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Page Four of Hitting Bottom

“Oh, we’re fine, I guess. To what do I owe the rare pleasure of hearing from you, Johnny? Do you need money?” he teased, always a little sarcastic.

“No, Pop, I just wanted to tell you some news. I joined AA.” There was silence at the other end of the line. Then I heard my father laughing. “Are you laughing at me?” I bristled.

“No, no! I’m not laughing at you. I’m delighted… because I joined AA too.” He said he joined AA in April after a series of fender-benders and drunken episodes at his club, one of which required two of the waiters to drive him home and put him to bed. Had I really not spoken to him for more than six months? I suddenly felt ashamed for neglecting him. We didn’t talk very long, but I told him I would fly down to visit him and Ruth the following weekend.

“I want to make my eighth step amends to you, Pop.”

“Great, Johnny, I have some amends to make to you too.”

I spent the weekend in Boca Raton attending AA meetings and having long talks with Pop. I talked about all the money I’d wasted, the cars I’d wrecked, the sleepless nights I’d caused him and my mother. He talked about how he had made fun of me when I was a child and buried himself in his books and writing on the weekends instead of spending time with me. We talked about one awful day when he knocked me down with his fist after I broke the window in his study with a rock. We both felt terribly guilty for not doing more to help my mother before it was too late. One of my greatest regrets about my drinking is that Mama didn’t live to see me in recovery.

When I told Mark, my AA sponsor, that I desperately needed to make amends to my poor, dead mother, he understood. He too lost his mother while he was still drinking. He suggested that I write a long letter to my mother telling her how much I regretted adding to her suffering for so many years, how much I wished that she had been able to find help to recover from her own addiction and how much happier I was since I finally found sobriety after thirty years of avoiding it. Then, he said, I should put the letter in the sink, light it and let it burn while I thought about my mother. I did what he advised, but even today, sober for twenty-six years, I am still full of pain and regret whenever I think of her, which I do several times each day.

The word “amends” literally means “changes”, not just telling someone “I’m sorry”. I was forever telling people how sorry I was during my drinking days. I was about the sorriest drunk you could imagine. But I never changed. I just kept going around in circles, putting down the bottle hundreds of times, only to pick it up again a few days later.

Change. That’s really what AA is all about. Taking stock of our lives with “a fearless and searching moral inventory” and then asking God to remove our shortcomings. Making amends (change, again) to people we harmed. Continuing to take personal inventory and, when we are wrong, promptly admitting it. Changing ourselves, changing our lives.

Whenever we told our stories at AA meetings, we were encouraged to say what we used to be like, what happened and what we are like now. I have covered the first two topics, but I need to say something about the third, what I am like now.

Like Wally, who led that very first meeting at High Noon, I too was surprised to find that I still had a lot of problems after I finally stopped drinking. But, again like Wally, I discovered that, for the first time, I was able to work on solving my “better class of problems” without all the C 2H 5OH in my system. Rather than continually apologizing for my behavior and then doing the same things over again, I was able to change my behavior, gradually and painfully. I still have to struggle every day with my inflated ego, my anxiety, my need to show off, to be right and to make you wrong. These “character defects”, as we call them in AA-speak, are very stubborn and require my constant vigilance to keep them from getting out of hand.

I love the idea of constant vigilance. There is an inscription on the fa Hade of the National Archives Building in Washington that reads, “The price of freedom is constant vigilance.” I like to think that my freedom from addiction also requires constant vigilance. Following the twelve steps of AA allows me a daily reprieve from bondage to alcohol, nothing more. What I do with that daily reprieve is up to me. I don’t squander it on the golf course like many retirees my age. I choose to be active, to work on my relationships with family and friends, to volunteer in the community, helping others to escape the bonds of addiction and other misfortunes, to do research, to write…in short, to make a difference in the lives of a few others and to be happy in my own life.

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