Don P. from Aurora, CO at the 6th Annual Big Book Weekend at Tanglewood in Camden, ME

Y'all asleep at all?

Let me see the hands of the snores.

Y'all get enough to eat

these? These guys are something, aren't they?

If my experience has taught me anything at all is that the experience of life

is different for everybody. It's a matter of perception, a matter of attitude, a matter of viewpoint.

Truth is truth, but we all

come at it in different ways at different times. So there is no right or wrong,

there's only what is.

Last night we had an interesting event the

showed up.

Now that meant different things to different people. For some people, there's the fear of the bet

getting into hair. There's for some people, there's not knowing what the bat's going to do. For others, it has a very specific significance. And would you share your perception with us?

Give her microphone

over here. OK? Would you mind using that?

Don't mean to embarrass her, but identify with her experience.

Well, because

I,

well,

I didn't wasn't afraid of it. It was like I knew it was a good sign. It was kind of like some people might see a dove or something. And so I went home and I read my book back while home. Last night was a 10

and one of the ironic things was was when I went to open it up. I keep a feather in it from the last place I was at and a month ago I had read my cards because I like Indian things and it was on the back

and so it is rebirth and he Dawn had talked about

psychic healing last night and what in the reading what it told me was it was about a shamanistic death and the death of old ideas in the South and beliefs and the re emergence of new ideas and beliefs. And that you must heal yourself before you can help anybody else and go out and help heal other people. So the back kind of came from

here and I just thought that was

no

some nice omen.

I just got back from Calgary. I'm still talking like a Canadian.

So I came to understand that I have a body that's different,

non alcoholic body. Doctor Silkworth, medical doctor likened it to an allergy.

Bill mentions whether we agree with that or not, it's a good analogy. My body responds differently to this particular substance than does a non alcoholic, which means it will have describable symptoms

and they are described here.

Then there's several of them. One is the craving that I develop after I take 1 drink of alcohol.

I develop a craving for more alcohol and this is physical

and it also becomes mental.

My mind changes,

goes on to share with us that that would be academic if we never took a drink. That would never happen. So when I say I recovered from that symptom because I don't drink alcohol, I don't exhibit that symptom. I don't get a craving for alcohol that comes after the first drink. Because I don't take the first drink doesn't mean I'm not, that I'm cured of that. In fact, the longer I'm around, the more certain I am that that's gotten worse, not better.

And the alcoholic that seems to continue on. And my

the reason for saying that is I'm watching people with 253035 years of sobriety drink again

now. Young relapsers keep coming back.

People who start drinking after a long period of time don't get back. They're dead within weeks.

Then there's another group of A members and I'm watching. Sadly, with long term sobriety who truly drinking is no longer an option. That's gone,

but they're blowing their brains out

because the pain has become too much.

And I'm concerned about that.

And I watch and I talk to my listen.

And it seems to me the main reason that that occurs is that they've stopped doing the things that are necessary to remain in fit spiritual condition, which means remain in tune with other people.

Yeah, there's a lot of some of them stopped going to meetings, some don't.

Some go to meetings until they shoot themselves. And I understand that. I've been to some meetings where I left wondering.

The main thing I noticed that they stopped doing. They stopped working with other people

and stop giving it away freely.

And that's consistent with my bullshit sifter from the very beginning. The second sentence in the beginning of this book is that we show others precisely how we recover. Working with others is what this is about, and from the very beginning we're taught in this book how to do that.

I still get live 12 step calls. I presume you do too.

Fresh meat is always available

and I like to take some fairly new people because quite often a new person will not identify with me.

I'm 35 years sober, that's not even possible. I must either be lying or it's I wasn't really an alcoholic or whatever,

Somebody new who still got a little bit of shakes. How did you stay sober today? So in my continuing to try to grow in understanding and effectiveness, how can I stay today so that I can be heard by the new person?

And that will be part of our challenge this weekend, to grow in effectiveness and understanding.

But the main problem of the alcoholic centers in the mind

when it comes to alcohol and several other things, I do not learn from experience.

I just don't. It's a very poor teacher in some areas because I don't learn.

I have a forgetter that is on duty full time.

There will come time. One of the one of the ways our kind of insanity is described is that I will sometimes not be able to bring into my consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the last time that this occurred. It just won't show up.

One of my old mentors put it this way. You can't solve the problem with the problem. You got to solve the problem with the answer.

Well, if my problem centers in my mind, I probably ought not try to use that

too much. But it must be a part of things. If things don't make sense to me, I'm not going for it. The human condition

is 1A. Need to understand. I want to know why.

If my thinking is lifted to a little different plane, understanding why does not become

it isn't done because if I don't understand, it's a threat to me.

Most of the time when I'm growing up, I'm trying to learn things so I can protect myself against what I think is a hostile world. And that's what my character defects are. Mainly. My defense is against what I think is a hostile world. This isn't a hostile world.

I hear funny things and I might as well get them out of the way so that you can either

challenge me or accept it or go home, whatever.

I do not understand living life on life's terms. Life doesn't make any terms. Only people make terms.

In my experience, I make the terms

that's either a danger or a good sign.

People who wear white hats are either OK or they shouldn't be allowed in polite company.

Our prejudices are ridiculous. They come down to stuff like that. When it gets right down to it's a prejudgment.

Prejudice is we'll cover some of that. But so I I was brought to understand

that my problem is so severe

there is no human power.

We can solve this.

My sponsors were very clear. You cannot have my God. I cannot even share my God with you. All I can share are stories about how I see it play out. I can't define God. Probably ought not even use the word, except it seems to be the right word.

It means so much. It means nothing

because of the way everybody looks at it. On the other side of that, because it means nothing. It means everything.

That's Buddhist as hell, isn't it?

I like Zen stuff. Because when you run out of smart things to say, you can throw one of those out and you're off the hook.

Yeah,

I drank alcoholically from the time I started drinking, which simply means I was out of control from the beginning. I have never had any control over the amount I drank, and I quite honestly never tried to stop drinking. I did try to control the drinking

when I came out of that, out of the Navy when I was 19. Within three months, I had also drunk myself out of a good job. I was a mainframe man for what was in Mountain Bell, the telephone company. And I, I really love the work. I have one of those meticulous little minds, and here's these thousands of connections up here and I get to make them. And this was fun.

It was particularly fun to make a connection, which was illegal, and we can listen in on what's going on.

Party line, You know, nothing serious going on. I just have one of those inquisitive natures. If I came to your house, the 1st place I go is your bathroom so I can look in your medicine cabinet. And it isn't that I want your stuff. I want to know what you're taking. It tells me a whole lot about who you are. I'm just curious.

One of my favorite phrases came from a kid that I sponsored. As we went through the big book, he would say, why would I want to do that?

And I got it.

That's my life question. Why would I want to do that? And I'm not being belligerent. I'd like to know why

I'm willing to try it. That's the other side of my nature. Whatever it is, let's give it a shot.

But I kind of like know why I'd want to do that. Are you one of those out front guys? The cliff's only 40 feet high. Let's see how many of us can survive this one. Me first,

we go.

The human condition is one of duality.

I don't want to get all philosophic, but it is about duality. It is about the human condition. Little, little human animals compete naturally.

They're in training.

There's upsides and there's downsides. There's rights and there's wrongs. There's this whole duality. The spiritual life is one of unity,

so those have to be coupled here if we're going to learn to live this way. It becomes a very interesting thing

because I am in the human condition, but I'm a spiritual being. How do I learn to live with that?

And one of the things this book shows me is how to learn to live with that.

What I'm leading up to is this. This book talks about the destruction of self centeredness being absolutely required. My main problem is self centeredness. That's the root of my trouble.

It does not say the death of self, it says death to self.

In essence, I've taken the keys and the car away from the five year old,

didn't get to drive anymore. But you always want a 5 year old on the trip with you.

I mean, have you ever? I've ridden with some adults. What a pain in the neck. They just want to get there, wherever the hell there is.

I come from the West where we have miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.

And we would take trips across this great expanse. My dad would pull us out of school and take us to Carlsbad or out onto the desert. And

I can remember we drive along one time in particular. This, this one was fresh in my memory still. We were headed for Los Angeles because he had business to do in Los Angeles and I couldn't have been maybe 10 or 11:00 somewhere in there. And if we're driving across the desert, suddenly there's this big hand painted sign. 10 miles.

See the two headed calf?

Yeah,

A2 headed cat. Yeah, and a mile down is another sign. 9 miles to go,

crippled monkey.

He didn't even slow down.

Now this trip's getting interesting at 8 miles, 8 miles. Baby rattlers,

see the eagle at 5 miles? Are we there yet Dad? Slow down Dad. And then you come to this God awful sign. Huge big red arrow with yellow borders. Desert Museum 2 headed calf half mile down this way.

Turn and turn. You got to talk him into it. He wants to get to Lai. Want to see the two headed cat?

We got down to the end of the road and sure enough there it was. Old Desert Scotty,

who is a con man by the way. All good people are con man.

Yeah, the most spiritual of all are con men. Did you ever see a picture of His Holiness the Dalai Lama? That's a shit eating grin.

You said

little life, Globe says you won't get serious, Read my book if you won't get serious. You want to have some fun? Come talk with me

anyway

there. And sure enough there is a 2 headed calf now. It's stuffed.

Probably the extra head was sewn on somewhere, I don't know. But it it may have been real at one time. And there were baby rattlers in a little box. There were some baby rattlers.

This guy is slick Outback. He had a real rally snack and a pen. Old decrepit. The eagle was molting. There was a crippled monkey. I'll never forget the crippled monkey because I I identified with the crippled monkey.

But the thing I knew for sure, absolutely without doubt, is that I needed to stay here and help Scotty with this museum.

That was my destiny.

Just leave me, I'll be fine. Me and Scotty will will do fine.

Without that youngster, the trip would have just been a trip.

The youngster makes a journey,

the curious one, the one that is no hurry to accomplish anything,

but if you don't have an adult, you end up staying out on the desert with A2 headed calf.

OK, got to have an adult to say this was fun. We got to get back on the road now we

do have some things to do and that's the balance that I see living the spiritual life in in the human condition. Never ever pass up an opportunity to see the two headed calf.

But remember, we do have things to do

and the journey must continue

and we can all go home now. That's all I've got that's sold. I love that story. Yeah, I'm going to tell that again someday.

So there's this sensitivity that I brought to

alcohol.

The other side was the terrible fear

and the sense that

I can remember laying in bed, 13 years old, crying with the covers over my head, wondering when my people were going to get back from outer space and pick me up because it had become obvious to me by the time I was 13 that I'd been dropped off on the wrong planet. I've been listening to human beings talk.

And I didn't think like they did.

I didn't feel like they did. My responses to life were not I tend to laugh at funerals and cry out hockey games. I'm inappropriate

and actually happened. I got in real trouble in Dakota, Mexico. One time we were visiting down there. A funeral went by. I don't know how to respond appropriate. I started laughing. Many people do in those circumstances.

And boy did I catch you all for that,

which proved once again I really am a misfit. Inappropriate.

I've learned since then that a lot of people lie about what they think and feel because they're in the same boat I am. They don't know what's appropriate and it's a certain time in our lives we must be appropriate.

I love watching adolescents. I don't want to ever raise another one.

I just don't have what it takes anymore.

But I love watching them

because I stayed in that state till I was just about 42 before I finally finished it.

This is where the drive for I am so different. I'm the only one on the planet. But I don't want you to know that I want to look just like you do. So we all wear uniforms.

It's not just Catholic schools. All schools wear uniforms. It's just the Catholic schools. The nuns decide what it's going to look like in regular schools. The 8th graders decide,

OK,

what was your uniform? And

10th grade?

No, I'm, I'm looking back. I'm going to pick on him. He's got that look in his eye.

Well, was it T-shirt, jeans and AT shirt? Yeah, ours was jeans and AT shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the arm.

Whether you smoked or not, that was the deal.

Rat tails? Yeah, ours was a Mohawk haircut.

If you are really cool, see that the Mohawk was a wonderful thing to have in junior high school and high school because it was this to the system

and at the same time it was cool.

I remember when I got mine, we had a little family bar next to the Barber shop and my my mother likes a little beer with her friends now and there was no big deal. And I saw her go in and I had my baseball cap. And when we were finished, Tom Mcgonigal, I both had really gorgeous mohawks, about half inch tall and peak.

And I walked in the barn and she's sitting there talking with her friend. And I took my head off. She literally looked at me, looked at the beer and pushed it across the table

as if this must be a hallucination.

And she said, you get home right now. And I knew I'd won me a battle. We couldn't go to school till unless we wore caps. We weren't allowed to school unless we wore caps, which made it ultra cool

and that's important at one time. If I carry that into adulthood, then I'm in trouble.

And that's what I did because the minute I started drinking, I stopped growing.

No matter what I look like, no matter what I did from that point on, my emotional and

metal response to the world is adolescent. I'm more concerned about looking good,

but I'm in accomplishing everything. I'll get into that horribly lazy state. I I am, by nature, incredibly lazy

physically, mentally, emotionally, and particularly spiritually.

I was a spiritual thief. I've known since I was little my answer would be spiritual in nature, but I'm a spiritual thief. I'll steal it from you

then. It sounds good, but I don't have to pay the price that it takes. And this is some of the stuff my sponsors helped me understand. And

if you want what we have, the suggestion is that you might want to do what we do.

You can't steal this one.

And one of the dangers

of those of us who've been around for a while, as we tend these days to teach the new people our lingo

without the substance behind it.

And the danger there is that when you say to them, how are you,

they can give you the lingo and they sound pretty good. They're really dark inside. We've got to be careful with that. I do.

OK,

so I bring all this crap to alcohol.

An alien on a strange planet

loved girls. Terrified of girls.

I'm a pretty fair athlete

but only weighed around 135 lbs when I wanted for football and the average team weight was 180 and they hurt me the first day of practice so I quit.

I was a Golden Gloves boxer, trained with Tommy Golden in Denver years ago.

Got all the way to the finals

and I had this fight, one in the second round where they were three round fights and I had it won.

So I lightened

and then the third round he just beat me to death. He was motivated. He had two brothers up in the stands. He told me later in the locker room, he had two brothers up in the stands who'd said to him, if you lose this fight, you got another one as soon as you get home.

And and he was motivated and I had

quit early, which became a pattern.

I was a sprinter in the game of life, not a long distance runner.

Well, I quit boxing.

I come from a musical family. I think I told you my brother is a professor of music. Well, play instruments. I can play the trumpet and trombone and the harmonicas, and right now I play a lap dulcimer

because I don't want anybody else around when I'm making my music and very few people can stand the sound of a lap Nelson. In fact, my friend Tom Mr. said if I ever play that his presence, he'll break it over my head.

But

I played in the in the school band and I was first chair because I have I have some talent.

And then this kid came along and played better than I did right off the bat and got took my chair. So I quit. He had this ridiculous idea that you should practice two and three hours a day. And I know that anybody with my natural talent only needs about 1/2 hour a week.

And I brought this to alcohol.

This is that period of time when my image was who I was

and I got desperate one time and really needed to be somebody that

mainly to attract the blonde girls in the school that comes along with a certain time and every boy's life, his jeans jump up and said, oh, I know my life worked. Now I'm to repopulate the planet.

So many women, so little time doesn't have the slightest idea of what's going on. But so I got my dad to buy me a 49 Mercury convertible

maroon with leopard skin seat covers. Well, that was the thing back in the late 40s.

I was gorgeous. It did what it was supposed to do, put two blonde girls in the back seat right off the bat.

Second day they it had an automatic top and they pulled the top and they broke the top

and I quit the car.

My dad worried about disposing it and I brought that to alcohol

and this is kind of my MO. Anybody identify with any of that? Oh, I hope so, because otherwise I'm in the wrong place.

And along that way then, and we got a guy to buy some whiskey and we went out east to Denver to drink it.

And my life changed forever. I was transformed for a period of time that night. It was OK for me to be made just as I was, and it was OK for you to be you just as you were.

And that felt so good because that is a spiritual attitude. I was spiritually fit. Isn't it interesting that they've called alcohol spirits for years? Because that is what it produces.

Sense of ease and comfort. A sense of rightness of

a place.

But for me, I didn't know that if one works, you take 10.

That's just the nature of the beast. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

Always.

I still have not gotten over that one.

Just put it in God's hands and oh, there we go

now. Alcohol did not solve the problem.

It made me in a state of being where there was no problem.

I believe God uses whatever is at hand, and so when I got into this process, that's kind of the way we went.

Forget everything you think you know about anything. We're not about solving your problem or problems.

When the big book talks about finding a power greater myself, it will solve my problem. There's no S on the end of that. There's only one problem me. Selfishness and self centeredness.

One of the guys as you leave here, one of my guides as to whether I'm beginning to get off base a little bit is if I hear myself say where's mine?

Anytime I'm wondering where's mine, I'm off base because I'm always sitting right in the middle of it.

One of my fun, funniest inventories came Where's my wife? I need her to know where she There she is somewhere back there.

I like to look in her eyes and check to make sure I'm telling the truth. I, I, well, I generally stay with the truth, but I, I do like to embellish

and I'd like to check the timelines because I, I honest to God don't have any sense of time.

It's so it's gone somewhere.

When you are here now, time loses its meaning. I was about 12, yeah, 1213 years, silver, sitting in the basement of my house. My car's up there in the garage. My family's playing and cooking and doing what families do,

and I'm sitting in the basement wondering, where's my.

And it was a wonderful little inventory because that's where I discovered I'm always sitting right in the middle of it. See, these things happened to me long before I perceived them.

I don't know what's happened until later.

If I know what's happening at the time, I tend to take credit for it. So,

so I usually when I have an awakening of some kind and a behavior change, it's about six weeks later that I realized you did that differently than you've never done it before.

And thank goodness for that. So if you're kind of new and you're looking for immediate results, you've already got them.

Just wait long enough and you'll be aware that you've already got it. Where's mine? You're sitting in the middle of it

right here, right now. You got everything you're ever gonna have. Not a bitch

is it? Won't get any better,

but it'll always get better.

The big book talks about men and women drinking for the effect produced by alcohol. All men and women drink for the effect produced by alcohol. The effect from a mother is

tastes good. She does not like the feeling that comes as the barriers go down.

Me, I like to kick the barriers right on down

and early on now these are some of the things my sponsors made me bring to this deal.

The effect produced by alcohol. I can remember early on

I couldn't even smell whiskey for about four years without gagging. I'd gotten that sick from the whiskey just, oh, it was awful. But I very quickly found out what wouldn't make me gay. And then I began to find out different things did different things to me. To hear a little obsession here, I'm spending a lot of time becoming conscious of alcohol

since I'm going to drink it. What's this going to do anyway? We, if we were going to go out and fight a little bit and young boys do that. Mothers, don't worry. They're, they're just practicing and posturing and posing and getting a black eye here, there. If we were going to go fight, I learned to drink vodka because vodka makes me mean. And if you're going to fight, you might as well be a little bit mean

if if we're going to go to a party and there might be some girls there.

I drank dark Bacardi rum, makes me warm and sensitive.

Great lover,

never doing, just stood there and looked cool.

Well in my day we weren't ever told what to do. It was.

I can remember running up and down East Colfax looking for girls and one night we found some bad night. We didn't know what the hell to do and they didn't know what to do. It was terrible. We got drunk instead. It was awful.

Early on in my drinking I reached that place that is so devastating where I couldn't feel anything,

which is just Walking Dead

because by now things are such a tumble I can't sort them. So I just shut them off.

But then I could drink Cooler's beer

and listened to Ferlin Husky and Jim Reeves singing stuff like 4 Walls, Ray Charles, Born to Lose. Oh I love. I lived on that for months

and I could just cry like a baby and once again feel OK. I began to make that mistake in judging what my condition was by how I felt. Very bad measure

to judge where I'm at and how I'm doing by how I feel.

You can't get away from it, but it's not the best measure of the truth.

Then. Then vodka made me drunk and Rob made me drunk and beer made me drunk

because once I start, I go past the line

my friend Gary describes and is waking up at 82%.

And so you have a drink and it takes you to 90

and then you have another near 98 and then you have another shit about 102.

Missed the mark. First night out was wonderful. Never caught that edge again.

So we bring all this to a substance that is by its very nature shuts down all your civilized coverings,

all the good manners that you've learned just go out to win the.

I've always

loved drunks being one.

The inconsistency of

two guys in a bar go out back and beat each other bloody and then come back in. Buddy, I just love you. You're my best thing that ever happened to me. Let me buy you a drink. And that's the way we are.

And it gets confusing. Done.

The upshot of all this is after 14 years of

drinking, running,

they told you I'm one of the freaks that came out of Berkeley in the 60s throwing owls acid around, screaming out. Where there's dope, there's hope. Burned down City Hall.

I did a lot of speed along the way. I'm not a drug addict. I just did a lot of speed along the way. But I could always start a stop with that that I love to abuse it. If I had a drug of choice, it would be methamphetamine hydrochloride. That's what I'd choose. The one I don't have any choice over is alcohol. That's what makes me alcoholic. I don't have any choice there.

I bring this up only because we have

this thing will work for anybody as long as the foundation is truth. Now you may be both alcoholic and drug addict. You may be primarily a drug addict who's also alcoholic. Whatever you are, find out so we can get the truth under you and

then it'll go to work.

We can talk more about that later if you want to. It's not a big deal, it's just a big by God deal.

Well, you gotta, you gotta have the truth. You can be 700 different things. It won't matter. This fixes that. It takes care of her, but you got to know what they are. The only thing this won't fix is goofiness.

Stay as goofy as you can get, because the most important role in life will be coming up. I'm finally in it, grandfather.

Grandfather's primary function on the planet is to be goofy

and entertain the little children.

Let me tell you the benefits of that, because I am. I'm just a sucker for babies.

My 5 year old granddaughter came to me the other day and she said grandpa, you're just

best grandpa in the world

and I'm curious. I said Honey, Gian knows her name. John, Why? What do you think? That she's old because you love us so much?

That's the message,

there's no doubt in her mind.

And that is what makes me the best grandpa in the world, because I do. I love her so much.

And then she said, how is it, Grandpa? Did you know everything?

Because that's the second part of the grandpa role, and that's also a requirement. If you're going to be a good sponsor, you've got to preserve that illusion,

OK? I said, Honey, that's easy. I've lived a long time and I pay attention

and that's the truth.

See, little ones bring the truth out of you if you let it.

You got to get all the lies away, so the truth come. I've lived a long time and I do pay attention

and that's why I seem to know everything.

If you get to know me, you'll understand. You don't know nothing.

What was that? What

Bolson used to say. What do you mean by that? What do you really mean by that? That'll get your attention. You better be able to answer that. You lose them anyway.

So the consequences of my drinking took me to some strange places.

My first federal penitentiary when I was 19 because I missed an appointment.

I couldn't find my way home in time.

My second federal penitentiary in 1966.

I want to tell you about that.

These are the things that lead us to this place. You are here today because somewhere along the way something occurred and you've got to look at your life and said, oh shit, I can't do this anymore.

This has to stop or you wouldn't be here today

and Christmas week in 1967,

I was on federal parole for that little beef. We're on ADC. I'm in real serious trouble. I can't get out of bed without a shot of speed to get up and go pull some kind of scam to get enough money to get the kids some food and to get me some booze so we can come home and I can drink myself back to sleep. This was kind of our life

and what occurred there.

I had come to the place where I stopped trying to be a decent human being. Couldn't figure that one out. I'm still totally devoted to my children, part of the living pain in my heart.

And make no mistake, there are some things we get to live with. There's nothing we can do about it. It's done

and that's good because it keeps me in touch with.

If you come in great pain over something you've done, I really do understand and I can feel it. What had happened. In this case. We all have an ace in the hole. Have I gone over this one before? OK, because this is the third talk I've given since Thursday. And thank you. I'm glad you haven't heard it because I love to tell the story.

It's a Horror Story.

MY2 little boys mother split and they ended up with me at about the same time that I hit a bottom that I couldn't get up from. This was that bottom that you just say, oh to hell with it. This is how we're going to live. When the Big Book talked about,

we recognize that

our lives were not normal. We didn't live them like normal people.

What I realized was that for me, my life was normal. This kind of life. We were on the road. We went into the subculture.

My boys grew up living in Hells Angels hideouts and in the Northwoods. The Northwoods was a great time.

I understand about perception from that. My young one thinks it was a great adventure. My old one was still pissed about it,

you know. What are you gonna do?

But we all have an ace in the hole. That's the person that no matter what we've done, at the end of this particular run, at this bottom, there's a place to go. They'll give you a place to stay and feed you and bitch at you for a little bit and then help you heal up so you can go out and do it all over again. And my dad was my ace in the hole. I understand. I am desperately just trying because I really do love my children and I wanted so badly to be a good father.

And so we periodically try that we're at home.

Sorry Jerry,

I did that once when he had his earphones. I watched him jump,

cleaning up a little bit,

fattening up a little bit, getting kind of settled in.

And Albert, one of the guys, one of the snakes that I ran with, called me from Albuquerque, said we got a problem.

We got 30 kilos of good marijuana up to Juarez and our driver got arrested on a traffic charge and the stuff sitting in a hotel and we need to get it across the border.

Will you take the job

now? I'm really trying to get straightened up.

I'm a father now trying to straighten up. And my sane response would have been you're out of your mind, Albert. My response was of course,

of course, and I didn't do it for money. I got 2 kilos and sorry young people at that time we got them for 200 bucks a key.

You pay that much for a little bag these days, so is chump change. I did this for prestige. See, I was the only one they could think of in the United States to call

to go into Old Mexico

and rescue the stuff. Sorrow.

You know what's funny about that? The president of Mexico is a man named Fox. That's Zorro. He finally made it to the top,

but there I go. I'm gonna go off and do this for the prestige, and I don't know that at the time, but now I'm useful again.

See, the human pain reaches its absolute bottom when you become useless.

Now I'm useful and I knew how to do it. I wondered at the time I was picked up this last time, when I thought it was a sociopath. This will tell you why I knew precisely how to do this job. Clearly. I stopped drinking and stopped using and got straightened up and got Sport coat, became Joe Tourist. I had them run a Volkswagen bus and somebody else's name. I let them take care of all the arrangements. I am not stupid.

I don't want any links to me whatsoever on this because I knew even then this is illegal

and I don't want to go back to prison. Huh. I I've done that once. That was enough of that.

Anyway, we got down there and, and the place they got us the bus and I, Frank, had gotten us a motel to stay. And actually it was just a Mexican whorehouse, which was fine on the surface.