Bruce's Journey: From Early Drinking to Lasting Sobriety

Our main speaker tonight, Bruce T.

- Yeah.

- My name is Bruce, I'm an alcoholic.

- Hi Bruce.

- Thank you Abraham for asking me to speak tonight.

It's always a pleasure to speak

at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

I had to remind myself tonight

that my primary purpose is to stay clean and sober

and be of service.

I did have a conflict of interest.

However, my primary purpose is extremely important to me.

And here I am tonight as I was last night

at another meeting that I led.

So it just wasn't meant for me to be anywhere else

but at an AA meeting at this time.

So again, I wanna thank you

and tell you that my sobriety date is September 1st

1987, I have a sponsor and I sponsor people.

And it's an honor and a privilege to be and do and have.

And one of the things I've learned over the years was

that I really came here with no life skills.

I came here with survival skills.

I didn't know how to be honest.

My fear was too great and I didn't know how to be present

or a true friend to anybody.

I was selfish and self-centered like it tells us.

And I fit the bill for an alcoholic

whether I drank or injury.

I came from New Jersey originally, suburb of New York

and grew up there with my family.

I had two sisters, my parents stayed together

till I was a teenager.

And I had a normal childhood as far as I can tell.

I had friends and I had a nice place to live

and went to school and had friends outside

and life was as far as I knew good.

And I started working early on with a paper route

where I rode my bicycle and delivered to newspapers

and made collection once a week

and the Sunday paper weighed a ton.

And when I was old enough, I got my first job

and worked all through high school.

And I went to college.

I went to college and I wound up paying for it myself

with three different jobs while I was there.

And yeah, I was responsible and I was showing up

and doing my part.

And my parents split up when I was 16

and things changed with them and the extended family.

And we were kind of isolated after that.

And when I was in high school,

started to drink with my friends.

And what I realized looking back was,

'cause I was never in the moment.

I was truly an alcoholic even before I knew what that was.

My drinking was always too excess.

I never had just a few drinks.

And I was the guy who would throw up in your car

or throw up in your bedroom or your bathroom and pass out.

And I didn't realize that that might be symptoms

of something more serious.

I just felt I drank too much

and I would not drink that much next time.

But of course I did.

And when I went on to college, it was the fraternities.

It was, I went to college at the Jersey Shore

at a college that was small comparatively speaking.

And it was a party school and we partied a lot.

And the fraternities really brought that out in me.

And my drinking got worse in terms of more frequently.

The results are still the same.

And I heard a speaker once share

that he never understood why they didn't put headrests

on toilets because we had spent so much time

on the bathroom floor, the tile 'cause it was cool.

And that made sense to me.

I totally got that.

I did spend a lot of time on the bathroom floor.

So I graduated college.

I got a job, started, I wanted to work

in the healthcare field in administration.

And I started in the personnel department

and worked my way up, this is in New York,

worked my way up to an administrator for human resources.

And I did that for a good 14 years, maybe more.

And the problem was that I was married.

And we had kids already.

And I came out of the sixties in terms

of graduated high school in '63.

And by '64, I was in college.

Those four years I started going to Manhattan to New York.

We were talking bell bottoms, platform shoes, shag haircuts,

head shops, black light posters, water pipes.

You know, the whole deal.

And it was just a way of life and of course drinking.

I drank alcoholically, I used drugs alcoholically

and I still showed up for work right up until 1986.

And I'd gotten divorced from my first wife

and I was living in Manhattan alone.

And as you may recall, there were discos,

there were sex clubs, there were after work bars,

there were after hour clubs.

I mean, literally you could go

to a club all hours of the day and night.

And New York was very supportive of alcoholics

in the sense that it provided for you.

And you know, my drinking, my using got worse

and you know, did things that I put myself

in dangerous situations and positions

and never thought anything would ever happen to me.

And you know, it was naive in that sense.

And so what happened was is I was working

for this hospital in Long Island

and wasn't showing up for work on a regular basis.

And in the days that I did show up,

I often had to go and hide in the employee health service

for about four or five hours in the morning

to like to function.

And then eventually, you know,

I started doing drugs to an extreme

and that made it impossible for me to show up for work.

And I remember all too clearly as the night would wear on

and come in the morning, just dreading daylight.

And I swear I could hear the sun

coming through the Venetian blinds.

You know, it was kind of like, if the hours wore away,

knowing I wasn't gonna go to work.

And finally, my boss had that conversation with me about,

you don't come to work, we're gonna have to fire you.

And I'd been at this job for 10 years

and I was director of human resources,

responsible for the employee health service.

And the welfare of the employees.

And this was a big hospital.

And of course, I was out the next day.

And when I did show up for work and call him,

he almost fired me, he had tears in his eyes.

And, you know, and he never had a fire in his body.

And I put him in that position.

And he was one of the first people I made an amends to

and thanked him for firing me.

'Cause had he not, I probably would have died.

At least it slowed me down to the point

where my life started to catch up

and I could take affirmative action for myself.

I had two kids who, you know, that are now grown.

And they witnessed some of my behavior at the end.

Of course, I had lost a lot of weight

and I looked like somebody who was struggling

with the problem.

And my answer to anybody who said,

"Are you having a problem?"

Was, "No, no, I'm fine, fine."

When I lost that job, it took a while

for everything to fall apart in terms of,

not a long while, a fairly short while.

I got evicted from my apartment.

I lived on 89th and 1st in New York.

And I remember being evicted and standing outside,

looking up at my apartment thinking,

"How did this happen, how did this happen?"

And I eventually wound up in an abandoned house

in the Bronx through some people that I knew

and of like mind.

And my sister, who lived in New York at the time

and moved to California out here,

had asked to help me six months before

and I told her I wasn't ready.

And at this point, I was ready, you know?

I said that alcoholic prayer, "God, please help me.

Please help me."

And something happened.

I could feel it.

I got the courage to walk down to a payphone on the corner.

Smelled like urine and feces.

The handle was sticky, the glass was filthy.

And I called her and I asked for help.

And she said, "Well, you know, I'm happy to help you.

The deal is you stay clean for a year

and get into a program."

And I agreed.

And she got me a plane ticket

and I had to pick it up at the airport.

And I went and said goodbye to my kids

and told them why I was leaving and what I was doing.

And I hoped they would understand.

And I took my match set of luggage,

it was two green garbage bags.

I walked on that plane with one shoe

and one contact lens sideways so I could see better.

Sat down after I put my baggage in the overhead wrap.

And halfway through the flight,

I remember saying, "God, am I doing the right thing?"

Like leaving this glorious lifestyle behind me.

And I loved it on September 1st, 1987,

my first day of sobriety.

I didn't know those words, sobriety.

And true to my word,

I had to get into a program and stay clean for a year.

She had enrolled me in St. John's outpatient,

St. Joseph's outpatient program in Burbank, it was 1987.

And I went there for a year at night.

And I lived with her at her condo

in Studio City and I was introduced to Los Angeles.

I was introduced to California.

I was introduced to Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I needed that outpatient program

because it let me gently enter the world

of sobriety and Alcoholics Anonymous.

And I met some great people in that outpatient program.

September 2nd, I went to my first AA meeting

'cause that was part of the deal.

And it was a Chandler Lodge.

I knew nothing about AA.

I knew nothing about sobriety.

And certainly nothing about meetings or meeting halls.

And Chandler Lodge has been open since 1960.

It's events over living.

And it also has a large hall,

which has been used for meetings since 1960.

And I walked in hearing loud voices, laughter, shouting.

And I was a little put off not knowing what to expect.

And I walked in that room and packed.

And there was smoking back then.

And I remember looking around the room

and there was a lot of older people there, my age now.

And younger people that were around my age

and younger than that.

And it was packed.

And we smoked back then.

And I smoked and smoked for the first year of my sobriety.

And looking around and this guy all of a sudden

takes his artificial leg off and slams it on the table.

And yelling, shouting, and I'm thinking to myself,

this is okay.

It's like being in a bar.

And I felt comfortable.

The meeting started.

And people came and introduced themselves to me.

And they just told me to relax, take it easy.

Good, I was there.

And then the sharing started.

And the leader led and this is my first exposure

to Alcoholics Anonymous.

And what I heard with people talking about problems

they were having in their life,

what was going on and what they were doing about it.

It just wasn't complaints.

And I'm thinking to myself,

how can these people talk about their selves now?

How can they be so open and honest?

So far from where I was coming from the world of secrets.

And I realized in looking back a couple of things.

One was I truly had to come away from New York

where everything was familiar to a place

where everything was unfamiliar.

I had to come to a new group of people

who were willing to show me how to live my life,

to share with me living skills.

And I was just in awe that they were talking about

so openly what was going on in their life.

And I could relate to pretty much almost everything

that was being shared.

So the truth was is I kept secrets.

Nobody really knew who I was, what was going on with me.

I presented an image that I wanted you to see.

And it usually was based on what you expected of me

in terms of who I was and what I was doing.

And I was doing what you were doing is what I said.

And I wanted to be a part of,

but nobody really knew who I was.

And I realized that no matter how many people I was with,

how many people I went through,

I was still very, very lonely

'cause nobody really knew me.

They didn't know who I was, what I liked,

what I didn't like.

I was a communion.

I was whatever you were.

And I wanted to fit in and I wanted to be a part of.

And that was a major realization for me

as to why I drank and used so much

because that's what people were doing.

And that was the group of people I chose to be with.

So here I am and, you know,

and I got a job with one of the guys

from the outpatient program

that had a studio rental truck, two or three.

And I cleaned out those rental trucks

for a couple of months for him.

And I got paid a little bit of money and, you know,

and then I started, you know, looking for work.

And I also was kind of frustrated

in the sense that I didn't have a date.

And, you know, in the sober world,

it's like you date people.

You just go say hello and have sex with them.

It didn't work that way.

And I started to pray to God.

You know, it's been a while.

A little sex wouldn't be bad, wouldn't hurt.

And people say, you're not supposed to ask God for sex.

That's not what it's about.

And I said, well, I read in the book

that you can ask God for things for yourself, you know,

if it's of service to other people.

No, I didn't understand.

And, well, I changed my prayer

because a little sex would be nice if it be thy will.

And within a week, within a week, I got a job

selling X-rated movies over the phone.

And I realized I needed to be more specific.

And that was my prayer.

But I did that for nine months.

And I got out of the X-rated business

and went into the general release movies.

This is video movies now.

And it was all telemarketing,

talking to people all over the country,

selling Westerns, mostly was my biggest seller.

And I did that for 10 years.

And I eventually started my own business,

buying and selling, I didn't know how to do this,

buying and selling movies, you know?

And then 10 years in, blockbuster video,

the 2020 video, Hollywood video,

they all started taking over the market

and the mom and pop stores who were my customers

got put out of business, really.

So I had to figure what am I gonna do now, you know?

And I hated sales.

It was easy.

I just hated it.

I was not a slam dunk salesperson, but I was honest.

And that's what seemed to be a quality

that the store owners appreciated.

So I decided, well, what am I gonna do now, you know?

And I didn't wanna work in the healthcare field again,

but I decided I wanted to be a therapist.

So I went back and got my master's degree.

Now my head immediately on that decision

said what it always said, who are you kidding?

You're too old.

Everyone's gonna laugh at you.

You don't even know how to use a computer.

You're gonna make a fool of yourself.

You may as well not do it.

None of my head always said.

And, you know, I had a sponsor at the time

and he was my sponsor for 26 years.

And he was an old Norwegian

who had him more to some odd leaders at that times.

And, you know, he helped me understand

that I had every right to do this if I wanted to.

And all I had to do was make my mind up to do it

and to be willing.

So I went through this and I did,

that's exactly what I did.

And everything fell into place

so that I could get student loans.

And I went to school, graduated in two years

with honors, I might add.

And, you know, became a marriage family therapist.

And, you know, through the course of my internship

and getting my hours,

I realized that there's a niche for me

in the treatment field in as much as being a program director

or clinical director, that kind of thing.

I liked that.

And I felt it was an area that I could do good in

and do good work in and be of service to people

in a different way.

And that's what I did.

And, you know, I worked for a nonprofit

and eventually went to the profit area

and stayed in that profit area till about five years ago

where I retired.

So I have 38 years of sobriety.

I'm 38 years older and it's a different time in my life.

And I've had a great run and I attribute it all

to being sober and I attribute it to having people

in my life who are supportive.

My kids are now 56 and 50, 55 and 53.

My daughter is a restaurateur.

My son, the teachers outside of Columbus, Ohio,

he's got his doctorate degree

and I'm very, very close with both of them.

And I've been married now one year

after 19 year engagement.

So they've been together and my wife is 27 years old

and I have a sponsor.

My first sponsor died and took me two years

to find another sponsor.

I asked two people and we gave it a try

and it didn't work out 'cause they just had time constraints

and we just didn't have time.

So I asked a friend of mine who I hadn't met

when I first got sober and though we were friends,

I said, "Would you sponsor me?"

And he's turning 40 this December, 40 years older

and he's been my sponsor for the last 12 years.

So now I see my job is to be of service,

to work with new guys and I have several sponsors

and I go to a meeting just about six days a week,

I do panels and like Abraham asked me

and I never say no, unless there's something

that's happening.

I don't keep secrets anymore, which is big for me.

My wife and I have a very open relationship with each other.

We're very different people.

It's difficult for her to see me not really working,

but when I was working, she complained I worked too much.

And so I'm having a lot of fun.

She's still working and I just shared with Abraham.

I gave up driving a year ago, September.

I had a few accidents that were my fault.

Thank God nobody was hurt, but it was a sign

that I need to not drive anymore.

And I've been getting around on bus and access

and Uber and Lyft and I find that I can get around.

I can do the things I need to do.

So although it's a big change, it's inconvenient,

still can do the things that I wanna do.

And I never thought my life would be like this

in a good way.

I always struggled because I was so dishonest.

And I was a terrible liar.

I could never remember what I said to who.

And another example of what had happened,

when I got fired from that job,

where I had been for so long,

my secretary was a woman from West Indies, Jamaica.

I knew her, her husband, her kids, and she was my enabler.

She covered for me when I was out all the time.

And when I got fired, people actually gave me a party

when I knew who I worked with.

And she knew I loved West Indian food

and she made this dinner for me in honor of me.

And spent hours with the West Indian food.

And the night before, I of course was partying

and up all night and I knew I wasn't going.

And they came and I called and told her I was sick,

I couldn't go.

And I had the good fortune to be able to talk to her

when I was sober and thank her and made an amends to her

for not showing up after all the hard work she had done.

And I was in my disease and I was selfish and inconsiderate.

I'm tearing to the point where all that mattered was me.

And she accepted my amends,

as did the hospital administrator,

as did the other people in my life

who I made amends to, my kids, my sisters.

And the small family that I have left,

my sister who helped me lives in Hawaii now,

Kauai, and we two are very close.

The rest of my other sister had passed away some years ago.

I give everything to my kids in terms of attention

and support and love.

And I have a granddaughter who's 15 now.

And she lives in Ohio and I just saw her in June.

And I go out there once or twice a year.

And my life is just so different.

It's so different because alcoholics anonymous.

I have living skills today.

I can say that, and I can say that I'm responsible.

I pay my bills, I even paid my taxes.

I don't owe any money.

And I'm living out the rest of my life

kind of in a place that is very comfortable

for me right now.

I truly use Alcoholics Anonymous as a foundation

for everything that I do.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

And my job now is to get back,

to help people who want to be helped, to be of service.

And although I would have loved to watch

the End of the World series, whatever happened.

You know, I chose to come here and that's what I do.

That's what I know.

That's what I was taught.

So I think that's it for me.

Thank you again, Abraham.

Thank you all.

- I would like to introduce our secretary, Abraham.