Steve M. had been sober, or rather, hadn´t had a drink, for three years, but he was still the insufferable, sneering used car salesman he´d always been. Until that fateful phone call.

He´d been ignoring the phone, and for months had not been opening his mail because bill collectors were hounding him. Way behind with child support, he was afraid his ex-wife might call. "It was my third birthday in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I was dying," Steve said. "I couldn´t remember when I´d eaten last. It must have been two or three days. I concluded I´d be better off if I wasn´t here. Nothing dramatic. I was trying to figure out what to do that wouldn´t screw up my kids too bad, when the phone rang.

"This time, for whatever reason, I answered it. It was a classmate from the little Catholic high school we´d both attended, and he said, ´I heard you´re in AA. I am too. I´ve got four years.´ I´ve got three," I told him. "Then he said something that turned my life around. It´s one of those AA stories you hear about. Mike-his name was Mike-said, ´When I had three years, I thought I was going to die.´"

At that, Steve started to cry, and he said, "I´m dying right now." "Yeah, you probably are," Mike replied. "Then he told me that when one alcoholic takes another through the 12 steps in the Big Book, an inevitable thing happens: he gets well. He asked me if I´d be interested in getting well. Nobody had ever talked to me like that before. It´s not that nobody ever gave me the same message in all those meetings (he´d been to a meeting every day for three years), but I just hadn´t heard it.

"So I started meeting with Mike and some other people. We started on the first page and read every word. When there was a direction, we did it. Some people told me I´d gotten involved with a bunch of Big Book Thumpers, but I said they were a group of men who were more gentle in their living than any I had ever met. From the moment of that phone call, something changed in my life. An alcoholic recognized that I was dying even though I was in the bosom of AA. Because he extended his hand and shared the experience he had gone through, nothing in my life has been the same since.

"I´d been a jerk, a know-it-all. Those first three years, I had my little corps of know-nothing people to hang out with. We´d sponsor each other, always quick to condemn, never consider other people´s feelings or points of view." (At family gatherings-he has six brothers and two sisters-Steve liked to tell everyone that he made more money than any of them.)

Jill B-D, office manager for AA´s Intergroup, thoroughly agrees with Steve´s self-assessment. She knew him through a Mercer Island group they both attended. "Steve was one of the most sarcastic, angry, arrogant people I´d ever met when he came in. Then it seemed like overnight he became a different person. He still had the same sharp wit, (example: "I met a lawyer one day. It felt so good to meet somebody I could look down on," said the used car salesman.) but instead of using it on others, he was turning it on himself. I could only say WOW at the change."

Steve and Mike made the connection just in time. Steve had nowhere to go but up. An alcoholic from the age of 14, he married at 19, fathered four children and destroyed his marriage with rampant infidelity. His career as a used car salesman ended when he sought his business partner´s sympathy. "´Can you believe this?´ I asked him when I got my divorce papers. I hadn´t counted on his answer: ´I don´t know what took her so long. I´m sure you´re making her sick. You´re making me sick. You´re out of here.´"

Broke and out of a job, he went to work for one of his brothers as a freight loader. "I don´t want anything important," Steve told him. "Don´t worry," said his brother, "it won´t be." The job ended when he nearly crippled himself by wearing boots that didn´t fit. "It was crazy. Normal people don´t do that." Another brother then took him on as a laborer on construction jobs, and that´s where he was when Mike made his fateful phone call.

With Mike and his group, he began reading the Big Book from cover to cover. "At first, I had my radar up, waiting for someone to tell me something to do. That´s when I usually leave, but this time I didn´t. Later, they laughed. ´Steve, you had nowhere to go.´ They never told me anything, just said, ´This was my experience´ and left it up to me. The program they outlined was this: 1) show up; 2) pay attention; 3) tell the truth; and 4) help others. It wouldn´t come all at once. Well, I figured, I can do the first thing, so it began. And before long, I realized that God was transforming me, and all I did was show up. These were people who knew about drinking and about recovery, and they demonstrated it in their lives.

"For a year, I went through the steps with those people. They talked about making tiny payments for years to make amends to stores and people they had harmed, till finally the slate was clean. I knew about Steps 8 and 9 in a general way, but what it meant to me was saying ´sorry´ when you got caught. I owed so much money there was no chance I could ever pay my debts. They just looked at me and said, ´if you keep showing up, the money will too. That´s the way it works.´

"One of the people I had to make amends to was my former partner. I´d embezzled a lot of money from him, something like $35,000, and I showed up with a check for $25. I told him that was all I could do right now, but I would make good. He didn´t take it, which I thought was pretty neat ´cause I needed the 25 bucks. I could tell he wasn´t real impressed with me. We had been close, and I´d hurt him badly.

"I was mowing lawns for a living at this time. A year-and-a-half later, my ex-partner calls and says, ´Steve, I´ve got a vacant car lot. If you meant what you said, I´d like you to start up the business.´ I told him thanks but no thanks. I didn´t have any money. ´I know that,´ he told me. ´Tell you what. Whatever amount you need to get going, I´ll give you. Just get started.´

"It was like a Twilight Zone experience. I couldn´t imagine anything better. He gave me some money, $10,000, I think, and said ´I can´t figure out how to record this transaction. We´re both car people, and we know if one is going to screw the other, it will happen no matter what. The best of luck, and whatever you need, call me.´ That´s how I got back in the car business. Since then, we have become close friends again."

Steve got his start as a boozer when he was just 14, a dishwasher at a summer camp. A camp counselor got a fifth for him and the other teenage dishwasher, and the pair drank it all. "I remember waking up in my own vomit. We were both violently ill. The counselor came walking in and said, ´You boys like to have a drink?´ The other fella turned even greener than he had been, dry heaves and all, and I´m thinking, ´OK. I like this guy." Today, he would go to jail for what he did, but his intention was to make sure we would never want to drink again.

"From then on, I was off to the races. How could anyone tell me drinking was bad? It had an immediate effect, and I liked it. In high school, we´d terrorize shopkeepers to get our booze. ´We´ll buy it, but if you won´t sell it to us, we´ll steal it.´

"I managed to finish high school, and went into the Marine Corps when I was 18. The next year, I got married for the first time, and we eventually had four children. Twelve years in the car business, drinking all the time and cheating on my wife. Eventually, she filed for divorce.

"After some years, I married a woman I knew in AA. All the hard feelings that there used to be have been healed, especially with my children and my family. But don´t get the idea that I pretend to be a role model. A terrible price was paid because of my behavior. Today, to share my life so fully with somebody else is a miracle to me. You can´t get from where I was to where I am now without a miracle.

"Alcoholics Anonymous and some good people did it for me, and hopefully I´ll be there for somebody else."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.