Committed members of AA are not ones to hold back or varnish the truth. Case in point: Al S., program manager of the Seattle Indian Health Board´s Chemical Dependency Services.

Al, a transplant from the mean streets of Yorkville on Manhattan´s upper East Side, spent the first two thirds of his life as a street hustler, small time crook and, for 14 of those years, a guest of the New York prison system. It would have been only six years but for booze, he recalled the other day.

Discharged from the army in 1971 after a checkered four-year career in Vietnam and Korea, "I got into some heavy crime," he said in a masterpiece of understatement. "I was doing burglaries and stickups on a regular basis and running with some pretty fast people. One night, the cops were chasing us on the Westside Highway when they crashed and two officers were killed. It was devastating. I ended up with a pretty hefty prison sentence, 6 to 18 years for negligent homicide.

Throughout his time in prison, he attended AA meetings conducted by faithful members from "outside." But the program only worked for him while he was behind bars.

"I was in Dannemora upstate, Sing Sing, Greenhaven, and finally, Woodburn, a medium security facility. I made parole after six years, but when I got out, I relapsed right away. (Editor: one condition of parole was that he not drink.) I turned up with a couple of dirty UAs (urinary analyses) so they violated me and put me back in prison for another six years. "

When he got out again, it was the same old, same old. "I started drinking again and didn´t report to my parole officer." But he did go into a detox program of the Brothers of Atonement at Holy Mountain, a retreat center in upstate New York where priests from all over the world go to sober up. He was there for three weeks, working as a janitor and kitchen helper. When he left, clean and sober, he decided to call his sponsor and start going to AA meetings again.

"You forgot something," said the sponsor, like reporting to your parole officer. He´s been looking for you.

"My attitude had always been, ´Well, they´ll catch me when they catch me," Al said. "Know what I mean?" His sponsor told him, "With that attitude, you might as well go out drinkin´ again ´cause that problem ain´t gonna go away."

"AA must have taken hold of me by then," Al said. "I actually went with this guy down to the parole office and turned myself in. I was feeling sooooo righteous, doing the right thing. This was soooo cool! I told ´em I´d missed a few appointments and wanted to clear things up.

"This guy comes out and asks if I´m Al S. I says´yeah,´ and he says ´Will you stand up, please, and turn around?´ I did, he takes out his handcuffs and puts one on my wrist and slaps the other around this pole that was fastened to the wall. ´Now you can sit down,´ he tells me.

"Wait a minute, you don´t understand. I´m turning myself in voluntarily."

´I know that," he says, ´and I appreciate it. But a lot of people sit out here with that in mind, and then when we turn around, they´re gone. I´m just trying to help you with your decision.´"

So Al did a final 18-month stretch as a parole violator before he left the prison system for good in 1986. He considers May 30, 1986, the day he came out of prison for the last time, as his AA birthday. He didn´t drink in prison, and attended AA there, but doesn´t count the time because it was less than voluntary sobriety. "I didn´t drink in prison ´cause that jailhouse hooch is garbage. It even stunk. But the real reason I didn´t drink was I didn´t think there was enough."

Also a drug addict before he was sentenced to prison, he went into treatment at a place called Phoenix House while out on bai on the homicide chargel. "I thought I could use it as leverage when I was sentenced, but the court didn´t give a crap, so I had to leave treatment before I finished. But I never used again. I credit Phoenix House for getting me off drugs."

With the prison system behind him for the first time in a long time, Al continued his hustling ways, but legitimately at last. He launched a career working and selling at flea markets in the Northeast, and eventually moved to Rhode Island. He was living there when the 1990 national convention of Alcoholics Anonymous was held in Seattle. The rest, as they say, is history.

He and his partner came out for the convention and liked this remote corner of the country. During his time in prison, Al earned both a bachelor´s degree in counseling and a master´s degree in business administration, from New York University extension, so he was well prepared for his new life in Puget Sound. He soon signed on as director of Renaissance Recovery House in South King County. When that program ended in 1994, he became director of Sea Mar Community Health Centers, which emphasizes treatment to Latinos. In 1997, he was recruited by the Indian Health Board and has been in that job since.

When he moved up to Seattle to manage the Indian Health Board chemical dependency programs, he took on the crown jewel of Indian residential treatment programs. The Thunderbird Treatment Center at 9236 Renton Ave. S. has 86 beds for youths and adults, the largest such center, according to its Web site, in the U.S. Outpatient treatment is at 12th Ave. S. and Weller St., where there is also an extensive network of other programs: medical clinic, WICs (Women, Infants and Children) nutrition, and a unique program for medical residents, primarily from UW. The newly minted doctors get an intensive course under the supervision of doctors from Swedish Hospital in working with low income people, particularly Indians. Most of the residents are themselves Indian doctors who come from tribes all over the country, but principally from the West-Sioux, Crow, Navajo and Apache as well as Western Washington tribes. Currently, there are six in residency. They sit in on AA meetings-there are meetings four days a week-talk to patients, watch intake procedures and generally get the flavor of an intensive drug and alcohol treatment program.

"They probably get more extensive training in substance abuse here than they do at medical school," Al remarked. "Even to this day, medical schools do very little training in chemical dependency."

Although the priority population is Native Americans, the Indian Health Board serves all races and ethnic groups, currently 50 per cent Indian and Alaska Native, 30 per cent white and the rest black, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific Islanders. He estimates that about half the people who go all the way through the program-up to 180 days-stay sober for a year. If they make it that far, they´ll probably make it through the second and third year, and "there might be a few dropoffs after that."

Just now, the biggest concern of the Health Board and its staff is the planned Jan. 1 closure of Cedar Hills, King County´s inpatient treatment center. If that happens, 158 beds will be lost. Services are already woefully inadequate. He says only 20 per cent of the need is being met as it is. That includes alcoholism, of course, but also such "special populations" as metaphetamine addicts and those with co-occurring disorders (dual diagnosis) --addiction and mental illness.

Through it all, Al´s personal priority is his own sobriety. Working 60 or 70 hours a week, he still makes at least one AA meeting every day. Usually, it´s at one of the halls-he mentioned Fremont´s Aurora Fellowship, 23rd and Cherry, both in Seattle and the Southend Fellowship in Kent-where he finds more openness to problems other than alcohol.

"AA is becoming more open to other kinds of addiction, but we need to be open to mental illness too. People with dual diagnosis like the structure and the fellowship of AA more than Narcotics Anonymous.

"Few of the people who are coming into AA from the courts and the treatment centers are addicted only to alcohol anymore. Just a few old timers like you and me. If we don´t change, we´ll run out of pure alcoholics. That will affect the membership and undermine AA in the long run.

"It´s a bad thing if a newcomer is turned away on his first contact. It should not be luck when you find a welcoming meeting, but groups create their own levels of acceptance. Even though we´re a program of change, some people, particularly the oldtimers, don´t want to change. We need to be more flexible."

Al wrapped this jstory up with a bit of philosophy from a long-ago sponsor.

"I had lost everything, had just come out of prison. He told me that the things AA would enable me to get back in my life-career, family, whatever it might be-are the same things that would drive me away from AA. Get too busy with work and family and I can forget what my number 1 priority is: alcohol. ´You can change priorities 2,3,,4 and 5,´ he told me, ´but you can never afford to change priority number one.´

"Without this program and this fellowship, I won´t have anything else in my life.

"I always try to remember where I came from."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.