Ernie M. was a part of some of the great events of his times, but the alcohol fog was so thick he hardly knew it.

Hanging around Raleigh, North Carolina, in the early ´60s, he participated in some of the demonstrations for racial equality that roiled the South in that era. "I kind of remember some campus rallies at North Carolina State, but booze had me in such a lash I never felt a part of it. Or a part of anything, for that matter," he said. Ernie, who is black, has only a vague recollection of whites-students and others-throwing rocks at the demonstrators and burning them with cigarettes.

"There were huge crowds, but I was pretty much insulated from it all by booze."

In 1965, he was in the vanguard of the Viet Nam buildup as a radar technician in the Air Force, drinking heavily. One night while patrolling outside his air base, he and his squad ran into a band of Viet Cong. Ernie shot and killed one. The patrol captured the rest. "I´d been drinking heavily all day. It wasn´t until I got back to the States that I allowed myself to feel and discovered what fear can do to you. I tried to mask the mental pain with drinking, but it didn´t work."

Ernie was born in Miami into a family of nine children. In 1959, he was one of a handful of blacks to enroll at newly desegregated North Carolina State. He´d never had a drink till he arrived on campus at the age of 19 and pledged a fraternity. "When I first tried booze, it was wonderful, calming. All my life, I´d been a loner. I thought I wanted to be by myself. With booze, I no longer had to isolate. Booze did for me what I couldn´t do for myself."

But the down side soon set in. "I started missing classes, missing assignments. By the time I was a junior, I could no longer function, so I dropped out and never went back. I lived on the streets of Raleigh for a year and a half." Without a college deferment, he was soon drafted into the Air Force, and wound up drinking his way through five years of military service. He was discharged as a staff sergeant at Fairchild AFB in Spokane, "one of the few soldiers who got five promotions in five years," and thus became a transplanted northwesterner.

Without the military to provide cover, life soon spun of control. He decided to throw a huge party with his severance pay, and blew $4000 on free booze, free beer and free chicken to guests from as far away as Oregon and Montana. "There were 200 people there, and I didn´t know more than 15 or 20 of them. Word just got around that it was party time in Spokane.

"Things got so out of hand that I just grabbed enough chicken and booze for me and split. They tore up the house of this woman I was living with, and that ended the relationship. I moved to Seattle, but seven or eight times I drove back across the state to tell her what a bitch she was for keeping all my stuff-my clothes, my TV, my tools. She would never talk to me, so I´d stand out in the parking lot, drunk and yelling." Later, when he joined the fellowship, he tried to make amends, but she was gone by that time.

Once a Seattleite, Ernie began exploiting his talents as a natural born technician. "I realized in my brilliance that I could fix anything. I went around to several TV shops, telling them I could fix anything in the house for $40 or less. That kept me in booze till I heard of a Ballard shop that needed a technician. There were four of us when I went there, and only me when I left.

"That was the shiny side of the story. There was a tavern next door where I drank and learned to shoot pool for $50 a game. I began hanging out with techs from the University of Washington, bragging how I´d replaced three techs at that TV shop. One of ´em was impressed enough to get me a UW job application, and that´s how I became the broadcast technician for Channel 27, the internal UW station, UWTV. That was in 1973, and I´ve been there ever since. I was thinking about retiring, but they made me part of the professional staff recently, and gave me a big pay boost, so I´ll stick around for awhile."

Ernie held his present job for 10 years before he quit drinking. When he did quit, he asked his boss why he´d put up with the drinking for so many years. The boss said he always thought Ernie was having anxiety attacks. As well he may have. Always a hard charger, he still sleeps only 3 ½ hours a night. "I go to bed at midnight and get up at 3:30. I have to keep busy. My wife says I´ve torn everything in the house apart. But I´ve put most of it back together." In spite of that routine, he says he´s never tired, and has no trouble working an eight-hour day.

Ernie´s wife and two daughters never said much about his lifestyle, though his oldest daughter saved his beer caps and soon collected a box full.

Ernie quit drinking on Oct. 4, 1983, but only to prove he wasn´t an alcoholic. A judge forced him into a treatment center after what Ernie defined as his first traffic accident-an extraordinary definition, as we shall see. He was driving home from a party, and thinks he had several blackouts before he slammed into two parked cars and a truck and wrecked his van. He was two blocks from home. When the police arrived, he was down on his knees picking up little pieces of glass. His face was cut, in what Ernie calls "my first real accident." Even at that, though, he was allowed to drive home when his long-suffering wife came to pick him up.

The time before, when he hit a motorcyclist with his car, doesn´t count as an accident because he, Ernie, wasn´t hurt. Even though he had a broken leg, the motorcyclist agreed not to press charges when Ernie agreed to pay for the repairs on his bike.

"What I call an accident is when I do something that hurts me. I did all the things that people normally do-like driving into a ditch in Granite Falls chasing a woman, or driving home from a party on the median strip of Highway 99. The arresting officer gave me a ticket for traveling in the wrong lane, then led me home, following his tail lights."

But when he finally had a major crash, the judge ordered him into treatment. "Most people who come in here don´t make it. I don´t think you´ll make it," said His Honor.

"In the treatment center, I told ´em I´d rather eat worms than go to an AA meeting," Ernie recalled. "But I went to meetings at Fremont Hall and Phinney Ridge. That´s where I heard what I needed to hear: that if you don´t think you´re an alcoholic, go out and try to control your drinking. A guy at Phinney Ridge chalenged me to not drink one day at a time.

"Well, I was going to prove I wasn´t an alcoholic, so I set out to go to all the 637 meetings a week we had at that time, and I got to a lot of them. Later, I went back and apologized for my rudeness and all the yelling and screaming that I did. I´d gone to the `12 and 12 Sunday morning men´s group, for one. The next week, I went back and apologized. ´Were you here last week?´ they asked. Very humbling. About that time, I made Lake City my home group. They won´t let me talk that much, so I do my thing at speakers´ meetings.

"For five and a half years, I went to a meeting every day, and somewhere along the line, the feeling came over me that I´m a part of this program, that I´m an alcoholic. I was often at Fremont ´cause they had late meetings.

"As I started feeling better, I started getting into the politics of AA. Pretty soon, I was chairman of the Office Committee down at Intergroup. I was chairing a meeting at Ryther Child Center, so they told me I had to attend Hospital and Treatment Committee meetings. I was just running around, running around, but somewhere along there, I got it. I chaired the Picnic Committee in ´86, but I was so stuck inside of myself I couldn´t handle it till Jill (Intergroup staff member) taught me about delegation. It was my idea to hold hands at the picnic and say the Serenity Prayer. ´Big deal,´ said this guy from Fremont." Another touch of perspective."

As time went on, Ernie became involved in the Washington area structure, including a stint as DCM for District 16. He´s still a high tension guy, but he´s slowed up a little. "I´m a Type B+. where I used to be Type A." Oh, yeah? He´s talking of running for higher office in the program after he retires.

Through all of this, his wife and two children have supported him loyally. Both his daughters now have families of their own. He once suggested to his wife that she go to Al Anon. Nothing doing, she replied. "You got yourself into this mess and you can get yourself out."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.