- Alcohol
This is an interesting period because it is where I hit my bottom and start my recovery. Not without a few bumps and bruises along the way though.
I had gone through my brief homeless period in 1979 and was now back in the same apartment that I had been evicted from a couple of months earlier. I had no electricity or phone service but at least I had a roof over my head again. I was trying to clean up my act and get another job.
There was a pay phone across the street from my apartment building on US 1 in Mamaroneck. No booth. Just a phone attached to a telephone pole. I used the number for that phone as my telephone number, which I put on the resumes I sent out. I had a milk carton and would go sit by that telephone all day waiting for someone to call. It was late November through early December, and it was getting cold. What made it even more difficult was that it was right in front of a liquor store. I knew I couldn’t be drunk if and when the phone rang. It was always tempting to say “screw it” and go buy a dollar bottle of wine. I’m not sure how long this went on for but I was persistent. One day the phone rang and it was for me. It was an accounting firm wanting me to come in for an interview. I couldn’t believe it; another chance.
I usually clean up pretty good and look fairly presentable in a suit. I think I had one suit back then. I did my best to not drink the day before the interview. I can’t remember now if I was successful or not. Anyway I took the bus to their firm, which was located in Rye. This was a fairly large firm, but I interviewed with Ric, the managing partner. Ric was to play an important part in my getting sober and is one of my heroes. I don’t remember much of the interview but somehow he kept probing me and it came out that I was an alcoholic. I remember telling him I was going to the alcoholism clinic in New Rochelle every week and staying sober. I was going to the clinic but I wasn’t doing a real good job of keeping sober. I didn’t tell him that. He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself and much to my amazement he offered me a job. The only stipulation being that I continue going to the clinic and report each week to one of the other partners, Lou, on my progress. I started in December 1979 and began a tumultuous two and one-half years working there.
I was trying to stop drinking, but I hadn’t reached my bottom yet. I believe all alcoholics reach the same bottom, regardless of their physical, emotional, financial, or spiritual conditions. It is the exact moment when the perception of pain from the next drink outweighs the perception of pleasure.
In any event I was working again, going to the clinic every week (or most weeks), reporting to Lou and still drinking.
Ric was acutely aware of my continued drinking, despite my denials. He seemed to have a sixth sense that allowed him to know whenever I had been on a particularly bad drunk. Either that or the fact I was oozing alcohol through every pore, had bloodshot eyes and a distinct shake to my hands when I was holding a pencil might have helped him know as well. You see, like a lot of alcoholics, I thought I was hiding it pretty well but really wasn’t.
Ric would call me into his office periodically to talk to me. Sometimes it was with great understanding but most of the time it was to put the fear of God into to me which he did very well. One of his favorite things to do would be call me into his office on a Monday morning, when I was the shakiest and tell me he had had it but he was too busy to talk to me then and I was to come back at the end of the day. This would make me think all day about what was to befall me. Had he finally had enough and was about to fire me? Would I wind up on the street again? Would it be the Bowery this time? I would never be projecting pleasant thoughts. Then the end of the day would come and I would go see him with my head down and full of remorse. Usually he would tell me he had another meeting and I would have to see him first thing the next morning. A reprieve. I usually was still too sick on Monday evenings to drink anything so I would go back to my apartment (I now had electricity and phone service) and worry about what was going to happen.
The next morning one of two things usually happened. Either Ric would say he was very disappointed but he still didn’t have time to talk with me, or he would have time and would tell me in much more detail why he was disappointed. This was always much more devastating to me. I really had the utmost respect for Ric and really wanted to please him and have him be proud of me. He gave me a chance when no one else would and I realized that. He sent me to see a psychiatrist who was a friend of his. He had a daughter of one of the firm’s clients, who was also in a 12-step program, take me to dinner and try and twelfth step me. He had Lou continue to meet with me and talk with me. In 1981 he sent me to rehab in Rhode Island after my third drunk driving arrest. He would always try to help and I would always disappoint.
I resigned my position there in late June of 1982. I didn’t think I was going to last there much longer (even Ric had could only take me for so long) and I was able to manipulate an offer from one of the firm’s better clients to join them as their Controller. A little more than nine months later I had my last drink. I always credit Ric for having played a large part in that and for helping to save my life.
There was one more time of marshalling my resources and trying to control my drinking and pull it all together. I had settled in a routine by now. I was drinking from Thursday evening until Sunday night. Sunday was always a struggle. I didn’t want to drink because I knew it would then be iffy if I could make it into work the next day. I knew I wouldn’t be able to just have a few. Many Sunday mornings I would sit on my living room sofa, sweating and having an internal debate. There was a deli a few blocks away where I could buy beer on a Sunday morning. There was also a bar down the street, where if you knew the secret knock they would let you in the back door and you could sit and drink in the bar with all the lights turned out. It wasn’t usually a group of social drinkers that gathered there. There was church down the street and I can remember the guys making fun of the people who would walk by the bar in the morning on their way to church. I never did. I always wondered how to get what they had, which was some belief in something greater than themselves.
I didn’t realize that on a conscious level, but I know now that’s what I was feeling. Anyway, the side of me that wanted to drink usually won the debate. There were many missed Mondays. There were also a lot of Mondays that should have been missed.
I was getting into more and more bar room fights. There were a couple of twisted relationships in this time frame that were solely based on drinking. I’m pretty hazy on what transpired. All in all, the downward spiral was still progressing.
I nearly beat my brother Brian to death one day. I thought he stole some money from me and I started to pummel him in the lobby of my apartment building. He was drunk and so was I. Then I went up and passed out in my apartment. Someone called an ambulance and Brian was in the hospital for a week. It took him at least 5-6 days to get his vision back. He swore he was going to kill me after that. That lasted a couple of weeks. I felt guilt, shame and remorse. Then again I felt guilt shame and remorse about almost everything. This is something that would stay with me though. I loved my brother and couldn’t believe what I had done. It wasn’t enough to get me to stop drinking, though. In fact it gave just another excuse to drink more.
In June of 1982 I convinced one of the larger clients of the CPA firm where I was working that they needed a controller. That was the easy part. It took a lot more persuasion to convince them that it should be me. I needed to do this because I could sense my days being numbered at the CPA firm. Not for a lack of work, but for a lack of my being responsible enough to perform it. The firm that hired me was an up and coming real estate development firm that specialized in developing and managing low-income housing in the five boroughs of New York. It was a great opportunity for me. It was also owned by two of the most honest, decent men I have ever had the opportunity to know, Bill H. and Ted O. I had been servicing their account for over two years so both sides knew each other fairly well before I started. In other words they were already aware I had a drinking problem.
I brought some things to the table that they really needed, but I brought myself to the table as well and that pretty much outweighed whatever good things I was doing. It wasn’t unusual for me to go out to lunch and not return, which was preferable to me going to a three hour lunch AND returning. I was stopping at bars on the walk from Grand Central Station to our offices. Just to steady myself of course.
It was during this period that I developed the 52 plan. I started to go to lunchtime A.A. meetings during the week to keep me out of the bars and drink on weekends; hence 5 days of being sober and 2 days of being drunk. The plan worked for a couple of weeks and then it became the 43 plan. Then the 34 plan. Then I would just go to meetings on Wednesdays. You get the picture.
What was becoming more and evident was that I was getting tired…very tired. Living what amounted to two separate lives. I was getting worn down. Death didn’t worry me. It seemed like it might be a way out. I tried just about everything else. I remember one night sitting in a bar, feeling more desolate and desperate than usual. I wrote a little note on a coaster and walked across the street to the train station. I sat down on the tracks and waited for the next train to come in. I was told that the cops pulled me off the tracks about a minute before that happened. They took me for a psychiatric evaluation and I was let go the next day. If my memory serves me right, I just went back to the same bar and resumed my drinking as if nothing happened.
In February of 1981 I was arrested for the third time for Driving While Intoxicated. The cops arrested me after I had parked where I normally parked in the parking lot of the restaurant behind my apartment building. I couldn’t believe they were arresting me while I had safely parked. It appears they had been parked in the lot and had watched me drive down the sidewalk before turning into the lot. I believe we plea bargained this one down (I’m really not sure) and avoided any real consequences. The court did revoke my driving license for life however, which was actually fine with me. I have a line in my comedy routine where I say “After my third drunk driving arrest I knew I couldn’t drink and drive anymore. So I gave up driving.” This, like most of my material, is based on fact.
I went to rehab in April of 1981. Lots of reasons, none very good. Because of that 3rd DWI in February I was looking at possible jail time. I Thought it might look good to attend a rehab before court. Another girlfriend dumped me because I drank too much (and too sloppily). Thought it might look like I was trying to get with the program. Was about to be fired at work because of my drinking. They demanded I go to a rehab. Also a small part of me (very small) thought it might be a good idea to get sober.
So off I went to Rhode Island. My Mother and my Stepfather, Walter, drove me from their home in Connecticut. As I remember it (and this part is pretty foggy) I think I had two gallons of wine in the back seat with me that I drank on the way there.
Rehab was very interesting. I learned a lot of things that were to eventually help me, and I emphasize eventually. The rehab center was a beautiful place overlooking the harbor in Newport. Very upscale, it fit my ego beautifully.
Early into my stay there they gave me the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. There’s a line in there that almost killed me. On page 22 it said, “It was a statistical fact that alcoholics almost never recovered on their own resources.” There it was in black and white, “…almost never recovered…” Didn’t that mean that some people did recover, and since I was so gifted how could I fail? Surely I would be one of those that did recover. The other place I missed the boat was in not understanding what recovery was. I thought it meant being able to drink all I wanted to drink and not suffer the consequences.
Another book that one of the counselors gave me was called “The God Players – How Not to Run Your Life” by Earl Jabay. Difficult book to read. It took years to finish. The basic premise of the book was that I could never have God in my life as long as I thought that I was God. Not consciously, but as long as I had the answers. As long as I knew what was right for me. As long as I was the director, God was going to let me do whatever I thought was best. It took a while for this concept to sink in and before I was able to grudgingly turn my will over to God.
I had a pretty bad experience doing the Fifth Step and the next day my friends Ray and Chester B. picked me up and drove me back to New York and I was drunk before the end of the day. Oh yeah, and Ric called the apartment in the evening (while I was drunk) to welcome me back and say how excited they all were to have me returning. Needless to say his disappointment was great. I failed yet again.
One valuable lesson I did get from this, although it wasn’t apparent for many years, is this. I know many people who have been sober in the program for many years that have never done a fourth and fifth step. I did one and drank. The lesson: doing a fourth and fifth step is no guarantee that you won’t drink again and not doing them is no guarantee that you will. However I strongly urge those people I sponsor to do them. Why? Because the quality of sobriety I see in those people that do is greater than in those people that don’t. Their ability to deal with life and be comfortable with themselves is greatly enhanced.
I had been at my new job for about six months and they were growing weary of my antics. I was looking at another round of joblessness, welfare and homelessness. I really wasn’t sure I would survive that again.
I met Kathy on an Irish Singles Weekend. January 14, 1983. Pretty close to the end of my drinking. The two events are not without relationship. I read a little blurb in the local newspaper about the upcoming event (the weekend—not the end of my drinking) and thought it would be a fun thing to do. Now, I’ve never skied in my life. Still haven’t. I really didn’t think people actually skied on these things anyway. I thought you just hung around the lodge and drank. Anyway I was Irish and I was single, so I figured I at least had two of the three covered. Ran into my good friend John M. at the bar again and told him about my plans. He thought much like me and decided he would join me.
We met at the bar on Friday morning. We had to meet the bus in front of a shopping center in Yonkers late in the afternoon. By the time we got there we both pretty well lit. There were two girls there also waiting for the bus. I was taken aback a little because they both were wearing ski parkas, had boots on and were carrying skis. I was dressed in slacks, sport coat and loafers, ready for the lounge. The bus had made two previous stops, one in New Jersey and another in Manhattan and was just about full when we got on. Shock again as I saw that everyone was dressed as the young ladies were at our stop. I was thinking maybe we had made a mistake. Then someone handed me a bottle of wine and I knew I was in the right place. It seemed like just about everyone was in varying degrees of drunkenness. We felt like a bunch of old friends. John and I sat down together near the front of the bus. Shortly thereafter a beautiful girl comes up to us to introduce herself. This was Kathy. She and her friend Colleen were there from the Irish Singles group of New Jersey. Everyone one else on the bus was from Citicorp and had got on in Manhattan. She thought that John and I were from the Irish Singles of Westchester. She was beautiful and I was smitten. I convinced her that her friend Colleen should come up front and sit with John while I regaled her with stories of me nearer to the rear. I don’t remember much of what said. Kathy does, and likes to kid me about where my tux is and where I went to school to get my MBA. I don’t have either, but seem to have told her I did—more examples of the low self-esteem issue. Anyway, I digress again. We hit it off. The following day, Saturday, I awoke with a terrible hangover and went downstairs to get a drink. Was very surprised that there was no one around (seems they all went skiing—imagine that). I was even more surprised to see that the bar was closed.
I did the next best thing and walked into town. I found a saloon, drank some shots and beers and played some pool with the locals. I staggered back to the lodge in the afternoon and collapsed in my room to sleep it off.
Awaking early in the evening I went down to get some dinner. The skiers had returned and most had already eaten. I forced some food down and was heading for the bar when I met Kathy again. She agreed to accompany me to the lounge. First I had to run upstairs and put on my three piece suit, a la John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. I don’t remember everything about that weekend but I’m pretty sure I was the only one there with a 3-piece suit. If I remember correctly, it was a brown suit with a purple shirt that had an oversized collar. Pretty dapper, huh? We entered the lounge and sat at a little round table at the edge of the dance floor. Kathy had an Irish coffee and couldn’t understand why I was ordering 2 drinks at a time. We were hitting off pretty good. She was asking me if I remembered asking to her to marry me on the bus. (I didn’t – but pretended I did). We played variations off that theme. Whose apartment would we live in, NY or NJ? What kind of furniture? How many kids would we have, etc?
After about an hour the band took a break. I went up to the drummer, slipped him $5 and asked a favor. After the break the band came back and there was a big drum roll. The singer had a big announcement to make. “For all of you people who are here for the Singles weekend we are pleased to report how successful this can be and are happy to announce the engagement of Kathy and Dan. Another drum roll and the spotlight was shone on our table. Well, I thought Kathy was going to crawl under the table. Then they played “Two Less Lonely People in the World” and Kathy and I were asked to dance as the rest of the crowd broke into applause.
We started to date and fall in love. She wasn’t a drinker. In fact she had no idea why when we went out on a date in New Jersey, I ordered two drinks at a time and she really didn’t understand as to why that was the more efficient way of ordering. She knew I was an alcoholic and only agreed to keep seeing me if I quit drinking. I said I would. She was a psychiatric nurse with a master’s degree in psychology. Little did she know what she was getting into.
She went with me to Ray B.’s wedding where I managed to stay semi-sober. First time I had been able to do that at a wedding. After a short period of dating we got engaged. I had always said that if I had a good enough reason to quit drinking I could. Well now I did, and couldn’t. I tried. Then I tried again.
I knew I was getting close to my bottom. This is stranger than fiction but I knew the end was near when, two weeks in a row, I was watching Happy Days on TV and cried at something deep that Fonzie said.
The job was shaky, the relationship with Kathy was shaky, and I was shaky, literally. My last drunk wasn’t too different from many other drunks that preceded it. I started on a Thursday night and called in sick on Friday. It continued all day Friday and Saturday. On Sunday I was supposed to go to Kathy’s family’s house in New Jersey and meet her mother and father for the first time. We were going to have Easter dinner. I didn’t have a license or car, so she was coming from New Jersey to pick me up. I was passed out on the living room couch and didn’t hear her knocking on the door. She called me later and I answered the phone and proceeded to curse her out. So much for meeting the parents. So much for our engagement. So much for me.
I continued drinking Sunday night and all day Monday. On Tuesday morning I walked down to a bar and had a couple of shots and beers to get my hands to stop shaking. Then I called work to see if I still had a job. An acquaintance came in who had a boatload of coke on him and we went into the bathroom to sniff up a storm. I came back out, sat at the bar and looked at myself in the mirror. I was about 40 pounds overweight, my face was beet red and I was sweating. I said to myself, “What the hell are you doing?” That was it, I gave up. I couldn’t fight one more round. I knew I was licked. I surrendered. I could feel the proverbial rock being lifted off my shoulders. I knew this was finally it. There would be no more next times. I walked out and went home. It was April 5, 1983.
The next day, Ted O. picked me up to drive me to our office. There was a transit strike and I had no other way of getting into New York City where I worked. He stopped at a luncheonette in Mamaroneck and sent me in to pick up some coffees for us. I ran into Gil F. in the store. Gil was an old drinking buddy and good friend who had gotten sober a couple of years before. I asked right there if he would be my sponsor. He agreed and we went to a meeting together that night. So began my path of recovery.
I went to a lot of meetings. Seven days a week. Many times I was at multiple meetings in the same day. They were more than pleased at work that I found something else, besides bars, that could occupy my lunchtimes. I would go to one meeting which was just a couple of blocks from our office. Sometimes I would go to one on 55th and Fifth, and Fridays at noon were for my favorite meeting. At night I would attend meetings in Rye-Harrison, Scarsdale, Larchmont, Port Chester and White Plains. On weekends you could find me in White Plains during the day and usually a Rye-Harrison meeting in the evening. Gil started me on the Steps right away and I think at least half the meetings I went to were step meetings. I especially like the meetings in White Plains where they presented a step and an alternative topic for anyone who wasn’t on that step yet so everyone could share. I liked to share. Looking back it was good for me and I encourage new comers to share. Gil used to say that you can’t let the good stuff in until you get the bad stuff out.
It was at one of these early Sponsor House meetings that I ran into Phil K. I had known Phil since elementary school. We were co-captains of the football team. Both of us were about six feet tall with blonde hair. His mother Connie, who I also ran into again at the White Plains meetings, used to call us the golden boys. I always liked that. Turned out neither one of us was what could be considered golden. Phil and I later would drink together occasionally. I always looked up to and respected Phil. Seeing him at a meeting made it so much easier for me to feel comfortable in a 12-step program. I still see Phil go to meetings, he is an inspiration.
I think I need to interrupt the story here and write a little about Gil. This will help put things in better context as we move forward. Little did I know that when I first met Gil he would turn out to have a most positive effect on my life.
When I first moved to Mamaroneck in 1974, I ran into John M. John was a guy I knew from New Rochelle. He was a couple of years older but we had some mutual friends. Anyway, now John was associated with a well-known social club in Mamaroneck and invited me as a guest several times and I wound up joining. That’s where I met Gil. Gil was a loudmouth like me, a wise cracker like me, and a drunk like me. We hit it off instantly and became friends. We used to drink together regularly at the club and at assorted taverns around Mamaroneck, where we were always running into each other. Believe it or not, when Gil had a package on, he could be even more insulting than I was and I recall getting him out of a bar on more than one occasion before he got his butt kicked.
He and his wife lived on the second floor of a nice two family house a few blocks from the apartment I lived in and it was our routine that on Saturday mornings I would pick up some beer and go over to his place to play chess. Very intellectual. We would also solve all the world’s problems as we played. Of course we did more drinking than playing. He would have his half gallon of bourbon and I would have my beer and take some shots of his bourbon and we would play. There were many Saturdays when his wife Marilyn would come home from work and find the two of passed out somewhere in the vicinity of the chessboard. Marilyn was a sweetheart but even she had her limits. I wound up buying a couple of used cars from Gil after he was through with them. One was an old Cadillac convertible; bright red, with a white convertible top with the back window in the shape of a heart. How I loved driving that around. My brother, Brian, borrowed it one day when he was over at my apartment to go out and get us some more beer. He went one block, flipped the car over and hit a tree. Brian was in the hospital for a week and the car was demolished.
It was in spring of 1980 and Marilyn had finally had it with Gil. He showed up at my apartment with a little suitcase and asked if I could put him up for a couple of nights. Seemed he had lost his job as well. He stayed for a few weeks. He slept on the sofa in the living room. His drinking was out of control, round the clock. He seemed determined to drink himself to death. I was working at Ric’s CPA office then and was desperately trying to hold it together, at least during the week, so Gil was a major distraction. I’ve never seen anything like this before or since, but he would sit in the middle of the sofa dead drunk. Then he would fall towards one end of the couch or the other. At one end he had a gallon on vodka on the floor and at the other end he a gallon of bourbon. Whichever way he fell he would reach down and grab the bottle and take a slug. Eventually he would work himself up to a sitting position again and I would sit there to see which way he fell. He was also smoking and the cigarettes were dropping to the floor. I would come home and see burn marks. I was getting nervous about leaving him alone. Finally, I told him he had to leave. It’s pretty ironic when, I think about it, asking my future sponsor to leave because he drank too much.
He got sober in December of that year and I would see him around town. He was only picking up some occasional work and was living in a fleabag in New Rochelle. He also seemed different. He was not only sober but a lot calmer. A lot clearer. There was a smile on his face.
I was going to rehab in Rhode Island in April of 1981 and asked Gil if he wanted to stay at my apartment while I was away. He jumped at it. I returned after 28 days and Gil was still there and still sober. He had a few female friends over the day I returned and I would begin a relationship with one of the. They all drank. Heavily. Gil was sober but he wasn’t really all that involved with A.A. yet. He was sort of working his own program, hence the women and with the booze. I was drunk the same day I got home and began an on again, off again relationship with Rita, one of the three women who were at my apartment the first day back.
Anyway, Gil still didn’t have a place to live, so he wound up staying. Thus began an extremely strange year where he was sober and I was drinking. We were never sure who this was harder on. He joined the Rye-Harrison group and started on the steps and started to really change for the better. I would occasionally accompany him and once in a while go on my own. I remember he gave me a case of beer for Christmas that year. After I got sober I asked him why he did that and he replied it was to help me hit my bottom. Guess I’m hard to shop for.
I’m not sure when he moved out. Late 1981 or early 1982 would be my best guess. As fate would have it I ran into Gil again on April 6, 1983. This was the day after I had my last drink, and I asked him to be my sponsor. He appeared shocked but agreed. He would later tell me that he didn’t think I would last through that first weekend. He started taking me to meetings and talking program with me. He started me on the steps right away. I joined the same group as him have been a member there ever since.
My first year was so critical and Gil played a large part of helping me get through it. I wanted to drink for the first seven months of my sobriety. He helped explain the things I heard in meetings that I didn’t understand but didn’t want anyone else to know I didn’t understand. I could do that with Gil. He gave me advice that I thought was sent from the heavens. How did he get so smart so quick? We knew each other pretty well which was also a good thing. He knew my lies and could call me on them, though he was always gentle with me.
I remember having what I thought was a huge dilemma in my first year. Since I was newly engaged when I got sober and was supposed to get married in September, how could I reconcile that with what I was hearing in the meetings; namely, “No relationships in the first year” and, “No major changes in the first year.” Should I get married or shouldn’t I? Since I was already engaged, wouldn’t it be a major change if I broke off the engagement? You can see I was confused. Not only about this, but just about everything.
So I did what I was supposed to do and asked guidance from my sponsor. He told me a few things then that I still remember to this day and try to impart the same to the guys I sponsor. He told me I really wasn’t looking for an answer as much as setting up someone to blame if things didn’t work out. He said that the way you learn to grow is to make your own decisions and accept responsibility for them. Get as much advice and counsel as you want but you have to be the one to make the decision. Then he added something that I have held very dear ever since and that is, “The cornerstone of every decision you make should be whether it is good or bad for your sobriety. If you do that you will usually be right.” With that in mind I got married and it turned out to be the second best thing I ever did.
Gil became an expert on the Traditions. In 1987 we started an alternating Step/Tradition meeting in the Rye-Harrison group. This became Gil’s favorite meeting and he seemed to know more about each tradition than the rest of us combined. A lot of people learned about the traditions by listening to Gil. At least I know I did.
Gil sponsored a lot of people. Usually the worst of the worst; lots of people who kept slipping. A few who died. Lots of street people. I remember when I was a few years sober asking him why he sponsored all these lost causes and he just smiled. Later on I realized I was one of them.
As time went on our relationship grew more into a solid friendship. This is where I believe a lot of sponsor-sponsee relationships wind up. I have been sponsoring Tim C. for about 19 years now and I count him as one of my closet friends.
Gil and I always stayed in touch. We would see each other at meetings and talk on the phone once in a while. We made more than a few trips to Atlantic City together. One day, in 2000, I got a call. It was Gil’s brother John, who I had never met; I never even knew Gil had a brother. He told me he had been at Gil’s apartment and found my number. He said Gil was in the hospital and in pretty bad shape. John said the people at the hospital had done a search for next of kin and found him. He lived somewhere in upstate New York. He told me that the men at the construction site where Gil was working found him wandering around in a confused state and brought him to the hospital, where they discovered a large, inoperable brain tumor. I immediately went to see him in the hospital. He clearly recognized me when I walked into his room but called me Richie, instead of Dan. He would be lucid one moment and then off on a tangent the next. I got a chance to talk to the doctor who told me that the tumor had grown too large to operate on and about the only thing they could do at this point was to make him comfortable.
What was left of his family moved him to a hospice in Connecticut and I would go see him a couple of times a week. Sometimes he was better than others but the effects of the tumor were growing more and more noticeable every time I went. He died after about a month in hospice, a great loss for me and everyone who knew him. He had an enormous, positive influence on many lives.
We held a memorial service for Gil at the site of his favorite meeting at a church in Harrison that, despite being a cold, snowy night in December, was very well attended. We took turns at the front of the room telling Gil stories, and remembering how great a guy he was. His brother John and his father came to town for the meeting. John gave a 20 year coin to the group to memorialize Gil’s 20 years of sobriety. He would have celebrated that month. Selfishly, I kept that coin. I still have it and it is one of my most cherished possessions. I think of Gil a lot still and try to remember how gentle and loving he was with me, and I try and pass that on to the guys that sponsor.
I’ve had two sponsors since. First was Vincent B. who I have known since I got sober. An Irish poet and a great guy. I waited almost a year after Gil died before I asked him. I think there was a subconscious sense of loyalty to Gil that prevented me from asking sooner. Then when we moved to Tampa in 2003 and I got another sponsor there, Sandy B. I didn’t know who he was and in fact asked him if that was some type of stage name. Turns out he is a legend in our 12-step program. I didn’t know that when I asked him to sponsor me, I just knew I liked what he had to say in meetings and liked the humble way in which he carried himself. Unlike some of the other circuit speakers I’ve come across in my years in the program, Sandy was a guy who walked the walk and was decidedly not full of himself. I now split time between Tampa and New York and both gentlemen are still my sponsors. I call them my New York sponsor and my Florida sponsor. They are both great and I wouldn’t hesitate to call either one when I’m dealing with something that I need help with. They give me a sense of security that prevents most stuff from overwhelming me, although after all these years that phone can still weigh 700 pounds and it’s difficult for me to reach out for help. When I do, though, I’m never disappointed. I remember Gil saying that a sponsor is someone who knows where you’ve been, doesn’t care, and then helps you get where you are supposed to be. I always try to remember that as well as emulate Gil, Vincent and Sandy. Three extraordinary role models.
All right, let’s get back to the story. Funny thing happened. I started to get better. I could think a little clearer. I could make connections a little better. I wasn’t quite so afraid. I could utter more than one complete sentence at a time. These things hadn’t been part of my repertoire for a long time.
Then something else happened as well. Things started to get better. I wasn’t missing work anymore. When I was there I was actually doing what I was supposed to and even more. In a short period of time I was promoted to Chief Financial Officer.
That engagement that was broken became unbroken. Kathy was very supportive of my sobriety. We would spend weekends together and we would find meetings where there were support groups for us both meeting in the same church or another nearby. This was even more helpful considering I still couldn’t drive.
We got married in September of that year. I was six months sober. Besides getting sober it was the best thing I ever did. I didn’t think enough of myself to stay sober for me, so I stayed sober for Kathy. Eventually I stayed sober for me. Fear of getting drunk again was a strong motivator. In time that was replaced with not wanting to lose the type of life I was finding and living. It far surpassed anything I could have imagined.
I stayed sober through my first bachelor party (mine) and my first wedding (also mine); two important sober references. The references started to increase and my unease started to decrease. This was actually working. Surrendering was the key. Who knew that I needed to surrender to win?