It's No Game

AA Grapevine® - Our Meeting in Print Online Volume 59 Issue 12 May 2003
I am sitting here in my jail cell thinking that I better put this down on paper for the sake of someone else who may be thinking of going back out there.

I was doing well as long as I was attending three meetings a week. However, I never made a commitment to a home group. Half-measuring, I was on AA but not in AA. I gradually went from three meetings a week to two and then none, and I still can't figure out why, for I like going to meetings. I had almost a year of sobriety, and I threw it all away.

One day, I decided that I could drink just as long as I mixed the booze with some vitamins. Then, I proceeded to wash my vitamins down with whiskey at night and with vodka in the morning--a couple of swigs, that was all. I guess that in the back of my mind, I had doubts about whether or not I was an alcoholic, and I thought that maybe after a period of abstinence I could drink normally. Well, I proved that no alcoholic can drink normally.

One morning, January 7, 2001, I took two extra big swigs of vodka with my vitamins, and I went down to my parents' house half drunk. A big mistake, for my dad had said that if he ever caught me drinking again he would call the police. My folks were fighting when I walked in on them, and my dad was calling 911 on my mother. This left me in a state of shock. When my parents saw that I was drunk, my dad hung up the phone real fast and proceeded to dial 911 on me. In a drunken stupor, I proceeded to club my precious seventy-eight-year-old father over the head multiple times with the barrels of three different rifles while he was on the phone. The police and the ambulance came like lightening, and my dad was life-flighted to Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh, with a fractured skull. I was immediately taken into custody and charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and harassment. It all happened so fast that I still can't believe it. My dad spent a few weeks in the hospital and was sent home. The hospital should never have sent him home. On February 1, his brain began to bleed. Again he was life-flighted to Mercy Hospital, suffering brain damage, which has left him unable to walk without a walker and half blind. I have been in custody ever since in the state mental hospital and in jail. As I write this, I do not know what will happen to me or whether or not I will ever draw a free breath again.

If you are neglecting important parts of the program, or if you are in jail, I just want to say to you, Don't play games with the program! When you get out of jail, jump into AA with both feet: Go to ninety meetings in ninety days, get a sponsor, get a home group, keep coming back, do what is suggested. Don't let this disease gain the upper hand, for if you give it an inch, it will take a mile! Get all the way in AA, not on AA. Don't give this hideous disease a chance to wreck your life.

Greg K.
Pennsylvania
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