Ryan's Journey: From Irish Roots and Early Crime to 23 Years Sober

- Hey everyone, my name's Ryan, I'm an alcoholic.

- Hey.

- Before I get in the quagmire of self,

I wanna wish everyone a Merry Christmas

and a Happy New Year and thanks, Karen,

for asking me to come out and thanks for your share, Scott.

I didn't think rules applied to me either.

More importantly, I didn't think the laws

applied to me either.

(laughing)

My sobriety date is September 9th, 2003

and that's not a record, but it's pretty impressive

for a guy who acts and thinks and drinks like me.

And that's all due to the program

of Alcoholics Anonymous and the people in it, you know,

because I had tried many countless vain attempts

to try to stop drinking on my own.

Not only did they not work,

they ended even more horribly than the world.

I was born in a small town in New Jersey

and come from a long line of, not necessarily alcoholics,

but crazy Irish immigrants that tend to have mental

and emotional problems that sometimes manifest themselves

in alcoholism and 90% of the time that manifests themselves

in criminal activity and stuff like that.

That skipped a generation with my father and my uncle.

My grandfather came from Ireland in 1906.

He was a thief, he was about 15 years old.

He ended up going into World War I when that opened up

and he came out and I'm sure he was doing tons

of illegal things when he was in the Navy in World War I.

So when he came back from the war,

they decided to make him a New York police officer,

which probably wasn't the best job, you know,

but he died when I was young, I never got to meet him,

but everyone in my family says,

"You're exactly like your grandpa."

And like I said, my dad was a straight-laced guy.

He went to Fordham University in the Bronx, New York,

graduated with a business degree.

His brother, my uncle, owned an acoustic ceiling

and contracting business in New York.

So I had great examples of what a good man should be

as a kid growing up.

It's just that I didn't want to take them.

We stayed in New Jersey till I was seven.

And like I said, my family's a little on the pinky side

of how to make a living.

So my grandfather owned bars in New York.

My uncle Mike was a semi-connected guy

in the Gambino family and he owned a bar

right across the street from Chase Stadium.

So as a kid, my dad would take me to bars

and that didn't make me an alcoholic.

It's just, it gave me a place that I knew

when I could start drinking where I wanted to be.

I wanted to be where there was action.

Even at seven years old, I knew what a pimp was,

I knew what a bookmaker was, I knew what a loan shark was,

I knew what all these things were

and that's what I wanted to be.

I wanted to be like that.

So in 1975, my dad was transferred out here to California

and we ended up in a little town west of here

called Canoga Park and it was a perfect place for me.

I was the only white kid on the neighborhood

and I grew up with the Munozes, Rodartes, the Ramirezes,

all that stuff.

So it kind of gave me a sense of who I was,

but I was, you know, and I always kind of battled with that.

And even till today, it's still like,

well, I'm like this, I'm like that,

but I kind of stopped trying to figure that out.

My first drug of choice was sports.

I was a kid, my head was loud, even as a young kid.

I mean, it was just going off.

And the first thing that took quiet in my head

was playing a game that I had never even heard of

until I came to California and it was soccer.

You know, I grew up football, boxing, baseball,

all that stuff.

And I remember the first time I played it, I grabbed it,

I picked up the ball and started running with it.

And no, no, no, you can't do that, you can't.

And I remember I felt so ashamed,

but in my alcoholic genius,

maybe I should have asked what the rules were

before I started playing, but I didn't do that.

And from that moment on,

I decided that I was gonna do everything I could

to be the best soccer player I could be.

And that was a great thing,

but it also was a double-edged sword.

You know, I had, one of my coaches was from England

and he had connections in England

and he wanted me to go back at eight years old

and play in the youth club there.

You know, I didn't want to do it

because what happened was when I was on the pitch

and I was playing, my head was quiet.

I just reacted to the game.

I had great intuition and they called me,

one of my coaches called me the garbage man.

I just knew where to be at all times.

But the problem was is when the game ended,

I didn't want to get off the pitch

because nothing made me more uncomfortable

than someone telling me I was good at something.

You know, and that's keen alcoholic

and absolute alcoholic thinking.

I mean, literally guys on the team's parents

would come up and say, "Oh man, you're great."

And I could feel the back of my neck stand up.

I hated it.

I couldn't get out of there.

So that was the beginning of feeling less than,

feeling, you know, below, feeling different.

You know, I get the whole, you know,

I didn't have the handbook and life and all that stuff,

but I just felt out of place.

And you know, I was a shy, quiet kid,

but inside I needed a valium

the size of a hockey puck to calm down, you know?

And that went a long way for me

until I was 13 years old is when I took my first drink.

And by the time I was 18, I was a daily drinker.

Not only was I drinking, I'd grown up in Canoga Park,

I was doing cocaine, I was taking steroids.

So if you want to be a spiritual human being,

those are three drugs you don't take in a combination.

They make you a little whack.

So like I said, by the time I was 18,

I was drinking every day.

And I remember all my life growing up, my family,

the one thing we all had in common was music.

And don't ask me why, growing up in New Jersey,

I remember staying home and my mom,

well, this is in the Hank Williams Senior.

It's not like normal music from New Jersey.

And Eddie Armand and then my sisters would come home

and it'd be rock and roll, Bach and Turner all would drive,

you know, all the classic rock.

And my dad would come home and it was the Spinners

and the Manhattans and stuff like that.

So I grew up loving music.

And I remember older people like me might remember

they used to have like the record

of the Tape of the Month Club, Columbia.

And I remember I got two, I didn't order it.

It just showed up at my house.

And one of them was an album that I still loved to the day.

It's today, it was called Operation Micron by Queensrank.

And the other one was Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hits.

And I remember listening to it.

And I remember Margaritaville as a kid growing up.

But I started, as crazy as it is,

I would like to blame Jimmy Buffett

for all the problems in my drinking.

He wrote a lot of songs which kind of,

the way I took them, there was a lot of nobility

and good feelings about drinking

and kind of living an unnormal lifestyle

as the way you look at it.

So at 17, you know, I set sail for Margaritaville,

but then I got knocked off course

and I ended up in Merle Haggardville.

That's not as exciting as Margaritaville.

But when I was 17, I was court ordered to go to AA.

I got arrested for my first DUI.

So I can tell you some funny stories about my drinking

and things like that.

But I've been arrested probably somewhere close to 15 times.

And I've given up decades of my life

to jails and institutions and prison.

And five of those arrests were for DUI.

So there's really nothing funny about the way I drink.

When I put alcohol in my system,

I don't care about anything but doing what I wanna do.

You know, and in the course of that,

I mean, I can kill someone.

My second DUI I got in Arizona,

I went down, I was living in a town called Prescott, Arizona

and I went down to Phoenix to go to the racetrack.

I drank all day.

And I was coming back and I'm on the 17 freeway going north

and there were cars in the right-hand lane.

So I got over in the left-hand lane.

There was a car sideways in that lane

and people standing in the meridian

and I hit in the median

and I hit the car in front of me, spun.

It came within a foot of killing four people.

And that didn't stop me from drinking

and it didn't stop me from drinking and driving.

You know, and looking back now,

that's, you know, that could have been, you know,

one of my nephews.

That could have been one of my grand nephews or grand nieces.

But at that point in time in my life,

I was on a straight track that all I wanted to do

was shut off my head

and if I got lucky, I would go to sleep enough.

And that's not normal feelings and normal thinking

for a 19, 20-year-old kid.

After that, I had to move back to California

and nothing really changed, you know.

I'm so blessed to have the family that I had.

I had three older sisters and, you know,

I would just get into trouble

and they would bail me out

or give me a couch to live on and stuff like that, you know.

And I never appreciated that from them.

I never appreciated the pain and the suffering

that they had to watch,

whether it was my parents or my brothers and sisters,

to watch me slowly disappear from the planet, you know,

and become so engulfed in alcohol and drugs and crime

and just really stupid behavior.

I only thought I was the only one that was getting hurt.

And I was okay with that.

I never looked at it at the outset of the point

of what I was doing to my parents, you know,

because there's a 10-year difference

between me and my youngest, closest sister.

So what I think my parents were trying to do

is they were trying to give it one more shot

to have a son and they got me, or it was a mistake.

And you know what?

I tried to prove every chance I could that I was a mistake,

but they were gonna pay for it, you know.

So my life was going horribly.

I would get a job, maybe eight months, I'd get fired.

So what happened is I got fired from a job

and my sister was living out in Thousand Hills.

She had just gone through a divorce.

And she said, "Hey, can you come out here

and help me with my two nephews, Colt and Kyle?"

And I said, "Yeah, that's no problem."

So I'm collecting unemployment, I'm sleeping on her couch,

I'm drinking every day, I'm sleeping till three o'clock,

I wake up, I drink, the kids come home from school,

I'm making something to eat,

I end up drinking till four or five in the morning,

go to sleep, do it all over again, you know?

And to me, as sad as it is, that was okay.

I was more than happy to live out

the rest of my life like that.

And that's pathetic, pathetic.

One of the DUIs I got, my sister had gone to sleep,

I took her car, I got pulled over in the parking lot

of this place called the Yukon Bell out in Thousand Oaks.

And for some reason, with my history,

they must have missed something, they O-R'd me.

So I got my one phone call and I called my sister

and I said, "Hey, I got arrested,

can you come pick me up?"

She said, "Yeah, no problem."

I said, "But you have to make one stop

before you come and get, 'cause I wear it."

I said, "You gotta go to the Yukon Bell and get your car."

'Cause I took, you know,

that's how selfish and self-centered.

And shortly after that, I ended up getting a job

in the mortgage business, I was making good money,

I was living out in Westlake.

And I came out here on a, it was a Sunday afternoon,

I went to a couple bars out here

and I was heading back to Thousand Oaks

and I got pulled over for my fifth DUI.

This was my fifth DUI in 11 years.

So I was looking at eight years in prison, you know,

and as tough and as savvy as I thought I was,

that's just not something I didn't wanna do.

And I had been given the opportunity to go to rehab

every time I got arrested before that

and I never took it, thank God,

because maybe going, taking it that one time

is what saved my life.

And I had a, my brother-in-law's son

had gone through a rehab out in Pasadena,

a place called Impact.

And, you know, he paid for me to go there.

It was mostly guys being paroled from the state penitentiary

or the federal penitentiary.

There was like eight people that actually paid to be there.

And, you know, I was one of them.

And I'd like to tell you that I went there

because I wanted to stop drinking and, you know, get sober.

But I went there because I knew legally

it was better for me to be there than not.

And thank God, you know, they, after three months,

I finally bounced around at every court and they said,

okay, well, you can complete another six months

in that rehab or you can go to prison

for eight years, you choose.

I'm not the brightest light on the porch,

but I knew a good deal when I heard it.

So I decided to stay there and that set me on the path.

I didn't stay sober, but what I am really grateful

a lot of days from now is I can look back

at the things that happened in my past

and see what it brought me to where I am.

And I'll never forget, in that rehab, like I said,

it was mostly parolees.

There was a guy from East LA, I named John.

And he was just, to me, the most irritating person

that ever walked the planet.

And about three days when I was in that rehab,

they had a break out of pink eyes.

So they had to put us all in this room, we couldn't leave.

And of course, who else had the pink eye was John.

After that, we had to go into the kitchen.

Who was working next to me was John.

After that, we went on what was called night phones,

which was kind of like you work at night and John was there.

And during the course of that time,

I was open minded enough to look at people

for how they were similar to me, not different.

And like I said, John was a junkie from East LA

and we ended up being roommates.

And we were shooting crap one night

about our illustrious history.

And I always thought I was better or different than someone

because I never put a needle in, I stopped short of that.

And we were talking and he was telling me about his wake up.

And I said, what's a wake up?

He's like, well, every time I shot heroin that night,

I would always save a little bit for the morning

so I could get through the day and it hit me like that.

I had been doing that with alcohol for decades.

So I am no different than him.

We ended up having a great friendship

and I ended up staying in that rehab and working there.

And he went on, he completed it and he left.

And I remember we packed up his stuff,

we went out to his car and we looked at each other

and we had shared a part of our lives,

and we cried like little girls.

And he was the first man, I didn't even tell my father,

I never said, hey, he was the first guy,

I said, hey, I love you.

So that was a valuable lesson.

Unfortunately, he passed away at cancer a few years ago,

but he will always be in my mind

and he'll always be part of my sobriety.

And like I said, I wish I could tell you

I stayed sober after getting out of rehab, but I didn't.

After about 18 months, I copped a resentment

towards a place because it was changing

and wasn't the same as got me sober, so I left there.

And of course I moved right back into my old hood,

right out of Galton, Alabama.

And I had gotten a sponsor when I was there,

he was taking me to the Pacific group over the hill.

And it's amazing what you'll put up with

when you've got eight years of prison hanging over your head.

I went and was somewhat active,

went to a couple of watches and stuff like that.

And that was all great,

but at that point in time in my mental capacity,

I was just gonna have no part.

So like I said, I moved back to my old neighborhood.

I went there and took a cake for two years

on a Wednesday at the big meeting.

And by Friday night, I was on the business end

of a bottle of Captain Maury and then a crack pot.

Because what I had done is I didn't get involved

in the program of alcoholics around us.

I call it dry, you can call it whatever you want.

That's all I was.

So lucky enough, I called a buddy of mine

that I was in the rehab was still working there.

And he said, "Hey, do you wanna come back

"and I'll get you in right away?"

And I said, you know what, no, I think I'm just gonna try AA.

That was the best idea I've ever had in my life.

So I went back to AA,

but I still had my same preconceptions

and wanted to act a certain way.

And I stayed sober for six months and then I went out.

But in that six months, I met some good people.

So when I came back, I knew at that point

when I came back to AA on September 9th, 2003,

that if I continue to drink and use

and do the things that I do,

I was gonna do.

And for once in my life, through the grace of God,

I didn't want, I wanted to live.

I wanted to experience life.

And lucky enough, there was,

I was sitting in my apartment, high and drunk.

And there was a knock on the door.

It was a guy named Josh that I had met

at one of the meetings that I had went to.

And he took direction from the sponsor

to go and check on me.

And he came and I had hair back then.

I looked like, I don't know if you guys remember,

Nick Nolte's mug shot when he got arrested.

I mean, I was no vision for you.

I was a mess.

And he came with another guy, Joe, that was new,

that we affectionately called Shakes the Clown.

And I just remember when I opened the door

and they came in, just that look on their face

is that they knew exactly what I knew,

that if I continue to keep doing what I was doing,

I was good.

Josh said to me, he said, "Hey, what are you doing tomorrow?"

I said, "I don't know."

He says, "Do you think you can not drink tomorrow?"

I says, "I don't know."

He says, "Do you want me to pick you up

and go to a meeting tomorrow night?"

I said, "I don't know."

And he came and picked me up and I've been sober ever since.

And that, to me,

there's two things that are an absolute proof to me

that there is a God.

The first one is the program of alcoholics and others,

because how do a stockbroker and a proctologist meet,

come up with this program and save millions of lives?

There's gotta be a God.

It's gotta be divine inspiration.

And the second one is that he just showed up

and I've been sober ever since.

So I came back to AAA and, you know,

I still did everything half measure,

but I was given a gift on September 9th.

I think my higher power knew I was gonna have

a hard enough time dealing with all the other stuff

in AA, the spiritual program, the principles,

and all that stuff.

He said, "We gotta take the money

to drink away from this guy."

And since September 9th,

not that I haven't had a passing thought

of drinking and using,

but I've never been hit with the obsession.

And again, that's a gift from God and that's a blessing.

But what the curse is, I can't give that away to him.

I can't give that to someone with a conversation.

I can't give that away to someone

by smacking them in the head or doing anything like that.

And there's so many people that I've been sober long enough

that I know struggle with this and they don't have that.

And I can't give that.

And it breaks my heart because I've watched more people

than I care to remember die from this disease,

whether it's through the actual physical drinking

and using or taking their own life.

So I ended up getting a job as a tour manager for a band

and it was great.

I traveled all over the US, traveled to Europe.

It was a great thing.

But after a year of that,

I realized that babysitting grown men

is not for a guy with my kind of mentality,

because I've just been,

"Okay, we gotta leave at 6.30 out of the hotel, be there.

Am I gonna go chase down a 30 year old man

to tell him to get in the car so we can go somewhere?"

So I was out of work and I was living right over here

by Jesse almost parking.

I was sharing a house with two other alcoholics

and one of the guys that worked there was like,

"Hey man, there was a meeting.

It was right over on Louise or Sherman Way.

Why don't we go there?"

So I went there and I went to a Sunday night meeting

and I remember Alex was there, Mariana was there,

Bill was there, Noel was there and a bunch of other people.

And I kind of hung out on the fridges of life and sex.

And thank God I did because I didn't know it

in a short amount of time.

I was gonna have to go through something

that I was gonna meet every one of those people

that were there.

So like I said, I kind of just hung out on the fringes.

Linda S's son, Eddie, I actually was working with

and he introduced me to Michael Smith

and we got along, but he was like,

"Hey, you got a sponsor?"

"Yeah, no, I don't need one, I'm good."

You just stuff like that and he always used to say,

"I was the first guy, I was out of that meeting hall

before the Lord's Prayer."

And that's how it was.

And finally, after being there and seeing the beauty

of what a group of people working together

for a common goal can bring,

I became open-minded and I asked Michael to be my sponsor

and he reluctantly said yes and we had a lot of good times

'cause that was a tough case.

'Cause my favorite thing was saying

when he would say something to me was,

"Well, in theory, Michael,"

'cause I was an intelligent guy

that barely graduated high school.

And he would tell me, "Theories don't mean anything.

It's what your actions that you take."

And in 2008, I went through 2005,

I had a really just a bad week.

My uncle, one of my uncles was a Mons senior.

He joined the seminary when he was 11 years old

and he had retired and he had a stroke.

And he ended up passing away in Florida.

My mom went back for his funeral.

She passed away in the same bed the morning of his funeral.

And that same day, a guy, Marcel,

that I had gotten sober with died

in an unfortunate forklift accident.

So that was tough, but what it had done,

it had kinda, I don't wanna say hardened me to death,

but I realized it was part of life.

And circumstances are circumstances I can't control

when someone's gonna live or someone's gonna die.

And in 2008, I went through something

that I never thought would ever happen.

My niece, Jennifer, had a daughter named Mia

and she was what the Irish like to call an old soul.

She was three years old going on 30.

And through some circumstances,

I don't know how she had contracted leukemia.

And she brought more happiness and joy to our family

than I ever did.

And it was tough.

And I'll never forget, she was in Mattel Hospital at UCLA

waiting for a bone marrow transplant.

They finally had gotten a match.

And she was literally in that hospital for almost a year

or for about eight months.

And they found a match and she was able to come home.

Think of like a little lady.

She was able to come home.

And it was a Sunday night when my sister's for dinner

and she was there.

And she was sitting next to me watching baseball.

And that was a Sunday night.

She died on Thursday.

And the thing that hurts the most

is I remember being there when she died.

And I remember going up to her to look at the,

it's permanently actually in my mind,

whatever I think about her, that's what I see.

Is the look of confusion on her face

because you can tell a grown person you have leukemia

and you're gonna die.

You can't explain that to a three-year-old.

And the look of confusion, all she knew is it hurt.

And like I said, she packed away on a Thursday

and thank God for all the people at Life's in Session.

They carried me through that.

And there was, every year they have a walkover

at Warner Park, Warner Center Park for leukemia victims.

And a couple of people from LIS went there with me

and it really meant a lot.

I became an active member of that group.

I started, I was a secretary of the Saturday night meeting.

I had commitments and I did all that.

But then as for my MO, I took my will back.

And things didn't learn as important

as far as doing the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I had to, I was co-owner of my own business.

I was making good money and I just pulled away.

And after about three months of dealing with my business

partner, I just walked away from the company that I started

and I moved out to Santa Clarita and I didn't,

I could say from probably 2015 till about August

or June of this year, I maybe went to three meetings.

That's not something that I would tell anyone to do.

But what that did for me was, is that I always use the fact

that I was an alcoholic to justify me doing shitty things.

And I could just say, "Well, I'm an alcoholic.

"This is what I do."

But what that allowed me to do is to not focus so much

on the fact that I was an alcoholic,

but to focus on the fact that I was a human being

that needed to change the way he did.

And that happened.

And once again, I was given another opportunity

to make a lot of money and be successful and all that.

And me and my big mouth ruined that.

And in 2020, right before the pandemic, I was out of work

and a sister of mine's friend worked

at an employment agency and he got me a job

working in a machine shop.

The only thing I could do with my hands is loose fingers.

I'm not the guy you want working

with a four-foot bandsaw cutting them.

And right then the pandemic hit, I'm like,

"Once again, here we go again."

But we were a critical work need.

So I went from working eight hours a day

to 12 hours a day for a year and a half.

If you would've told me that I was gonna be the happiest

I'd ever been doing that job, I would've said you were crazy.

And in January of last year,

I started getting some dental work done

and I noticed every time I came back from the dentist,

there was a problem.

I was getting really short of breath

and finally went through a situation

where I didn't sleep for three days

'cause every time I fell asleep,

I would wake up feeling like I drowned,

like I was drowning in my sleep.

And I'm a knucklehead, man.

I played that out for another month and a half

till I finally took myself to the Tarzana emergency room.

And they're like,

"Do you know all your heart valves are defective?"

I said, "No."

And they said that if I wouldn't have come in at that time,

there was a real good chance

that somewhere in the next three or four

'cause I would've went to sleep and never would've.

And they told me I had to have open-heart surgery

and have all my heart valves replaced.

I was like, I wasn't, I was still like,

"I wanna do this."

Believe me, I'm like, they put a pacemaker in

a couple of years ago.

I'm like, "That's not gonna solve it."

They're like, "No, you're not listening to us.

If you don't have this surgery, you are gonna die."

So I said, "Okay."

And I went to Cedars-Sinai Hospital

and they told me before I went in for the surgery

that when there's always a chance

that I'm gonna come out of the drugs that they give me

either during the surgery or right after.

And right after, they put in a thing

that's called a breathing tube.

They should call it a not breathing tube

because it's a little tube like this big

that they put down in the throat

and that's how you breathe.

And I came out of it and I just panicked

'cause you can't, you can breathe,

but it doesn't seem like you are.

And they had two guys by the edge of my bed

and I'm reaching, trying to grab it.

They grab my arms, I get low, get away.

I punch one guy in the face.

Finally, they had to shackle me down, everything.

And it seemed like it was four or five times

that this kept happening.

And finally, not to sound gross,

what had happened is I threw up and there was nowhere

for it to go.

I was going out like Jimi Hendrix.

I was choking on my own vomit.

And I just laid there and I said, you know what?

This is it.

This is how I'm gonna go.

And a piece fell over me that I had never felt before.

And I passed out and I don't know how long it was after that.

I woke up in the tube and it's been a tough recovery,

but the best thing that came out of that

is I had nothing but time on my hands after that.

After a couple of weeks of being out of the hospital,

I was able to move around.

And you know what, like I said,

the best thing that came out of that is I just decided

I should go back to start going to meet again.

And that's the second best decision I've ever made.

I'm a different person, not necessarily because of,

you know, the problems with my heart,

but I'm a different person more.

And again, I don't like saying this

'cause I don't want to condone it for everyone.

I was a different person when I took that time away from A.H.

to focus on who I was as a human being, you know?

And I have, my niece has had three more children since then.

I have a nephew that has another four.

And my nieces was remarried and he has another six.

So now I have basically like 14 grand nephews and grand nieces.

The two youngest ones are Bella and Layla.

And everything I was ever chasing with drugs and alcohol,

those feelings I get now when I get over and see those kids.

They like, my nephews, I was close with my nephews

and I was close with my niece,

but I didn't grow up in a family where we, you know,

you showed emotion, you told people you love them,

you didn't do that.

And those two little girls,

when I walk in the door, they come running

and it's just such a fabulous feeling.

I wish I could get another feeling

that unfortunately I can't give away.

People that are parents, you know that feeling.

I don't have any kids, so I don't know it.

So I live it through them.

That keeps me going every day.

I moved literally five minutes away from them.

So I go over there every chance I get, my niece gives me

keys to my house.

My sister gives me keys to her house.

That's stuff they didn't do in the past, rightfully so.

So, you know, I am so interred.

Grateful is like an understatement of how I am nowadays

for, you know, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous,

the people in it and for my family and for my friends,

I keep it going every day.

Thanks for letting me share.