The 6th annual Fellowship of the Spirit conference in Queens, NY

Hi, I am Gary and I'm an alcoholic

and I've been able to sit up there. I had the best seat in the house

and

I these two just did such a wonderful thing of kicking this thing off.

I'm a little ticked about it, frankly. I

I've been set up.

My dry days the third day, December 1964. And I'm telling you that because I'm bragging. I

I did it all by myself

and that's not true. And I really do know that

poop. It's great. You know what

good goosebumps just sitting there looking at y'all. And it ain't because you're ugly. Well, most of you

I'm I too am a real alcoholic. And I too am one of those who discovered it after I'd been around for a while. And very briefly, I'll tell you that I hit a nut house a month or so before my 25th belly button birthday.

And I started learning this deal then and like tell you more about that later. But

I, I didn't drink long. I guess probably from that, that incident. I remember my first drink and, and, and that, that we've been laughing about. I probably drank maybe maybe eight or nine years. So by the time I'm 25 years old, I'm in serious trouble. I'm 6 foot two inches tall. I weighed something less than 130 lbs and I was dying.

Hell, if I walked fast, my legs whistled and

and and I understood what happened when I drank

and I understood that I couldn't not do that. And a thinking, an incident came about in my life where I had that talk.

I, I had thought I'd gotten back in the house because my, my wife had asked me to leave a few weeks earlier than that point. And so I went out and moved in with the Hams beer distributor.

I thought that was a remarkable move. But a couple days later, he didn't think it was so slick and,

and, and, and I've done some things and I'd called the house and I told Julie I wanted to come to see the kids. And she said OK. So I thought I was back in. But when I got there, her dad was there.

We had that talk.

You know about that talk, don't you? That talks a bitch. You know, that's tough. That's tough talk.

An end result of that is her dad put me on a Greyhound bus and sent me 400 miles across the state of Wyoming to a the Wyoming State Hospital. To the rest of us, it was a nut house. But

we didn't know what else to do with me.

They didn't know. I didn't know. The only experience I had at that point in time that I even knew anything about Alcoholics Anonymous. We saw in the movie The Days of Wine and Roses,

started a drive-in theater,

got high centered on empty beer cans, just

throwing them under the truck,

and the process started there, if you will. Up in that point in my life, I've known everything these two had talked about. I'd had to hold my belly with the wind blowing through it and no way to get away from it without liquor. Couldn't do it. That was the only answer I had. And all that. And I get locked into this place and I'm learning to eat again and I'm recovering from some

beatings I had taken. I was a fighter. I wasn't a winner. I was just a fighter

and

and what happened to me in there is they got me physically back together

and I learned some things in there. I learned that I was an alcoholic

and I learned it the way many people seem to learn today. And some of you have been in the jitter joints of the spin dries, have seen EU shaped Gelenich charts on the wall. You check off the various symptoms of alcoholism, you get down at the mess in the bottom, and then there's a various stages of recovery. Well, I just kept checking them off and I got down there and I thought, I'll be damned.

I wonder what that means. I'd known I wasn't like anybody else. No real. I was told a lot I wouldn't like anybody else. Julie told me a lot like I wasn't about

and that kind of started me on a program. It took me 4 years in a A to find the book in the 12 steps,

and that was probably the most 4 painful years of my life. And I say that absolutely seriously. I didn't drink only because of God's grace and I'm not trying to make nothing arrogant about that. I lucked out

and then some things happen in life and we ended up in From Laramie Wong to Denver, Co

and we a series of circumstances. I ended up around a group called the Denver Young People's Group.

So now I'm going to use the old timers prerogative here at at a deal like this and share story with it because it involves some people that are important to you guys. Some of them you've never heard of, but they're important to you. You are descendants of what we learned

with this big book and a bunch of us getting together and going through the steps.

At this point, like I said, I've been in a A for four years time. Did I start this thing?

I'll get you out for breakfast.

I got this young people's group, and it was different from any a meeting I'd attended to. I'd been in meetings in Wyoming and Northern Colorado, in the small towns, and I had been well taken care of. I had people who for some reason I understood, cared about me. I didn't know why, had no clue why anybody would care about me, but but they did and they kind of led me in a direction that held me together enough

that I got around to some people that that

saved my life.

And so I got down there and I attended one of these meetings the first time and some things didn't happen there that had happened at other meetings when I got sober. And Wyoming back then I probably, I'm sure I've never heard otherwise was the youngest member in a a in the state I'm in a state of 400,000 people. So that's

there's more people in Queens and there's a whole state of that's A and I know that's true. It's got to be true then. Yeah.

But nobody said to me, and I got in there, Gee, isn't it good you got ahold of this thing so young? You didn't have to go through all the stuff that we went through. Nobody said that to me,

one guy told me. Sit down and shut the hell up,

he told me. Say things different a lot

and I never heard any of the stuff I was hearing in some of the other meetings I was getting to

and at some of those lies that we hear in a all the time but they just didn't happen there. And I heard a different lingo amongst these guys and gals and it as time came up some things were going on. We were hustling the prisons and we were working the prisons and that sort of thing and there was an old timer in Denver name of Reed. You remember Reid, Jerry and Jerry would and Reed would go up to Kansas City prison and he talked to him

regularly. I don't know if there's once a month there every week or how often he went there. But when somebody was getting out,

Reed always told them, listen, if you come to this place where I go, which was the York Street Club in Denver and a a club, if you come there when you get out, maybe you'll stay out.

And I don't know how many times I heard Reid say that, but he said it a bunch of times.

And one day one of those guys got out and he remember, agreed, telling him that. And he showed up at the York Street Club and that's where we met him. That's where we met Don,

and so a lot of my adventure from that point on, even though I've been dry a little bit longer than he has kind of started out together.

We were influenced by some Canadians who had learned that if you

do what the big book says,

whatever, you know what a concept. Jeez,

your life will change.

And they brought that idea to us. And so we just started decided we were going to start another meeting.

At that point in time, the Denver Young People's group had a had a closed discussion meeting down on the Skid Row near the Denver Post, and it had an open speaker meeting at the York Street Club.

There was kind of a phenomena, the 2nd floor, that old club was it was a small ballroom in a mansion and if you crammed everybody in it, you could maybe get this group in here. But you all got to be able to smoke three pack cigarettes in an hour.

I mean, you flat got put out some smoke and

and I think people that come to that meeting just to see who's going to come in next, you know,

of the phenomena. And then the young people's meeting was a discussion meeting to downtown at the Skids and I learned some things in there I hadn't heard before. They talked about taking the steps in order and I thought, what the hell, they're up on the wall, just reach up and grab one,

Lilly said. You can go ahead and do that if you want to, Gary, and you should live through it. You might want to try what we do.

And then we had Don come in and some other people came in and we heard what these Canadians had to say and we decided to start a third meeting for that group

and we didn't have a place to meet. So we would decided we would just kind of meet in homes and go where we had to go.

First meeting we had was on Goat Hill

because of the goats.

That's where Lee B lived and I'm sure he had to kick the goats off the front porch to get in the damn house. And

we didn't know what we were going to do. And so we we walked in and we all brought our big books. We know enough to bring those,

and we started at the very front of the book.

What a concept.

And we didn't have any gurus there to tell us how to do it or that sort of thing. And so we started at the front of the book and somebody said you read for a while.

And so that person read for a while and then anybody could interrupt them. There were any rules?

Say what you want, if you said something stupid, you heard about it.

I said the way I interpret that,

Lee said. We don't much care

how you interpret that, Gary. All we're interested is a black print in the white page.

They said that to me any number of times over the next few weeks.

And so that's how it started. We just kind of go around the room and some time went by and I don't know what we did, but the girls left.

It started out Coed and also Murdonda, 14 men

and I, and I really don't know how that's true. I didn't say anything.

And some things went on in my life there. At that point, I'd, I'd stayed sober, if you will, on dumb luck, a lot of pain. I was. I was going through jobs as fast sober as I was drunk,

writing bad checks, as fast sober as I was drunk,

waking up terrified as much sober as I had drunk.

I was just dry. Just dry.

So we start reading in the book, and I'm doing it because they're doing it,

and I like the guys I'm hanging around with,

and I'd never had that in my life.

You we say we were loners

because people didn't want nothing to do with.

And I'm just going to tell you, some things happen. I understood clearly. I think I was given the first half of the first step the first time I looked at it in that nut house. The first time I heard one of them Cowboys talking about her,

I understood as powerless over alcohol. And that's pretty simple concept.

Once I start drinking, I can't stop and I can't keep from starting.

Pretty simple. That ain't powerless. I don't know what is

and we came into the third chapter that Linda was talking about a minute ago

and I remember when we read it real Duke, the second paragraph right there says we learned we had to fully concede your innermost cells that we were Alcoholics. This is the first step to recover the delusion or anything like other people are presently. Maybe has to be smashed,

and I don't know why or how, but I was given the keys to the Kingdom right there

truly was.

I knew right there that I had no ability whatsoever to manage my life.

The trouble is that I have these occasions since then where I get to think, and I can, but so far they've been relatively short lived

or I would have been relatively short lived.

So I had that gift and it went on and I understood quite a bit. Then I had learned about God in A at that point, like I've been dry for a while.

I learned the Lord's Prayer in a a meetings. You fake your way through it. If you don't know it,

you really do. You kind of mumble,

you get to how far the part real good. And then

so I didn't know anything about God, but I somehow knew there was one. I grew up out in the flatlands of Wyoming and and it don't rain there much very often and 16 inches of moisture a year. There's a lot of rain

and they measure that in terms of hay. Crops doesn't mean a whole lot out here, I don't think, But

and it would be real dry and livestock would be dying and people's, people's livings were in jeopardy.

My dad would go over to the Mormons house down the road and he'd ask him to pray for rain.

Sometimes it rained.

So I've had a hunch that there is this God thing going on.

And so we looked at the second step in the 4th chapter and we understood a little bit about what that's saying.

I discovered that the most insane thing I did, I did stone sober.

Anybody got a problem with that?

Taking the first drink is the craziest thing we did, right,

and I picked that part up out of that.

I think for me, right in that point in my sobriety, the most important thing in the 4th chapter was the bedevilments. And I'm sure we'll be talking about those tomorrow because I'm going to do it.

Uh,

but I discovered that talked about when that's that's what we do when we're sober.

Cool, huh?

It's nice to look at that and say yeah I was that way when I

bullshit.

Did a sober Cosmo home sober and more harm sober than I ever did as a drum. Didn't drink long enough to do all that stuff. I do it sober.

Not true, but I did it.

Along about this time this group's going on and one of the members of the group starts talking about the insanity of the second step and not being able to drink. And he equated this to an experience he had as as a a 19 year old.

They tried to sober him up. And so they sent him to an institution in Denver called Mount Airy.

Mount Airy for the Airheads

Psychiatric Center that at the time did the old avert the old aversion treatment for the treatment of alcoholism.

Any old geezers in here that remember that? I don't see any.

It's a medieval thing, and I think it's still probably goes on somewhere. But

it was a hospital setting, and he was admitted to this hospital. And the treatment room was just a room, maybe 12 feet square,

had mirrors on the walls, shells on the mirrors, liquor on the shelves.

The middle room is a Barber chair kind of thing at a stainless steel pot that would swivel in front of or away from who's in the chair.

Ned given Thompson man abuse and they put him in the treatment room and they pointed at the liquor on the shelves and said you can have anything you'd like to drink.

And I heard an old shit over here. Yeah.

The whole idea of that is you drink on the attribution, you get violently ill and you watch it happen in the mirrors.

You know, you your hair falls out, your toenails curl, sweat a little, bit, puke a little bit. And after that experience, you're just going to be so adverse to it. You never take another drink.

That's what it was about. The true story. That's that's that's what the treatments about.

And so four or five years later, Tom shows up at

this group. He tells us it really worked. He says it really did. He had not had reason or excuse take an abuse since.

Over the years, I've told that story a lot more times than Tom ever did. I'll tell you that.

But Tom is one of the reasons that that the second step happened to me. I'm not sure you take the second step. I think it happens to you.

It happened to me because Tom was crazy. He's craziest man ever knew an A a I'd love to see him again. He he was just wonderful. He did 12 steps on the streets through window buses. He's riding one bus, pulls up the next to another bus, and his friend arts in the other bus.

Really. What

pulls down the one? Hey man, I got something neat going on. You got to come with me tonight, meet me at the corner, such and such. We're going to a meeting.

That's how I got sober

names. Art Stanberry wasn't too long is tough stepping people and taking them to jump out airplanes with parachutes.

So the group moves on and we get into the 5th chapter and we read the bit about the actor

because it says we're step three. Very clear. He says well you got this far here, step three. OK cool so we are step three and we're reading all this and little leaves. Got something cute to say. He says. I got an idea.

I think we all ought to stand up, hold hands and read slash pray this third step prayer together.

I wasn't cool with me.

I wouldn't about to be seen holding hands of a bunch of boys.

Worse yet, I didn't want to be seen praying.

And he said the reason for that was that last 2-3 weeks any meetings he went to in the Denver area were all seen to be four step meetings. People were writing inventories

as best they knew how. And he go after people after meetings and who hadn't written an inventory and asked him why. And many of them said, well, it's 'cause I'm not taking the third step yet. Many of them. And So what Lee told us was I would like for us all to read, slash pray this third step prayer together. So it's sometime next week or later, you hear me telling people I haven't started writing yet because I haven't taken a third step.

You can call me a damn liar 'cause you saw me do it.

And that's kind of logic that's always made sense to us,

and we did it.

In all honesty, I did it because the Mother 13 guys were doing it.

You're all nodding your head, you know, that's why I did. It wasn't nothing cool about me. I just did it because I didn't want to look like a fool.

And driving home that night I told God. I said I really mean it man.

Everything I just said in apparent got to happen to me. It's got to change

and I know I need your help. I mean it.

That prayer. Fourteen of us took that prayer.

One of us went out and drank, froze to death. Eddie went out and done

and the rest of us stayed silver.

Now some of us have gone.

Jay Leedy left. He's gone.

Don Pritz became a trustee at large. Most sought after speaker in a probably

and help more people anybody in a

I'm I'll be 40 years sober in December

and don't don't clap. That ain't done anything for me.

You can clap for the group, but not for me. Let me tell you about these rest of these monkeys.

There's a Don M that lives in Las Vegas now. He's 47 years sober.

Tall Indian that was skinnier than me.

Lee's 30. Lee is 3 months behind me and sober and I've always held that over his head.

I don't think you can just go anywhere and find 13 guys that had an experience together to stayed sober and been able to carry the message anywhere they went and their time they wanted to.

I don't think it happened. There's a miracle that happened there that none of us earned.

Certainly didn't deserve it,

but what I'm trying to tell you here is you're the result of that prayer that night when a bunch of us said a prayer because everybody else did.

Hey,

I'm not sure I thought that before.

Yeah.

So we went on from there. I wrote an invoice inventory after that and took a fifth step with somebody I didn't like.

I'll maybe share some. I can share some of that tonight here. I got a couple of minutes and I'm not

much more.

One of the guys in that group

is a big, good looking fellow. Mexican heritage. His name is Ernie,

and Ernie and I really didn't like each other.

Now, that wasn't unusual in that part of the country. Probably still isn't, but

we just didn't like. We go to a meetings back then, and this is back in the

late 60s and early 70s, Assignment of the times as a peace sign.

You love everybody.

We didn't love each other.

I guarantee you

I'd walk into the a meeting. But he had to be cool, 'cause you're hugging everybody, right? You know, you're loving everybody. You're walking the area, meeting and Ernie be sitting over there,

so I can't let everybody know I don't love him. So I give him the peace.

He gives me the peace sign back on. He's missing his finger.

That's only one reason I didn't like him.

Early was cool, he really was. He's still a good looking man in the Julian.

He'd walk into the club, you'd hear the gals at the coffee table. So, you know, when Ernie walks in, it just takes my breath away.

I think that son of a bitch.

One day, Ernie disappeared.

Flat dropped out of sight.

Go to the meeting, they say. Where is Ernie? Say, don't knock it, he's gone.

I'm serious. I'm still in Siri

and I don't know how long he stayed away too. Maybe 3 weeks

and I go to the young people's meeting one night and I walk in there

and I looked him in the eye and there was something really different about Ernie.

There was somebody home. Hadn't been anybody there before, but there was somebody home that night. Search. You could see it.

And Ernie shared that he'd gotten a beef at home and run away and went down to a place in Texas called Lake Whitney. And he'd hooked up with a guy named Bob White down there. And

Bob sat him down with the big book and the pad and the pencil and showed him how to write an inventory.

And so Ernie stayed in this old fishing cabin down there on that lake and wrote that inventory. And he finally come up out of there and told Bobby is done.

Bob says you want to go fishing.

There's only one thing already likes to do better than fish,

and here's you guys are slow out here, I thought. God damn.

And so and so he jumps in the boat and they take out in the middle of Lake Clinton and Bob. Bob trusted boat off, he says. Now tell me what you wrote in that inventory.

And Ernie can't swim, so he took a fifth step.

I seem 2-3 days later and there's a significant change and you can buy God see it, it's there absolutely was there.

And

that night I went home for the a meeting and I took my book and my pad and my pencil, and I wrote my first inventory.

And I've written a lot of inventories and everyone of them was better than that one.

But that one saved my skinny ass

that kept me sober long enough to get to the next stuff and do that.

It's just part of this learning thing that was going on. And I did my best. I mean, I really worked hard. I didn't mean to miss all that stuff.

Didn't do that on purpose.

So that was the start of the process for that's when I took that fifth step with Ernie. Literally was the time when the whole of my bell and the wind bland blown through it began to grow shut.

Just did like you said

and my life showed some significant change. But see, then I lost my mind,

went home, Julie and I said a prayer. Because some things in our lives weren't working out real well.

And the answer to the Paris seems to be that we had to leave all these people in a A that we love so much in this cocoon we were wrapped up in. And we were supposed to go to Indianapolis IN.

Now that's a big change. I mean, it's a big change. And I'm not knocking the people in Indianapolis. I did for a long time. Some of them I still will, but

and out there I learned a lot more about the program. But we left this exciting city we lived in and the people we lived in and this wonderful experience I'd had with those people that I still love.

And we left it

and we went out there and we went to an A meeting together

and we were really alone.

But I had a message to Carrie.

We were so alone at the first meeting Julie and I went to.

It was a speaker meeting and the Southport group, the Old Southport group and

went up there in a fairly large meeting and the guy got up and he says hi everybody, I'm Alan, I'm an alcoholic. And Julie and I hollered hi Al and the whole group turned around, looked at us.

Come time for the Lord's Prayer, Julie and I reached over to hold hands. You should have seen it. What are you doing?

And they just hadn't been around that yet.

They're around it now,

but they hadn't done that yet.

And I was pretty sure I knew why I was there after that night because I didn't hear any reference to the 12 steps

by a number of people that showed some a lot of time in the program.

I quote one of those guys still he was in that a retired police officer in his last name was Green and I don't know what happened to him since

don't know why I thought, but he told the story of the the group secretary that absconded with the funds and went out and drank.

Remember that store? And he, he said, he comes back

and he's sorry. Oh boy, is he sorry. This guy is really sorry. So sorry. I went back out there and drinking, drank and just upset you people so much and ruined your programs and, and and all of that. And he says, but I didn't spend all the money and he sets it on the table. This guy said they threw him out of the group. They didn't think he was a real alcoholic.

I,

oh,

I guess I can tell you this and then I'm going to sit down. We can pretty well wrap this up with this. I've had any number of experiences are going through the 12 steps in order

over the last 35 years of my life.

30-4 maybe,

And something happens every time I do that.

Ernie used to say it, he said. Every time I do this I get Weller.

I just keep getting Weller,

and that's been my experience. And every time I've done it, whether I'm with a bunch like you or just a few of us wrapped up around in A

and a, in a room in a Catholic Church in Indianapolis where we cram, what, 14 or 15 or 16 of us in there and we go through this.

And there's never been a time that I've done that, that I haven't learned a great deal from everybody else in there.

I was thinking about this the other day

when I first got around A and got around doing the conferencing a little bit. Not not, never did it much, but a little bit in that sort of thing. I saw myself as maybe going to be the next young Chuck Chamberlain,

and I had to come to Indianapolis and find out that carrying the message is really about all I'm supposed to do,

and maybe the next Chuck Chamberlain is going to come out of this work. Ain't gonna be me,

that's for sure. And so as a result of what's going on out there, I have learned so much. I've learned so much from Linda, and I kind of keep track of it.

And a guy named Mike who lives there and a guy, a big tall guy, a friend of mine named a Jim who's picked up on it, probably the best teacher of all of us, and didn't get out much because he's got a bad ticker.

And it all boils down to 14 of us Stay in the third step prayer and

Goat Hill.

So what I know most is all of us sitting here and all that, and I, there's friends I hadn't seen in years sitting here from California and around and, and it's just been wonderful me to see him. And

but the only message I really got to tell you is, whether you like it or not, this is God's deal.

It's absolutely God's deal

and we just so blessed to be a part of it.

I've been blessed to be here with you all and I thank you for the opportunity.