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"Skin-tight jeans, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, war paint-my kind of girl."

So said Roy C. of his first meeting with Carol C., who´s been his wife since April 2, 1982. That first meeting was in 1979. Nothing came of the encounter for the next year. He was getting a divorce and Carol was struggling to hold herself and her two small children together selling cheeseburgers at McDonalds.

Carol´s home group was in Snellville, Georgia, and Roy lived in another Atlanta suburb. Decatur. "Roy used to come to my home group," Carol recalled, and after a year or so, they had their first date.

Roy says their budding romance was a "13th Step deal." Carol says "not so. He had another gal that was 13th stepping him."

Their first real date was to a roller skate park. Carol invited Roy. "I didn´t dare say no, so I spent the evening clinging to the safety rails. That was my first and last experience with roller skating."

Both recently divorced, they let their romance move cautiously. "I was just trying to survive," Carol said. Roy brought food over for the kids, who fortunately liked him. "It was old fashioned courting," Carol said. "There was no thought of his moving in. We didn´t do things that way. I´d been around, but my moral upbringing in the Catholic Church kept the lid on. I´m grateful today for that upbringing."

They were married April 2, 1982, and both agree they have lived happily ever after. Carol´s son gave her away and Roy´s daughter played the piano.

"We have such a wonderful life together," Carol said. "We have such respect for each other. How could we ever have gotten so lucky? We´ve never had a fight or raised our voices in anger. He´s soft spoken, and I am too now. I learned that from him. We complement each other."

"True," said Roy.

Carol and Roy came to this point in their lives the hard way. Carol first:

"I was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. (There´s still a touch of the Northeast in her speech. I grew up there, went to an all-girls parochial school there and got sober there,

"I had my first drink when I was eight. I couldn´t sleep because of my parents´ fighting, so Mother would give me brandy. After a few months, she saw how much I enjoyed it and cut me off. That was it ´til high school, the normal thing just like the other kids. I thought of beer like coffee.

"I left home and left college when I was 19. It was too confining for this party girl. Studying was a waste of time. I struck out for Miami, got a job in a department store and a fake I.D., and began drinking in bars. I was kind of a sophisticated party girl-no falling down, no loose woman at that time. I moved to New York to work as a receptionist in the heart of Manhattan. I got the job ´cause I looked good, but I was drinking every night after work and showing up the next day with my hair in curlers and no makeup. I´d head to the ladies room to get it together. But that only lasted a year.

"A friend asked me to fill in as the hat check girl in a bar, and that was the beginning of the end. I made more than a week´s salary that night in tips, so I quit my day job and went to work as a lounge waitress. I was still only 20, but I was a real night person.

"Back in Florida, I found the ideal spot, a bar that opened at 8 p.m. and closed at 6 a.m. "We all had guns under the bar. This was in the Sixties. We wouldn´t serve blacks, but we had a great black band. (Reminiscent of Sammy Davis Jr.´s story of Las Vegas: the headliner who couldn´t stay in the same hotel.) All through the riots, we had great music."

Carol decided to go back to her home state and went to work in a Syndicate-owned bar. "It was a dump, but a good dump. I was making a lot of money, but I spent it all."

Her Mafia contacts led to a job at Egg Harbor, on the New Jersey shore, where she was allowed to sleep in the back. "Jimmy the Brute was the owner. He was so good to us. I´d get drunk but he´d never fire me. Jimmy loaned me money to buy a car down in Florida. I never did pay him back. Twelve years ago, I made amends for that with a donation to the American Lung Association. Jimmy died of lung cancer."

Roy: Those guys were all scumbags."

Carol: "That wasn´t true. They were always good to me."

Back in Rhode Island, she married her high school sweetheart because he thought she´d bring excitement into his life. "It was a frickin´ nightmare. I was a full time maintenance drinker by then. The worst part was I had two children. I knew nothing about A.A., but I read something about it in the Pawtucket newspaper. I called for help, and Helen took me to my first meeting that night. For several months, I never went to a meeting sober. No one ever said anything.

"One night, at my basement bar, something happened. I don´t know what, but I knew that was my last drink. I started cleaning up. My husband couldn´t deal with my sobriety. We moved to Florida to try to save our marriage, but it ended anyway. I got the kids, the house, the car and all the bills. But we´re good friends today."

Carol went to work for McDonald´s in Snellville and worked on her sobriety. Roy entered the picture around that time, and would come in occasionally.

"I would hide when he came in, but once he caught me mopping the floor."

Roy: "She was kinda cute with a mop bucket."

Roy was even more of a wanderer than Carol, much of it with the assistance of the Air Force. Born in Portland, Oregon, he and his family moved to Topeka after his father´s death when Roy was 11. "When I started drinking as a kid, I was alcoholic from the first drink. I drank some beer, but 100-proof bourbon and vodka were my drinks of choice. I was a good student in high school even though my life was built around booze."

Good enough that he got a degree from Washburn College in Topeka, living the riotous fraternity life all the way. "I worked full time, drank full time and went to school full time." When he graduated, the Air Force offered him a commission, and he spent the next eight years flying KC 135 aerial tankers and four-engine bombers for the Strategic Air Command. "I was pretty well around the world, drinking all the time."

He says he never flew drunk, but had a severe hangover many times. "You know the 12-hour rule? No booze for 12 hours before you fly. But I´d have been better off drunk than with those disabling hangovers. Thank God, I never hurt anyone. There were lots of alcoholic fliers. The rule said you could not be an alcoholic and fly, but many of us were and did.

"Fact is, it was encouraged. Every Friday afternoon, the commander held a stag party. Nobody who was there drank moderately. It was easy to drink. Alcoholic fliers were helped to cover it up. Everyone knew about it. I understand it´s still going on, but not so openly."

When he left the Air Force, Roy wanted to fly commercially, but there were no jobs, so he went to work for a construction firm in Atlanta and has done that kind of work ever since. "I ruined my marriage with booze," Roy said. "By then, I was drinking when I woke up in the morning. My wife tried to get me into counseling, but I wasn´t interested. I could still work. For the last six years of my drinking career, it was vodka and a little coffee for breakfast. It began affecting my health."

"Mine too," Carol chimed in. I was throwing up bile."

In 1977, after a stint in Al-Anon, Roy´s wife divorced him and took their daughter. They´re now on good terms, Not then, though. Roy was living in his car. As an outside salesman, he had to look presentable. He´d sneak into the office for a nap and clean himself up.

He had been to an A.A. meeting, forced there by his wife. "I was three sheets to the wind. I didn´t hear much." But then he had a spiritual experience and turned himself in to a counseling center and a counselor who was an antibuse believer. Ironically, the counselor led him to Alcoholics Anonymous. When Roy arrived, the counselor said he was too busy to see him, but suggested he "go with those guys," several A.A. members who were doing 12th Step work.

But that was the beginning of his new life. He went to lots of meetings with this crowd. Then he discovered Atlanta A.A.´s Biscayne Room, where he got into 12 Step work. "We´d bring ´em into the club, detox ´em for 72 hours and feed ´em a diet of orange juice and brewer´s yeast.

"Myself, I never intended to stay sober, but I was going to a lot of meetings and one day realized I hadn´t had a drink for awhile. After a few months, I got a sponsor and everything began to get better. I met Carol around this time."

Carol and Roy were embedded in Atlanta A.A. when he was offered a good job in San Francisco managing the firm´s construction offices there and in Seattle. Two years later, he was transferred to Seattle and they´ve lived in the Lake Union neighborhood ever since.

"We didn´t want to move," Roy said. "We both had daughters in college in California. But I´m glad we did. We love it here."

They´re both active in A.A. service, but not together. Roy´s primary thing is sponsorship and greeter at his home group. He´s also been GSR over the years. Carol is also an active sponsor and is on the Intergroup phone crew on Mondays. "I don´t work MY program," Carol said. "I work THE program. It´s everybody´s program, not mine.

"We go to a few meetings together, but if we do, we sit in different rooms. We´ve never talked about it. We´re just not joined at the hip in A.A. He has his friends, I have mine. It works well for us. It´s made our marriage stronger."

"They say you can talk to your wife about anything. We both sponsor a lot of people, but we don´t talk to each other about it," said Roy. "Oooohhh, no," said his wife.

The couple starts each day, separately, with prayer and meditation.

Both are deeply involved in A.A. in Seattle now, but they had to overcome classic Seattle standoffishness first. "When someone new or from out of town comes in, I make a bee line to welcome them ´cause it didn´t happen to me," Carol said. "But I still see people standing by themselves."

Looking back over more than 30 years of sobriety, Carol and Roy agree that A.A. is the best thing that ever happened to them. As Carol said, "I´d have no life without it." To Roy, "A.A. is the easiest thing I´ve done. It´s the easier, softer way. Nothing was harder than life out there before A.A. My worst day of sobriety was better than what went before."

Interviewing and writing by Dick S.