[Side two of tape]

That sort of progress, that sort of growth and change is going to get us past where we have been stuck. I might be able to stay here. I have thought for a long time that maybe that effort needed to go somewhere else. Yep, I could go to the meetings and I could go to H&I and do a little service work and I will do something else and find that spiritual growth that I am not finding in Narcotics Anonymous. Because Betty cannot talk to Greg but I saw her today, turn around and say would you come up and share and I almost fall out of my chair. I watched Bill turn to Greg and I know how angry you have been here with Greg ( ). That sort of change and that sort of growth is something that I have been seeking for a couple of years here and I have not felt it. But I see it today in forum like this. We started to get all wrapped up all of this stuff into the 80s but we did not invite those people because we ain’t got enough strength to handle those people. We cannot deal with those personalities yet. There is enough alienation between this group and that group that you cannot even picture. But if this group pulls together the diversity of the individual characters involved today pulls together, it will be a piece of cake. If they can draw that unity and put those differences aside. You heard about misinformation, gosh, there have been people, “Oh well, he stole fifteen thousand dollars.” That has been so widespread and it was the bankruptcy of a printer. The Fellowship does not know about it so it is bullshit and somebody gets stuck in the ass for it over and over and over again for eight years. It is time to end that shit. Maybe we can stop some of that through some of our communication. We have got a chance to grow and change. I got a chance to stay here. I got a chance to be apart of something and know when my fifteen and twenty years comes in this fellowship there is still growth available for me because I saw the people before me do it. I was not seeing that happen and I will do whatever the fuck it takes to keep it growing. Keep doing that. There are still some heads‑bumping fine we have got a couple more days keep doing it. Thanks.

Well as you know, I am Bill Beck and I am still an addict. I would like to respond to what this young lady said because it is a valid question. Something was going through my mind about Jimmy that I was getting the idea that maybe you people were getting the idea that this man was a controlling man. You have to understand that nobody wanted anymore than he did for the WSO to grow up and function as an entity had being approached in a proper way when the Fellowship was ready with the money. Nobody would have been happier to relinquish the job because he was not getting any pay or any big pay for this. I mean this was a humble man who had no money and did not give a shit about the money aspect of it all. The other thing that everybody is forgetting because they are trying to lay shit on him and you have to remember at this time the WSO already was formed and had a board of directors and Jimmy Kinnon only functioned as one of those BOD and as the office manager as an employee. So anybody who was responsible for the running of that office was the BOD and not Jimmy Kinnon. It pissed me off when two lame brains went with ten thousand dollars, and then the goddamn board and as a matter of fact I almost got into a fistfight with Chuck Gates over it because I was telling him you son of a bitch you got a job and Phil what is his name. You people work that is ten thousand I mean it was the first time. Bob is talking about we never had any money and suddenly there is ten thousand dollars. I am saying hey man this guy is a successful real estate man and the other guy has a job and is driving a new car why the hell could not they pay that money back? Now you want to talk about misdirection, it was not Mr. Kinnon, it was the friggin board and I was a member of that board. I was a member of that board. It irked me then and it irks me now. I still think they should have to pay that money back. Then again, they said we feel sorry for them the printer moved you know. So a lot of people have a lot of misconceptions about somebody that was supposedly right. Hey this is the guy that put the whole thing together right. This is the guy who talked to you for hours on the phone at a time. Was he senile? Was he ineffective? Hell no man! It is like Fawn said, you got people here that are trying to cover up. They are still trying to cover up their goddamn guilt. You heard it, it was going along real smoothly earlier and then all of a sudden man people are still trying to cover it over man instead of saying hey ok the war is over the old man is absolved. We made a mistake. He is our founder. Now let us move on with the history. They want to beat a dead duck. I do not know, it blows me away this kind of mentality we have you know. For God sakes understand that the man did not run anything poorly, haphazardly or we would not be where we are today. Now some power hungry greedy people that went to war did some very uncool things. Earlier I talked about the thing of the factions coming together with their shield and their sword. That is the big mistake of NA. What the guy said that talked in front of me that is it. It is that simple that is all the healing does, you know what I mean. Bo Sewell called me a name and I called him a name and fuck it that is the end of it you know what I mean. (Applause)

Podium: I want to thank everybody for sharing and I want to close this meeting now.

Jim: Can I just have a second? My name is Jim and I am an addict, hi Jim. The reason that I wanted to end this session with just one more thing. I guess I am going to hammer on Jimmy being a human being. I love Jimmy and I was not nearly as close to him as the other people but I loved him. I also sat in his house and watched him because of the physical things that were happening with him change his mood just a little bit from time to time while I was sitting there in his house and he was talking to me about having people

Betty: I resent him talking about Jimmy like this when Jimmy is not here to defend himself

Jim: Well I am sorry that you resent it. I am sharing my observation when I was sitting in your house while Jimmy was talking about having connections in my state. I loved him and I cared about him but I do not think it is doing him a service or us a service to make him into a demigod. He was human being and a wonderful human being. You know what else at the ‘83 WSC there two things that the conference saw were. The one was, well I do not know there were probably a lot of things. The two things that come to my mind now, the one was the changes to the Basic Text from the way it was approved that was attributed to Jimmy. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Jimmy but it was attributed to him and that is how the conference felt and how people saw it. I was one of those people. The other thing was that there was a study done. It was about the blue Service Manual and part of the finding of that study was that the blue Service Manual was not published the way it was approved by the Conference. That study was distributed to everybody. I do not want to be unpopular but perhaps that is to be my role. I think it is good for us to understand what the Conference saw and what was going on at the time when the motion was made and the Conference made the decision.

A couple years later Joseph called me and he said after Stone had done one of the things Stone did in his letters you know that we went from the frying pan to the fire and we made a mistake.

Room: Can I ask you a question? It seems like you are pissed off because he rejected you right.

Jim: No

Room: I mean these were your words and because you were hurt and your were rejected you think this guy should be banished to hell.

Jim: I was hurt because of his rejection but I am not pissed off. No, I think this man should be celebrated just as the man was. To give him this status of demigod

Fawn: Who is doing that? Who said that? We just give credit where credit is due.

Jim: To say that he did not make errors.

Fawn: Give credit where credit is due.

Room: Who said that, everybody knows he made mistakes.

Jim: Ok, if you are not to call him founder.

Fawn: Because he was

Jim: I do not believe he wanted that and I do not think you guys think he wanted that. I do not think the minutes from the meeting or the experience that has been shared with me from the people that he sponsored or the experience that I had with him I do not believe we are doing the man a service by forcing that role on him.

Fawn: He is on a tape at the New York World Convention if you listen to it.

Jim: He is on the tape at the New York World Convention sharing that he is a member of another fellowship too. Is that not right?

Room: He is the person that called the first meeting together. Now if that is not what a founder is, then I will kiss your ass right here in front of everybody man. You are a stupid motherfucker.

Podium: This is a real good time to get some food and meditation possibly, close this thing, and get on with it. I would like to thank everybody who shared. Don’t everybody leave we got a nice way of closing this thing.

Tape 7

Montgomery History Conference 1991

Speaker: Bob B

My name is Bob and I am an addict. We like to call people by nicknames. Sometimes I like to be called Bob, sometimes I want to be called Robert depending on what setting I am in. I do not know if that changes me, but that is just me. I want to just for the hell of it and for history sake and just because I like to do shit like this anyhow. I want to take a group conscience, okay. How many people in this room want to use Basic Text Second Edition? How many hands we got (counting). How many want to use Basic Fifth Edition? That is half‑and‑half divided. What about Third Edition Revised? See the thing about it we would probably have to go and vote on the Second or Third Edition Revised because those are the ones that got the most votes.

Room: What about the original, the Grey Book or the Sixth.

Bob: No, see we are only going to use two. We are not going to go through, see we can play that little game of manipulation once again. We are voting on two books. We tried three just for the hell of it. We are talking about how group conscience comes about. About the use of material in a meeting or use of material anytime. Now Third Edition Revised probably got a greater amount of votes than either of the other two. Now is that acceptable as a group conscience? If that is the decision of the group conscience then what happened to the other people that descended? They should we did not say that they would, they should that is all I want to know. You see where we get the conflict because they cannot be accepted because I did not vote the way that you voted. Isn’t it ridiculous how hard we try to hold onto the something, our past or whatever and to make change. We still struggle at it. We need to learn how to be beyond dope fiending. Recovering addicts is beyond dope fiending. (Applause) It is a hell of a concept.

That was just kind of an example of my name is Bob and I am an addict and I came in with many misgivings in terms of from where I came. I came into the doors of Narcotics Anonymous for all the wrong reasons. I came to the doors of Narcotics Anonymous because I someway got the impression that you were going to make it ok for me, you were going to fix it for me. As long as I suffered under that premise that you were going to fix it for me I stayed sick. That is all that Narcotics Anonymous would tell me was “keep coming back”. I understand why they told me to keep coming back because somewhere along the way if I stay long enough and become accepting and I become willing for change something will take place. Something will happen that I like. Now most of us would like to think as I use to think that I love myself. I use to stand in the mirror and admire me constantly. I do not know about you but I had to convince me that I was ok for a lot of years. Very often how I did that was to stand in front of the mirror, you sure look cool baby, all right. I thought it was all an outside job. How well do I look to you? Perhaps I did not look as good as I thought I did when I was in the mirror, but I was presentable. I put it that way because I believe I was presentable because I fooled a lot of people that I was ok. I have a long history of drug addiction and a long history of all the madness that goes along with drug addiction. I am not even going off into it because I think all of you have arrived here with some of the same or similar stories are the only reason you are here. I cannot think of you being in Allentown this Friday night listening to me and being here all day listening to all that went on without having been some of those places, with all the madness that goes with it.

I use to think that I had been a dope fiend for twenty years and then when I got honest about it, it was about fourteen or fifteen years. I would like to tell you all the penitentiary time I did and I got out and said I oh nine or ten years that spent half my life in penitentiary. It narrowed down to about five or six years. Now these are revelations to me because I had been espousing who I was and what I had done for years. I was so convinced that it happened and that was the time frame that it happened and that is how it happened. I think we come here hopefully if you come here beaten enough ready to live and ready to survive your own insanity. Then we become teachable. That is what my experience has been. Not that we do not learn something along the way because some of the things I learned when I was coming through the doors of Narcotics Anonymous before I cleaned up. I came to Narcotics Anonymous in 1959 that did not mean I came to get clean. I came here to appease somebody else and I got tired of listening to their mouth about whatever was going on. The only way I could stay in that household was to go to those meetings that I did not believe were happening a bunch of lames were out there talking about some shit talking about recovery. I was going to give them the benefit my worldly travel and great knowledge about drug addiction and show them and tell them how it was suppose to be done. I do not know where I got all this great knowledge from, but if you had of asked me I had answers for questions never asked. That is the way I came to Narcotics Anonymous. I had running off at the mouth and I found as long as I was talking I did not have to listen. So I had done a lot of talking. Who got a question? Bob got a question. Who got a problem? Bob got a problem. I found out as long as I was talking I did not have to listen to the solution. But with some of the things that would happen, I would listen to the steps when they were read. Fact is I gave them the benefit of how my reading ability was by reading the steps for them. I did not think they could read to swell. People use to haltingly try to read the steps and I could read them with a little class a little finesse even you know, emphasize. I use to think that was a process of doing the steps was by reading the steps. So I did not have much success in doing the steps. I had none. Then I was going to do it my way. See I was going to eliminate a few steps shift a few periods and commas and make it like I wanted to hear it, like I wanted to hear it. They may have written it that way but this is the way I hear it. My head heard it differently and as long as my head heard it differently, I had difficulty in doing what they were suggesting that I do. Even from the first step, the step of surrender when they are talking about addiction. How can I talk about addiction or come to understand about addiction if I know nothing about addiction? First, I must in order to get past the first step I have to learn about the problem of addiction, as I am the addict. I understood and came to understand that it had very little to do about the chemical I used. It had something to do about my actions and the way I lived and the way I perceived things to be which were unreal.

I lived in fantasyland. I spent a lifetime of living in fantasyland. Because I thought that where you were suppose to do, they told me I was suppose to dream, and a dreamer I was. You know I had done a lot of dreaming and it this fantasy trip I always kind of perceived myself as being somewhere else, doing something else with somebody else at all times. I was never satisfied with where I was at any given time. I do not care what was happening even if I was having a good time I could have a better time over there. If I had enough substance here well I could have some more. See the name of my disease is called more. Whatever it is give me some more, now just because I removed the drugs does not mean I removed the disease. The disease is always encompassing me, involving me, the whole totality of me. I must come to understand the problem of addiction, In order to understand the first step. Now that does not mean I have to stall and stop there and tell you what I am working on that first step, that I am trying to find out what addiction is about. I think that is something that is revealed to you over a period. Now I know some of you come in here and get it real quick. You come in here and read the steps and you got it, I got it shit. I usually find out you do not have it, sorry because this is a learning process. This is an experiencing process that goes on in recovery.

When I got back to Narcotics Anonymous when I did not want to die because the police were trying to shoot me, I made a decision not only to surrender of this way, I made an internal decision that I better try something before I die. I had been to the doors of Narcotics Anonymous and they told me what was going to happen to me. Everything they told me was going to happen was happening or had happened. So I am standing at the thresholds of dieing because that was all I had left or living and finding some method of recovery. I came to some kind of an idea as to maybe these steps would work if I worked them, because they told me that is what was suppose to happen. Now I walked back to the doors of Narcotics Anonymous hopefully that you was going to work them for me. In some ways, I kind of gave Jimmy at that time permission to work the steps for me. Fix it for me Jimmy, shit. We use to spend great hours in his car or wherever I wanted him to fix the things that were going wrong in my life. I wanted him to get the parole officer off my ass. I wanted him to get my old lady to quit fussing, fighting, and goings on, get me a car and I needed a job and la, de da de da. What do you do Jimmy? He said work the steps. First, you have to understand what the steps are all about and I did not know a whole lot of people about working the steps. They say work it as you best understand it at this particular point. You will find out time and time again you will work the steps and work the steps and it will be unending that you will be working the steps. That is part of the process.

So I started doing the things that I did not believe were going to work. I had total resistance that the steps were going to work for me. Because, you did not understand my case was different and I could enumerate the number of things that happened in my life from childhood molestation, I had been in combat and had gotten run over hills and dales and I had been kicked in the ass and kicked in the head and I had been down the road to hell. According to all case histories I was suppose to be a dope fiend anyhow. I was black, I was from a broken family, poor family, on the wrong side of the tracks and I had been kicked around the world. All cases that I had read about black and brown is suppose to be if they fit those categories they were suppose to be an addict. All the conditions were prime conditions to be an addict and I wore that like a badge of courage. If anybody would ask me I was yes, I am a dope fiend because. I used that one a long time. I carried that around for a long time you know like I had a prescription for being a dope fiend. If somebody would ask me, I would lay the prescription on them. See that is the reason I am a dope fiend, society had been fucking with me too long. This is the reason I am a dope fiend and I want you to take pity on me, and I want you to help me out. What I want you to help me out are to remain dope fiend. I had no experience of recovery and that was kind of a difficult place to envision, recovery with nothing, talking about nothing. I had found out that I could fix how I felt by wiping out the feelings. If I started feeling things I knew what to do with it, I would fix that mother. I thought that was a good position to be in, absent of feelings was a good position to be in. I thought I functioned quite well with the absence of feelings.

Probably the drug of choice at the time was heroin because I could function to some degree and knew what was going on and you could not tell me I did not have it together. I just had greater difficulty maintaining that habit because the progression of the disease is such a nature it always gets worse and I knew nothing about the progression of the disease. I was experiencing the progression of the disease but I did not know about the progression of the disease. So in doing these here steps it became very difficult because people had to explain to me that the steps would work regardless of what I thought about them. They had to make comparisons like the steps work like castor oil Bob. You do not have to believe in it. Take a dose and wait a reasonable amount of time and you get a result. Or they here is the recipe Bob, or here is the formula for recovery. The 12 Steps is an exacting formula that will work regardless of what you think about it. That is all you have to do is put the ingredients in there and it will work, and it worked. Now if you are a keen dope fiend like me you have preconceived idea that you can short cut. Have you ever been a cook, a little less sugar or little less salt of a little less flour? Nine times out of ten, you are going to get a mess. If you follow the formula or follow the recipe, you get a good result, nine times out of ten. They had to explain it to me time and time again. Bob this is how it works and I was always going to show them why it did not work that way. I was always disproving everything. I questioned everything.

I have no problem with people asking all these questions today because that was me. I questioned everything and I was going to tell you why. I am not going to run that one by you because I do not know how you will feel about that religious thing see because some people get touchy in that area. I had no religious leanings so to speak and anyhow and I use to question what you believed and I could prove what you thought you believed exist did not anyhow. I always became argumentative in terms of getting something to throw you off track. It seemed to be one of those character defects I used for a lifetime; I used it with Mom you know. I would set up a situation to make her wrong and I spent a lifetime of trying to make you wrong. Sometimes it exploded on me, so what you know. If it worked one, time good enough for me. The other fifty times it did not work, hey fuck it. I spent a lifetime disproving every thing; there was no God, what God. Shit, I seen people dead lying out in a ditches around where I came from, I mean stacks of them. One thing I can remember very vividly in combat is stacks of bodies. I do not know why the stacks of bodies stick with me all the time because that is death you know. It did not stop me from using. Maybe that is how I survived because I was using, I do not know. I carried a lot of guilt away from that because all of my partners got shot up and I did not get shot up. I do not know maybe because I was in the right place or the wrong place I do not know. But I carried a lot of guilt maybe I was hiding behind something I do not know what I was doing. I survived and I felt guilty about surviving. I carried that around a long time and these kinds of things haunt you. Even today I don’t know what that represents, dead bodies stacks of dead bodies. I am not talking about one dead body I am talking stacks of dead bodies that stays with me very vividly and I do not know what it is about. That is one of the bugaboos that I would put to sleep when I started feeling or it haunted me I would fix it, shit I would fix it. It did not bother me then you know I got my head hit; nothing bothered me, earthquakes and all don’t bother me. I fixed it for a lot of years.

I started working these steps in here and I got to this here step talking about God and spirituality. I knew nothing about spirituality or that which they talk about. I knew nothing about God really. I kind of had some kind of idea that there might be something out there that existed that put it all together and held it all together, nature, man on the wind. My second sponsor was agnostic. He did not believe that there was a God but did not believe there was not one. We could understand that because I did not have any experience, God experience at least I did not think I had any God experience. As I look back at it in retrospect, I had a lot of God experience. My very survival was from a God experience and I was clean three or four years and I had to go back to jail in order to have a God experience. That is how I had to have mine, very therapeutic as far as I am concerned. I had the experience of God working in my life, I understand the working of God in my life, and I came to understand how God works for me. My God of my understanding. I had been giving it lip service you know I would breeze by it and read it somewhere. I would give it lip service you know because they told me that is what you are supposed to do. But it took me three or four years of being clean and carrying the message and ranting and raving about Narcotics Anonymous. You know I would get up there and evangelize and apostlize and preach and save a few souls and bless people and sprinkle some water on them and comeback lets do it again you know. Shit but I had no God experience and I came to understand that I had many God experiences. I just did not recognize a God experience I had no recognition.

Spiritual experiences along the same line, I had many spiritual experiences. My very survival had been a spiritual experience in itself because I almost died a couple of times. I said almost right there on that edge I do not know if you know about that critical edge. See I had OD’ed a few times and I had been at that critical edge. I know about that experience of just right there on the tilt and to return from that piece of being to say” hey that was some good shit give me some more”. That is insanity, that is insanity. I came to understand what they were talking about because I had some God experiences. Through circumstances that prevailed at that time it that put some people together in my life that I did not know where they came from or whence they had been. But they came in my behalf and they did some things that were not done normally. The next thing I am out walking the streets again wondering what happened and how did that happen? For it was only a God experience that could put that together. I needed that in order to have that experience of God working in my life. I came to understand about turning it over to God because God had been running it all the time. Learned about the power of prayer through part of the same process. Most of us here in this room tonight are here due to somebody else’s prayer. It was not yours, somebody else prayed for you. You moms, your sisters, brother, man I was sure praying for you, their prayer was answered. Then I worry about, get to the power of prayer, and found out that I had prayers answered, I started begging for shit, (Laughter) and I started getting things. I got very sincere, found out that God worked and that prayer worked oh yeah we had a good thing going. You give me two of these and five of the other I would be ok. Please God give it to me. I needed three old ladies so he gave me five, all right. I had to pray to God to take them away, drove me crazy on the brinks of insanity practicing my addiction one more time and it was not chemical. I got me a money jones going, I found out oh God I need to make some more money. He gave me a couple of jobs. I had an 8 to 5 I had on from five on and made meetings in between. I kept a pocket full of money. My old lady says, you got that roll n your pocket for, why you carrying that money around. I said I gave you the payroll baby, shit this is my money, wake me up at two o’clock in the morning to go make some money. It was not meeting time and I would go out and make some money between meetings. I would leave a meeting and go paint a house or something, make some money and I got to running behind money. What I am trying to convey here is one thing that I chased many things that I enjoyed chasing. I prayed for many things and very often had to pray to have them removed, because they were not for me. I could not handle them and did not know what to do with them.

When I had money, I bought toys. We all like toys, huh. All I needed was one car so I had four or five cars sitting outside, and the old lady did not even drive. (Laughter) Cars sitting outside got cars baby shit. When I bought one camera I bought five, they were all different and I can tell you justifiably why I needed them five cameras. I needed one 35 with a long range on it, one with a short range and la, de, da, de,da. I need one a give it to you now and one to give to you later. I had cameras all over the place and like to went bankrupt trying to get the film processed. (Laughter) Now I got to take care of all these toys too. Have to watch over them because somebody will walk off with them. You do not know where to lay them or whether to take them or what. You can go crazy about that. I use to arrive at a convention with three or four cameras hanging off my neck and they were like what is that. Oh, that is a long range, that is a short range, and this is for this. Sometimes I forget I have a camera today, but not then. I was caught up in a power play. I know all of you people love power. If you are an addict you do, we love power, love to be in charge, take charge Charlie. You can do it I know you can. As long as you say yes I can do it, go ahead somebody will let you do it and they will load you up. So when you get into this position of power you get to play the same game you know. The same game I played before you know you carry it to the enth degree. It was not just good that I was chairing this over here; I wanted to chair that over there and chair that over there. So when you came and ask me what are you doing well I can say I am chairing this over here and taking care of this and I am taking care of that.

When are you taking care of home, huh? That is what my old lady asked me, you are off on all these ventures doing all this good shit. When are you going to do something at home? I thought that was great. How could she be complaining, what is she complaining about. Ain’t I clean? I am clean, ain’t I? Shit, I am doing all this; I am saving all these addicts out here. Doing all these noble and great things but the home life is going to hell. Half the most of the time I am not even there. I don’t have time to be petting Mama all the time like lay down and lets take care of it and get it over with, period. It is not time talking about playing the other little game of saying take me out, show me a good time, and take me to dinner. I was fortunate in some ways because she was involved in a thing called Nar‑Anon and when she got involved in Nar‑Anon very often we would go to the same place to have meetings so we would travel together. I thought that was enough togetherness. We would sleep together every night, we ride to meetings right, and we would go shopping together right. That is not togetherness folks I am sorry.

I come to find that out but it is all in the process. I did not know that going in because I had not had that experience. Very often, they would talk about rehabilitate. I do not know anything about rehabilitate. I am a never been, what am I going to rehabilitate to a never been? It is all a learning process to me I do not know anything about no rehabilitate. I do not think I want to rehabilitate back to the army or the penitentiary or none of them places. So I am having to learn. I am having to learn how to be a husband and a father and a this and that and a provider and to be a human being. How to go to a job from eight to five, stay there, and do the work. That is all a learning process for me because I have never been there.

That is why I am always amazed to see people have a job when they get here. Back when I do not know if addiction was different or something. When we came to meetings, we did not have nothing. I mean stripped of everything I mean old cheap watches we did not have them because we had conned some old lady to three dollars for them it was gone, it was gone. Not even a decent pair of shoes because if we could pawn them we would get rid of those too. We would come to a meeting in our stocking feet if that were necessary. No such thing we say we use to arrive at meetings and talk about looking tacky. We will give us a hot second out of the pan, we started arriving at meetings in Stacy Adams and Hickey Freeman suits, and a Dobbs cocked sideways talking shit. We used to think it was necessary to dress up the outside to make us feel better to look to you like we were doing OK that is the way we use to come to meetings. We got to the place where we had a few days clean and found out how we could have enough money to go down and get a suit out of the pawn shop. Or go buy one and get you some shoes and shine them up and go to a meeting and stand back and tell them, well I am sure doing good. Life is so beautiful. That is kind of like what I had done for years. I thought if the outside looked good, I thought that the inside was ok. I come to find out that I had been doing a repetition of the same thing for a lifetime. Ever since I was a little kid, I went through school polishing an apple. I call it polishing the apple because that was always a pretense of making the outside look good. I went into the military polishing the brass because I know if the outside looked good, it was all ok. Along with that, I went to the penitentiary as long as you keep your shit out of the way and do your time, same thing you are doing good.

So I had a lot of bad habit patterns a whole lot of bad thinking and I had a whole lot of experiencing to do that I had never experienced and it was all a growing process. Now my examples became you and my questions very often became I would come to you and ask you how you did it or how to do it. I found out that question was a very good instrument. There are no foolish questions you might get a lot of crazy answers. Hopefully the reason you are asking the question is that you do not know, watch whom you are asking the question because I was a great one to give you an answer regardless of what the question was. So watch whom you go and ask a question. Hopefully that person is doing something that you need to know how they are doing it. If you would have asked me, I would have led down a primrose path to hell. If you did not see me doing it I was still trying to tell you how it was done. That is the thing that has happened here. The process of growing up in recovery is a process.

Now many of you have had the experience of being responsible and grown and taking care of thing. I am not one of those fortunate people who have had those experiences, so all my growing up has been a process of learning. I came to Narcotics Anonymous wit a few skills. Not many just a few though, because most of my skills came from the repetition of doing something over a period of time, long periods of time. In the military I did crew serve weapons instructions and all this kind of stuff so I knew how to talk amongst people you know. Hey, I could do that and I knew how to organize things so I became kind of a natural at that. I know how to repair cars and had been at a number of schools doing that, so I had some skills and in the process. I had repetitiously done some things that I could do. Although I had to learn how to work because it was not the case of me saying, fixing one object in the industry at large or the field at large. There are a lot of jobs to be done and they want you to do it in a certain way, not Bob’s way. See Bob always had a way too, and once again I thought out in the industry you just polish it up and it looks good and it was ok. I come to find out that is not what they want. That was a revelation you know he said, you do good work you just do not do enough of it. I was stunned because I sat out there and polished those mothers up good, and check it out again, tighten up those nuts and check it out again and check it out again. They were like no,no,no,no all this polishing and inspecting you should have had ten units out. I just could not understand why that was not acceptable. In fact, I almost was fired in the process. I said ok how do you want things done and he said, you do good work but why do you have to stand there and admire it all day? That is the nature of the addict that is the nature of me. I spent a lot of time polishing up you know always shiny and I am still out there wiping on that mother. Habits are hard to break, see because I spent a lifetime out there polishing the apple for the teacher, polishing the brass for them other people you know, or standing tall in those other funny places because I thought if you put on a good front that was it. Very often you find it very difficult even in the hospices of being clean and in recovery doing service we do the same thing. We wanted to polish it up and make it look good. We wanted to show to our fellows that we know what it is all about, and very often, when you show them you know what it is all about they give you some more to take care of. Since you are so sharp here is, some more and we are gluttons for punishment and will take on more than we can handle. We do not know when to cut it off and say no and we use all the right reasons not to say no. Another addict may be sick and I cannot do that but your baby may be sick also and you better take care of that also. Now which are your priorities your baby or that addict that is coming to your door asking how come nothing is going on. You had better learn what the priorities are. It is the learning that is the process. We spend a lot of time running up and down the road trying to save many addicts. I guess we carry the messages during the early days of Narcotics Anonymous. Collectively we would go together. We spent much time together and became very intimate in our relationships. One of the things that I probably miss most now is that intimacy that we had in our relationships in the early days. We went and done things together. We had meals in each other’s houses at any given time, we slept over a lot of times, we went to picnics, showers and weddings and wherever and 12th step calls. Whatever we went together, we made sure that we stayed at least in telephone contact with our fellows. We were concerned that they make it and we go out of our ways in that concern to try to help them along in whatever way we could. Sometimes the overload could get off into the thing of save bodies. We want to bless people we want to become saviors and we want to evangelize and give this program away. Don’t you know all these addicts out here are suffering and not realize that you are the addict that is suffering? We have deluded ourselves that somebody else is suffering and at some point in getting clean or in your clean time in your recovery, you would probably have to give up some of those loads that you have taken on and get back to the very basics of recovery.

One of the great things that has happened in Narcotics Anonymous, we have a lot of people that are capable of doing the work, a lot of people. I still have a responsibility and I cannot give that responsibility to somebody else. I must stay involved, very basically I must stay involved. If I do not my head seems to turn off and tell me a lot of crazy shit that I got it together, that I know what I am doing and I know how to do it. I stopped doing some of things that are very necessary for me to remain recovered. A couple of ago