West Edmonton Beef dinner in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

My name is Sean and I'm an alcoholic, and that's the end of the facts.

All of the rest of this stuff is my opinion, and I'm not a spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous.

I'm not an expert on alcoholism.

I don't speak for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Nobody speaks for Alcoholics Anonymous.

This is a wonderful thing about Alcoholics Anonymous is a program without dogma.

We all just share our own experience.

There are no experts here.

There's no Popes in Alcoholics Anonymous, although...

There are a few guys kind of getting ready for the job of if it comes open, you know, but...

So I'm just going to tell you a little bit about what he used to be like, what happened, and what it's like now.

I want to thank you for inviting me to this.

I mean, this must be, this must be the center, huh?

The mystic knights of sobriety.

I've been, I've been looking for the cult, you know, for a long time.

Yeah.

Who knew they were caterers?

This is great.

Can you imagine taking a newcomer?

We're going to take you to a meeting.

The Mystic Knights of Sobriety.

Ah!

Your worst fear.

This is wonderful. I want to thank Rick for asking me and Jack for hosting me. We've been, Jack, I mean the first thing you do in Edmonton is buy cowboy boots, right?

So that's where he took me and I bought some cowboy boots. Walk around in Vancouver, they smile at me.

You must be from Alberta.

So this is 73 years. Wow.

Well, and those two old farts met, huh?

Isn't that incredible?

I've been doing this kind of stuff, this kind of talking stuff for 24 years now.

I've been what is known as a circuit speaker.

Let me tell you, I know what it is.

It's the least important 12-step work there is, you know.

You know, it's really easy for me to stand here and blab and look good and get on a plane and go back to Vancouver and Unedict never actually see me in traffic.

You know.

I had to take the honk if you're a friend of BLW off my bumper because my driving is so, oh.

Anyway, the most important 12-step work of course is, you know, the stuff that you're doing, you know, the

One drunk talking to another, well, the other one pukes on your shoes.

You know, that one-on-one getting somebody sober, talking them through the first night,

taking them to the first meeting and getting through the first couple of days.

That's the most important work there is.

And, you know, there's the incredible thing about this is that it's not speaking, it's sharing,

so there's no performance involved.

And I'm only here, you flew me here to talk to, to share with one person in this room and

Usually you never find out who that is.

Sometimes you do, but most of the time you just never know who it is.

And so it's been a wonderful experience for me.

But I was asked to share a Founders Day a couple of years back and...

It's kind of a weird thing, Founders Day, because, you know, they're selling T-shirts out of Dr. Bob's basement, you know, which is weird.

And Dr. Bob must be spinning in his grave in Akron for Founders Day.

And then they had just opened the guest house, you know, where the two dudes met.

And...

Henrietta Cyberling's guest house.

And they just opened it up for Founders Day.

And so we all went.

You know, of course, I had to see it.

And it's about as big as this platform here,

this little guest house.

And, uh,

So you all had to line up, you know, to get into it, to go through it.

And while you're online, and it was like Disneyland, you know, it was one of those snaking lines.

They had little speakers with Henrietta Cyberling's disembodied voice talking about the first meeting.

I mean, it was very strange.

But the interesting thing is when you get into the house, you look across like three football fields of lawn.

And at the back of it is this huge English manor house.

It looks like Hampton Court, you know.

And I can just see Bill Wilson, you know, six months sober looking across the thing.

Whoa.

We've hit it.

And the room that they talked in is about this big.

And literally, it has room for two chairs.

They were literally knee-to-knee.

And knowing how Bill Wilson was, I mean, Bill Wilson could have sold snowballs to Eskimos.

And, I mean, he had Dr. Bob trapped in this little room for three hours.

Dr. Bob must have, would have agreed to anything, I'm sure.

You know, just get me the hell out of here with this nutcase in my face.

And so it was really fun to see all that kind of stuff.

But 73 years, it's hard to believe that 74 years ago,

guys and women like you and me couldn't have gotten sober.

We had no place to go.

That's not a long time.

That's not a long time.

We are part of what is basically the third generation.

Those of us who have got, you know, 25 to 35 years.

We're kind of the third generation of alcoholic synonymous.

And the third generation in any family business tends to screw it up.

And thank God for the traditions and thank God for the old timers and

But we got to be careful about what we're doing because we're passing it on to the fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh generation.

And I think it's really important that the message is not diluted, that we understand what our signal is of purpose is,

and that in some way we can always keep going back to the basics, the basic thing of one drunk talking to another.

Yeah.

Nowadays, we think a 12-step call is driving somebody to a treatment center, but that ain't it.

It's me sharing my experience, strength and hope with you.

I was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and all I wanted out of that town was out.

My father was a drunken sailor, and my mother was a saint.

And so we, you know, I've come from a large Irish Catholic family, so alcoholism is...

largely unnoticed in our society, you know.

You know, it's just simply the element that we live in.

It's like goldfish trying to describe water.

I mean, you know, occasionally there were the ones that had the failing.

You know, ooh, he has the failing.

I had an uncle, I had an uncle Joseph, a great uncle Joseph, who was my aunt Mary's,

my great Aunt Mary's brother, and he used to walk through this huge house.

I've never heard him speak in the entire time.

He never said a word.

He'd just walked through the house and go down in the basement where he had a home brew.

And he would stay down there and occasionally there would be like gunshot sounds coming from the basement, but it was just a batch that blew off the tops, you know.

Unbelievable.

So anyway, you know, drinking was just something we did.

I don't remember my first drink.

I have no idea when my first drink was, but I do remember my first drunk.

I was 14 years old.

And...

By that time, you know, puberty was hitting, and I don't know about you, but I, I,

puberty didn't feel good to me, so I skipped it. I, you know, I just, I just got drunk, you know, and

and sailed through it as best I could. The first night I...

You know, I blacked out, I threw up, and I could hardly wait to do it again.

And I did it every chance that I could, and by the time I was, when I was 17, I discovered

the wonderful world of chemistry.

I started raiding my parents, you know, medicine cabinets, and that was fun.

And by the time I was 18 years old, I, I, I,

said the phrase that only an alcoholic says.

And if you've ever said it, you're a drunk.

If you've ever heard somebody say it, you're listening to a drunk.

And that phrase is, I can control my drinking.

I said that when I was 18 years old.

I had been getting drunk for four years.

I had been taking drugs for a year, and I was in trouble with the chemicals.

But the idea of living without them, without something to kind of cushion what I perceived as an ever increasingly hostile world was impossible for me at that point.

I had become addicted. I didn't know it.

So I started the great obsession of every abnormal drinker to control and enjoy my drinking.

Now, I don't know about you, but I never got control and enjoy in the same room at the same time, ever, ever.

I mean, I, you know, when I was controlling my drinking, I was miserable, yeah.

The only way I've ever enjoyed my drinking is wildly out of control.

I mean, I just want you to know that I am a 3 a.m. stark naked howling at the moon drunk.

You know, that's what I am.

You just, no!

You know, I just, I'm noisy.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

when I, when I, when I, when I blew myself up, I took a lot of people with me, you know, and, uh, I did a lot of damage to a lot of

people.

You got into a lot of trouble if you had a little drinky with me, because we were liable to end up

tattooed and in jail, you know, um, um, um, and, um, and, um,

But I always had this kind of, you know, this kind of sweet Irish face, and I could talk my way out of more things that I unfortunately did.

You know, if more people had just stood back and said, that's bullshit, I'd have been here a lot sooner.

But I managed to do that.

Our family moved to California.

I went to San Francisco State University and majored in journalism and drama.

And then I moved to New York to become an actor.

And...

when I was 20 years old and by the time I was 24 years old I'd appeared in several Broadway shows

I'd done some national tours I was doing television commercials and all kinds of stuff

and I was drinking a quarter of Scotch a day and I'd picked up a little non-habit forming marijuana habit

and and I was working the docks

Not the kind where the ships come in.

Doctors.

I love doctors.

I love doctors.

They're so stupid and they're so arrogant.

And, you know, it's just perfect.

You know, and they don't know how to say goodbye

without writing something.

You know?

Yeah.

So if you give them the right symptoms, they'll write what you want.

So one of my first investments was a physician's desk reference.

So I went through all the meds and figured out, you know, my God, I suffered from fatigue.

I suffered from insomnia.

I suffered from weight problems.

I suffered from be underweight.

I suffered from whatever I could.

And I went and talked to all three of my doctors, and all three gave me prescriptions.

And then we'd meet for drinks and swap pills.

Here, you want to try a pink one?

No.

Let me have one of your yellow ones.

Let's see what that one does.

You know.

So I was in pretty bad shape.

So by the time I was in my mid-20s,

I was starting to go to moral superiors for help.

I don't know if you did that.

I went to doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers

and, you know, gurus and spiritualists and priests and Monsions.

policemen lawyers and judges and um and um and um and some of them were very earnest and knowledgeable people

and they uh and they would uh you know discuss with me what was going on and then they would make the

mistake of saying this is what you should do a bunch of problem well anybody points a finger at me

i bite it off at the knuckle you know and uh

So I decided what I needed was a good woman, and I met her in an elevator, and we started our dance of death, and eventually we ended up in A.A.A. in Alonon.

I was living in New York, so I took an actor's geographic, which is a national tour, and it closed in L.A., and we got married, and she settled down.

One day she was having a sip of whatever the hell she was sipping, and she said, this is boring, and put it on the table and never drank again.

And then she noticed that I drank.

A lot.

Yeah.

And let me tell you, I didn't marry a teetotaler.

I mean, nobody...

Marry somebody who didn't drink.

I didn't know anybody who didn't drink.

She was a 10 martini what the hell girl.

And all of a sudden, she just stopped drinking.

She didn't go through withdrawals.

Nothing.

She wasn't an alcoholic.

And there I was.

Way out there.

Way over my skis.

You know, just crazy.

And...

I was kind of restarting a career in film and television.

And in the meantime, I got a real estate license and started selling real estate.

And my life was just tipping out of control.

But I managed to accumulate a lot of stuff that didn't, that so it didn't look like that's what was going on.

I had a house in the Hollywood Hills. I drove a Mercedes. I had a pretty wife and a pedigree dog and a decent job and a little bit of a career.

And so things, and I was well-dressed and everything looked great except that I was dying.

And what was slowly dawning on me and becoming very hard-rooted in the bottom pit of my gut was that I could not not drink.

And that it was pretty clear that my life was ending, but I wasn't going to die.

Yeah.

And that kind of despair was kind of, it was kind of seeping into everything.

You could smell it on my clothes.

And I couldn't go to sleep without a little something, and I couldn't wake up a little

something, and I couldn't get through the day without a little something.

And, I mean, there were formulas and recipes and all kinds of combinations,

and it all came crashing and burning down on me on April 23rd, 1974.

I...

Basically, I couldn't handle another Easter, you know, all that dying and hiding.

And, yeah, that was just the eggs.

And on April 24th, I went to work, and it was a day at the real estate office where we had to go look at new listings,

and it was my turn to drive.

And I had been arrested the night before.

I was dressed pretty much like this, only I had fingerprint ink.

It's a nice touch, you know.

And we were driving, and there was me and three women in my car, and they started talking about drinking.

There was Mary. Mary was about 70 years old, and she was this adorable little Irish lady who drank three drinks a night, her entire life, every night of her life. She drank three drinks a night.

And then there was Chris who was going through a divorce and she was drinking too much.

And there was Suzanne who was sitting next to me and Suzanne had six years of sobriety.

And Suzanne was having a hell of a good time.

Suzanne laughed a lot.

She made no bones about being an AA.

You know, everybody knew.

And I thought, hmm, that's a little tacky, you know.

I come from kind of Scottish stock, you know, and you don't discuss your medical problems with people.

You just don't do that.

You just...

tough it through. And so they wouldn't shut up about drinking that morning. And I was,

I had decided a couple of years before that that hard booze was the problem. So I became a wine

connoisseur. Now, a wine connoe with a checkbook. And I have guzzled some of the finest French

wines ever made. Hmm. Good color. Excellent bouquet.

God.

But oddly enough, about a couple of weeks before I crashed and burned, I switched to straight

cheap vodka.

And I was on about a two-week vodka run before it all crashed and burned.

So the vodka, which leaves you breathless...

was kicking out of my liver that morning and you could smell it.

You know, that wonderful kind of alcoholic, that, that sharp, you know, that sharp thing

that no amount of cologne can cover.

And Suzanne was sitting next to me, and she got a whiff of it.

And we got back to the office, and I took her side.

It was 11 o'clock in the morning on April 24th.

And I said the last phrase.

I said, I'm an alcoholic, and I got 20 minutes before I go to pieces.

And that was absolutely true.

And she heard the screaming, and she canceled all her appointments that day, and she 12-step-me.

She took me to her apartment.

She sat me down at her dining room table.

She got out the big book.

She read Chapter 3, Chapter 3, Chapter 5, and the traditions.

And I thought, that woman's going to read that entire book to me.

Okay.

And then she told me her story.

Now, mine was sleazy, but hers was disgusting.

I mean...

Whoa.

Ooh.

But that first glimmer happened, I thought, my God, if she could not drink,

maybe I got a shot at it.

And she said, do you believe in God?

And I said, I suppose so.

And she said, that's good enough.

She said, do you think you can not drink for the rest of the day?

I said, of course.

Of course.

And then I immediately thought, oh my God, what did I say?

So she said, fine, let's go to your place.

So we jumped in her car and we went to my place and she poured out all the booze down the kitchen sink.

Now I had explained to her that drinking was the problem, but I had psychological problems and so I needed medications, you know.

And she said, listen, honey.

In Southern California we described sobriety as clean and sober.

And I said, what exactly does that mean?

She said that means we don't drink any alcohol and we don't take any self-administered mind-altering chemicals that affect us from the neck up.

I was real disappointed to that news.

And so she not only cleared out my booze cabinet, she cleared out the medicine cabinet.

a great huge cardboard box of prescription medicines and a big bag of grass and some other things went out into the trunk of her car.

She said, I'll take care of this, honey.

So I couldn't go back to the garbage can and go through it, you know.

So she took me to my first meeting, and it was exactly as I was afraid it was going to be.

It was in a church basement.

It was filled with smoke, and all those people I never would have drank with were there.

You know, I mean, you.

I mean...

And it must have been a slow night for newcomers because they're real pleased to see me.

Just, hi, you know.

It was like being dropped into a shark tank.

You know, I've never seen so many teeth coming at me in my entire.

Hi!

And he shook my hand and he wouldn't let go.

If you notice that, they don't let go.

You know, they hang on to you.

And then they lean in and say weird stuff to you.

That makes no sense at all, you know.

Keep coming back.

First things first.

One day at a time.

It's like being stoned to death with fridge magnets.

Jesus.

And then you touched.

You were touchy.

Oh, my God.

But you know an odd thing happened to that first meeting?

A thing that I mistook for a long time.

I thought I fell in love with alcoholics

and I was the first night that I was sober,

and that's not true.

I've always...

mislabeled my emotions.

What did happen to that first meeting was that I felt safe.

I felt safe for the first time in a very, very long time in my life.

I started listening to the meeting and, you know, the meeting had that same buzz that was, that this one had, as everybody was coming in here to dinner, you know, and everybody was talking.

Nobody listening, you know.

You know, that buzz, that thing, you know, because we're all adrenaline junkies, you know, so, I mean, that buzz in the rooms was just electric to me.

And I loved it.

And, yeah.

And then they had a couple of speakers.

Now, meetings, this was in Hollywood, California.

Now, meetings in Hollywood are huge.

The first three meetings I went to were 400 and 500 people each.

They were like one-day conferences.

All the meetings were like that.

They were huge meetings, and they were all speaker meetings.

And so the speakers got up and started talking,

and they would tell their whole story, their whole live.

So you got all, I mean, I just started identifying like crazy.

And, yeah.

And gradually what started to happen is when I got up enough courage to tell you who I was,

you never, ever said this is what you should do.

What you said was, I know how you feel.

Well, as soon as somebody says that to me, it dampens down the anxiety enough that I can listen.

See, I got a listening problem.

I got a hearing problem.

I don't hear what you're saying.

I've always had that problem.

And, uh, but as soon as you said that, I could, I could calm down enough. And then you never said,

this is what you should do. You said, this is what I've done. This is what I've done. And I could take that.

I could take it because it was your own personal experience. So it was true. It may be more true for you

than it was for me, but it was true. And I couldn't, I couldn't deny it. So it was incredibly

powerful that, that sharing right from, you know, from where you came from. And, uh,

I remember, I mean, my chips were a little scattered when I first got.

Like I said, I arrived at my first meeting dressed like this,

except more expensive.

I had on a $250, this is 1974, I had a $250 sports jacket from Sacks Fifth Avenue.

I had Italian loafers, French gabardine slacks, a designer tie.

I look fabulous at my first A-A meeting.

I did.

Oh.

But there were a couple of things that were going on that I wasn't aware of.

One of them was I had been drinking straight vodka,

and I'd put on a lot of lemon-lime cologne to cover it,

and I smelled like a gimlet.

And then I had newcomer eyes.

Now, the only other place you see eyes like that,

other than a newcomer in Alcoholics Anonymous,

is on a dog loose on a freeway.

I was just like,

because I didn't know what you were going to do, you know?

I didn't know.

I didn't know.

I had, you know, despite the fact that she had explained everything that was going to go on,

I knew there was going to be a song, you know, that we probably were going to have to learn a song.

And there's probably going to be like uniforms, but, you know, like, like navy blue work shirts and navy blue work pants.

And we'd talk about sobriety and then we break up into small groups with literature and go out to bars and give it out.

Like, you know, I...

And I was, you know, and there might be hats, too.

There might be hats or a secret handshake.

And, you know, I was so desperate that if that was true, I'd have done it.

I'd have done it.

I was so desperate.

Alcohol and drugs had made me sweetly reasonable, you know.

I was dangerous because whatever you told me to do, I did.

And so you had to be real specific, real careful with me.

My sponsor, I found the first night that I was sober, and he started shoving the 12 steps down my throat.

I didn't get to study them.

I didn't get to go to step study groups or anything.

I just took them, you know.

And so we started right off the bat.

And, yeah.

Man, it was weird.

I'd come home from a meeting and my Al-Anon would say,

okay, she went to Al-Anon six days after I got sober and has been there ever since.

And she would say, what did the speaker say?

And I go, now I'd just been listening to somebody for three-quarters an hour

and I couldn't remember one thing when they said.

Slowly but surely, if I could remember one thing, it was a huge victory.

I could hardly wait to get home, you know.

So I got my sponsor, he started the steps,

and I was assigned a new best friend,

and my new best friend was rich.

And Rich could not drive and could not talk,

and I had a car and couldn't shut up.

And my sponsor sponsored him, so we were now new best friends.

He had six months of sobriety,

which gave him the right to say anything he wanted to me.

But if I commented in any way on him, he would say,

don't take my inventory.

It was just charming.

.

Now, the first three steps were not a huge thing for me.

I mean, the first step, you know, I could not not drink.

My life was over.

I was not going to die.

I mean, so the unmanageability of it was, you know, my life was unmanagedable.

My life was dribbling down my sleeve.

I mean, I had the fingerprinting.

You can't get that stuff off.

Have you noticed that?

Am I in the right room?

Yeah.

I always look for the head nodders

I thought those were the ones with brain damage

the ones that were

you know

but those are the guys who would save my life

because I'd float something like that

you know and somebody would go

and I go

oh thank God you know I'm not

I'm not the only one

We had a men's group in Hollywood that met in a park,

and there was a lot of stuff going on in that park.

A lot of drug deals, and one day we were standing outside.

I still smoked at that time.

We were all standing outside the room smoking.

We're kind of looking into the parking lot, and this...

this police car was out there and they had this kid he must have been 18 years old and doing some

drug stuff you know and they slammed him over the back of the over the back of the the police car and

they wrenched his hands back and they snacked on those those those those handcuffs you know and you

could hear it you could hear the snack of those things and i looked down this line and there's like 30 guys going

my kind of guys so i mean the first step please you know and uh and the second step was

came to believe that a power grader meat could you know restore me sanity and that was

that power graded me kind of thing was getting kind of perilously close to god you know that

god thing and uh

So my sponsor explained to me that somebody with 20 minutes more sobriety than me was a power

greater than me. The big book was a power greater than me. A room full of drunks was a power

greater than me. You know, there were tons of powers greater than me, so just relax.

And keep my mind open. So I did. And restore me to sanity was a little difficult.

See, I'm a nice upper middle class drunk. We don't go to funny farms. We don't do rubber

rooms and paper slippers and no doorknobs on this side. We go to therapists.

Yeah.

and talk about stress.

And they give us meds,

if you tell them the right stuff.

And, uh,

So, you know, and I was going to, I was going to meeting in Hollywood.

I mean, you know, I mean, if you want insanity, you know, some of those stories were incredible, you know, and I was a piker as far as that goes.

But I had to pick Rich up for a meeting.

We used to go to a meeting on Friday night in Beverly Hills.

It was a very spiffy meeting.

And you had to dress real nice and look good.

You know, looking good was important.

I'd rather look good than feel good, usually.

And so...

So we were getting ready. I had to go pick him up because he couldn't drive.

And we had big hair in the 70s, really big hair.

And Rich, unfortunately, was follically challenged.

So it took him a while to get the big hair look.

You know, he had to kind of tease it all forward and spray it and then kind of bend it back.

You know, get that Peter Lafford hair hat look, you know.

And...

So he was doing that and he had a big old medical dictionary and so I flipped it open and I decided to look up a definition of insanity.

What else do you do? You know, so I looked it up and it was a huge long definition of medical definition, but out of the middle of it popped a phrase that enabled me to take the second step.

And this is it. It's a medical definition of insanity. Quote, a seeming inability to learn from one's mistakes.

Let me run that by you one more time.

A seeming inability to learn from one's mistakes.

Wham.

Nailed.

Nailed.

You know, my entire life was slamming into the same brick wall over and over and over again.

And I never bothered to look at how I got there.

All I was concerned with was getting the hell out of there.

My philosophy of life was a moving target is harder to hit.

You know, so I never identified the causes and conditions that brought me to the place that I was in.

And that clinically made me insane.

So, I mean, the second step, bam, I was there.

Then came the third step.

Made a decision to turn my will in my life over to God as I understand God.

I was raised in Irish Catholic as opposed to a Roman Catholic.

And...

ours involves a great deal more wine

and so i went to uh st louis college in victoria for 12 years the christian brothers of

ireland not very brotherly and not very christian and uh i was taught how to be a man by men

who had given it up and uh

they taught us learning by strapping us regularly,

lining us up in cold places and beating the hell out of us.

It was a wonderful way to learn.

And I was listening to, you know, today about what's going on.

I was listening to some of the descriptions of conditions that were going on in residential school.

I thought, when are they going to apologize to those of us who went to Catholic schools, for God say?

You know.

Yeah.

So anyway, my idea of God, which they taught me, which is probably not what they taught me, because I told you I don't hear stuff right, was this big old dude with a beard who had a book who was writing down everything that I did or was thinking of doing.

I mean, you couldn't get away with anything.

If you thought about it, it went down in the book, and I was a thinker.

And...

And because of that, I was going to be condemned to eternal fires while devils flayed my skin off with whips.

But he loved me.

I had trouble with that concept.

You know, I couldn't quite make it work.

Now, that may not be what they taught me, but that's what I heard.

So I largely abandoned that, you know, that concept in that church by the time I,

by the time I arrived in Alcoholics Anonymous, my spiritual life consisted of the two alcoholic prayers.

The first one is, dear God, get me out of this and I will never do it again.

And the second alcoholic prayer is, whew.

That was my spiritual life, you know.

So here I am faced with the third step.

You know, God as I understand God.

Now, I thought in order to take third step,

you had to get a handle on this God thing.

You know, you had to figure out something.

But what it was explained to me was that it was,

the big word in the third step has made a decision.

A decision.

The third step is a decision.

And this is how I relate that decision.

If I decide I want to live in a new house,

I don't have the keys.

Right.

What I do is I have to get a newspaper or go online and find a realtor and

tell the realtor what I want and we go look at a bunch of houses and eventually we find a house that we like and we make an offer and there's a counteroffer

and we eventually agree and then I got to go to the bank and get a loan

Then there's the deed search and there's insurance and there's all kinds of

Preparations moving bands and all kinds of stuff and

What happens is I made that decision, but there's a number of steps to the point where I eventually get the key to the house and