From Fraternity Nights to Sobriety: Hal's 20-Year Journey

and make sure there's the cameras at the right level.

- Hi everybody, my name is Hal Bastian

and I am an alcoholic.

Thanks for asking me to come out.

I live and work in downtown Los Angeles,

but I was raised in Northridge,

so I know a little bit about the valley.

And it was a busy drive out here.

And I kidded with Nathan.

I said, people heard that I was coming to the meeting.

They want to come see me on a freeway.

Yeah, you know, my primary purpose is to stay sober

and help other alcoholics achieve and keep their sobriety.

And if I can help anybody in this room,

let me know.

I'm listed as Harold Bastian for my landline.

I'm one of those people that still have a copper line

into my house.

So you can find me on the internet.

If you look up Hal Bastian,

any other social media platform, you can find me.

So there's no hiding.

And it's been a really good experience for me being sober.

My sobriety date is February 5th, 2001.

And it's kind of interesting

'cause I always think it's interesting that I got sober

before the catastrophe of 9/11.

And it was also the printing of the fourth edition

of the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous was in 2001.

And I'll tell you a little bit about what it was like

'cause I think most people in this room

probably know how to drink.

In my case, I use other substances too,

but this is an AA meeting, so I'm gonna keep it to AA.

But they were significant substances.

And so I was born in downtown Los Angeles

on June 25th, 1960.

And I was raised here in the San Fernando Valley.

And now I live and work, as I mentioned, in downtown LA.

So I didn't fall too far from the tree.

And I come from a long line of alcoholism,

double barrel down both sides.

I think it's very interesting, Bill,

that we talk about the allergy of the body

and the obsession of the mind.

But if I go to my doctor,

he can't pull blood or saliva and tell me I'm an alcoholic,

which leads me to believe that it is a spiritual disease.

But it came down both sides and it was really hard.

I'm an only child and growing up was tough.

I have almost no memories of before 10

when my father left and went away.

So I know it must've been kind of bad.

And I vowed I would never drink

because I saw what it did to my father

and what it did to their relationship.

And when I was 17 years old, I was in high school

and I was with a couple of guys

and they were painting a room

and they had a six pack of beer and I liked beer too.

And I did 12 a night, that was a starter.

So we have that in common.

They had a 12 pack of beer

and they said, "Come on, have a beer."

And I'm like, "No, no, no, not me."

And so finally I just did it to get them off my back.

So we had one beer each

and there was three left in the six pack.

And by the time they turned around,

I had drunk the other three as well.

So I had four, they had one each.

So that was a harbinger of things to come.

And I knew that, and then I got in the car and drove.

And I knew that was not good, that I liked it way too much.

And so I stopped.

I had a lot of willpower

and I was successful at that till I got into college

and I was in a fraternity.

And this was in the '80s in UCLA

and alcohol and drugs are very, very prevalent.

And my nickname in my fraternity,

since I didn't drink or use drugs,

was Hal, don't have any fun around me, that's true.

So one day we had this recruitment dinner

and the protocol was everybody was sitting there

and people brought potential new victims to the fraternity.

And they would introduce themselves

and they would take a big handle of Jack Daniels

and they would take a swig and everybody would be yay.

And so it got to me and there was this hush over the room.

And I don't know what possessed me,

but I was like, here we go.

And I took a drink

and then I drank alcohol three for 20 years.

And I had an incredible, incredible tolerance of alcohol.

At that same dinner, I went up to the bar

and they said it was 12 ounce amber glasses

that we had in fraternities so that we couldn't break them

or get it I hopped, that's what I remember.

And I told the pledge to fill it up with vodka.

And he looked at me and I said, let's do it.

And I drank that 12 ounces like you could drink 12 ounces

of room temperature water after a run, right?

Well, people thought that was pretty terrific.

So that's what happened.

And I want to fast forward to February 4th of 2001

when the bottom came up and hit me.

And I had been around AA at times in my 30s,

but my joke, it was like auditing the class.

And if you don't know what an audit of a class is,

in college, university, if you don't register for the class,

you just go, you're not registered.

You don't have to take the test or do the reading.

You just go and kind of, yeah.

And I audited AA for about 10 years in my 30s.

And so I called a friend of mine who was sober, who I knew,

and he worked at the Midnight Mission.

When the Midnight Mission was at 4th and LA street

in downtown LA and Clancy was running it at the time.

And I called him hysterical

and he really did wonderful 12 step work with me.

And he said, well, listen,

there's a cocaine anonymous meeting tomorrow at six o'clock

and why don't you come?

And I qualified for that program.

So I went and that's my sobriety day.

And there's talk about this spiritual experience

of the burning bush variety.

And I had one of those and my first week,

the week of February 5th of '01,

I really wanted to drink as you can imagine.

And I'm not gonna use profanity in this meeting.

So I know that's good.

So I won't use the swear words, but I will just say,

somebody who had a significant amount of sobriety said,

go home and get on your blank, blank knees

and pray to God to remove that feeling of wanting to drink.

And you stay on your blank, blank knees

and you say that over and over again,

God, please take away my desire to drink.

Please don't.

Until that compulsion is lifted and then get out.

If you're in a public realm, just bow your head.

And when it comes back, do it again.

So I did.

And it was miraculously lifted at that moment.

And then 10 minutes later it came back

and then I did it again and then it came back in an hour.

And I haven't had a desire to drink in over 24 years

because that compulsion and that desire to drink

just gave up.

At one point in my career, I do real estate

and I was managing a property out in Tenogo Park.

And when I would come in in the morning,

there'd be graffiti every morning on the same wall.

So I get my paint out my door and I roll it out

and I would do it every day.

And finally it stopped because it's no fun to do graffiti

and then have it not stay up.

Well, the same is true

when you deny the disease of alcoholism and use a prayer.

And eventually it just said, let's go to the beach

because he's just gonna use the prayer and it's gonna work.

And so let's not stop bothering him.

And so that's what happened.

And I like to focus on what it's like now.

And I like to talk a lot about the steps.

So I believe that alcoholism is,

and this isn't a unique thought.

I mean, it talks about it in our literature,

is it's a symptom of an underlying dis-ease

at being a human being in this plane.

And that's what I was.

I was uncomfortable in my own skin from the day I was born

until I took that four beer drink.

And when I was 17, I felt better.

I heard something recently that alcohol gave me wings

and then it took away the sky.

I thought that was a really good,

really, really great, a great metaphor.

And I love sobriety for a lot of different reasons.

I was talking to Nathan about things that he likes.

The number one thing is I have gone from being in dis-ease

as Hal Bastian 100% of the time

to at ease as Hal Bastian 95% of the time,

if I'm practicing the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.

And this is a spiritual program.

June 10th of this year, we'll be 90 years old.

The book was published in '39.

The 12 and 12 was published in '53.

So it's got something going on for it.

And God has mentioned in the literature

and that makes a lot of people upset.

And I tell people now, I said,

I don't think you've ever had a problem with God.

I think you've probably had a problem

with various religions and dogma and shame.

And I'm not anti-religion anyway.

I now describe myself as a recovering Lutheran.

I knew that at a very, very young age,

like I think '60s, 1967 or something that I was different.

And the word gay wasn't even used then.

I think it was just homosexual.

And I knew I was gonna go straight to hell.

And that was a big dark secret.

And as a child, I considered checking out

so nobody would find out this deep dark secret.

So I started to pray for God to remove that from me

and make me straight so I could have a wife

and a family and everything else.

And I did that from eight to 22.

And then when I graduated from university,

I just accepted the fact that it wasn't,

for me, it wasn't a moral choice.

It wasn't a lifestyle.

Yachting and golfing is a lifestyle.

And it's just the way that I was made.

And I didn't like it, but I accepted it.

So when I got to AA and they said,

"Hey, God's gonna solve your drinking problem,"

I was like, he did a horrible job on the gay project.

But I was like, I was so desperate.

I was just gonna go with it.

And when Richard told me what to do, go home and pray,

I just did it.

And anyway, if anybody in the room has a problem with God,

higher power, universal intelligence,

I'm happy to report to you

that some people use the group itself,

the group of drunks as their higher power.

I've known bona fide atheists

that have believed there is no God for sure,

which some days seems arguable around, you know,

at every point in human history,

but stayed so over 30 years as an atheist in AA.

I think it's harder.

You know, I like my spirituality

and I like having a relationship, you know, with God.

And I have a theory about God,

which is I think of life as a bicycle wheel.

And I think of the hub as God.

And I think of every spoke that's going to that hub

as a different cultural or different way to the great seeking

to explain the great mystery of old earth.

And if I had been born into a Jewish family,

I would be a Jew.

If I'd been born into a, you know, an atheist family,

I might be an atheist or at least an agnostic.

If I was born into a Hindu family, I'd be a Hindu.

And so I think, well, and then, you know,

there's various religions that say they're the only way.

I get it.

That's what they feel.

And that's that, I don't fight with that.

But what I do know is for me,

I, that my church, the Lutheran church,

they're still not too hot on the, you know,

that liking guys thing.

So I, you know, for me, this is my community in AA.

And by the way,

that issue is just such a small part of my being.

It's like, I don't know, especially at 64,

it's that much of my being, but it, you know,

it's just there.

And the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are designed

to get us connected to God.

It's designed to get us connected to God

so that we can get peace and comfort from God,

instead of having to numb the miserable dis-ease

of being us in this dimension, in these vessels.

And that's what it's all about, the 12 steps.

And so I'd like to talk about the 12 steps

and my experience with them.

One would think that at, you know, 24 years of sobriety,

I would know them all by heart.

And I do, I can recite them, but if I recite them,

I don't, I just, I do it by rote.

So it's okay if I borrow this, okay, good.

Oh, you know, one of the things

before I go through the steps, I like to tell people,

especially newcomers, they look at this book

and they're like, oh man, I like reading, you know?

And I said, well, I got good news for you.

The program of Alcoholics Anonymous

is in the first 164 pages.

So this is what we have to worry about.

This is just, this was said as a how-to manual

to people all over the country.

Then eventually the world, and these are people speaking,

just like I'm speaking to you with my verbal voice,

but these are speakers that are in print.

And then the 12 steps that get us connected

to our higher power so that we can be at ease

instead of in dis-ease are located right there.

And if I had to make a choice on only one part of the book

that I could use to help somebody get connected

and, you know, become not only absent,

absent is just not drinking, sobriety is having tools

to deal with the anxiety and the angst of living life.

I could do it right there with that.

And that seems to be, to make it, you know,

a lot more manageable.

So step one, admitted we are powerless over alcohol

and our life had become unmanageable.

So my sponsor had me make a list.

And before we had smartphones,

we made a list on a piece of paper.

And he said, write down every rotten thing

that has happened to you as a result of your addiction.

And go back as far as you can.

And it doesn't have to be perfect.

It doesn't have to be chronological,

but put down how these things

have made your life unmanageable.

So I started writing my list.

And so these are some of the top ones.

I had a friend of mine that I was using with

who overdosed in my presence and he died before me

and I couldn't bring him back with CPR.

That's my number one, you know, horrible thing.

God bless him.

He never made it obviously to the program.

I went to law school at the age of 22,

but I was busy coming out and drinking.

I wasn't coming out.

I was just accepting.

I was still in the closet.

And you know, law school was getting in the way of drinking.

And I knew that I'd fell behind.

I knew, you know, if I stayed, I wasn't gonna do well.

And the thing you do if you're not gonna do well

is you quit so you can't fail, right?

Quit so nobody can see you fail.

And I went bankrupt.

Later on, I became HIV positive.

I became HIV positive at a time

that it was right at the cusp of taking like a pill

to keep you alive.

And so I've been kept alive by pill for 30 years.

I never ever expected to make it to my age.

I got fired from jobs.

I, you know, got a DUI.

So you get the idea.

So I made that list.

And he said to me, listen, if you ever feel like drinking,

in addition to calling other people in AA

and obviously praying first,

I want you to look at that list and ask yourself,

do I wanna repeat something that's like on this list

or add something even worse to it?

And I have met people in AA who have killed people.

You know, they were the drunk driver

and they hit them and they killed them.

And they served sometimes decades and they got out.

And you know, it's not fun, right?

So that's how I did my step one.

It didn't take too long to accept it.

But I wanna say this about my audit period of AA.

When I started having trouble, I had a Cadillac,

I had a house in the Hills.

I had a car phone when it was literally a car phone

that cost a dollar a minute, you know.

I had $1,200 a month phone bills like in 1985 or something.

And, you know, I had a job and, you know,

I thought of alcoholics as, you know,

living in Skid Row or under a bridge or something like that.

And I didn't have any.

So I had the imposter syndrome.

Like I'm not really an alcoholic.

If I'm not really an alcoholic,

then I couldn't have all this stuff.

And if somebody had just explained the tradition,

the third tradition, that the only requirement

for membership in AA is a desire to stop drinking,

I would have got in sooner and I qualified at 20.

And, you know, if I'd gotten sober at 20 instead of 40,

well, the world would have been a far different place,

I think, you know.

But anyway, it turned out being okay, just the way it is.

I came to the belief that a power greater than ourselves

could restore sanity.

You know, I said, I said, I just,

I'm gonna try it 'cause I'm desperate and at work.

Three, made a decision to turn our will and our lives

over the care of God as we understood Him.

Well, doing it my way was not working

and that was demonstrable.

So I did that.

And then four, made a searching and fearless moral inventory

of themselves.

Well, my goodness gracious, that one took me a little time.

And it took me time 'cause I was reading the book

and the columns and Mrs. Brown and all this stuff.

And I was like, I don't know how to write this in the book

and where would I draw the lines

and, you know, some typical like perfectionist fashion.

I was like, I just procrastinated.

And then I finally found something on the internet

and I ran this through my sponsor, which was, you know,

resentment, so we have our resentment inventory,

our fear and our sexual inventory.

And so there was a spreadsheet for each one

and you could just print it out and write in it.

Well, it was pretty good.

So I, by the way, I typed in a manual typewriter

earlier in my life, right?

ASDF JKL semicolon.

And so I started working on that.

You know, who did I resent?

What happened?

What did it affect?

And then the dastardly thing about like,

what was my part in it?

Well, I will tell you that my entire four step,

when I go back to, when I went back to take a look

at like how much elapsed time it took to do this four step,

which was, it was pretty thorough.

I wrote a lot, but you know,

it was probably eight hours of writing,

checking boxes and writing a couple of words.

And it took me four months to do it.

So if anybody has not done the four step

and you're trepidatious about it,

please get my number and I'd like to talk you through it.

And I always encourage people just to go sit

with a fellow alcoholic and just write it.

They don't have to talk to each other,

but just be in their presence while they're writing

'cause it could be an uncomfortable thing.

And it was very, very annoying to find out

that I had thought that I had been evicted my whole life

and mostly I was the perpetrator.

I'm the guy that put myself up on the railroad tracks

to get hit and no wonder I had a resentment, you know?

So that's what happened with the four step.

And then of course I read my four step.

I did five, six and seven in an afternoon

with a very great sponsor who was a very patient man.

And I read everything to him for my four step.

And he was very helpful at identifying patterns

of character defects.

By the way, he also had me write a list of my assets too,

so I wouldn't jump from a tall building.

And so I read it to him and then the six and seven step,

I actually read them for somebody that's new.

We did the moral inventory.

Five is we admitted to God to ourselves

and to another human being,

which usually is just sponsored, but doesn't have to be,

the exact nature of our wrongs.

And then six were entirely God,

ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

That's an idea, it's not an action.

But he went for a run for about an hour

while I made sure that my cement was good

and I had enough mortar and all that stuff.

And then when he got back, we got on our knees

and I did the seven step prayer with him.

And that day was a transformative experience of relief.

I mean, it was like I was Atlas

and I got the world off my shoulders.

And then he had me actually burn my four step.

And I made the mistake of burning it

like in my bathroom over a toilet

and thinking that was a safe, don't do that.

I didn't burn anything down, but I almost did.

And then eight is we made a list

of all persons we harmed, people we had harmed

and became willing to make amends to them all.

Well, I was very upset about that

because they were on my four step,

but I could remember them.

And, oh, by the way, we're getting on here.

I made the list and one of the people on my list

was my friend who overdosed and died.

And I went to the cemetery

and it turns out the name that I knew him by

was not his legal name.

So I couldn't find his actual grave site

but I went to a grave site of somebody that had his name

and I asked them if they would please be my proxy

and get that message to him and that worked.

So I made that list.

When I made the list, I didn't put down

like somebody that I kicked in the sandbox

when I was five.

For me, I wrote down people that I harmed

that I knew was a result of my drinking.

It was very specific.

And I had some financial events too

because I was the best little boy in the world.

I was never tardy.

I always was a good student,

but I also at an early part of my life

was upset with somebody and I stole from them like money,

like quite a bit of it.

And there wasn't a way for me to make a direct amend on that

because I had a co-conspirator that would have been hurt.

And so what I did was I took that money that I stole

and I put it to a sister entity and I donated

so that I got all the money back to the institution.

And when I sought out to do my ninth step

is we make direct amends as such people wherever possible,

except when to do so would injure them or others,

like my co-conspirator.

I was able to make direct amends to almost everybody

on that list.

And so I went to them and I told them what I was doing

and I'd been sober for a bit

and I was part of this program of Alcoholics Anonymous

and part of it is making an amend, which is not an apology.

I didn't know for a long time

that making amends is not saying I'm sorry

because most alcoholics sorry

is not a really very valuable currency, right?

I mean, you apologize and then you repeat the same behavior

over and over, never making a change.

So, but my favorite and I didn't,

no one threw me out of their office.

Some people were surprised.

They didn't even know that I had done this thing to them,

but I went to my mom and my stepdad

and my mom was a black belt Avalon.

And when she would pick me up from my problems

and in the emergency rooms and when we'd be driving home,

she would say, "You might wanna think about stopping that."

And that was it, that was it.

And so I told my mom and Daryl

about the various situations

and when I had to borrow money and when I lied

and I said, these are the things that I did in my amend

is not to do any of these kinds of things again.

I mentioned that I'm in real estate.

Well, we do a lease and it could be a lease

that's 10 years long or something.

And we really try hard to think of everything

that could come up.

And sometimes something comes up we didn't expect.

Well, you amend the lease, you add to it

or you modify something that's already in it.

So an amend is changing your behavior.

And so I told that to them, I said, you know,

and I asked them also if there was anything else

I could do to make it right besides the things

that I had told them.

And the best reaction ever, they looked at each other,

they shrugged and they went, "No, we're good.

"What's your lunch?"

That was it.

And that was the biggest amend that I made.

So I was lucky.

Some people do get thrown out of offices

or people refuse to speak to them.

And so they never have the opportunity to make the amend.

And clearly that's not great,

but at least you've made the attempt

or you've made the actual amend and you need to move forward

'cause we clean our sides of the street.

Often I found that people did their own step to me too

during that process, but it's not required.

10, we continue to take personal inventory

and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

I love step 10 and I'll tell you why I like it.

I love step 10 because it demands self-governance

of my behavior from me.

And my biggest character defect is I'm not the smartest guy

in the world, I'm not the dullest,

but I'm somewhere in between and I'm impatient

when people don't get it as quickly as I do.

And it usually comes out in the tonality of my voice

and when I get frustrated.

And luckily for at least over 20 years now,

I'm pretty darn good about catching myself

when I feel myself getting out of my lane

and about to hit the guard, well, hit the person.

And I catch it because guess what?

I don't like making amends.

I don't like making it.

And so I check myself and I check my behavior

and I check my tone and then I don't have to make one.

And it's a really nice way to live

'cause I work to treat people the way

that I would like to be treated,

but I work at a report that I'm not perfect

and that's annoying.

And sometimes I get angry.

They say that anger and resentment is the dubious luxury

of normal men and women and people.

And boy, ain't that the truth.

More people drink over resentment and broken hearts

than anything else.

And I don't know about you,

but actually I didn't need a reason to drink.

I didn't need a specific circumstantial reason,

but the circumstantial reasons accelerated my drinking plan.

By the way, speaking about beer,

I would go every night on the way home from work.

And by the way, I was the kind of drunk

that could get to work before anybody, get his work done,

stay later than everybody, go home,

drink at least a 12-pack and do it again tomorrow.

So I was able to do that.

And I was one of those quote unquote functioning alcoholics.

And I like to tell people that this country had prohibition

from 1919 to 1933.

And the reason that we passed constitutional amendments,

which is not easy to do,

is because alcohol was killing people all over this country.

It was ruining families and we outlawed it.

We couldn't control it and it went to the black market.

So we just brought it back and taxed it and marketed it

as something that you needed to do to have fun.

And, you know, I don't know what the percentage

of functioning alcoholics is in America,

but in my experience, I'd say it's 50%, you know,

of people who get up and make it, you know,

make it into work and show up.

You know, one of the, I see the time is getting there,

but one of the things that we do in life is,

at least when I was growing up,

is I was taught to respect authority, go to school,

be a good little boy.

You know, then I was the first kid in my family

to have opportunity to go to university,

all my families and trades, which is great

'cause there's a beginning and a middle and the end.

Every day, it's something that you actually accomplish.

And, you know, and then we might go to college

and then we start incurring obligations,

like rent and a car payment or a mortgage or kids

in a private school.

And one day people wake up and go, oh my God,

I hate my job and I can't quit.

You know, including attorneys that are making

a million dollars a year to start to, you know,

have a $25,000 a year mortgage payment,

two kids in private school at 60 grand each

and the pooled person and the au pair

and the, it goes on and on.

So I like everything that money can buy,

but it's not always great.

When you don't have money, you work about getting it.

Once you get it, you worry about losing it.

So there you go.

Okay, sought through prayer and meditation

to improve our, that is number 11,

sought through prayer and meditation

to improve our conscious contact with God

as we understood in praying only for knowledge

and as well for us and the power to carry that out.

And, you know, prayer for me is talking to God

and meditation is getting quiet enough

so I could hear the response.

So what that means is, you know,

I can't be worrying and doing this

and either regretting or whatever.

I have to get quiet.

And I used to be under the misimpression

that meditation was not thinking,

not having a thought, which is, it's impossible.

So what it's about is just what I do

is I can't control the thought that comes into my head,

but I can manage it once it's there.

I could, you know, send it to its room for 20 minutes.

And if it's really important, we'll come back

and tell me about itself.

And I do it through breathing.

So when I meditate, I close my eyes

and I breathe in and as I take my breath in,

I say, God is, and I hold it.

And as I breathe out and I say, I am.

God is, I am.

And sometimes I'll add a little leg to a triangle,

which is God is, I am part of God.

And some days I get really sassy

and I go, God is, I am God.

But that seems a little much.

So I kind of cut back on that lens.

All right, all right.

And now we make it to 12, my favorite step,

which is having had a spiritual awakening

as a result of these steps,

we tried to carry this message to alcoholics

and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

So I'm getting to do that with you now.

I do it with people in the community.

I sponsor quite a few people.

I use the principles of AA in every aspect of my life.

And during the pandemic, I was like,

how many people are participating

in the program of AA around the world?

Well, in 2022, the office in New York

estimated it to be 2 million people.

That seems awfully low.

So let's say it's 20.

Let's say they were off by a factor of 10.

If you have a calculator that has enough places for it,

you divide 20 million by 8 billion,

we are 0.0000101% of the world population

that has this design for living that we have

that puts us into the fourth dimension.

And I think that's pretty special.

And I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you

and Alcoholics Anonymous is having its 90th anniversary

up in Vancouver.

And I went to the 75th anniversary.

I'm looking at my times, five minutes,

and I'm gonna wait for that one.

But I went to the one when I was 75 years old

in San Antonio and Texas.

And it was magical because to hear everybody doing,

everybody like 17,000 people in a stadium reciting

of the Lord's Prayer or the Serenity Prayer.

And it sounds like one voice, pretty neat stuff.

I asked the people in the hotels and the bars

and the restaurants, they said, "What was it like

"having people that don't drink alcohol in your city

"for like this week?"

And they're like, "It was fantastic.

"You guys don't drink, but you spend money

"on everything else and you tip really well

"and we wish you were here every week."

So anyway, with that, I wanna thank you, Nathan,

again for inviting me out.

And I told you my number is Harold Bastian in the phone book.

But I'll give you my cell phone, you have it,

which is 213-440-0242.

And I always tell people, you can call me 24/7

on that number because I'd rather talk to you

and get woken up at three in the morning

than talk to you three days after you relapse.

And if you're calling me at three in the morning,

I'm not answering 213-440-0242.

Then call 621-365-7300 'cause that's the landline.

I can't sleep through it and it'll ring until I pick it up.

So thanks for letting me be of service.

I hope you didn't see too much of Rosacea with that camera.

It was way too close.