Bill D. from Midlothian, VA speaking in Danville, CA

By 45 minutes, there's your water. There's a big book if you need it.

My name is Bill. I'm an alcoholic.

My drink date is January 3rd 1970.

I got sober in New York. I always give the numbers right in the front. Hi

kids saying hello to me over here. Hi,

are we done now?

OK,

take two. My name is Bill. I'm an alcoholic.

Louder.

That reminds me

of my drink. Date is January 3rd, 1970. I got sober in New York.

I started drinking at the age of 10. I was 23 when I came into my first meeting. I'm 49. I'm 26 years, one month,

26 years one month,

7 hours, 15 minutes

me

and I hear that time isn't important. I don't believe that there's not enough people with the time in this fellowship to pass it on. So time is very important.

Thanks for coming across and celebrating with us, Jack Frank.

I call you Jack because I have a Brennan in my life who died in 1986, who was sober a long time. I took my first drink in a church. It's great to be back in them sober.

I'm a Roman Catholic. I'm Irish.

I've passed through the Bronx often.

I was ready to serve a Roman Catholic funeral, a solemn high Mass, 5 altar boys. I was with the four cool guys from the 3rd grade, 7th grade. I was in the 3rd grade and I just turned 10 and I learned my Latin and my job was to stand in the center aisle with the coffin with a candle and not spill any wax on the mahogany.

And just before the math started,

a decanter of wine was passed around and I took a drink, maybe about a 5 oz soda pop guzzle.

And it went down and it lit the pilot light and I got all warm high up and my mask got warm and it went around this little circle again. And I took another

five or six ounce guzzle, maybe 10 oz altogether.

And several things happened around the first drink. Number one, I was in a church. And because I drank during the formative years and was altered by alcohol, I had a very unreal, warped outlook on God and religion and priests and nuns.

I'm a birth defect child. I'm a cleft palate child. Usually cleft palates don't talk too well. I've been gifted with a very good speech result. But I I really didn't look too good at that age. I grew up an ugly duckling in my grammar school and kids are cruel and they picked on me and called me names and beat me up and all the stuff that goes along with this.

And I was short. I didn't grow too much until I was in the 6th grade. I was a little munchkin

and I couldn't talk too well, so I looked differently, I sounded differently and I was short and those things vibrated around inside my head until this drink and it was like somebody bulked, erased my brain and those things did not bother me anymore. The other thing that happened is I began to feel real important,

superior, better than these cool guys who would probably beat me up after Mass.

This deceased person had given a lot of money to the archdiocese. So the cardinal, Cardinal Spellman was there with his people on the altar. I felt more important than him

and my uncle, the Monsignor, was his personal secretary. Personal secretary dealt with the insurance side of the Archdiocese of New York. So I'm very Catholic.

I I have a sister who's a nun

and she joined the order of nuns who taught me, which I'll go into later in the ninth step.

I

I began to feel more important than this guy in the box in the aisle,

and it was his big special day.

I remember probably within three or four days of this incident, thinking that if I just have a little of this stuff all the time, I'll probably be able to make it. It seemed like the missing ingredient in the chemistry formula. It seemed like The X Factor in the addition formula that made me whole. I've heard it expressed many different ways.

I also believe that I have the requirement that I hear talked about a lot at meetings for being an alcoholic. I had an instant adverse reaction to my first drink. It went down and it changed me. It gave me relief,

and right away I was looking forward to the bottle coming all the way around the circle again for the third time. But the bell rang and we had to go out on the altar.

I began to really become a devout Catholic.

I was in church all the time

not to pray.

I lived as close from here to Jerry from the sacristy of the church. Our house is right across the street, so it was easy for me to get up and run in and, you know, have a little cocktail.

I began to serve 6:00 AM Mass every day.

A lot of Catholics here. All right.

I, I really didn't, did not get in trouble with drinking until I was about,

oh, thirteen. I came home Sunday.

Sunday is a special day. You're allowed to serve 3 masses on Sunday.

So I fulfilled my quota of Masses,

and the 11:00 Mass was a solemn High Mass for me.

And

I went home and kissed my mother hello and she accused me of drinking.

I denied it. I'm an alcoholic, that's what we do. And she told me that she could taste the wine on my breath and that I should go across the street and resign from the altar boy Society, no son of hers in the guilt things that go along with that type of discussion. So I went up and got my circles and went across the street and sought out a drunk priest.

Bless me Father, for I've seen it's been 2 weeks since my last confession. I drink the altar wine and he said

I

I really never told any about that until I sponsored a priest for about a year.

He told me he did too, this priest that I went to confession to and there was no absolution. There was no contrition. The confession was over. It didn't seem like there was need for confession. So he began to say the 6:00 AM Mass for the same reason that I served the 6:00 AM Mass

and we would get there earlier and earlier. Whoever was there first got to drink before Mass.

A great power of example, this priest.

He died a very very slow, painful

medical alcoholic death. They took his limbs off one at a time, pieces of his limbs. He was in and out of hospitals for about 6 years. Drinking was never mentioned.

Great power of example for me.

He was the first alcoholic that I knew

down. Now, we'll zoom ahead to the last drink because the rest of it is just drinking.

And this is Alcoholics Anonymous and most of you drink and know about this

and some of you here had a drug problem and are addicted to something. I, my story is just alcohol. I'm grateful for that. I, I did not get addicted to drugs. I have one drug experience that I can share with you so you can identify

in case you can't identify it all with drinking, you know, you might be able to, might be able to identify with the the drugs side.

Anything that you can identify with to keep you here. That's the key you got here. Anything to keep you here, that's the key. My father is a physician, a doctor, a medical doctor, and I grew up in my house with a closet

knee deep full of drugs because my father got samples usually 10 or 15, three days a week. And it and my house that was full of drugs and I never tried any. And I had they had put the fear of God in me about drugs. Don't ever take drugs. They were so grateful that I was drinking

because they knew about drinking. My father's father was a periodic alcoholic and my father's mother died withdrawing from Paragon, which in the 20s and 30s is what they gave the female during her time of the month, which is a mixture of alcohol and codeine. And you were supposed to nurse a bottle through the three day or four day cycle that the woman goes through. She was drinking 10 bottles a day and

she died during withdrawal and she died young.

And my mother's father was one of these Country Club guys who drank around the club and and a lawyer and never had any money. And he tried to look like he had money and he was drinking and drunk and in in in trouble a lot. So my parents knew about alcoholism and drinking because when I came along and started tripping and throwing up and having trouble finding the bathroom,

I did not get validated. They went right into their old pain in their own movies about their parents, which which is a a problem that was

going out of my household. They really didn't understand my drinking. They complained a lot about it, but they did not understand it.

So. So I'm falling down a lot. I'm an entertainer, I I perform on stage, I'm a DJ and I begin to fall down because I was drinking so much. And then an era began where I couldn't get back up after falling down and people thought it was part of the act and truly it wasn't. I was just too drunk to get up. And this

drug dealing friend of mine suggested that I get off this alcohol and take some drugs, you know, so I could

function at least. And he said he would come right over and he brought over a little piece of hash. This is a middle of 1969, about the size of a booger. You know

drug addicts are over here.

Hey, bugger man.

And he put it in this little pipe and he took some and I took some and he took some and I took some. And I really wasn't stoned. I wanted to know what this feeling was. And I told him I wasn't stoned. And he said, well, we'll, we'll drive down to the club and you'll hear a band and you'll know you're really stoned. So we're driving along. I'm driving and my van and he's in the passenger seat and the light turned red. So I stopped and he put his hand on my shoulder. And he says, you know, in that drug talk,

he said, you're doing real good, you're doing fine. There's no police around. It's real good. We're about 200 feet from the line,

so just

so let's just ease off that break

and roll closer to the light.

That's all I got for the drug addicts. That's the only experience I got.

So I've complained in beginners meetings where drugs has talked about a lot that, you know, I, I really couldn't be a drug addict and they told me that I just was not persistent.

But you see that high, that wide awake high, everything's on 10. Everything's bright, clear. You can hear very wide and you can hear very long and you can hear people breathing in the back and it's really alert city. No, that's not me. I know I'm drink, drunk, puke, fall down, black out, wake up tomorrow. That's what I like.

So I didn't like the the drug high and I'm very grateful for that.

Now we're done with that.

I I drank myself out of two very good radio jobs and I got fired from the second job

and figured that the show business people were making me drink. So I was going to stop drinking. And to do that I would quit all my alliances with show business and stay in bed for two days and not drink and recover. Because I figured that people in the in show business, these derelict people were making me drink badly. So if I would stop being with them, I wouldn't drink. And so I stopped drinking and I went

about 20 days and on the 5th day I opened a newspaper and there's a New York telephone

company hiring Ed double wide and a phone number. And I called them. I said what are the requirements? It says if you're breathing you're hired.

So I went and I got hired and I started working as a dried up drunk about 8 days dry and I picked up a drink on the 20th day.

But in that 12 day window, I worked, I did my job. I ran in new lines. That was my job.

And I looked around this, this building, this, this floor that I was on, and I noticed that I was the only one working.

And I went to one of the old dogs, which is what I've learned to do in life and which is probably what saved my life in a, a hanging out with the old dogs.

And I said, what's the deal with the nobody's working? He said, we don't answer a ringing phone because if you answer a ringing phone, you have to go work.

And then I watched this and the phone would ring and a foreman would answer the phone and he'd say AL's up on a pole on Green Street. And he put the headset on the hook and nobody would touch it. And Al would be on the pole all day until the end of the work day. And then he would put in for overtime and

and we'd watch this. Al would have to go home and call in the morning. We did not work. But what I started to do is to have fun at the phone company. I would listen in to your phone conversations.

You know that little click you hear when you're on the phone?

And we had all the weird people in the in my building marked the, the convent and the the rectories and the hookers and the transvestites. And we had all the special phone numbers marked and we were listening to the cool people. And there was a machine,

a meter machine where you could look out and see how many phones are on the line. Well, I didn't use it for that. I I would connect two people up who never should be talking to each other,

like a hooker and a priest,

and you could ring both their phones. So I ring both their phones and listen.

And they would, they both thought they were being called, and they would have this dialogue back and forth, and one would figure out who the other one. Yeah. And they'd hang up,

do this all day,

a cool stuff. I did not work. I did cool stuff. Very important because it leads me up into my 12 step call. I had a four day New Year's Eve party 19691970.

I got on a drunk that started a couple days before Christmas. My last drunk, my worst drunk, I was sitting in a room drinking around the clock hoping to die. I had a death wish. I, I really didn't define it as suicide,

but truly it was a death wish. Truly I was drinking to kill myself. I figured if I just drank enough of the stuff, I would go to the next stop that we go to on this journey and we do whatever we do there. And I kept waking up. I kept coming too. And a lot of strange things happened over that weekend. I had stopped eating about eight months before. This time frame, I really was not eating. So I didn't have any pots and pans or food or plates or forks or any food

works, if you will.

And my cabinets over my kitchen sink were empty. So I put my stereo in those cabinets over the sink. And these cabinets are connected to the main wall that ran the length of this this building that I lived in.

And Led Zeppelin too

was new, and my copy skipped

for about 10 days

of that.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

10 hours of that.

This is how an altar boy properly rings the bell.

First time I've ever done that sober.

The people in my building thought I was dead,

so somebody came down and read my name off the door and called all of the people with my name in the phone book, and

they got in touch with my father. My father came over with some people and he broke in and they took me back to my father's house. And the Irish way is that keep you awake for 24 hours, walk you around a lot, and then they let you sleep for 24 hours. And I woke up a couple of times during that second day hallucinating. I didn't see animals or elephants or rodents or snakes. I saw windshield wipers

on all the windows and I could hear them. Automotor.

The big windows would go real slow and the little windows would go fast. My watch had one, my television had one,

and I didn't tell anybody about them till I was over about seven years.

And that lasted for about a week. And then the third day my father took me back to my apartment and told me I was on my own because the stipulation for me did not be in his house was because I was drunk all the time. So I went back to work and they had a meeting of all of the management, 3 or 4 levels of management in the big district guy. And

they asked me that question, you know, where have you been for two weeks? And I told them exactly what I had been doing. I said I've been drunk for two weeks. I've been sitting on my floor. I went about 20 quarts of booze and I didn't finish everything. The Alcoholics dream. I had more than I could drink. And is there any place for drunks? And this big 4th liner said, no, there's no place for drugs.

You're on final warning, which those of you who are familiar with Step Shop, Union Shop, it takes a couple of years to get the final warning and I had been with the company 5 1/2 weeks,

so I was on final warning and they define final warning for me. If I did anything wrong or if I drank, I would be fired.

Coming out of that meeting, I met Tipsy.

Tipsy was very obese. Tipsy weighed about 500 lbs. Tipsy was about 5 foot everything around back to front tall

and he had the laboring obese breathing that comes with drunkenness. He was drunk at 8:10 in the morning when he was not drinking. If you looked at the belt around his girth, it would be pretty level. But if you if he was drinking, it would tilt like this and

he couldn't talk because it's all crushing down. It was chest and they talk like this. And he said to me that he was my union delegate and he could protect my job

if I tried to do something about my drinking. Well, it took him 1/2 hour to say that sentence. I said it quick because, you know, we only have certain amount of time. And he gave me a number, George 212 phone number. This is in Westchester County. And he said George knows about drinking, Call George. So I went into my foreman and I said Tipsy says I should call George. And he goes, yeah, we know, go call George. So I got my ladder, which is on wheels and it's it's alongside frames are about about as high.

These are cross beans here. And you put cones around your ladder, like the cones that move you in the lanes on the on the parkways and the thruways. And when you go up on the ladder, people on the floor, I know you're up there so they don't take the ladder while you're on it. And I'm up there and I dial A number and the phone rings once and a secretary voice says, is this Bill?

Yes, I was very good at yes. And no. That was about it. I had broken thinking. If you said something to me, I would not hear you. It would go in. I would have to repeat it to myself inside. It would go up on the screen that's inside. And I would read the screen to myself. Then I would know what you said. I had very slow

thinking at the end of my drinking and

George says are you on a ladder?

Yes. Do you have your tones around your ladder

looking for cameras?

Yes, I have 5 cones, 3 on the outside, one in front, one in back. Code 5 cones. He goes good because ten years ago I was on my ladder in that building with my cones around the ladder and I was calling AA because I had punched my foreman in McCanns across the street. And my foreman was pressing charges and there was police at the bottom of the ladder waiting for me to finish making my. And he went into

his story that lasted about 40 minutes

and didn't breathe, didn't take any breaths, just right through.

He was, I guess he was excited that, that somebody called, but he's,

he's the type of alcoholic that I try to be like. He volunteered his anonymity and his alcoholism, put his, his job on the line to help people within the company. And he was the only alcoholic in the phone company that had done that. So I'm terribly grateful to George. And George talked about blackouts. I knew I was having them once I heard George talk about his, he talked about the fear of running out of alcohol. I had that fear too, the the fear of people finding out how I lived and how I thought

he, he got me talking about the cool telephone company stuff, about the listening in and blowing up phones and stuff. And I'm revealing to him my coolest, bestest stuff. And in the middle of me talking about hooking the people together and ringing both the phones, he stopped me. And he said that's nothing.

I lost a telephone pole.

This guy's cooler than me,

he says. Yeah, I lost a 65 foot telephone pole,

a cable well, and a cherry picker.

105 feet of Western Electric equipment never recovered. Probably in a river somewhere.

I just figured I got to do what this guy tells me. He's cooler than me. He knows I don't.

So George said he would call around and he seemed to think that he knew a couple of people and he might be able to find some people and get me into AA. So George started to make phone calls and Saturday morning

old Ed called me at 7:00 AM and Ed is kind of deaf

and I won't yell so you don't have to ride. He asked me three questions. He said. Is this bill?

Yes.

Are you having a problem with drinking? Never heard it put that way. New sentence for me.

Problem with drinking and set it up and screen thinking. The problem with drinking. Yes,

he said. Can you meet me at the Sherwood Diner in an hour? I said yes. He hung up.

Now, I didn't know what an alcoholic looked like and when I got to this,

when I got to this diner was packed because Saturday morning hunters get their coffee before they go hunt. And I, we didn't make up any Mission Impossible scheme where we would know each other.

Sit in the phone booth and I'll have a Red Hat on and I'll have an umbrella. When you come in, you'll look at your watch and I'll open my umbrella and you'll know it's me.

None of that

and I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to know this guy.

Ed and I walk in the front door pack and I hear hey over here.

So I went over here and I said dad, how did you know? He said sit down.

Well, I knew

sit down was not the answer to How do you know?

So I sat down

and he told me his story and he talked all about his drinking and hiding stuff from the wife and running out arrests and all sorts of terrible things. Ed was 70 and sober 2324 years at that time. He died sober in 1985, well over 40 years. And he had a new guy with him, Terry. I was Terry's first 12 step call. Terry had five months

and Terry had a long skinny neck and a big Adam's apple and a brush cut. I hadn't seen a brush cut in a long time.

And he smoked cigarettes and he held the cigarette between these two fingers and he looked around a lot and said.

He had that weird five month look, you know,

you know how people look when they have five months, right?

And, and, and Terry was too freaked out to drive. He was still pretty

upset, I guess is the word. So I would drive Terry to my first meeting

and Terry brought me into my first meeting and he introduced me to Vinny. Now Vinny is Sicilian.

Jenny smoked cigars about as big as this.

He had a pinky ring

and he would poke me with the cigar, pinky ring, the cigar and the pinky ring on the same hand. He would poke me like

punctuation, you know, to make his points, you know, commas. And

and he got right up in my face and the ashes here, you know,

and it probably didn't sound this way and he probably didn't say it this way. But what I heard was

you're not going to drink.

This is the old school.

You won't hear this at rehabs. I'm sorry,

only sharing. Only sharing.

I came in before a beginner's meetings. I became active in AA before 90 meetings in 90 days. The front row was my rehab.

The next sentence that Vinny said to me in the loving, caring way that we all are concerned about our newcomers. If they seem to not get along where they wind up and they drink and they leave and they go to another group, you might be friendly to them knowing that you they've been to other places, he said in that same

gentle tone.

If you have a drink, I'll find out about it.

Whenever I talk about Vinny, I start to sweat at the top of my

you know, that nervous sweat where your hiney meets the top of your leg right in there.

Then he's still alive

and that's the toughest venue ever was with me after that confrontation, which I thought, you know, I knew about the underworld and conflict and not doing the right thing. I knew about those things because I worked for some people who were in that line of work and I sponsor a couple of them today and

they've explained, shut up, Jerry.

They've explained to me that they're very, they're very surprised that I'm still alive.

I, I was in a fog. I was very mocus. And then he said, come on, first meeting took me back to the coffee urine. Now I had only seen them in diners. I never worked one. He took the cup and put it under the spout and he put the coffee in and he says first to take the milk and you put the milk in and you put the first sugar in and you get the coffee going. And once you get it all going,

then you put the second sugar in. You got it?

Yeah,

got it, he says. You think you can remember that? Yep. That's how I like my coffee.

And every once in a while I'll give you the signal. And I'm an altar boy. I know how to get the signal. And when I give you the signal, you come back and you do that. Do you think you can do that? And really, it was my first connection to really moving out and trying something. And I thought about it and I figured, yeah, I can do that. And that really began my recovery

two weeks later. Yeah, we went everywhere. We met in a mailbox near where I lived. Then he picked a mailbox for me to find. It was close to my door and my assignment was to be at the mailbox at 7:00. The meeting started at 9:00. If they were Rd. meetings, it would be earlier. We went everywhere to meetings. Long rides, 2 hour rides one way uphill.

That's my father coming out.

When I got in the car, I would ride behind Vinny. Then he had a mirror that you used for traffic, rearview mirror. He did not use the mirror for traffic. The mirror was on me and he kept maintained eye contact. He'd be driving. He he'd be, you know, looking. I get in the car and say, where are we going tonight? He'd say shut up.

How far away is it not important? When are we going to be home tomorrow?

And I'd ask four or five other questions, you know, nervous bar questions, really.

And I realized that there was number conversation going on, so I stopped talking. And then he would quiz me, you know, beginner stuff, good beginner stuff. So I don't know whether it still goes on, but the beginner stuff is food, you know, what did you eat for breakfast and how much of it did you eat? And how many cups of coffee have you had? And what did you have for lunch, if any? Was very into food and very into a rest and liquids. And then he was into liquids

and not alcohol. I mean, you know, other liquids.

It was very big on cutting down on the coffee. And that would be the quiz. And then coming home, I would be quizzed about the speakers at the meetings and trying he would try to figure out what I could remember, which really wasn't too much because I was I was taught to listen to the end of the stories because I was at the end of my story. And eventually, listening long enough, I was able to remember my beginning

about the middle of the third week, Al was sitting in my seat. Vinny signed me my seat everywhere I went. And I went right over to Vinny. And I said to Vinny,

Vinny, somebody's sitting in my seat. And he said, that's Al, he's going to sit in your seat tonight. But what do I sit? You're going to sit in my seat. Oh, well, it's OK. So I was getting to sit in the Vinny seat and Vinnie sat next to me. So Vincent leans across me and introduced me to Al. AL's at his first meeting,

Yeah, he says. Well, you were just at your first meeting a couple weeks ago.

He said, well, I said come on now. Now you see this is a coffee urn and you put the coffee in, OK. And you put the thing in and the second sugar, you get it going. Then you put the second sugar in and let it filter down. Now that's how Vinny likes his coffee. And I don't know what this has to do with drinking or a a or God or anything, but since I've been getting Vinny's coffee this way, I haven't had a drink.

So there might be something to this coffee thing.

AL's got 25 years somewhere

because when I wasn't there, Al got Vinny's coffee and then he drank after a couple of years. And I'm a couple years ahead of any now. And, and we talked probably once or twice a year.

I've been through the steps once every five years. I made a deal to do that with a, with a people early on who took me to meetings. There was there was Vinny, there was Ed screaming Ed. There was another George, different George than the one I spoke to at the phone company,

Roofer Bob and Terry. Those are the main players in my recovery. And the second night I was I met the the old grand dam of our area and she assigned me a sponsor, Al, another different Al. And Al really was a waving sponsor. I would come into the meeting, I would look for Al and I would wave an owl and if waving came back,

I was OK. And I never talked to Al. I never called Al. I was just like waving Al,

but I would talk to Vinnie and I would talk to Bob about everything. And

I really never paid any attention to a sponsor in the beginning. I just went to a lot of meetings. We went to about four meetings a week and we were in a A all the time. And

when I got out, I moved out here summer of 94 and I got a sponsor out here and he took me through the steps for my 25th year, the five year frame and

a whole new dynamic is opened up in my life. So I'm going to share some of the things that I got from that. We started

on the third step. I was told to get on my knees and say the third step prayer slowly and earnestly and mean it and

say it quietly and approach God with the idea that I was getting ready to do my 4th step. And I was to do that for two weeks. And I did that for two weeks. And I called him and I said the two weeks are up because he has a lot of guys.

I had my check in time at 10:30 every night and

the only thing this man gave me when I asked him to be my sponsor was he says I'm only going to give you 1 perk. I respect a man with the time that you have to come to a man with 14 years to learn more about sobriety and that's it. That's all you're getting. The rest is work.

So I, it was, it's an hour and 20 minute drive to his house each way. And so I, I went down prepared to get my 4th step instructions and we talked about how I had done the 4th step in the past and I had always written an autobiography that's very big in the East. You write everything out longhand. And he said, so you've never done the columns out of the book? I said

no.

So he says, well, we're going to do it like it is in the book. And

four things are the resentment list with the columns and then the fear list and then the sexual inventory and then the the paragraph about the ideal relationship. And either you'll do this and we'll talk when you're done or I'll never talk to you again. You call me when you're done. So five days later, I was done. I did a list a day. I prayed before. I prayed after

I call them done. He said that why don't you come down tomorrow night at 8:00 and I was there at 8:00 with my my paperwork and we would do our work in his garage between the cars. And I gave him my 4th step and he says, what's that? He said my 4th step. He goes, I don't get that.

I thought, oh, he says, what's the matter? I said. Every sponsor I've ever had is taking it from me, this is your past, and giving me a blank sheet. You're in the now and we're going to go over this and figure out what's wrong with you. So he said. So you're sober 25 years and you've never admitted out loud to another alcoholic the exact nature of your wrongs?

Trying to figure out a way to answer yes.

No,

he's just good. The step has been taking you for 25 years. Now you're going to take the step,

he says. By the way, you just finished. It was February of last year. I, I came up and got a 25 year chip here in January of last year. And I was the guy that read how it works and somebody yelled out in the audience, those of you who were here then Remember Me for that. For some reason, I don't know why,

he said, so

how many chips did you get last month? And I said, well, let's see, 19 at the meetings in the gold plated, one at the dinner that they gave me and three from there. 23, he said 23 chips. That's arrogance. Write that down. Arrogance.

OK and

I read my resentment list and he took notes

and I read my fear lists and he explained to me the only thing that would get me drunk was probably money,

which is what the fearless is supposed to reveal. Either it's going to be women or money. It's either finance or romance. It's either one or the other. Or if you're really crappy, both.

And then we got to the sexual inventory and it was a very creative, long

adventure ride.

And basically at the end of this

graphic description of my escapades, he explained to me that I was selfish. Every sexual act that I had ever had alone or with people or machines, was

I forgot where I was,

was selfish.

Every act was selfish. What's in it for me

go to get and coming out of that list, I had a new instruction. I was to go to give from then on in my life. After finishing this list, I was to go to give everywhere, not just in a, a everywhere in life to give. And

then I read the ideal relationship to him and he said it's interesting that in your ideal relationship there's no

mention or demand for money or sex. He said, read that again now and I read it again and there was no money or sex in this ideal relationship. And leaving the garage, he said you're you're now on your 7th step. And the instructions are that you get on your knees three times a day and you ask God to remove your defects of character after

you have looked them up in a dictionary,

The other big book. And I had 22 of them and I looked them up and I had long definitions for each. And I was to get on my knees using the seven step prayer. After the good and bad, I now ask that you remove from me arrogance. They are OG 8 the inappropriate upset at another's good deed

or and there's usually five or six other explanations for arrogance

and go through the list and it would take me about 10 minutes each time and during it for 30 days and during this 30 day period, I was to call him at 10:30 at night just to let him know that I had done my three. If I missed one of the three or two of the three or the three, I would have to go back to zero. And he said he might not hear from me for a couple of years or I would be speaking to him within 3540 days because I would have done the looking up of the definitions that usually takes a day or two and I would start on

day. Well I I finished in about 35 days and he was on the road so I didn't get to see him until I had about 50 days. And

on about the 45th day I had a real bad day, a low energy day, an icky day, a mopey day and there's several different definitions for me. I get neck aches and headaches and sometimes they would get as bad as a panic attack or needing needing to lie down.

And I called him at 10:30 checking in. He goes so how was today? And I said very icky day and I began to explain all the symptoms. He said So what happened? What happened today that to start this and said I don't know I just didn't. He goes no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

what happened today? What, what is it? And it has to do with being able to do or being asked to do or having the experience of speaking at a podium like this with, with this type of audience. I had always, I, I was on the unity breakfast committee in the East in Rye. And it was my job to go pick up the speaker who would come in to speak and take him out to play golf and get him his dessert and get him around the golf at Wing Foot or whatever he wanted to do.