Last drink, first AA meeting...I'll never forget.
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Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Colorado
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Last drink, first AA meeting...I'll never forget.
So, my last drink was on a Thursday night after playing pick-up ball with some friends. Five of us at the table and I had two lousy Coors on tap. You have got to be kidding me. If I had only know those would be my last.
On the Friday night I called up the only real friend in the world I have ever had, the girl I had run away from home with twenty years earlier, and told her, “I can’t stop drinking. I need help.” I think we talked for an hour or something and then she said, “Call your dad.” He said, “Go to Alcoholics Anonymous.” I still must have had some 0.01% of resistence left in me, because I said something like, “Common sense would dictate that the last people I should be hanging out with are people with a drinking problem.” He said, “Go with an open mind. I’ll bet there are a dozen meetings within five miles of you tomorrow morning.”
Open mind, Saturday morning, upstairs, Christ Church, eight o’clock. By now it’s been a couple of days since my last bad drinking, so the fog is more or less cleared. I’m sitting there and I’m looking at the pretty girl across from me in the silk scarf. No. Not her? Can’t be. I’m looking at the guy over there on the left in the $400 Italian shoes. No way. A drunk? Another guy with a watch on each wrist...okay, that’s a little strange. I’m looking at a disorganized guy apparently running the show who looks like he just climbed out of bed, eyes as sharp as a hawk’s though, and I’m thinking, I’m in the wrong place. These aren't drinkers. However, most of them are smoking and all of them seem to have coffee, so at least that makes sense.
Then they start talking. Honestly, it’s all a blur as to what they were saying. All I remember is being blown away by real people talking with genuine emotion about their lives...I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. All I’d known for years was convoluted intellectual baloney and bar talk. (Whoever said “In Vino Veritas” never sat at the end of the bar at the Shamrock.)
Sitting in an upstairs room above the sacristy surrounded by these people talking -- one at a time no less -- something inside of me responded as if I’d been waiting for years and I started crying to myself. Then, as I said somewhere else in another thread, at some point I heard angels singing faintly in the distance. The whole thing was like some otherwordly trip. (Of course, it was the children’s chorale practicing in the choir loft on the other side of the church!)
That’s it, I don’t remember anything else.
Thanks.
On the Friday night I called up the only real friend in the world I have ever had, the girl I had run away from home with twenty years earlier, and told her, “I can’t stop drinking. I need help.” I think we talked for an hour or something and then she said, “Call your dad.” He said, “Go to Alcoholics Anonymous.” I still must have had some 0.01% of resistence left in me, because I said something like, “Common sense would dictate that the last people I should be hanging out with are people with a drinking problem.” He said, “Go with an open mind. I’ll bet there are a dozen meetings within five miles of you tomorrow morning.”
Open mind, Saturday morning, upstairs, Christ Church, eight o’clock. By now it’s been a couple of days since my last bad drinking, so the fog is more or less cleared. I’m sitting there and I’m looking at the pretty girl across from me in the silk scarf. No. Not her? Can’t be. I’m looking at the guy over there on the left in the $400 Italian shoes. No way. A drunk? Another guy with a watch on each wrist...okay, that’s a little strange. I’m looking at a disorganized guy apparently running the show who looks like he just climbed out of bed, eyes as sharp as a hawk’s though, and I’m thinking, I’m in the wrong place. These aren't drinkers. However, most of them are smoking and all of them seem to have coffee, so at least that makes sense.
Then they start talking. Honestly, it’s all a blur as to what they were saying. All I remember is being blown away by real people talking with genuine emotion about their lives...I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. All I’d known for years was convoluted intellectual baloney and bar talk. (Whoever said “In Vino Veritas” never sat at the end of the bar at the Shamrock.)
Sitting in an upstairs room above the sacristy surrounded by these people talking -- one at a time no less -- something inside of me responded as if I’d been waiting for years and I started crying to myself. Then, as I said somewhere else in another thread, at some point I heard angels singing faintly in the distance. The whole thing was like some otherwordly trip. (Of course, it was the children’s chorale practicing in the choir loft on the other side of the church!)
That’s it, I don’t remember anything else.
Thanks.
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Join Date: Nov 2018
Posts: 5,164
I think first meetings are like that for a lot of us. We go in with expectations that are totally things we made up in our own heads. And all of a sudden you are thrown in with people who are being honest and talking about something other than foggy brained bar talk.
There's a certain amount of humility, along with a lot of self pride. How those two qualities go together almost seems impossible. The outcome is very productive discussion. Actual knowledge that is helpful, hope that is given, and confidence that doesn't have the qualities of an inebriated drunk talking with authority about things he knows nothing about.
But what would you expect after spending years around around a bunch of drunks pounding the table while gushing tripe? Yeah, it's different.
There's a certain amount of humility, along with a lot of self pride. How those two qualities go together almost seems impossible. The outcome is very productive discussion. Actual knowledge that is helpful, hope that is given, and confidence that doesn't have the qualities of an inebriated drunk talking with authority about things he knows nothing about.
But what would you expect after spending years around around a bunch of drunks pounding the table while gushing tripe? Yeah, it's different.
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Join Date: Aug 2019
Location: Colorado
Posts: 347
Hey, Guy, you must have been hanging out with a branch of the same club I was..."The Liars Club," or was it the "If Only Club" maybe?
You said it: Different. That was the key. I can't stand it when people tell new people their lives will get better. Or "it" will get better. How do you know? You don't know that. You can't tell the future.
And those charter members of The Liars Club know you're blowing smoke you know where.
No empty promises, please. I was told if I stopped drinking my life would be different. That was more than enough incentive for me.
You said it: Different. That was the key. I can't stand it when people tell new people their lives will get better. Or "it" will get better. How do you know? You don't know that. You can't tell the future.
And those charter members of The Liars Club know you're blowing smoke you know where.
No empty promises, please. I was told if I stopped drinking my life would be different. That was more than enough incentive for me.
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Join Date: Aug 2015
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Hey CR - I did just comment on another thread, partly to you, and I want to add here that after reading this, I am so glad that more of your thoughts of your own situation have been voiced, as I intuited they would from your (challenging) questions to Harv (and again, for me I should emphasize more).
It is indeed incredible to first see, and then ingest, the same and the (supposed) different that each of us is, and is fundamentally not.
Glad you are here.
It is indeed incredible to first see, and then ingest, the same and the (supposed) different that each of us is, and is fundamentally not.
Glad you are here.
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