Thirty seconds before I stand up to announce my anniversary at a meeting tonight, it hits me. I don’t have one of Len’s chips.
For 35 years, I’ve held one of Len’s hand-me-down sobriety chips every time I picked up a new one. He’d call me on my anniversary, we’d get lunch, and he’d hand me his old chip from that year. He’d gotten all of his from his sponsor, Rodger. Three generations of chips passed down through the same lineage of sobriety. Rodger to Len. Len to me.
When Len passed, I inherited all of his chips. I’ve been using them every year since. But Len never made it to 36. He died at 35 years sober. Covid took him on January 27, 2021…three days after my 31st anniversary.
So tonight, for the first time in 35 years, I’m standing up at a meeting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama…a room full of people I still barely know…and I don’t have one of his chips to hold.
I tell them the story. I ask to share before they announce anniversaries. These people don’t know me well yet. I moved here two years ago and I’m still the new guy. But I tell them about Len, about the chips, about the lineage. When I finish, they don’t have a 36-year chip. But a guy named Buck reaches into his pocket and hands me one of his own.
Keep coming back.
The Kid in Warren
I got sober on January 24, 1990. I was 15 years old. I’d turned 15 a week earlier.
Before that, I was a drunk. Not a kid who drank too much at a party once. A drunk. Doing all the things that an out-of-control kid in Warren, Ohio with a substance abuse problem does. Stealing things. Running from the cops. Drinking in secret to excess. The kind of kid that adults had already written off.
My last drink was in a house that had burned nearly to the ground a month or two earlier. I knew they had a liquor cabinet and I wondered if it had survived the fire. It hadn’t fully. But there was a soot-covered bottle of Peachtree Schnapps that was still drinkable.
That’s the last thing I ever drank. Peachtree Schnapps out of a burned house at 15 years old. If that’s not a bottom, I don’t know what is.
Len
I was 14 when Len started dating my mom. To him, I was the drug addict son of the woman he was seeing. That’s a hell of a first impression to make on your mom’s boyfriend.
Len was sober. Had been for years. His sponsor was a man named Rodger…a great man in his own right whose widow is still close friends with my mom. Len didn’t lecture me. He didn’t give me ultimatums. He just started taking me to AA meetings whenever he came to town. Showed me that sobriety could be something other than punishment. That it could be beautiful.
A few years later he moved us out of Warren to Shaker Heights. There, I learned compassion, empathy, and social responsibility from him and from a school system that promoted those values. He taught me how to be a boyfriend by buying flowers for my mom every week. He taught me how to be a husband by showing me what respect looked like in practice. When I had kids, he taught me how to shower them with love. He taught my boys how to “shave” the way grandfathers do…standing them on the bathroom counter with a bladeless razor and shaving cream.
When after 16 years my marriage didn’t work out, he taught me that life goes on. To continue to treat my ex with respect and dignity because she was still the mother of my children.
The term “step father” is wholly inadequate to describe what Len was to me. He saved my life. Literally. Everything I am as a man, as a father, as a partner…Len built that. He took a 14-year-old drunk from Warren and turned him into someone worth knowing.
He died on January 27, 2021. Covid. Anderson Cooper covered his death on CNN. He was one of the 500,000. To CNN he was a statistic with a good story. To me he was the best man I’ve ever known.
Drunk, Not Alcoholic
I identify as a drunk, not an alcoholic. That’s a Bill Wilson distinction that most people outside of AA don’t know about. Bill Wilson…the guy who founded AA…used the word “drunk” because it’s honest and it’s ugly and it doesn’t let you hide behind a clinical term. “Alcoholic” sounds like a diagnosis. Something that happened to you. “Drunk” sounds like what you are. Something you own.
I’m a drunk. I’ve been a drunk since I was 14. The only thing that’s changed is that I stopped drinking 36 years ago. The wiring is still there. The patterns are still there. I just learned to redirect them.
The Wiring Doesn’t Go Away
This is the part that connects to everything else in my life if you’re paying attention.
A few years ago I took a Hogan Assessment…one of those deep personality evaluations that PE firms use when they’re acquiring companies. My Excitable score came back at 69. That means I chase highs, get disappointed easily, and am willing to give up on people or projects when they stop being stimulating.
That’s addiction. That’s the exact same wiring. The substance changed…from alcohol to business ideas to trading to building things…but the pattern is identical. Chase the high. Get the dopamine hit. Ride it until it fades. Look for the next one.
The difference between 15-year-old me and 51-year-old me is that I know the pattern now. I’ve gotten brutally honest with myself about it in the last few years, and I’ve built a career around that honesty.
I built a trading bot because I know I can’t trust myself to make emotional decisions with money. The bot removes me from the equation. That’s not a technology decision. That’s a sobriety decision.
I run multiple small projects instead of one big bet because I know I’ll lose interest. I design for that instead of fighting it. That’s not a business strategy. That’s self-awareness borrowed from recovery.
I build systems that don’t require me to care about the outcome because I know that caring too much is where I get dangerous. “The less I care about something, the more fruitful it becomes.” That’s not a productivity hack. That’s a man with addictive wiring who finally figured out how to use it instead of being used by it.
Every bit of that comes from sitting in rooms like the one I sat in tonight. Listening to people tell the truth about themselves. Learning to tell the truth about myself. For 36 years.
What I’d Tell You
If you’re reading this and you’re struggling, I’m not going to tell you to go to a meeting. You’ve heard that. I’m going to tell you what Len showed me by example, not by lecture.
Sobriety isn’t the absence of drinking. It’s the presence of honesty. It’s looking at yourself clearly…the wiring, the patterns, the things you do when nobody’s watching…and deciding to work with it instead of against it. It’s not white-knuckling your way through life pretending you’re fine. It’s building a life where the truth about who you are is the foundation, not the thing you’re hiding.
Len didn’t save me by telling me to stop drinking. He saved me by showing me what a life built on honesty looked like. Flowers every week. Respect for everyone. Heart that just keeps getting bigger.
I wish he’d made it to 36. He would have handed me his chip, and I’d have held it tonight. Instead, Buck handed me one from his pocket, and the lineage continues in a different form.
36 years. One day at a time, every single one of them.