Brent's Journey: From Small-Town Shame to AA Fellowship

Well, I'm Brent, I'm an alcoholic.

- Hi guys.

- I'm glad to be here, thank you Ben for asking me.

I was here for the first time about a month ago

or so with John, and I left the meeting

as we were driving back to Palm Springs, just in a high.

I couldn't believe how friendly everybody was.

And I don't think there was one person

who didn't recognize me as some not a regular

at this meeting and came up and shook my hand

or gave me a hug and welcomed me.

And I just thought it was amazing

that that doesn't happen at every meeting.

And just the idea that everyone was so friendly

and open arm, yeah, I left here just so excited.

And when Ben called me and asked if I would come,

I said, immediately, I said, yes,

I wanted to come back to this group.

And it's, as you probably know,

this group's a little different than most AA groups.

You know, you have some traditions

that aren't at every group.

And I just thought they were great traditions

when they were explained to me,

the idea that we have to dress up and show respect.

I thought, wow, that's cool.

So anyway, enough of that, I'm glad to be here.

Okay, we'll start out.

I had my first drink when I was 17 years old.

Until that time, I grew up in a really small town

up by Mount St. Helens in Washington State.

The town was like 500 people

and I grew up on a farm 10 miles outside of town.

So it was a real rural area.

I would, for a long time, I made up stories

so I could blame my parents for what went wrong.

That was just bull because my parents were fine people.

The only problem I had was

my father was from the old country.

He's Finnish and the Finns are very traditional.

There's only one way to do things and that was his way.

And that wasn't always the way I wanted to behave.

And so there was some push-pull and arguments

and stuff as I was growing up.

But there was no abuse or anything.

All of that I made up in my mind

so I could have an excuse to misbehave.

But none of my bad behavior came from my family situation.

It was all invented in myself.

So when I was 17 years old, I had been a pretty good kid.

Had swore that I was never gonna drink

because in our little town, there was a town everything.

There was a town drunk, there was a town whore,

there was a town this, yeah.

And if you got that name, it never went away.

And so I saw that growing up

and so I didn't wanna have one of those names.

So I wanted to be a good kid and I was.

And so a couple of weeks before graduation,

my best friend Jimmy and two other friends, Dick and Larry,

I was like the last one in our group

that was gonna graduate that hadn't gotten drunk.

And so they decided it was time for Brent to get drunk.

So they took me out in Jimmy's 1954 Chevy

with a bottle of vodka and a six pack of orange crush.

And we drove out into the hills somewhere

and they told me you take a swig of the vodka

and then drink some orange crush

and they told me that was a screwdriver.

So that's what I did and sure enough, I got drunk.

And what was amazing about that was now I had grown up,

actually my best friend Jimmy,

his birthday was August 9th, my birthday is August 7th.

So I had grown up like from birth knowing these kids.

I mean, our moms, Jim and my mom would have our birthdays

usually like on the 5th or 6th of August together.

And the other two friends in the car,

I had started first grade with.

So these were people that I had known forever.

Our parents knew each other,

our grandparents knew each other.

But what happened that night was the first time

I ever felt like I really belong.

Now these were people I'd known from birth

but I always felt like an outsider.

I always felt like I was more where they weren't looking in

and observing.

I never felt a part of until that night.

And I just thought, wow, I gotta do this again.

Well, I did again and again and again.

Now I was fortunate enough that right after college

or right after graduation from high school,

I went to college and coming from that very small town,

there were 45 of my graduating class.

I realized real quick when I got to college

that I was way behind what the kids from Seattle

and Tacoma and Spokane, the big cities,

they had learned all kinds of things

that we weren't taught in our school.

And so I realized I was gonna have to study.

And so my freshman year, that's pretty much all I did.

I just studied, didn't party, didn't drink,

just I thought I gotta do this or I'm gonna fuck out.

Well, for those of you who have gone to college and stuff,

pretty soon you figure out the system.

And by the end of my freshman year, I knew the system.

So I got fairly good grades my freshman year.

And from then on, I just started sliding

'cause I figured it out.

And the summer after my freshman year,

I got a job in a paper mill.

And I was one of the only people in that paper mill

that summer that wasn't a full-time employee.

They were all, that was their careers, their jobs.

Well, they were all hearty drinkers and partiers.

And I started, started with them that summer.

And by the time I went back to school my sophomore year,

I loved to party, I loved to drink, and that's what I did.

And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here tonight

on my drunk-a-log or anything.

But what happened was I came from that small town

from good people, and I started living a life

that was full of shame.

I started doing things that I knew were wrong,

but if I drank enough, it was okay to do them.

And that just continued on and on and on.

Now, if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm gay.

And yeah, (laughs)

and so there was, and we're talking,

I graduated high school in 1963.

So there was that shame of, you know,

there was no gay lib there back then.

You know, if you were gay, you were considered, you know,

like there was a town queer in our town, you know,

and I didn't wanna be that.

But so anyway, there was the shame of that.

And then add the alcohol and the shame of how I was living,

lying, cheating, you know, always, always looking

for the fastest, easiest, softest way,

never wanting to really put in the work.

And that led to all kinds of dire consequences,

as you can imagine.

Now, I guess the worst things I didn't, you know,

I didn't serve time in a penitentiary.

I served two separate nights in the drunk tank.

That was the closest I ever got

to really horrible law enforcement consequences.

But it just kept getting worse and worse.

And my solution to everything, any problems,

any illnesses or anything was just to drink more

and get through it.

And I was lucky, you know,

this was back in the late '60s by then.

I graduated college, I had moved to Chicago

from that little town and went to graduate school

and just kept partying.

And I guess it wasn't so bad that I wasn't,

I was still able to achieve.

And by the time I was 27 years old,

I had like a job I couldn't even have ever dreamed of

coming from where I came from.

At 27 years old, I was the human resources director

of Playboy Enterprises in Chicago.

Yeah, I'd like to say that, you know.

It's almost like saying I was star of a film or something.

But with that job, my office was right next

to the Playboy Club in Chicago.

With lunches came free martinis,

free happy hour after work.

And I had also been elected at that time,

the vice president of the Chicago

Personnel Management Association.

So everything in town was a free drink, everywhere I went.

Well, at 27, I got that job.

And by the time I was 30, I had lost it.

It was all gone.

I went from being an executive at Playboy Enterprises

to being a doorman in a hotel and a busboy in a deli.

Anything I could do to just keep drinking,

that was the point.

Make enough money to be able to go to the bars.

I wasn't a home isolated drinker.

I've always been a social person.

And so I was what back in those days they called a bar fly.

And I found a bar, I had moved back to Seattle at that point

from Chicago.

And there was this bar down in the bad part of town

that had happy hour.

It was a tavern, not a bar, that just served beer and wine.

But they had happy hour from four until six.

And from four to six, they served 10 cent schooners.

I get a kick out of, sometimes you go to a meeting

and when they pass the hat, they'll say,

remember the price of your last drink,

throw that in the basket.

(laughing)

And I think, okay, here's a dime.

But anyway, from four to six,

I could drink beer, 10 cents a glass.

From six to eight, just down the street from that bar

was another happy hour that served dollar pitchers.

So I moved from the 611 that was sitting with the bar

to the 2024 and drank pitchers.

And then from eight to 10, I could go to Mr. Larry's

and drink martinis for the price,

double martinis for the price of singles.

Well, this is how I lived for about three years,

every night, four to six, six to eight, eight to 10.

And by 10, I was blotted.

And I figured I could get drunk.

And I mean really drunk for like six or eight bucks a night.

Can you imagine that?

That's what a drink costs now, you know?

But anyway, so what happened was,

like I said, I still work

and I was getting sicker and sicker.

And I was getting sick and I couldn't drink my way through it

I'd always been able to get a cold, get a flu,

whatever, just keep drinking, it'd go away.

Couldn't do it anymore.

And finally, some of my friends and coworkers said,

"Brent, you have to go to a doctor."

My skin, you could do this

and layers of skin would fall off.

My fingernails were growing out like washboards

and I had a fever that wouldn't go away.

So finally I did, I went to a doctor,

I told him my symptoms and he sat there and he says,

"Well, I don't know what's wrong with you."

He says, "Sounds like you're either in the advanced stages

"of syphilis or you've got some rare form of scarlet fever."

Or he says, "This could be some sort of liver disease."

He says, "Do you drink?"

And I said, "Oh, a little."

And he says, "Well, I thought I'm gonna take some blood tests

"to find out what's wrong with you."

And he says, "In case it is something with your liver,

"don't drink until I get those tests back."

I said, "Okay, when you getting them tests back?"

And he says, "Well, it'll take a week."

He says, "When you leave, make an appointment

"with my receptionist, you come back in a week."

I said, "Okay."

So I left, that was February 14th in Seattle.

Well, in February in Seattle,

that rain comes off Puget Sound

and it has little bits of ice in it

and it blows directly at you,

doesn't fall down, it comes at you.

And if you've got a fever,

those raindrops just sting like hell.

And I was walking home and I had a car, didn't work.

Didn't matter that it didn't work

'cause my license wasn't current,

nor could I afford insurance,

nor were the license plates current.

So I had a car, big deal.

But that's how I lived, you could probably identify.

Anyway, on the way home,

a little voice somewhere in my head said,

"You know, you've been out of control for a long time.

"Maybe now something, time to do something about it."

Well, by the time I got home, I told myself,

"Yes, you've got to do something about this."

So at the time in Seattle,

there was a publication called the Seattle Gay News.

And in it, I had seen something about Gay AA.

So I get home, I called the Seattle Gay Community Center

and this nice lady answered the phone

and I said, "Hello, can I have your alcohol division?"

She said, "What are you talking about?"

I says, "Well, I saw something in the Seattle Gay News

"about Gay AA."

And she goes, "Oh."

She says, "No, we don't have an alcohol division."

She says, "But I have some names here of people

"that belong to Alcoholics Anonymous

"and they have given us their phone numbers

"and you can call them and they can help."

She gave me three phone numbers.

Well, I called the first one

and a guy named Robert answered his phone.

And so I told him where I got the number,

why I was calling, he says, "Oh, fine, where do you live?"

I told him, he says, "Okay, I'll be by your house

"at eight o'clock, there's a meeting at 830,

"a few blocks from where you live.

"I'll pick you up, we'll go to a meeting."

Whoa, okay.

So I'm thinking, wow, did I make a commitment here?

Now, I lived in squalor, I didn't.

So I started trying to clean up my house

and clean myself up.

And I'm kind of thinking, 'cause I hadn't had any dates

or anything like that for a long time,

that wasn't important, the drinks were important.

But I'm thinking, ooh, gentleman caller.

So anyway, comes eight o'clock, I wasn't quite ready yet.

But anyway, I'll get to that in a minute.

I opened the door, standing on my porch,

and I say this with all the love in my heart that I got,

was the ugliest homosexual I had ever seen in my life.

So, so much for gentleman caller.

So anyway, I said, "I'm Brent, hi, Robert."

I said, "I'm not quite ready yet, make yourself at home."

And I went in the bathroom to try to get myself together.

And he says, "Can I get a drink of water?"

And I go, "Yeah."

And he goes in the kitchen and he calls out,

he says, "Is it your birthday?"

Now, this was February 14th, my birthday is August 2nd.

And I said, "No, why do you ask?"

He says, "Well, there's this birthday cake in here."

Well, I had had half of a birthday cake sitting on my

kitchen counter from August 2nd till February 14th.

That just, I bring that, that's how I live, okay?

So anyway, Robert took me to my first meeting.

And at that meeting, they start talking about,

well, oh, I have to bring this up.

That first meeting was a candlelight meeting

in the basement of a church.

And so they, do any of you old enough to remember

that they used to have those candles that were like

in red glass bowls with white plastic fishnet around them?

- Oh yeah.

- Okay, well, that's the candles they had up

and down the table and they lit them.

And I thought, oh, how nice, this is like a cocktail lounge.

They're trying to make us feel at home.

And they lit the candles, turned the lights out

and had the meeting.

Well, one of the few things I remember hearing

at that meeting was they said, take a spot.

You know, they talked about sponsorship and they said,

make sure it's somebody you're not attracted to.

Well, there was Robert.

So there was my first sponsor.

And they also said, go to meetings, clean house

and don't drink in between meetings.

Well, that's funny.

So anyway, I asked, on the way home,

I asked Robert to be my sponsor.

I got home and the next, he said,

well, I'll pick you up tomorrow.

I said, yeah, fine, meeting tomorrow.

Well, he picked me up every day for a week or two.

Finally, one day I wasn't ready

and he came in the house.

And he goes, wow, your place is together.

What happened?

And I said, well, they said, go to meetings,

don't drink in between meetings and clean house.

So I've been cleaning house.

And he goes, no, no, that's not it.

It's nice your house is clean,

but that's not what they mean.

Well, anyway, just a note about Robert.

People would ask me, you know,

as I'm going to my first meetings, do you have a sponsor?

And I go, yeah.

I go, who?

And I go, Robert.

And they go, oh, crazy Robert?

And I go, well, yeah, Robert.

Well, come to find out, yeah, Robert was crazy.

But Robert was only 13 months sober at that time.

And Robert was already doing cold calls.

He was already doing service.

He was taking me to meetings every night.

You know, he might've been crazy,

but he knew something I didn't know.

And that was how not to drink one day at a time.

So I am, I mean, to this day.

Now that first meeting was February 14th, 1980,

and I have not had a drink since.

So I am, you know, I,

there's no way I can express my gratitude towards Robert

and those people at that meeting.

Now so much has happened since then.

I'm 79 years old.

I'm going to be 80, or I'm 78.

I'm going to be 79 August 2nd, next Saturday.

So I've had a lot of years to fumble around

in this thing they call sobriety.

And I've been fortunate enough

that I got a career back together.

I got a career that lasted long enough

that I actually get a little bit,

teeny little pension check in the mail every month, amazing.

I found a relationship at a couple of years sober.

I met a very decent man called Jim.

And Jim and I had a 21 year relationship.

He wasn't in the program, but he didn't drink.

And we had a wonderful relationship.

The last, Jim got diagnosed with a terminal illness

and the last three years were pretty rough.

But because I was sober,

I was able to handle that one day at a time.

Have these lights come on and I've not,

oh, no, you got a light minute.

Oh, okay.

You know, I was able to handle that

like a responsible adult should handle it.

Before sobriety, I would have just fled.

I wouldn't have dealt with someone who was dying

and what comes with that.

Anyway, so we had a good life.

At that point, I was living in the Bay Area

and like I say, got my career back together.

It was a wonderful life.

And my home group at that time,

I'd had the same home group for 14 years.

And we met on Saturday nights at 8.30.

And Jim happened to die Saturday afternoon.

And I called a good friend of mine, John,

and said, Jim passed away today.

John came right over.

And when somebody dies, said, oh, there's a lot of shit

you gotta go through, you gotta call the coroner

and the this and the that.

Anyway, by the time they took Jim's body away,

it was about 8.50.

John said to me, what do you wanna do now?

And I said, let's go to the meeting.

Now, I was too shook up to share and stuff like that.

But as the meeting was closing, Linda came over to me.

She was a regular to me and she says, you okay?

'Cause I usually shared at meetings.

And I said, yeah, I said, Jim died today.

And I walked out.

Well, the next day, it was like living

on a little house on the prairie.

The next day, people were at my door with casseroles,

with everything, you know, what can we do for you?

Do you need this?

Do you need that?

And I mean, it was the most incredible return of goodwill

that I ever experienced in my life.

And I mean, I had seen that before it happened to me

because I was sober quite a while by then.

But when it's coming your way,

you have no idea how it fills your heart.

It's just unbelievable.

And all this was with no strings attached.

And some of it was from people that I didn't really know,

just enough to say hi or nod at a meeting.

But there they were at my door asking what they could do.

I never felt alone.

I never felt, you know, a lot of people,

their grief is so dark and so awful.

That didn't happen to me 'cause everybody rallied around me

and made life great.

Well, shortly after that, I moved to New York.

I'd always wanted to live in New York.

When Jim was dying, he said, "Go to New York."

He didn't wanna move to New York.

"Go to New York."

Well, I said, "No, I won't."

Well, I did.

I ended up, I lived in New York for seven years.

And it was wonderful.

But I gotta tell you how this program works.

I was sharing this with my dinner companions tonight.

At one point while I was in New York,

I had bought a condo.

And when I got there, my homeowners and my taxes

were around five, 600 a month, which I could afford.

Well, six, seven years later,

that had gone to 16, 17, 1800 a month.

I couldn't afford it anymore.

I was running out of money.

I had retired and I had to put it up for sale.

So I was trying to sell my condo

because I was running out of money

and starting to get more worried every day

because the market was not going up, it was going down.

Anyway, during this time,

I had become sponsored to this woman who was 40 years old.

And at that point, she was 20 years sober.

She had gotten sober at 20.

And after she got sober,

she was diagnosed with extreme epilepsy.

And during her 20 years of sobriety, before I met her,

she had had seven brain surgeries

to try to stop this epilepsy, these seizures.

And none of it had worked.

And I'm on the bus going to a meeting that day,

just beside myself and how I'm gonna go to the meeting

and share how life's not fair.

I'm running out of money.

I can't sell my place.

Well, I get a call from her.

She was calling me from the hospital.

She had had a seizure on the subway

and they had come and taken her to the hospital.

And the doctors had told her

they were gonna take her off of all of her meds

and keep her in the hospital for a week to watch her seize.

They wanted to watch her for a week, have seizures,

so they could figure out what was going wrong

and what they might be able to do for her.

Well, let me tell you,

when you're just worried about some little shit thing,

like not having any money,

and somebody calls you and tells you about a real problem,

that's how this program works.

All of a sudden, that meant nothing to me anymore.

And sure enough, the condo sold.

Not for what I wanted, but it sold.

That's life.

And you know, it's been a series over the years

of events like that happening all the time.

Your partner dies and the fellowship

just wraps themselves around you.

You think you have problems, but if you're doing service,

those problems disappear

because there's things more important

than your own little problems.

The friendships that I've made in Alcoholics and Honors,

I mean, I've been sober in Seattle, the Bay Area,

New York, and now Palm Springs.

I have friends in all of those places.

I mean, my life has been so full,

and I hope, you know, I'm getting kind of old,

but I hope I can stay strong enough and healthy enough

to continue to do service because that really is the key.

There's only one thing that's more important.

Oh, does that mean, oh, five minutes, okay.

There's only one thing more important than service,

and that's the 12 steps.

You know, because I can't, my first sponsor, Crazy Robert,

oh, one thing I gotta tell you about Crazy Robert,

Robert's job, Robert worked from midnight

to eight in the morning at a porn shop in downtown Seattle.

Okay, that was his job.

Well, I had a hard time sleeping when I first got sober,

so I would call Robert up down at the porn store

and say, "Robert, I can't sleep."

He'd say, "Great, grab your big book and come down here.

"We'll work some steps."

So I'd go down to this dirty bookstore,

sit behind the counter with Robert, and we'd do our steps.

Okay, so anyway, doing the steps,

the most important part that I got from the stepwork

was four and five and eight and nine,

knowing how to keep my own side of the street clean

because before that, all I wanted to do

was blame everybody else or blame situations.

I never wanted to accept responsibility for what was mine.

Well, that doesn't lead to a successful life.

You know, like, I blamed my parents for no reason.

I blamed being gay.

Well, my older brother's name is Butch, and he is,

and he's straight, and he was a worse alcoholic than I was.

He's sober now, by the way,

but I mean, that being gay didn't make me an alcoholic.

What made me an alcoholic is how I felt

when there was alcohol inside of me.

That's what made me an alcoholic.

So I learned by doing the steps that I can't blame others.

Now, I still have that propensity.

When something, you know, when it hits the fan,

I still want to go, "Well, who's fault is that?"

And then when I start thinking about steps

four and five and eight and nine,

I realize, "Oh, it's your own pen."

You know, there's a freedom in that too.

When you quit blaming others,

you realize you can do something about it.

You don't have to wait for others to take care of it.

You know, so there's a great freedom in that.

So anyway, there's been other benefits from doing the steps,

but that's the one that always comes to mind.

What's my role in it?

What can I do to fix it?

'Cause I can't change you or anything else.

So anyway, yeah, I am an incredibly grateful member

of Alcoholics Anonymous.

That used to, didn't that used to really kind of tick you off

when you came in here and gave up?

My name is Joe and I'm a grateful alcoholic.

Heck, are you talking about?

But now, I mean, I really do live

in the state of grace, of gratitude,

'cause I, you know, to begin with, at 79 years old,

I've lived through two incredible epidemics.

I lived through the HID, the AIDS epidemic,

where everybody I got sober with died

and they died before they were 40.

I was 34 when I got married, or got sober.

So I've lived through that.

Then I lived through this recently,

which I don't know, is it over?

Maybe, maybe not.

But anyway, how grateful can I be that I'm still healthy,

I'm still making it, and it's because I'm sober

and I learned to live in almost the right way.

I still mess up, you know, but I'm really grateful

and I'm really grateful to be here tonight.

Thank you.