End of My Rope
A parolee says serving time in prison saved his life
You wouldn't guess by looking at me—a quiet sort of person—that my
story would be dramatic. My 11 years of sobriety weren't gained by going
to meetings after work or weekends. I could've had 33 years
in the program, had I stuck with it when I first started going to meetings. In 1976,
I started going to AA and I rang up four years of sobriety.
Life improved and I quit attending meetings. I had the attitude that AA
was like medicine. When you get better, you don't need it any more. When
I began drinking again, it didn't take long before I was throwing up early
just so I could drink all night. I was also using a lot of speed. I
was single, in my twenties, a hardcore biker, and no one could tell me what to do.
I moved out of the city and bought a farm in the country. Life soon went
sour. I was fired from my job of 10 years because of drinking, was pulled over
twice for driving under the influence, and got divorced. I was in serious difficulty
now, and in desperation I started going to AA meetings again. I got a sponsor but I
was still drinking heavily and I hid my drinking from my sponsor. I even
did a six-month stint as chairperson for my AA group, but I was very depressed and
angry and I wouldn't confide anything to my sponsor.
I was doing irrational things when I was drunk. I was mad at my
car one day, so I set the garage on fire. It got rid of the offending car,
but it wasn't insured so I didn't gain anything. The homeowners' insurance paid enough
to get another car, which wasn't any better than the first one. On another night, I was
angry with my ex-wife so I took all the furniture that we had bought together out of
the house and burned it. All I had left in the house was my bed and a table. I sold my
motorcycle to pay bills—this was as big of an emotional blow as my divorce.
I called my sponsor one night but all I got was his answering machine. I was drunk and can't
remember what I said. I couldn't see any way out of my difficulties so I decided to hang myself out
in the barn. It's very difficult to do a complicated thing like that while drinking. I couldn't throw
the rope over the beam because it was so high up. I got a ladder and broke the light bulb with it. I
found another bulb, but had trouble getting up to the light fixture in the peak. When I finally had
light again and got the rope over the beam, my sponsor walked into the barn.
"What are you doing?" he asked. I said I was going to hang myself. "Can I watch?" he said.
That ended it for me. he convinced me to go to bed and the next day I checked into a treatment center.
I sold the farm and moved into an apartment after I got out of treatment. I discovered new
things about myself that I never knew. My tastes and personality sober were totally different from
the hard-drinking biker guy I made myself out to be. I discovered classical music and a love of
flowers. I also shopped antique stores for overstuffed furniture and art deco items. I joined a Pentecostal
church and worked on the spiritual side of my program. I didn't want to live without a motorcycle, so I
bought an old fixer-upper and got it running.
You'd think that the story would have a happy ending here. unfortunately, being sober doesn't make a
person smart, at least it didn't work that way with me. A woman with whom I had worked a long time ago,
when she was still in high school, reintroduced herself to me at an open AA meeting where she had taken a
friend to try getting the friend sober. She was in a new-age religion that believed in messages and visions,
and said that several years prior, she'd gotten a message saying she was supposed to be with me because
I was her soul mate. She was an attractive girl and I was flattered that she would think of me in that way.
It was a mistake to get into a serious relationship based on someone's vision. Everything went fine
for several years, but after we got married, the relationship fell apart. She moved into
a spare bedroom and we lived like roommates. I was emotionally devastated to find out that she didn't
love me, or even like me. She had never liked any of the things I thought we had in common. And here
was when I found out the hard way that I had been neglecting my program. My sponsor had relapsed
and I hadn't replaced him with anyone, because the pastor and the elders of my church had
done a "laying on of hands" healing on me. I was told that my alcoholism was now gone and I was healed
by God; I stopped attending meetings.
One of the church elders was a friend and he suggested we have a couple beers and talk about my
relationship problems. One beer was all it took and I was drinking daily again within a few weeks. Then,
when I had the pastor come over to my house to ask him why I couldn't stop drinking, he said I was sinning
deliberately. God had healed me, so if I was drinking like an alcoholic, it was on purpose. I was hurt and
angry and I quit going to church. About a month later, the pastor was fired from the church when it was
discovered that he was having an affair with the wife of the elder I drank with.
I don't know how long I could've held on to what was left of my life. I was drinking again and I was living
with a woman who thought God punished her by telling her to marry me. This is when the bottom fell out
of my world.
There was a fire in a vacant apartment beneath mine. The police thought it was arson; all the tenants
had an alibi but me. I had gotten drunk early in the day and I couldn't remember anything after 4 p.m. I
was terribly depressed and had been having suicidal thoughts. While being questioned by the police, I said
that it was possible I'd started the fire. I was remembering the times in the past when I burned the car and
the furniture.
I WAS charged with arson and sentenced to 15 years in prison. I thought I had just been sentenced
to hell. I've never thought of myself as a criminal, just a guy with a drinking problem.
I spent six years in maximum-security prisons, two years in medium-security, and then went to a
minimum facility with work-release privileges. You might think this was a terrible experience, but it
depends on how you look at it. Prison was rough. I got caught up in a prison riot and got teargassed.
I saw an inmate die from an asthma attack while the guards ignored him. Another inmate committed suicide.
I saw gangs attack people on the recreation fields. I had to fight off a cellmate who wanted me to be his
"bitch." All these things were hard to cope with, but prison was actually a success for me.
I think of it as God's divine intervention in my life. If I hadn't gone to prison, I might've killed
myself or someone else through my drinking. I'm certain that I couldn't have survived as a practicing
alcoholic much longer. In prison, I attended a nine-month-long, 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week treatment
program. When you do group therapy with 15 other inmates and you're in denial, they'll tear you apart. I
needed a hardcore rehab program to break through a lifetime of denial and stinking thinking. This was
during my fourth year of incarceration. Six months before my release, I started a four-month-long relapse
prevention program.
After nine years I was granted parole. I'll be paying restitution for the rest of my life, but I'm free! I'm
free from prison and I'm free from the compulsion to drink. I believe that God knew this was the only way
to get me off the streets long enough for the AA program to take root inside me.
I no longer believe I can be cured of alcoholism, and I no longer hold back from speaking about
things that I once thought were no one's business but my own, or that I might have previously been too
embarrassed to talk about. I believe that half the mistakes I've made in my life wouldn't have happened if I'd
talked to a sponsor regularly. I now have a sponsor, I go to meetings and I do service; I volunteered to be the
Corrections representative and also the Bridging the Gap coordinator for my local AA group.
I have 11 years of sobriety, and I live a life now that is different from anything I've ever known.
Geo M.
Fort Atkinson, Wisc.
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