The first thing I did when I moved to Las Vegas in 1980 was to locate the local AA and when their meetings were held. I maintain that it is the little things we do in our lives that help us stay sober. Getting sober is an inside job: not taking that first drink. I accepted that I was an alcoholic when I became a daily attendee at meetings. I was told early on in my recovery that if you drink everyday you need to have an excellent reason why you miss a meeting. You might say that the AA meetings were a safe haven from King Alcohol.
I was working for one of Nevada’s major banks. As part of my interview, I had to pass a security check, which included testing me for alcohol. I told the security official that I was an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous. If I had lied, I would have soon been found out from the background check that was conducted. I did not deny my drinking history, and luckily for me I was still hired to an excellent banking position.
After I was hired, my boss (the CEO) approached me and confided that a few employees at the bank had drinking problems. He asked if I would be willing to talk to these people about my own previous problems with alcohol and how I finally was able to control it. Initially, I didn’t want to become an in-house alcohol and drug councilor. Besides, Las Vegas is a relatively small town, and once the word gets out about a person, they lose all that anonymity of being a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. But then again, while I was a crazy drunk in the 1960s, I was very careful to keep my addiction a secret. Today, I could care less if people know if I am an anonymous drunk or not. Maybe, I reasoned, if people knew the truth about me, I might be a better help to others.
Be careful of what you wish for.
The Mountain Man, as I call him, was quite a wild man in both his drinking and partying. His favorite “watering hole,” which I did not frequent, was on Boulder Highway. Boulder Highway held an infamous reputation. I had heard about some of the bars along this strip: they were also known as “buckets of blood.”
One quiet, normal Tuesday night, the back door to our room was suddenly, violently flung open during the meeting. Like a bad nightmare, Mountain Man stood in the space that used to serve as a door. He was the very depiction of his moniker: huge, tall, unkempt in beard and long hair, a barbarian right out of the movies. All he needed was a long club or Conan’s sword to complete the illusion. Obviously drunk, he came to the meeting with only one purpose in mind, and that was to fight. He stomped into the room and began bellowing at the top of his voice. He started cursing and swearing and threatening others in the room, intimating in no uncertain terms that he was going to beat the crap out everyone. He declared that he was the most feared patron at all the bars he frequented.
Now, I am tall, almost as tall as Mountain Man, but I was nowhere near a match to his girth and prowess. Yet, everyone in the room looked at me to do something, like control this man. I had become somewhat of a leader—an instigator of sorts—in this chapter, and people were expecting that I could remedy the situation.
Anyone will tell you that you do not control a drunk. You cannot control a drunk. Most of the cognitive centers of the brain are impaired or temporarily turned off. The primitive part of the brain is in control, especially the fight-or-flight mechanism that is supposed to protect the body. Even trying to reason with a drunk is impossible. It’s like trying to teaching a pig to sing: a waste of time and highly annoying to the pig. Besides, it only makes matters worse in most cases. Still, I had to find some way to guide Mountain Man into a more submissive tone. Gearing up my courage, I shouted at him.
“So, you’re a tough guy, huh?” He turned on me. I still have this image of a maddened bull: red eyes and steam coming out of his ears, picking his target. “If you’re so tough, don’t pick up a drink tomorrow. But if you do drink tomorrow, then you’re just a slave to King Alcohol. A tough guy is a slave to nobody or nothing. A tough guy stays sober. So, what do you say? You still a tough guy?”
I fully expected Mountain Man to charge me and beat the living daylights out of me. Instead, to both my surprise and relief, he sat down on the nearest seat and remained morose but quiet throughout the meeting, which we eventually recommenced. I looked around at my fellow members: their eyes were as big as saucers, as they couldn’t fully understand what had happened. They, too, along with me, were expecting a down-and-dirty, punch-like-nobody’s-business street brawl.
When the meeting was over, Mountain Man stood up. Ah, I thought, this is where the confrontation begins. Thankfully, I was wrong.
“Nobody,” he began, kind of threateningly, mostly because of his imposing size and personality and still inebriated, but in a quiet voice, “has ever told me to shut up the way you did. I respect you for that. What’s your name?”
“Ed,” I replied, trying to control my fear.
Mountain Man nodded once, curtly. “I was told to come to this meeting and look for an Ed. I was told that ‘Ed’ would be able to help me stop drinking. If you are this ‘Ed,’ can you help me?”
“I can work with you,” I emphasized. “I’ll be your sponsor. We’ll start tomorrow. You come tomorrow, but I want you to be sober. Can you do that?”
“I want to. I’ll try.”
“Not try. Do. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Mountain Man kept his promise and showed up at the next meeting sober, and for the next two years or so, he remained sober. He attended meetings on a regular basis and even helped other alcoholics to come to the meetings.
There was nothing special about me or the way I handled Mountain Man. He had the desire to change, to free himself from the addictive slavery that was ruining his life. But he was an intimidating man, and no doubt acted this way in his personal relationships with other people. I feel that he sought me out and had to challenge me. A bully will only respect another bully or someone who is not afraid to stand up to him. So, it is to Mountain Man’s credit that he changed when quite possibly everyone else had written him off.
Never Count a Drunk Out: they will surprise you.
Tom was a World War II veteran, and he had made good during his time of service. After he left the service, he went to work for a big company in Las Vegas, eventually holding down a high position of authority and responsibility.
Unfortunately, he started to drink. I don’t know if he was suffering from post traumatic stress—back in those days, post traumatic stress didn’t exist—we called it survivors’ guilt. As I related in my book Miracle, Luck, or What?, it took nearly four years of testing, diagnosing, and what-have-you to determine that I suffered from post traumatic stress, and the triggers facilitated my addiction to alcohol.
In any case, despite being very successful, his marriage started to crumble because of his drinking. His wife eventually divorced him. How much she loved him didn’t matter. Her breaking point had been reached when he did not—would not—change.
Now, my friend lived in a posh apartment building in the same town where Hugh Hefner—the originator of the famed Playboy Clubs—lived. He started drinking and using cocaine heavily. Working in tandem, cocaine is supposed to lessen intense feelings from alcohol-induced inebriation, while the alcohol is supposed to temper the discomfort with a withdrawal from a cocaine high. On the negative side, the combination seems to encourage or enhance tendencies towards violent thoughts and actions, which may lead to an increase in violent behavior.
Tom wasn’t heard from for several days, and while a few people were a bit worried about him; it was his sister who eventually found him. She should have been a Drill Instructor, because she was as tough as nails and didn’t take anything from anyone. In other words, she gave as good as she got.
Anyway, he was in bad shape, lying on the floor in a stupor, half in and half out of consciousness. The first pitiful words out of his mouth were: “I don’t want to work; I want to die.”
His sister straightened up and said to him as coldly as she could: “In that case, die!” And then she left the apartment.
Fortunately, that was his moment of his clarity. His sister had been a close confident while they were growing up, and he expected some kind of sympathy if not empathy from her. That she could turn her back on him in his moment of complete vulnerability, expressing not a whit about whether he lived or died hit home. The first thing he did was to enter a treatment center. He got sober, and he became one hell of a guy helping other people, like me, to stay sober.
So, now he was off the booze. I won’t say that Tom was a chain smoker, but he smoked a lot. Like a chimney, we used to say when we were kids. When he came into AA he was already a heavy smoker. (If you weren’t a smoker, all you had to do was stand next to him, and you would get your daily ration of smoke.) A lot of people who came into AA who were smokers continued smoking. Some stopped; a lot didn’t stop. But my friend stopped smoking in the following way:
“You know, Tom, you have a lousy program,” his sister, who was also in AA, criticized.
Scandalized, he asked: “What’s wrong with the program?” He knew he had a good program, helping all kinds of people helping themselves.
“When you start talking about God—God does this, God does that—you don’t believe in God. You’re a hypocrite. ‘Cause if you really believed in God, you’d stop smoking. Every time you have a cigarette, you’re shortening your life, and you can’t do God’s work. So, please. You’re full of shit. Stop talking about God, and don’t talk about God until you stop smoking.”
He did stop. But he had one hell of a withdrawal.
When Harry was telling this story at an AA meeting, the whole room was laughing. It was the way he explained how he had experienced that turning point in life that brought him to AA.
If you had met Harry when he was suffering from addiction and binge drinking, you might have mistaken him for a homeless person. He certainly fit the perception most people have about them.
“Having to tell people, ‘I am homeless’ is embarrassing as it makes me feel like I’m some lazy bum with a drug and alcohol problem who doesn’t do anything to help themselves. I overhear people talking, and this seems to be a common opinion.” (Client comment in a Hanover Client Survey 2008) {2}
The truth of the matter about Harry was that, in fact, he was a drunk. He was a drunk who slept in the streets, or more specifically, a trash collection bin, a dumpster. On cold nights he would crawl into a dumpster to get out of the cold. Trash, garbage: it didn’t matter to him. He could go to sleep anywhere. He was so blitzed that most of the time he wasn’t cognizant of where he was. In the morning, he joked, sometimes he found something to eat. He called it his “bed and breakfast” lodging or just plain “breakfast in bed.”
His story reminded me of a talk Paul Wedding shared on the Internet.{3} Destitute, no money, no car, no job, no prospects, just the clothes he was wearing and a worn notebook, Paul lived in a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant in Westminster, California. He ate there, too. When he would give a talk, he would start out wearing the same clothes as he wore as a homeless man. Then he would slowly step out of those clothes and reveal the suit and tie he had on underneath. The audience painfully recognized the same man they had passed coming into the building who had been panhandling them.
It was this public perception that allowed Harry to live his kind of lifestyle. No one was willing to risk their reputation helping a person who was, in their opinion, beyond their help or didn’t want to be helped.
In his own mind, Harry thought he had a good life. He slept well enough. He was able to maintain his habit. Sometimes eating wasn’t too bad, if you didn’t mind the odd assortment of buffet he often fell into. And, best of all, no one bothered him, which could have been explained by the “aroma of le dump” that hung around him. (I don’t know if he was accompanied by a squadron of flies to ward off any chance encounter with a “do-gooder.”)
So, what was his turning point? Early one morning he was rudely awakened by the fingernail-screeching-on-a-blackboard when the two forward blades of a dump truck slid into the brackets on either side of the dumpster. He sat bolt upright when the truck began to lift the dumpster off the ground.
He thought: Oh my God! They are going to pick up the dumpster; I’m in the dumpster; and I’m going to be trashed! With that, he vaulted out of the dumpster, much to the surprise of the sanitation engineers who immediately braked the dumpster’s ascent. The last sight they caught of Harry was him running down the alley to the street and turning the corner.
When he finally stopped and leaned up against a wall, clutching his racing heart, his next thought was “I’m going to AA to control my drinking.” He had finally realized that his drinking—his life—was out of control.
He went to the Salvation Army—initially to obtain a new set of clothes—sobered up, and eventually became a big shot in collections. After all, the dumpster had been his habitat. He was no stranger to dumpsters. Only instead of housing him in times of his alcoholic stupor, they were now sources of help and relief to countless people needing the Salvation Army’s help.
When I first met her, she looked like death warmed over. But when she sobered up, she looked very attractive, in spite of the life she previously led that could have—should have—been a rather short one.
Pissy Ann Mary had been a street bum. She used to work the infamous Boulder Highway scene, making money however she could. When she was young and still had her looks, making money was easy—if not dangerous, considering the location she decided to work.
Boulder Highway was really a place for the locals. Although it carried the moniker of “buckets of blood,” many visitors had some nice things to say about the place. (I could say the same thing about Broadway in New York, I guess. Yes, there are some really nice places to go, like theaters and restaurants, but you still had to navigate through the “peep” holes, the one-hour rooms, and a bevy of street-walkers pestering you as you walked down the street.)
Arizona Charlies (a little on the rougher side), Sam’s Town (with a western theme and their “Mystic Falls” attraction), the Eastside Cannery (classy but a bit boring comparatively), the Railhead Lounge, buffet restaurants, a free shuttle that connected the downtown and the strip, and the like offered a fun afternoon, but it was not a place to walk after dark.
Ann Mary must have made good money, but her life was in a shambles. She was a thing, a toy, an object to be used and abused over and over again. She was fortunate to only have danced with the demon King Alcohol and not anything worse.
The worst night of her drinking, as she described it, happened after she had fallen asleep outside a restaurant. In a drunken stupor, drunks can sleep virtually anywhere without a care in the world of their safety. She was leaning up against a box or something to prop herself up.
While she was asleep, some men came along, looked at her, and decided to have some fun. They unzipped their flies and started urinating on her, aiming to see who could fill her mouth. When she woke up several hours later, she wondered what that horrible taste in her mouth was. When it dawned on her what it was, she was totally embarrassed, shocked, you-name-it. That was her moment of clarity. She recognized what alcoholism had done to her: it had reduced her to something less than a human. Her next step was to attend an AA meeting, and as they say, the rest is history.