Finding Sobriety Outside the Family: Doug's 37‑Year Journey

My name is Doug Ralph. I'm a great poor alcoholic, and I thank you for inviting me to come and

do this. And I want to thank Elizabeth for welcoming me. And my name is Scott. Thank

you for your talk. I am planning to get my society dated June 7th, 1987. So I'm 37 and

a half years sober. I'd like to get to have in there in case, not I'm obvious to say,

in case they ever get a punching deal going here at this program for 37 and a half years.

My sponsor's name is Ralph White. And my home group is called the New Attitude group of

Alcoholics Anonymous. We meet in Burbank, just off of Hollywood Way, every morning at

7 a.m. And it's kind of fun because my former home group for 30 years, at some point right

after the pandemic, decided the traditions were just a suggestion. They didn't really

need to follow them to the letter. So about a dozen of us left with 400 years of sobriety

and started tuning Zoom meetings. And my home group, this New Attitude, a face to face meeting.

So now in the Burbank, North Hollywood area, there's four places where people can come

and get sober. So anyway, I don't know why I'm an alcoholic. It almost seems like I shouldn't

be. I don't come from an alcoholic family and I didn't start drinking too young. Really

when you first come here and your sponsor or somebody will say, look for the similarities,

not the differences. It's good advice. But usually what we do is go, oh yeah, yeah, I'll

do that. No, we don't do it. We start looking for the differences. So maybe I can find a

reason why I can't be here, you know, like Scott was saying, you know. Yeah, this isn't

really for me. I love it that your guide said, OK, well, you know, if you make it back, basically

I wish that we'll be here. When I was brand new, I was either brand new or about to be

new. But I was going to meetings and I was going to the Pacoima group. There was a woman

there named Doris who was, we used to call her Mother Superior. She died with almost

40 years of sobriety, I think. But anyway, Queen Bee, you know, she was there. And she

said before the meeting started Thursday night, she said, Doug, would you go outside and be

our greeters, down at the door and welcome people? I said, you know, I'm new, you know,

and I don't know, I might be welcoming somebody with 20 years of sobriety to visit their home

group. And I'm saying welcome. They're going to say, what do you mean welcome, here's my

home group. I didn't mean for them to be too bad. But the movie is all about me. And I

said, would you do that? I said, yeah, I'm really not comfortable doing that. And there

was a, there was a guy there. He said, I wouldn't be comfortable, would you? Sitting on your

deck, having a whiskey jar, would you be comfortable doing that? And I said, yeah, I would, actually.

And he said, would you do that? And he looked back and said, there's a lot of great people.

These people are tough, man. As I said, I didn't come from an alcoholic family. My dad

was the kind of guy who would drink the beer once in a while. You know, it wasn't important

to him. You know, he might be working the yard, working his car, watching a game or

something, stopping to have a beer. And then he would go back to what he was doing, you

know, whatever that means. Because I don't, that's not the way I drink it. If I stopped

to have a beer, that's what I'm doing, whatever I was doing. Before, I couldn't drink it.

And why would I stop and have a beer? We never knew if she was an alcoholic or not because

she wouldn't drink. And, you know, they all swallow the alcohol. It makes it very difficult

to diagnose a case of alcohol. And I finally asked her one time, I was about three years

sober, I guess, you know, and it's just the two of us were sitting in her kitchen. And

I said, Mom, why don't you drink? And it caught her off guard. She said, what do you mean?

I said, well, I mean, why don't you drink? She said, alcohol? I said, yeah. What? I don't

know. When I was young, my friends drank, I drank with them. And every time I drank,

I got sick, stupid and obnoxious. You got to drink through that, Mom. I promise land

lies beyond sick, stupid and obnoxious. My mom was a great woman. She was, there's a

little bitty thing, she was about four foot eleven. And she was very loving and generous.

She was smart and funny. She was, I mean, you know, my friends would say, God, I wish

I had a mom like yours, you know, but she just did not have the tenacity to make it

to AA. So I never said, I have three younger sisters, none of them are alcoholic. So I'm

kind of a soft-made alcoholic, I guess, you know, and I didn't start drinking too young.

Like I said, what happened was the guys in high school didn't make it look attractive.

The guys who drank, you know, they would get sick, stupid and obnoxious. It didn't look

like anything I wanted, so it didn't appeal to me. But my friend Morris, he was like,

seemed like a sex sponsor, you know, I mean, he was this, he was limited business to the

guys we all got with him. Morris said to me, you know, if you want to get a home with this

girl, you're going to have to get her drunk. And I heard that, because we used to use these

baseball terms, I don't know if it was a civilian to any brother, but we had a first base, a

second base, and a third base. I don't know where the bases are. It doesn't matter,

people did not know bases if you're doing it right. And second, you know, I'm married,

it's like step up to the plate and slide home. So anyway, I'm going to say, we're going to

get a home with this girl, you're going to have to get her drunk, so I heard that. Now

I'm interested in drinking. And I grew up in Gardenville, and you know, the liquor store

in Gardenville Boulevard, people said, there was an old man that ran the store and he ran

it by himself. So if you ran in the back door, which for some reason was always unlocked,

you could run to the fridge and grab a bottle and run out. He couldn't catch it, he couldn't,

you know, he'd run the store by himself. So I tried it and it worked. And so I grabbed

the quarter of 80 rail, and that's pretty much the neck and the beverage, you know,

and so now I got my ammunition, you know, the school and then parked by the railroad tracks,

which we had done before, but now I got my leg, you know, so like, it's something to see in my

car. And we started to hug and kiss, and we send her, got this bottle that cracked the top on that

bottle. It's used in that carbonated dishwater, but I wondered if you were quarantining so much,

and so I handed it to her, and she drank some past the break of that bottle in about five

minutes. So it's a little awkward to stand in a room full of alcoholics and say, Eason,

half a quarter of 80 rail will take your ass downtown, but if you're 18 years old and you've

never had any alcohol before, it works. Half a quarter of 80 rail will do the job. And I just,

all of a sudden, I felt something I'd never experienced. I was like, I'm charismatic,

you know. I was intelligent and witty and handsome and cool, you know. Cool is one of

those words. Everybody knows what cool is. You don't have to, in fact, in the dictionary,

look up cool. It says cool, cool. What would that mean? One thing I mean about cool is that

really, all of a sudden, I was so cool, you could see me across the street and go, that guy's cool.

You know, that's what alcohol does for me. And so it turns out,

first time I ever had an alcohol voice, and the first time I ever had sex in front of a witness,

so Morris was right. And it turned out, I made a commitment that I'm going to do both of these

things as much as I can, left in my life. And I talked about commitment today. That was a life

commitment that I made as a teen years old. And I was, you know, I'm still too young to legally

buy pills, but it was still easier to get than sex. But I did the best I could. But I started

playing guitar, because it looked to me like all the girls like guitar players, but that's why I

got to start playing guitar. And I graduated high school in '63, 1963. Goddamn, it was a long time

ago. And the music of that time, the popular music was folk music, Kingston Trio, Peter,

Paul and Mary, John Baez and Bob Dylan. And then there were the old guys, the Pete Stevens and

Woody Guthrie's. And, you know, so I got, I got this guitar and I started going to coffee houses,

which coffee houses in the 1960s were not Starbucks, nothing like Starbucks,

nothing like them. And they were dimly lit performance venues. People were playing music

and tell jokes. So I started going there and playing music and telling jokes. And, you know,

make a couple bucks here and a couple bucks there and started performing at these things.

And then I got with a partner, Bill, named Jennifer. Well, we were, Jennifer did the

rum and tube, and we started playing some bigger coffee houses. So the thing that happened is the

Beatles came to town. And that wasn't the whole British invasion. So, you know, the Rolling Stones

and the Yardbirds and just, oh my God, Green Top. And then we started getting our own American

rockers, you know, grateful dad and Jefferson Airplane and the holding company and Jenny

Hendrix and Jenna's chocolate. And I got a record guitar, man. That's what's happening now. I got

an electric guitar and I joined a band. I joined a band in the county called the Scepters, which

we played, because it was actually 21. I didn't move up to Hollywood. That's where the music is.

Well, I went to high school with him as a musician. He was in a band called the Music

Machine. And I moved up there and moved in with him and this other musician in Royal Canyon. And

it was a really cool place to live in 1969. You know, Royal Canyon was the deal. It was funny.

Anything I missed because I wasn't always sober, it was strange. Okay, let me get this out of the

way. I also used some drugs. I only use them every goddamn day I've ever heard of. Some are not even

careful. So they're only using my five or six times. Anyway, you've got to give me a shot,

you know, I mean, really. But still, I mean, it just, I'm sober so long. But AA is a big

part of my life. If I had known then, when I know now, the first time somebody said,

somebody said, you know, I'd love to, but I'm going to be talking to an AA meeting in 30 years.

I don't want to piss anybody off, you know, so, but I didn't know. So yeah, just, you know,

you use every drug I've ever heard of. I moved into Royal Canyon and I got in a band called the Rock

Wall. And we played all the clips up and down Hollywood. You're shaking your head. Have you

heard of the Rock Wall? Okay, guy is big son. We haven't recorded anything. We just went to,

we just went to work and played mostly cover songs, a couple of original things. We played

almost every clip up and down Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevard. And,

and we were making a living, you know, and, and people would buy you drinks and, and, you know,

any joints and stuff. And, and what happened during the, it was a fun part of my life, but in 1969, a show

opened on Broadway, actually '68, it opened on Broadway, called Hair. And I liked Broadway

musicals. I always did. I loved Flower Drum Song, The Music Man, and Oklahoma. It's not what my,

my band played. We played rock and roll and we had meltdown stuff. But I always loved those

musicals. And this musical was rock and roll. Hair was about people living on the streets of

New York and, and sex, drugs, and rock and roll, you know, and playing band way. They did a Tony

on them. They got two Tonys, one on Broadway and one on Broadway. I mean, this was a popular show.

And then they brought the company to Hollywood. And I went to see that show and I just fell in

love with it. I was like, Oh my God, these people are acting and singing and dancing. And the next

thing I saw on a Tuesday night, the next day, I called the playlist theater. I said, Cory,

a theater, can I help you? I said, yeah, I want to be in your show. And this can't happen today.

Today, if you tried to do that, they would say, well, who is your agent? You know, or do you have

a manager? Have your representative call us. I just, that's just the way business is now.

But at that time they were hiring people off the street. I said, I want to be in your show.

She said, hold on a second. Connected me to the company manager. He said, can I help you? I said,

I want to be in your show. He said, you do. Can you sing and dance? Hey man, that's what I do.

That's how I pay my rent, brother. That's how I put gas in my car. You thought I'd sing and dance.

I never danced a step in my life. I'm up on the bandstand. I'm playing, I'm singing every night.

I'm singing, singing, singing, but you know, I'm watching you dance like good dancing, bad dancing.

I mean, how hard can that be? So I even tried it, but I was pretty sure I could do that. So

I said, yeah, yeah, man, I sing and dance. And he goes, what's your name? And I told him, he said,

what's your phone number? I gave it to him and he said, okay, what are you doing Friday at one

o'clock? So you tell me, he said, we're having auditions Friday at one o'clock. Come down to

the Aquarius theater at one o'clock Friday. We'll give you a shot. But I haven't been on the phone

three minutes and I got an audition for hair. So we went to work that night and I told him,

oh, he said, get, get a piece, bring a piece of sheet music, a song you like to sing.

So I went to, I went right down to Warwick music city and got the sheet music. And I went to work

that night and I said, let me sing this song a couple of times a night. Cause I got an audition

Friday and he said, okay. So I did it Wednesday night and Thursday night. I sang a song a few

times and Friday morning I got my guitar and I'm practicing the song cause I know I got a shot at

this thing at one o'clock. I broke a string on my guitar. And yeah, I know they said big sheet

music. I'm not going to be playing the guitar. We're going to have a piano player there,

but somehow I can't explain it now. But here he's like, I went to my room to see if he had

the string that I broke and that in the middle of his messed up dresser was a little white envelope.

And I thought, I wonder what this is. I picked it with the white envelope. I needed the D string.

When I picked it up, I threw in a white capsule underneath the envelope. And that's when I thought,

I wonder what this is. And I got in cause we didn't have a PDF. You pretty much had to swallow

the test. I think it's a good chance. And then really, if you eat it, you're going to know

precisely what that drug does. And so I did. And it turned out it was THC, synthetic marijuana,

which is a nice little psychedelic drug. And so my addiction was like in 45 minutes. Just right.

Secondly, I got down and rode about maybe a few miles down to the Aquarius theater,

pulled into the parking lot, put the kickstand down. And it seemed like it took me about three

minutes to swing my leg over that. Now that was really how I opened my shoulders, you know,

just squished when I grabbed it. I had these hip hugger bell bottoms. On bell bottoms,

I bet they call them elephant bells. Cause they're when you walk and tickle your ankles, you know,

and like, and I had no shirt on. I was wearing this belt with six legs and foot long red,

red and bean leather French. It was like, I was like a walking wind chime. And I kind of

flooded up the stairs at the Aquarius theater. And I'm standing at the back of the other term.

I think I was late because they were already auditioning people. And so I'm standing back

there holding my sheet music. And now they're, God damn, these hippies can sing and dance.

And they called my name, Doug Rowell. Is Doug Rowell here? Yeah. And I went,

ran down the aisle and up on stage and handed my sheet music to the piano player.

And he opened it big green and he started to play. I can't do it like I could do it when I was 24

because I had COPD. In case you thought that was in my nose, some kind of cocaine delivery system.

[inaudible]

When people who are auditioning are looking at me, looking at each other, this guy says,

"Hey, that's your energy, dude. Can you do something a little mellow? So we kind of get

arranged, you know, what you can do?" I said, "Sure." So I went into this a capella version of

Otis Redding's "Doc of the Bay," you know, setting in the morning sun. And the piano player knew the

tune. He didn't need the music. And he just started and he was writing my key. We were in the

pocket, man. [inaudible] I made myself cry. And back then I could sing. And people go, "Well,

you still sing?" Yeah, I can sing for like seven seconds. Anyway, so they said, "We love you, man.

We just got to see you dance." I said, "Okay." So the guy started to play and I started to move.

And I wish I had a film of it because I don't know. But I suspected initially I looked like

the offspring of Joe Cocker and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, you know, say a book. It got good to me. And I've

seen my hair come around, getting trails off my hair, trails off the fringe on this vest,

you know. And I'm in this tornado of trails and I heard somebody say, "Jesus, can you dance?"

I thought so. And they said, "Come on, come down here." They said, "Turned out they were having

auditions. It wasn't for the Hollywood show. It was for the Las Vegas show." So they said,

"Here's the deal. We're putting together a show in Las Vegas. Can you be in Las Vegas Tuesday?"

"Yeah, yes I can." "Where do I go?" "Go to the International Hotel, go to the Jets." And

that gave me his name. So I got a job in Las Vegas doing hair in Las Vegas. I went to work

that night. I said, "You got to get a new bass player. I'm going to Vegas to do hair." And

they're like, "Cool, man." Because we knew a lot of musicians, you know, with somebody could feel

a lot of singers, a lot of bass players. So that wasn't a problem. I told my roommates,

"You got to get new roommates." Shit, everybody wanted to live in Laurel Canyon. That was no

problem. I had to find a home for my dog. That was the only thing. I'd say it was a little

Vietnamese restaurant. Said they would take them. So I know now. So Tuesday morning,

I loaded up a duffel bag and dropped it on my Harley and ate a tab of orange sunshine and

headed across the desert for fame and fortune. About five hours later when I pulled up to the

International Hotel, I was fried, man, riding a motorcycle through the desert on LSD. And

got there and found the people I needed to find. And it took about three days, three or four days,

to learn all the steps and lines and everything we had to know. And now we're doing hair and

Vegas. And it was a cool job. And we did it for six months. And they gave me the understudy of

one of the lead roles. So two nights, two out of eight shows, I would play the lead. And it was

Vegas with strangers. We did one show at nine o'clock and one show at midnight, you know,

on Fridays and Saturdays. So they would give me the midnight shows. And sometimes there'd be like

11 people in the audience. Because they would, if somebody like was drunk at the tables,

falling asleep and causing a scene, they'd say, "Why don't you go and see hair on us?" You know,

it's complimentary. Okay. So we had like an audience of like maybe 20 people, you know,

drunk and on the last show. But anyway, we did that for six months. And then we became the first

national tour. And we started touring. We toured the United States and Canada for three and a half

years, two weeks here and two weeks there and a week here and all over the United States and

Canada on the game of the lead role, Burger, the obnoxious speed freak, sex crazed leader of the

tribe. It was a stretch, but I could do it. And it was a fun thing to do. And I'm traveling with

all these other hippies. And, you know, we would get to town and somebody would score like a

quantity of pot or something. And we split it all up. And we figured when you're with a bunch of

people who make a union scale, you can afford anything if you split it up among the tribe.

But anyway, by the end of that run, I hooked up with a girl that worked in the office.

She got pregnant and we had a little girl born in Baltimore when we were still on the road.

And we finished our running tape back to Hollywood with our little one year old daughter.

And she went to work, my wife went to work, Kelly girl doing office temp work. And I went down to

Goodwill and bought a used car seat, welded some brackets on it and broke it in on my Harley.

And I would take my little girl and with me in a diaper and the back of my Harley and make shift

car seat on the back of a Harley. And she would take her with me to auditions because I was

auditioning for other things and go visit friends and cheat on her mother and other things. What a

good father I am. I'm taking care of my kid while I'm supporting the family. And I wasn't a good

father. Taking a one year old in diapers on the back of a Harley in LA traffic is just not a good

idea. Unfortunately, there was never an incident with that. And going to visit friends and cheating

on her mother and taking her into bar rooms. And her mother said, look, I can't do this anymore.

You got to go. You know, I want you to stay in your daughter's life if you want to. But

but just get the hell out of mind. And so she did and she married at some point. And I did stay in

my daddy's life. And we had a lot of fun doing stuff together. But to work, I got a job as a

prop man on TV, because I ran into the guy with the prop man on the show. And then I was parking

cars at the Aquarius theater. I was a parking attendant. And he said, why don't you go to the

union and tell them I sent you to make some good money. So I did that. And I started being a dealer

on a soap opera. And it was just my life was getting out of hand. You know, I would show up

on a call, and I might fall asleep or might break stuff or sometimes I'd be real good. I was real

good when I was good. But other times, you know, I'd fall asleep and miss a call or make something

in the middle of the taping or something. And one time I dropped a glass table, a glass table from

four feet off the ground and shattered in the middle of the eyeball, kind of love scene or

something. But anyway, you never knew who was going to show up. And I got sober about halfway

through that 25 year thing, I started hurting myself. It was one day when I went to pick up my

daughter, picked her up at noon on a Saturday. And we would spend the weekend together and bring her

back Sunday night. I had to pick her up and her stepfather let me at the door. He said, Doug,

you're drunk. I said, I am. It was a little point in debating it. You know, somebody says,

have you been drinking? They already know the answer. So I said, yeah, I am. And he said,

well, Sarsa didn't have a call with you. He was right. And I knew that, you know, it was built my

heart, you know, that not that I was drunk. I didn't mind, I like being drunk, but I was caught

and embarrassed. And my daughter and I were going to spend the weekend together. I said, I'm really

sorry. I was looking forward to this. And he says, so was she, who are we? But it's not going to

happen. And then he said this, syllable for syllable is exactly what he said, Doug, you're

welcome in our home any time sober. Don't come over here drunk anymore. It's very hard on Star.

Very hard on my daughter. He's protecting my only child from me and he should because he's a good

father. And I understood a little bit of that. And it killed me. It was like a knife in my hand.

And I said, it won't happen again. And I went, I went home and a lot of things happened. I started

hurting myself. I skied off a cliff up at Arrowhead, got my shoulder and a lot of work in grid two

for six weeks. And a kiss came back to work and I fell off a four-story building, drunk. I happened

to know that I had a .4 blood alcohol level because the thing I fell off was the parking

structure at St. Joseph's Hospital. So they took my blood and they also, I was in that hospital for

10 days while they tried to figure out how to put my foot back together. Cause I landed on my feet

and my knees buckled and I kicked myself in the ass and broke my pelvis in two places and broke

the heel bone on my right foot, shed it to my foot. And my foot looked like a tether ball with

toast. And it only took me five months before I could walk with a cane or a crutch or something.

And my friend, Teddy, who I used to like to drink with, was with me when that happened. And

it scared her like, I fell off a four-story building and she hit bottom. And she went to 8A.

By the time I got out of the hospital, she was nine days sober. And she got active. She got

active at 8A and watched her help people get sober. And she met and married a handsome TV star.

And they had a little girl, she had this storybook life. And I finally decided to try

just to go and check it out. And when I went, I mean, people would try to help me and say,

"I'm not here to get help. I'm just here checking it out. I just want to see whether in case my

drinking ever gets bad." You know? Meanwhile, I'm missing people walking with a whip, but they're

all like, "Oh, look at him. Oh, I'm walking there." And I said, "I got a book at that meeting."

And I started reading this book. And they were like, "I didn't, I just skinned it." You know,

"Bill's story. Who cares? Doctor's opinion. I've had doctor's opinion." But we had nothing to stop

my attention because I thought that would be like, this is how the smart people get sober without

God. That information is not in there. But there's a sentence that says, "We found that God does not

make hard terms on those who seek Him." I never heard anybody say that before. All the religions

I thought I knew something about seemed like they all said, "Yeah, I'm talking about my drunken

opinion of organized religion." Seemed like they all said, "God does make hard terms. The hard

terms are the right ones. We have everybody up as well." That's what it seemed like to me.

But it seemed like, in fact, it didn't seem like it. So this is what we found. God does not make

too hard terms on those who seek Him. And I didn't go back to AA to seek God. I went back and I

started to fall in love with the fellowship. And after five months, my first five months, I didn't

have a home group. I didn't have a sponsor. I didn't read the book. I didn't take the steps.

I didn't know what the tradition was. I didn't believe in God, and I was drinking every day.

But finally, after listening to people in meetings for eight months,

I finally fell on my knees and asked God for help. I didn't even mean to fall on my knees. I

used to fall a lot. I tried my knees, and I had a bottle of whiskey in my hand,

and I spilled it all over the bedspread. Oh my God, there's whiskey in the bottle,

but I melted it to the bedspread. So I started bringing my knees, second whiskey out of the

bedspread in the voice of my answers. And I'm like, "You're thirsty? There's whiskey in the

bottle." I'm like, "Shut up. No, I'm not thirsty. I'm frugal." That was my life.

That's when I got the whiskey evaporating the bedspread over. I looked at what I'm doing.

God, I've been going to AA for eight months, and I haven't learned how to not suck whiskey

out of a bedspread. And I did a dumb thing. I said, "God, if you're there, please help me."

And over the next couple of weeks, I started reading into people from AA. I forgot to tell

you, I've got four different sibratic dates and four different groups. I've taken chips all over

the place. I'm doing everything wrong except keep coming back. And finally, after two weeks of

running into people from AA, behind the counter of liquor stores, in the liquor department of

Bond's Market, as a waitress in a restaurant, it's like every time I reach for a drink,

there's some little little familiar agent. When I finally got the message, I asked for help. I

got the help. I came to believe that a pile greater than myself could restore me to sanity.

It's time for me to quit, but I'll tell you this, I'm this close to being restored right now.