Harold B. is a guy you didn´t want to mess with when he was drinking.

A grizzled commercial fisherman from Massachusetts, he has been sober since 1973, but before that, it was a no-holds-barred life. Drinking from the age of 15, three years of boozing and brawling in the peacetime military, barroom and domestic fights all over the Cape Cod village of Chatham.

He earned a spot on the village´s PC (for "protective custody") list, which was posted in every liquor store and bar. Anyone on the list was banned from buying booze. It was a New Year´s Eve party that got him on the list.

"I´d been drinking all day. At the party, my wife´s cousin intervened when I got in an argument with her. We got into a fist fight and I ended up tearing up my host´s living room. It took three cops to subdue me. I tore the door off when they were dragging me outside. I was all cut up and bleeding, but I wouldn´t let the doctor into my cell till I´d sobered up.

"What brought me to my knees," he said, in a memory so painful he had to stop and regain his composure, "happened on Labor Day weekend that year. I came home from fishing and my wife was at her mother´s. I told her to meet me at home, but I stopped off at a bar and had a few on the way.

"When I got there, dinner was cold cuts and potato salad. I threw ´em at her, and beat her up pretty bad. A neighbor called the cops. My wife was storming out the door with our two children, two black eyes and her dress torn half off when she met the cops coming in. ´He´s got a gun,´ she said. Well, she was right. I met ´em at the door with a 12-gauge and told ´em I´d blow everybody away.

"The cops all knew me in our little town. They agreed to leave me alone till I´d sobered up. A neighbor woman (editor: remarkably brave neighbor woman!) came over and asked me if I thought I might have a problem with alcohol. Naw, I told her, I´d be fine if my wife would straighten up her act."

His wife straightened up her act by getting him kicked out of the house. He grabbed a half gallon of gin, his shotgun and his clothes and headed for his boat. He downed a fifth of rum and was passed out when his crew arrived at 11 p.m. "God, drunk again," a crewman said.

But they went with him anyway, down a channel to the sea "that would break a snake´s back." Why? They needed the work, and one of the crew owed Harold for having rescued him when he wrecked his own boat.

They made it to sea, but as the sun was coming up that morning, the thought occurred that "I don´t like this way of living. I knew I didn´t want to drink anymore, but I couldn´t imagine life without booze."

Alcoholism was rampant in his family, but Harold had some sober relatives in A.A. by the time his wife threw him out, and with them behind him, he was able to make it to a meeting on Sept. 20, 1973, his father´s birthday. He promised his wife he would stay sober, so he was allowed to move back in, but it didn´t last. The marriage ended the next year. "She got the kids, the house and the car. I got the boat and $80,000 in bills we´d run up."

There´s a rich irony that Harold sobered up on his father´s birthday. "I´m a carbon copy of my old man," he said. "As a child, I used to sit in a corner and watch my father beat on my mother and me and my three siblings. Even when he was sober, his disposition was shaky at best."

Like his father, Harold was a North Atlantic fisherman. In 20 years of daring the elements, he owned five boats. The last one was named for his two children, Dana and Val. That boat survived a 93-mile-an-hour gale, and the next year nearly lost its pilot house when he was 150 miles off shore.

When his health and the declining Atlantic fishery combined to force him to quit in 1976, he worked as a mechanic and found a new wife. Twenty-one years ago, they moved to Issaquah to be near his new wife´s family. He worked a variety of jobs here, the most memorable the installation of the Caboose, a well-known Issaquah landmark on Gilman Blvd. "I laid the tracks, the foundation, the works. I was like a gandy dancer," he recalled with evident pride.

His second marriage went south in 1985, and he remarried the same year. That one has lasted. The fishing life still pulled at him, so he crewed on a crabber out of Long Beach for awhile before they moved to a farm at Cathlamet and then to Coos Bay, where his wife worked in a nursing home. They also owned property in Maple Valley, where they live now.

Harold had a long history of health problems, but they escalated while the couple was living in Coos Bay. "I was sick all the time," he said. Then both kidneys failed. He went on a self-dialysis program, but there were complications. "I´m lucky to be alive." His temperature rose to 103 degrees while he was hospitalized in Springfield, Oregon. At that desperate point in his life, the hand of A.A. reached out to him. "This guy came looking for me on a 12 Step call. A total stranger, he had heard of me through the program´s grapevine, and he offered to do what he could to help. He was there every day till I was discharged. It really helped me through a bad time." There were repeated surgeries before he got onto the kidney transplant registry in September 1995. Only a month later, he had a new kidney. ""Just one. That´s all you get, so you´d better take care of it."

His health restored for the time being, Harold´s thoughts turned to the sea again. He bought a gill netter and fished for salmon and bottom fish for two years out of Coos Bay, when he sold the boat and quit fishing forever. "I never tired of it, but the fish were declining and permit costs were increasing. It was just time to go."

In 1998, he and his wife decided to move to Maple Valley. During the move, "I was loading the truck with my tools and equipment when I had a heart attack. Laid me right out on the ground. There was nobody around, and after awhile, the pain subsided, so I got in the truck and drove the 450 miles to Maple Valley. After I offloaded, I drove back to Coos Bay to pick up my boat and trailer. I never mentioned it to my wife for three weeks. When I did, she put my ass in the hospital right quick. I´ve been on meds ever since, and haven´t had any problems."

He´s also a diabetic, but says he has it under control. "It happens to a lot of transplant patients." What about A.A.?

"Oh, my God, it´s phenomenal. I´ve been to meetings all over the country, and I gotta say that people in the program here are a whole lot more caring. I judge that by Everett O. He keeps track of more people than anyone I´ve ever known."

Harold is an active sponsor himself, and makes about two meetings a week. He´s also a part of a moveable feast of 30 A.A. men who get together once a month at various restaurants "to tell lies to each other."

Unlike many recovering alcoholics, Harold had little trouble losing the urge to drink. "Very soon, I realized that alcohol was no longer my friend and it wasn´t taking care of me anymore."

Smoking was another matter. At his wife´s urging, he finally took the plunge to quit in 1986. "I went cold turkey and you talk about shake, rattle and roll! For two weeks, I ate everything I could lay hands on. I gained 50 pounds, but I finally quit." He´s lost 30 pounds of that excess recently, but still is a massive 250.

"When I came to this program, all I wanted was not to drink, and instead I´ve found unconditional love. There used to be a fella came to meetings in Chatham, looked like a Mafia hit man but he was really a postal clerk. He told me that ´life in Alcoholics Anonymous will open up worlds beyond your wildest imagination.´

"He was so right."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.