Bob O. AA Male Disk 1

**Bob** (0:07)
Thank you. My name is Bob, an alcoholic. It's by the grace of God and the fellowship of the Alcoholics Anonymous that I haven't found an eater and excuse to take a drink since May 28th in 1973
Thanks for inviting me. I haven't been to Kentucky for quite a while. It's nice to be back. I'm a member of the Happy Way group in Englewood, Colorado. I didn't pick the name.
Sounds like a bunch of people on Thorazine.
I would much rather have been part of a group that was called the Outright Mental Defectives, or the Beaten Into a State of Reasonableness group, or anything but Happy Way. And so, I always feel like I have to make excuses for it every time I stand up.
I stopped. I started going to Alcoholics Anonymous in 1968 I didn't get sober then. But I didn't know what to do. I, things had really gotten bad for me. I didn't even start drinking till I was 17 The first time I drank, I was a junior in high school. I drank four cans of beer. I think I threw three of them up. And it didn't really much affect me one way or the other. I didn't think. I started drinking when I was 17 At that point, I was the head of the church youth group. I was the vice president of class. I started junior achievement in my hometown. I was the kid that they stood up in front of the town on what used to be called VJ Day, Victory Over Japan Day. I lived in a little town that had a square in the middle of it and had a band shell in it. And I was the kid that they got up to read Flanders Fields on VJ Day. And so I started drinking that year, and by the end of that year, I had been arrested and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.
See, it's always fun to go some place where you have a gun culture.
You tell that to somebody, and they go, oh my god.
I knew all about guns from the time I was about 10 So, anyway, I was sentenced to the Wisconsin State Penitentiary. And the judge, who was a World War I veteran, with a really bad stutter, I think that he got gassed. As far as I was concerned, they didn't finish the job.
So, he sent me to the Wisconsin State Penitentiary for four years, and then they did a plea bargain and said, if you'll go in the military for four years, well, you don't have to go to the penitentiary. But if you don't get an honorable discharge, you come back and do all four in the penitentiary. We'd still sound like a better deal until I got shot at.
So anyway, I was a chronic alcoholic by the time I was 20 I was in the military, and I had this propensity to drink all the time. And I think that the military knew that I was in there because I chose not to go to prison. And so I was...
I joined the Navy, so I wouldn't get shot at. And wound up learning how all the big guns on cruisers and battleships worked, and became a forward observer. So when we were going to invade some place, or if we wanted to go light somebody up, the Marine and I and a radio man would go in the middle of the night in a rubber raft and set up an observation post and call fire in. Which is real nice until they figure out that somebody must be watching them. And all the places that I went, I didn't look like everybody. You know, you can't be this sort of German-Norwegian and land in Lebanon.
You might as well have a bull's-eye on your forehead, because you don't look like anybody in the whole damn country.
So I was a little spooky by the time I got out of the military. I was kind of an intensity freak, which really had to do with if somebody didn't have a gun pointed at me, I didn't feel like I was alive. So I took a job as a bell collector in Chicago.
And I found out that if you weighed like 190 pounds, people didn't listen real well. And so I went up to 240 And I learned all kinds of really neat social skills. One of them was how to kick somebody's door in. One of them was how to make, how to put people against the wall, and talk to them until they collapsed.
Do you know what a sociopath is?
Well, that's pretty close to what I was. So I didn't really give a damn about anybody. You know, I gave a damn about getting people's money back for them. So I just did whatever was necessary to do that. Now, back then, they didn't have a lot of consumer protection laws.