At the end of October 1986, I had an older Mercedes and a 1969 MG-C (that's a rare 6-cylinder deal that would go very fast). I had some 21 credit cards. I owned a business. We had two sets of offices in Carmel, California. We had contracts with major educational and psychological publishers on both coasts. We developed or edited testing and teaching materials. (I once edited the Drug and Alcohol Abuse section of the California Licensing Exam for Physicians. I edited it while I was drunk, and more than once I made contentious phone calls to the test's author, a physician/professor at Johns Hopkins University.) My partner/womanfriend and I leased a house down the coast towards Big Sur on what is called Hurricane Point. It sat on a 500-foot cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and had a hot tub, marble floors, floor to ceiling windows overlooking the sea, even in the shower, and attached stuido apartment for guests, and so on.

A month later all of that was gone, and everything I owned fit into a rented bedroom in a senior citizen's apartment, except for a car someone gave to me, a beat-up Ford Fiesta, which was orange.

I spent nearly a year drinking alone in my room. No one wanted to be around me. I'd had the drunk driving arresst so I didn't want to drive to the bars. They didn't want me either though. I'd be drunk by the time I got there.

When the business folded, I got a job in a graphics and type shop setting digital type on an old Merganthaler machine. I somehow managed to get to work every day. My work was fine, but I had become quite unpleasant. Probably the nearly daily brutal hangovers had something to do with my moods. Near the end, the boss asked me if whether I wouldn't be happier working somewhere else.

I have a recipt from my nearly daily trips to the grocery store in those days. It reads: Cigarettes, Soda, Vodka, Lettuce. I'd devour them, except for the lettuce, which would rot in the refrigerator. I ate pizza and fast food. I carried Alka Seltzer with me everywhere. I had to hold my morning coffee cup with both hands.

I stopped going to my post office box. I stopped answering the phone. I talked to the people in my tv set. I had a portable computer, which was about the size of a steamer trunk. I'd write people nasty letters every night. I don't recall whether I mailed any of them.

What I thought about mostly were all of those times early in my drinking when I stopped for days, weeks, even months sometimes. I didn't understand why I couldn't just stop. I wanted to stop. I no longer wanted to drink. But nearly every night, alone in my room, that's what I did -- drink.

And there were the spiders and the rat that only I could see.

In 1987, November 6 was a Friday. After work I settled in for another night of drinking. I was miserable, depressed, defeated. I made myself a drink of vodka with a bit of Diet Coke in it in a tall glass. By then I hated the taste of any alcohol but I had to somehow get it in me, get enough in me to knock me out for the night. I took a big swallow and felt ill.

The voice asked: "Are you ready to die -- now?"

That was that. I was at the end. I had reached a point where there was only one choice left: live or die.

Except I didn't want to live any longer if I had to drink. I hated my life, my self. It, I was meaningless.

I took the drink and bottle to the bathroom. I remember exactly how that last swallow of alcohol tasted. I can still see myself pouring the contents of the glass and the bottle (which was a plastic 1.75 liter thing) down the sink drain. It was 6:35 p.m. My drinking was done, one way or another.

I cannot describe to you the feelings I had between 6:35 p.m. that evening and 4:00 a.m. Saturday morning as I sat on my bed and waited. For what, I didn't know. I could only wait because I had no idea what to do next. I had no hope of a new life, or how to get one, yet I could no longer drink.

"No words can tell of the loneliness and despair I found in that bitter morass of self-pity." (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 8)

"Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping-off place. He will wish for the end." (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 152)

Live or die.

At 4:00 a.m., I called Alcoholics Anonymous.

The reason I have a life today is because of AA. The reason I can help someone now and then, or be a jerk or self-serving, is because the "hand of AA" was there, even at four in the morning, even for me, a really, really helpless and hopeless drunk.

I love you all, and I love this AA stuff.

Thank you for being here.