Well Well Well, months and months later I came across my blog and decided to write something but didn't have a topic. I decided to write and tell you all that I have completed 14 months of sobriety.! Free from alcohol the AA way!
"God willing, we.....may never again have to deal with drinking, but we have to deal with sobriety every day." (big book,pp.553)

About my long long ordeal with alcoholism. Yup, been many years of pain and suffering not to mention all the pain and suffering caused to others! Pain, wreckage, CALAMITY!

My drinking started long time ago at the age of 15, after my dad and mom got divorced. I had my fist quart of 'home brewed beer'. I lived in Denver then and I was with the neighbor boy Johnny Ortiz and he knew a guy who made beer.
We ordered two quarts of home made beer and the rest is history.
I think I actually remember sipping dad's beer b4(dad and mom were not alcoholics) and I do remember getting a hold of some spiked punch at a cousins wedding another time when i was younger but really started drinking on a regular basis at 15.

Neither mom or dad were alcoholics, uncles and aunties too. My 2 grandfathers on both sides were. During prohibition dad's dad was bootlegging and had to use some ingenious methods to keep from being detected. Mom on the other hand claimed that taking away her father's booze was what killed him! She was only seven and missed her dad and was always angry with my grandma or whoever took away grandpa's whiskey. Maybe I grew up with the idea that if I quit drinking I would die??
When you are an alcoholic and you have to stop drinking or someone takes away your booze you think its the end of your life.

Yes, I felt my life was over 14 months ago as well but it was just the alcoholic me.... or just the life of living in the Pub, socializing strictly with other people who drank and only going to social events/functions where drinks were served or where I was allowed to bring my own.
Yah, thats right, I know what you are thinking right now. How could anyone live like that? Its as bad as it sounds....ONLY WORSE! What can I say, my story makes some stories in the AA Big Book look like fairy tales!

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So, moved from Denver to Redwood City, Ca. (Story in this blog in: Discovering America) in 1964 just before school was starting around mid August 1964. We moved into our first apartment near the school, mom was prudent about this so we didn't have to walk far and also it was near her new job in a nursing home.
I wasn't drinking then, I guess it was the newness of California and the total adventure of it that I never thought of drinking and I guess maybe I wasn't an alcoholic then?? We had neighbors who drank and we would go to their house weekends and all of them were drunks. The fat lady named Mary would always get my head and put it or rub it between her huge titties! She would purposely get me alone in one room and attack me! This was traumatizing but nice for a boy 16.

My little sister and I started school in the same high school. She would be 2 years below me. The school was well known and the oldest most established high school in the Bay Area. It was difficult to make friends coming from the South West to California....kids were different and I was different.
I got a partime job in a laundry to help mom make ends meet and there I met some new people to hang around with. They were all in high school, Richard who was older than me and the others a grade below me and younger. Richard and I went to the same school and the other boys went to Menlo Atherton, the rich school.
We would become the best of buddies for some years until i dropped out of high school and some of them would be drafted into the army or go to college.

My mom met a man who drank alot and started to be his steady. I don't remember if I started drinking with him first or my new friends from work? But anyway I started drinking steady soon (3 or 4 months) after arriving in California. My Mom would marry this guy, he became a drinking buddy instead of a step-dad. We would remain drinking buddies for about 20 more years before are paths would separate by mom's divorce from him.

I only lasted a half year in high school, dropping out half way thru the 11th grade. My excuse was that I was working too many hours and I was too tired but was really uninterested becos i didn't make good friends in school, I was also getting to be good frens with some of the kids at work and would drink with them on the weekend. They would only drink on the weekends. I always had my step dad to drink with.

Riding my new motorcycle was also a priority and much more fun than going to school. Boys just wanna have fun uh huh uh huh! Dropping out of high school also gave me a chance to meet new ppl, other drop outs! They were great! Some of them didn't even work, just have fun, and drink. You see where I'm going?

Somehow we alcoholics manage though. I managed to hang around with some of the guys and girls that hadn't dropped out and even get a g/f that encouraged me to get my G.E.D. and then go to a Junior College that she was going to. I did go to school for a while but without very good results. I didn't notice it then but it was obvious that I had a one track mind, chicks and drinking!

While living in the Bay Area in 1968 I would marry a normal girl, have a kid and divorce within 2 years, all while drinking and drugging (marijuana) on a daily basis. It was the sixties, what do you expect?
While I was with this woman she watched me go from job to job and then finally quit them and become self employed. This gave me the chance to go to work when I wanted and drink when I wanted.
I NEVER THOUGHT I MIGHT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH ALCOHOL!

GEOGRAPHICAL
We stayed in the Bay Area while we were married, living in and around Redwood City. We lived in Emerald lake when rent was only $100 PM. and La Honda for only $80, where Ken Kesey lived on a farm with his merry pranksters! La Honda was a cool place to live, only 16 miles from the coast and 40 minutes to the city. And there was Apple Jack's .
I took the wife and kid to NM,USA to see if she would like to move there.....my first attempt at a "geographical". We stayed a month there traveling around the South Western USA but she would hate it. Maybe she was smart enough to know better than to leave her mom and dad and go out and suffer with me??? I brought her back and we lasted another year before I told her we were moving to NM. She told me to go alone that she wouldn't entertain my fancy to go traipsing around the country.
At the time I thought It was a great idea that I would go alone, after all, I wasn't abandoning her and the kid, they didn't want to go?? If they didn't want to follow the breadwinner (alcoholic as I was) they could just do as they liked.
I packed up, left her and my son a car but not much money and left on my own.

I moved to New Mexico in May 1971 and the divorce papers would follow behind me. I made a quick flight back to SF to beg her not to divorce me. She went thru with the divorce and I went back to NM.
I bought one acre that had an abandoned cabin on it dirt cheap! I tried to find work in NM but there just wasn't anything in the Valley. What work, didn't I realize they were all farmers? I didn't have a farm! I went to Denver to help my dad work on a house he was sprucing up to be sold. He said if I came to help him he could come and help me work on the cabin after that. I moved my dad to NM cabin from Denver soon after and he helped me to repair fences, clean and get the cabin in order. Dad planted pine and fruit trees and built a carport. When he moved there he came with one car and by the time he died he left me fourteen vehicles! Motor home, 3 jeeps, cars and trucks!
I would not stay long without work, as soon as the divorce was final, draft papers would come. I would be working for the US Army for the next two years.

ARMY
I was inducted to the US Army in 1972, end of the Vietnam War. I seriously considered dogging the draft but was convinced by my father that since so many before me would be in the Service of the United States it was only right that I take my place, stand up to what my country expected of me.
I went in in Sept. 1972 and was soon shipped off to Monterey, Ca. for my boot camp. Boot camp as I can remember was quite uneventful, almost all the guys were 18 years old. Kids that had not married or gone to college like I had and differed my duty. After our initial breaking in ie; haircuts, some marching and exercise routines, say about 2 weeks we were able to go off base or drink on base. I could buy beer in coin operated machines for twenty five cents! Yah, it was great! I was back at it!

I made many trips home to Redwood City during my 16 weeks of training. One time I got so drunk before I left base and hitch hiked home I got caught shoplifting in a small town of Boulder Creek . I stole a cassette with some music i fancied. The manager let me off with a good scolding so I made my way out of up the road to go visit acquaintances I had met on one of my previous trips home but they weren't home. Still drunk I broke a window to get in and steal all their marijuana I thought they had but couldn't find it!
Imagine if they were home and didn't like what I had done or just scared that I might be a killer, they would have been in their rights to shoot me! Yes, more degrading shit every time I drank. Debauchery at its best, many times never making it the 90 miles to my home, shacked up instead and drunk for the weekend till reporting back to base. Still other weekends going to the homes of other army buddies out of town, sometimes traveling 200 miles risking life and limb drinking and driving the whole trip in fog you could cut with a knife! And still got people who don't believe in a Higher Power.

GERMANY
Surviving the few months of Basic Training I was shipped off to Germany and attached to the 1st n 10th Artillery unit. I was Head Quarters company, in communications and we supported the guys who shot these guns, 155 Howitzer considered the "Cadillac of Guns".
I had never been out of the USA. I was looking forward to it, looking forward to an adventure! And it was just like camping , I really enjoyed it when we went on maneuvers out away from the base in Scheinfurt. One such place was called Graf or Grafenwohr. Graf was the place where we went 2 times a year for the gunners to practice shooting, me to roll out wire for communications for everybody in the battalion and enjoy for 2 weeks!

Soon after arriving in Schweinfurt Germany and at my post I was involved in an altercation while on guard duty. Drunk and high on German downers (Quaalude equivalent)I was charged and arrested. Dumber than being drunk, I pointed my M16 at a sergeant that was coming home after a good drunk himself, he took my weapon away from me and whacked me with it almost breaking my jaw! I was heavily fined and had to attend some classes on the dangers of drinking and pointing weapons at drunk ex Vietnam vets. I quit drinking for a few days. Is easy to stop drinking, its staying stopped that is difficult. I noticed that they didn't really check on us so I started drinking before and after my classes. I thought i could handle it after a brief dry period and was really trying but it was soooo boring, I just hated the army. I hated the fact that I was uprooted from my family (the family I abandoned)and friends in California. I hated the fact that I was not in control of my own life anymore, as if I was really in control of my life anymore since my first drink!
Germany was great, it was just like Colorado or New Mexico weather wise anyway. If only I had not taken to drinking as soon as I got there. I went on to do more things I'd be sorry for ie; stole jeep from motor pool and went out to a village to drink, another nite came home walking from the village and almost fell asleep in the snow we were so drunk and cuda froze!, left half a dozen weapons in tent while we were galavanting at village drinking, (lucky nobody stole them, then I would have been in jail for life), was busted for selling whiskey and cigarette's to the locals to make pocket money. I was not jailed but my pay was taken away for months and it goes on and on and on. Consequently I came out with the same rank as I went in with 2 years prior. Longest 2 years of my life. Did I learn anything? Not hardly! Came out of the Army and fell back into the old routine, hangin around same old slippery people and slippery places.
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By the time I got back to the USA the wife and kid....ex wife, moved far away to the east near Yosemite National Park. I would see my kid only 2 or 3 times a year. Maybe he would stay with me in the summer sometimes. One time while he was in my care I took him to see the Godfather of all movies and he would have nightmares for weeks. It seems that the horse in the bed would not agree with him! I would not be allowed to take him anywhere for awhile. I wonder why?