September 19, 2025 • 40 mins
Carin S. Step 11, Step Series at the Tuesday Night Step Group, Twelve Step House, Fort Lauderdale, FL. 9/16/2025
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is Karen.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
I'm an alcoholic and my sobriety date is September the eighth,
last Monday, nineteen eighty eight, celebrated thirty.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Seven years of continuous sobriety. Didn't really celebrate.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It was raining to the points where my ceiling fell
in and water came up off the floor, and you know,
you go to call your person and he's sick, and
nothing went right for me.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It's all about me, so I recognized it.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Well, we didn't really celebrate, but it was it's all good,
It's all good.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
We also went out to dinner like a few nights.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Later with friends of ours who are in the room tonight,
and I didn't eat very much at dinner and I
ate it tonight, which was.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
A big mistake.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
So you may be hearing some of the dinner from
Saturday nights.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
I'm saying anyway, it's good to be here. You look
good for me. I need you to be here tonight.
I need you to be here tonight. We're gonna talk
about the eleventh step. But I want to roll back.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I want to roll to take back just a little
bit and just do a tiny little recap.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
A lot of people here tonight, I don't recognize a
lot of you.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
I do recognize, so I just I think the most
important thing that we can start out saying tonight is
that the first ten steps it's not a permanent fix period.
Can't do the first ten steps and think that that's
it for you for the rest of the time. Doesn't
work that way. As a matter of fact, if we
don't keep practicing those steps, that obsession comes back.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I don't know why that is either.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
You know, it's not a question of like, I have
to do the steps again, I have to do the
steps again. It's what I'm saying is that if we
don't put them in our lives, take them off the
wall and put them in our lives and keep practicing
these things, that obsession comes back. And what we lose
is we lose that freedom from thinking about alcohol. And
I don't know about you, but if my thinking, which
stayed with me long after I stopped drinking, and eventually
(01:51):
the thinking gets so bad, is that we have to drink.
I mean, everybody knows that. That's not a big secret.
Why do you think they take that think sign and
have it upside down? Because that's who we are. So
the twelve steps in total are our plan for living,
and we got that.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And the only reason why it's our plan for living
is because it worked better than my plan. My plan
didn't work for me. You know, I drank. I thought
I had a good plan, but at the end of
that plan, I drank, I drank or I used, so
it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
But in step eleven, the interesting thing is is that
we come to understand how important the first step is.
I didn't really see that for a long long time,
but I now know that. You know, we weren't looking
for spirituality in step one. I can tell you that
we were looking to stop drinking. We were looking to
feel better. I wanted to be a little less crazy.
You know, I wasn't even concerned with in step one
what kind of a person I was, or everybody else
(02:38):
was concerned about that, but I was not. I just
wanted to.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Stop using and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So the thing is is that the most important thing
about step one we've already we've already discussed this one
hundred times, is that you know, I was powerless over
alcohol when I was drinking it. My life was unmanageable
when I wasn't, but I wasn't looking for any kind
of spirituality. But here's the thing in order to stop
that insanity of the first step I pretty much realized
(03:06):
fairly soon is that I'm gonna need something else other
than me, that I'm not gonna be.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Able to be the one that actually makes this happen.
But here's the real interesting thing about this.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
This is why I love AA. Because we can't convince
you that there's.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
A higher power. We don't have that.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I don't have the authority to do that. I can
convince you that I have a higher power, but I
can't convince you that.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You have a higher power. The only thing I can
convince you of is that you're gonna need one. That's
the only.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Thing that I can convince you of after that Step eleven.
By this time we get there is an extraordinarily individual step.
As a matter of fact, people are gonna kill me
for saying this, But if you have a great sponsor,
they can't help you. Can't help you with step eleven.
It is so personal, it is so individual. It's like
getting married, which you know I know a lot about.
(03:56):
It's like getting married, and when you're going up there
and you're about to say your vows, some of a
guy walks up here and says, I think I'm gonna
take you through these vows.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
You who are you?
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I'm gonna just sponsor. I'm gonna take you through this.
It's between me and God. It's between you and God.
Nobody can help you. Sponsor can't help you. They can
tell you how it helped them, but they can't tell
you how it's gonna help you.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
But here's the thing. When you get to that.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Point that you recognize that you need a higher power
and that no one's gonna be able to show you
how to get that higher power, a higher power shows up.
I don't know how that is, but that's how AA works.
You look up one day and you're not alone anymore.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
You're not alone anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
You've got something there that you didn't have before.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
So I say all this to say I usually don't
tell this story.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This time of the year because it gets to me.
But tonight I promise that I would. Sorry will so.
On September eighth, nineteen ninety three, for five years, almost
five years, four years, three hundred and sixty four days.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
I was sober without God. It was sober without a
higher power.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
It can be done by the way, which is why
we agnostics. It's such an important chapter to read.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
It can be done. It's easier with God, I can.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Tell you that, but it can be done without God.
And I faked it through five years. I had an
excellent sponsor. I had great AA posse. I went to meetings,
I sponsored people, I was sponsored. I did all the
things they said to do. And I had no God
in my life whatsoever. And I was married for the
third time, and after the first two times where I
(05:32):
was drunk, I got sober in the third marriage. And
I actually it was the only marriage I got married in.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
That I wasn't afraid.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
You know that I fell in love and this guy
was the guy for me. And by the way, I
gave away this guide over a bottle of wine, So
that told you how great he was.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
You know, I know how to make my choices, but
I stayed with him. We loved each other. He was
my person. He was my person.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You know, he understood he wasn't one of us. He
was a very spiritual guy. And we decided to get
married because that's what I do. That's that's my solution.
I decided to get married. We got married, and he
had a son and I had a son. His son
was six weeks younger than my son.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
What else did we have?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
We're inter racial. He was black, I was white. His
kid was black, my kid was white.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
I wound up raising a little black child a little
white child, and it was fiercely fabulous.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
But I didn't have any God in my life at all.
And we decided we want to have a baby ourselves.
We thought that would be a good addition, you know,
like a weird, little britty bunch kind of family.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And we were just going to make this happen.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And we tried for three years, three years of not succeeding,
and I really couldn't understand it because we've both had
kids with other marriages, so.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
We knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
And you know, we just decided that we would go
to our respective doctors one day and come back and
give the report. And I went to my doctor and
they ran all these kind of tests on me. And
by the way, you know, my doctor was the one
that delivered my son as a drunk pregnant woman.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
So my doctor knew my background, you know, she knew my.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Alcohol background, and she knew my drug abuse background, and
she said, well, we're going to check you out pretty
good and we're going to see maybe.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
You're the problem. And she said, you got to clean
dull of health. You're good.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
So that night we went to dinner and we were
in a restaurant and I said, you know, everything's good
with me, and uh, doctor says, I'm good to go.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
He says, not so good with me. I have AIDS.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
And we had been having We've been trying to have
a baby for three years.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
I was only a couple of years sober, one year
sober or something like that. And all I could think of.
My first thought was, God, I have no idea why
you gave me this life if you're just going to
take it away now. Because if you remember, in the
eighties and the nineties, we had AIDS one hundred percent mortality.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Nobody lived.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
It's a different different scenario today, but nobody lived. And
so we went on this spiral really of you know,
drug testing and hospitals, and every time he got sick,
we went to the hospital and they would wrap us
in plastic because nobody knew how you got it, and
everybody was scared, and they were scared of once his
(08:17):
own doctor died of ads. And this is I'm doing
all of this with my family and not recognizing how
far down I'm sinking again, how far down I'm sinking.
He's the one that's sick, but I'm the one that's dying.
And the only thing that is going right in my
life is that I'm not drinking and I'm not using,
and there is nothing else that is going right anyway.
(08:40):
Towards the end, it got so bad that I remember
walking down the streets. We were in booking by then,
and I walked down the street and I didn't know.
It was like spit in my mouth or something.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I don't know, but YO know, I'm in New York.
I'll spit on the street in a skinny minute, you know.
And I turned around and I.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Spit on the street, and I spit out a mouthful
of blood, and I thought, you got a problem, girl,
You got a problem.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I looked down at my hand.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
My hand was bandaged because he kept wanting the window
open and the window closed. And finally I lost my
patience and I put my fist through a plate of glass.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I mean, I was going down.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
He was sick and he was dying, but I was
going down anyway.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
On the eve of my fifth birthday.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
And I just actually had this conversation this afternoon on
the eve of my fifth birthday. We had a fight,
and I'd like to say we had a fight, but
you need two people to fight.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And at that point he was no longer able to
have a conversation with me.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
He was talking to people in the walls, and he
had very few lucid moments. And we had these two kids,
and I had to watch the kids, and we had
this person who was coming in from the state to
try to help us, and the house was a wreck,
and you know, nobody wanted to see us. His family
abandoned us. My family abandoned us. I had a couple
of people in AA who used to come over, but
(09:52):
they were afraid to walk in the door. You have
to remember the younger ones in here, you don't don't
think about this now, but for the older people in here,
you didn't go near anybody that had it because you
had no idea what was going to happen. But try
taking four year olds to the clinic to have them
tested for AIDS every three months, you know, that's what
(10:13):
we had to do.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
I had to do it.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
I had sixteen AIDS tests within four year period, and
I went with my sponsor every time we used to
go to Harlem.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
It was what do you call it, anonymous.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Testing, because in those days, if you tested positive, they
took your kids.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
And I couldn't chance that.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And on top of that, it took three months to
find out what your results for. And you know we're alcoholic,
that's not you know, my best asset is not waiting.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I can tell you that.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
And so they would test me, and I would wait
three months, and three months later Albert and I would
go back up to Harlem and they would tell me
I was negative and they'd say, just one minute, we
need to test you again.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
And they did this every three months for four years.
I was I never got it, the kids never got it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I really don't know, because the doctors had told us
that his medical condition when they diagnosed him was so
bizarrely low is that they figured he'd had had it
for about fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
And so you know, medically, who knew what was going on? Anyway,
at the end, you could tell, you could.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Walk in the house and tell something was desperately wrong
in the house.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
You know, we were all going down.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
The kids were getting crazy, I was getting crazy. And
he sat me down one day and he said, I'm
ready to go. And because I am who I am,
and because I had no God, and because I thought
that I could control this, I said, you're not ready
to go. I'm not ready for you to go. The
kids are not ready for you to go. Everybody's ready
(11:35):
for you to stay. Let's just have some dinner and
everything will be okay. And then later on that night
we had a horrendous fight, and or I had a
horrendous fight, and I screamed at him with such veracity
over everything that was wrong that he fell to the floor.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
He just fell to the ground and couldn't get up.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And somewhere in that scenario I croaked out an apology,
which I'm so grateful that I managed to do that,
because we went to sleep that night and I was
pissed and didn't sleep in the same room with him.
And when I woke up the next morning, he was gone,
and the front door was open, and he hadn't been
out of the house in years.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Front door was open, and he was gone.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
And on the piano where it was his wedding band,
his wallet, his watch and.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Some other stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
And I began making phone calls and I called his
family and started calling the neighbors and called.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
People in AA.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
And you know, I'll tell you, if you're get into trouble,
just call AA. Skip everybody else and just call the
people in AA. And they all came over to the
house and they started making xeroxes. You've seen this in
the movies of his face, and they're all over the
streets putting his pictures up.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
And you know, I wanted to go out and looking for.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Him, and the police came and they said, you have
to stay here because if he comes back here and
doesn't see you here, he might get distressed. And so
I stayed in the house and I walked outside for
about I don't know, maybe an hour or two later,
and it started to rain. And I've got a thing
about the rain. I've got a thing about water, a
thing about the.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Ocean, and we'll talk about it later. But as soon
as started rating, I thought, these are God's tears. He's gone.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Anyway, About three o'clock in the afternoon, you know, there
was a knock at the door and the police were there,
and I had scoured the house, and you know, I
got a little crazy.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
I was a little crazy, and I looked all over
the house for him.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And I remember reading some kind of an article about
Karen Carpenter when she went to kill herself.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
They found her in a closet. I went through every
closet in the house.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I went under the beds in the house, I went everywhere,
and he was, you know, nowhere. And the police came
about three o'clock and they said, you know, you were
you missus so and so. And I'm like I am
and they said, you know, was this person in your husband?
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I said he is. I said, why are you talking
in the past tense? And they said you are.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
And then I realized what they were saying to me,
and they said, your husband is at Saint Vincent's hospital.
He jumped in front of a subway. He got hit
on impact, he died, and we need you to come and.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Identify the body.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
And you know, there's there's nothing that prepares you for that.
There's nothing. And the next thing I know, you know,
his relatives were throwing themselves on top of me, and
everybody's screaming and crying, and the police are there and
they're like, you know, we'll take you down. And I
remember distinctly saying to them, don't worry about I'll.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Get a cab and no, no, no, no, we're going
to take you down.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
And they took us down, and I was in the
back of the car with his mother and his brother,
his younger brother, and we got to the hospital and
they took me down, you know, down down down down
to the morgue. And I had seen way too.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Much law and order, I have to tell you. I mean,
I really would have done better without that, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
But they brought me in there and I was, you know,
waiting for I don't know what I was waiting for.
But when they brought me in there, they left me
in there alone, and he was already on the table,
and I walked over and I.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Began to feel strange.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
I began to feel really strange because I realized that
I couldn't put my finger on it.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
But he had waited for me. I could feel it.
I could feel it.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
And I had more fear after he was dead than
I ever had waiting for him to die from this
horrendous disease.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
And I went over to him.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
And I put my head on his chest and still
had pieces of glass in it from the subway, and
I started to talk to him, and then I turned
my face to him, and some type of essence came.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Out from him.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
And I can't explain it, except that the room got
very bright, and I started to breathe in this essence.
And the only thing I can tell you that it
felt like was that I could breathe underwater.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It was like I had put my head underwater.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
And taken its deep breath, and I could feel this,
and I knew exactly what it was, even though I
had never felt anything.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Like that before.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
But I knew that I was breathing in the essence
of God as sure as I was sitting there, and
because when I breathed it in, and when I couldn't
hold my breath another second, the voice of God came
to me and said, with great God comes great love,
and with great love comes great responsibility.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
And then there was nothing. And then there was nothing.
The doctors came in, the police came in, his family
came in.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I couldn't speak to anybody. I couldn't possibly tell them
what had happened to me. I was still so filled
with this, and thirty two years later, I need to
tell you that when I need to, I sit and
I get quiet, and I breathe in, and.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
It breathes in all over again. And it has been
like that for over three decades. So I've heard the
voice of God.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
For years and years and years, and I can't explain
why it's me because I'm wast a godless, soulless woman
out there on the street after twenty five years of
drinking and drugging. They used to find me on the
streets of Broadway, eating out of garbage cans. How did
this woman thirty two years later breathe in the essence
of God with the message as I'm breathing it in
that you have to do something about this. You don't
(17:06):
get to get me without giving it away. And that's
pretty much been my life in AA. That's pretty been
That's been my life.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
So I go back when I.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Work with people and they say to me, you know,
how do I find God where you sure as hell
don't want to find them the way I found it.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
But it's when. It's not how, it's when. So I
can tell you.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
What happened to me, But I can't tell you how
it's going to happen for you. I just know that
when you get quiet, it'll happen. You have to be
able to pay attention to see what is going on here.
So my conception of God was zero. I had no
conception of God. And by the way, I teach that
(17:49):
to people that I sponsor, if you can't figure out
what you want and God, let's make up your own.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Conception of God. I never had that.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I have no idea what my conception of God is
except my God is so big and so strong that
there's nothing that my God can't do. And I'm a
hard leaner. I lean hard. And it tells me in
the book that I'd been to human help and human
help that failed me. So now I had a God.
(18:16):
Now what do I do? I have a God and
I've always.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Heard this voice, but he never told me what his
will is. And when I would get to this eleven
step with people and they would say, well, if you've
had this experience.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
And by the way, I don't speak about this anymore
like years really that this comes to mind, and mostly
because this year on the anniversey of his death.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Thirty two years he's thirty two when he died.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So you know, he's now dead longer than he was alive,
which is unimaginable to me, you know. But I think
at the same time that I'm thirty seven years sober,
and you know, for thirty two of those thirty seven.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Years, I've been giving God away.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
I've been trying to tell you that if you close
your up and hold my hand and breathe with me,
you're going to feel the essence of God. Open your mouth.
Don't breathe in through your nose. There's not enough room
open your mouth. So I wanna, I wanna talk a
little bit about in this step about they talk about
prayer and meditation.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I'm not good at either. Haha. Not good meditator, not
good prayer. Done it, I do it. I do it
all the time.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
I you know, a very famous man used to say,
pray without ceasing, and I do.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
You know, I don't get on my knees and pray.
I don't have a set prayer.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
You know. The eleven step tells me that I have
a relationship with God, and it's a conscious relationship with him.
And you think about how you how you develop a
relationship with a human being.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And that's through talking everybody I've.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Ever loved in my whole life. That began with a conversation,
you know, and nothing else. And so I talked to
God all day long. I had a conversation last night
with at one of the meetings I go to in Delray,
and he's a lovely guy and he's all about breathing
and you know this and that. And I said to mom,
I'm all about the crying because I don't understand. I said,
(20:11):
I cry all the time. You know, I'm a strong woman.
I'm a faithful woman. I have a God who resides
within me. And I cry every day and sometimes many
times a day, and I'm not sad. You need to
know that crying has nothing to do with being sad.
And you can be sad and cry, that's okay. But
because you're crying because I'm crying, it doesn't mean I'm sad.
(20:32):
It means I'm getting rid of something. I'm getting rid
of something and I'm making more room for God. We
did it in the fourth step. We do it in
the ninth step. We did it in sixth, we did
it in seventh. We are constantly unloading, unloading, so I
can make more room for God. And if you don't
understand your God, it doesn't matter. Nobody wants a homeless God.
(20:53):
Everybody wants God within themselves.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Chuck C.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Chuck Chamberlain, one of the.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Founding fathers of this organization, used to say, if you're
looking for God, what you're looking for, you're looking with
He was pretty clear about that. You know, he's still
a story. Was He was a weird old guy, but
he was a deer hunter. And I guess deer hunting
was acceptable wherever he was, you know, living and anyway,
(21:19):
he was coming out of the deer hunting place, and guys,
you can correct me on my vernacular later. I don't
really know what it's called, but the deer hunting place,
you know, whatever that is. And the woods, okay, kicking,
Oh my god, that's so sad.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
I am such a New Yorker. The woods, coming out
of the woods. And he had a truck also, I
know it's a truck.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
I don't know what kind, but he was a truck
and he was coming out of the woods with the
truck and in the back of the truck he had
two dead deer that he had, you know, shot or
bow and arrowed.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
I don't know what he did. And this guy came
over and he said, you know, I'm here.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I also want to go into the woods and kill
some deer, and you know, and where are they? Where
are they? And Chuck looked at him and said, you
see him where they are. You don't see him where
they're not. And he says, oh, oh, So the guy
goes into the woods. He had no idea that Chuck
was sending him on this spiritual journey because you see him.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Where they are. You want to find God. God is
where he is. It's not where he's not. It's not Worri,
he's not some things I knew up front.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I was pretty certain God wasn't in the bar. I
was pretty certain that God wasn't in the shooting.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Gallery, you know.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
But now I know that you know what I'm looking for.
When I'm looking for God, I stand in front of
the mirror because God lives within me. And by the way,
I don't know if it's good and I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
If it's bad, but I can tell you don't have
any choice about it.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I don't have any choice about housing the size of
the God that I.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
House, and I've had tried to have this conversation. Bizarrely enough,
don't do this. I've tried to have this conversation with clergymen.
Don't do this.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Don't tell them that you have God living inside of
you and that you don't need to be in a
synagogue or in a church to be able to find God,
because they just want you gone. And please don't tell
anybody else what you're telling me, because they want their
pulpits filled.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
But my God lives within me.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I don't need to be in church, and if you
want to look around, you know everybody's in here with their.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Concept of God.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
So praying for me is a little controversial because I
don't pray for anybody, and I know that it pisses
people off, and it pisses them off to the point
when I tell them I don't pray for anybody, because
it tells me I don't pray for anybody. I just
do what the step says to do, and it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Say to pray for anybody.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And the reason it doesn't say to pray for anybody,
and this is the controversial part, is because that's a
tacit acknowledgment that I know more than God, you know
your mother is sick. I'm so sorry she's sick. Oh,
I'll pray for her. That says, I know you're busy
over here, God doing something else, so don't worry about it.
I'm going to take care of this guy's mother because
you're too busy.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
It's not how it works. It's not how it works.
I have to have enough faith in my God and faith.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
In the universe to know that everybody's got a higher
power that I can hope that your mother is okay,
and I can have faith that God will help her.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
But I'm not God and my prayers. You don't want
my prayers.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
You want God. You don't need me. And I have
said this a million times. Many times I've said this
from the podium.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
People will invariably.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Call me and write me and discuss with me how
wrong that theory is and that you know, this gives
me respect, and this gives me this and this is
not about me. It's about God, because what it tells
us in the eleven step is when we get the
power back, It's about God.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
It's not about me. So what do I pray for.
I've said it before.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
I pray for clarity, just let me see this the
way it is. I had to do it, you know today.
Let me see him.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
For what he is and who he is, and not
for who I want him to be.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
And I pray, pray, pray all the time, and then
I pray for courage.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
To see if there's anything I'm supposed to do, and.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
The most courageous thing I can do is nothing, absolutely nothing,
and leave it to God.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
You know, I don't know what it is. You know,
I would say, you back for a second that.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Albert, my sponsor, made me talk about this story about
what happened in the Morgue for years.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
He said, I want you to go to every AA
meeting you.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Can possibly go to, and I want you to talk
about it all over the place because people need to
know that this can actually happen. And then you're walking
around like a regular person, still making mistakes and still.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Cursing, and you know you're not on some kind of
a pedestal anywhere anyway. You know. After he died, we.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Got back from the Morgue and I didn't know what
to do. I made a phone call to my friend Michael.
I always say Michael in case he listens to this
at some point, and Michael celebrated forty five years.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
The other day. I mean, I love this man. He's
been in my life forever.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
And he's the only person alive.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Actually who remembers me drinking and using.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
He used to come to my apartment in Manhattan and
sit on the couch to make sure I didn't no date.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
I mean, that's a friend. So he got sober.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
He was sober when he came over, and you know,
and I didn't know. And he said, I said, I
don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.
And he said, go to an AA meeting. I'm going
to get there and the speaker hasn't shown up. Volunteer
to speak, And so I went to a meeting in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I'm a real snob. We were living in Brooklyn, but
I only went to Manhattan meetings, so.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I didn't know anybody in these Sorry for anybody from Brooklyn.
I didn't know anybody in the Brooklyn meetings. And I
showed up and they said the speaker's not here.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Was someone volunteer? I volunteered to speak?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
And I walked up and there's my upstairs neighbors sitting
right there, you know, and these are the neighbors that
I lied to for years about what was going on
with us. So I would say, he's going to Atlanta,
he's going here. My husband was in the entertainment business,
so they were you know he was he was in
the music business, so he travel a lot anyway, so
you know, they were there. And so years and years later,
and I'm telling this story to everybody who will listen,
(27:06):
this woman calls me up and she said, you know, hi, Karen.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
You know, this is Lucy from the whatever meeting. And
I said, Hi, how are you. She said, I'm good.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I'm just calling to let you know that my husband,
John died. So I said, oh, I'm so sorry that
that happened. You know, when did it happen? And she
said right now? But I heard your story and I
knew that you made a call, so I'm making the call.
You know, the.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Eleventh Step is not for everyone. I need to tell you.
Once you get there, there's no turning back. There's no
turning back.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
It's exquisitely individual. It's a relationship that's beyond your wildest imagination.
And it's the longest running relationship I have in my life.
It is the longest certainly lasted any longer long any
of my marriages.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
For sure. You know that I can't turn around and
tell people I'm married to God. They'll think I'm a nun.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
But it's the longest relationship of that type that I
have had.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
So that's what I do. That's how I pray. I
don't pray for anybody.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I pray for clarity and I pray for courage with
the understanding by the way that I know from breathing
this in that God doesn't make anything happen. He doesn't
make good things happen, and he doesn't make bad things happen.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
I grew up in a house you know where you know.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
We would say Daddy, what are you doing this weekend?
And he'd say, God willing, we're going to the movies.
I now know that God doesn't give a shit if
we go to the movies or not.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
God does not make anything happen.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Stuff happens, good stuff happens, bad stuff happens. What God
gives me is the strength to deal with whatever happens.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Whatever happens, I have my God.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
And if you're an alcoholic and a drug addict like me,
it's more important for me to have a God when
the good things are happening, because my tendency was to
use when I felt you for because when I felt bad,
that's my default setting. I know what that feels like.
But when I was feeling good, what am I gonna
(29:10):
do with that feeling?
Speaker 1 (29:11):
When things are going well?
Speaker 2 (29:13):
When I have the man of my dreams, the job
of my dreams, the house of my dreams, I know
I better get rid of all of it. I better
get in the car and go. That's where my head goes.
But that's where my God says.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It's time to just sit and look at the water
and breede me in. Just take a big breath. Everything
will be okay.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
And the thing is about having a God in your life,
if you really sit down and think about it, all
it really really means is if you close your eyes,
you know that everything is already okay.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
It's already okay because God's got you. That's it. So
there's nothing I have to think about and nothing I
have to do because I've prayed.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
For clarity and I pray for courage and the rest
is up to God. So that's my prayer. I don't
do it in the morning. I'm not recommending any of this.
By the way, this is just me. I do it
all the time. I do it all the time.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Because I need it all the time.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I work with a lot of alcoholics. I work with
a lot of crazy people who are not alcoholics. I
need prayer all the time. I need conversation. I don't start,
you know, anything else out I have conversations with God
all of the time, and that's.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
What keeps me strong. So I want to talk a
little bit about meditation while we're on things I don't
know how to do. I clearly do not come off
as a person who meditates. I make no bones about that.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Meditation was always hard for me, my feeling meditations. Put
me in a dark room with chair, make me meditate.
Make sure there's a forty five in there so I
can shoot myself in the head.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
I had no intention.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I mean, what do I do with my life for
sixty seconds when when my sponsor has says, just take
sixty seconds and do nothing. Your long sixty seconds is
to do nothing, to think about nothing. And I said,
how do you think about nothing? He says, it's your
thoughts that got you into trouble to begin with. It's
your thinking that gets you into trouble to begin with.
(31:08):
It's like your thinking is waiting for you to wake
up in the morning, and as soon as you wake up,
it says, I don't make enough money. As soon as
you wake up or you wake.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Up under death, he's gonna leave me. Oh my god,
my thinking is there. And so meditation.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
And that's why, by the way, that's why the majority
of alcoholics pray and meditate in the morning. It's not
that they're so spiritual. They can't stand the thinking.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
The static, you know, because.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
When you look at the ten step by the way,
where we just came from, when it talks about you know,
when we're disturbed, there's something wrong with us?
Speaker 1 (31:38):
What is wrong with us? We're disturbed? How do I
know that? Because I'm thinking about it. I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Thinking about what is because nothing what's disturbing me, because
there's nothing physically happening to me at that moment. I'm
just thinking about it. And so I had to find
a way for me.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
To learn how to meditate very hard.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
So I have a special relationship with the sea. Everywhere
I've lived except in Manhattan, I've lived by the water,
and I look at the water and I think the
answers are in the water.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, I'm good for getting in my car and going.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
To the ocean or going to a lake and disappearing
for a couple of days and just staring at the water,
because that's it. I think that's where the answers are.
I see God more clearly in the water.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Than anything else.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
But this goes back to, you know, old habits. At
the end of my drinking, I was, you know, I
was drinking in the shower. There's more water, you know,
I cry all the time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
There's more water. You know. I have this sort of
unusual relationship with water that I love.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
But my relationship with God is all about what Step
eleven is talking about.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Okay, so my God. I had all these things to say,
and I didn't read any of them. So there we go.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
In the old days, they used to talk about if
you want to clear out a room of AA, just
talk about God. People just walk out all the time.
I don't know who those people are, but I know
they walked out. People walk out. It's hard to listen
about God. It's hard to listen to somebody to talk
about God. I either feel like I'm playing ketchup, or
there's some kind of a competition that I'm not as
good as you, or I don't have a god.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
And what am I going to do? But the reality
is you do.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
You do. And the reason I know that is because
I do, and I've worked with enough men and women
and I sponsor men and women to know that it's there.
You just have to get quiet enough to listen for it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
It's all you need to do.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
The other thing I want to say is that as
much as I loved my sponsor, when it came to
you living step, I sought help from an old timer.
He's a kind of famous old timer, Sandy Beach, Sandy
Bee who lived up in Tampa. But he was an
old friend of mine and he was really wonderful. And
I was so distraught when he died because I used
(33:59):
to go to him with these problems. Because the reason
I went to him with these problems is because his
daughter died.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
When my husband died, and his daughter died badly. She
was murdered, and the guy.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
That murdered her rolled her up in a rug and
put her in the back of the house like the garbage,
so nobody knew where she was.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
For a very long time and until they found her.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
And I had gone through that because when they found
my husband, you know.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
On the tracks at West fourth Street, he.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Didn't have any identification on him, and so they went
through a whole big thing.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Of trying to figure out who he was.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And the police had given him a ticket for jumping
the turnstile like two stops before, and if they had
not given him the ticket, nobody would have found him,
nobody would have known who he was. And so Sandy
and I used to talk about that, and he would
say the most important thing that you can remember the
two things and one we just talked about that God
doesn't make anything happen.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
God didn't kill his daughter. God didn't kill my husband.
God didn't give my husband an AIDS. God didn't make
me not have aids. God didn't do it any of
those things.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
He said, No matter what happens to you in this world,
it should not change your opinion of God. If I
can impart anything at all, no matter what happens to me,
what happens to my family, what happens to my loved ones,
it does.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Not change my opinion of God.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
It's the same opinion I had before anything bad happened
or anything good happened.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
So the conscious contact is the point of this poet.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
It's not just like knowing God, it's knowing God on
a conscious level all the time. That's why I talk
to God all the time, because that's the thing that
tells us if I'm talking all the time, that everything
is already okay. I'm the only one who didn't know it.
And that's important to remember. You know, when it looks
very dark, everything's really okay, everything's really okay.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I just don't know it yet.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And Albert taught me that when I would get my
results from my aid's test and I would say I
can't wait any longer.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
I can't wait any longer, and he would say, I
don't have to wait at all. The results are in already,
you just don't know what they are. And I thought
that was harship.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
So I want to finish up a little bit and
talk about the eleven Step prayer. And I'm glad Patt
is here because we're very different on how we look
at this eleven step prayer. It's very important for me,
who I am, to understand that the eleven step prayer
is about peace.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
It's about peace. It's about becoming a channel.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
So I had to look up what a channel is,
and a channel is a body of water, a short
body of water between two places.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It's not going around the bend, it's not going through towns.
It's just this little thing of water going between two places.
The problem is, as an alcoholic, with things that have
happened in my life, each one of these resentments or
terrible things I did. I put a rock up in
that channel, and so it was impossible for that water
(36:59):
to go from that short space here to the short
space here because of all the rocks that I had
put in. So it was explained to me by the greats,
by Sandy, by Clancy, by Albert. Your only job here
is to do whatever you need to do, to pick
up a rock, one at a time and get rid
of it.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And one day you will look.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Up and that channel is just whushing back and forth
and it's water.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
So you know, I love that. I love the channel
and the water, and that's all that it is. But
now I look.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
At it and this same prayer. Now I've removed all
the rocks I can do. This channel is for peace
and being who I am piece.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Is the most important thing in my life right now.
I don't know how else to explain it. You know,
we we look at the world today.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
I look at the world today on a daily basis.
On a daily basis, I don't feel safe. I don't
feel wanted, I feel threatened.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Most of the time.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
I do everything I possibly can to dispel that. I'm
not a good person to dispel that. I'm going to
hurt you, to dispel all of these crazy crap that
goes on out there.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
I just want peace.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
So I'm not an activist. I'm not running around. I'm
not doing anything. I'm swimming in the channel. That's what
I'm doing. I'm swimming in the channel, and in this channel,
i'm doing the right thing. I'm helping another alcoholic. I'm
showing you where God is. I'm taking you through the steps.
I'm going to meetings. I'm sponsoring people. I'm being sponsored.
(38:38):
I speak a lot because that's how I do service,
and that's how I stay in the channel with no rocks.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
That's how I stay in there. So I also want
to bring up one more thing about.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Conscious contact with God, which is bizarro, but it's right
there in the step. I didn't write this is that,
you know, we don't know what God's will is. I mean,
maybe there's, you know, some saint out here in the room.
I don't know, but I don't know what God's will is.
I'm pretty sure I'm doing it right now. I'm pretty
sure staying sober day at a time and trying to
help another alcoholic is what God's will is for me.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
When I die, you can say you wasted thirty seven years.
You know. I don't know, but that's what I think
that it is today. But it tells me the eleventh step.
Look at that, I got the power back. I worked
all this time, I did all these things you told
me to do, and what was my reward? I got
the power back. What am I supposed to do with
the power? Not Karen, not Karen. Whatever God wants me
(39:37):
to do with the power.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
What am I supposed to do it? I don't have
the directions. Oh AA has the directions. What I do
with the power? I work the twelfth Step. That's what
I do with the power.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
All of it gets channeled into the twelfth step. And
we're gonna talk about the twelfth step next week. Not
so much how we do the Twelfth Step? But why
we do the Twelfth Step?
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Night to be Sober. Thanks so much,
My name is Karen.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
I'm an alcoholic and my sobriety date is September the eighth,
last Monday, nineteen eighty eight, celebrated thirty.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Seven years of continuous sobriety. Didn't really celebrate.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It was raining to the points where my ceiling fell
in and water came up off the floor, and you know,
you go to call your person and he's sick, and
nothing went right for me.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
It's all about me, so I recognized it.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Well, we didn't really celebrate, but it was it's all good,
It's all good.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
We also went out to dinner like a few nights.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Later with friends of ours who are in the room tonight,
and I didn't eat very much at dinner and I
ate it tonight, which was.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
A big mistake.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
So you may be hearing some of the dinner from
Saturday nights.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
I'm saying anyway, it's good to be here. You look
good for me. I need you to be here tonight.
I need you to be here tonight. We're gonna talk
about the eleventh step. But I want to roll back.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I want to roll to take back just a little
bit and just do a tiny little recap.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
A lot of people here tonight, I don't recognize a
lot of you.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
I do recognize, so I just I think the most
important thing that we can start out saying tonight is
that the first ten steps it's not a permanent fix period.
Can't do the first ten steps and think that that's
it for you for the rest of the time. Doesn't
work that way. As a matter of fact, if we
don't keep practicing those steps, that obsession comes back.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I don't know why that is either.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
You know, it's not a question of like, I have
to do the steps again, I have to do the
steps again. It's what I'm saying is that if we
don't put them in our lives, take them off the
wall and put them in our lives and keep practicing
these things, that obsession comes back. And what we lose
is we lose that freedom from thinking about alcohol. And
I don't know about you, but if my thinking, which
stayed with me long after I stopped drinking, and eventually
(01:51):
the thinking gets so bad, is that we have to drink.
I mean, everybody knows that. That's not a big secret.
Why do you think they take that think sign and
have it upside down? Because that's who we are. So
the twelve steps in total are our plan for living,
and we got that.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
And the only reason why it's our plan for living
is because it worked better than my plan. My plan
didn't work for me. You know, I drank. I thought
I had a good plan, but at the end of
that plan, I drank, I drank or I used, so
it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
But in step eleven, the interesting thing is is that
we come to understand how important the first step is.
I didn't really see that for a long long time,
but I now know that. You know, we weren't looking
for spirituality in step one. I can tell you that
we were looking to stop drinking. We were looking to
feel better. I wanted to be a little less crazy.
You know, I wasn't even concerned with in step one
what kind of a person I was, or everybody else
(02:38):
was concerned about that, but I was not. I just
wanted to.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Stop using and I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So the thing is is that the most important thing
about step one we've already we've already discussed this one
hundred times, is that you know, I was powerless over
alcohol when I was drinking it. My life was unmanageable
when I wasn't, but I wasn't looking for any kind
of spirituality. But here's the thing in order to stop
that insanity of the first step I pretty much realized
(03:06):
fairly soon is that I'm gonna need something else other
than me, that I'm not gonna be.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Able to be the one that actually makes this happen.
But here's the real interesting thing about this.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
This is why I love AA. Because we can't convince
you that there's.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
A higher power. We don't have that.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
I don't have the authority to do that. I can
convince you that I have a higher power, but I
can't convince you that.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
You have a higher power. The only thing I can
convince you of is that you're gonna need one. That's
the only.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Thing that I can convince you of after that Step eleven.
By this time we get there is an extraordinarily individual step.
As a matter of fact, people are gonna kill me
for saying this, But if you have a great sponsor,
they can't help you. Can't help you with step eleven.
It is so personal, it is so individual. It's like
getting married, which you know I know a lot about.
(03:56):
It's like getting married, and when you're going up there
and you're about to say your vows, some of a
guy walks up here and says, I think I'm gonna
take you through these vows.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
You who are you?
Speaker 2 (04:06):
I'm gonna just sponsor. I'm gonna take you through this.
It's between me and God. It's between you and God.
Nobody can help you. Sponsor can't help you. They can
tell you how it helped them, but they can't tell
you how it's gonna help you.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
But here's the thing. When you get to that.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
Point that you recognize that you need a higher power
and that no one's gonna be able to show you
how to get that higher power, a higher power shows up.
I don't know how that is, but that's how AA works.
You look up one day and you're not alone anymore.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
You're not alone anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
You've got something there that you didn't have before.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
So I say all this to say I usually don't
tell this story.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
This time of the year because it gets to me.
But tonight I promise that I would. Sorry will so.
On September eighth, nineteen ninety three, for five years, almost
five years, four years, three hundred and sixty four days.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
I was sober without God. It was sober without a
higher power.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
It can be done by the way, which is why
we agnostics. It's such an important chapter to read.
Speaker 1 (05:09):
It can be done. It's easier with God, I can.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Tell you that, but it can be done without God.
And I faked it through five years. I had an
excellent sponsor. I had great AA posse. I went to meetings,
I sponsored people, I was sponsored. I did all the
things they said to do. And I had no God
in my life whatsoever. And I was married for the
third time, and after the first two times where I
(05:32):
was drunk, I got sober in the third marriage. And
I actually it was the only marriage I got married in.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
That I wasn't afraid.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
You know that I fell in love and this guy
was the guy for me. And by the way, I
gave away this guide over a bottle of wine, So
that told you how great he was.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
You know, I know how to make my choices, but
I stayed with him. We loved each other. He was
my person. He was my person.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
You know, he understood he wasn't one of us. He
was a very spiritual guy. And we decided to get
married because that's what I do. That's that's my solution.
I decided to get married. We got married, and he
had a son and I had a son. His son
was six weeks younger than my son.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
What else did we have?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
We're inter racial. He was black, I was white. His
kid was black, my kid was white.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
I wound up raising a little black child a little
white child, and it was fiercely fabulous.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
But I didn't have any God in my life at all.
And we decided we want to have a baby ourselves.
We thought that would be a good addition, you know,
like a weird, little britty bunch kind of family.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
And we were just going to make this happen.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
And we tried for three years, three years of not succeeding,
and I really couldn't understand it because we've both had
kids with other marriages, so.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
We knew something was wrong.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
And you know, we just decided that we would go
to our respective doctors one day and come back and
give the report. And I went to my doctor and
they ran all these kind of tests on me. And
by the way, you know, my doctor was the one
that delivered my son as a drunk pregnant woman.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
So my doctor knew my background, you know, she knew my.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Alcohol background, and she knew my drug abuse background, and
she said, well, we're going to check you out pretty
good and we're going to see maybe.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
You're the problem. And she said, you got to clean
dull of health. You're good.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
So that night we went to dinner and we were
in a restaurant and I said, you know, everything's good
with me, and uh, doctor says, I'm good to go.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
He says, not so good with me. I have AIDS.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
And we had been having We've been trying to have
a baby for three years.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
You know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
I was only a couple of years sober, one year
sober or something like that. And all I could think of.
My first thought was, God, I have no idea why
you gave me this life if you're just going to
take it away now. Because if you remember, in the
eighties and the nineties, we had AIDS one hundred percent mortality.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Nobody lived.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
It's a different different scenario today, but nobody lived. And
so we went on this spiral really of you know,
drug testing and hospitals, and every time he got sick,
we went to the hospital and they would wrap us
in plastic because nobody knew how you got it, and
everybody was scared, and they were scared of once his
(08:17):
own doctor died of ads. And this is I'm doing
all of this with my family and not recognizing how
far down I'm sinking again, how far down I'm sinking.
He's the one that's sick, but I'm the one that's dying.
And the only thing that is going right in my
life is that I'm not drinking and I'm not using,
and there is nothing else that is going right anyway.
(08:40):
Towards the end, it got so bad that I remember
walking down the streets. We were in booking by then,
and I walked down the street and I didn't know.
It was like spit in my mouth or something.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
I don't know, but YO know, I'm in New York.
I'll spit on the street in a skinny minute, you know.
And I turned around and I.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Spit on the street, and I spit out a mouthful
of blood, and I thought, you got a problem, girl,
You got a problem.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
I looked down at my hand.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
My hand was bandaged because he kept wanting the window
open and the window closed. And finally I lost my
patience and I put my fist through a plate of glass.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I mean, I was going down.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
He was sick and he was dying, but I was
going down anyway.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
On the eve of my fifth birthday.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
And I just actually had this conversation this afternoon on
the eve of my fifth birthday. We had a fight,
and I'd like to say we had a fight, but
you need two people to fight.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And at that point he was no longer able to
have a conversation with me.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
He was talking to people in the walls, and he
had very few lucid moments. And we had these two kids,
and I had to watch the kids, and we had
this person who was coming in from the state to
try to help us, and the house was a wreck,
and you know, nobody wanted to see us. His family
abandoned us. My family abandoned us. I had a couple
of people in AA who used to come over, but
(09:52):
they were afraid to walk in the door. You have
to remember the younger ones in here, you don't don't
think about this now, but for the older people in here,
you didn't go near anybody that had it because you
had no idea what was going to happen. But try
taking four year olds to the clinic to have them
tested for AIDS every three months, you know, that's what
(10:13):
we had to do.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
I had to do it.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
I had sixteen AIDS tests within four year period, and
I went with my sponsor every time we used to
go to Harlem.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
It was what do you call it, anonymous.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Testing, because in those days, if you tested positive, they
took your kids.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
And I couldn't chance that.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
And on top of that, it took three months to
find out what your results for. And you know we're alcoholic,
that's not you know, my best asset is not waiting.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I can tell you that.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
And so they would test me, and I would wait
three months, and three months later Albert and I would
go back up to Harlem and they would tell me
I was negative and they'd say, just one minute, we
need to test you again.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
And they did this every three months for four years.
I was I never got it, the kids never got it.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
I really don't know, because the doctors had told us
that his medical condition when they diagnosed him was so
bizarrely low is that they figured he'd had had it
for about fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
And so you know, medically, who knew what was going on? Anyway,
at the end, you could tell, you could.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
Walk in the house and tell something was desperately wrong
in the house.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
You know, we were all going down.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
The kids were getting crazy, I was getting crazy. And
he sat me down one day and he said, I'm
ready to go. And because I am who I am,
and because I had no God, and because I thought
that I could control this, I said, you're not ready
to go. I'm not ready for you to go. The
kids are not ready for you to go. Everybody's ready
(11:35):
for you to stay. Let's just have some dinner and
everything will be okay. And then later on that night
we had a horrendous fight, and or I had a
horrendous fight, and I screamed at him with such veracity
over everything that was wrong that he fell to the floor.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
He just fell to the ground and couldn't get up.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And somewhere in that scenario I croaked out an apology,
which I'm so grateful that I managed to do that,
because we went to sleep that night and I was
pissed and didn't sleep in the same room with him.
And when I woke up the next morning, he was gone,
and the front door was open, and he hadn't been
out of the house in years.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Front door was open, and he was gone.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
And on the piano where it was his wedding band,
his wallet, his watch and.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
Some other stuff.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
And I began making phone calls and I called his
family and started calling the neighbors and called.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
People in AA.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
And you know, I'll tell you, if you're get into trouble,
just call AA. Skip everybody else and just call the
people in AA. And they all came over to the
house and they started making xeroxes. You've seen this in
the movies of his face, and they're all over the
streets putting his pictures up.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
And you know, I wanted to go out and looking for.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Him, and the police came and they said, you have
to stay here because if he comes back here and
doesn't see you here, he might get distressed. And so
I stayed in the house and I walked outside for
about I don't know, maybe an hour or two later,
and it started to rain. And I've got a thing
about the rain. I've got a thing about water, a
thing about the.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Ocean, and we'll talk about it later. But as soon
as started rating, I thought, these are God's tears. He's gone.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Anyway, About three o'clock in the afternoon, you know, there
was a knock at the door and the police were there,
and I had scoured the house, and you know, I
got a little crazy.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
I was a little crazy, and I looked all over
the house for him.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And I remember reading some kind of an article about
Karen Carpenter when she went to kill herself.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
They found her in a closet. I went through every
closet in the house.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
I went under the beds in the house, I went everywhere,
and he was, you know, nowhere. And the police came
about three o'clock and they said, you know, you were
you missus so and so. And I'm like I am
and they said, you know, was this person in your husband?
Speaker 1 (13:39):
I said he is. I said, why are you talking
in the past tense? And they said you are.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
And then I realized what they were saying to me,
and they said, your husband is at Saint Vincent's hospital.
He jumped in front of a subway. He got hit
on impact, he died, and we need you to come and.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Identify the body.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
And you know, there's there's nothing that prepares you for that.
There's nothing. And the next thing I know, you know,
his relatives were throwing themselves on top of me, and
everybody's screaming and crying, and the police are there and
they're like, you know, we'll take you down. And I
remember distinctly saying to them, don't worry about I'll.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Get a cab and no, no, no, no, we're going
to take you down.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
And they took us down, and I was in the
back of the car with his mother and his brother,
his younger brother, and we got to the hospital and
they took me down, you know, down down down down
to the morgue. And I had seen way too.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Much law and order, I have to tell you. I mean,
I really would have done better without that, you know.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
But they brought me in there and I was, you know,
waiting for I don't know what I was waiting for.
But when they brought me in there, they left me
in there alone, and he was already on the table,
and I walked over and I.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Began to feel strange.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
I began to feel really strange because I realized that
I couldn't put my finger on it.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
But he had waited for me. I could feel it.
I could feel it.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
And I had more fear after he was dead than
I ever had waiting for him to die from this
horrendous disease.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
And I went over to him.
Speaker 2 (15:07):
And I put my head on his chest and still
had pieces of glass in it from the subway, and
I started to talk to him, and then I turned
my face to him, and some type of essence came.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Out from him.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
And I can't explain it, except that the room got
very bright, and I started to breathe in this essence.
And the only thing I can tell you that it
felt like was that I could breathe underwater.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
It was like I had put my head underwater.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
And taken its deep breath, and I could feel this,
and I knew exactly what it was, even though I
had never felt anything.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Like that before.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
But I knew that I was breathing in the essence
of God as sure as I was sitting there, and
because when I breathed it in, and when I couldn't
hold my breath another second, the voice of God came
to me and said, with great God comes great love,
and with great love comes great responsibility.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
And then there was nothing. And then there was nothing.
The doctors came in, the police came in, his family
came in.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I couldn't speak to anybody. I couldn't possibly tell them
what had happened to me. I was still so filled
with this, and thirty two years later, I need to
tell you that when I need to, I sit and
I get quiet, and I breathe in, and.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
It breathes in all over again. And it has been
like that for over three decades. So I've heard the
voice of God.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
For years and years and years, and I can't explain
why it's me because I'm wast a godless, soulless woman
out there on the street after twenty five years of
drinking and drugging. They used to find me on the
streets of Broadway, eating out of garbage cans. How did
this woman thirty two years later breathe in the essence
of God with the message as I'm breathing it in
that you have to do something about this. You don't
(17:06):
get to get me without giving it away. And that's
pretty much been my life in AA. That's pretty been
That's been my life.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
So I go back when I.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
Work with people and they say to me, you know,
how do I find God where you sure as hell
don't want to find them the way I found it.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
But it's when. It's not how, it's when. So I
can tell you.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
What happened to me, But I can't tell you how
it's going to happen for you. I just know that
when you get quiet, it'll happen. You have to be
able to pay attention to see what is going on here.
So my conception of God was zero. I had no
conception of God. And by the way, I teach that
(17:49):
to people that I sponsor, if you can't figure out
what you want and God, let's make up your own.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Conception of God. I never had that.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
I have no idea what my conception of God is
except my God is so big and so strong that
there's nothing that my God can't do. And I'm a
hard leaner. I lean hard. And it tells me in
the book that I'd been to human help and human
help that failed me. So now I had a God.
(18:16):
Now what do I do? I have a God and
I've always.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Heard this voice, but he never told me what his
will is. And when I would get to this eleven
step with people and they would say, well, if you've
had this experience.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
And by the way, I don't speak about this anymore
like years really that this comes to mind, and mostly
because this year on the anniversey of his death.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Thirty two years he's thirty two when he died.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
So you know, he's now dead longer than he was alive,
which is unimaginable to me, you know. But I think
at the same time that I'm thirty seven years sober,
and you know, for thirty two of those thirty seven.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Years, I've been giving God away.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
I've been trying to tell you that if you close
your up and hold my hand and breathe with me,
you're going to feel the essence of God. Open your mouth.
Don't breathe in through your nose. There's not enough room
open your mouth. So I wanna, I wanna talk a
little bit about in this step about they talk about
prayer and meditation.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
I'm not good at either. Haha. Not good meditator, not
good prayer. Done it, I do it. I do it
all the time.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
I you know, a very famous man used to say,
pray without ceasing, and I do.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
You know, I don't get on my knees and pray.
I don't have a set prayer.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
You know. The eleven step tells me that I have
a relationship with God, and it's a conscious relationship with him.
And you think about how you how you develop a
relationship with a human being.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
And that's through talking everybody I've.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
Ever loved in my whole life. That began with a conversation,
you know, and nothing else. And so I talked to
God all day long. I had a conversation last night
with at one of the meetings I go to in Delray,
and he's a lovely guy and he's all about breathing
and you know this and that. And I said to mom,
I'm all about the crying because I don't understand. I said,
(20:11):
I cry all the time. You know, I'm a strong woman.
I'm a faithful woman. I have a God who resides
within me. And I cry every day and sometimes many
times a day, and I'm not sad. You need to
know that crying has nothing to do with being sad.
And you can be sad and cry, that's okay. But
because you're crying because I'm crying, it doesn't mean I'm sad.
(20:32):
It means I'm getting rid of something. I'm getting rid
of something and I'm making more room for God. We
did it in the fourth step. We do it in
the ninth step. We did it in sixth, we did
it in seventh. We are constantly unloading, unloading, so I
can make more room for God. And if you don't
understand your God, it doesn't matter. Nobody wants a homeless God.
(20:53):
Everybody wants God within themselves.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Chuck C.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Chuck Chamberlain, one of the.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Founding fathers of this organization, used to say, if you're
looking for God, what you're looking for, you're looking with
He was pretty clear about that. You know, he's still
a story. Was He was a weird old guy, but
he was a deer hunter. And I guess deer hunting
was acceptable wherever he was, you know, living and anyway,
(21:19):
he was coming out of the deer hunting place, and guys,
you can correct me on my vernacular later. I don't
really know what it's called, but the deer hunting place,
you know, whatever that is. And the woods, okay, kicking,
Oh my god, that's so sad.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
I am such a New Yorker. The woods, coming out
of the woods. And he had a truck also, I
know it's a truck.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
I don't know what kind, but he was a truck
and he was coming out of the woods with the
truck and in the back of the truck he had
two dead deer that he had, you know, shot or
bow and arrowed.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
I don't know what he did. And this guy came
over and he said, you know, I'm here.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
I also want to go into the woods and kill
some deer, and you know, and where are they? Where
are they? And Chuck looked at him and said, you
see him where they are. You don't see him where
they're not. And he says, oh, oh, So the guy
goes into the woods. He had no idea that Chuck
was sending him on this spiritual journey because you see him.
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Where they are. You want to find God. God is
where he is. It's not where he's not. It's not Worri,
he's not some things I knew up front.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I was pretty certain God wasn't in the bar. I
was pretty certain that God wasn't in the shooting.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Gallery, you know.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
But now I know that you know what I'm looking for.
When I'm looking for God, I stand in front of
the mirror because God lives within me. And by the way,
I don't know if it's good and I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
If it's bad, but I can tell you don't have
any choice about it.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I don't have any choice about housing the size of
the God that I.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
House, and I've had tried to have this conversation. Bizarrely enough,
don't do this. I've tried to have this conversation with clergymen.
Don't do this.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Don't tell them that you have God living inside of
you and that you don't need to be in a
synagogue or in a church to be able to find God,
because they just want you gone. And please don't tell
anybody else what you're telling me, because they want their
pulpits filled.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
But my God lives within me.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I don't need to be in church, and if you
want to look around, you know everybody's in here with their.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Concept of God.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
So praying for me is a little controversial because I
don't pray for anybody, and I know that it pisses
people off, and it pisses them off to the point
when I tell them I don't pray for anybody, because
it tells me I don't pray for anybody. I just
do what the step says to do, and it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Say to pray for anybody.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And the reason it doesn't say to pray for anybody,
and this is the controversial part, is because that's a
tacit acknowledgment that I know more than God, you know
your mother is sick. I'm so sorry she's sick. Oh,
I'll pray for her. That says, I know you're busy
over here, God doing something else, so don't worry about it.
I'm going to take care of this guy's mother because
you're too busy.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
It's not how it works. It's not how it works.
I have to have enough faith in my God and faith.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
In the universe to know that everybody's got a higher
power that I can hope that your mother is okay,
and I can have faith that God will help her.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
But I'm not God and my prayers. You don't want
my prayers.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
You want God. You don't need me. And I have
said this a million times. Many times I've said this
from the podium.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
People will invariably.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Call me and write me and discuss with me how
wrong that theory is and that you know, this gives
me respect, and this gives me this and this is
not about me. It's about God, because what it tells
us in the eleven step is when we get the
power back, It's about God.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
It's not about me. So what do I pray for.
I've said it before.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
I pray for clarity, just let me see this the
way it is. I had to do it, you know today.
Let me see him.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
For what he is and who he is, and not
for who I want him to be.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
And I pray, pray, pray all the time, and then
I pray for courage.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
To see if there's anything I'm supposed to do, and.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
The most courageous thing I can do is nothing, absolutely nothing,
and leave it to God.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
You know, I don't know what it is. You know,
I would say, you back for a second that.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Albert, my sponsor, made me talk about this story about
what happened in the Morgue for years.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
He said, I want you to go to every AA
meeting you.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Can possibly go to, and I want you to talk
about it all over the place because people need to
know that this can actually happen. And then you're walking
around like a regular person, still making mistakes and still.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Cursing, and you know you're not on some kind of
a pedestal anywhere anyway. You know. After he died, we.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Got back from the Morgue and I didn't know what
to do. I made a phone call to my friend Michael.
I always say Michael in case he listens to this
at some point, and Michael celebrated forty five years.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
The other day. I mean, I love this man. He's
been in my life forever.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
And he's the only person alive.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Actually who remembers me drinking and using.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
He used to come to my apartment in Manhattan and
sit on the couch to make sure I didn't no date.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
I mean, that's a friend. So he got sober.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
He was sober when he came over, and you know,
and I didn't know. And he said, I said, I
don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.
And he said, go to an AA meeting. I'm going
to get there and the speaker hasn't shown up. Volunteer
to speak, And so I went to a meeting in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I'm a real snob. We were living in Brooklyn, but
I only went to Manhattan meetings, so.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I didn't know anybody in these Sorry for anybody from Brooklyn.
I didn't know anybody in the Brooklyn meetings. And I
showed up and they said the speaker's not here.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
Was someone volunteer? I volunteered to speak?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
And I walked up and there's my upstairs neighbors sitting
right there, you know, and these are the neighbors that
I lied to for years about what was going on
with us. So I would say, he's going to Atlanta,
he's going here. My husband was in the entertainment business,
so they were you know he was he was in
the music business, so he travel a lot anyway, so
you know, they were there. And so years and years later,
and I'm telling this story to everybody who will listen,
(27:06):
this woman calls me up and she said, you know, hi, Karen.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
You know, this is Lucy from the whatever meeting. And
I said, Hi, how are you. She said, I'm good.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I'm just calling to let you know that my husband,
John died. So I said, oh, I'm so sorry that
that happened. You know, when did it happen? And she
said right now? But I heard your story and I
knew that you made a call, so I'm making the call.
You know, the.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Eleventh Step is not for everyone. I need to tell you.
Once you get there, there's no turning back. There's no
turning back.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
It's exquisitely individual. It's a relationship that's beyond your wildest imagination.
And it's the longest running relationship I have in my life.
It is the longest certainly lasted any longer long any
of my marriages.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
For sure. You know that I can't turn around and
tell people I'm married to God. They'll think I'm a nun.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
But it's the longest relationship of that type that I
have had.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
So that's what I do. That's how I pray. I
don't pray for anybody.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I pray for clarity and I pray for courage with
the understanding by the way that I know from breathing
this in that God doesn't make anything happen. He doesn't
make good things happen, and he doesn't make bad things happen.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
I grew up in a house you know where you know.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
We would say Daddy, what are you doing this weekend?
And he'd say, God willing, we're going to the movies.
I now know that God doesn't give a shit if
we go to the movies or not.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
God does not make anything happen.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Stuff happens, good stuff happens, bad stuff happens. What God
gives me is the strength to deal with whatever happens.
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Whatever happens, I have my God.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
And if you're an alcoholic and a drug addict like me,
it's more important for me to have a God when
the good things are happening, because my tendency was to
use when I felt you for because when I felt bad,
that's my default setting. I know what that feels like.
But when I was feeling good, what am I gonna
(29:10):
do with that feeling?
Speaker 1 (29:11):
When things are going well?
Speaker 2 (29:13):
When I have the man of my dreams, the job
of my dreams, the house of my dreams, I know
I better get rid of all of it. I better
get in the car and go. That's where my head goes.
But that's where my God says.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
It's time to just sit and look at the water
and breede me in. Just take a big breath. Everything
will be okay.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
And the thing is about having a God in your life,
if you really sit down and think about it, all
it really really means is if you close your eyes,
you know that everything is already okay.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
It's already okay because God's got you. That's it. So
there's nothing I have to think about and nothing I
have to do because I've prayed.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
For clarity and I pray for courage and the rest
is up to God. So that's my prayer. I don't
do it in the morning. I'm not recommending any of this.
By the way, this is just me. I do it
all the time. I do it all the time.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Because I need it all the time.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
I work with a lot of alcoholics. I work with
a lot of crazy people who are not alcoholics. I
need prayer all the time. I need conversation. I don't start,
you know, anything else out I have conversations with God
all of the time, and that's.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
What keeps me strong. So I want to talk a
little bit about meditation while we're on things I don't
know how to do. I clearly do not come off
as a person who meditates. I make no bones about that.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Meditation was always hard for me, my feeling meditations. Put
me in a dark room with chair, make me meditate.
Make sure there's a forty five in there so I
can shoot myself in the head.
Speaker 1 (30:47):
I had no intention.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I mean, what do I do with my life for
sixty seconds when when my sponsor has says, just take
sixty seconds and do nothing. Your long sixty seconds is
to do nothing, to think about nothing. And I said,
how do you think about nothing? He says, it's your
thoughts that got you into trouble to begin with. It's
your thinking that gets you into trouble to begin with.
(31:08):
It's like your thinking is waiting for you to wake
up in the morning, and as soon as you wake up,
it says, I don't make enough money. As soon as
you wake up or you wake.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Up under death, he's gonna leave me. Oh my god,
my thinking is there. And so meditation.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
And that's why, by the way, that's why the majority
of alcoholics pray and meditate in the morning. It's not
that they're so spiritual. They can't stand the thinking.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
The static, you know, because.
Speaker 2 (31:32):
When you look at the ten step by the way,
where we just came from, when it talks about you know,
when we're disturbed, there's something wrong with us?
Speaker 1 (31:38):
What is wrong with us? We're disturbed? How do I
know that? Because I'm thinking about it. I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Thinking about what is because nothing what's disturbing me, because
there's nothing physically happening to me at that moment. I'm
just thinking about it. And so I had to find
a way for me.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
To learn how to meditate very hard.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
So I have a special relationship with the sea. Everywhere
I've lived except in Manhattan, I've lived by the water,
and I look at the water and I think the
answers are in the water.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
You know, I'm good for getting in my car and going.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
To the ocean or going to a lake and disappearing
for a couple of days and just staring at the water,
because that's it. I think that's where the answers are.
I see God more clearly in the water.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Than anything else.
Speaker 2 (32:24):
But this goes back to, you know, old habits. At
the end of my drinking, I was, you know, I
was drinking in the shower. There's more water, you know,
I cry all the time.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
There's more water. You know. I have this sort of
unusual relationship with water that I love.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
But my relationship with God is all about what Step
eleven is talking about.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Okay, so my God. I had all these things to say,
and I didn't read any of them. So there we go.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
In the old days, they used to talk about if
you want to clear out a room of AA, just
talk about God. People just walk out all the time.
I don't know who those people are, but I know
they walked out. People walk out. It's hard to listen
about God. It's hard to listen to somebody to talk
about God. I either feel like I'm playing ketchup, or
there's some kind of a competition that I'm not as
good as you, or I don't have a god.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
And what am I going to do? But the reality
is you do.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
You do. And the reason I know that is because
I do, and I've worked with enough men and women
and I sponsor men and women to know that it's there.
You just have to get quiet enough to listen for it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
It's all you need to do.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
The other thing I want to say is that as
much as I loved my sponsor, when it came to
you living step, I sought help from an old timer.
He's a kind of famous old timer, Sandy Beach, Sandy
Bee who lived up in Tampa. But he was an
old friend of mine and he was really wonderful. And
I was so distraught when he died because I used
(33:59):
to go to him with these problems. Because the reason
I went to him with these problems is because his
daughter died.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
When my husband died, and his daughter died badly. She
was murdered, and the guy.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
That murdered her rolled her up in a rug and
put her in the back of the house like the garbage,
so nobody knew where she was.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
For a very long time and until they found her.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
And I had gone through that because when they found
my husband, you know.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
On the tracks at West fourth Street, he.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Didn't have any identification on him, and so they went
through a whole big thing.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Of trying to figure out who he was.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
And the police had given him a ticket for jumping
the turnstile like two stops before, and if they had
not given him the ticket, nobody would have found him,
nobody would have known who he was. And so Sandy
and I used to talk about that, and he would
say the most important thing that you can remember the
two things and one we just talked about that God
doesn't make anything happen.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
God didn't kill his daughter. God didn't kill my husband.
God didn't give my husband an AIDS. God didn't make
me not have aids. God didn't do it any of
those things.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
He said, No matter what happens to you in this world,
it should not change your opinion of God. If I
can impart anything at all, no matter what happens to me,
what happens to my family, what happens to my loved ones,
it does.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Not change my opinion of God.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
It's the same opinion I had before anything bad happened
or anything good happened.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
So the conscious contact is the point of this poet.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
It's not just like knowing God, it's knowing God on
a conscious level all the time. That's why I talk
to God all the time, because that's the thing that
tells us if I'm talking all the time, that everything
is already okay. I'm the only one who didn't know it.
And that's important to remember. You know, when it looks
very dark, everything's really okay, everything's really okay.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
I just don't know it yet.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And Albert taught me that when I would get my
results from my aid's test and I would say I
can't wait any longer.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
I can't wait any longer, and he would say, I
don't have to wait at all. The results are in already,
you just don't know what they are. And I thought
that was harship.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
So I want to finish up a little bit and
talk about the eleven Step prayer. And I'm glad Patt
is here because we're very different on how we look
at this eleven step prayer. It's very important for me,
who I am, to understand that the eleven step prayer
is about peace.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
It's about peace. It's about becoming a channel.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
So I had to look up what a channel is,
and a channel is a body of water, a short
body of water between two places.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
It's not going around the bend, it's not going through towns.
It's just this little thing of water going between two places.
The problem is, as an alcoholic, with things that have
happened in my life, each one of these resentments or
terrible things I did. I put a rock up in
that channel, and so it was impossible for that water
(36:59):
to go from that short space here to the short
space here because of all the rocks that I had
put in. So it was explained to me by the greats,
by Sandy, by Clancy, by Albert. Your only job here
is to do whatever you need to do, to pick
up a rock, one at a time and get rid
of it.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
And one day you will look.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Up and that channel is just whushing back and forth
and it's water.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
So you know, I love that. I love the channel
and the water, and that's all that it is. But
now I look.
Speaker 2 (37:30):
At it and this same prayer. Now I've removed all
the rocks I can do. This channel is for peace
and being who I am piece.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Is the most important thing in my life right now.
I don't know how else to explain it. You know,
we we look at the world today.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
I look at the world today on a daily basis.
On a daily basis, I don't feel safe. I don't
feel wanted, I feel threatened.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Most of the time.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
I do everything I possibly can to dispel that. I'm
not a good person to dispel that. I'm going to
hurt you, to dispel all of these crazy crap that
goes on out there.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
I just want peace.
Speaker 2 (38:15):
So I'm not an activist. I'm not running around. I'm
not doing anything. I'm swimming in the channel. That's what
I'm doing. I'm swimming in the channel, and in this channel,
i'm doing the right thing. I'm helping another alcoholic. I'm
showing you where God is. I'm taking you through the steps.
I'm going to meetings. I'm sponsoring people. I'm being sponsored.
(38:38):
I speak a lot because that's how I do service,
and that's how I stay in the channel with no rocks.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
That's how I stay in there. So I also want
to bring up one more thing about.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Conscious contact with God, which is bizarro, but it's right
there in the step. I didn't write this is that,
you know, we don't know what God's will is. I mean,
maybe there's, you know, some saint out here in the room.
I don't know, but I don't know what God's will is.
I'm pretty sure I'm doing it right now. I'm pretty
sure staying sober day at a time and trying to
help another alcoholic is what God's will is for me.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:13):
When I die, you can say you wasted thirty seven years.
You know. I don't know, but that's what I think
that it is today. But it tells me the eleventh step.
Look at that, I got the power back. I worked
all this time, I did all these things you told
me to do, and what was my reward? I got
the power back. What am I supposed to do with
the power? Not Karen, not Karen. Whatever God wants me
(39:37):
to do with the power.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
What am I supposed to do it? I don't have
the directions. Oh AA has the directions. What I do
with the power? I work the twelfth Step. That's what
I do with the power.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
All of it gets channeled into the twelfth step. And
we're gonna talk about the twelfth step next week. Not
so much how we do the Twelfth Step? But why
we do the Twelfth Step?
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Night to be Sober. Thanks so much,
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