Although I wandered aimlessly through more than 20 years of escalating drinking and inner turmoil, I somehow still was able to achieve what some would consider success.

For about three years I’ve been leading an AA meeting inside a medium security prison about 35 miles from my home.

I’m currently 26 years into a life sentence in a California maximum-security prison.

I’m currently serving a sentence of six and a half years for alcohol-related crimes.

My life changed forever on a March evening in 2008.

I’ve been an alcoholic since I was 12. I can still vividly remember that first time a beer tasted good. I was transformed from a scared and desperate little boy to a man in charge.

I am serving a life sentence here in this prison. I shared my story once before in the June 2015 prison issue of Grapevine.

Thanks to some of my fellow AA corrections volunteers, I was introduced to taking meetings into jails and prisons in early sobriety.

Grandpa was the only person in the world I didn’t hate. The only thing I liked was sitting on his knee and hanging out with him.   I had a tough childhood. Mom and Dad were mean.

At our regular Big Book study meeting one Wednesday, our discussion digressed into an argument about the dated language preserved in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I never expected the desire to quit drinking to enter into my mind in any way, let alone find forgiveness for myself.

As a result of divorce proceedings, I was sent for an alcoholic evaluation at our hospital in Berwyn, Illinois. I was given a series of 20 questions to answer, and I lied my tail off.

When the churches shut down in March of 2020 due to COVID-19, my home group in Manhattan transitioned to virtual meetings.

When 2020 started, I was full of hope and plans. But the second week of January, I had to have my leg amputated below the knee.

In March of 2020, when everything shut down because of COVID-19, I was terrified that the liquor stores would close. How would I get through a pandemic without alcohol?

In October of 2017, I was living on the Massachusetts North Shore. I was just three months sober when my father became very ill and was hospitalized back in my old home state of Ohio.

When I first got sober, each day forward was a struggle. After a few months, the alcoholic fog began to lift as I started to understand and embrace the AA program.

On a spring afternoon in 2018, I was working out before joining friends for an AA meeting later that night. Then my friend—I’ll call him Al—phoned.

I grew up in a family of heathens in Kansas, the buckle on the Bible belt. Both my parents came from poor families and they barely drank.

In AA meetings I listen as people speak, and it sometimes seems that God is talking directly to me through them. I always hear exactly what I need to hear.