe you remember him. His name is Perry Mason. Right? And Perry Mason, you know, he's you see Raymond Burr now in the TV movies.

He recently died and he had this white beard and a cane. You know, he walked around. He's real burly and stuff. And they said, well, why would you idolize this guy? Raymond Burr in the sixties didn't look anything like that.

In the old Perry Mason series, that little black and white television, I look at Perry, man, he had to be the handsomest white boy I had ever seen in my life. Suits fitting, real nice, you know, nice blacks well, I guess they were black with black and white television. Chip black hair, just slicked back kinda, you know, walking around, had this presence about him in the courtroom, walking around examining witnesses, just in control, and there was something about his eyes. Raymond Burr had these piercing eyes and he had a glare, a stare. He could fix a witness on the witness stand.

And they get near the end of the episode, right near the climax, and you knew whoever he had on the stand at the end. That's the person that did it. Right? Because you knew what was coming up. And he'd have me and he'd say, isn't it true?

Do you answer this? Or somebody would run from the back of the courtroom, I did it. I did it. I mean, I don't believe I ever even saw a case go to the jury. Right?

I know a couple of you guys in here wish that were true. Amazing. You see, Perry was everything. He was more than just a lawyer. He seemed to be a forensic scientist, a detective, a policeman.

He would not only get his client off, he would solve the crime. And that's I wanted to be like Perry Mason. I wanted to have people looking at me at the end of the episode saying thank you. Perry had what I didn't have. He had power.

Lack of power was my dilemma, and I needed power. So I grew up wanting to be a lawyer. I wanted to be Perry Mason. As I grew up, my addiction to reading played perfectly with school because I was a good reader, I was somebody who was real good at essays because I had an active imagination. And so I could always be real you know, I was the guy you guys knew as the teacher's pet.

You know, you had your names for me, the professor, mister Peabody. You guys knew me. I was always the guy with, you know, papers and books and glasses. You know, I was one of the original nerds. Right?

But I had straight a's in school. I was I came through, the inner city in Los Angeles, 100 9th Street Elementary School, and and some hardcore areas in Gompers Junior High School and Locke High School, and I was getting these a's, and I was becoming more active in student government. And you would think that I would have been real happy with these accomplishments. But on the inside, even on the outside, while I tried to portray this attitude of better than because I'm this, you know, I'm this guy, on the inside, I always felt like I wanted to be like the athletes. Those guys who were scoring the touchdowns, who were getting the write ups in the newspapers.

The the the cool guys, the ones who could go to the dances and they could slow drag with the prettiest girls or they would be king at a prom or or even those guys that you wouldn't think that I would admire. But there were always a group of you guys. I see a few of you in the room tonight. I'm not gonna point you guys out, Jim. But, never went to class, right?

Always kinda hanging by the hash lines. That's where you get your food. Just kick back. Hands in their pockets, smoking cigarettes, sometimes smoking reefer. Just cool.

I'd walk by them and I'd smell that weed and I'd crinkle up my nose. It's nasty. Right? Little was I know. Right?

But at the time, they'd stand there and they just seemed so cool, so in control, so self possessed. And occasionally, a girl would walk by and they would do a very vulgar act. They would kinda grab their crotch. Right? Just to show that they knew they had it down there.

And I walked by and I said, disgusting. You won't even graduate. Right? That was that was that was my comeback. Right?

But at the time, even when I portrayed that, what I felt inside was damn. Look at that. These guys 16, 17 years old just like me but they seem so confident. They seem to know what life is all about already. They even have enough courage to grab their stuff in public.

I could never do that. So on the outside, I tried to act better than but on the inside, I felt less than. That's the story of my life. That's the story of the way I grew up. When I got out of high school, when I graduated from Locke High School, I was accepted on a scholarship to go to college.

This university in Los Angeles called Loyola Marymount University. Now this is a small Jesuit Catholic school, in Westchester, LA, and I'm coming from the inner city from a baptist background. I don't know anything about Catholicism. I don't know anything about what it's like to go to college or whatever, but I'm excited and I'm scared. My senior class gave a beach party the summer after I graduate and before I started college.

And at the summer beach party, it was one of those night beach parties where they're burning fires, they got fires going on the beach and I'm walking along by myself drinking my soda, right? And I see this guy and this girl underneath this blanket And the blanket was moving. And I heard the girl giggling. And I said, damn, I wanna get underneath a blanket. But but everybody knows the professor doesn't get underneath blankets.

Right? And somebody was passing around something and I wish I remember what it was because it became my first drink. It was high class stuff, you know, something. It was either some tyrolia or some spinata. Now, you know, we were high rollers, I guess, back then.

And it was back when they made it in the jugs, you know, the kind that you hook your thumb through and you throw over your shoulder, you could chug a lug. Right? Because you see, I wanted to get underneath a blanket and I felt like if I drank something I would have the courage to do that because everybody else seemed to be able to do that. And by now I had forgotten that vow I made while growing up about never drinking, about never becoming like my dad because you see, I figured he wasn't nothing but a janitor. I'm going on a scholarship to college.

I'm 10 times as smart as he was. He was just ignorant. He wasn't as strong as I am. He wasn't as intelligent as I am. I'll be able to drink and control it.

I don't know if I consciously at the time thought all that, but I knew I was different than him. I was better than him. And my head told me I'll just have a drink and get underneath a blanket and everything will be alright. I'd never thought that I would become like him. And I didn't right away.

Probably only another alcoholic or addict will understand what happened to me in the beginning when I drank and used. When I would drink, I never really liked the taste but I acquired the taste because, you know, I knew what was gonna happen. But that burning sensation would go down and I'd scrunch up, and it would go down in here, and it would be hot, you know, and it would start to spread down in my gut. And as it spread, I just got tall. And I just got buffed.

Maybe you saw the Hulk series. It seems like stuff I just got pecks, you know. Stuff just started to pop out on me. And my hair just got long. And my skin just got light.

And I just got cool. You see? Right. Before when I would try to curse, I would say, oh oh, you motherfucker. The professor.

Right? Let me drink something. Yeah, motherfucker. You know, with the head. Yeah.

Little subtle changes took place in there. Now when I would go to the dances, I was no longer the wallflower who would stand at the back and watch and see, you know, who was the ugliest girl. And so, you know, maybe she won't say no to me or I would look for another nerd I would look at who he would ask to dance. And if she danced with him, then I'd ask her to dance too. That was the kind of stuff I did.

But now, after drinking, man, I was the life of the party and I was, you know, I was dancing. This was back in the seventies when no. Yeah. Seventies when the bump was out And I was, you know, I was hey. I was partying.

I can identify with Bill Wilson and Bill's story, one of the co founders of Alcoholics Anonymous in chapter 1, where he writes in there, when he when he started to drink, he felt a part of life at last. I felt like when I started to drink, I was no longer on the sidelines looking. I was participating. I was in the game. I was playing.

And I became a part of this secret paternity. This kind of this society of guys and girls who drank. And we knew each other. We would see each other at parties, and we'd know and we'd just kinda give each other the eye. And we'd know, you know, you'd be slipping out of the parties smoking herb.

Right? We knew each other. It progressed so that we'd be at parties and all of a sudden we were in the get high room in the back. A couple of you guys know what I'm talking about. You know?

This I felt like I was a part of something special and my way of living became a normal way of life. I began and it didn't start off just that way at the beginning. I was still a good student. I was a freshman, a sophomore, a and b student around my junior year as I started to add more drugs to my drinking and my drinking progress from just beer and wine, the hard stuff, I started to smoke more herbs. I smoked dust.

This was back before it was that shirm, that water. You remember the old days back when they put it on the little mint leaves and stuff and you would keep it in the freezer to keep it good, and I was high for 5 days once. That's the only drug I quit on my own. And I started do mollies, those are black beauties, and mushrooms, and experimenting with acid. You see, I'm a garbage can doting.

I started off drinking and the drinking eventually wasn't enough for me. So I always searched to add more to try to fill this bottomless hole. And I didn't realize I had a problem. And around my junior and senior year I started having no things happen to me. I stopped getting all a's and b's and I started getting b's and c's.

And I didn't connect it with the fact that I was going to these all night parties, and that I was smoking herb and that I was drinking and that I was starting to miss exams and that all of a sudden the professor was starting to plagiarize his papers. Things I never thought that I would do before, paying for term papers. I know you guys never did nothing like that. But, you know, I used to have this term paper service I would go to to pay for my term papers and stuff. And I would eventually my whole character and my demeanor started to change.

And I started to become a different person. And I didn't even realize it at the time because, you see, I was still passing my classes. And I still told myself, you still alright, Ronald. You're still from the, you know, you're still from the hood and you're still in this college. You haven't gotten kicked out yet.

Somehow, I got out of Loyola on time and graduated from college. The summer in between college and I forgot to tell you I got accepted to law school pursuing Perry Mason. This school called Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. In the summer between college and law school I discovered this white stuff we call cocaine. Now before I had been exposed to cocaine but when it was offered to me, I I always said, no, that's the hard stuff.

I'm I'm not gonna do that. That that and heroin, I know that stuff is addicting and I'm not gonna use that. Pass me that dust joint. Right? Right.

You know. But the progression of my disease told me, and I saw what was happening around me, told me it'd be alright to toot a couple of lines. And probably you addicts can identify with the feeling I got from cocaine when I first started using. That ultimate sense of power, of utter confidence, of just knowing, knowing, knowing that deep down where I live that I had arrived, That I was the man. That I had the plan.

That I knew all the answers. That I had found the magic drug. The one that is odorless, that people can't tell when you're high, I used to think. Right? You know, this and and I take a couple of 1 at ones and I have me a little pack and I think I used to be able to put it away, save some for the next day.

We had coke etiquette. My brothers and I, we always got high together. We'd always you know, when in the beginning when you would pass the mirror around, oh no, it's your turn. You know, you could leave the room with your little pile there and it'd still be there when you came back. You know, in the beginning.

And I really thought I was into the ritual of the whole thing, the whole set up, the copping, the whole you know, that whole lifestyle I became addicted to because it made me feel important. I felt like I was in the fast lane because y'all deep down inside I still felt like that guy back in in high school, that nerd, the guy who was the square and I figured someday somebody is gonna find me out but not yet because I was I was partying. As I went through law school, I became clerking. I was a law clerk for a guy who was an addict, an alcoholic. And he would have me run out every day at 5 o'clock sharp when we finished work.

I'd run out and get a fit of brandy. We'd sit down and unwind, and then he'd send me out the copper package. And we got high every day after work. And law school was perfect for a dope fiend like me because they only have one exam for the whole year at the end. So I would go for the 1st month or 2, learn the ropes, learn what I needed to do, and I'm a good crammer.

And so I would just not go to class anymore. And Hastings is one of the largest law schools in the country and you could go not go to class and nobody would miss you, I thought. And I was passing my classes. And I went to summer school after my 1st year and summer school after my 2nd year and I graduated early. I got an accelerated degree.

I graduated from law school in two and a half years at the age of 23. I stayed in San Francisco because I wanted to graduate with my classmates who were finishing that last semester. And while I was waiting up there, I said, well, I might as well just, you know, study to take the bar exam in February of 1979, I believe that was. And while I was studying for that bar exam and when I took it, the results came out the same day that I graduated. And my whole family had flown up to San Francisco and I was getting dressed for my graduating graduation ceremony and one of my friends came by and told me I had passed the bar.

And so at age 24, I became one of the youngest black attorneys licensed to practice law in the state of California. And I was on top of the world. And the champagne flowed that night and we snorted everything. This was this was before basin. Right?

This is before smoking. And, I mean, I was on top of the world. But I'd like to tell you that this young boy wonder, this young genius, this attorney at age 24, 5a half years later when I was age 30, the only job I had was carrying out the trash for a 21 year old dope dealer who lived across the street from my mother's house. And every Tuesday night, I believe it was, I would carry his trash out for her because it was trash day the next day. No.

It was Wednesday night I carried his trash. Tuesday night I'd sat on his porch and I watered his lawn for him. And then I would knock on his door and I would ask him, Don, do you need anything from the store? So that he would give me my nickel piece for working for it. This was just 6 years after having passed the bar exam the first time around.

This was young Perry Mason. Oh, wait a minute. I had another job. That wasn't my only job. I was the doorman at mama's house.

Not my mama but this 68 year old lady who sold dope out of her house. And if you don't know who the doorman is, he's the guy that sits next to the door and when people come to cop, I would peek out the door, you know, little people, and I would announce to mama who it was and she would tell me if I could open the door or not and then I would sit back down. And then every half hour or so somebody might pass me a hit. Yeah. I heard some, some nods of applause and stuff when I said I passed the bar at first.

What happened? You see, I'm an addict. Cocaine is no respecter of intellect. It doesn't care if you graduated from law school or if you dropped out from high school. Cocaine doesn't care if you grew up in Westwood or in Watts.

Cocaine doesn't care if you're a man or if you're a woman. Cocaine doesn't care if you're short or if you're tall. It doesn't care if you're skinny or if you're buffed. Cocaine doesn't care about any of that stuff. It's an equal opportunity ass kicker.

You see if you suffer from the disease that I suffer from that is physical, mental, and spiritual in nature, It doesn't matter. I wish I could tell you in the short period of time some of the things that I did during that 6 year time period. But, you know, a lot of it is a blur and it comes back to me in snatches, getting pistol whipped by this guy, this dope dealer because I wouldn't watch the street for him when people were coming to cop and I had to be a lookout, a lawyer and I'm his lookout. About going in my mother's refrigerator and stealing her food while she was at work so that I could cook up little breakfast plates for people that would go to the dope houses and stuff and I'd wrap the plates up and go around and hopefully somebody would give me a hit when I bring them a plate. The guy that even while I was a lawyer I would go back to work after getting paid on a Friday a nice salary and I'd go back to work on Monday begging the secretaries for cigarette money.

That's the kind of dope fiend I am. The kind of dope fiend that would catch the bus to work while I was practicing law because I could never save up enough money to buy a car even during my entire practice. The kind of dope thing that never had a nice condominium or a house or even couldn't even keep an apartment. I was sleeping on my mama's floor because she was the only person would take me back. You see, that's the kind of disease I suffer from.

Until finally on July 13, 1986, something happened to me in front of my mother and she was my last enabler. And on this particular day I burned this guy who lived a couple of doors down on a dope deal. He had given me a couple of dime bags of herb to sell for him. And I had spent his money on on some cocaine and I smoked it up like we always do. And when he wondered where his money was and I didn't have it, I thought I'd tell him about this in front of my mother's house because I thought she's at home, he won't do anything to me because everybody respects her.

And he asked me to step outside of my mother's house and we get this thing straight. And when we stepped outside, he knocked me to the ground with all his might and started trying to kick me and stomp me to death. And as he was kicking me and applying the boots to my head, it seemed as if I were removed from my body looking at this happen. And while I saw him trying to beat me and stomp me to death, I looked over and I saw my mother step outside the house. And I expected her to say, no, no, stop, that's my baby.

But she said nothing. This the woman who had continually sent me those care packages to when I was in law school, when I would spend all my money on dope and I would cry with those lies to her and she would send me her last dime after she ended up raising me and my brothers by herself after she put that drunk of a father out. And this woman who I loved dearly, who I didn't have enough strength because of my disease, I burned her badly and she continued to take me back in. This woman who I thought would rescue me said nothing while this guy kicked me and stomped me. And I looked down and he was still kicking me and stomping me.

And I looked back at her and she turned around and she walked back inside the house and she closed the door. And it was at that moment deep down in my soul that I admitted to my innermost self that I was powerless over cocaine. It was the next day that I checked into the Harbor Light Center See, you see, I I try to make it sound fancy, I'm a real addict. I didn't check-in to the harbor light center. I didn't have reservations.

I didn't I didn't go there with luggage, you know. There were no invitation. I was dropped off at the harbor light center by my oldest brother, Willie. And I told you the condition I arrived there in and I was much more dead than alive. And I wasn't even thinking about staying sober.

I was just tired y'all, tired of getting my ass whooped, tired of waking up every day having to chase that rock, wondering how I was gonna get it at this time. Because you see, I had tried to get sober twice in 1985 by going to recovery home, Relapsing twice. Thinking that I wasn't I couldn't get this thing. Relapsing because number 1, the first time I went on one of those passes that they give us, those 30 day passes, and when I went home, I wanted to carry the message. You know, I'm real intellectual.

I won't carry the message at 30 days. Right? Now I'm sponsoring people in the recovery center and I'm, you know, I've read the big book like a novel and I just know it. Right? Until the girl was smoking.

And I wanted to show her this nice recovery home booty I had and stuff and, you know, how we start eating again and we start growing out. And she was smoking and she said, well, Ronald, you haven't had one in a long time. Why don't you have one? And I told her, no. Thank you.

I'm not getting loaded anymore. She looked at me in amazement. I was real proud of myself. So she continued to smoke and I continued to look. 20 minutes later, she said, are you sure you won't have one?

In my head it made that shift that it's described as a strange mental quirk. And it told me this bitch never used to offer you nothing free. You can have one. You see, I didn't understand the physical nature of the illness I have. I didn't know that one starts this intolerable craving, this phenomenon, this thing we can't explain why it happens, but my experience tells me that it does happen.

It explains to me why I was never able to just smoke a dime or a quarter. It explains to me why I was always the one that couldn't go home, why I always had to stay there till everything was gone on the mirror, on the plate. And even then, we had to rinse the pipe. And even then, I'm hold I'm smoking over a stove and even some of y'all know what I'm talking about. Nah.