Danny's Journey: From Bronx Roots to 40 Years Sobriety

- Hi, good evening.

My name is Danny and I'm an alcoholic.

- Hey Danny.

- I wanna thank Abraham for asking me to come out

and share tonight.

It's, I've been here before and just,

yeah, as I was sitting here, I was thinking,

I go to a book study on Monday nights

where they really, really focus on the program of alcohol

which Howard really started, you know,

Bill Wilkes and Dr. Bob, and as I was sitting out

just thinking, I said, maybe, you know,

this is probably not very far different

than when it was, you know, back in 1939

and when they got together at people's homes

and, you know, it's just a small group of people

trying to help each other.

And it felt really, really nice sitting here.

Dan, I gotta, where is it?

There it is, Dan, I gotta tell you.

You said, you didn't know how you got the job, okay.

Well, we all know how you can lose it, you know.

So be great with what you got.

The other thing I wanna say,

I wanna say hello to Nancy and to Susan.

And Nancy, I sure hope you get better quickly.

And Susan, we go back so many years.

It's just wonderful to see you and that you got it well.

For me personally, a couple of things happened.

I was asked to speak at a Thursday night meeting

about a month and a half ago.

And it was a 35, 40 minute talk.

And right in the middle of it, I stopped.

I stopped talking about it.

My mind went completely blank and I couldn't talk.

I wasn't, it was really, really weird for me

because all my life I'd talk, you know.

But I do remember a guy in the program that I loved

had really, Don Locke, that was his name.

He passed away and he was a hell of an AA guy.

And I remember when he got older,

we asked him to come to one of our meetings

and I saw what happened to him.

I don't even know why I'm telling you guys this

other than the fact that at that meeting, I blacked out.

And he, and I saw him do that.

So I'm at a stage in my life now,

matter of fact, I'll give you some statistics.

In year 2020, I turned 80.

I also had 40 years of sobriety married to the same lady

for 51 years.

So those are pretty good numbers.

Now, here I am at 87 and my life has changed quite a bit.

I'm retired now, which has presented a whole new shift

for me in the way I live and what I have to deal with.

It's, I love my job.

I miss working.

And, but anyway, as far as my story, I,

everybody has a story.

I had some of the best talks I have ever heard in AA

were from people that I would never have hung out with them.

You know, one of the men, a little lady, Millie Greenberg,

she was actually shorter than me.

But boy, I'm telling you when she talked,

not only when she talked, but how she behaved

and some of these things that happened along the way

that helped me to bridge that gap where I used to sit

in the back of the room for a long time when I was new

and I would put my hands over my ears

to not want to hear the speaker

because I didn't like the way they looked or this or that.

And then suddenly we talk about awakenings

and stuff like that.

I call it like a spiritual or an insight.

That's a better word for me.

And I had an insight.

The insight said simply,

"Danny, if you hadn't screwed up your life all these years,

you wouldn't be here on a Saturday night

having to listen to this person."

And that kind of took that edge away from me, you know,

where I'm able to now sit in a meeting

and for the most part, I can pay attention

and learn from what the speaker has to say.

I was born and raised in the Bronx, a big Italian family.

It was seven boys and one girl.

I would say, when I talk about being poor,

you always bump into somebody that you can have,

who was poorer, more, you know?

Well, I can tell you that we were very poor.

I mean, we didn't have heat.

We had a cast iron stove that my mother,

a little tiny Italian lady cooked for seven boys, a girl.

Mother, father, and uncle lived in that one house

in the Bronx that my father and my uncle built.

And I look back and I don't know how that lady did it,

but she did, kept us all together.

Matter of fact, I'm the last of my family.

Everybody has passed away.

So for some reason, I'm the one that's still a Spaccarelli.

That's my name, you know?

And you know what I found out recently?

A guy sent me a picture of Italy,

and there's the food of Italy.

And on the right-hand side in the middle, there's a city.

There's a town called Spaccarelli.

If you meet another Spaccarelli, he's a relative, okay?

But there they were.

And so that's kind of, a couple of weeks ago, this happened.

I'm running around showing everybody the map,

you know, my family.

But anyway, it was, like I mentioned, poor.

We were all poor.

There's nobody in the neighborhood did it.

Italian, Jewish neighborhood, it was pretty good.

The city tore down the neighborhood, they built projects.

That changed everything.

Talking about alcohol, we had a wine cellar

that was maybe half the size of this room.

We made barrels of wine every September, October.

Matter of fact, I remember being in that wine cellar

with the press, and we got these boxes of grapes.

And it's a great ranch of Cucamonga, California.

We would open up and throw them in the press

and make the wine.

So in terms of alcohol, it was never a prohibition.

I mean, my father would get a gallon of wine every day,

put it on the table, and that's it.

You know, you just don't make a fool of yourself,

but that's it.

What happened to me, it was, I had special eye problems,

and I was in a special class and stuff like that.

But I started to gravitate away from the routine

of the family.

I started to move out, I was, let me put it this way,

I was attracted by a bunch of guys

a little bit outside of the neighborhood.

Very, very, matter of fact,

it was just like in "The Brock's Tale."

If you've seen that movie, that was filmed

just a few blocks away from where I live.

And that's exactly what it was like.

A bunch of would-be hoodlums, you know,

hanging out by this bar and talking about women

and talking about all their exploits.

And it was very exciting, and here I is,

little Danny, with very big, thick glasses,

and I was attracted to it.

I mean, and I certainly had no qualities

to be part of that group.

I was small, I could fight very good,

but I started hanging out with them.

What was the rule?

Not the rule, but we were drinking a lot,

and all the wine I ever wanted.

But the other thing that happened,

just when the girls talk about boys in the neighborhood,

they'd be sitting on a park bench and they would say,

"Oh, you know, Vince, he's so good looking,

"and Joe D, you know, what a guy."

They had all of these descriptions

of the boys in the neighborhood.

When they talked about Danny, they said,

"Oh, that Danny, he's such a good guy."

I hated it, I hated it.

I didn't want to be a good guy.

I wanted a good lady, and I didn't know.

I didn't know how, I didn't know what that was.

The only sex education I ever got

was a photo album like this that my brother Victor

put together when he was young,

pictures of ladies, they were pulling up their stocking.

You see more in an LA Times Macy's ad

than what was in that book,

but that book went from Victor, to Angelo,

Frankie, to Eddie, to Danny, to Louie.

When it got to Arman, the young, it was torn open.

It was ripped open.

So anyway, I'm trying to get to the point of what happened.

One of the guys said that they found

this Catholic high school in the Bronx called St. Helena's,

and that's where they keep these girls,

they keep them cooped up all week long.

Then they let them out on Friday, and you cannot miss.

I could not wait for Friday.

So I'm up there inside the Starlight Cafe

in the bowling alley and the pool hall,

and we get in the car, and we go out to St. Helena's.

And here's what happened.

You go in there, and it was a gymnasium,

and all the boys are on one side,

and all the girls are on the other side,

and you have to walk across this gymnasium to ask girls.

I didn't know any of you.

I would rather have bought a horny alligator

than to walk across that floor.

And the reason, I never learned how to dance.

Nobody, in those days, you danced with a girl to the melody,

and you worked together, you danced.

Today, you could go out on the dance floor

and have a convulsion,

and people would say, "Oh, my God, look at that."

But I was terrified.

So for the first time in my life,

I went back to the car that we stayed in.

We had plenty of wine there.

And that's the first time that alcohol did something for me

that it had never done before.

And it never stopped after that.

It went on, and I just, and then my brother's,

"Danny, you're such a good kid.

"You're the first spacarelli that's gonna go to college.

"What are you doing hanging out with those bums?

"You know, they're bad guys."

And I would just yes him, "Yeah, yeah, you know, I'm okay."

And then, eventually, I started,

I got in a lot of trouble, arrested three, four times.

One time, I ended up at Westchester County Jail

at two o'clock in the morning.

I don't ever remember being arrested.

And I don't know how I woke up in a jail cell,

how I got there.

We talk about black ops.

I never believed in it until I had several.

But anyway, one night I came home,

I was about 24 years old,

and I fell asleep on the bed with a cigarette

and the bed caught fire, not flames, but smoldering.

And my mother came in with a bucket of water

and she threw it on the bed.

Had she not awakened and done that,

it's possible that I would have been responsible

for killing my mother, my two kid brothers, Louie and Armine,

and my uncle who was in the bed.

He had a stroke, and so that was a bad situation.

I'll tell you something about that uncle.

You know, it's really funny.

We're in his room, we all know each other a little bit

and everything, but I'll tell you what I'm capable of.

I would go into his room, and there he was paralyzed.

He had a suffering from the stroke.

All he could do was move his left arm,

and I would walk into his room

and he had a dresser over there,

and I would go to his dresser, I would open it up,

and I would take his money.

My mother would put his social security or whatever

in that drawer, and he'd be struggling.

And he was crying, he was crying.

This is his nephew.

He raised us, he lived with us every day.

But I bring that up because I never want to forget

that I'm capable of doing that,

and my thought at the time was, F him.

He doesn't need it, I need it.

And that's how it was for me.

And eventually, two days shortly after that,

my brothers got together on a Sunday,

and they came over because they had already moved out

and started their families, they were older than me.

And they got me, slapped me around,

and threw me down a flight of stairs,

and then told me, get in the car.

And I got in the car and they took me

to 42nd Street, 10th Avenue,

put me on a Greyhound bus, one-way ticket to California.

The last thing I remember when the door was closing,

don't come back, you little bastard.

And I don't remember much of it,

but I end up in Santa Monica, I get off the bus.

I don't even know how, I don't remember going across,

I get off the bus, where is everybody?

There's no people here.

Not like New York, I mean, there's people everywhere.

And so I ended up here in a place called Synanon House.

It was the first of the,

actually the best of the drug rehab programs.

And I was the 100th person in that facility.

And people go to these rehab facilities and detoxes,

and say 30 days, 60 days.

I stayed there for five years, I was there for five years.

And I advanced myself within that structure.

I became associate director,

had a pretty good position there.

And I traveled around, called in on suppliers,

asking them to donate.

Everything that we needed was donated.

We had no money.

I met my wife there, she was a volunteer.

She graduated college and actually went

to the Peace Corp for two years.

And she came down to visit and I started to talk with her.

And eventually I left and I ended up getting a job

as a salesman here in California.

And we were doing good.

We got married and everything,

and I started calling out retail stores.

And eventually I started drinking again,

started to use, which I had never really done before

that very much.

But I, and here's what got me into AA.

I had a family, I had a wife and children.

We had five children.

By that time it was maybe three children.

And I was about ready to lose my job, I had a good job.

My family was, they didn't know what to do.

They were mainly in New York.

And I did not, I wasn't raised to treat my family

the way I was doing.

I didn't care about you, I didn't care about other people.

I lied to everybody.

I was sneaking liquor into the office where I worked,

sneaking it out at night, doing all those things.

But I really didn't care much about what you had to say.

But I got to the point where I couldn't live

with myself anymore.

And so one day on a Friday night,

I'm at a McDonald's, I'm at Thoreau Boulevard, 1979.

And a guy taps me on the shoulder,

I'm fixing a cup of coffee.

And it turned out as this fellow, Paul,

that I knew in Synanon, he was there with me

when I was there.

And he said, "Danny, how are you doing?"

At that time, I was about ready to lose my job.

My wife saw it, realized what I was doing.

It was, my family wanted nothing to do with me.

And I tell him, I said, "Paul, I'm doing okay."

So he gives me his card, his business card.

And he says, "Well, I'm in AA.

"If you ever need any help, give me a call."

So that night I went home and I put his business card

on my dresser.

And every night, every morning, I looked at that card

and I felt so dirty.

I felt so dirty, so shameful about what I was doing.

So on October 21, 1979, I called him up.

It was Sunday.

I said, "Paul, I need some help."

And he said, "Okay, get over to my house."

He lived about 15 minutes away.

He said, "We'll get you to an AA meeting."

I knew very little.

The only thing I knew about AA is that they relied on God.

Their emphasis was on a higher power.

When I was in Synanon, the emphasis was self-reliance.

You relied on yourself.

God helps those who help themselves.

That was the theme.

So I went there and he took me to,

he didn't take me, but another friend, Frank.

Frank Sebo, who passed away,

he took me to my first meeting and it was crowded.

Ohio Street meeting, jam, people in the parking lot.

I have no idea what happened there,

other than there was a lot of people.

I don't know what happened that following week,

but I went back the next Sunday

and I walk into that meeting and a lady comes up to me

and she reaches out and she says, "Danny, how are you doing?"

She remembered my name.

I'm telling you, these little, we call them God shots,

whatever word you want to put on it,

but here I am many years later

and I can remember her reaching out and remembering my name.

It really got a little bit of glue, got me closer.

And then with my sponsor, Paul, he's my sponsor today.

We've been together all these years.

He said to me, "Danny, you stay between me and Frank.

We're going to tell you what to do.

You do what we do, you come with us, you're going to be okay."

And I respected Paul and I love Frank.

I was right between the two guys.

The thing that got that help me

is that they did what they said they were going to do.

In other words, whereas I was in this thing

called the Pacific Room, this is what we were.

And I did not like the Pacific Room.

There was this adoration of the old timers, you know,

get them a cup of coffee, kiss their ass.

Whatever.

And I tell you, I'm in the back of a car,

six of us are going to go out and hear this guy Clancy talk,

his Christmas talk in West Covina.

And it was football season.

And they're talking about football.

And I said something like,

"I don't think the Rams are going to do very good this year."

And this guy screams in my ear, "God damn it, shut up.

He just got here a minute ago.

You got nothing to say."

He blew me out of the car practically.

I said, "All right, okay, I get the picture.

Let me tell you something."

I said, "I'm going to get this guy."

And here's what I found out.

I found out that old timers like to sit in the same seat.

And at that time in AA, Chuck Chamberlain was alive,

Clancy was very active.

So many icons of AA were alive and well.

And Chuck used to talk about unlimited love,

unconditional love.

That was unconditional love.

And AA over the years, you'll see different themes surface.

And people, unconditional love was one of them.

Perception, you know, you'll hear people talk about it.

But unconditional love.

So what I did is on Wednesday night

at a big meeting at the synagogue,

I found out where this guy sat

and I went and put my keys on the seat.

And I just made believe like, you know,

so he comes down, he looks at his seat.

He said, "Who's keys are these?"

I said, "Those are mine.

Get your goddamn keys off of my seat."

I said, "Not tonight."

"You son of a bitch, I'm going to tell your sponsor."

I said, "Go screw yourself."

You know, I'm sitting in it and I did, I sat in that seat.

And then also another time, unconditional love,

it went right out the window.

- The frauds are expensive.

- I knew there were a bunch of bakes and frauds

as far as I was concerned.

A guy takes a cake for about 16 years.

And it is, you know, tradition,

if you shake the person's hand, say congratulations.

I went up to shake this guy's hand

and I had a cup of coffee.

And somebody bumped me just as I was about,

and the coffee spilled like on his shoes.

He grabs me, you know, big guy, he grabs me.

I started laughing.

Unconditional love, again, out the window, you know.

And I, so I, and those are some of my adventures

as a newcomer.

But then speaking, speakers,

Saturday night meeting was in the federal building

on Wiltshire and Sepulveda.

And I was there, I was calling.

They would have, they'd call you up to the speakers

to come and share before the main speaker

like we did tonight with Dan.

And so I was around for a little bit

and I went up to the secretary.

I said, "How come nobody, you never asked me to speak?"

She said, "Danny, you got here an hour ago.

What the hell, you gotta do some time, you know,

before you can get up at the podium."

But anyway, I must've bugged her

because a couple of weeks later,

they called to speak at that podium.

I got up there and I said, "You know, this AA craft,

it's all pretty good for you guys,

but I'm gonna tell you something."

I was, everybody's running around

and I don't know how this guy plants him,

ever takes a crap, with all those lips on his ass.

That's not what I'm going to put on.

And I said, "Now, my sponsor is sitting right here.

I forgot your name."

Again, and he's, I see him sliding under the chair,

you know, and then I click him down

and the lady says to me, "Danny, you're a good guy.

You speak your mind, but you're not going anywhere

in a Pacific group, ever."

Anyway, after all these years,

I made it to the coffee crew.

I'm on the coffee crew Wednesday night,

and that's a really pretty good honor to get on that crew.

But I share a couple of other things

that I'm not paying attention to so much,

but some of the things that I think worked for me,

number one, I stayed, I stayed.

Number two, I had a good routine.

And I remember my boss, boss Paul,

he said, "Danny, the day will come

when a good routine is going to save your ass.

Things are going to be flying

and things are going to go wrong, unexpected.

But if you have a good AA routine, your meetings,

people you work with, your commitments, all of that,

if you have a good routine, it's going to help you out."

The other thing is, is that for me anyway,

I was having trouble with some of the meetings,

making the meetings.

And I would call, I was lying to my sponsor.

I was doing a lot of stuff I shouldn't have been doing.

But I'd call him, I'd tell him, "Batteries, Dad,

my wife is sick."

You know, 'cause, oh, Monday night football.

I love Monday night football.

But that was one of my meetings, you know?

So I had always a story

about not making a meeting on Monday night.

I watched the football.

But anyway, what happened to me, and I'll tell you this,

and I, if you have children, if you're raising children,

or if you're living with someone, you'll say something,

you go to one of the kids and you say,

"Okay, Matthew, I want you to clean up your room."

Oh, yeah, okay, whatever.

Whether the kid cleans his room or not,

it's not really that important.

And even the way you say it, it's a little bit,

there's a little wiggle room there.

But there are times when you talk to a child

and it's not negotiable.

I don't want you going in the street

without holding mama's hand or grandma's hand.

And you say it, it's not negotiable.

And so what happened to me, I put this thing in my head,

this category called not negotiable, okay?

Not negotiable, my meetings are not negotiable.

What is negotiable?

The clothes I wear, do I pay the bill, do I lie to you,

do I cheat my boss?

Yeah, you have, the rest of the world is negotiable,

but what is not negotiable is my meetings.

And I'm preaching this now to a lot of guys, you know?

And it's, and I've had guys come up to me say,

"Dana, you know what?

I was having trouble too."

And so my meetings now for 47 years have been pretty good.

The other thing too is what I come to value.

You know, I have a job,

maybe live in a nice house and things are good,

but what I've come to value in the book,

we talked about promises.

The promises that if we do these things,

if we follow these steps and everything,

we will have a better life.

But what is not in the promises is to be trusted.

And it's only within the last couple of years

that that concept, that thought,

because I remember my brother Victor, my oldest brother,

he was the oldest member,

I remember hearing him say to his children on a weekend,

he didn't know I could hear it,

but I was up in his house and he said to his kids,

"Listen, Uncle Danny's coming over here this afternoon.

If you leave him alone, he'll leave, okay?"

That hurt me so bad 'cause I loved him, I loved his kids,

but I was a mess.

I was not a good person.

And so all these years, and so to be trusted,

to be worthy of trust, to have a job,

like Dan talked about his job,

and have the boss come up to you and say,

"Hey, Bruce, would you close the shop Friday night?

I'm gonna do something."

To be trusted by your peers, you know?

It's something that I don't,

and I've got a group of people, men mainly, and women,

but mainly men where I don't wanna do anything

that's gonna take away from the trust.

And what is trust?

You can't buy it, Amazon doesn't have it for sale, right?

You gotta earn it, it's one of those things.

And I'll tell you, if there are no apparel,

and I started reading the Bible, and it's parable,

you know, I have a parable for you.

In my neighborhood, the kid, one of the kids,

Vinny, Vinny Chantelmo, okay, he's a good kid, right?

We used to really abuse him a lot.

I mean, he was a good kid and everything,

but unfortunately, he didn't have a father.

His mother, this is during World War II,

so I go back quite a few years.

But anyway, here's what happened to Vinny.

We'd all be playing, school was over,

and after, our neighborhood, stickball, or whatever we did,

and his mother decided to teach him to play a musical

instrument, and there's a word that we used to have,

if you're called it, it's not good.

Mama Luca, Mama Luca is a mother's boy.

You're a mother's, Mama Luca, Mama Luca,

you know, we used to do that, to put each other down.

Anyway, we were doing that to Vinny,

but she would, she'd take him into the house,

and he was learning how to play a trumpet, right?

And we used to tease him, one day, we're out there playing,

and she grabs Vinny in the house, he gets in the house,

and he plays this trumpet, and we knew what he was playing.

And so here's the parable.

What happened, what happened that day?

Why was that day different than the day before?

You know what it was?

He got it, he got it.

How, wherever, he got it, and that's how AA works.

It's funny, you can go for years, you know,

and never get it, and then something happens,

somebody does something, or something, and all of a sudden,

you got it, it makes sense to you.

You're resistant, so at least I'm talking about myself now.

And I've seen it in other people,

that you wouldn't have been a dime on 'em, you know?

And we know that, we know people that,

like I said, you wouldn't have been a dime on 'em.

And something happens, they see something,

they feel something, something happens to them,

an insight or whatever, and they get it, you know?

So, if you haven't got it, I hope you get it, right?

I feel that that's right, they got it.

I think, what have I got here?

I got a few minutes left, she ain't running out of gas.

No, I pray, that's another thing, too.

I was raised Catholic, knew all of it.

I, recently, I was asked to close a meeting

with the Lord's Prayer.

Yeah, I'll call it, I forgot the Lord's Prayer.

So now, I have it written, and I have it right by

where my computer is, so in case they ask me to read it,

the Lord's Prayer, but no, I sponsor quite a few guys.

Oh, that's horrible, yeah.

I was raised with the Catholic prayers,

and our Father, the Hail Mary, after Confucian,

and even in the book, the seventh step prayer,

the third step prayer, and for some reason,

I never liked it, you know?

They were, I didn't, they're beautiful,

the words are beautiful.

But what I do now is, Father, thank you for another day,

thank you for the wonderful life you've given me.

And who came to, a guy named Dave, Dave Zupa,

on a Saturday night, where I was really new,

and we were talking about prayer and that sort of stuff.

He said, and I was telling him, you know,

about the Catholic prayers, he knew what they were,

but he said, "Danny, you can tell them for God,

"you can tell them what's on your mind.

"Get on your knees, and just tell them what's going on,

"what you'd like help with, you know?"

And so, I started doing it.

I said, "Father, thank you for the life I've been given.

"I live in a wonderful country,

"and I pray for your guidance, your strength,

"to help me to do what is right,

"the right thing for me to do.

"I pray for my children, my family,

"and I pray for others that I know."

Right now, we have so many people

that are around a little bit younger than me or whatever,

but that are not doing well physically, you know?

So I pray for them and where I can.

I have, like tomorrow Sunday, I have a route that I have

of visiting different people that are about doing well.

And I want to tell you one thing about that first.

When I mentioned it to other guys,

you know, "Let's go see Ronnie, you know, at the VA.

"Oh, Danny, you know, Ronnie's a good guy,

"but I, you know, what can I say?

"You know, he's dying, whatever."

And I tell him, "Listen, nobody gives a crap

"about how you feel, okay?

"What's important is how he feels,

"because you're just being there.

"List that person's spirits.

"You don't have to have words of wisdom.

"There are times I go, and there's really not much to say.

"It's just that you're there."

And so I try to encourage some of the guys,

and we all know people that, and we say,

"Gee, I should go see, you know, Robert."

And then you find a reason to not go see.

Then you feel bad that you didn't go see him,

and it's just a bad cycle.

I set it up for myself,

like I did with the Met Negotiable.

I go visit.

I got about three or four guys that I see

on a regular basis, and do what I can to help them.

And then we have a friend in a family.

I really feel bad for her.

She's a wonderful lady.

We've known her for 55 years.

Our kids grew up with our kids.

She just lost her husband.

He was 100 years old, and now she's like 86 years old.

And she has a son in Oregon and a daughter in San Diego.

She's here at Woodland Hills,

and she's really got confused.

So that's another thing where,

that's another thing I tell you.

Take the blinders off.

There's opportunities everywhere, in AA and out of AA,

where you can maybe reach out a little bit

via help of somebody else.

But I thank God every day for the life I've been given,

and I pray that you guys all find your peace

on this world that we're living in and do the right thing.

Thank you.