The Razors Edge Meeting of CA in Phoenix, AZ

Ask if you must talk during this meeting, take it outside. Tonight, our speakers can. Wow. Thanks. Did you like I'm Ken can you hear me?

Yes. Okay. I'm Ken Cross. I'm an alcoholic. Yes.

I also did a little cocaine in my lifetime. I didn't expect to start talking now. I have to kill a lot of time. I have a friend here, Brandon, who just moved from LA. He's sitting right there, the really tall good looking young guy.

He just came up to me and goes, man, this is one of the wildest meetings I've ever been to in my life. And, and in a good way, you know, with enthusiasm and excitement. This is the way CA was back in 1983 when I got sober, You know, people being a service. We didn't have who's an addict to call out during. Now we didn't call out during anything because our sponsors would kick our ass if we did but that was then and this is now and it's good to be back here.

I haven't spoken here in about 8 years, I think. Something like that. I've been coming to I've been coming to Phoenix almost yearly and giving talks since about 1984 when CA kinda first started get got going over here with Mark and Alan and, and some other folks who, who kinda first put this thing together for you. My sobriety dates February 3, 1983. So this year, I celebrated 21 years of sobriety And I wanna stress, free from all mind altering substances, all mind altering substances And it's funny because I hear now that there's this thing going around CA where people are starting to complain that CA should have singleness of purpose and should only be open for the cocaine addict, you know, that if you're not a cocaine addict, you shouldn't be able to identify from the podium.

And, you know, I was at the meeting where we took the format from AA and we rewrote the format at Denny's in Hollywood 1 night and we specifically put in the words, all other mind altering substances because AA wouldn't let us in the room. And we wanted to know that if somebody came in with a glue problem, that they could come in and they would be welcomed whether they were sniffing, you know, whether they were sniffing carbona or gasoline or cocaine, you know. I mean you gotta realize, I got sober pre crack and a little bit of free base was still going on and, you know, I came in during the power and glory years where, cocaine was attorneys, rock stars and groupies. So meetings were really interesting back in LA in those days, you know, and, you know, and for me, my entire sobriety has been a gift. You know, an absolute gift, because I'm not one of these guys who woke up one morning with a really bad hangover and said, said, you know, maybe I ought to go check-in the crossroads today and change my life, you know.

When I got sober, I was living in a stolen Volkswagen Rabbit that I had stolen out of Tucson where I did my last geographic. I had some stolen money from a bad coke deal. It wasn't a bad coke deal, it was a coke deal that never happened because I stole the money. And I went back to LA because it was the only other place I knew where I could go or maybe I could do something or have some kind of a life, you know, and, you know, my family wanted nothing to do with me. My sister swore she would spit on my grave.

I had no friends left. I burnt every bridge and my life in Tucson at the time revolved around me getting a front of a gram or 2. Going to Jack in the box at 4 in the afternoon and buying the biggest, gnarliest hamburger and eating it, so that it would like sit in my stomach like a brick and then I would go hustle at the bars that I used to hang out with and I knew all the bartenders and I tried to sell a couple of grams and you know, steal a few lines out of it and, and drink for free and that was my life almost every single day, you know. And then when I was living, they finally asked me to leave and so when I headed back to LA, you know, what what was in that Volkswagen Rabbit was it. That was my life, you know.

I'm 6 foot 6 and my life had been condensed down to the front seat of a Volkswagen Rabbit and, and that's where I slept at night. So you don't roll over much, you know, and I would take that car up into the canyons in LA and I would park it and I would put towels in the window, so that if anybody came by and wanted to see who was in this car, I could like have a second to get my act together because I was so ashamed and humiliated, you know, about where my life had gone and, you know, and we and for newcomers you know, we talk about living life one day at a time. I don't know about you guys but but when I was in my last month using, my life was down to about 1 hour at a time because I had nowhere to go. Nobody wanted anything to do with me. You know, I would wake up in the morning, I would go down to the 711, I'd buy a one of those 711 sticky muffins that are about the size of a grapefruit.

I'd buy a big cup of coffee in a newspaper and I'd go sit in the park and I'd read every single word in the newspaper because I had nowhere else to go. I had nowhere to go, you know. I'd it was before cell phones, so it wasn't like, oh yeah, I'll just call my buddy, you know. It was, you know, it was a time where, you know, either I went to see my old friends that I that I knew got high or or, you know, there was really nothing for me, you know. I was afraid to go hang around the people that I knew because I knew they got high.

Now to back up a little bit, you know, I started drinking when I was 13. I started doing drugs when I was 15. I shot dope for the first time when I was 18 years old. The first night that I shot dope, I shot PCP, which at the time we called match head THC, you know, which Yeah, right. But what happened that night January 19 69 when I stuck my arm out and this guy stuck a syringe in it, I realized that I went from point a to point z in a nanosecond.

You know. And when I started getting high, I come from an alcoholic family, you know. My mother died down in Tucson at 47 years old. She rolled her car 6 times, broke her neck and back. Last time I saw her, she was in Saint Mary's Hospital in a halo bed with her head screwed down with blood dripping out of her forehead and the only way she could communicate with me was by blinking her eyes.

And she was 47 years old, 6 foot 2, beautiful strapping woman who alcoholism had crushed, completely crushed. The last time I saw my stepfather down in Tucson, he was riding off with the dirty dozen and, and I had a gun and he had a gun and it was gonna be either somebody's gonna leave or somebody's gonna get shot, you know, and the way I met my stepfather was I woke up on Christmas morning, my mother slept on the pull out couch and my sister and I each had a bedroom. I woke up on Christmas morning to come out and open presents and this man was in bed with my mom and she had picked him up from Sing Sing where he just got done doing 3 to 5 for armed robbery and she had met him by giving his mother rights to prison on visitation day. And so when he got out of jail, she figured he's better than a puppy. So she took him in and he was this 5 foot 10 body builder and I was a 6 foot 5 14 year old and he was gonna teach me respect, you know, and he was a full blown alcoholic, full blown, insane human being and you know, and he beat my ass for the next 3 years on a regular basis.

You know, so I've seen alcoholism up close. You know. I've seen alcoholism up close every single day, you know. I come out of Greenwich Village in the sixties when there were juicers and heads, you know, and I was one of those heads. We used to drive around in a 59 Chevy and flash peace signs at people and think we were cool, you know, and take Aussley and walk around the Fillmore in the West Village.

And, and I was never gonna be a juicer because I watched what alcohol did to my family, you know, and there's no way I was gonna end up like my mother, you know. There's no way I was gonna end up like the kind of person that my stepfather was. And, now where all this is going, I have no idea. But, you know, so I started down this road of, of insanity at a very young age, you know, at a very young age. When you're shooting dope at 18 years old and you're living out on the streets, I left home at 17 and never went back.

At 19 years old, I was snorting cocaine and heroin off of gold records with $100 bills thinking everything my parents told me was a lie and this is what my life was gonna be because through circumstances and and incidents beyond my control, I ended up working in the music business back in the early seventies late sixties when stuff was just exploding and I was in the right place at the right time, you know, and I hooked up with some people and life was crazy and it was all about abundance and insanity and and we thought it was just normal, you know, it was normal and that was the life I came out of and that's the life I lived till about 19, well almost 1983, but full bore, up until the late seventies. You know, it's funny because when I got here, I wasn't an alcoholic. I was just one of you guys. I was just a coke addict. You just, you didn't understand.

I was a coke addict and, and I didn't realize that I carried a bottle of Kahlua in my suitcase everywhere I went because every morning when I would order coffee from room service, I made sure there was Kahlua in it, you know, to sweeten it up with some cream and then it got to be, well every morning there was some Kahlua and some vodka in the coffee because it needed a kick to get me started, you know. And it I never it never came to my mind that when we worked and we were out on the road, we, you know, we had alcohol pro flow freely but you know, I only drank Heineken until 10 or 11 o'clock. So that doesn't make you an alcoholic if you're just smoking buds and drinking beer in the morning, you know. The alcoholics are the guys that drinking Jack Daniels at 10 o'clock in the morning, you know. I never touched Jack Daniels till at least 2 or 3 in the afternoon, you know.

I mean, that was a daytime drink, you know. And, so like I said, you know, I got here under some really crazy circumstances, when I first started when the first time I did cocaine, I injected it. You know. I remember I did it and I was strung out on black tar opium and I said, what's the big deal with this shit, you know, this doesn't do anything. It's like, okay, I've got to overcome a big habit of black tartar fuel cocaine, it's not gonna happen.

And then the magic happened, 1 guy showed up with a quarter ounce one night and said, here, do as much as you want. And my roommate and I went on a little shooting spree, you know, and it was back in the days where where cocaine wasn't addictive, you know. So, you know, we started doing it and come about 4 or 5 in the morning. I don't get maybe not that late but it was dark. It was late.

All of a sudden, you know, my roommate gets into that thing where, you know, it's time to turn off the stereo and the TV because he has to listen for them. And, you know, and then he starts doing the window thing And I'm like, dude, what's what's going on here? And he says, look, there's a bush in the bush over there behind, you know, and I don't see anything because I don't get it yet. You know what I mean? But that yet part was really major.

And, you know, it got to the point where it was so bad that the next day, we went outside and he there was one of the bushes were broken and he said, see, I told you there was a guy in this bush last night. And and you would think from the first night of the insanity, because what happened, you know, we were being nice and we were taking turns, you know. Okay. This is your shot. This is my shot.

Somehow, when there's 2 people doing it, somebody always gets the last hit. And it was me who was gonna get the last hit and we got into a fist fight on the floor because I took it and put it on the floor. And, so you would think with the insanity of a fist fight with my roommate, paranoia beyond control, peeking out windows till, you know, the sun came up, trying to find a dealer at 5 o'clock in the morning to get more, you would think that might have been a clue that something was wrong, you know. Because I'm a little hippie from Greenwich village that thought I'd take an acid and, you know, cruising around was it, you know, and here I am shooting class a narcotics, peeking out of windows at 3 in the morning and, and it wasn't, you know, I continued to shoot cocaine for for probably almost 15 years, you know. And, and that was my preferred way of ingesting the drug.

I thought smoking it was a total waste because I didn't need to get the curtains high, you know. I didn't get that part. It's like, what? You know, you know, and then it took all that time to do all that shit with the ether and the baking soda and, you know, you guys now I guess I have it easy. You just go down to the hood and you buy a macadamia nut and smoke it.

But, you know, so because I have so much time to kill, I'm gonna just tell a couple little more stories and one is, you know, one of the nights when I knew I was really really out there and I had gone back to Atlanta from LA, which is one of the places that I had spent some time, and, and I ran into an old friend of mine and this old friend of mine was the 1st drug dealer I knew that made it. I mean, made it to like the 911 Porsche to the house in the country, you know, made it for 1976 or 77. He was living high on the hog. He had hefty bags full of cash buried in the woods and the whole deal. And, and he invited me over to his house to party and he had an old country house, you know, out in the sticks.

And he came out with a with a red wax ball and split it open with a big knife and it was one giant Peruvian flake and it kind of crumpled up on the table and he had a box of syringes and he said, man do as much as you want you know. So me being the rock and roll whore, I sat down at the table with a butter knife and did this shot and sat there and turned around and was like having a little thing and he said, well, how was that? And I went, you know, in my arrogance, I went, well, it was good but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. And he went, oh, go ahead. Do do some more if you want.

So, you know, within about 30 seconds of already doing about a quarter of a gram, I dip a butter knife into this thing and do another hit and it was a really hot hit, you know. And I turned around on my chair and I put the syringe in the glass and my hand starts going like this and my feet start going like this and I'm like twitching like crazy and my eyeballs are switching and I hear this clicking noise like in a silent movie where everything is just and I look at my friend and I go, is this really happening or am I hallucinating? And he goes, no. This is really happening and I'm like, you know, turning bright purple. So they take me into the next room and there's an air conditioner in the wall and a rocking chair and they put me in this rocking chair and they wrap me in ice towels with ice in them and I'm like dripping and I'm sitting in this rocking chair holding on and going like this and you know, getting up to about a 100 miles an hour.

And and the old, the old homes in Atlanta, maybe your grandmother's house, had flowery wallpaper, you know. So I'm watching all this wallpaper doing all this shit like I take a 3 hits of window pane or something and I'm like going holy shit and I'm dripping with sweat and then all of a sudden I realized that I'm getting tunnel vision and the tunnel is starting to shrink you know and it's shrinking and it's shrinking and it's getting smaller and it gets down about the size of a 50¢ piece and I'm sitting there just holding on white knuckled in this chair rocking out, staring at this little tiny spot on the wall knowing in my heart that if I black out, I'm probably gonna die. You know, if I black out, I'm probably gonna die And I sat there and I rode out that rush and I got done and I came out of it and I walked into the other room and my friends went, are you okay? And I went, yeah. And they say, well what's going on?

I said, I don't know but let's do some more because that was fucking great, you know. And, that was 1976 or 77 and I continued to shoot dope through 1982. And every time I shot cocaine, I looked for that rush. You know, I looked for that grand mal seizure and I can't tell you how many times I found it and I was in the wrong room and remembered that I didn't lock the front door and all of a sudden I'm crawling on my hands and knees to check the security system, you know. Am I locked in, you know.

And, you know, and in the end it got to be complete insanity. You know, in the end, I started having stare down contest with space people and shit, you know. And and the worst part is is that I had 2 kinds of space people, you know, I had the tall guys with hoods who had red eyes and they never moved. They just stood on the other side of the window really still. And I knew they were there and I peeked out at them and just watch.

And then I think, well it's time to go do another hit but I don't wanna leave yet, You know? And then, I had the other kind of space people, who were these little guys about this big and they scampered. You know. They were the guys that like ran from chimney to chimney and bush to bush, you know. And I knew they weren't cops because they were too short.

And then, I get really brave, I go back out on the porch, you know, I'd venture out into the air and like see if I can maybe catch one up close, you know, kinda like munchkins or something. And, you know, one night I spoke at a locked down VA unit in LA and a guy came up to me afterwards and went, man I'm so glad you told that story. I thought I was the only guy that saw those little guys running around on the rooftops, you know. And you know, in the end when cocaine finally quit working for me, when I still had a little bit of shit going on down in Tucson, you know, I would go home at night and at the time I was managing this, biker strip joint down there that was about half the size of this room and, I would go home with a bunch of blow and I'd lay out shots for the night and have a bucket of ice and a bucket of hot water and I'd sit there and I had my whole bar set and I would just start shooting dope, you know, and I had a loaded 44 and a very sharp pencil and I would do my shot.

I would get fucking whacked out. I would get paranoid. I crawl into one room on my hands and knees. I take the pencil and I push push aside the vertical blind and I lay on the floor and I just look out with the pencil because I knew if I use my finger you guys could see my finger. But, you couldn't see the pencil point and then as soon as I thought that room was secure then I go in the other bedroom and secure that room and then go into the living room and make sure that was secure And as soon as my hands weren't shaking anymore then I'd go do another hit, you know.

Now I worked at a strip club and offered dancers as much coke as they wanted to come home with me and they wouldn't take me up on the offer. Something about a vision for you, I guess, you know. So I thought something was wrong with that picture and, you know, and basically that led me up to where I told you, where I did this deal and stole this car and headed back to LA, you know, and that was it. And when I got there, I had nothing, nowhere to go, nobody to see, I was scared to death, the people that I knew that lived in LA were in the entertainment business and I knew they all got high. In the back of my mind, somewhere I knew that getting high was part of my problem.

I knew that that drugs and alcohol had led to my downfall, but I wasn't quite sure how to how to connect the dots, you know. I wasn't quite sure how to make it work and you know, I tried to get a hold of a few friends, I would see a few people, I would hang out, I try to find couches to crash on and I was just literally bouncing around. I was 31 years old and didn't have anywhere to go. I'd blown every single opportunity in my life, I'd blown every single relationship in my life, you know, although I did have, I did get married when I was using, that was exciting. I met this girl on a December on a job, we snorted coke.

On January, we had our first date. She asked me if I knew how to shoot coke. I said, of course. 3 weeks later, I moved in because she was a bisexual coke addict who was in the bondage. 4 months later, we got married and it was quite the affair.

And 4 months after that, we were divorced. But there was a lot of awake time in that 10 month period, you know. So I figure it was like about a 5 year marriage squeezed into about 10 months. But So I'm breaking things up here. So when I got back to LA, obviously my ex wife didn't want anything to do with me.

Most of my friends didn't want anything to do with me, and, and I finally was able to get a hold of 1 man, you know, and who was a friend of mine and we'd spend a lot of time partying and and doing stuff and hanging out, and, and he said he would meet me for dinner, you know, and, I went to this restaurant in LA and he met me there and he said, you know another friend of mine is coming, his name is Charlie. And I was like, well, who's this guy? And he said, well, he's my sponsor. He goes, I've been in AA for a year and a half and I have 90 days sober. And Charlie showed up and they, talked to me.

When my memory being what it is, I can't tell you if they really 12 step me in the sense of trying to 12 step me into a meeting, but they just kind of talk to me about you know, if you're really sick and tired of being sick and tired and you really wanna try to live life a different way, then maybe you might wanna come to a meeting with us, You know, just maybe. Now, CA at the time was about 3 weeks old. They had had the first meeting about 3 weeks earlier and they said, well, we know where this new meeting is if you wanna come with us tomorrow night, you know, and they took me to this meeting which looked like this but really wasn't like this. It was about a third of this room and they sat me in the middle with 2 guys on either side who were absolutely spooky and, you know, I'm living in my car with the stolen money and this was in West Hollywood or Hollywood, right on the border, and I'm looking around the room counting Rolexes and at the time New Balance running shoes were in and they were like a $100 a pair and my self worth is diminishing by the second, you know, thinking what am I doing here?

And the speaker got up and he talked about making 1,000,000 of dollars, losing 1,000,000 of dollars and now he was making 1,000,000 of dollars again and I'm thinking, fuck man. What am I doing here? And, you know, and I had no idea. No idea what was going on and then they opened the meeting up to participation and this guy raised his hand and he got up and he shared about going out on a relapse and he talked about getting on his hands and knees and picking stucco out of the carpet. He talked about putting tinfoil on the bathroom window and poking holes in it, you know.

Now I related to this guy, my ears perked up because I understood everything he was talking about. I identified with every feeling that he was telling me and then he said, the one thing that changed my life forever. He said, the reason he was back in a meeting was because he knew that this is where the hope was, you know. And at that moment, I don't know if I heard that for what it was. The fact that really what I wanted was just hope.

Hope to have some kind of a light. Hope to have a couch to sleep on besides the front seat of a Volkswagen. Hope to maybe have a hot meal instead of a muffin from 711, but it was appealing. It was appealing enough for me to make the decision to maybe stick around and try to go to one more meeting to meet some other people. You know and I went up and introduced myself to this gentleman after the meeting thinking he was some little Hollywood street urchin, you know, and we became friends and he invited me up to his mansion in the hills for a party the next week because he turned out to be some famous plastic surgeon.

You know, and we still take cakes the same week every single year, you know, and, and he's not a guy that I would mix with, like it talks about in the book. I hang out with cops today, you know. I mean it's weird, you know. One of my good friends is an ex Detroit homicide cop who and who started out, you know, on the vice squad when they first started vice. I mean it's so bizarre who we end up hanging out with, you know, but what happened is is the man who came up to me after the meeting and said, do you have a copy of the big book?

You know, and this is the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, and I said no and he said, here. He gave me my copy and my friend said that as long as I was willing to go to meetings and stay sober that I could sleep on his couch. I ended up sleeping on his couch for 5 months. And this man, Tom, said to me, and for those of you who don't know, I'll say his name. Tom Kenny, Tom Kenny, Tom Kenny.

Without Tom Kenny, there would be no cocaine anonymous. No matter what you read in HFC, what you hear from anybody, there would be no cocaine anonymous without Tom Kenny. It was his thought to create the first meeting. Anyway, Tom gave me my big book and said, take this back, read chapter 3, more about alcoholism. If you have any problems with the word alcohol, you substitute it for cocaine or cocaineism.

You know, today it might be crack or crackism or Vicodin or Vicodinism, but whatever it is, it's the ism. You know, and that night I became an alcoholic because what happened is I started to read this book and by the time I got through the second second page of chapter 3, it described what my life was like and the insanity in my life. Now I thought when I'm 31 years old living in a stolen Volkswagen rabbit that I finally grown up to be the piece of shit that my stepfather always told me I was gonna be. Something about that started to ring really clear in my head, you know. And what the book told me was is that I suffered from a disease that was cunning, baffling and powerful and that if I chose, there is a possibility to recover from this because I because I'm one of those guys who used to get plenty of fronts and had plenty of grand schemes and plenty of opportunities and plenty of ways that this time it was gonna be different.

That this time, if only, you know, I always thought my life was a case of bad breaks and misunderstandings, you know. I was always the victim. It was always something going on, if only, you know. What I come to find out was it was my bad choices, my lack of responsibility for every single thing I did because of the way the disease of alcoholism ran my life. Because the obsession to drink and use overwhelmed my desire to think clearly and live right, you know.

And, you know, and by the time I got to the story about the Jaywalker, I mean, that's it. You know, when you stick needles in your arms, you're like jaywalking with a locomotive, you know, because I can't tell you how many times I stuck a needle in my arm and woke up the next day hitting hitting yellow jackets. If any of you guys remember what those were, they were barbiturates. We used to have these things, nebbutal, second nulls, 2 nulls, before quaaludes. And even for quaaludes, some of those you guys have made might not have caught some of those things, but Quaaludes were tough to shoot, a little milky.

But, I tried. I beat shit with hammers and cold soaked shit overnight to try to get it into a syringe. If you're a drug addict of my variety, you did whatever it took to get high, you know, and, there's many a night that I OD'd and woke up and had grandma seizures and swallowed my tongue and all sorts of crazy shit, you know, and if that's not jaywalking in front of the bus, I don't know what is, you know. So that chapter described the insanity of my disease of alcoholism to a t, you know. So no matter what, if you think you're an addict or you think you're a cocaine addict, you know, you probably are a person who suffers from the disease of alcoholism which makes you an alcoholic, you know.

You can play some antics about it but, you know, the book I read says, I'm an alcoholic who suffers from the disease of alcoholism. Maybe if they were crushing up coca leaves before they are crushing up grapes, we'd be talking about a different disease but we're not right now And the recovery that I know the cocaine the cocaine anonymous practices comes from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is around here somewhere. You know. That's the basic text and the basic tools for recovery here, you know. The big book and then once you read the big book there's this other book called the 12 and 12, which is pretty goddamn important, and I'll get to that later.

But anyway, where was I? So you get me on these rants about recovery. Shit. 12 before. No.

No Quaaludes. 12 before. Somebody who doesn't know what a Rohrer 714 is, boy, I feel sorry for you. Gorilla biscuits. Anyways, so I went to this meeting and, you know, and this guy gave me this book and I went and read it, you know, and what happened for me was is that I got bit by the bug of enthusiasm that I talked about before.

You know, I saw all this energy and all these people and people were doing stuff. Now, I didn't have a whole lot of other places to go. So it was a good idea for me to go to meetings if I wanted to be sober. You know, I would go to 3 meetings a day and I would hang out with anybody I could. I would go to to coffee and fellowship afterwards with $5 in my pocket and spend my last five last $5 just to be a part of, you know.

But the thing was is that I was staying sober and I was going to meetings and I was doing what I had to do, you know. And and I was hearing a little bit more every day, you know, I would hear a little bit more every day. You know, when I got here, you know, there was a man who had talked about prayer and he talked about how he's going down to face a federal judge and he was going to jail and he went in a men's room stall and he got on his knees to pray and this whole thing. And now, this was the guy that was the millionaire that was the first speaker at my first meeting and I'm thinking, this guy is in a stall in a men's room praying, what's this about? And I went up to Tom and I said, you know what's the deal with prayer?

You know why is it so important? And and we talked about it and I said, well I don't like the idea of getting on my knees to pray. You know, I don't want to get on my knees for nobody and he said, well if you got a problem with getting on your knees he goes at night just take your shoes and throw them underneath the bed and in the morning when you're down there on your knees, just stop and say a prayer, you know. And that's the way I prayed for the first couple of times, you know, I would make believe. And if I would hear my friend coming from the back of the apartment, I would jump up so quick, because there's just no way anybody was gonna catch me on my knees.

I'm a hip cool rock and roller, you know, there's just no way. And, you know, and that's the way I started to pray and I was still very uncomfortable with with praying on my knees for a lot of years and for those of you that don't know, we had a, a non addict trustee in cocaine anonymous who is named father Francis and father Francis is a Benedictine monk and for any of you that may have even read HFC which is another piece of literature that is suggested to read around here. There's something about going to meetings that besides going to meetings you read the literature. You know, it's in the literature. It's not in the meetings.

You can go to meetings. You can stay sober on meetings. You will go insane and drink. You will go insane and drink or use if you only go to meetings. The solution is not in meetings.

You know, you find out where the tools are in meetings and you find out where your sponsor is in meetings and you find out where your sponsor's friends are in meetings. Enough preaching for a moment. Where was I? Oh, the monk. So if you've read HFC, there's a story where my friend Lionel picks up the bag out of cocaine out of his pocket, throws it up into the air and the wind and at the monastery.

So father Francis was the first non addict trust and I was up at the monastery one time visiting with Francis and I said, you know I am still having such a hard time with the idea get on my knees. He goes, man I hate to pray on my knees. I said, you're kidding me. He goes, no. The only time I do that is when I'm in the chapel and I have to do it.

He goes, to me, that's like Catholic aerobics. Right John? He's like, I hate it. He goes, when I wake up in the morning, he goes, I sit in my chair and I pray and I meditate. And it was like, this big weight off of me that, God, I don't have to be perfect in the eyes of God every time I try to pray.

All I have to do is the best that I can do for the day that I can do it, you know. And that's the way that I opened up my heart to start to pray more, you know. And, you know, and then I moved on into the other stuff because when I first started to hear the steps like most new comers, it sounds like Chinese arithmetic. You know, it's like, what? You want what?

Character defect. What? God as I understood. What? You know, and you know, and I heard the thing about inventory and I was saying, you know, what's this about?

And my sponsor said to me, he goes, you want a new life? You gotta get rid of your old life. Because if you're living in an apartment and you got a bunch of old furniture, he goes, if you wanna buy new furniture, you gotta get rid of the old furniture. Because if you're making cider, if you're making, moonshine in an old still, because you gotta clean that still out really good if you wanna make cider in it because the littlest bit of old residue, you're gonna have fermented cider all over again. So, you've gotta do an inventory.

So, So I thought, well I'm gonna write this great American rock and roll war story out and it's gonna turn into a screen play. You know, I forgot to mention, when I got sober I thought, well, if I stay sober long enough in a year or so, I'll be a circuit speaker, I'll live back in the hills in Laurel Canyon, I'll have a Mercedes, another Harley Davidson and I'll be working back in the music business. And on day 366, I was like, where's mine? My sponsor reminded me that I hadn't had a job yet for the 1st year and I went, oh. But anyway, what what he said to me is no.

He goes, you're not. He goes, you're gonna take this inventory. You're gonna make these columns and you're gonna write it like a telegram. You're gonna go that that that that that that stop and you're gonna go down that that that stop and when you get done you're gonna go to the next column and you're gonna do it that way and he goes the only thing I want you to do is I want you to put at the end I want you to put the secrets in there that you were never gonna tell anybody. You know, and I did that.

When I sat down and I shared that inventory and did that 5th step, that was the first time as an adult I'd ever been completely honest to the best of my ability with another human being, you know. And the freedom that there that was there for me was unbelievable. Now if you read the big book on page 77, you guys hear all the time about the promises and we read them from the podium. The first set of promises on page 77 where it talks about the 5th step being the bridge, the the beginning of the bridge back to life, the beginning of the spiritual experience where the path broadens, you know. That's the 5th step.

It's the first set of promises when you go through the book, you know. And for me, it was the beginning of that freedom to allow me to become who I am. Because for years, I was a hustler, a liar, a cheat, a con artist, you know. I remember I was at a party for a band in LA one night and I knew all the guys in the band and I was walking around and I had one of those brown bottles with square bottoms on it, you know, that they talk about in who's an addict. And, and a bottle of Dom under my arm and I was working the room and I was hustling and I looked over and the keyboard was staring at me.

The keyboard player was staring at me shaking his head going still the same because he knew. He knew I was just scamming on everything in the room you know, that there was nothing really going on. It was just one big hustle. You know and today I I can get that same feeling back of how he expressed that to me because I knew that I was so full of shit, you know, and I wanted to do that inventory. I think I did my first inventory when I had about 79, 89 days, something like that, you know, know, and I wanted to get it out.

I wanted to to start to clean up and to start the process of recovery. It says in the book when you read chapter 5 and it goes a b c's, it says we immediately set upon a course of action, of taking an inventory. It doesn't say we wait till we have 4 months because in the 4th month we should take the 4th step. It doesn't say we should wait till we have 4 years because in the 4th year we should take the 4th step. It doesn't say wait till your sponsor tells you you're well enough to do it, you know.

It doesn't say we we wait till you think you're well enough to do it because in that case we never do it. It says we immediately set upon a course of action you know and and that's what it is, you know. And, you know, in Bill Wilson in his later years in his writings said that the two biggest keys to long term sobriety is inventory and meditation. You know, Bob said love and service before he died and before Bill died, he said he said meditation and inventory. The 2 biggest things for long term sobriety.

Now I've been coming to this room for a long time and there might be 3 people that I know in here that probably have over 15 years, you know. Now I know they're still some of them are still around, but you know, a week ago, a girl with 8 years that I know committed suicide. In my last 5 years, I've probably seen I, actually, more people than I can count OD, die, and go out and use, you know, because they held on to their secrets, because they held on to their character defects, you know, and another thing we'll go into, we'll go into, when you read the book on on the 6 and 7 step, there's 2 paragraphs on 6 and 7, in the big book. So if your sponsors taking you through 6 and 7 in the big book, say please can we do it in the 12 and 12? Because in the 12 and 12, there's 43 paragraphs on 6 and 7 written less than 10 years after the big book was written.