Happy Joyous and Free episode 7 with English John

SPEAKER_1 (0:30)

Good day, everybody, and welcome to Happy Joyous and Free. In the spirit of attraction, we present this week's speaker and hope you find something in this message for your own recovery. More information about us will be available after today's talk.

John Alcala (0:43)

Good evening, y'all, I'm John Alcala.

John (0:45)

I'm John.

John Alcala (0:47)

I first met our speaker, what do you know, three and a half years ago, of brain damage.

About a year later, I asked him to speak for me on a Tuesday night over there. I like what he had to say. I like to listen to him, so I asked him to come out here, and hopefully we all enjoy tonight. Let me introduce John.

John (1:14)

Hi, my name is John.

John Alcala (1:15)

I'm an alcoholic.

John (1:17)

My sobriety date is November 27th, 1993, which means I got sober in Thanksgiving, which is kind of weird. I'm not from Cincinnati. We don't celebrate Thanksgiving in England. We don't go, hey, the natives fed them. They ain't coming back. You know, somebody actually asked me if we celebrated July 4th. I said, we don't do that either. You know, hey, we got our asses kicked. You know, so November. But I tell you what, Thanksgiving now has a really special meaning in my heart. You know, it's when I got sober. And every Thanksgiving, I spent a lot of the time doing AA, because that's when I got sober.

Anyway, great to be able to talk down here tonight. It was just so wonderful just seeing a bunch of people I just haven't seen for just a while, you know. And I sit in there, talking to Mark, talking about stuff. And it just warms my heart when you come over. There's a lot of meetings over in Kentucky, and just coming back here and seeing these guys, it just warms my heart to just touch base with them again, you know. It's great to stay sober. It's great to stay sober a long time. And grow old in AA. It is. So, anyway, I'm an alcoholic. I always like to start out by describing a non-alcoholic. I have two kids who are non-alcoholic. And I think it's very important to just think about how they drink. You know, my son came and stayed with me for two weeks, over Christmas. And they went and got some alcohol, okay. They bought a four-pack.

I didn't know they made four-packs. I can't imagine ever going in the store and going, give me a four-pack, I'll be back in ten minutes. I can't imagine that. So they're there for two weeks. They drink two. They pack two beers to take home. I mean, that's not how I drink. My daughter's not an alcoholic, right? She's in a band. They were playing their debut concert over in one of the bar. So I thought, I'm going to be the big man. I'm going to put my credit card behind the bar, and I'm going to let the band drink on me. We were there for five hours. Five hours. I was thinking, this bill is going to be big. So six people drinking for five hours, $135.

I mean, five hours, six people drinking, they're not alcoholic. They felt that they needed to be at their best when they were on the stage singing. And it's not...

You know, I'd be puking over the mic going, don't remember eating that, you know. Anyway, you know, that's not how I drank. You know, I drank to a point of just complete humiliation, regret and shame. Just guilt. I was just buried in this pit. That's how I drank. You know, so many things happened while I was drinking, and I just like to just talk about a couple of stories. This came about, actually, you know, this comes back to me a couple of months ago. A friend has a dog called Holly, and I'd like to just talk about Holly for a minute.

I came to the States in 1983, and I met Holly in 1985 And we dated.

I absolutely, I treated her very badly. And what happened was she was murdered.

And a guy followed her into her apartment, tried to rape her, and then shot her five times in the back with a 0.44 through a pillow.

Now I absolutely ruined the last six months of her life. I lied, I cheated, I did all that stuff. And the first person she wanted to speak to was me.

She said two things before she died. I think women will understand this one. He didn't rape me, I'm okay.

And the last thing she said was, Please get John.