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Carlos E. and I hit it off famously when we discovered a mutual love for Bugs Bunny and his friends.

Carlos immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico as a teenager who spoke little English. But with the help of Bugs, Daffy Duck, the Roadrunner and Elmer Fudd, and some ESL courses in high school, he mastered this very difficult language. He speaks flawless English with a Spanish accent.

His two grown sons, who were born and raised here, speak flawless Spanish with an English accent. How´s that for overturning a stereotype? And there´s another one too. Carlos never worked as a field hand. He helped his brother a couple of summers in the avocado ranches of the San Diego County hill country, but most of his working life has been spent as a skilled sheet metal worker,

Carlos was born in Camalu on the Baja Peninsula, and came to this country with his parents and five brothers when he was 15. The family settled in Escondido 40 miles north of the border. Carlos´s dad was a farm worker, and the whole family was able to get "green cards" as legitimate immigrants. This was in the early ´70s, when immigration restrictions were not so tight. But Carlos has never been able to move beyond that status to U.S. citizenship, thanks to some youthful behavior that got him into the record books in a negative way.

He dropped out of San Marcos High School in his sophomore year and went to work with his mother in a plant nursery, and a short time later joined a brother in a sheet metal shop. That has been his trade ever since, with a few interludes necessitated by a shortage of sheet metal jobs.

His drinking career started in Mexico, "where you can buy booze when you´re five years old." He wasn´t quite that young, but he was 13, and when he got to this country, the drinking escalated out of control. And there was heroin too. Carlos had a $150 a day habit to go with the alcohol. How did he support it?

"Me and my friends, we use to go to stores and get clothes, stuffed in our clothes, and sell them. I got busted three times. I could make $150 a day. Some of my friends made $500 a day."

Ever get a DUI?

"No, none. Oh yeah, when I was 19 I had one. Got fined $200 and ordered to alcohol school. On my last day, I got my certificate and went out to celebrate and got drunk."

Later, the court sent him to a treatment hospital in nearby La Jolla for a month. That´s where the sun began to come up. Two months later, he joined the fellowship to stay. His sobriety date is December 1, 1983,

Before that happened, Carlos was sentenced to a year in a San Diego County conservation camp. "We fought fires, lots of fires. We were paid $3.50 if it was a federal fire and 35 cents for the county. When the year was up, I had $1,000 saved up. Imagine how many fires that was at those wages. Twenty at least."

When there were no fires, Carlos worked in the parks. He was put in charge of Camp Cima, near Julian, in the San Diego apple highlands. For that, the county paid him $1.20 a day.

This all happened when he was already in the program, so instead of blowing his nest egg, he bought clothes for his kids and his wife.

His loyal wife held the family together through all his vicissitudes. "She worked a lot in those days. I owed her a lot."

Through all of this, he followed the sheet metal trade in shops all over San Diego County. In 1990, he came to Seattle for the International Convention and fell in love with the rain and the green. "It was so beautiful. Lots of water, everything green. As a kid, I´d dreamed of living in a place where it rained a lot.."

So in 1991, the family made the big move to the Northwest. At first, he couldn´t find a job as a sheet metal craftsman, so worked as a janitor at the airport. Since then, it´s been a series of sheet metal jobs all over King County until the work dried up with the recession. He´s been on unemployment for two months.

Ever optimistic, Carlos is studying computers at the employment office. "Computers are the wave of the future and the present, and the training´s free. I think it´s going to lead me into a sales job in sheet metal."

When Carlos arrived here in 1991, there was only one Spanish-speaking meeting in the greater Seattle area, so he joined an English-speaking group in Des Moines "and the next day, I was the coffee maker."

Against the opposition of oldtimers, Carlos and a friend started organizing more Spanish-speaking meetings. "The oldtimers thought one meeting a week was enough, but too often, members would go back out and drink."

For seven months, the new meeting they started was composed of Carlos and his friend, but gradually it grew, and now there are daily meetings for Spanish-speaking. There are 17 all together, in Kent, Auburn, Burien and Renton.

He goes five times a week. Service has been a big part of his sobriety. He was the first Spanish-speaking GSR, twice, and was instrumental in getting a meeting started for Hospitals and Corrections. Much of this growth was with the support of Seattle Intergroup, Carlos says. "They taught us everything."

Through A.A., he also conquered his heroin habit, though it was a tougher road than alcohol. Because heroin played such a big part in his addiction life, he has no objection to people talking about drugs other than alcohol. He does.

Today, 27 years sober, what does A.A. mean in his life? "It is my life. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think of is A.A. It´s the best thing that ever happened to me, and I used to think it was the worst.

Interviewing and writing by Dick S.