Honesty, Sponsors, and a Lifetime of Turbulence

(indistinct)

- Got alcoholic.

- That's all right.

- Thank you guys.

My sobriety date is July 6th, 1989.

Appreciate you asking me out.

Appreciate Sergio coming out.

Some of the guys who are coming home to hurt me.

There's no end to their torturing.

(laughing)

- And Joe for coming.

- Joe Z.

- Joe Z.

- Yeah, I've known Joe for 32 years

and he's killed every sponsor he's ever had.

He's had five sponsors and he buried every single one.

So a month after the last sponsor died,

he calls me up and says, "John, can we talk?"

(laughing)

- Okay, Joe.

- Okay, we'll try it.

One month later, I'm in the hospital

having tumors taken off my thyroid.

- Hey, you know I have a thyroid, thanks Joe.

- So I try to say to you, every day is a gift.

What's your sponsoring, Joe, and you're still alive?

- I was born in Kansas.

I have a sister, a year and a half older.

They had a family that had more degrees than a thermometer.

(laughing)

They had a logical life and drunk.

And you can't get sober being a liar.

You'll notice the first paragraph

that we read in chapter five.

It's all about honesty.

If you can't get that, you're not gonna get the program.

You're not gonna get anything in life

as far as I'm concerned.

You're not gonna get the program if you don't have honesty.

'Cause you gotta look at you

and you've gotta admit where you are and what you've done

as you guys look for a way to clean it up.

'Cause you can't do that bad in yourself.

And so it was not an easy situation.

And I guess when I was five, he came home one night

and tripped over a toy and threw me up against the wall.

I slid down and that night after he passed out,

my mom put a kid under a job, this 1950.

And women didn't do that then.

So she was a bad lady.

Put a kid under each arm and the train for California.

L.A. from Kansas.

And we got here, we did the union station

for a couple of days

'cause she's trying to find out her girlfriend

she went to school with.

Finally, she found me, stayed with them for a long time.

And then she got a job and we got our own place.

And when I was eight,

she met this truck driver from Kentucky.

We were living in Southgate.

And he decided he was gonna take us away from all that

and show us about that.

So he moved us to El Monte.

I've never been to El Monte,

picture Pacoima without all the glitter.

That's pretty much El Monte.

So he moved us there.

All his relatives from Kentucky

are in like this two or three block area

with a compound above it.

They couldn't spell cap.

He spotted the C and the T

and they had an opinion on everything, you know?

And I immediately was treated like excess baggage

or so I interpreted that.

And I mean, he didn't jive with the family.

It got rough right away.

By the time I'm 15 years old,

I ran away from home on a passive basis

and getting jobs and doing that.

And going back to the police would bring me back

and straighten that somewhat.

But I always had a job, you know?

And when I was in high school,

I had a great job for a Chinese restaurant

that they had a bar attached to it.

And I had to stock the bar with ice

and with the alcohol and things.

A bottle would end up in the trash every single night.

They just had to do that, you know?

And I could start drinking then.

And 1962, I was 17, and Kennedy made his speech,

I think it was on Wednesday, on the Cuban blockade.

And everyone was buying in the store.

We all thought we were going to war.

And I thought it was a great opportunity

to get out of the bathroom.

So I joined the Air Force.

I went back and they sent me for it right away.

They'll straighten this kid up, you know?

Give him in the military.

They'll straighten me up.

By the time I was 20,

I was in jail in five different countries.

So they straightened nothing up, you know?

It just continued on the way it was.

I went in the Air Force,

and the first place they sent me to was Japan.

And as soon as I got off the plane in Japan,

you go in the place,

and they make you give up all your American script

because it's worth so much money on the black market.

And they give you what we call Mickey Mouse money, or yen,

to keep the American dollars off the...

All I had to hear is that once through Ireland,

I'm meeting these kids,

these young guys are coming off the plane.

I'm doing the exchange for them,

giving them a little more.

I'm selling black market dollars downtown.

It was like an invitation to me.

And before long, one of the few guys there that had a car.

You know, it was a big old '51 Chevy

that didn't fit in their streets very well.

I'd get it stuck at times

and have to go back the next day a bit after they get out.

Oh dear, it would be upset, you know?

But my drinking was getting worse,

and I was good at my job.

I liked my job.

I taught survival,

and we didn't know it at the time, of course.

In fact, I got there in '63.

We were having this conflict in Vietnam,

and the papers weren't talking about it.

I was getting air crew members back

to retrain for jungle survival and things like that.

I was good at my job.

But off work, I was me, you know?

And I didn't really have a lot of rules.

In '64, I was in Sinjuku, downtown Sinjuku,

and we were drinking academic wine,

and I somehow or another got it in my head

that it was the Russians that made me leave home,

and Monica O'Brien, Mr. Monica.

So I decided we should go to the Russian Embassy.

Three in the morning, we went to Russian Embassy,

and they caught me breaking in, going over the gate.

And they sicced their dog on me, and I kicked their dog.

They pulled out their guns, they're gonna arrest me.

Then around the corner came the Japanese police,

and they're going like that, "Here come the MPs."

Anyway, it was a big, they were,

Bella Cherry was very upset, they asked

when I might leave Japan, and I thought it might be a good idea.

So they sent me to Columbus, Ohio,

right outside of Ohio State University,

a long-form Air Force base.

And I was gonna be there for three months,

and then go to France, and go to France for three months.

Well, the first thing, you know, back then in survival kits,

we didn't have any technology that we have to have.

The most important thing we had in survival kits were bennies,

because if you went down, someone had to stay awake

while they're looking for you.

Especially in Nog, you can't have a helicopter

circling one area very long.

So you gotta have people awake, so you have bennies.

So they put me, this is your government,

in charge of repositioning bennies.

Asking all the kids at Ohio State University,

thinking I was their greatest thing on earth on exam day.

They could stay up and cram because John was in town.

And I had that going on pretty soon.

I had a couple of girls at Patterson Hall,

me and my bennies farming, I had that going.

I'd go to France, and that'd be all under control.

And what happened there was, I found some pilots

that were flying to Gibraltar every other weekend.

I couldn't figure out why.

Finally, we got to be friends, and they told me,

and they took me with them.

And they kept finding these cases of scotch

falling off of trucks in Scotland.

And I was able to get cases of black and white scotch

for $15 a case.

And what I would do then is take two bottles

and hitchhike into Paris, about 64 miles.

And the ladies that owned this cafe on Mont-Porlange Avenue

would put me up for those two bottles

'cause they'd make $600 from it.

So on this 64, 65, it was big money.

They had stamps, everything.

So they'd make a lot of money off that.

So I had my food, my place to live,

give me a key to the cafe.

It was really neat, but I was getting in trouble.

It was great because all the women from all over the world

went to University of Paris, which was right there.

So women-wise, it was great.

But in the bars, I didn't get along

with the French guys at all.

And I got to the point I hit a lot of them.

(all laughing)

And it just seemed like the only answer to the situation.

It was getting rough.

And one of my trips, I was drunk on base or something

and I got in and we got out.

So I hadn't done worse in Ohio and all,

but this is when they came out.

And I cut him up pretty bad and he bit this ear off.

And so they sent me to jail for a year,

sent me to prison for a year in Germany

and showed you our stupidity before sentencing.

The judge listened to all this and he said,

"Do you think you might consider

that there's some people that shouldn't drink?"

That was my opportunity, but I was such a jerk.

I said, "Your honor, it's not the drinking it's getting from."

And he answered and gave me a year and my attorney went.

'Cause they knew he was looking for a way to cut my sense.

Ego and stupidity together is a terrible, terrible thing.

So I got a year, back in the center of the year.

And after seven months, I was able to get out.

And I shared after I got out.

They didn't make me make up all my time.

So I got out in December of '66 out of the Air Force.

And you know, I was trying to straighten up.

But what had happened when I was in prison

is I was introduced to LSD.

And you know, has anyone here ever done LSD?

Has anyone here been to prison?

Has anyone done LSD in prison?

Longest night on the face of the earth,

18 hours, I had no idea what it was.

Guy ripped a page off a book and said,

"Chew this up and swallow it."

So I did what I'm doing, I said, "What is it?"

And he says, "It's acid."

LSD, I didn't know what acid, 65, I don't know what acid was.

The longest 18 hours of my life.

But when I got out, I liked LSD a lot, you know?

And I got a motorcycle and I loved riding a motorcycle

on acid, but I felt safer then.

Any other time, ever since there was a magical connection

between am I drinking really minimized it?

And then I had one bad trip and I got off of it

in the '70s, mid '70s, and sort of took back up drinking

where I left off, and doing a lot of other drugs,

mainly drinking, and trying to pull it together though,

'cause I wasn't dumb, you know, I got a job,

I got a job working for the auto club.

I've been in for a counter boy job,

and the guy started talking to me

and hired me as a claims adjuster.

And after I was working for a penny dealer,

so as a claims adjuster, they sent me to Hollywood

to be an attorney negotiator.

So it was really out of my element.

I mean, you know, they were impressed,

but I didn't know what they saw.

But you know, I wasn't fit to be an attorney negotiator.

Yeah, and anyway, though, I could see it.

And eventually after a year or so, I quit,

and I just wrote my books and did acid,

and it was wonderful.

Then I moved to Laguna Beach, and I had one bad trip,

and that ended that.

But I went from that, and I got a job in a clothing store,

and ended up being a buyer for a chain of clothing stores,

and then some friends who were in the printing business,

said we can get you in the printing, look at all the,

and it was a lot of money.

And so I went in the printing business,

and was doing really well.

And then they came up with something called Photoshop.

And at the beginning of the '80s,

and Photoshop is what I did on film,

using brushes and camera exposures.

I did all that stuff, removing brushes, changing colors.

And so I knew my stuff was right, so I started selling.

So I sold printing, and I was really doing well,

and I moved back to Laguna Beach,

and just really piling through it.

I mean, I've got a place on a cliff in Laguna Niguel,

and I've got a brand new car, and I'm really doing good.

I'm driving to work one morning on the coast of the waves.

And there was this girl that came in,

this club I went in all the time.

I think she had a black hair,

and she looked like a gypsy whore,

and just exactly what I wanted in my life.

So I did a U-turn, I went back and picked her up.

She ended her up, and she was impressed with the new car.

And you know, I'm tied up, and you know,

not like the guys in the bar, they're looking pretty clean.

And she wanted to see it to come back,

but look, I drink okay, and she was there.

So I took her home, and I pulled out the cocaine,

and she said, "I hope you don't mind,

"but the only way I can get off is if I shoot it."

Okay, well, most guys do it, most of them.

They bail, basically, one right here, bail.

I married her.

I married her, it lasted eight months.

She was from New York,

and her folks were out to see us four times,

and we had to see, go back there for two times.

It was living hell, it was living hell.

So now my name is starting to appear in the paper

in Laguna for a minor incident, you know?

But every time I go, "John, I saw you."

It wasn't me, but you know, but it was.

So I moved to West LA.

I moved to West LA in '85.

I'm really trying, I'm working out of my place,

and I'm still doing well, working out of my place,

but things are starting to happen.

I'm drinking, I'm watching a movie or whatever,

and I go to bed, and I get up in the morning,

and I take a shower, and I start getting dressed,

and go to my desk and everything.

I'm always at my desk by eight o'clock,

and go down to get the car, and the car's gone.

Damn, so I come back and call the police,

I call the insurance company, I rent a car,

and later that day, there it is,

parked in front of some bar,

and dash, I mean, ignition isn't punched out,

the windows are all okay.

So the fourth time that happened,

and I, to this day, does not know how I got home,

the fourth time that happened,

the police said, I called the police,

and they were quiet for a moment.

They said, "Mr. Henry, you seem to find a car

"for bringing anyone."

And they wouldn't take the police report bigger than hell,

I found it later in that day, and it wasn't very far.

But I don't know how I got home all those nights,

and so that's going on.

It's starting to scare me,

I'm not finding any way to stop it, you know?

And then one morning, I get a phone call,

and it was from my best client,

it was an account that our company

had been trying to open forever and ever,

and they couldn't get in, and I opened it.

I was very, very proud of that.

It was Carnation Foods,

and the lady was just a phenomenal lady,

but she was very strict, but we got along good.

And she did what I told her I knew, and gave me a lot of work.

And she said, "I know you said I didn't wake you last night,

"but I gotta go over these numbers."

I don't remember, called her,

so we went over the numbers, and before she hung up,

she said, "You know, I gotta tell you,

"I gotta tell you, if I didn't have so much respect for you,

"I would swear you were home alone, South."

And we hung up.

The sun had not come over my courtyard enough yet

to where my front window wasn't more clear

than it was with the...

And I saw me for the first time in years.

I was a blotted, runny-eyed, red-nosed drunk,

mid-aged drunk, 44 years old at that time.

I said, "There's nothing else

"I could put underneath that picture."

And I had, evidently, on my credenza.

At night, I would take numbers of these recovery centers

and tape it.

Everybody would talk, but for some reason,

I hung up from her, and I told her,

"Hey, hey."

And they said, "Well, have someone call you back."

The guy called me back, said, "Pour everything out,

"and meet me such and such.

"We'll take you to a meeting."

And so I did it, and I went into this meeting on Friday night.

Fourth and Wilshire, and everybody was wearing a necktie.

Everyone was dressed to the nines,

and they were absolutely kind, and loving,

and helping, like all these business cards.

I drove home that night, and I had one feeling

that I had never had about anybody ever before.

These people are authentic.

What are they gonna do when they find out about me?

How this, I don't see a welcome mat for anyone like me.

I don't know.

And so that was, you know, I said the next day,

they picked me up, which was nothing.

And all this went on, and I got a sponsor,

and tried to do what, you know, I was asked to do,

and he didn't read the book.

And eventually, you know, after a couple of years,

for a year, I married this girl on the program,

and everyone was excited.

It was almost like a shotgun wedding.

People, her sponsor, Donna Byrne,

you made your mind dying for me to get,

you know, settled down and whatnot.

And that's how I was 15 years sober,

and we're driving along,

and I'm upset with something that's in the rain.

And she says, "You know,

you've lived on the west side of LA now,

longer than you were in prison,

longer than you were in El Monte,

but everything that happens, that's the guy that shows up.

That's the guy, you're always that guy.

You're gonna kill somebody on the road for nothing."

It's an argument, but a strange thing happened.

It was trying to be hit a lot of a life,

so at this point, he's with my sponsored guy,

and I had to get a new sponsor.

And so I'm at my Roxbury meeting,

and there was this guy there

that was the secretary at the time,

and he's 6'4", 280 pounds, he rode off.

And my sponsor had every nice car he ever saw.

The only corner side of the dashboard.

He was not that guy, so this guy was opposite.

That's good.

So I knew, he said, "Sure."

And he wrote us a address down, and he had it to me.

He says, "Now, be at my place in Manhattan Beach

Saturday morning at 7.30.

Bring your book and your marker,

and you're never gonna read the book."

Oh, you don't understand.

I got 15 years, you know, I've read the book.

I'm like, "Be at my place Saturday morning."

And that was it, and he walked away.

So I remember that alarm went off that Saturday at 6 o'clock,

and I said, "What's that?"

Said the new sponsor, said, "Paint," but I went, you know?

And he said, "When I went in,

now open your book to the first page.

I want you to write the name Bill Wilson."

Bill wrote the book.

Now, he marked the book up with a fellow in New York

by the name of Jules, write Jules' name down.

And then Jules then came out to LA and sponsored Chip Cornell.

Write Chip's name down.

He said, "Chip was my sponsor, so put my name down.

Put your name under mine. That's your lineage."

And we mark up the book, and we read it with people.

We do it the way Bill marked it up.

It's nothing to do with my opinion,

nothing to do with this guy's opinion.

This is how Bill marked it up.

And we could talk about different opinions,

but that's the only way we mark it up.

And so I started reading that book,

and things started happening.

The program kicked me.

What an amazing thing.

And all of the things that I thought started disappearing,

you know?

And I started understanding the more I read the book

and the more I read with other people,

the more I understood me.

You know, but it went in.

I started in the program with a really negative place.

Where I started in, my concept of God

was that there's a God about five minutes in an alley.

That was my concept of God.

And so now all of a sudden, things are changing,

and I'm starting to kind of wonder about this.

And I'm starting acknowledging that something's working,

you know?

And I would get different things.

You know, we all talk, you hear people say,

"Yeah, I worked those steps back in such and such time."

I have to work them every day.

Every day of my life, I'm working some steps,

somewhere in some situation.

And I have to do that, and I read with a lot of people.

And the people I read with,

I insist they read with a lot of people.

And we keep passing the thing on.

I think that's what we're there.

And I've started understanding

that God has always been there.

He's always been there and always been a part of my life

and always getting me through.

And the longer I think about some of the scrapes

that I've walked out of, impossible, impossible,

but I've walked out of them.

And I don't even tell them from the podium,

because a lot of them are unseen.

And they're also,

they're not the things I brag about anymore,

but I've learned in the program

that the bad things in your life are lessons,

and the good things are blessings.

And if you got rid of all the bad things,

you'd have to get rid of all your wisdom,

'cause that's where you got your wisdom.

You didn't give very much wisdom for the good things.

But when you screwed up,

it made an impression on your mind,

and that's where you learned.

I've taken that and gone with it.

But there's still a lot of things

that I don't wanna talk about.

That it was just, I was a jerk, you know?

And I did how I wanted to do things

that I didn't have a whole lot of regard for other people.

And sometimes it got very violent, and that's gone now.

And I watch how that happens.

And it's amazing.

You know, you can't put it down,

but I'm reading with some guy once,

and I think I had 18 years sober,

and we finished the book and we're reading the 12 and 12,

and all of a sudden I got the seventh step.

It just, I had never got it before,

but it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Man, all the things, all the people,

no one did anything to me.

What they did, I took the interpretation as bad.

But they were doing the best they could.

They're just bozos on the bus like me.

But I messed up everything that happened.

You know, that was on me.

That wasn't on them.

So me being able to look and let go of all that stuff

made my life a lot easier, an awful lot.

You know, I retired in 2017, and it's been good.

You know, every once in a while I would drive Uber

for a little extra money or something,

and I have a story that I tell,

but I know I'm gonna finish early.

That's just what I do.

But I was driving Uber, and I had,

I got a call to pick up this girl on Hollywood Boulevard.

And when I got here, she was in a wheelchair, Italian girl.

And she would have been about five,

seven, 130-pound gorgeous.

And her mom was with a wheelchair.

Did I say wheelbarrow before?

Wheelchair, okay.

Her mommy gave me, her mom's about five, five, 140.

And her mom picks her up from a wheelchair

and puts her in her seat.

Adjust her butt so I know she's really paraplegic.

You know, so I put the wheelchair in the car.

We're going down the road, we're laughing.

We're having a good time.

This is a tough story to tell.

And she said, "Is this your full-time job?"

And what I do is I don't tell people I'm in AA.

I have a business card thinking about it.

There's no AA on it.

What I tell people is, "Well, you know, I'm a veteran,

"so I go to the VA and help guys

"try to recover from alcohol and drugs."

Or I go into Central Jail, I go to the Twin Towers,

I go to Skid Row factories, but that's what I do.

And I was telling her that,

and she said, "That's what happened to me.

"A drunk driver broke my heart.

"Just thank you."

All those times I was in a blackout.

Why would I live it?

There isn't just one person.

These are two people that are now in prison.

They're like, "Mom can't leave her.

"She can't even get off the pot and off by herself."

As long as mom's alive, that's her job.

I couldn't have done that to somebody.

What do you do?

What do you do when you do that?

How do you live with that?

And I didn't not do it because of me.

I do believe I've been looked after.

All the times I thought I wasn't,

I think I've been looked after.

And it's an interesting place to go.

And it comes down to, again,

if you can look at yourself honestly

and be ready to pick yourself apart

like you should and be able to want to do better

and admit that you have to,

you can do anything.

You know, I have a great life now, geez.

I can't tell you how many guys I sponsor

'cause I don't count them.

You know, I count Joe because Joe's just my job.

You know, I have to count Joe.

(all laughing)

You know, I sponsor Sergio is another big job.

But I mean, there's so many people I know

and I don't count 'em

'cause I never wanted them to be noticed enough

that I got a name.

And we read and they read.

You stop and think about that at the end of the day.

And I think, why does this work?

Why do we have this disease that absolutely will kill us?

And we don't have to take medicine.

We don't have to go to therapy.

And we don't have to have any of that trials done.

We come in and we start helping another human being.

How the hell does that work?

It doesn't make sense.

And then you stop and figure,

maybe that's what we're supposed to do in life.

Maybe what we're supposed to do is walk each other home.

And there's nothing more complicated than that.

And all the other things we do, they're window trimmings.

But when you're helping other people

and we're walking each other home,

that's a pretty nice life.

That's pretty good.

You know, no one has to get up every day

with a burden on their head.

They got no one to share with.

They got plenty of people they can talk to.

They got plenty of people with answers.

The wonderful story on 217 that I always quote

because it's a guy that's gonna, he's sober

and he's gonna set up his desk above the garage

and get a bottle and type and sip and you know.

And he's backing out of the driveway and he said,

"You know, I'm at least gonna tell my wife."

So he pulled it back in and he goes in.

She's staying in the living room.

He says, and he tells her what he's gonna do.

And they both just stand and look at each other

and start laughing.

Because those thoughts, once they're out of your mouth,

they no longer have any power over you.

You keep them inside and they start building a case

and lifting weights and building a wall over here

and they become a fact.

You get that stuff out of your mouth

to somebody that cares and someone that's sober,

they're gonna tell you, "You're full of crap.

What are you talking about?"

And you're gonna agree.

It's a really funny thing.

We're back to the honesty again.

But you're in a program, you never have to travel alone.

You never have to go through anything alone ever.

It's the greatest thing in the world.

The rest of your life, you got people to help you.

You got people that are listening to you.

So I love meeting with new guys coming in

and you guys are the lifeblood.

You're gonna be the ones next, you know,

that keep carrying this through.

We always want to treat the new people with kid gloves

and let them know how much they're wanted.

It's important.

You know, these guys that I met last night

for the recovery home and try to see

if I can go start reading with them on a Thursday night

and get them started.

One guy's from Washington, D.C.,

another guy's from Lake Havasu,

another guy's from North Carolina.

But they can at least take this back and start.

So if they want to call and talk on the phone,

I know a lot of guys just pick up the banger

and mock it up as I do.

And they'll have someone to talk to forever

to read the book through.

And then they can start reading with someone else.

So again, it's an opportunity.

I didn't know I was going to speak last night

and tonight those things just come.

But what a nice little gift.

I found another way to get that message out

across the United States.

Not that I'm gonna go to one recovery home.

You know, it's a nice situation.

I couldn't have planned it.

Anyway, I don't ever go over and I hate it when people do,

but I'm so grateful you guys are here.

I really am.

I'm glad you guys are here.

If you walk in, it just feels like AA.

It's good.

You're always safe when you walk in AA.

So thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thanks John.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for sharing.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.