Billy's Journey: From Inglewood Gangs to 29 Years Sobriety

- Hi everybody, I'm Billy Christian, I'm an alcoholic.

- Hi Billy.

- It's good to be here, kind of.

I want to thank Karen and Ben for inviting me.

It is an honor, it is a privilege,

but I don't always feel like coming.

I do appreciate meeting new people

and going to different groups,

and that has definitely blessed my life.

But our time didn't go on today.

Fortunately, when I was new,

someone pointed out that we have a chapter

in our big book called "How It Works".

There is no chapter called "How It Feels".

And so, success in this program and in my life

has really been blessed by the fact

that I have access to a power that has divorced me

from how I feel, and I'm able to take certain action

and consequently, when I look over my day,

I don't really look at it in terms of how I felt

at 10 o'clock in the morning,

or was I anxious at two o'clock.

I look at what did I do,

and that's a better metrics for how I'm doing.

Did I read, did I pray, did I meditate,

did I talk to another alcoholic, did I go to work,

did I do the things I'm supposed to do?

Anyway, that's a long introduction

into how I arrived here today.

I'm from Pasadena, Rose City Speakers is my home group.

I have a sponsor by the name of Gerald P,

and my sobriety date is October the 11th, 1994.

My last date was for 29 years.

And if you're new, welcome home.

Nobody wants you, we want you, so I'm glad you're here.

My story is that I grew up in Inglewood, California.

Inglewood in the house, no, I didn't think so.

I didn't think something told me no.

And, you know, I grew up in a time, it was a scary time.

I think every generation has its challenges.

You know, every time it is complicated by it.

I think it's very hard to grow up right now as well.

For me, my challenges were, I grew up in this era

where the gangs were starting to take root, you know,

in the neighborhood, and that was the Bloods, the Crips,

the LA County Sheriff Department, you know,

the typical suspects.

And as a kid, I had, you know,

my outlook on life was that the world was a scary place

and there were only pockets of safety, you know.

And I feel very blessed that the opposite is true now.

I feel like most of the spaces I move in are relatively safe

and every now and then, you know,

I find myself in a situation.

But as a kid growing up, you know,

there was a lot of fear.

I grew up on a block with a lot of kids.

Most of us were poorly supervised boys,

so there was a lot of testosterone.

It was, you know, it was a scary place.

When I was 11 years old, I found alcohol, you know.

I drank, it wasn't my first drink,

but that's the first time I drank alcoholically.

I got drunk on two and a half cans of old English 800.

I would never be the same, you know.

I had bitten the alcoholic apple of knowledge, you know,

and I would learn that alcohol

would vaccinate me from my fears and my feelings.

And it was just really no turn of the back at that point,

you know, and pretty soon, you know,

I would say my mid-team,

I started to experience what we call

the first nip of the ringer, the first wave of problems.

That was when I was wrecking cars, I was getting arrested.

I was passing out in inopportune moments, right?

One of my favorite examples happened in high school.

I had switched high school.

I was going to Morningside High School in Inglewood

and I had transferred to aviation high school

in Redauga Beach.

And when I got there, I had learned some new tricks, right?

And so one day I took on a quaalude around fourth period,

which is a very popular hypnotic sedative

in my generation, right?

And I didn't feel it.

And so at lunch, I drank a half a pint of spinal comfort.

(laughing)

And I went to my next class

and I was sitting there enjoying class,

I was rather relaxed.

And all of a sudden I had heard this horrific crack

and I raised up, I realized that it had been my head.

I had face planted on the desk and it popped right back up.

And I looked around the whole class, teacher, students,

everyone was frozen in astonishment, right?

I stood up, I thought it was a good time to make a speech.

(laughing)

It was a short speech.

And it went like this, I said, I am sick.

And I remember like the whole class was like, oh yes.

You know, 'cause I nodded in agreement.

And then I walked out and I drove home

and I did not drive home very well, I might add.

I'm not sure what I hit on the way home,

but something was not the way it was before I got.

Anyway, I can tell you that story

with slightly different circumstances,

a lot of different ways, right?

I mean, that happened to me.

That's just my favorite example.

Me overshooting the mark happened many, many, many times.

And so it's not that surprising that I would find myself

an alcohol synonymous for the first time

when I was about 18 years old.

And actually I was at a low point, can't get into it,

but you know, kind of discussed it with myself.

Saw a hotline on the television screen one night

and I called the number.

I told the woman on the other end what was going on with me.

And she said, "You should go to a meeting."

And she said, "There are no meetings in Inglewood,

but there is one down the beach."

I was kind of familiar, you know, with where it might be,

which was rather serendipitous.

And I went into a meeting, now you gotta understand,

this is 40 something years ago.

There were no television shows that referenced AA.

People didn't talk about going to a 12 step program.

That was just not part of the conversation.

Certainly not in my circle of people, you know?

So this was very new to me.

I came in, I sat way in the back, you know,

in the, you know, I dare you to get me sober section.

And I listened.

There was something about it.

I'm one of those people, not terribly common,

that was drawn to AA fairly quickly, you know?

There was something about the warmth.

I felt that tonight coming in, by the way.

Thank you for your welcoming ways here.

But yeah, the warmth, the humor,

and the way you told your stories, the hard way, you know?

With the unvarnished truth.

And I was attracted, I was drawn to that.

That was so different than the way I was living my life.

And so I started to come back and I got a sponsor.

And I went to meetings for 40 days

and I worked the first three steps.

And then my sponsor started talking about this searching

and fear of small inventory.

And that scared me to death.

I was not ready to trust anyone with my story.

And of course I drank.

So what I learned is a couple of things,

a couple of seeds were planted.

And thing one is that sobriety is good.

This is better.

Trust me, I got loaded for 20 years.

This is better.

So it'd be new.

I don't know if it's your firmest day sober.

The book says we have our pearls off the same skin.

But if nothing else, I hope you at least face the ground.

I hope you're rolling around all the time.

Because if you're like me in those dark and lonely moments,

it's hard to get that taste out of you.

It's hard to forget that there are people like me

that are living relatively happy and productive.

The other thing is that I assembled the magic.

Something magical happened for me in those 40 days,

or at least in the very beginning.

And what I'm referring to is this thing

where one day I needed to drink.

And virtually the next day,

I wanted to be so in manageable transition.

Bill Wilson calls it the act of prominence in the cloud.

And the recovering community,

they call it spontaneous moving.

To me, it just seemed like magic.

And I couldn't seem to get it back.

I had this idea to be this Wilson any time I wanted to.

And what I learned was that the window of recovery

would only crack open every so often.

And it would be a long time before I actually got sold.

And I began this revolving door coming in and out of treatment

and in and out of the corals.

And I just really couldn't get any traction involved.

And I took them all to school.

And I was having a field of marijuana business,

which was fostering and selling marijuana

on my folks at their house.

I know they call it cannabis now.

I understand that you can go to a little place

where they cross on it and buy it, buy it, buy it.

I don't want to sell weed. I don't want to sell it now.

I'm just kidding. I ran with Tom and Caleb.

Anyway, my folks, they were my folks.

They were like, "Hey, why don't you just get a gym

and straighten up and fly around?"

I was in my early 20s. That seemed logical, right?

Unfortunately, logic is not a treatment plan for alcoholism.

It would be nice if it were, but it's not.

But I did. I complied.

I got a job in the mailroom of a large law firm

in Central City. This was a good job for me.

I mean, I was literally one of the lowest people

on the totem pole, but it was a great pole.

It was a great place. And I was grateful for that job.

And I'll tell you how I showed my gratitude

is I drank on the very first day.

And the reason for that is simple,

is that they hired an alcohol.

And I worked there for 10 months,

and that's right around the time that I knew

that the jig was soon to be up.

And I had a very clear picture about this

because a kid that worked with me in the mail,

he split up to me one day very quickly.

He said, "Really, can I ask you a question?"

And of course, I know, I said, "Sure."

Of course, now I know if you found a job

and somebody very sheepishly comes up and says,

"Can I ask you a question?"

The correct answer is no, because chances are,

you're not gonna like that question.

I didn't. And he said, "How come after lunch,

you always slur your words?"

Oh, yeah. Yeah, my heart drops.

'Cause I knew, if he knew, probably everybody knew.

And I was certain that he was just concerned about me,

that he wasn't asking for the technical answer.

I didn't tell him, "Well, it's the methadone

and the malt liquor produces that," you know.

Like I knew he wasn't asking for the recipe, you know.

And sure enough, I got fired

within days of that conversation.

I was devastated.

I was not, it was weird.

I was not surprised, but I was devastated.

I was devastated for two reasons.

Reason number one, it was starting to dawn on me

that I was not gonna jerk off this alcoholism

and become a regular person.

Like I wasn't gonna have that idea.

Maybe this is a phase and I'm just gonna, you know,

adulting all of a sudden and everything will be fine.

That illusion was gone.

And then the second thing is it just so happens

that me getting fired coincided with my father

being diagnosed with cancer.

And so here I am, I'm living at home.

I got no hustle.

I dropped out of school.

I'm unemployable.

I try to be there for my father.

I would, you know, I'm trying to be the dutiful son.

If he's going to chemotherapy, I'll take him.

If he could eat before or after, we would go have sushi.

That was my thing, you know.

And that worked for a while, but eventually, you know,

my father got progressively worse and I got progressively worse.

And there came a day when my father was gravely ill

and back in the hospital and the nurse called and said,

"You guys need to come down here now."

And my mother and my sister, who were not alcohol,

but neither was my father.

My mother and my sister got ready to go to the hospital

and say their goodbyes to my dad, and I did not.

And I loved my father.

He wasn't perfect, but I loved him.

But I stayed home because of the emotional coward

that I was, and I got him.

And, of course, my father died that night.

And I mention that because from that point on,

that became a huge impediment to my sobriety.

Like, well, you know, from that point on,

if I was in jail or in treatment,

at the same time, you know, after, you know,

a week or two of being separated from a drink or a drug,

I would be flooded with guilt.

And what I wanted to know from you alcoholics in office

is how would I ever live with that shit?

How would I ever live with the shame

of turning my back on my father when he's dead?

Which, of course, is a good question,

but I never asked anyone, and I never stuck around

long enough to get the answer until this time.

With the help of a sponsor

and the big book of alcoholics anonymous

that come across that line in front of me,

I read the big book every day.

And I read it today.

It's on page 124.

And it says, "Cling to the thought,"

as if it were speaking to me,

"Cling to the thought that in God's hands,

the dark past is the greatest possession you have."

Now, if you've never heard that line before,

just take a second to absorb the audacity of that statement,

that our deepest, darkest secrets,

the things that we don't want to tell anyone

is the greatest possession we have.

And I don't know if that's true for so-called normal,

but for us, that is the message of hope.

It goes on to say,

"That is what inverts death and misery for other alcoholics."

'Cause when I sit across from the new man and he says,

"Billy, you don't understand, I've done bad things,"

I get to say, "Me too, yeah, me too.

Now let's walk together on this path."

So what happened, the thing that happened,

a lot of things happened, but my father passing away

and the combination of that and my behavior

really fractured our little family unit, you know?

And eventually my mother and my sister would move away

with no forwarding address.

I wouldn't know where they lived for about 10 years.

And there was a little money flowing around the family,

it was enough to keep myself afloat for a while,

but eventually the bottom fell out of my life

and I became homeless personally.

I was a kid growing up in downtown Los Angeles.

And when I say that, I mean really and truly,

because I've been in all this glory, sleeping on the sidewalk,

I would say technically, I guess you would call it

a homeless, alcoholic, cranky window washer.

I was one of those people in the '90s,

that if you parked your car near me,

I just started watching the windows

and hopefully we work on a paper plane.

And I wore the uniform, I was filthy.

I would go literally months without changing my clothes

or bathing, my feet smelled so bad,

I could have taken off my shoes and robbed a bank.

And I lived like that for a long time.

You know, I lived on the street.

There was a part of me that was concerned.

I was like, wow, you know, this might not end well.

And then there was another part that had a sense of relief

that I didn't have to pretend to be

a regular person anymore, you know?

And drugs are part of my story, namely cocaine and heroin,

but I'm a real alcoholic.

And at this point in time, alcohol had become a necessity.

And I would have to crack open that Chimo liquor

or that Cisco or that gin and drink it down

before the police would come and report.

Often it would be the same police officer

and we'd have pretty much the same conversation every time.

He'd say, Mr. Christian, I told you

you cannot live in this doorway.

There are these stores around here.

They don't want you here.

And then I would say something smart to him like,

you know, you think it's a business district.

I think it's a residential neighborhood.

You know, we just got a little zoning problem.

And then he would threaten to take me to jail.

You want to go to jail? I'll take you to jail.

And then I would say, is it burrito night?

You know, 'cause sometimes at Parker Center

they would have these frozen burritos.

He never took me to jail, but he would call the drunk tank

and the drunk tank would come

and drive me a couple of miles east and let me go.

Kind of like the Department of Fish and Game

with a problem bear, the same concept.

Here's the interesting part of that story.

I'm somewhere about five years

sitting in a meeting in Pasadena.

Guess who walks in and raise their hands

and will come, that police officer.

And I went up to him.

I was like, oh, I'll sponsor that guy.

Like, nobody touched that, that was mine.

And I went up to him.

I introduced myself and didn't ring any bells.

And then I quietly mentioned where he might know me from.

I'll never forget this as long as I live.

He kind of leaned back, he squinted.

And when he recognized me, he reached out and he hugged me.

I mean, he hugged me like he was trying to hug the whole body.

Like whatever happened to me, he needed to have happened to him.

And so it's just a beautiful and bizarre moment in our lives.

A lot of things happened.

Basically, I went into a rehab for the 14th time

in October of 1994.

I wasn't planning on being sober.

But something bothered me and I saw it.

I heard that song a lot, too.

I didn't know the specifics.

I didn't even know it was happening.

I just said, I've been around for 14 years.

I know what I'm doing, man.

I know it, man.

You go to meetings, you get a sponsor, you go to steps.

You really like praying, meditating, doing something.

As soon as I shared that magical transition,

I instantly wanted to be sober.

I got sober on a birthday.

I went to a little meeting.

I raised my hand as a newcomer.

Like, man, I really, bravely did this evening.

And the secretary came over

and asked me if I had a big book.

I said, no.

And he offered it to me and I have to book him a story.

Now, I didn't know his story.

And frankly, I didn't care what his story was.

He had, it was the secretary.

And he ended up just saying, big books, you're it, pal.

And it turns out, you know,

I mean, there was a moment where I realized

that when you're in an emergency room,

it's not the time to go shopping for doctors, okay?

It's not the time to say, who else is on duty?

It's you.

Once we started to do some work,

and we started to uncover, discover the story,

we realized, oh, you know, he grew up in Brentwood

and I grew up in Inglewood.

You know, that's quite different.

I used to see, I learned later

that I used to see his father on television.

And my father used to repair television.

Well, we started to, you know, get down to the nitty gritty.

Oh, we behaved, we thought, we felt in a lot of similar ways.

And I really jumped on the program, you know,

I jumped in with both feet.

And that was good because what happened

is at a certain point, I was both,

you know, those new, those first weeks and months,

you know, I was both joyous and scared to death, right?

I was scared to death because I got problems.

Alcoholics in the house, like I have been,

I haven't had a job in 10 years,

since the job I told you about.

I've been living on the street for three and a half years,

which does something to a psyche, right?

I no longer felt like I was part of society.

My, on top of that, I had eight failures to appear in court.

I had eight warrants, nothing serious,

but I had been getting tickets for jaywalking

and open container tickets, and I had eight warrants.

And then my only family essentially was my mother

and my sister.

They were, you know, parks unknown

and the alcohol and protection program somewhere.

So, and I, and I shared with my father

after doing a little work, building up a little trust.

And I said, listen, this is what's gonna happen.

Eventually, I'm going to have some negative contact

with the police and I'm gonna get crack for these warrants.

And they're gonna send me to the county jail.

And when I get out of the county jail,

I will have lost, you know, this sober living

that I'm living in and I had a little part-time job

and I will be back at square one.

And I'll tell you, I know what square one looks like

when I get out of county jail in downtown Los Angeles.

And he said to me, he said, I have a plan.

Don't worry about it.

And I was like, let's hear it.

And he said, what you're gonna do

is you're gonna go down to the courthouse

and you're gonna put your faces on the dock.

And then you're gonna go upstairs and get a public defender.

And he said, I'm gonna go to court with you one time.

And I said, that's the plan, knock on the front door.

I mean, I thought you were gonna say something reasonable

like change your name, get plastic surgery, something.

But he said, do it.

And I swear to you, I did not,

I had no faith in this plan at all, but I did it.

I went down, I did everything that he said.

The public defender said, you know,

bring in letters from this job and from rehab that you,

you know, and I brought in letters

from every person I knew who could write.

So I go to court, very large courtroom.

And my sponsor's there.

And I'm thinking, I know how this is gonna go.

Like I, I'm already catastrophizing.

I know how this is gonna work, right?

We're gonna be here all day.

And then they're gonna take me into custody

in one of the side doors.

But none of that worked in that fashion.

In fact, because I had a lawyer, they took me first, right?

My public defender was there.

And I'll never forget the judge, you know,

they read the charges and then she looked at the paperwork

and then she looked up and she said,

how long have you been sober?

I said, nine months, very quickly.

You know, we who are sober,

we know how long we've been sober, right?

We'll see.

And it was a good thing.

You know, I didn't fumble at that moment.

And she, she kind of, she nodded her head,

she nodded her head and then she, she said, okay,

one year in the county jail.

It was a very long pause.

And then she says, suspended.

Don't come back, Mr. Christian, you know.

And this, all of this took five minutes,

not $1, fine, nothing.

Just five minutes.

I remember walking out of there

and that was the first time I thought,

it was the first really tangible moment

that I thought maybe this, this thing always really works.

Maybe, maybe it works.

It was, and I, I had believed,

I had come to believe that,

that the power we created in ourselves

will restore you to sanity.

I wasn't so sure it was going to work for me, right?

But this was the first time when I thought, oh yeah.

Now I gotta tell you that I did come back.

I've come back as a sponsor.

I've come back as a speaker in drug court

and I've come back as a lawyer.

I am now a public defender in that very same building,

eight blocks away on the same street

from where I slept in that doorway.

The point is, is that everything that happened,

everything that happened is a result of me putting

all my eggs in this basket.

Every good thing can be reverse engineered

to this program and the people that I met

and the influences along the way

and me setting aside how I feel about things

and just taking direction and taking action.

And that has resulted in a life that 29 years ago,

I would not have even been close to dreaming of myself.

I just, in closing, I always like to give credit

where credit is due because it's not about me.

It's not what I did.

It's about you.

It's about this fellowship.

It's about these steps.

It's about this program and it's about what God did.

And what God did was peel me off this sidewalk

and shook the dirt off of me and prop me up

just like he's propping me up right now.

So we can say, this is what I can do because I'm God.

That's it.

Thank you.