Abraham's Prayer, Spiritual Insight, and a Houdini Halloween Tale

- Thanks Billy, and I'll call on Jay.

It's great to see you all tonight.

I appreciate you asking me, Abraham,

to come and participate in my sobriety

and be part of this group for a night.

It's an honor for me to walk the path of AA

with other people in my community.

Is this an all-day meeting or an alcoholics,

alcoholics anonymous?

Okay, well, I qualify for that too,

but I also, I mean, I'm a cross addicted person.

I won't talk about those issues tonight

'cause this is an alcoholics anonymous meeting,

but I definitely qualify as somebody who is powerless

over the effect of alcohol on me physically

and especially spiritually.

So if you don't mind, I'm gonna just take a minute

and invite God into the room and the way that I do it.

And that's with by saying, I'm listening,

I'm listening to that still small voice so dear.

I'm listening, I'm listening to my heart

and my soul, my ear.

In this quiet time of prayer,

we have the opportunity to relax

and open up our hearts and our minds

to a greater awareness of God.

And as we pause and listen to the still small voice

of spirit within, we experience peace

and the assurance that our lives are unfolding

in wonderful ways.

So with hearts and minds now attuned to God,

we join together in praying one with you dear God,

I am united with all creation.

In this sacred moment of prayer,

I open up my heart in faith to you

and to your infinite wisdom.

When I think of peace, I feel your peaceful presence

within me and outside of me.

And once again, I thank you for your abundance of feeling

and the silent unity of this group.

So I pray all the time, sometimes hourly,

definitely at least twice a day.

I hit my knees when I pray, not to get God's attention,

but to get my attention because I'm a kind of person

who drifts and I've always been a drifter in my imagination

and in my actions for the longest time.

I wander, I drift and I drift off.

Now, some of that is good.

Some of that's been to the good.

I have traveled in my heart.

I've traveled in encountering other human beings,

but I was an addict and an alcoholic

long before I ever took a drink because I've come to learn

in my 11 good years in this program,

I've come to learn that alcoholism is a state,

a spiritual state and a state of being that happens to you.

And the drinking is like, what do you call it, a symptom.

So my way of fixing myself from this drift

of spiritual emptiness and fear and confusion and anger,

my way of fixing myself was to take a drink.

But before I took a drink,

I let my mind take me to strange places.

And you know, and like, again, at first,

you know, there's a certain charm to our fantasy life.

You know, there can be something charming

about seeing the world in a kind of a strange way,

but do you guys know who the great Houdini was, right?

So when I was a kid in the early 1960s,

there was, you know, I started reading books

and it was this book on the life of the great Houdini.

And you know, it was a paperback book.

It costs like 25 cents and I read it

and I read it with like wonder.

It wasn't just that he was a magician.

It was that he was an escape artist.

And that fascinated me.

I thought, this is fascinating.

So I read the book and then I finished it

and then I read it all over again.

And I became obsessed with the great Houdini.

And then one Halloween, and I was reminded of this

'cause you know, we just had Halloween

and I was just taking my grandkids out

for, you know, to go trick or treating.

And they asked me like a little bit about,

you know, my older grandchild.

She asked me a little bit about what was, you know,

Halloween like for me when I was a kid.

And I didn't want to tell her

because this is what I remember most.

On a Halloween party, the first boy-girl party,

you know, this is like 1966, all right?

So I'm 11 years old, 11 years old.

So this is like first boy-girl party.

It was a Halloween party at Patty Powderly's house.

And I was in love with Patty Powderly.

She was my friend down the street.

She was my, she was the most beautiful, wonderful friend.

Her father was a cop, but he was a nice cop.

And they had like seven kids.

And I wanted to be in her family.

Her mother was super nice.

I loved Patty.

Her brother Chris was my brother's best friend.

We were always over there.

Anyway, Patty's having this Halloween party

and it was my first boy-girl party.

And I wanted to go as, well,

everybody was going as like a fireman, a cowboy.

All my friends were like dressed up like superheroes.

So I walked into the party.

I'd gotten a rope from our garage.

And I walked into the party and I announced,

I said, I just came in like a white shirt and black pants.

And I said, I walked in the party and I just said,

I held up the rope.

And I said, I am the great Houdini.

And I challenged anyone to tie me up

and I will escape at this party.

Do your worst.

And like everybody was like.

And my friends were like, they hogtied.

Hands in front, but I mean, they were like,

my friends were like boy scouts, right?

So they did like, they hogtied me.

I was, and then I spent the entire party on the floor,

thrashing, trying to get out of my bonds.

People were walking over me, stepping on my shoulder,

shrinking punch, dancing to the twist.

Everybody just was like walking over me

and I was sweating bullets trying to get out of this thing.

'Cause I had convinced myself

that because I read the book twice of the great Houdini,

that I would know how to get out of my books.

You see what I'm trying to say here about,

before I ever took a drink,

I had a natural tendency to get an obsession

and lock myself onto this obsession

and believe it to the extent that I would do something.

I mean, it was like at the end of the party,

like everybody left and I'm still in there and tied up.

Patty Powderly comes over and she go like,

do you want me to get my father?

I said, yes.

And Officer Powderly came downstairs

'cause they were just upstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Powderly.

Officer Powderly came downstairs

and he was like, oh Danny, Danny Stone, Danny Stone,

what are we gonna do with you?

Should I get scissors?

And like, you know, he was like such a,

like, yeah, he's like a good guy, you know?

And he was like, like the pity.

He was like, what, what, I mean, you're like a nice kid,

but Danny, what's wrong?

Hey, cut me loose.

Everything went back to normal.

Nothing was changed, but something had shifted.

Something had shifted inside me.

I brought it, what was in there.

I, you know, I don't have to,

I'm not gonna psychoanalyze myself here.

I don't know what made me that way.

Any more than I can tell you what made me become

a flipped out alcohol,

but this person has a tendency to obsess.

And that was the beginning for me

of starting to see myself, my interior world

in relation to the world outside

as something different that I needed to vent.

Then there were other experiences.

I'm gonna skip ahead.

I'm gonna go to the end of the story

because I just had an interesting experience today

before I came here.

It relates to my grandkids who I,

I look after my grandkids quite a bit

'cause I'm very lucky.

My, I mean, my kids are great parents.

My daughter's a fantastic parent and so is her husband,

but they work a lot.

They're, you know, they're very busy and they work a lot

and I'm lucky and honored enough that they know

that they want me to look after my grandkids.

And I, I mean, you know, but both my grandkids,

okay, so my granddaughter is, she's really sick.

She's got like some kind of a virus

and she's like back and forth going to diarrhea,

throwing up and everything like that.

She's, oh, shoot, we were playing and, you know, relaxing,

watching TV, playing a game.

My grandson, she's five.

My grandson's a year and eight months.

And so like my granddaughter starts to,

we're playing at the other end of the apartment.

My granddaughter goes, "Oh, oh, oh God, I have to throw up."

And she starts to run

and she doesn't make it to the bathroom.

So she starts hurling on the floor before the bathroom.

My grandson, her brother, not yet two, chasing after her.

A panic, I don't know what he thinks is gonna help

or whatever, he starts chasing after her.

She throws up copious amounts of puke on the floor.

He, she, and then she starts crying, puking, crying.

He's running to help.

He slips, he's barefoot.

He falls and slips, ass over tea kettle, slam, down,

falls on his head, screaming, crying.

You know, he's like, he just, he slammed his head

in the, he's got puke all over him.

The granddaughter's puking and crying from the puking.

And it's just me taking care of them.

And you know what?

It was, I'm really skipping ahead to my recovery now

because I took care of, I took care of everything.

I, first of all, the first thing I did

was get the little one.

I got him in my arm, in my right arm,

patting him on the back.

I helped Hazel, my granddaughter, to get to finish up

if she still had more puke to the bathroom.

And I just took care of both of them one at a time

and cleaned up the puke, cleaned it off of her,

cleaned it off of him, cleaned it off of me.

And everybody stopped crying.

And it was very relaxing in the aftermath of this disaster.

And my sobriety, I could not have had that moment,

that intense peace.

I had this intense sense of well-being, Abraham,

from having just been sober to address this thing

because this was so important.

It was of monumentally trivial but important,

monumental importance that it just be taken care of

simply with regard to being of service to somebody,

somebody that I care enormously about

who can't really do anything for themselves.

I don't know.

I don't know what I'm saying here.

And I know I'm jumping all over the place time-wise,

but I think you guys, I think you're getting the point

in terms of like my life, you know, I reflect a lot.

You know, I just turned 70 and I reflect a lot

on the back and forthness of time since I become sober

and the difference in my being able to be present

and be a force for good, even if it's something small

or seemingly unimportant, I have a duty and a usefulness.

And I don't know, I kind of went to the end of the story

for a second or third in it, but I just wanted to say that

because, you know, instead of, you know, I made a lot of,

I did a lot of boneheaded things.

It took me 40 years to get 11.

You guys know what that means, right?

You know, I started going to meetings, you know,

when I was young and I went in and went out,

went in, went out, went in in front of my face,

went out and got in trouble, came back in, messed up again.

So, you know, I really didn't come in both feet

till I was 59 years old.

I mean, I'm just being honest, you know, that's, you know,

some people might say to themselves,

oh, it's a little late in the day for you, Danny boy,

you know, and you know what?

And some guys did say that to me, you know,

and I don't think they meant it in a bad way,

but I think, you know, there were people who were saying

to me, you know, like, you know, when Iris was talking,

you know, and I was hearing, you know,

what I heard in your story was a real vulnerability,

but also real hope, you know, because, you know,

you got another job and you're, you know, you're back.

And I, you know, I salute you for being back.

And, and I really, I really got a lot out of your share.

And, you know, this Alcoholics Anonymous thing,

it's really been, it's been really fantastic for me,

just because of what I just told you guys,

that it's, I've been really, really come to realize

that those, you know, big grandiose things that, you know,

were always eluding me, the brass ring, or, you know,

being not, you know, that feeling that you,

I don't know if you guys relate to this,

but there's this feeling you get of not being enough.

So it makes you be somebody who chases something

all the time, or you're being chased, or you're being chased.

So that's, you know, I mean, you know, I can, I can,

I can tell you gory details, but really what it amounts to,

in a nutshell, is that I'm a person who acts like

he's chasing something or is being chased by something

when I'm high, and I was high almost all the time,

and, but, and, but, and, in recovery,

and I like to say recovery because it's active.

I like recovery because it's kind of a verb for me,

and I like verbs, I like solutions, I like actions,

you know, 'cause if you lead me to my own devices,

I'll think myself into a corner,

and then act like a trapped animal and say it was your fault,

sound familiar, you know, I mean,

these are the kind of habits,

and they're, and these are, they're habits, right?

I mean, these things that we do when we dream are habits,

and the things that I do when I don't dream

are habits that I call practices, practices.

I'm in rehearsal for being a human being again,

and I love rehearsing, I love practice.

I have all kinds of spiritual practices that I do.

I'm a practice person.

I'm a practice, I don't want to say fanatic

because that has a implication

of some of this obsessive stuff,

and I'm trying to relax about it, you know,

because I want to be trying to learn how to relax here,

but I also, you know, I have a lot of energy,

and a lot of, you know, mental energy,

so I'm trying to use it in a way

that I don't turn it against myself or against you.

You know, so these practices that I do, I love to read,

I love to read spiritual stuff.

I love to talk spiritual shit with other people.

I love to rap with other alkies.

I love the people that are in the program.

I think that Alcoholics Anonymous,

I think the whole world should be in Alcoholics Anonymous,

or some 12-step program.

I think that we learn how to be honorable

and listen and connect,

all those things that make you not sick.

So let's just talk about, I don't know,

how am I doing on time, anybody?

- 15 minutes. - 15, thank you.

So this is how bad it can get, and this is how the steps,

this is what, you know, this is my fun reading.

This is my idea of fun.

I love this, I really do love the 12 and 12.

I like the big book too.

Some great literature, great stories.

But the 12 and 12 gets me talking to myself

and talking to others.

I love sponsoring people, sponsoring people.

It's awesome, it's awesome, so helpful for me.

So it's the selfless act of selfishness.

I've just, there's so much release for me and surrender.

Surrender is my favorite word.

I surrender to win all the time.

I'm praying for me again, which is something,

and I'm not a big God guy.

I'm not a big God guy, so it might seem paradoxical

for me to talk about a God, to tell you so much

about praying and stuff like that.

But I'm almost, I almost qualify for the "We Agnostics"

section of the book, to be perfectly frank.

And yet, and yet, I pray like a person who it matters

that I pray, kind of like my survival depends on it.

So like I say, I hit the knee, I hit my knees,

not to get the Lord's attention, but to get my attention.

Because my attention, where I place my attention

is a matter of life and death for me.

I went to the doctor when I was in my 30s.

I had a hacking cough that I couldn't,

that just went on for like three months.

And I put out a cigarette, my cigarette,

and I went into the doctor's office.

And I said to him, you know, what's up, what is this here?

He listened to me, my chest.

He says, okay, breathe into this tube here.

I said, ah, that looks just like my bong.

And he said, that's not funny, right?

Dr. Rosamond, right?

Sky, right?

He said, that's not funny.

Breathe into it.

I was 35 at the time, 35 years old, 35!

Sky breathed into the thing that the object of the action

is you breathe into it and you try to get this ball

that's on the water, try to get it with your air.

You get it to come up.

And you know, somebody who has good lungs,

they can make the ball go like halfway,

three quarters of the way up into the bong like looking too.

And I'm doing my breathing and I go into my breathing.

The ball goes up like this and he looks at me.

He goes, try again.

Like, oh, I'm gonna take a breath.

And this time the ball went less far, less far than this.

Like it barely went out of the hole.

And Dr. Rosamond, he says, I'm gonna save your life.

He says, have you ever heard the word emphysema?

And I said, yeah, for other people.

He said, in three years,

you're not gonna be able to catch a breath.

I'll give you three years tops

if you keep going the way you're going.

If you quit smoking today, today!

And he said it to me like that.

I'm not exaggerating.

This guy was caring enough and no bullshit enough

to look me in the eye and say to me, if you quit today,

then maybe you won't come back here in three years

in the emergency room.

I said, is that gonna fix me?

Is that gonna fix me then?

Will I be better?

He said, you can't turn back the clock.

Those six words affected me so deeply.

And quitting smoking was the beginning for me

of mastering my other habits.

But it was the hardest thing in the world for me.

It was very confrontive.

I was like a white knuckle drunk

without a program to live with, for my wife,

and not a pleasant person to work with,

and a fireable personality, an aggressive, confrontive,

know-it-all, authority, rebellious person.

And that was part of my withdrawal from nicotine.

I come from a long line of two-pack-a-day smokers.

My grandfather was a New York City cab driver

and a painter, he was an artist at night,

but he drove a cab six days a week.

And when he finally made enough money

and smoked two packs of Paul Malls,

and when he finally made enough money

to buy his medallion in 1972, when he was 71 years old,

he bought his medallion, which means he owned his cab,

which means that he could work six days a week

and keep his money and not pay the man.

So Grandpa Ben worked six days a week, 14 hours a day,

raked in the money, which in those days was,

he must have made $500 a week

for the first time in his life.

And he was ecstatic.

And then he kept smoking and he had a massive coronary

in the men's room of a gas station on Sutphin Boulevard

in Queens and died in a gas station men's room.

And this guy would have been,

he had the constitution otherwise of a horse.

He would have probably lived to have been 90 or could have,

or maybe he just would have lived five more years

and been able to breathe.

Anyway, this is all to say this stuff runs in families.

Nicotine is a habit too, and it's corrosive,

but Dr. Roseman set me straight.

I quit smoking.

I got over my, I white knuckled my way through

without a program, my recovery from cigarettes.

And then I took up drinking.

So I don't have to tell you what happens.

I mean, I don't have to tell you how far down we can go.

You've got your horror stories.

I have mine.

What it amounts to and why I treasure the program so much,

what it amounts to is a loss of,

what's the expression in the book?

When you lose your will to live.

It's a, help me out here, it's that phrase,

that famous phrase about demoralization.

You know that when you're thoroughly demoralized,

emotionally distraught, okay, now I'm putting

in my own words, but again, you know what I'm talking about.

What's your name?

- Bruce.

- Bruce, thank you.

Pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.

Let's have a nice laugh.

I mean, 'cause all you can do is laugh about it, right?

Really, I mean, let's laugh,

'cause we have a little distance from it, you know?

But it's not funny when it's going on.

And that's what brings us here.

And the surrender, the surrender that's required for me

is, was the key thing.

And the surrender, the praying that I do,

the meetings that I go to, the dudes that I sponsor,

helping to take care of my grandkids,

being a friendly and supportive presence for my wife,

being a good dude at work,

being somebody that can take orders,

or have on my own ideas,

depending on what's appropriate to the situation.

Hey, that's some grownup shit right there, right?

That's not that baby shit that I do.

It's not that baby puke that I come up with

when I'm in my immaturity, when I'm in my cups.

I mean, let's face it.

Who wants to be with somebody?

Who wants to be around somebody that can't listen?

I wanna be the guy that people enjoy.

I saw this wonderful thing.

You guys like dogs, right?

Right, I mean, you gotta love dogs.

And being an alcoholic, a dog is like,

wow, they're like the teacher, right?

I mean, the dog's like your teacher,

because let's face it, what do they know?

What don't they know that I couldn't learn from?

I mean, they're in the moment.

They're attentive to your feelings,

but they're about their feelings too.

And anyway, so I was watching this thing,

Inside the Mind of a Dog.

It's like a special, so.

Wonderful, so great.

And this guy who's like the head vet,

the veterinarian, like a research scientist,

but he's not like an egghead kind of a guy.

He's like a really, he's like a really Hamish dude,

you know, but he loves, but he said, you know,

remember, you guys remember Darwin saying

survival of the fittest?

They're like, shit, fucking shit.

I hate that, survival of the fittest.

That's what basically the dog scientist said.

He said, how about this?

Dogs have survived because they learned

survival of the friendliness.

They literally, and it's literally biologically true

because the wolves and the bears

were the only ones of all of the animals

that survived the million years purging

and changing of the climate and environment.

The wolves survived and the wolves evolved into dogs

from being in a pack and then from wanting

to get near the people.

So they lost, they lost their feral,

opportunistic aggression and they said,

let me survive by being friendly.

I take this so much to heart and it helps me to, again,

to deal with my own animalistic, feral nature

and realize how much more is in it for,

this in it, is in life for me when I'm a open hearted,

caring and unselfish dog of a person.

My life has expanded, grown, deepened

as my heart has softened and all this is related to,

for me, stopping using alcohol and substances.

Physical sobriety, the program of Alcoholics Anonymous,

the community, our relationship to a god of my understanding.

That's the god of my understanding

and that god of my understanding could be this group.

For me to take this to heart, this is my work.

This is my life work.

I have other jobs that I do and sometimes I'm unemployed

but when I'm unemployed, this is my job.

I have a job right now, this is my other job.

I love my work, I live for this work.

I do it 100 different ways and like I said earlier,

I practice 100 different ways of being spiritually engaged.

I make mistakes, I revert to my wolf.

There is a wolf inside me still as there is also a dog

but as the Ojibwe Indian says, thank you, I see that.

The Ojibwe says, the Ojibwe grandfather

is talking to the grandson and he says to the grandson,

he says, "There are two wolves in me,

"the wolf that wants to tear, fight, win everything

"and then there's the other wolf,

"the wolf that wants to love and be friendly

"and be a part of you."

And they go to war with each other, grandson.

And the grandson says, "Grandfather, which wolf will win?"

And the grandfather says, "The one I feed."

I learned to feed the friendly wolf in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I have learned it from day one when I walked into a meeting

and another man extended his hand to me and said,

"Sit next to me, you seem like you're new.

"You also seem like you're in trouble, sit next to me."

That has been the way people have treated me

in Alcoholics Anonymous from day one

and that's the way I treat other people too.

And then I try to be that way out in the world

as much as I can.

It's really an honor to be one among you

and it's a pleasure for me to be here with you tonight.

Thanks for letting me share.

- Yeah, thanks a lot.

Really like that prayer.