Louis shares how his journey into recovery brought him full circle with his family and his AA fellowship.
My name is Louis. I’m an alcoholic. Almost a month ago, I celebrated 32 years of continuous sobriety. I don’t know how that happened – blink of an eye! But I’m really grateful that I haven’t allowed alcohol to kick my butt anymore. It wants to, and sometimes I forget, but so far, so good.
I remember early on, I was at a meeting, and the speaker was saying, “I don’t think any of us, when we were kids, said, “When I grow up, I’m going to become an alcoholic.” When I heard that, I immediately remembered that when I was a kid, I told myself, “When I grow up, I will not become an alcoholic.” I said that to myself was because my dad was an alcoholic, and I didn’t want to be that way.
Now, my dad was the type of alcoholic that when he drank, he would blend into the woodwork. He was not violent. He wouldn’t become loud or boisterous. He would just kind of disappear. He worked every day. He provided for us and he was a loving guy. One of my favorite memories of him when we were still young kids was bedtime. About once every three or four months, he would pick us up, carry us to bed and tuck us in. How can you feel any safer than that?
Dad was a great guy. Everybody loved him. But he was an alcoholic. He loved to drink.
The whole notion that I didn’t want to become an alcoholic when I grew up really made me cautious as a kid. In high school I stayed away from the druggies and the kids who drank, but I also thought high school was boring. I thought the kids were squares. They just didn’t know about anything.
When I went to college, I met a whole new group of kids who were more worldly. They just seemed to know a little bit more than I did. I always felt like I was this young kid who didn’t know much about the world, trying to pretend with them. There was never any pressure for me to drink with my college friends. But one weekend in the summer between my first and second year, we were at one of my friend’s houses and they were drinking wine. They asked me if I wanted some. This time I said, “Yes.”
My first time drinking, I had two glasses of wine. Suddenly I felt like I was now an adult. Magically, I knew how to act and how to talk… everything. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “Wow. This stuff is great! Now I feel like I’m at my friend’s level of maturity.” The alcohol made me feel mature.
That night I’m driving my little Volkswagen Bug drunk and I have a fender bender. The girls we hit were drunk too, so we both agreed not to call the police. Next morning, my dad was getting ready for work early and came into my room. He saw that the front of my Volkswagen was bashed in. He woke me up and asked me what happened to my car. Right there the lying began. My dad, being an alcoholic, probably knew it was a lie. He probably smelled the booze still on me, but he didn’t say anything. So there my journey into alcoholism began.
I started drinking alcoholically right away. Those two glasses of wine were the first and last time I had two of anything. I would always say, “Well, I’m just going to have a couple of beers.” But it didn’t work. After two years I graduated from Bakersfield College and then I transferred to Los Angeles to start my third year. It was great. I was on my own for the first time. I met all these new friends. I started using other substances a little and I thought it was great.
One of the things that I kept telling myself when I was drinking was: “I’m not like my dad because I’m younger. I’m more educated than he was, etc., etc., etc.” But you know, booze knows no boundaries of age, education, ethnicity, race, or gender. If it gets you, it’s going to kick your butt. Period.
When I joined AA, I had abused alcohol for 17 years. My last drunk lasted 17 hours from the first beer I took at the bar until I walked out of jail 17 hours later. Within that period, everything that had happened to me that was horrendous in the prior 17 years, I crammed into that 17 hour period:
I got drunk.
I didn’t show up for my family.
I lied.
I totaled my car again.
I was sexually inappropriate.
I destroyed other people’s property.
And I was in jail – again.
I crammed it all in.
The book Alcoholics Anonymous talks about having a spiritual awakening or spiritual experience. This was mine: There I was in the car that last night. It was wrapped around a tree in an orchard in the middle of nowhere. It was a huge tree. I was fortunate that when the car hit the tree, it cracked it and the tree fell forward instead of backward on top of the car. I would have been crushed. I couldn’t open the door, but I was able to roll down the window and get out.
Very quickly afterwards I thought, “You know what happened? I rolled down the window and God grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me out of that car. God kind of shook me and stood me up and said, ‘That’s it, Louis. I’m not abandoning you, but I’m not going to enable you anymore. I’m going to go to Al-Anon.’” And I knew I had to do something because I was going to end up that way again.
There was this person at the office where I worked that I knew was in AA. They called to see how my weekend was. I interrupted them and I said, “I need to go… I want to go to one of those meetings.” Just like that, I changed the word from need to want. I don’t know where that came from, but that’s what happened. They took me to a 7:30am meeting at the A.T. Center, which is in the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles. That’s when I began my journey into AA.
It was only later that I found out that although a lot of people need AA, it only works for people who want it. I thought I may have a chance because when I asked to be taken to that meeting, I started saying, “I need to go.” But I stopped myself and said, “I want to go to one of those meetings.” I knew that if I stayed in AA, I had a chance to not drink anymore.
The reason I knew that was because by this time, my father was a member of AA and he had been sober for 15 years. I thought, “I don’t know what kind of hocus pocus they do in AA, but if my dad hasn’t had a drink for 15 years, I’m gonna go see.” I wanted to stay in AA. I wanted to stay because I didn’t want to drink.
There’s this phrase you hear in meetings: “Don’t drink no matter what.” In the early days, I would hear that and think “What does that mean? That’s an incomplete sentence.” So I started making it into complete sentences. I would tell myself, “Louis, don’t drink no matter what you’re thinking.” Now, that made sense to me. Or, “Louis, don’t drink no matter what you’re feeling.” That made more sense to me too.
This one was the real important one for me: “Louis, don’t drink, no matter what you think other people are thinking about you.” That was a real lifesaver. I had to do that work in my mind to stay in AA so I could stay sober.
Sometimes I feel that my relationship with alcohol was like being in a relationship with domestic violence. Even though my parents had their problems with their drinking and substance abuse, they never got physical with each other. Never. So I didn’t understand it. How can someone who claims to love you so much beat you up? It just didn’t make sense to me.
But then I would look back on my relationship with the bottle: I’d go out, get drunk and get all beat up. All these terrible things would happen to me. And then the next morning, the bottle would say, “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. It was that bar. We’ll go to a different bar tonight. And I would believe it. Then I would get beat up again. The next morning the bottle said: “Oh, baby, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. We’ll drink at home.” And I would get beat up, even at home. Next morning again the bottle would tell me “Oh, babe, I’m sorry. It was the curtains.” That’s how my relationship with the bottle was. It was awful. It wasn’t how I expected my life to be when I was a kid. I had grand ideas, big hopes back then. But all of that went out the window. The bottle was number one. It was number one above everything, even above God.
When I first joined AA, suddenly my body’s not getting any booze and it’s saying, “Hey, what’s going on?” I started having these tremors in my arms that lasted for months. It was just my body saying: “Where’s the booze?” But everybody in AA surrounded me and I just let them take me wherever they were going to take me. I would go to morning meetings during the week, then go to work. On the weekends we’d go to have coffee or maybe breakfast after a meeting. And then it seemed like every Sunday somebody was having an AA birthday party, and I would go to that. I felt lucky. I didn’t die and now I had all this support from my family, my friends and the new friends I made in AA.
After all these years, I still sponsor people. I do it the way I was taught, which I think we all do. But I really feel like with all these guys that I’ve sponsored – and that I’m sponsoring now – they’re actually sponsoring me. They’re the ones who are helping me stay sober and to continue to take inventory about anything that I’m doing that’s wrong or hurting other people. Because when I hurt other people, I hurt myself. That’s been my experience in sponsorship. They may not realize it, but they take care of me too. I love it and I appreciate it. I’m grateful for it.
I still have alcoholism. I’ve come to understand how it’s a disease that doesn’t go away. But it’s treatable. You can live a long life, even if you have it. These days, my alcoholism is usually way, way behind me. But on those days when I feel like it’s breathing down my neck, I don’t panic. As long as I can stay in front of it, I’m gonna be okay. I just gotta make sure I do the work so it doesn’t suddenly come from behind and stand side by side with me. God forbid it’s in front of me, because then I’m doomed. But as long as I do the work to keep it behind me, I’m not going to get drunk. Being sober can be difficult sometimes, but it has never been impossible. Not one time.