I was 15 years old in the summer of 1970. I wouldn’t turn 16 until December of that year. Vince and Charlie and other high school buddies introduced me to the Oxford Tavern in DC across the street from the entrance to the zoo. I bought my first pitcher of beer in a bar. I experienced the most wonderful feeling of my life as I got drunk with friends in the warmth and comfort of a bar. Beer and later bourbon were the poetry of my life.

Later in 1970 I stole the driver’s license of the only red-headed eighteen-year-old at Good Counsel High School. That opened up the bars in DC and Utah (the following summer). Many years later, Pete Hamill wrote a memoir called A Drinking Life. I get it; I took to bars like fish take to water. I was living “a drinking life” at a very young age.

I was expelled from high school the last week of my senior year. My father John picked me up, walked out to his convertible with me, lit a cigar, looked at me and said, “your mother is not going to like this.” Then we went to a bar and drank. God bless him. He had his own demons and was sober more than three years at his death on his 56th birthday.

A few weeks after my high school exit — the summer of 1972 — I joined a police department. Either I was schizophrenic, or my life was a contradiction. I worked very hard on the police department and attended junior college and then college. But I also drank away every paycheck I earned for 10 years in every dive bar in DC. I never accumulated more than $1000. But, I closed bar after bar after bar. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.” And along with drinking came wrecking cars, bar brawls, arrests and “unarrests,” and a marriage that lasted six months and a day. If it was fixed, I could break it. By the time I was 27 I had worked on a police department for ten years, had a BA in English literature with a minor in Economics and was living on Whiskey Bottom Road in North Laurel. At about the same time I was applying for law school and getting an A in 12 credits of English Literature, I was writing a suicide note and trying to find the courage to shoot myself in the head.

I never did find that courage. Instead, I found my personal rock bottom and a room over the drug store on Main Street in Laurel. The room was smokier than a pool hall and it was mostly men – including half of Laurel’s homeless population – but we worked a 12-step program. I learned to hold hands and say the Our Father at the end of every meeting. Sometimes we would go to Howard Johnsons at Route 1 and Main after the meeting and talk for hours. I had my last drink sometime before the Memorial Day Weekend of 1982. Today is 40 years one day at a time. I have never once celebrated an anniversary at a meeting. I am superstitious about holding myself up in front of others as sober. I honestly believe that I am one drink away from my next drunk and I fear anyone else depending upon me to get us sober and keep us sober.

But I am not writing this for me. In fact, I still carry lots of regrets. I have tried to make amends where I can, but I consider myself one of the most flawed people I know. My tribe is like me: incredibly flawed people you meet in the darkness on the edge of town.

They get me; I get them. In fact, the people I don’t get are the perfect people. But not to worry: they don’t get me or like me so we don’t vacation together. Like I said: flawed. I am writing this for two reasons. One to thank all of the tribe (many of whom I met only once in a room somewhere). My tribe has helped me day after day after day and I have put together something resembling a productive life. I still work hard, but I am not spending half of my waking time damaging my best efforts. The second reason I am writing this is to carry the message to the still suffering alcoholic.

When we prayed for serenity, I remember thinking that if I ever found serenity I would be so bored I might just find the courage to shoot myself in the head. The opposite is true. My life is filled with that which interests me. And instead of bars, I find rooms with the same people I used to talk to in bars. They get me and I get them. I have no idea what tomorrow will bring to me. I am open to the challenges God gives me as well as the opportunities to try to help a fellow traveler. I have said a prayer today of thanks for the men and women whose selflessness allowed me to have the opportunity to live in a free country. I made some bad choices along the way with the free will and opportunities I had. When I f’d up, which was more or less the norm, my father used to tell me “let’s play a great second half.”

If I was in a bar, I would raise a glass of bourbon or a bottle of beer and lead a toast. But, thank God, I am not in bar. I am at work, with a cup of coffee, a client who needs help, and the opportunity to be a decent person. Thank God for his amazing grace.