The Meaning of Success

In 1963, after ten years of alcoholic binges and unbelievable misery, I attended my first AA meeting in Southern California. I don't remember what was said, or who said it, but they had hot coffee and doughnuts and it was warm inside. I honestly didn't go to that meeting because I wanted to stop drinking; on the contrary, I went because a wino buddy told me those people would understand how sick we were and would help us. I understood "help" to mean they would buy us a bottle of cheap wine, which we sorely needed at the time. But, no, they did no such thing. Someone said, "Keep coming back, we need you," and I thought "Yeah, they need me to clean the place or something." Why would a group of clean, well-dressed, smiling people want this hopeless skid-row wino I had become? I was twenty-eight years old at the time and thought, "These old fogeys don't know what's happening in the world."