- Alcohol
- Friends & Family
Submitted by: Bo Brown
I was born in Selma, Alabama in 1962. My family lived on a farm and we enjoyed a simple, wonderful, life, but it was also a drinking and partying life.
There was always a good time happening because everyone was drunk most of their non-working time. I remember sipping a little beer on a regular weekend basis starting when I was around five years old, but never too much. My uncles thought it was fun to watch me make faces due to the bitter taste.
My maternal grandfather and great uncle were both active alcoholics on the farm that we lived on. There were many “don’t go near them today, they don’t feel well.” days. It was explained away because they were in Pearl Harbor on one of the bombed ships.
My fraternal grandfather left his six kids and wife when my dad was 12. He (my fraternal grandfather) was known to be a drunk. This left a bevy of uncles and aunts who all enjoyed drinking most of the time when they weren’t working. It was an interesting life with LOTS of drama and police arrests, etc. Alcohol took its toll on this family as a whole but it was considered normal by most and so no one ever thought much about it.
We moved to Prattville, Alabama when I was 13 years old and that was a hard move. We had been secure in our familial craziness until then. When we moved, we went to a town of 4,000 people where we had no relatives or friends. My mom, sister and I were Jehovah’s Witnesses and that made us outsiders among the regular society, so we learned to enjoy our lifestyle of non-stop worship and exclusion.
When I was 15, we moved to Nashville, TN, and there we started over again making friends. It was easier as the town was bigger and Mom quit being a Jehovah’s Witness, so she began to smoke and drink and party. Life was ok then, which is weird because I was still a Jehovah’s Witness and worshipped and lived very strictly. I was very shy and lacked self-esteem due to lack of socialization with secular people.
I found my solution to the shyness via alcohol at age 15. We had a lake house party with several families of relatives at that time. I made the cocktails for everyone so I could be included, because I usually sat by myself during family gatherings. This time was different. I woke up the following day and everyone told me what a great, fun person I had been the night before! They told me I had sang, danced, and entertained the group and everyone really enjoyed me! Would I do it again? Well, I didn’t remember it all! I had blacked out on my very first drinking night.
That was the beginning of many years of drinking until blacking out. I stayed mostly drunk from age fifteen until age 27, when I finally stopped. It was stop or die so I am glad I chose the harder option!
I graduated from high school and went to university. My mom had put a fifth of bourbon in one of my boxes of items to unpack at the dorm. That fifth that lasted for about a day or so after I got to school and found it. College was a blur of alcohol afternoons and nights. All of this eventually lead me to leave college to never return.
I worked for a delivery company for four years and drove everything from vans to eighteen wheelers. I was great at my job– I finished early every day and drank as soon as I was finished, so that every morning, I was still drunk. I drove drunk from ages 15–27 and wrecked and totaled a variety of vehicles. I wrecked the company trucks a few times but caused more damage to my personal cars and family vehicles that I would borrow. I totaled my mom’s camper pickup truck at 60 MPH by crashing it into a telephone pole, which knocked the top off the truck, and the pole came through the windshield. If I had not passed out onto the floor board, I would have been decapitated. God watches over the drunks! So I have a small scar on my bottom lip to remind me of that incident.
At that time, I was no longer happy with Nashville and moved to Atlanta to experience the big city life I knew I was destined to enjoy. It was great fun and LOTS of alcoholic days and nights. After a couple of years of drunken days and nights, the consequences began to show up. I ran the people in my life away, spent money I didn’t have, and stayed in a blackout. After three DUIs over a year and a half timeframe, reality hit me square in the pocket. I was going to prison for 16 weekends in a row to get past the DUIs.
I knew I wouldn’t do well in prison and my ego was still in full force! I paid an attorney to win me the ability to wear the bracelet that allows you home arrest. It only cost $10,000.00 for that privilege, and since I was already into debt $100,000.00 for the other court costs and vehicles, why not?
Needless to say, the lawyer and judge suggested that I get to some type of treatment. I figured it was other people’s actions that had caused me to be a drunken mess, so I went to a co-dependency 12-step group. I went to that meeting weekly for about a year until I finally realized that it might be more than other people who were causing me all this trouble. It might be alcohol– so I finally went to an alcohol 12-step meeting to check it out.
I had already gone to two or three meetings over the past five years because every time I would total a car or hurt myself physically, I would think I might have a problem, but my mom and dad would tell me that it wasn’t an issue if I would just drink and stay home. Then they would prepare a 12-ounce Tupperware glass of vodka and splash of soda for me to enjoy before I would leave to go out to the bars later that evening. Of course, I would take the cup with me, full of another 12 ounces of vodka!
Well, the twelve step meetings in Atlanta were great and plentiful and there were lots of other drunks that I immediately enjoyed meeting and fellowshipping with. Of course, there was some serious “thirteenth stepping” going on, but I was ok with that as I had to replace all the drinking with something else and did for about a year.
Finally, I got a sponsor that “understood me” and stuck with him for about two years before I moved to Dallas, Texas. My life began to be better and better with each passing year and I loved the meetings and the camaraderie of the fellowship. I bought a house with a swimming pool in Dallas and enjoyed living there until I met a cute blonde who had about one month sober. I felt I could handle my sobriety and his newness issues would not affect me if he went off the program. Only about six months later, I sold the house and moved to Austin because that was what he wanted to do. But the day we were to move, he showed up from a day at the bar and was drunk and obviously had WAY too much fun with some of the bar patrons!
I moved alone to Austin, Texas and the twelve-step program was my saving grace! I hated myself for being so naïve about my power over others and their sobriety. After eight years of sobriety I still thought I was powerful. My sponsor had warned me of the pitfalls of ego in relation to sex, money, and pride! I hadn’t listened well enough but that is part of the process. I have tried to always keep my now deceased sponsors advice in mind: “We as alcoholics can do anything we want as long as we are willing to accept the consequences.” It reminds me to “think things through” when I am making decisions– so lesson learned and now relearned daily!
Since that time, I have moved from Austin back to Nashville, TN, to Fort Lauderdale, FL, and then Nashville, TN, to Manhattan, NY, to Raleigh, NC, where I have been for 14 years. I have always stayed close to the 12-step program and the members and tools have carried me through many hard times.
As I celebrate 26 years of sobriety, I know that my life has been a wonderful experience that my Higher Power has had a huge part. Many hundreds of AA members all over the world have had input into my program whether they knew it or not and for that I am thankful. The keys of my success are one day at a time, surrender everything, acceptance, principles instead of personalities, prayer and fellowship.
Thanks for allowing me to tell my story and I hope to hear yours one day!