AA Spiritual Breakfast, IIene W., Los Angeles

[00:00:00] Chair: It's a pleasure to introduce Illeen W. from Los Angeles.

[00:00:14]: All right, I'm standing on this box because I'm a shrimp.

[00:00:25] I used to be 5'6". Now I'm not even getting to 5'3". It's very sad. Don't get old. This is my recommendation.

[00:00:35] It's a problem with long-term sobriety. You get old right along with it. Anyway, yes, thank you. My name is Illeen, and I am an alcoholic.

[00:00:44] I want to thank the committee, particularly Richard, for asking me to speak. He said the first time he heard me speak was at the Pow Wow in Palm Springs in 2018, And it was in June, and my father had died in March, and the minute I mentioned his name, I started to cry. And I cried halfway through my talk, but nobody seemed to mind, so I guess that talk is why I'm here this morning.

[00:01:06] I want to thank Charlie. I'm sorry that I missed your talk. I couldn't be here on Friday night, and I'm so grateful to be here. My sobriety date is March 3rd, 1975. I'm 51 years sober. I got sober when I was 18 days shy of my 24th birthday, and now I'm 75 and a half. So, yeah, I did get older. Anyway, I'm going to tell you what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now. That's the format, and so I will do that. I'm a Jew from Idaho, and if you know anything about Jews or Idaho, you know how weird that actually is.

[00:01:43] My parents, whose names were Harry and Harriet because they were a set.

[00:01:48] They were from the Bronx in New York, which is where you're supposed to be from if you're Jewish. And my father was like Charlie's father. He was in the Marine Corps during World War II. He served in a place called Guadalcanal, and he came back from overseas.

[00:02:04] And he took a train across the continental United States, and he landed back in New York City one day before his marriage to my mother. And they got married on July 15, 1944. And shortly thereafter, my father got a Marine Corps commission to go out to the western United States. They went to Portland. They went to Butte, Montana. And they ended up in Boise. My father was a lifelong baseball fan, a Yankee fan. He was in Yankee Stadium when Lou Gehrig gave the speech, which is a nice fact about him. And he got out of the service and he became a minor league baseball announcer and disc jockey in Boise. And my brother and I were both born there, and they were on the verge of moving back to New York when my father got a job in Los Angeles, so we came to L.A. in 1955. So I've been in L.A. for 71 years, so I'm practically a native. And I was the star of my grammar school. It was the last time I achieved greatness.

[00:03:04] I peaked at 11 1⁄2, and it was kind of downhill from there. And you can tell by my vintage that I grew up during the 60s, and I loved everything about the 60s. I loved the drugs, the alcohol, the music, the clothes, the politics, the free love, which turned out to be neither free nor love. It actually turned out to be pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. But as my late friend Liz Lepresti said, someday your sex inventory will become your gratitude list. And I can speak about that for sure.

[00:03:41] I had breast cancer about a year ago, and I had to stop taking hormones, so I'm essentially dead inside. And so, you know, that's just how it goes. I used to be a heat-seeking missile, and now I'm dead. And anyway, what could I say?

[00:04:01] When I was 12 years old, I got lured down the street by an 18-year-old boy who lived down the street, and he said if I did this rather minor sexual favor, he would give me some beer. And I didn't know what the sexual favor was. I quickly learned, and he gave me some beer. And I don't know what it was about me, but I wanted that beer. I just wanted that beer. And when I got the beer, I found out why I wanted the beer. And my life for the next 12 years became a relentless pursuit of alcohol and drugs. I don't call drugs outside issues. They are drugs, and they are the thing that I believe got me to Alcoholics Anonymous a lot sooner than I would have gotten to AA had I not used them, and that's just the truth of my story. And I was a very beautiful young hippie girl. I had black hair down to my waist. I was porcelain skinned. I was a little round.

[00:04:56] I was very beautiful, and I quickly learned that I could use my beauty as a commodity because when you're a teenage alcoholic girl, you have to find a way to get a source because you can't go into a liquor store or a bar and put your money down. You know, you just can't buy alcohol freely. But you can find people who are more than willing to get it for you if you are more than willing to give them what they want. And I don't know how willing I actually was, but I knew it was a necessity. And I used to have a friend named Cahuenga Begay, who some of you know, and she used to say that she would do anything for the promise of a drink. Not even a drink, the promise of a drink. If there was a chance of a drink in it, I would do anything. And that became the truth of my existence. And I used to do what I euphemistically called favors for older guys. And I did a lot of those favors.

[00:05:53] And one night, when I was 17, I had just barely graduated from high school, I did a favor for a drug dealer named Gimpy, and I got pregnant. And because I had only a passing reality with a passing relationship with reality at that point, I simply refused to believe I was pregnant. I just wasn't pregnant. Plus, it was 1968, and I was 17 years old, and I had no idea where you could go to get a pregnancy test without telling your parents. And so in the fall, I got into college barely by one one-hundredth of a percentage point based on my SAT score, and I went to the student health service.

[00:06:34] And not only was I pregnant, I was four and a half months pregnant. And even though it was 1968, there were things you could do. You could go to Puerto Rico or Mexico or convince a board of psychiatrists that you needed to, you know, somehow do something about this. But it was way too late for me. And so I carried a baby to term. I had my son in March of 1969. I drank and used through my entire pregnancy because I drank and used the way I always did. And then I got sent away, and I went to live in this family as a mother's helper, and they were rather lenient with me. And I quickly discovered that the boys next door had long hair, and I started getting loaded with them. And knowing what I know today, I don't know how much damage or if I did any damage to that child in the womb, but my son has a multitude of problems, and it is entirely possible that I caused those problems, and those are the kinds of amends you can never, ever make.

[00:07:33] But I had that child in March of 1969. I signed paperwork. I didn't see him. I didn't hold him, and three days later, I just gave him away. I just gave him away. And I would never allow myself to think about it until after I got sober. And I drank and used for another six years. And it got progressively worse and worse and worse. I didn't get into trouble with the law. You know, I didn't have, like, huge, you know, problems or consequences in the sense that I was, you know, I went to jail or anything like that. But the consequences for me were absolutely dire. I mean, I was just devastated by what had happened to me because, you know, here's the truth of the matter. Charlie talked about being born with potential. I was the girl who had everything you were supposed to have in order to make it. You know, I had looks and talent and brains and opportunity. I didn't come from an alcoholic family.

[00:08:31] My parents were married almost 63 years when my mother died very suddenly in 2007. They were meant to stay forever, and I was the disruptive factor in my family. You know, and I just I couldn't stay sober. I didn't want to stay sober. They say in the book that we are men and women who like the effect produced by alcohol. I love the effect produced by alcohol. I was one of those people who was always more or less insanely drunk. That was me. And I drove drunk. I never got a DUI. I had a lot of fender benders, scrapes, accidents. I had blackouts. I woke up with people I didn't know. I was raped. I mean, a lot of things happened, and I would just write it off as the cost of, you know, what I needed to do.

[00:09:19] And in 1974, I became acquainted with Alcoholics Anonymous through a very circuitous route. For you young people, we didn't have 24-hour television. At midnight, TV went off, and a test pattern, a black and white portrait of an Indian, would come on the screen, and then it would come back on at 6 o'clock in the morning. But very clever people knew that you could buy time very cheaply on late-night television, and central office in Los Angeles knew that you could do this. And so one night after drinking about a gallon of Red Mountain wine, by the way, if you're trying to get a beat on me, I'm kind of a Ripple and Reds kind of girl. I'm kind of a Tequila and Quaaludes kind of girl. I'm the kind of girl who doesn't want to be here, so I drink a lot of cheap wine. And to this day, I don't know how to operate a corkscrew. I just, I haven't a clue. You know, I'm a twist-off girl. I'm a Mad Dog 2020, Thunderbird, Ripple, Red Mountain kind of girl.

[00:10:19] I'm an Annie Green Springs, you know, Boone's Farm. I'm, you know, I drink the kind of wine that my friend Don Norman used to describe as coming, you know, and coming and hovering over a grape but never quite coming in for a landing, you know, that kind of wine, you know, because it's cheap and I don't have much money. And anyway, I drank about a gallon of Red Mountain. I was passed out on the couch, and about 3 o'clock in the morning, I came to, and there was a single card on my television, which, of course, I hadn't turned off because, A, I was passed out, but, B, you had to cross 12 feet of shag carpet to turn off the television in those days. And anyway, there was a single card on my TV, and it said, Do you have a drinking problem?

[00:11:04] And I thought, How do they know?

[00:11:07] Who's in the television?

[00:11:10] What the hell is going on here?

[00:11:14] And there was a telephone number.

[00:11:16] It was central office.

[00:11:19] And I called the number because I was curious about who had done this. And a man answered the phone and he said, Alcoholics Anonymous, may I help you? Now, I had never heard of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a much more anonymous organization back in 1974.

[00:11:35] You know, rock groups weren't breaking their anonymity en masse in People magazine. You know, pop singers weren't doing things like talking about California sobriety, which, by the way, does not exist. If you don't know what she was talking about, you can smoke pot and stay sober. That is not true. Just want to tell you that is not true. That's not part of sobriety, smoking pot.

[00:11:59] And anyway, this man said, Alcoholics Anonymous, may I help you? And I said, I think I drink too much. And he said, would you like me to have somebody call you? And I said, okay. And he woke this total stranger up in the middle of the night. It blew my mind. This woman was woken up in the middle of the night, and she called me. And she said, may I help you? And I said, I think I drink too much. And she said, would you like me to take you to a meeting?

[00:12:25] And I said, no, thank you.

[00:12:28] I'll get there myself. I came to AA like this. Help me. Stay as far away from me as possible, but please help me. I was not a cuddly newcomer. I was not a vision for you. You know how sometimes, like, a really adorable newcomer comes in the meeting and everybody just converges on him? I was the newcomer that people were more likely to run away from. I came in like this with my little fists all balled up. I was all defiant and stuff. I had nothing to be defiant about. I was just terrified. There were not a lot of young people in AA in 1974. I did not get sober in 1974.

[00:13:07] I came around for five months. I don't refer to that period of time as slipping. It was not slipping. I was drinking. I was occasionally going to a meeting. When the holidays rolled around 74, 75, I thought, well, there's certainly no point in sticking around AA during the holidays, drunk. It seemed very depressing. And so I left with a vague plan to come back after the first of the year. But my birthday is March 3rd because, you know, I had good intentions. I had really bad follow through. If my mother was talking to me, maybe she would invite me to dinner and I would say I would come. And then I'd run into somebody and they would say, would you like to go to Mexico? And I'd get in the car.

[00:13:49] Just seemed like a good idea at the time. And anyway, I was always in therapy, and I'm not here to knock therapy, by the way. Therapy has been incredibly helpful since I've been sober. You know, sometimes you have to take outside issues to therapists. I mean, I've needed other help besides Alcoholics Anonymous, but I want to make a distinction. AA is the only therapy that I have ever employed for my alcoholism. I have gone to therapy for anger, for depression, to talk about my son, to go through my retirement. I mean, I've got to talk about the horrible relationships I've been in. I mean, I have gone to therapy for all kinds of issues. And it's amazing how much help you can get from therapists and sponsors if you actually tell them the truth. The truth is a very important component in getting any sort of help whatsoever.

[00:14:46] But when I was in therapy prior to coming to Alcoholics Anonymous, I was not there to tell the truth. I was not there to talk about my drinking. I was there, as my sponsor, Julie C. says, to unravel the fascinating mystery of me. And God knows it was fascinating. And every therapist I had prior to coming to Alcoholics Anonymous was weirder than the previous. And this guy was the ultimate weird therapist. His name was Sid, and he was blind. And we used to smoke dope and neck during my sessions. So you know I was getting a lot of help from Sid. So Sid persuaded me to go to this place for New Year's weekend called the Beneville Pines, which is a church camp in the San Bernardino Mountains, but it's not what you think. It's not run by the Southern Baptists. It's run by the Unitarians, and they're loose. So anyway, we go up to this place, and of course I had to drive because Sid was blind.

[00:15:42] And we got there, and they were unloading a bunch of jugs out of the back of a station wagon of unknown vintage. That's my drug of choice, unknown vintage. And anyway, I don't know what happened to Sid, but I ended up having a completely drunken weekend with a pair of sex therapists from Carpinteria, California, whose names were Bert and Sally. I don't know why I remembered their names. I guess I thought I'd look them up, which I never did, Not because I actually think there's anything wrong with a three-way or a two-way. I wish I had the energy for a one-way. But I didn't look them up because they were creepy. And as were most of the people I knew when I was drinking. Anyway, I didn't make it back to AA right after the first of the year after that escapade. And I came back two months later, and I wouldn't have given you two nickels for my chances of staying in Alcoholics Anonymous from that day to this.

[00:16:41] That was March 3rd, 1975. But on March 4th of 1975, I went to a meeting at the Radford Clubhouse on Radford in North Hollywood. And I ran into a man that I had met the year before. His name was Bob Earl. He was a well-known guy in AA. He was a circuit speaker. And he recognized me, but not in a good way.

[00:17:03] And he backed me up against the wall in that clubhouse, and he said to me, look, punk, he said, you have a serious problem with alcohol and drugs, and you better damn well get sober, or you're going to die.

[00:17:16] And for some reason, I believed him.

[00:17:20] I believed him. Lots of nice people had given me their phone numbers a year before I hadn't called one person. They'd give me their numbers on little slips of paper, and I'd stick them in my pockets, and I'd throw them out at the end of the night because what was I going to say to somebody if I called him? The miracle of that encounter is that I actually called Bob. I took his number, and I called him. What was even more miraculous is I called him a second time because completely unsolicited by me in that first phone call, he started telling me what to do. And I don't like people telling me what to do, especially if I haven't asked them. I mean, they're not kidding when they say that defiance is the outstanding characteristic of the alcoholic. It was certainly one of my outstanding characteristics, you know. But I called him. And the things that he told me to do are actually a facsimile of what I still do in my 52nd year of sobriety. He told me to go to seven to nine meetings a week. He told me to sit in the front row. He told me to be responsible for my chair and my ashtray.

[00:18:19] He told me to thank speakers, whether I thought they had anything to say or not. He told me to get a big book in a 12 and 12 and read them. He told me to get a meeting commitment. He told me I was basically useless, but I had a car, drive other people to meetings. I didn't like any of these suggestions at all. I had a great alcoholic car. I had a 1972 Kelly Green Datsun 510. It was filled with dents and scratches. It reeked of cigarette smoke. The back seat was full of fast food wrappers, and I would pick up people in that car, and they actually got in the car. People were stupid. Anyway, my first meeting commitment was shaking hands at the door of what was then the biggest meeting in Los Angeles. It was called Wilshire-Normandy. They called it that because it was on the corner of Wilshire and Normandy.

[00:19:10] My friend Serenity Sam gave me a meeting directory from 1966 once, so I thumbed through it trying to find amusing meeting names, my favorite, the No Donut Group in Pomona. Can you imagine that? A bunch of humorless old farts saying, you know, we don't want the message adulterated by pastry.

[00:19:30] We're not even going to have coffee, nothing to dilute the message. They just sounded grim.

[00:19:35] But anyway, my first, so I was a greeter at Wilshire Normandy. I was a hostile greeter. You got greeted whether you wanted to be or not, and if you tried to go around the pass, I would intercept you. And then they gave me $10 to get cookies for 200 people, and I would arrange those cookies, and if you tried to touch them before I was ready, I'd slap your hand. That's what I was like. And yet people invited me to coffee at Piper's Coffee Shop, the weird girl from the door at Wilshire Normandy, and I started to make lifelong friends. Unfortunately, a lot of my peers are no longer with us because when I was 24, those people were 30 and 40. Some of them were 50, you know, and they've gone on. And, you know, but there's still a bunch of us left. I mean, it's amazing how many people are sober, like, decades and decades. My sponsor has 64 years of sobriety. She's 97 years old. She's completely bedridden.

[00:20:33] She can't go on meetings. She can't go to meetings. But I visit her every other week, and we talk for about an hour. She's as sharp as a tack. And because she's not able to be active anymore, I also have added on Marilyn S., who is my sponsor and awaiting my secret underground clandestine advisor. You know, so I have help from both sides, and I sponsor a lot of people. I sponsor a lot of women. I sponsor a couple of men. I inherited them from the late Don Norman. They were already very well trained, so, you know, and they're very helpful to me. They drive me. They change light bulbs for me. I like having these male sponsors, you know. It's very good, you know. And we have wonderful relationships, all of us. And I'm very fortunate, you know, because I'm in the middle of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, I never feel like I have it made. You know, I don't flout my sobriety. I don't think I'm better than you because I have more time.

[00:21:31] It's just that I got older and I didn't drink for longer, you know.

[00:21:36] And, you know, but I stay here because, you know, when I was much newer in AA, I used to think there would come a time when I would need this program less. And, of course, the converse is true because the older I've gotten, the more challenging life has become in some ways. You know, I've had 10 orthopedic surgeries since 1992. I just have one of those bodies where the warranty runs out on my part every couple of years, you know. And last fall, I was diagnosed with very early breast cancer, and I had a partial mastectomy. You know, there's always, you know, a silver lining. I got that reduction in lift I've always wanted. And, you know, and Medicare had to pay for it. Fantastic.

[00:22:18] You know, and I had 20 radiation treatments, and I got through that. And, you know, right after I was diagnosed, three of my sponsees were diagnosed.

[00:22:26] It's incredible. I mean, you always find opportunities to share your experience, strength, and hope. You know, I'm the joint replacement whisperer of Alcoholics Anonymous, so if you're facing a knee replacement or a hip replacement, just call me. I know everything to do, you know. And so I always have something to share, you know, and it doesn't have to be in the nature of the steps or, you know. I mean, I have never had an experience in Alcoholics Anonymous that I haven't been able to find somebody, you know, who's shared it. You know, AA is based on the principle of one drunk talking to another. You know, we are amateurs for amateurs, you know, but we know about our subject matter. You know, I'm an authority on myself. I am not an authority on you. But I have experience to share lots of it, you know. In 2007, my mother, who had been fine one day, was dead the next. I was in Dallas speaking at a convention, and I had to get on a plane and fly home. And it was before you could get a text message on a plane, so I had absolutely no idea what was going on, and I got home.

[00:23:29] And my then-boyfriend picked me up, and we went to the hospital, and my mother was in agony, and she was pacing around, and she had this horrible nurse's aide in ICU. It was Memorial Day weekend, and we went home, and 20 minutes later, they called us to come back, and by the time we got back to the hospital, she was dead. And my father was 86 years old, and he was absolutely devastated.

[00:23:52] I mean, my father was bereft. He was so devastated. We didn't know what to do. It was the worst day of our lives. And, you know, I didn't know what to do, so I moved in with him for a couple of months. And for the next seven years, while my father still lived in his own home, I stayed with him every other night so that he would always have something to look forward to, so that he didn't have to eat a solitary breakfast every single morning. And I used to speak a lot around the country. I used to be a circuit speaker. I cut it off completely because I was not going to leave my widowed father alone on the weekends to rush off to speak somewhere. That was just how it was. And although I have never taken a hiatus from AA and I have never taken a vacation from AA, I had to change the nature of my participation. If I got to two meetings a week, that was fine. If I got to three meetings a week, that was fine. Some of my sponsees fell away.

[00:24:46] I was speaking less because I had a full-time job as a personal assistant in the entertainment industry. I had my father, and I had Alcoholics Anonymous. And it says somewhere in our literature that our 12-step work is an avocation that comes after our job and our family. And my father had to be my number one priority. He just had to be. You know, and he lived until he was almost 97. And my father was the absolute prince of men. I've never met a better person than my father. I was so lucky.

[00:25:23] But it was hard at the end because he got very old, and it became very inconvenient in many, many ways, and I had to alter things, and I had to change plans, and I had to adjust, and I had to get used to the fact that, you know, there were going to be emergencies, there were going to be falls, there were going to be surgeries. I had to cancel my trip to the Atlanta International three days before because my father needed emergency surgery.

[00:25:51] But we had great times, too. You know, we traveled, we went to ball games. At the end, my father was practically deaf, but he could hear symphonic music. So I would take him to Disney Hall so that he could hear music.

[00:26:03] And he was a gem. He was a gem. And at the beginning of 2018, I took a look at him, and I thought, he's not going to live through the year, and he lived exactly two and a half months. He died on the Ides of March. He went into a coma, and he died the following afternoon. And I was with him when he took his last breath, and it was a privilege. It was a privilege to be his daughter, and I have not one scintilla of regret for what I was able to do for my dad. And, you know, it's been eight years, and my life opened up, you know, quite a lot after he passed away. And then I retired five years ago. I had a 36-year career as a personal assistant in the entertainment industry. I worked for the late Carrie Fisher for two years. I met her on a 12-step call. I used to go to Century City Hospital where they had a program every other week. My friend Marie would call me and ask me to come and take some girl in the program out to a meeting. And one time I showed up, and it was Carrie, who Charlie knew well.

[00:27:02] And I took her to a meeting, and she asked me to be her sponsor. And three months later, she asked me to work for it, so I told her to get another sponsor. And after a couple of years, it wasn't working out, and then I went to work for my last employer. And I worked for him for 34 years.

[00:27:17] And it was a great job because it was all about being of service. You know, my boss once said to me, I have no idea what you do, but everything seems to work. I said, that's all you need to know. You don't need to know anything else. I said, I'm taking care of it. And I had great adventures. I mean, he was a well-known person. I traveled a lot. I met amazing people. I did amazing things. I just had a great life doing that. And it was hard for me. It was a huge loss when my career ended. COVID kind of ended it because I had to be bi-coastal because he basically lives in New York now. And I couldn't go anymore because of COVID, and so I retired. And now my life has opened up again. You know, I'm able to go to daytime meetings. I'm able to sponsor more people. I'm able to be of more service. You know, I can travel. I can do whatever I want. You know, my morning routine, I get up. I have an espresso. I make myself a latte. I get on the couch. My 12-and-a-half-pound cat gets in my lap. I do a little prayer and meditation, And then I do six New York Times crossword puzzles in a desperate attempt to keep my mind sharp.

[00:28:23] And I do all kinds of stuff like that. And I start my day. I get up two hours before I have to be anywhere. And, you know, I take classes. I sing. I write. I train with a trainer. I, you know, I try to, you know, I try to keep lively. You know, I don't travel as much as I once did. I was supposed to go to Japan in June, but I was suffering from severe sciatica. And so instead of going to Japan, I had surgery. And I allowed myself one day of complete and total disappointment, and by the next day I was in acceptance and relief. And one of the things that Marilyn says that I love the most, she says, acceptance does not mean approval. I really wanted to go to Japan. It was on my bucket list. But then I had to think, well, if I had gone to Japan, It would have been my 23rd international destination. It's not like I've never gone anywhere. You know, at the beginning of the pandemic, I took a look at my life and I thought, you know what?

[00:29:22] If I never get to take another great trip, if I never get to go to another great concert, you know, show, musical, play, if I never get to eat in another fabulous restaurant, I have had so much more than my share. And that's kind of my life philosophy now. I have had so much more than my share. You know, I have had this incredible life that I never expected. You know, Marilyn also says that life is hard, but you never know. You know, and I've had some experiences that were really difficult. And, you know, five months before my mother died, I had this horrible foot surgery, and I lived with my parents for six weeks with a health care worker that my very generous boss paid for, and then I went home. And two years later, I'm taking this private yoga class with this teacher, and she told me about this little boy in her children's yoga class, and he would go into the class and he would thank his body parts.

[00:30:19] He would go like, thank you, head, thank you, chest, thank you, arms, thank you, legs. Well, I wasn't going to do that. But I looked down at my flat, deformed flipper of a foot that I'd had surgery on, and I said, thank you, foot, for giving me those six weeks with my mother that I never would have had under any other circumstances, you know? Then I got a tattoo on top of my foot, which I would not recommend.

[00:30:45] That hurt so much. It was so bad, but once I started, of course, I had to finish. And it's a little memorial to my mother, and every time I look at it, I think, thank you, foot. My father was no fan of tattoos, but I showed him my foot, and I told him the story I just told you, and he said, I think that's remarkable.

[00:31:05] you know? I mean, I've had a great adventure. You know, I've had a great adventure. You know, I've obviously worked all the steps. I work the steps with other people. I go to a lot of meetings. I'm one of those people, I'm so lucky. I still love Alcoholics Anonymous. I'm in love with AA. I go to meetings for four reasons. I go to meetings because I need them. You know, I'm not one of those people who's ever been able to labor under the illusion that I don't need Alcoholics Anonymous and I am grateful for that every single day. I go to meetings because I like them. I love meetings. I hear the most extraordinary things in meetings. I see people I love, you know. I love this community of Alcoholics Anonymous. I go to meetings because, as my sponsor Julie C. says, that's where they keep the newcomers. You know, not being in the habit of going to bars, I generally locate newcomers in the meetings. And the fourth and final reason why I go to meetings is because it reminds me, it reminds me that the life that I have today is because I'm sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, and for no other reason, because there are two kinds of people who come to AA, I think. There are the ones whose lives are fairly well together, and as a result of alcohol and or drugs, they begin to fall apart.

[00:32:28] And then there are the people who could never get it together in the first place, and I'm one of those people. I don't function in the world when I'm drinking and using drugs. I just don't function. You know, I'm always amazed to see people who, you know, got wives and husbands and cars and college degrees. And, I mean, I'm like, well, how did you do that? Because I can't. You know, I went to college for four years. I accumulated 32 units in disparate subjects like Buddhism and Marxism. And I went to a Chaucer class where they studied Middle English, and we used to sit in the back of the room and drink Old English 800. It seemed appropriate, you know. But basically I majored in getting loaded, rioting, and hanging out. That's why I was at college, you know. I was there during the war, during the Vietnam War, and I was, you know.

[00:33:23] I did help turn over a police car, but the statute of limitations has run out.

[00:33:30] I also scaled a wall once. Can you imagine?

[00:33:34] I can't even step up like that, like Keith did.

[00:33:38] But I scaled a wall.

[00:33:42] What else can I tell you? Oh, of course.

[00:33:47] So on July 4th of 1996, I was sitting on my couch. I was drinking a large mug of coffee. I was staring out the window. I was thinking about the four days I was going to have off.

[00:34:00] I thought at some point I'd go to the store and buy the ingredients for the salad that I promised to bring to the barbecue that afternoon. And my phone rang, and it was a woman.

[00:34:11] And she said, my name is Julie Jones, and I'm a private search investigator from Seattle, Washington. And I swear to God, I had no idea why she was calling. And then she asked me my name, and she said, does the date March 28, 1969 mean anything to you? And, of course, I knew, and I started to cry. And I said, is he in Seattle? And she said, oh, no. She said, we do this all by computer. He lives in your area code. My son was living a mile and a half away from me 27 years later. And not only that, but he was working the door. He used to work the door of clubs around Hollywood, and he was working the door of a club, a notorious strip club called Jumbo's Clown Room, Which maybe some of you fellows or girls are familiar with. But anyway, what makes that even a weirder story is that Jumbos was owned by the family of the guy my niece was married to. So my son was working for my niece's mother-in-law, but nobody knew he was my son.

[00:35:11] Anyway, she said, can I give him your number? I said, no. I said, give me his, call him back, tell him I'm going to call him as soon as I do a few things like pick my stomach up off the floor. because I never expected him to come looking for me. I had heard that boys were much less likely to look than girls, and I wasn't going to look. I felt that it was a violation of his privacy and that of the people who adopted him. But anyway, here it was. And I called him about a half hour later, and he said to me, I said to him, my name is Eileen W., and I understand you're looking for me. And in our very first conversation, without knowing a thing about me, he told me he'd been in a rehab two years earlier. Now, considering the details of his conception with Gimpy, the drug dealer, I was not really surprised.

[00:35:57] And I could tell by the tone of the conversation that he was not currently rehabbing, shall we say. So I thought, oh, what the hell. So I said, hey. I said, what an amazing coincidence. I said, I have 21 years in Alcoholics Anonymous. And I could sort of hear like, oh, God, oh, Jesus, she knows. Anyway, I went to meet him three days later. and except for the fact that he's six foot three, half Mexican, and a guy, we look exactly alike.

[00:36:25] And I took him, can you do me a favor? Can you get that bottle of water, which seems to be on the floor?

[00:36:31] Somebody can get it for me, please.

[00:36:34] Oh, thank you so much. Where am I going to put this? Do I just have to hold it? You know what, I'll stand here and hold it for you. You're going to hold it for me?

[00:36:44] The service around here is unbelievable.

[00:36:49] You can put it down. Thank you. That's so nice. Do you want to be my sponsee? I could use your services.

[00:36:58] These are the kinds of things I need guys for.

[00:37:02] You know, open my water bottle, change a light bulb. Anyway, I took him downtown for sushi. We seem to have a predisposition for liking sushi.

[00:37:15] And he drank some beers, and I bought them. And the subject of Alcoholics Anonymous came up, and he said, AA is a great program. I'd go to a meeting any time. And I said to him, look, I said, there's something you need to know about me. I said, I'm not just a casual go-to-meeting-every-once-in-a-while kind of gal. I said, I'm a rabid, fanatical member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I said, as a matter of fact, you can think of me as the empress of AA if you like.

[00:37:42] Anyway, what I thought was going to be my greatest joy has been my biggest challenge. My son has gone in and out of AA for 32 years. He's got about four years of his own idea of sobriety. He's not drinking or using meth, and quite frankly, I don't give a shit what he does otherwise, because, you know, he doesn't go to meetings. I hooked him up with a great guy in Phoenix. He's living in Phoenix now. And I have a couple of grandkids. I have a granddaughter who's 20 that I don't see.

[00:38:08] She and her brother, my grandson, have different mothers. But my grandson is the absolute love of my life.

[00:38:16] And he's a great kid, and he has shitty parents. And anyway, I'm going to stop soon because I'm getting really hot up here.

[00:38:29] About four years ago, he had an accident. My son was MIA, and his mother was MIA, and I did what I could to help him. And he said, Grandma, you're the only adult in my life who has never let me down. And that's because of AA.

[00:38:42] And I'm just going to finish with this. As my late friend Father Terry used to say, not only am I grateful to still be sober, I'm grateful that I'm still happy about it. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.