It's not a timer. It's just a little clock.
Anyway, good evening. My name is Tony. I'm an alcoholic.
Thanks you so much for asking me to be here. Finally, we put this together.
And Bill, is Bill our 10-minute speaker?
Tom.
Tom, I'm sorry. That was a great lead.
What stuck out to me was when you were talking about cocaine.
And I was talking about sponsoring you today on the phone.
You had a cocaine problem, as did I.
But when I was new and I would hear in the meetings, you know, I did a lot of dry goods.
And I thought, dry goods?
I imagine, you know, Don Wayne Western and the General Store and Bolts of Gingham,
you know, a sign that said dry goods.
It was probably months later that I realized, oh, they're talking about cocaine.
So this is great. I'm really glad to be here. I really am.
I love Alcoholics Anonymous more than anything.
Anything and everything that I have, it's the first time in my life that I allowed anything to do that.
I drank every single day for 20 years, every day.
And I also, you know, use a lot of everything.
But it was alcohol that was my number one go-to substance.
It was the thing that almost killed me.
And I have serious alcoholism.
And I am an alcoholic.
And I had my last drink on Sunday, May 27th of 2001 at 3.5 p.m.
And I remember that distinctly because sitting on the couch in my parents' house,
while they were sleeping upstairs, staring at a television that was turned off,
in a half-gallon room temperature absolute vodka in my right hand,
deciding, making the conscious decision that I was going to drink myself to death.
And I saw that. I saw the specter of death in front of me.
As clearly as I'm looking at all of you now, I saw it in the black television screen.
I said, this is it. I'm going to die.
Now, so I've been sober, so 24 years, three months, three weeks, and six days, right?
And I say that because I'm very specific about my sobriety and my sobriety rate.
I'm not one of these, I'm going to have this amount of time.
I'm coming up on this amount of time.
I have exactly that amount of time.
And I learned that from my first sponsor when I had 29 days.
And I said, I'm going to take a 30-day chip tonight at Radford because I won't be here tomorrow.
And these people all know me and I met them and said, "Oh, no, no, no. You don't have to."
And that always stuck with me.
And I believe permanently it's the most valuable, cherished thing in my life.
It's my sobriety that I never tried to get sober.
I knew all about Alcoholics Anonymous.
I used to ride my bike drunk down Fountain Avenue in Hollywood with a pint of vodka in my hand
because I was too drunk to walk and drive, but I somehow managed to get on my bike.
And I would ride my bike past A&A meetings and I knew exactly what was going on.
Exactly. I knew all about Alcoholics Anonymous.
I'd seen the movies.
My parents, who were not alcoholics, had friends who weren't alcoholics at all.
There's a couple of them, which I'll get to in a second.
So I knew all about it.
But I kept thinking that if I could just keep drinking, my life would have to get better.
If I could just get you this decade, just get you this decade.
Because my life had been a rollercoaster since I got out of college.
So I thought, well, it's just going to be ups and downs.
I'm going to have this, I'm going to have that, I'm not, I'm not.
And that was all okay.
As long as I was getting high and I'm acting out in my other inventions,
namely food and sex and money, power, property, prestige, I was fine.
I was good to go and I didn't see any need for that.
And so the idea of getting sober was completely foreign to me.
So I drank for the 20 years in the last nine and a half to 10 years and seriously alcoholic.
And the last five years were a living nightmare as I watched everything go away.
I drank away two huge careers, two huge careers.
One in the music business, from which I earned seven gold records.
And one in television, which I earned two Emmy nominations.
And I drank and I drank and I drank and I drank.
Nothing went away.
I drank away in marriage.
And eventually I drank away my place to live.
When I became homeless, I had nowhere to go.
And I was dating this girl who I had known on and off in my life since I was 21.
And we'd always had this sort of on again, off again thing.
And she said, well, you can move in here with me.
And we had a properly codependent relationship, a nice, healthy, firm codependent relationship.
And the alternative was to move in with my parents in whose house I was drinking like a schoolgirl.
And they were beginning to fail.
My father was beginning to fail.
And so I was spending time with them and drinking and then with her.
And then when I lost my place to live, I destroyed my apartment and did the alcoholic neglect.
Did the alcoholic neglect.
Something happened.
The thing broke.
It was my fault.
And it flooded my apartment and destroyed the apartment below.
And it took all my money, all my savings to settle out of court and left me with nothing except my car.
And a watch.
People say, like all the time I say, as long as you have a watch, you haven't lost everything.
So I moved in with her and I kept drinking.
And then I decided by the time I really wanted to get sober, I couldn't.
I was in the grip of the disease so much and so fully that I could not stop drinking.
And like I say, I drank every day, but now I really ramped it up.
And the last three or four years, I was working in television, so I time off and stuff.
And what I would do is I would drink all day and all night and I'd go to sleep and then I drank myself to sleep.
And then I would get up at 5.55 a.m.
I would actually set my alarm if I could do it.
And I'd stagger down to Ralph's when the registers would turn over at 6 a.m. to sell alcohol.
And I would buy my pint of vodka and two bottles of wine.
White wine.
A nice chablis.
That was a nice summer wine.
Sometimes a Sauvignon Blanc, something like that.
And because I didn't want to seem like I was an alcoholic, I would, of course, buy something else.
So when I checked out at the counter, I would seem respectable.
So I would buy something like capers.
Visine.
Visine and capers and a bagel, you know, because I'm not an alcoholic.
As a matter of fact, I remember the first amends I made, the first amends I made was to a cashier at the Ralph's on Fountain and La Brea,
who I screamed at at the top of my lungs because she wouldn't sell me my alcohol.
I said, "It's 6 a.m." She said, "Sir, I'm sorry. The registers are on a timer. It's 557."
And I said, "I'm going on a camping trip and I've got to have this for, you know, what we do."
I just made up stuff all the time.
And I went back and made a mess to her when I first did my first part of my night step.
And she was still there.
And so I was sitting there and I was drinking myself to death.
And like I say, I could not get a day sober, ever.
I just couldn't even get a single day.
And like I say, I did not cry because, quite frankly, I thought I was not good enough for it.
I thought it was way up here because I knew it worked.
I knew it worked. I had nothing but the highest respect and awe for it.
And I didn't think I was smart enough or good enough or worthy enough.
And I was slothful and I was lazy and I didn't know what it was.
I didn't know there was a book. I didn't know there were steps.
I knew people who met at meetings and they said, "I'm my first name, alcoholic. I knew that much."
And my parents had a friend, a guy, his name was Jack Bailey.
And he had been a very big announcer in Los Angeles.
He was on a show called Queen for a Day.
And he, I remember, I was nine years old and my parents had a dinner party and they invited Jack and his wife.
And he was the only one not drinking alcohol.
And my parents were, they liked to drink.
They were moderately heavy drinkers, but they were not alcoholics.
I'm the only alcoholic in my family.
There's not a family disease in my family. Sorry.
And I said to my mother and my father after, I said, "How come Jack wasn't drinking?"
Because I had my first martini at nine. I was mixing martinis at nine.
I loved gin as a boy. Can you imagine?
And I was known for being able to mix them and drink them in the mountains.
And my father told me this story about Jack.
That he had woken up on the beach in Hawaii in Honolulu in his suit and in his stage makeup from taping his television show with the water lapping at his face,
not knowing how he had gotten, that he had then joined Alcoholics Anonymous.
I still had no idea. I was, you know, pretty little.
And it turned out that he was a major part of L.A.A.
He was part of the Cecil Hotel group downtown that started A.A. in Los Angeles.
And the beginning of why we read chapter five is when they first did that at the Cecil Hotel.
And so I knew all about it. So I'm drinking myself to death.
I keep returning to this because it's the most vivid part of my story.
Seeing death, wanting to die and something happened.
I cannot tell you what it was, but I somehow put down that bottle, got my ass off the couch.
I went to the phone and it was at 3.45 p.m.
That's why I know the time of my last drink.
And I picked up the phone and I called the only person I knew in A.A.
who was a woman married to my best friend, a normie, who had worked for me on several projects.
And he and I were really close friends.
She, however, couldn't stand me and didn't want me in her house because of my drinking.
She had 15 years sober at the time.
And I would go over to their house and she would go in the other room.
This went on for like five or six years.
And I would say to him, "I don't think Jeannie likes me."
He said, "No, she doesn't."
"But I like you and, you know, she doesn't like the drinking and all that."
But I knew she was in A.A.
And he answered the phone and I said, "I've got to talk to Jeannie."
He thought I was kidding.
He said, "Yeah, right."
I said, "No, please."
I said, "Okay."
And he handed her the phone and she said, "Hi, what's going on?"
I said, "You have to help me."
I can't stop her.
And she said three words that I always say to newcomers today.
"Do you want to go to a meeting?"
"Will you go to a meeting?"
"Will you go to a meeting now?"
"And do you want to be?"
So that came like that.
She said, "Will you go to a meeting?"
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Will you go to a meeting now in an hour?"
"Yes."
And she took me to Radford Hall with five hours of surviving.
And I went into Radford Hall, shaking, crying, sweating, too scared to raise my hand as a newcomer.
And I sat with her and I was like, "This is someone who didn't like me."
But this is someone who I knew and was very open about her survival.
So she was the classic example of that creed.
You know, anytime anyone reaches out for help, I want to hand it.
They always to be there and for that I am responsible.
And she was living that.
I'd later come to realize how important that is myself.
And then I got through the night with the help of a phone call to another friend of mine who had gotten sober.
Finally, I found somebody else that I knew had gotten sober.
He got me on the phone with a doctor who walked me through the night.
My mother gave me, she had some Valium.
She'd barely, almost never talk.
And I got through the night and the next day they rushed me to a hospital.
We brought them to a medical center in Culver City on Washington Boulevard.
And I had a blood pressure of 200 over 130.
And they said, "You're starting to go under seizure."
And I was having doo-teens.
And they said, "You have alcohol poisoning and we've got to get you surveyed right away."
And it was a great program. It was called the Exodus Program.
It was on the top floor.
And it saved my life.
And so when I awoke the next day and I started to go to group and I realized for the first time in over 20 years I had two days sober.
I couldn't believe that. I was astonished.
I was astonished doing the intake with my counselor at the time.
Astonished that I had ended up doing this.
Sitting here allowing myself to turn my will and my lives over to the care of something that I didn't understand quite.
But I knew something had happened.
I had had a spiritual experience.
That's the only way I can define it.
I had had a spiritual experience and the miracle had happened.
The miracle something unexpected.
Because that's what a miracle is.
It's something that's unexpected.
And that was my miracle.
And it stayed with me.
I've never had the reason or the need to go out on it.
So the rest of my sobriety has been a practice and a joyful pretty much existence, you know, like that.
But I knew that I'd been given this gift.
I knew something had happened.
I knew that the obsession had been with me.
And I began to understand what was going on.
And when I got out of that hospital nine days later and I went back to my girlfriend who had cleaned the house of alcohol.
Because they said, you know, if she doesn't do that, you're going to really have to go into sobering living.
And I didn't want to do that.
And she was a good, like I said, a good healthy codependent.
And she was all on board.
She didn't really care about life.
She wasn't quite clear on my going into treatment and so forth.
She just wanted me to pay attention to her, you know.
And she was great in so many ways.
But that's not why I appeared in life.
And I began to be turned on, introduced to, and invited into Alcoholics Anonymous.
And I began to go to meetings every day.
And I realized that I was loving this immediately, immediately.
I became obedient to my sponsor about working the steps, obedient about going to a meeting every day, obedient about calling him.
And because I had had this spiritual experience, I was able to understand the rest of the program.
Now, like I say, I'm not an intellectual, you know, I'm not like that.
I never wanted to and I don't want to know this program beyond my ability to grasp.
That's what I always have to watch out for.
And I don't do that, you know.
So when I got into the book and I got into the steps, I began to get into service.
He'd say, you're going to take a commitment, great.
You're going to go to the 630 Palisades meeting and that great AM.
And everything I was told to do, I did.
And everything I was told to do and that I did, I enjoy.
I did nothing reluctantly. I never argued. I never quibbled about it.
I wasn't trying to wiggle my way out of it.
I didn't have my eye on the door like I always did my whole life.
Or as my father used to say, "I'm full of the banana peel."
And I began getting into this.
And because I, again, had had that spiritual experience, I was raised in a non-observant Jewish household.
So I wasn't burdened with any religious stuff at all.
My parents, we did used to celebrate the four major Jewish holidays. We celebrated Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, and the Oscars.
And so what I realized, in that miracle, in that spiritual experience of this power greater than myself that had lifted this from me, I had done my full surrender.
It's the only surrender I can honestly tell you I've done in my program.
The rest of my program, from that moment on, I don't surrender anymore. I just continually let go.
And as I began to understand in those first one, two, three years, up to five years maybe,
and I began to understand completely and fully the message and the complete truth that there was a solution, that I didn't have to live this way anymore.
Then the understanding of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 Steps was replaced by a continual experience of Alcoholics Anonymous.
That's what I always wish the newcomer.
I wish them the ability to stay long enough to have the experience.
And the experience is different than understanding it.
Because I know plenty of people who say, "I go through the book line by line, word by word."
I say, "You do? Why do you have to do that all the time?"
I mean, I do it with how it pertains to the steps.
I think it's crucial because that's where the solution is.
That's where the sobriety is. That's where it is for me. That's where I go.
That's the treasure map. That leads me to the treasure.
But I have to allow myself continually the 24 years, the months, three weeks, and six years, the experience.
The experience is something I participate in. That's the difference.
I participate. I participate fully in life and in the present.
And so I found something, and fortunately I feel very fortunate that I wasn't really raised in a serious religious household,
but I've sponsored many people who have, and I try to explain to them that what I found in AA is,
with my limited knowledge of Judaism and other religions, is that AA magically allows me a place in the universe that I never had before.
A place that is comforting and exciting, that is unifying, that rejects the divisive, self-centered nature of what I've heard about organized religions.
And so by doing that, I was able to go through these steps and fully look at myself, which wasn't that hard, quite frankly,
because my defects of character, those patterns of behavior that didn't work for me were very, very vivid and very, very clear.
I did not have a problem. Although when I had two months and my sponsor said, "Time to do your fourth step," and I said, "Yeah, what do you mean?"
He said, "Well, I want you to write this out and the cons and the this."
I said, "Can't we just have a little chat, like me at the coffee bean? I'll have a non-fat latte and you can have a..."
He said, "Well, we could, but you probably drink." And that's all I had to do to close out of my voice.
And I did it without fear. I really did. I really came to it without fear.
I came to it with curiosity and adventurousness and the ability to work each step and at the end of each step be able to say to him and to myself, "Well, now what?"
And that's how I like to do the steps. Well, now what? Now what are we going to do? What are we going to do now?
Okay, well, once I admit my powerlessness, once I do my first step, which has no solution in it that I've ever found, which is the good thing about it,
now I get into the solution and I work the remaining 11 steps. And through that, somehow, magically, my thinking changes and I have that wonderful shift they talk about.
And that's why experience, the word experience, which appears more than 50 times in the big book, mostly centered around many times spiritual experience that we must have.
The experience, no matter how far down the scale we have gone, we'll see how our experience can help others. There's nothing so true.
Nothing ensures our sobriety, but practical experience has shown in helping others and can help us with that.
So once I was willing to participate, I've never had to do that. I've never had to go back.
I've never had to return to the old thinking and the old behavior and the old conditioning and the old programming. I haven't.
And when I almost went out 10 years and 10 months of sobriety because I became a caregiver for my parents and I did that the first 13 years of my sobriety until my mother passed.
And I lived with them. It was my classic living amends. It's the best thing I've ever. It was a glorious time.
It was years without taking care of them because I was an aggravating, destructive, expensive, dysfunctional child.
We caused nothing but problems in the family. And I went from that to being running interference.
And they both slipped away and they both died in my arms. My mother at 99 and my dad at 93.
And I got to experience, again, there's that word, by participating in life, but moreover, participating and understanding the experience of the present.
Something I never could. I could never honor the moment. I could never let go of no longer and not yet.
I was always in between. I was always straddling those things. I was always just waiting for the next great thing.
I was always impatient. I was always restless and irritable and discontinued. I was always disturbed.
And today I'm not. Today I've gone from a guy who used to see how much drugs and alcohol you could put in his system to a guy who wants to see how undisturbed he's going to be and how calm he's going to be and how he's going to live with it.
With the lack of suffering. I've not suffered a single bit of my sobriety. Not real suffering.
I've had some difficulties. I have chronic condition since I was a child that just has begun to kind of crop up a little bit.
And I've had many, a couple of experiences, more than two actually, where I was forced to be hospitalized, writhing in agony for five hours on an ER gurney.
And never once did I think, oh, I need something or I want something. All I kept saying is, hmm, what can I make of this? How can I remain cured?
How can I turn this around and prevent that suffering? And that's kind of what how I live today.
I get curious. I wonder what's going to happen. I kind of wonder how am I going to flip this so that I can enjoy where it's because it's ultimately the only choice I have is that.
And so by doing that and by living inside these 12 steps, which I do, by the way, I don't isolate.
I don't do maintenance on 10, 11 or 12. I keep all 12 right here all the time inside me. The awareness of them is never, never too far.
And so two years and 10 months when I was watching my father fade away in a hospital room and being told by the doctors he was going to be permanently different.
And he was going to require even more care than he did require the first year and a half I took care of him.
I thought to myself, oh, this is it. Now, at this time, I was going to eight meetings a week at least. I was sponsoring four men.
I had five commitments. And yet this was sort of a deal breaker in my mind, my old idea of correct all.
So I went out to my car in the hospital parking lot. The sponsor was in Europe. I couldn't call him.
And I picked up the 12 and 12 and began flipping through and then I stopped at step three.
I didn't even know what I was doing. I was just flipping through the book. I stopped at step three and I thought, oh, oh, there it is.
I forgot that I made the decision to turn my will and my lives into the girl goddess. And I didn't go out and I did not feel, by the way, great relief.
The next day and a half to two years. But I didn't use it. I was able to be of comfort to my mother.
And I've never gotten that close to a relapse since I had another squirrely moment, 13 years of sobriety, but nothing, nothing threatening like that.
Two girls in 10 months, which I remember again because I was willing and that's what I felt living inside. Step three, understanding that I had been restored to sanity.
One of my favorite parts of the language of the book is the prefix re re restore, relax, return, reassess, re means go back, return to that.
Right. So I've been restored to sanity, which to me means I've been restored to good judgment.
That's all it means. It's the end of my fantasy world and I've been restored to good judgment.
Now, the rest of it, if I'm able to constantly let go and let go and let go, then I'm always turning it over.
I'm living inside that experience. I'm participating in not taking it back.
I'm participating in not being disturbed or upset or angry.
And when I'm living in that consciousness and that reality, then I can understand that God is real.
That's what my higher power is, reality. And God's will for me, except reality. My acceptance, the way things are, is great.
Whether I understand them or not, things are going to be just as they are.
And so I've been able to live in not just acceptance, which can sometimes take the form of compliance, like, OK, I'll accept it, but just you wait.
You know, to me, what I've been able to do, and this just happened in the last maybe three or four years, is to turn acceptance into something that is perfect.
It's perfect. I perfectly accept things and then they become joyful.
There's actually a joy that can come from accepting things that I didn't expect, things that I didn't prefer, things that I didn't want.
And then I've achieved the ultimate goal, I think, for me, which is emotional survival, because I've been able to give up my selfish expectations, my unreasonable demands and my unnecessary dependencies.
Those three things. Selfish expectation, unreasonable demands, unnecessary dependence.
And when I do that, I'm left with the most wonderful two things of all, clear perception.
That's what I never had when I drank the noodles. That's how I lost everything.
I did not perceive it correctly. My visceral gut reactions to things were my mind wasn't clouded by alcohol and drugs or by my selfish desires or my unnecessary cravings.
I was lost. So Alcoholics Anonymous ultimately is giving me this clarity of perception, clarity of perception,
which allows me to easily segue into perspective. Perspective is what I do with the perception.
It's the importance I give of what I'm perceiving. So I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, oh, well, what am I going to do with that?
What's my assignment here? Whether it's taking somebody to the steps, whether it's reaching out my hand to the newcomer,
whether it's sharing it with me, whether it's the next indicated action, first things first, easy does it, live and let live.
These wonderful slogans that I live by for the first two years I was sober, sometimes that was all I could do, use these slogans as almost a tranquilizer to not make things any different,
but to somehow guide me into a better way of doing things, giving me a better state of mind, giving me that attitude of gratitude.
And so if I have that clarity of perception, then I get the greatest thing of all, an accuracy of response, accuracy of response.
So I have the clear perception, a mindfulness about the perspective, and then I get to respond.
Actionless action is sometimes the greatest thing I'm able to do.
So that's where I am about that. And when I sponsor, what I try to share is I'm asked by guys to be their sponsor.
I sponsor a couple of women, too, who have time. But when I get asked and I say all I can do is a point of view.
That's what Alcoholics Anonymous is doing. It's changed my point of view. It hasn't made me smarter.
It hasn't made me lofty. It hasn't made me more academic or more anything like that.
But it's given me a point of view about the world and about the people, places and things in it.
That's what it's given me. And it's given me that ability to smile more often than not, to find okayness in nothing in particular, to be grateful.
There's so many different things. To realize that when I used to have a guy, he used to save me from you.
One of the first guys I sponsored, he'd say to me, "All I want to do is get my ducks in a row.
I said, "There aren't any ducks. There is no row, but maybe we can do other things. Maybe we can do other things."
And that's going to happen slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but it generally will.
So I'm going to close with something. One of my mentors was a man named Sandy Beach, and I went on Sandy Beach's last retreat.
And he used to close his retreats with a small writing from a 13th century Chinese master named Wuhan.
He said, "Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in awe, the cool breeze and some of the snow in winter.
When the vine isn't cluttered by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life."
Thanks for letting me share.