Maybe you do make a difference
Name: John D.
Sobriety date: June 5, 1988
Home group: The Back Porch Group, 7:30 p.m. Mondays at University Lutheran Church, 1020 S. Harrison Road
What were you like before?
John: I have always been around alcohol, right from birth. My parents were drinkers. My uncles and aunts, grandparents. Everyone drank. I did not know life without alcohol. I’ve always been sarcastic, mainly because I don’t want to talk the truth. My first instinct is to be funny and to be entertaining.
I hear people talk about the first time they drank, I don’t have a first time. It was part of my life. It was always, “Daddy sip?” “Mommy can I have a sip?”
The first time I got drunk in a social situation, I was 16 at a high school party in Waterford. I got drunk on sloe gin. I thought this was great because people really thought I was funny. I felt like I belonged there. But then at midnight, I remember my girlfriend at the time shoved a sandwich in my mouth to make me eat something. This was during the time when you couldn’t eat after midnight if you were going to go to communion the next day. I’m talking 1963. They shoved food in my mouth because they thought that would sober me up.
Well, it made me sick. After the party, I remember my girlfriend driving my car to my house, helping me up the steps, putting me between the screen door and the main door, opening the main door and pushing me in. I fell on the floor. My dad was sitting there. He just got up and went upstairs to bed. That was my first drunken debacle.
I got married. Before that, I joined the Army because she wanted to get married and I didn’t want to. They tested me and I scored good enough to become an interpreter. They sent me to the Foreign Language Institute. I didn’t get out of the draft, but I wasn’t drafted. I became regular Army at the time.
Because of society, and the way I was raised, I ended up getting married. It was a girl that I had dated in 1963. We got married in 1969, and I drank a lot. She’s the only girl I felt comfortable with because she knew all my weirdness, my drinking and my sarcasm.
In the Army, I drank a lot. Everybody drank a lot in the Army. I was uncomfortable, so I drank. I was stationed in the Republic of Panama. Rum was only $1.50 a bottle. I learned to like rum. I got engaged while I was down there, long distance, because my girlfriend was really upset that I hadn’t proposed before I went. So, yeah, I did it because I was supposed to. We got engaged because we were supposed to. And it was another lie.
In 1969, we had the whole wedding thing, and then I started to have a family, and I drank because I wasn’t a really good dad. I drank a lot just to run away from everything. My son was born in 1970 and my daughter was born in 1973.
My son was born while I was in the army. There wasn’t any of this Lamaze stuff or natural childbirth. The father had to stay in the waiting room. I didn’t get to see my kid until they had my wife call down to the lobby and say, “You have a son. But visiting hours are at 7 o’clock.” He was born at 9 o’clock in the morning, and I couldn’t see him until 7 o’clock. I got all the people in my office, and we all went out and we got drunk. I forgot to go to visiting hours. I didn’t see my son till he was a day and a half old. So that was another, you know, guilt. “Oh, I’m going to be a great dad now, so let me have another drink.” That’s the way I lived my life. I used drinking in order to make myself appear normal.
So what brought you to AA?
John: We were living in Ann Arbor. I was going to the gay bars a lot and then going home at night and trying to be a father. I got a job in Howell. I was driving back and forth. I thought, “I gotta get away from these bars. If I get away from these bars, I’ll stop drinking.” So we moved to Fowlerville. I was good for about a year, but then I found that Lansing had bars. So I started to go to the bars in Lansing from Fowlerville.
My father died in 1986. I remember being distraught, really distraught because he and I were kind of estranged. We were okay, you know, it was a regular father-son thing, but we had our boundaries, and I couldn’t understand it. I really drank after he died, for about two years.
Then I started therapy. The therapist said I should look into Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn’t do that until the night of June 5, 1988, when I got arrested for drunk driving. When I got out of jail, I decided I was done. I got out of jail on Sunday and Tuesday I went to my first meeting at the East Club. That’s how it started. It was because of the police. I wouldn’t have gone myself. All of a sudden, I started to understand what a life without alcohol was. My sponsors and the people that I begun to hang out with had a much better life, they were much more content than I was. They knew what serenity was. I didn’t know what serenity was. I didn’t even know I wanted contentment until I got sober. It took me a good six months to a year to understand that this is the life I want as opposed to what I had.
They also told me that if I stayed with my wife, I was gonna drink again. I couldn’t stay sober. And that was true. So, that’s why I had to leave my family. Not leave my family, but I moved from Fowlerville to Williamston because my sobriety people were in Lansing. At the time, it made sense to me. I had two sponsors. And it’s amazing, they didn’t know each other yet they gave me the same guidance. One sponsor was gay, one sponsor was straight, they both always agreed on what they told me.
I moved to Williamson, and I lived there for eight years. My sponsors required me to go to at least three meetings a week. I did that, and they told me that I had to start service work, so I started answering phones in 1995.
You’ve been doing this 31 years actually now. Why do you keep doing it?
John: Because it’s service. The phone calls used to be a lot more dramatic than they are today. If they called the Central office, they were scared. People were scared. I’m a better listener than I am a talker. And I’m empathetic. I’ve had training in community intervention. We would take students that were at risk of becoming alcoholic and we would have group sessions. One time, this girl was in a group and after the group, she came up and hugged me and she said, I wish you were my dad. I thought, “Man, I didn’t plan on that.” It only happened once, but once is enough for you to say maybe you do make a difference. Maybe you don’t have to make a difference every day, but maybe once or twice or three times in your lifetime you make a difference somewhere.
When I came out as an alcoholic, I also came out as homosexual. I told my family, my kids, my wife, both that I’m an alcoholic and I’m a homosexual. My son was a little standoffish. He didn’t say much, but my daughter knew my lie. My son not so much, my daughter knew I was lying my whole life. At first, they were not happy. My son particularly was not happy that I left the family. I lament that, too, because I left when he was 17. And my daughter was 15. I wasn’t there for my son anymore. We were a good father/son match when he was younger. He did idolize me, however I think when I came out as alcoholic and gay, it was a lot for a son to reconcile. We were close, but the situation, while honest, must have been devastating for this teenager.
Today, I’ve got a great relationship with both my kids. I’ve got a relationship with my grandchildren. I wouldn’t trade what I have today for anything else, because it’s honest.