0:31 Thank you. All right. Good evening, everyone. I'm Richard. I'm an alcoholic. Hi everybody. I'm very honored to be asked to come to this AA and Al Anon event. I'm representing Alcoholics Anonymous, hopefully in a good fashion. In my home group in West LA, they post little informational sheet every week. It's called the poop sheet, and it will list some milestone birthdays, and maybe somebody who is ill and needs some prayers, and maybe somebody's moving with a it's pretty it's pretty amazing when when someone moves, they they'll be 20 or 30 People who will come to that person's house and move them in a matter of hours, when something like that hour, you know, to do that done by professional movers. That's that's pretty expensive, so it's a pretty remarkable event. But this past week, I brought this with me, because we have Al Anon representation here. There was a little little blip here, and I'm going to read this. Okay, on this day in 1891 Lois Burnham was born in Brooklyn, New York, on my birthday. That's pretty cool. Same birthday, she took an interest in art and became an interior decorator and later a teacher. In 1918 she married Bill Wilson, an alcoholic stock broker, beginning a road to Rocky destiny. After bill got sober in 1934 she took on a period of soul searching about her dissatisfaction with her now sober husband and his new life, a life he achieved by working with alcoholic strangers after years of her best attempts to help him realizing that she might just be as sick as he is, he took on she took on a similar role as the wife of a co founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, with the families of alcoholics and also experience the effects of alcoholism. Thus Al Anon was born. Yay there. There are now 24,000 Al Anon family groups and 1500 alatin groups in 118 countries. Lois died at 97 in 1988 her spirit, sacrifice and influence continue to lift the spirit and alleviate the suffering of people who love alcoholics, drunk or sober. Thanks, Lois, right. So yay to Lois. So the significance of this with me is in 2015 I went to Bill Wilson's house in East Dorset Vermont. It's the it's where Bill Wilson was was born, and that house was slated to be condemned because of of disarray, and back in the early 1990s and then the message got out that that house might be torn down, and so the Alcoholics Anonymous rescued it, and it's now a beautiful shrine place for recovery. When you when you go inside, actually, when I went there, I drove a significant distance to go out of the way to go to that house. And I got there and on the port was on a Wednesday, and on the porch, there's a big sign it says closed on Wednesdays. Oh, no. So you've got to be kidding me. No, no no. So I, I said, Okay, well, I'm just going to sit on the porch here for a few minutes, and through osmosis, try to get this energy of the house of the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. And what happened was this lady, she drove up and. She got out of her car and she said, Are you visiting? I said, Yeah, I'm here for California. This is my 25th year that I was sober. That's why I went there specifically. And she said, Well, I'm a volunteer, and I'll let you in. I said, Oh, my God, unbelievable. So when you go in there the directory at the for the visitors is pretty, pretty amazing. As you can imagine. There's people from all over the world that go to that house, and then in the corner there's a light that's left on 24/7 because Bill Wilson was born in that corner of the house, all right, so it's pretty amazing. And then afterwards, very generous for this lady to to do that for me. And I said, Is there, is there something else that I can do? And she said, Well, you can go down the street about a mile to the cemetery, and in that cemetery is Bill and Lois Wilson are buried next to each other. So when I got to the to the cemetery, it's a lot of plots, I couldn't really find it, and then I just sort of stumbled upon it, Bill and Lois Wilson, very non discrete plots.
6:25 And the thing that's amazing, though, is there's little bucket there, and people put their medallions and chips and all these, these messages from, I cheated and took one out. Said, one said, well, thank you for saving my brother. So that was pretty cool. So I like to thank my friend Richard for asking me to come here. Richard has been my friend for over 25 years, and we have over 75 years of sobriety between the two of us. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, Richard is pretty funny.
7:16 One time I heard this expression, it said that some people don't have two people that would come to their funeral. So I was thinking about that. I said, Well, I think if I died, I think my sister would come, for sure, so I need another one. So I asked Richard. I said, Richard. I said, Richard, if I died, would you come to my funeral? And he said, It depends on if it rains or not. I said, that's the type of friend he is, but we're both baseball fanatics. My team, Yankees and Richard Dodgers. Richard never, never fails to remind me of the Dodgers won the World Series last two years so but there's an expression we all know. Most of us have any time in here, if you're new, the expression is pitiful and incomprehensible, demoralization. And that expression applied to me for my my sports allegiance during my time, because I used to I had season tickets for the Raiders when they played in Los Angeles. Yeah, you know, the Raiders have been suffering from the disease of alcoholism for about 35 years now, you know, yeah, so I had this. I had this 1965
8:29 Plymouth Valiant. It was Aqua. It stuck out like a sore thumb. It was a cool car. That was my car had when I was drinking. But I went to this Raider game, and in that car with two or three of my misfit friends, and we drank before the game, we drank during the game. We drank after the game. So when we came out, we realized that we had a small dilemma, and we didn't realize where we parked the car. So we drove around, where we walked around for an hour or so, aimlessly looking for the car, who couldn't find it. And so he said, Okay, we're just going to go to the to the security and tell them the car got stolen. And so we went there, and then they asked us. They said, Well, where did you park the car? And we didn't think they would ask us that question, you know. So the solution to that was that we had to wait another hour, hour and a half, until all the cars in the parking lot cleared out, and then we see the car way in the corner, right. And then we're having fleeting recognition at that time that this is caused by alcohol. This, this chain of events is, is alcohol here. That's why we can't find the car, and this is not happening. So, so the the transformation now is Richard and I have both been to many sporting events since we've been sober. And so you go to the event driving car, and you. You park and you go to 6e and you commit 6e to memory, and you go inside the stadium, watch the event, enjoy the event, because you're sober. Go back out, go to 6e go to your inside your car and drive home. You know, it's just these, these fringe benefits of sobriety are just amazing, unbelievable. Yeah, so, you know, I've only had two sponsors and Alcoholics Anonymous. My first sponsor was Bill, and he used to call me up and leave me messages, and he would say, I'm just checking in. It's better to be checking in than checking out, and that's true. I'm glad to be checking in today, and I'm here tonight because I said I was going to be here. It's one of the things of plants used to say all the time, do what you said you're going to do. It's not doesn't get much more complicated. But my confession is, I have not always done what I said I'm going to do. I've there's been times, for lack of better description, that I've just flaked, made an excuse. So the idea with that is that I'm going to do what I want to do, I'm going to take a nap, I'm going to eat some food, I'm going to talk to some friends, I'm going to enjoy this experience. But that turns out to never be true. What happens is every time that I'm not somewhere that I'm supposed to be, I'm thinking how I should be there. So I don't like that feeling, so I just suit up and show up like tonight and leave the rest up to God, and you know, I'll do my best. I've been trying to do my best for a few 24 hour periods. Some days I succeed, and other days I don't do as well as others. But I heard this analogy when I was nearly sober. It said that being sober could be like being in a card game, and God is the dealer, and sometimes God may throw you a bad hand, and your response to that may be, why? Why are you doing this to me? I'm trying to change my ways and embrace this incredible gift of sobriety that you've bestowed on me, and hopefully I can slowly become the person that you would want me to become, but you give me this bad hand, and God's response to that would be, you should be glad you're even in the game. And that's true, you know, because that's a loose description. This is no game, but I understand for all intents and purposes, that I should be dead, but I'm not dead because of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my sobriety date is May 25 1990 so I've had the blessings of Alcoholics Anonymous for almost 36 years, and I don't Have any reservation about saying how clocks Anonymous is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. I came in or beat up like most of us. I was broken spiritually, I was broken mentally, I was broken physically. I weighed 130 pounds, wringing wet. I had two drunk driving charges. I had burned every friend in sight, and I had one foot in the grave, but I've managed to take that foot out of the grave since I've been here. And today I started my day the same way I have for most of my sobriety. That's I asked God to guide my thoughts, deeds and speech and bless me with a good attitude. I ask that I give 100% that I exercise patience and I'm courteous, and at the end of the day I say, thank you God for what you've given me, thank you God for what you've taken away. And most of all, thank you for You've left me, and that's kept me in pretty good standing for a few 24 hour periods. And also pray that I never lose my sense of humor or take myself too damn seriously. And I get an opportunity. Well, I initially got an opportunity to do that with my first sponsor, Bill. Bill was very funny one time, I say, ask him all these crazy questions. And I asked him, I said, Bill, if, if you had, if you were diagnosed with some terminal illness, and they told you had six months to live, do you think that you would drink again? And he said, Oh, no, he was. I thought about that many times before he goes, if I had six months live I get back together with my ex wife, because I know it would be the longest six months of my life. That was a good one. Yeah, that was good.
14:22 And, you know, I'm also very glad that I have a higher power that I can pray to, which is something I did not have when I first came to Alcock songs. So here I am. I'm trying to get sober, which is a daunting enough of a task as it is, but then I'm hearing over and over and over that I need to develop some sort of concept of a higher power. And the reason I was having so much difficulty with that was because of the loss of my sister. My sister died for melanoma in 1988 and she was, without question, the crown jewel of our family. She she really was. So I told my first sponsor about this. Him. I'm having a lot of difficulty with this, you know, loss of my sister and this higher power and trying to get sober, this is just too much for me. I can't deal with this. And he said that his revelation came when he was a second grade school teacher, and he told his kids, he said, take out a crown and a piece of paper and draw the most important thing in your life. Most of the kids drew something that you would expect a child that age should draw, like a picture of their house or some sort of food. They love their favorite cartoon character, their parents, something like that. And he said he came across this one little girl and he didn't recognize what she had drawn. And he said, What's that? And she said, That's God. And he said, Well, nobody really knows what God looks like. And he said, she turned and said, very sternly, well, now you do. I thought, Whoa, that's that's pretty heavy for for a second grade child, you know, I was like, wow. But the message is, look, if a second grade child can have that conviction of their higher power, then you can too. You may not get it tomorrow, next week or next month, you know. So that's been true for me. In Alcoholics Anonymous allow something to unfold in God's time, which is not always. So I heard this said before, that you may ask God for something, and there's three answers. One is no, and the second one is not yet, and the third one is, you've got to be kidding me, yeah, so that's what's but I live the first part of my life in Lexington, Kentucky. My father was the mayor. We live in this beautiful blue grass country home. We had all the trimmings. And I think my first addiction was a combination of adrenaline and gambling, because Kentucky is racehorses. And my father took me to the racetrack at a very early age. And when you go in there, they give you this form. It's pretty complex, has a lot of small numbers, and it's not easy even for an adult to read this thing. But my father taught me how to read that that form at a very early three, three years old, and I used to win, win some money. My father taught me how to bet and and I would win occasionally, and we would stand by the finish line and to see and feel those, you know, 2000 pound thoroughbreds coming down the track. That's that's a pretty heavy feeling, you know. So my father exposed me to that too. And so one time, I got my mother said that I got displaced from them.
17:49 I was lost basically in the the public address announcer, or the person went on and said, there's a little boy. He has red shorts and a blue shirt and $65 in his pocket. My mother goes, That's my son. They're walking around with some Cha Ching, you know, an armorer I used to so I don't know if that's in the parenting handbook. To be teaching your son how to read a racing form, you know? So eventually we moved to New Jersey, and the reason that we moved there was because my father was a brilliant man. He was he went to school at Harvard. He was part of the Rhodes Scholar Program in England, and the the idea was to to go there and have my father work at these huge companies in New York that wanted him to come there and also to be exposed to the best public schools in the nation. So that's what happened, but the latter happened, but the former did not. Because of my father's alcoholism, he was never able to secure work. So when we moved there, I was surrounded by these super achievers, academically, athletically, culturally. So I was in I was this is out of my league. These students were unbelievably smart that I went to school with. They were just crazy. And so I would say I saw some harmless drinking at 16, and by 19, I was a full blown alcoholic. My first DUI that I got very bad situation. So I was arrested, and this policeman said, Do not go back to your car. If you go back to your car, you will be arrested again. So I had this suspect relationship with taxi cabs at that time. So I ordered a taxi cab from the police station that I was just arrested at, and I told him. To drive me about a quarter of a mile from my house, and then I bolted out of the backseat of the taxi without paying. Now, when you think about that, that is a very bad plan, because the taxi driver just called back the police station that I had just been arrested from and had all my personal information, so the police came into the taxi and escorted the taxi to my house, and they knocked on my door, and I was stupid enough to answer it, so, so I was promptly arrested a second time, you know. So that qualifies as a bad night. That's a bad night, you know. I haven't had one of those in a long time. So my disease started taking me into some dangerous neighborhoods, and mainly that was the South Bronx in New York. That's where it's taking me. And so I moved. I got a job at FedEx, and I was very proud to work at that job, because it was very difficult to get that job, and plus the hours that I got after the training was over, people would quit because they couldn't deal with it. And now express this to a room full of alcoholics, the hours were 130 in the afternoon until 10 at night. And I'll tell you, those are alcoholic hours. You can continue your job working a job like that. So, so I moved to to Atlanta to get away from it's clearly a geographic. That's what I'm doing. I'm having a geographic here to get away. So I my best friend was Rick Henderson. I work with it. He was a strapping he was a very great, great guy, and I was best friends with him for a long time, but the disease was taking us into some bad places it was. And so I came home for Christmas one time, and I called his house. His wife answered, and she was he was not home, and I knew, based on just the chain of events, that Rick was going to do what we should not be doing. And so the next morning, I got this telephone call from one of my other close friends, and he said, Were you with Rick last night? I said, No, and he said he was shot and killed in a botched drug deal in New York. Yeah, so if that you would think something like that would be an eye opener for you to help me to to fly right? But the thing I remember the most about that was his mother. She came into the church, or where the services were, and the Pew I was sitting on the seat right next to the aisle, and she came in and screamed, and it was a scream that could decalcify your spine from about 50 meters. And you would think something like that would make me stop, but it didn't. I kept drinking for another couple of years, and I lost that job at FedEx, and then we all, we need someone to rescue us. So had this flight attendant gal live out here in California. So she right after I lost the job at FedEx, I contacted her. So here I am. I'm landing lax, and I've only known this lady over the telephone. Never met her before, so I get off this plane and I'm moving into her house. You know, this is, this is a bad plan here, yeah, so I'm bringing this, I'm bringing this disease to her. And I tried, I mentioned this gentleman in the back. I tried to make amends to her. Many years ago, I sent a letter to her for apologizing for my behavior and and it came back, returned to send her. She didn't want anything to do with me, so I made the effort to reach out, you know, and so, so when I got here to California, I had one pitiful night, and went inside to this job that I had, and I told him I needed help. And they put me in Exodus Recovery Center, Marina del Rey, 1989 and I thought it was on when I was this model recovery person there, you know, doing everything right. But then when I got out, I was not ready. I got loaded again for another almost nine months. So I was going to this meeting in in Arcadia was like a, it was like an amphitheater type setting, so, and it was this lady there. Her name was Mindy, and Mindy had five years of sobriety. It's like, Whoa, man. Mindy is a heavy hitter. She really is, right. So someone was, someone was leaving, who was doing the cookie commitment, and Mindy was in the front. And Mindy turned around, and she goes, I want that guy to do the cookies. And she pointed at me, and I was like, oh, you know, I know about the phenomena of getting mentally loaded. Long time before you actually go and pick up a drink. And that's what was happening to me. Then I had 44 days of sobriety, and I got assigned that cookie commitment. Now the circumstances were, is I like cookies. I'm jazzed for cookies. I am so I would buy the Pepperidge Farm ones in the white bags, you know? And I would take out a, like, a ruler, and I'd measure the height of it, or whatever, and I'd put it on this plate, like, oh, it was just an unbelievable presentation. It was, yeah, this is just craziness. This is neuro This is cookie. Neurosis is what it is, yeah. But anyway, one, you know, because we're all looking for something in the beginning. So I'm outside the meeting one time, and some somebody, somebody said, Hey, who brought the cookies? And I said, I did. And that was my first introduction to a feeling, you know, that that I was becoming a part of Alcoholics Anonymous, so I was able to to do what I needed to do for the first five years, and then 1995 I was ready to go out again. I had had enough, and I just wasn't hearing the message. And someone said, go, go to the Alcoholics Anonymous International Convention in San Diego. Because I was living in Pasadena, I knew nothing about the convention, so I I went there, and there was probably 40,000 people in the stands, and another, maybe 30,000 people on The field, 70,000 people. And what they said was, who uh, okay, okay, so can we have a moment of silence for the alcoholic who still suffers? Now, the conventional wisdom with that is we're praying for people who are outside of the meeting, people who are actively drinking and in the throes of alcoholism. So but that was the reverse, because I was inside, but I was suffering too. So in that one minute of silent meditation, I was lifted of the obsession to drink. It's one of the most powerful moments I've ever been through. So Richard and I, we, we just went to Vancouver, which is where the convention was this year, and I took note of that that time when they said that, can we have a moment of silence for the alcoholic who still suffers? So if I've ever get an opportunity to to remember the chaos of my disease, I'll take a look at it. And the other day, was clearing out some of my papers, and I found this article that I cut out of the Los Angeles Times,
27:51 1995 and I was working at this little part time job, KPCC radio in Pasadena for Larry. This guy names Larry mantle. He used to have these pretty cool guests. So this lady came on, and she was not entirely convinced that she's an alcoholic. She'd been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous for a number of years. So she's starting this new program. It's called moderation management. That's what it's called, right? So when I was the call screener on this TV, on this radio show, and she came on, and she was very well dressed and very well spoken, she was but the gist of this is that you can have up to 14 drinks a week if you still have reservations. So you're an alcoholic, and I was thinking 14 drinks a week, that's two drinks a day. That would just make me angry. I would not be able to subscribe to that program. But alcoholics, you know, we're we can figure out anything. So when I said to my friend, look, you just not drink for six days and then have 14 drinks on the seventh day, right? Or, even better, just not drink for seven days and have 28 drinks on the eighth day. Yeah, so, but I don't, I don't know if you know the story behind that lady, but she got drunk she drove the wrong way on a highway in Washington and crashed and she killed two people. Yeah, that's what happened. So I've heard a number of variations other than Alcoholics Anonymous in the time that I've been here, and the one that always works for me is Alcoholics Anonymous, no drinks one day at a time, and my life slowly gets better. So I think the last thing I'd like to say is my sister Mary, when she died, I was in Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York. We were talking, and she knew she was going to die, and I knew she was going to die. It was an unbelievably painful situation, but she still had the graciousness to ask me how, how I was doing. Can you imagine someone whose life is ending? So this is not the forum for me to be giving my tale of woe. It is not so I just said I had not been doing too well. And she said to me, You know what, Richard, you have all the tools to have a very good life. You do, but I know you've been having a lot of problems over the last several years. And that was an understatement. I had been on like, a 10 year run. And she said, I don't know what it is you need to find but I hope that you find it, and I don't have any reservation about understanding that what I needed To find was Alcoholics Anonymous. Thank you.
31:01 Thank you.
31:13 Yes, a Yeah, okay, coming up now to read a 12 Steps and then one other out on the speaker. You.