The Rosemont Group, Frederick, MD

My name is Mike. I'm an alcoholic, and at least half the people in here heard me tell my story about six or seven times. I'll resist the urge to or the temptation to, to modify it and then he sort of way to make it, to make it new and interesting. So sorry, you're going to hear the same old story.

Consistency is important.

My sobriety dates February 24th, 1978 and I was told if I never forgot that date, I'd never have to memorize another one.

That doesn't mean I'm going to fall over drunk if I forget the actual date I came to Alcoholics Anonymous. But what it does mean is if I forget where I came from, I'm going back. It's as simple as that. I don't, I don't ever forget where I came from. I pray every day for God to never ever let me forget where I came from and that without him I'm nothing. And every time I come to an A, a meeting, I'm telling everybody in the room that I need you. I need you.

We we have a a shared problem and we don't kid ourselves about that. There's a lot of

joking and laughing and bantering it before and after the meetings and sometimes during the meetings. We hope to hear a lot of laughter during the meetings, you know, but we're all here on very, very serious business. We were drinking ourselves to death. And we learned that with with God's help and us recognizing our suffering in each other, that we can stay sober and we can live a happy, useful whole life. And that's important to me. Never, ever to forget that. And, and it's a good thing because I just happen to love the people and Alcoholics Anonymous. I love the Fellowship, Alcoholics Anonymous.

I love going to meetings. I love everything about it. I never ever think about how many meetings do I need.

You know, whenever I hear that, it's just like it doesn't compute in my head that how many meetings do you need? Well, I don't know. Do I need one a week, two a week, three-week, four week, two a month? What, what do I need? I don't even think about it. I go to as many meetings as I can and I, I will challenge anybody who says I'm hiding an A, a, you know, or you ought to get out there and live in the real world. You know, can't hide an A hide in an A A. I've had a full life in 31 years of sobriety. I've had a long career.

Well, I like to call it a career because it sounds better than a job, but

not a long career. The Montgomery County government and the Department of Transportation,

never mind what I did all those you, I can stop that voice now. And you know, I've had a family and a daughter. I'm now a grandparent. I've traveled all over the country. In fact, I can, I've even been to Europe now and so I can say that and stuff. So I ain't hiding in a a

what I do and Alcoholics Anonymous is I, I continued it to grow spiritually. I continue to,

to, to learn how to, to work the principles that these 12 steps have taught me that have led me to have a happy, useful life. I've learned how to, how to work those better in my life every day. And I'm also here to give away what was given to me. And that's very, very, very important to me because I was a useless human being. I had drank myself to a point where I could not justify the space I took up in the world. I was a big fat and nothing.

My old buddy Henry the plumber down in Silver Spring told me. There's three kind of achievers, Mike. Yeah, he says. There's there's overachievers. I'm thinking, that ain't me, he says. There's underachievers. I thought I stood a pretty good shot at being that, He said. Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, Nope, he says. And then there's no achievers. That's you. And I started out on the bottom and stayed there. It's just as simple as that was a very shortfall for me. Very shortfall

when I got today, you know, when I go to a step meeting tonight, that's where we make a list of all the people we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all. And were were, were were hearing about this long list that we've constructed and all will have to comb every relationship and go back through every year and all that. I'm thinking, well, you know what? Henry once again said, Mike,

you were just basically a public nuisance in a general pain in the butt. OK, you don't have a long list. It just didn't affect that many people. I didn't get married, didn't have children, a junior high school dropout. I never saw any normal drinking. I never did any normal drinking. I come from an alcoholic family. I got, I got my mother drank herself to death. I got an aunt and uncle who drank themselves to death. My sister's an alcoholic. My brother's an alcoholic. If I start getting into cousins and stuff like that, we'll be here all day.

I come by this thing naturally. Alcoholism has been just generations and generations in my family. Alcohol and alcoholism has affected me before I was even born. You know, it affected me before I was even born. Some of my earliest childhood memories or, or being alone at being home alone with my mother while she was passed out on the floor and me kneeling over her. I was like 3 years old not knowing if she was dead, alive or what what was going on.

Odd behavior,

you know, loud noises, arguments, screaming and yelling, door slam and glass break and I'd lay awake in bed at night and just flinch every time I'd hear that. I've been sober 31 years on 55 years old

and I still, my palm still get sweaty when I hear loud voices from another room, you know, and I still have what I've heard the, the psychiatrist call an exaggerated startle response. You know, my wife and daughter would just crack up when my phone would ring and I jump out of my skin. You know, I, I just still did, I just, I just do it. And I was reading something about delayed stress syndrome once and, and this exaggerated total response is one of the one of the marks for that. It's normally reserved for combat veterans,

victims of violent crime. And oddly enough, a lot of Alcoholics have it, you know, so it's like this. Is this like unresolved conflict or there are issues that I haven't dealt with, You know, is there something going on there now? I believe there's just, sometimes there's just scars. There's just scars. You know, that's all there is to it. I don't spend too much time worrying about it or, or thinking about it too much because today I'm, I'm happy and whole. And I got that way thanks to the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If I'm repeating myself, you're already forgive me. But anyway,

I've been shot at, stabbed, beat so bad I couldn't walk. I've been in jails from here to Florida. I spent most my drinking on the streets. And when I say on the streets, I don't mean sleeping in in a homeless shelters and eating at the soup kitchen. I mean sleeping in the woods, sleeping in a parking garage, stairwells, your car if you left it unlocked. I I would call them abandoned cars. An abandoned car to me was a car that was just parked with nobody in it.

I used to just, I used to just walk down the street pulling on car door handles. When one opened up, that's where I slept. That was it.

And it's amazing how nice people were. You know, nobody ever, like, came out to their car in the morning and dragged me out of the backseat and started wailing on me and, you know, never. Yeah. They were just getting their car like, whoa. Because generally, generally they, they, they noticed me first by the smell, Taco Bell or something that left the packet. They look around, Holy cow. There's a there's a person back there. So it's like,

hey, how you doing? Yeah, I was kind of like almost used to that, you know, so they, they would usually just kind of be standing there like this

as I was walking down the street. So yeah, anyway, no bad repercussions of that. And I, I would, I had a habit of inviting myself over to your house whether I knew you or not and whether you wanted me or not. And if you didn't answer the door, I might look for a way in. All I wanted to do was sleep, you know, and I would find my way in and, and go to sleep. You know, usually in the basement is where I would head to the police call that breaking and entering. I just called it looking for a place to sleep.

And I remember,

I remember what, you know,

people who aren't Alcoholics don't really get this, the whole blackout thing. They don't understand it, you know, and I know that every alcoholic here has heard some of the same things I've heard. And one of the things that we've all heard is you don't remember.

Yeah. Yeah. You just figured that out now. Yeah, that's right. I don't remember. They're just, they're astounded by that. You don't remember? Another thing that we hear is, what's the matter with you? Has anybody heard that? I mean, how many times have we heard that? What's the matter with you, man? I don't know.

She's, you know, try being with me. You're, you only got to put up with me for like an hour or 15 minutes or whatever it is. I'm with me all the time, 24/7. You're asking me what's the matter with me?

Sorry. One, one time I wake up in the basement of this house and I'm, I'm awakened by the noise of another human being in the basement.

So I'm like,

what's going on here? And I've been living on the streets and I was drunk and dirty and extremely smelly. And the things that people normally do in the middle of night when they wake up to go to the bathroom. I did without the waking up and going somewhere apart and, and now this, this person is is headed towards the room that I'm in. This isn't good.

This isn't good. So you know, so I get up. I had hair. Then it's all over the place, you know, and I'm dirty and smelling them. I'm just going like this. I'm going from room to room in this basement. And and she just kept going. Whatever. It's like, man, she was following me. I'm like, this is what? So finally I'm in the last room. There ain't no more rooms to go to. And I'm I'm like this and the doors here and the door opens like that and she's standing like right here. I can just like put my hand on her shoulder and it's an elderly lady. And I'm thinking, man, I don't want to like scare her, but I got to do something. This isn't, this isn't.

It's going to be worse if she just turns around and sees me. So I figure out, just introduce myself.

I said good morning.

And she screams and she turns around. I'm like, it's okay, I'm not going to hurt you, you know, And I, I run out the door and it's daytime, you know, and it's, it's like, I'm like a vampire, you know, it's like the sunlight, you know, I'm in between these houses. I'm in like suburbia is actually on Wayne Ave., Wayne and Cedar

house on Wayne Ave. I'm pointing to somebody who knows where that is and and I'm like, I'm caught between these two houses. I'm looking like this, you know, and and she's she's Outback and she's like yelling at me, you know, and I found out later I was in that neighborhood for a reason. It was actually a friend of mine's house was close by and I think I'm hypothesizing here. I think I thought I was helping myself to his basement. I didn't realize in this in the neighbors basement and later this lady talked to

one of the the the mother of the person whose house I thought I was in and she said she felt bad for her.

She said she was scared at first, but she said when she looked out there and she saw me between those houses like skulking away, she really felt bad for me. There's a lot of good people out there. You know, there's a lot of good people out there. But anyway, so I didn't I I didn't, I didn't have years and years of normal drinking, whatever that is. I didn't have, I didn't have like a careers and marriages I didn't like slowly. I didn't cross some line at some point is what I'm telling you. I think whenever I took my first drink, whenever it was and I don't remember it, I was that young. It was simply a case of

alcoholic meat and the alcohol. I believe that absolutely there was a war going on inside of me that only alcohol would calm down, you know, And I can't think of any other way to explain it. There was something very, very wrong with me before I ever took a drink. And alcohol was something I needed. It was something that kept me glued together. I remember just looking at my bedroom window and thinking to myself, I just as soon as I can, I'm leaving, I'm heading out of here. And I did. And I can remember being as young as

years old, There's a particular model of early 60s Chevrolet 62, seems to ring a bell, but I can't think of a model. And it was very, very easy to steal. And I had been hanging around with some older guys and they showed me how to do it. It was really easy. You just, all you needed was a screwdriver, take a screwdriver and you turned, turn the ignition on. The engine wouldn't crank then, but that's all you had to do is get it on. You lift the hood and you lay the blade of the screwdriver. Back then they didn't have the solenoid on the starters. It was on

firewall and you could just lay the blade of the screwdriver across the two terminals on the solenoid. That thing would start up. I can remember the feeling I would get when I would do that, you know, because I had like so no control in my life and, and it was just crazy at home listening all I was listening to. But somehow when I would start that car, I was in control. I had something man. And we'd hook up with people that would steal like whiskey from their parents house. So we got the AM radio blast and, you know, Sam and

playing Soul man on the speaker coming out of the middle of the dashboard. We're drinking whiskey and we're driving to 62 Chevrolet. The windows are down. I'm smelling like honeysuckles. I'm thinking, man, this is great. This is the life for me. This is a life for me, man. And I want to do that just as much as I could. And I started getting locked up, you know, a lot. And, and, and that was back then. It was like, it was almost fun. It was like, hey, here's where all my friends are at, Waxter. So. So this is where you are when I don't see you around. Yeah. We've all been here for three months. Yeah. So I thought it was fun.

Let me rewind just a little bit. I, whenever I hear somebody tell their story, what I'm listening for and what I, what you'll usually hear is either it's a, it's a spiritual story and you'll hear a story about either a departure from God or just a story of, of not having God in their lives and eventually, you know, getting a God of their understanding in their lives.

And for me, I was, I was raised a Catholic and I, I went to Catholic school. And also let me say this, my parents is as many problems as they had and is chaotic and

problem filled as our house was. My parents were good people who loved their children. And I don't blame anybody or point any fingers or make excuses or anything like that. It's simply a fact of my life. This is my story. And it was in the day when, you know, they grew up in the depression and they fought in World War Two and they everybody smoked and drank and, and if you had problems, you solved them yourself. You kept it to yourself.

So they did like all the wrong things for her alcoholism, you know, So I just want to get that out of the way. Going to Catholic school for me, I, I enjoyed it very much. I loved the stories they would tell. I went to church every day, I prayed, I just, I just loved it. I thought it was great and I, but I started praying for things like for my mother to stop drinking and for my sister to stop drinking. My sister would come into my my room sometimes late at night when I was like 8-9 years old and she'd be drunk and she would, she would tell me all these things, 8-9

shouldn't be here. And she'd say pray for me, you know, and I would, I'd go to church and I'd pray for it's very good feeling. But, you know, things started, you know, you can't. I was a little jumpy, a little nervous, had a little tick, you know, you know, going up in an alcoholic, I'll kind of do that for you. And so I started acting out a little bit in school. I had questions. There were things. Yeah, I just, I had questions, you know, like, sister, if, if God is so good and merciful and grateful. But this whole like hell thing is, you know, I don't understand it quietly.

You know, the mistake I made back then was, was God looked like that nun to me. That nun was God, you know. So I don't anybody to think that this is Catholic bashing because it certainly is not a kind of come full circle on that. And it's certainly not bashing organized religion. AA has many good friends and organized religion in the beginning that helped us out and we wouldn't have made it without them. So I don't want that to be misunderstood,

but at, at one point in, in church, one day when I was 10 years old,

I got tossed out of church for inappropriate behavior, shall we say, And I was taken across the street to the school and the school was empty. And the nun took me upstairs to, to the, to my classroom and she grabbed my desk and she dumped all my books out and she said leave and don't come back. And that was my departure from God. You know, this, this nun with wearing full habit pictures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph on the wall. And in my 10 year old eyes, that was God saying leave and don't come back. Little side note to that is years later, there's a, a, a

in the basement of that school. And I can remember being in the basement of that school and I'm looking at where I was in the 3rd grade, you know, and I'm looking, you know, this is the cafeteria where where I ate, you know, right upstairs is where they dump my books out. And I was just always struck by the irony that my departure from God started upstairs at the hands of a nun. And here you got these coffee swilling, chain smoking old men drunks down in the basement. And they're the ones that brought me to God. They're the ones that showed me, showed me how to have God in my life. And

something ironic about that. So I spent

years after that being getting progressively angrier and angrier and angrier. God, there used to be this play in DC called Your Arms Are Too Short to Box with God, and I wasn't so sure. I thought for sure I could draw them out somehow. I will make Him show himself to me. By golly, yes, I am.

I, I was hearing somebody who was it somebody very yesterday at a meeting I was at and they were talking about their mother was an alcoholic and she used to hide bottles around the house.

And Gee, same thing happened at my house and

except it wasn't always her hiding them. Sometimes it was my father hiding him from her. Well, my father was gone a lot. And I deter, I figured out being a smart 10 year old, that it's that that stuff that she's drinking is making her sick. This is not good. This is a problem, you know. And so so I took the moving the bottles from her hiding place to a different hiding places. Not a good thing to do to an alcoholic. You know, when somebody needs a drink, man, they need a drink.

And I can remember, I can remember 11 morning, she was literally begging me to tell her where it was, like 1/2 pint of Echo Springs whiskey out hidden. She was literally begging me to tell me where it was, for me to tell her where it was. And man, I just didn't want to, I just didn't want to. And finally she, she promised me that she would just, she just needed a taste. She just needed a sip, you know, And I said OK. And I, I, I, I gave it up. I went and got the bottle and I brought it to her. And we're standing here at the sink where she's supposed to pour.

And she tipped that bottle up and it was almost full and she drained it. And it was like somebody stuck a knife in me. Like somebody stuck a knife in me. Man, I'll never forget that. And I'm not here to tell my mother's story. And I'm not here. And I don't say that for any other reason than to, to set up the the violent twists that that I took in, in my development, why alcohol became so important to me

very in a very short time later, why I had that war going on inside of me. And that's what worked.

You know, I drank whiskey when I was 13 years old. I got as drunk as I could off it, you know, and I loved it. I loved it. It fixed me. Alcohol kept me glued together. I needed it. This was not, this was not something I could take or leave. It was something I had to have. I had to have it.

So anyway, so that's that. And there was a, there was another string of thought following at that just totally went out the window. So I'm going to have to regroup here and think, OK, what are you going to say now?

So anyway, we got the departure of God out of the way. We got the the alcoholism thing going on here. And I meant it was a real important point. And it is so, so gone. You know, man, I lost her now. I'm afraid so anyway. So I continue to to run the streets and to get locked up. And I can remember like a scene out of a movie. I can remember my father died when I was 15 years old and I'd already been out of school for.

For like a year and a half, I stopped going to school halfway through the 7th grade and I actually managed to finish the 7th grade

and Waxter's and then I did about half of the 8th grade at Tacoma Park Junior High School. And then I was like let go for good. That was it. So I have AI have a 7/7 and 1/2 grade education. And anyway, like a scene out of a movie on my, my, my father on his deathbed says to me, he says take care of your mother.

You know, OK, so here's how I took care of my mother. I ran the streets. I was out at night. I was gone for days and days at a time. That poor woman, she struggled with sobriety. She went to she went to AA at one point, I think she actually had about two years.

I I actually ran into a a woman who remembered her at meetings and I remember I just remembered at other land line. I thought where I was going,

so I'll forget this one to go back to that one.

Here it is. I came home from school one day when I was like 10 years old. This was probably after the draining the whiskey incident. And my mother was drunk, which wasn't unusual, but there were, there were two women with her and they were talking to her in a way that I've never heard anybody talk to her before. And they were saying things to her that I'd never heard anybody say to her. They seem like they knew what they were talking about. They seemed kind and they seemed loving. And I remember creeping down the hall and just listening.

And then it was time for them to leave and they got up and, and they left. And I remember running to the window and peeking through the blinds and watching them get into the car. And I remember wishing they, one of them, hoping one of them would turn around and look, but they didn't. And I've never forgotten that. And, and now today, of course, I know what I was witnessing was one of the most powerful things in Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12 step call, you know, that's what I was seeing. So that was actually my first exposure to Alcoholics Anonymous, even though I couldn't, you know, didn't know it. Then, of course,

at some point after my father died, my mother was struggling with sobriety. And she, I went to a meeting in a rec center in Jessup Blair Park, which is at George Ave. in a District line in DC, the park that I later would live in. And Tom lived in the park across the railroad tracks at one point. So we were like neighbors.

Anyway, she took it to you as a it was a speaker's meeting. And all I can remember is that these women kept coming up to me. I was maybe like 13 or 14 years old, something like that. And all these, these women kept coming up to me and they were saying things to me like, oh, honey, your mother sees nothing

now. Don't you worry about her drinking. She's nothing. And then they were like, bragging to me about how much they drank. You know, I remember thinking, man, y'all don't know her. Like I know her. And I can still see my mother's face kind of standing behind him going like, yeah, see, I told you, I'm not that bad, you know? And I've often pondered that. And I thought to myself, well, you know what? I'll bet that those those those women died sober, you know, And my mother died a lonely alcoholic death

in an apartment. Minneapolis. At the time I was 1000 miles away

living in that park where that rec center was, where that meeting was. I used to sit in that park drunk, look over that building and remember that night. You know, I've never forgotten that. The lesson there is is I will never, ever marginalized anybody's drinking. You don't know what's going on inside of them. You know, a A is a funny kind of place. It's got this upside down kind of status thing. Like the worse you were the the beer shots, you RNA. It was so bad. My picture was on every post office wall from here to California. What? What? Excuse me,

You know, it's like, where'd that come from? You know, so so people get here and there, they're all though they're such bad, terrible drunks, you know, and they marginalized other people's drinking. And I heard Ross say this at a meeting once. He says if I get it wrong for you, me. But anyway, it was something like light cases, alcoholism have a extremely high fatality rate, extremely high fatality rate. So you will never, ever hear me marginalized anybody's drinking. Never.

I've bounced around a lot. I did the Florida thing, that California thing, and everywhere I went look like the inside of a bar. I could shoot pool just good enough to stay drunk, not enough to really win any money.

You know, I get a little, you know, if you're playing for a Bureau a dollar. I was fine. You know, if it went past that, forget about it, you know, but I could stay drunk if I had enough to get started, I could stay drunk, you know, and that's what I did. I I, I just survived. I just survived wherever I went, whatever I got going didn't last long. If I was sleeping indoors, I figured I was doing pretty good, but it was always a part of me that knew it wasn't going to last. You know, I didn't have very many cars. In fact, I only I had

had one car during my drinking and it was a money I got a car I bought with my big inheritance

from my mother passing away and I've been cut out of every will there was was to be in. But I got a couple of $1000 out of this one. And when I got that money, I mean a couple of $1000 in the early 70s in Brevard County, Florida was like man, you know, well that turned into a $500 Chevrolet and a six week tequila binge and it was gone. I discovered this. You can write a check for anything. It didn't matter what any more money in there. I was still writing checks when the last stops I made.

The last stops I made was at ABC store.

I, as I was leaving the state because I started getting these notices about we're in the business of selling food, not collecting bad check debts. And I, I used to go in the grocery stores and write checks for $10 over the amount just to get the cash. And at first I was trying to look like I was really grocery shopping and buying a variety of things. You had to buy like, you know, 10 or $15.00 worth of food. Then you could write a check for $10 early amount. Finally, I stopped doing that and I was just grabbing a couple of steaks, anything that could get me up to the right dollar amount, but I ain't eating. So I got this food at home in my little apt. I lived in this, this housing project

in a Merritt Island, FL and my refrigerator freezer was stuffed with food. It's so, so it's the, I don't have a stick of furniture in this place. You know, this is an apartment that was like 75 bucks a month, you know, And so I'm sitting on the floor drinking and people would just come in. They'd poke their head in the door.

Guy giving the food away.

I felt like Robin Hood. Yeah, sure. Help yourself. You mean I can just go take something? Go ahead, take some, you know? So that's what I was doing.

So this is a great way to live and

I, you know, here I am like, you know, I'm out there in a, in a weed getting a returnable bottles and taking them to the 711. You could get a six pack of Old Milwaukee for $0.89,

6 pack of returnable bottles up. So anyway, so you know, this is just the way I live. My sister, my my oldest sister, not the alcoholic sister, but my non alcoholic sister. Four out of six in our immediate family were Alcoholics and fund of the non Alcoholics was my oldest sister. And boy do I feel bad for her. But she had it harder than all of us, she really did. And I had gotten myself in some serious trouble back here and she heard about it and she came and got me and brought me out there out to LA where she was living to to help me and, and God bless her. I was so far beyond human.

I mean, I had been beyond human health for years already at this point. But she tried, oh, did she try? She took me, she took me a shopping to get clothes. So I had like new jeans and the new T-shirts and stuff like that. And she, you know, I had hair. Then I even got like this neat little haircut and everything and, and oh man, I was looking good. And then she would take me to nice places to eat, you know, and I'd order the closest thing to a cheeseburger. And usually what I asked for was you got ketchup.

Is there anything you don't put ketchup on? Don't not really, anyway. So she tried hard. It didn't last, you know, it didn't last. You know, I'm laughing about, but it was really, it was heartbreaking for to watch me deteriorate And then, you know, I wasn't, you know, like a, a mean violent person. I didn't slap her around and, and yell at her or abuse her anything like that. I just stole her Peace of Mind. You know, I've watched people I love drink themselves to death and I've I know how that feels. We know what that looks like. We know how that rips your heart out. And that's what I did to her.

And I knew I was doing it at the time. I really did. But I was perilous to stop it. I couldn't. And I hated myself. I hated myself for it, which of course meant I needed to drink more and which didn't fix a thing. Finally, she cut me loose. One day I went to her apartment to put the touch on her for some money and some food, and she wouldn't let me in. She opened the door about that far. I'm like, this is different, you know what's going on here? And she gave me 10 bucks, which I was grateful for. And she said, I never want to see you again.

And that might not sound like a big deal to some people. That was a huge deal because she was much more like a mother than a than a sister because she had sort of taken on that role of, of trying to raise me. But it was, it was just too late. I was already gone. It was just too late. At the time. I was actually relieved because I knew I was going to keep hurting her if she didn't do something to stop it. And I was actually glad she did it. I understood why she did it. And I wasn't mad at her at all, not one little bit. I found out years and years later in sobriety that she cried for three days after that and I didn't sober up

another five years. And for the longest time, she blamed herself for that. And she she thought and she says to me one day, she says, but it didn't work. Yeah, I said, well, let me get you did what you had to do and it did work. It cut me off from one more source of, of, you know, you weren't enabling me anymore. So I've learned that when we make our amends and our immense steps, that sometimes people,

people have really good people that love us, have a way of blaming themselves,

you know, And part of the immense for me was to let her off the hook, you know, my gosh, no, no, no. Don't you feel bad about a thing? So anyways, now I'm living on the streets in LA and I was a pretty much a petty criminal. You know, I never really did any serious crimes. And maybe a couple here and there. That was really not. It was just the way they wrote it up.

I mean, seriously, one time I stumbled into a little Tavern on Georgia Ave. with a ball peen hammer. I'm so drunk I can hardly stand up. The cops have been watching me for 15 minutes. You know,

these, these these police officers, they're really in tune. You know, they see this drunk guy stumbling up down Georgia Ave. with a hammer. Let's keep an eye on him. Yeah. And some detective work for you there. Anyway, follow me into A to a little Tavern and I start beating the bejeebers out of the counter. I demand all the money in the cash register and 100 cheeseburgers. And the lady behind it, the lady behind the counter, all she says is she just looks at me and she goes, you're in trouble.

See Points over my shoulder,

I look over here come these two cops trotting across Georgia Ave. So I just sat down. They come in and yanked me off the stool, start cleaning the floor up with my face and but anyway, it was serious charge. I mean, they charged me with, they charged me with

a robbery and assault. It's like, oh, no, Oh no, no, no. I'm my customer. He charges drunk and disorderly. You don't understand. That's kind of serious. So anyway, I thought I was a petty criminal. And one time when I had invited myself over to someone's house who didn't know me

well, they were home and I was knocking on the front door, and they didn't let me in. And, well, that was OK. So I left and they called the police. And the police caught me about a block away. And he admonishes me for what I had done and says, don't do that, OK, I won't. And somehow I got disoriented and turned around. I walked in back the wrong way. And I cut through the same yard, same house. I knock on the same door, you know, lights come on, you know, kids yelling, dogs barking.

And so this time the cop wasn't so kind. And he, you know, he had to lock me up

and months later, I went to court for that. And I'm hungover when I went to court. I mean, this is what happens to petty criminals in court because, you know, it, the whole status of being a tough guy is, is the, you know, the severity of the crime. And I always had these absurdly ridiculous, stupid crimes, you know, so I was always the butt of everyone's jokes. I can remember going to court with people from the neighborhood sitting in their like that. And you're standing up there dying. Well, anyway,

I had I had some some open warrants in Florida and I'm saying, you know, we're in court and Upper Marlboro, which is like a zoo and me and my brother are sitting in the back row. And I said,

man, I hope, I hope they don't find out about those warrants in Florida because I don't think so. Don't worry about it. Okay, so then this lady comes out and says, you know, courts going to begin in a couple of minutes. We ask you all pleased to be very quiet. We have very sensitive microphones in the courtroom that can pick up so much as a whisper from the back row.

And I was like,

you know, I'm hungover, sweats popping out of my head. I'm shaking like this. And finally I get called, you know, and I come up there and, you know, state your name, whatever. And, and the judge says to the States Attorney, he says, are you asking for jail time on this? So help me God, I thought he said yes, you know, he says, as far as I'm concerned, he said yes. And I'm like, I'm

judge. No, wait, what? What's he asking for jail time for? It's a stupid little trespassing charge. I didn't hurt anybody. I was drunk. I mean, nothing was going on. I'm going on and on like this. And the judge, he goes like this. And finally he says, he said no. I said, oh, okay, that's fine. You know, everybody's laughing. I'm not laughing. It's killing me. And you know, then he asked me to explain what happened. I said, well,

you know, he always got a story. There's always got to be a story. And I said, well, you know, somebody told me there was a party there, judge, and now the judge is a comedian. He says, yeah, a surprise for it. You know, everything happened.

I'm feeling like I'm going to throw up. I'm just sick to my stomach. And so I just explained to him what happened and he says, he says, do you have a drinking problem? You know the $1000 question, a drink of no Sir, no Sir, I don't. In fact, now I'm going to elaborate why I don't have a drinking problem. It's I, I'm not used to drinking and that's why I was so drunk. You see, I had been at a it was around Christmas time and I had been at a party and he stopped me. Coy says Christmas time.

I said gap. He said, Mr. Marketis, you were arrested in February. I said, well, that's around Christmas, isn't it? So anyway, that's how I usually went in court for me, because that's kind of criminal. I was I was a petty criminal. All that was a lead up to when I decided I was when I was out in LA and I was living on the streets and things were kind of bad and I, I, I just, I knew I was drinking myself to death and that was all right with me. You know, I heard somebody when I got here saying that Alcoholics are more scared of dying than they are living. And I

that just a little bit I'd say I was, I was more scared. Or did I get that backwards? I was more scared of living than I was of dying. I'll mend that a little bit. And saying I was more scared of living than I was of being dead. Dying is not fun. Being tortured to death by alcohol is not fun. But the idea of being dead didn't bother me. I knew I was not going to live to be an old alcoholic and that was all right with me. I didn't have a problem with that,

at any rate. So I decide I'm going to I'm going to rob this liquor store

and and that was a step up from me, even though I did have experience with a little Tavern, the ball peen hammer. I'm really not an armed robber. So this is a step up for me. And I, I, I had picked a liquor store out and I had I've been in liquor stores that have been robbed before. So I knew how to do it. I was over at Tacoma carry out once and a guy came in and he was in front of me in line and I see some money fall to the floor and I'm picking up the money. I'm trying to hand it to him and I'm tapping him on his shoulder. He keeps going like this. Hey, you drop some money here. He's going like this. And finally he turned around. He's got a pistol right here and he