Tom L., now clean and sober for 12 1/2 years, tried to answer that over and over again from the time he was 13 years old until he finally cleaned up his act.

The son of a highly decorated World War II naval pilot, Tom grew up in the upper middle class neighborhood of View Ridge here in Seattle. His father, as Tom remembers him, was tough as nails but always available to bail him out, literally and figuratively.

When he was 13, a friend talked him into going to an exclusive British-style boarding school in Victoria, B.C., for his seventh grade. "When I went up there, I´d made a contract with my dad to stick it out at University Boys School. The professors wore flowing gowns and we all had uniforms, but that didn´t control their behavior, or ours for that matter. They whacked us for not covering our mouths when we yawned, and I mean whacked. The masters used bamboo canes and hickory sticks. Everybody got beat on. Imagine! This was 1967."

"My first drunk was that year," Tom said. "And I had a blackout that first time." Tom ran away with a friend to a day student´s house, where they all got drunk together. Tom was 13 at the time. The kids were found there the next day and brought back to school, where Tom got nine whacks with the bamboo rod. "It didn´t sway me from drinking, though."

Tom came home the next year and enrolled for the eighth grade at Nathan Eckstein Middle School. White and middle class though it was, Tom soon found a crowd that liked to steal, get high and drink. "We did what the hippies were doing: rock concerts, boozing it up, out all night. It was ´Katy, Bar the Door.´ By the time I was 15, I was a full-blown alcoholic. "

His dad, who Tom dearly loves to this day, didn´t know what to do about his son´s drinking, so he hung the lad from a rafter and beat him with a cat o´ nine tails. "I was completely insane, and nothing made any difference. All the friends I had from that time are either dead or in prison. One of them is doing 80 years for murder."

His next stop on this journey downhill was Roosevelt High School, another Seattle bastion of the middle class and high achievement. Tom, who suffered from learning disabilities along with his other problems, was enrolled in a program called Tune In "for hotheads and losers. I didn´t go to school at all-just ran around and raised hell. I stumbled along till I turned 18 and could join the army. I wanted to go to Vietnam, but that never happened. My worst drinking was in the military."

He was sent to Ft. Polk in Louisiana for basic training as a mortarman, but he went AWOL and ran off to Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, to get a supply of marijuana. "I stayed drunk down there for 11 days." When he got back to Ft. Polk, he was downgraded to infantry training, then transferred to Ft. Lewis. He got on the wrong plane and announced he was a war hero, but he finally got there and resumed his lifestyle.

"The military at that time was dealing with all the drunks and druggies coming back from Vietnam, trying to restore some spit and polish to the army. That was their priority, not mine. " His was drugs and booze. On one of his drug expeditions to nearby Tacoma, he contracted hepatitis C from a dirty needle. He was sent to Madigan Army Hospital, where he spent 12 days under treatment and shooting heroin on the side. "Bunch of bad stuff there, too," he recalled ruefully.

One time, he slipped out of the hospital to get a supply of drugs and booze for everyone on the ward. Some party. It was then he discovered that "hep" C makes one´s alcoholism much worse. "I was throwing up blood."

Tom had been in the army a mere 16 months by this time, and was slated for a dishonorable discharge when his father came to his rescue. "He loved me, no matter what," Tom said. "Dad begged the colonel to give me an honorable discharge," and the old school tie paid off. His father was one of the most decorated navy PBY pilots in the Aleutian campaign, a genuine hero. Result: Tom left the army at the age of 20, technically honorably.

Even then, he almost blew it. He got drunk to celebrate the night before his scheduled discharge. Passed out two miles from the base, he barely made it back in time to collect his piece of paper.

By the time he was 21, Tom had been arrested six times for drinking and once for burglary. Thanks to his long-suffering father, he never went to jail. "I was a privileged kid," he said. "The police respond to parents who are there for their kids."

Back in Seattle, Tom continued to self-destruct, in this phase of his life protected by the girlfriend who has been his wife for the past 28 years. Through thick and thin, including being attacked with a fork, his lady stood by him. After that, she gave him some A.A. pamphlets and arranged for a 12 Step call.

"He took me to a meeting. That was Aug. 3, 1977. I was coughing up blood, but I sat there and listened, and when I walked out of there, I said I would kill myself if I ever took another drink." And he never did, but instead redoubled his consumption of pills and marijuana.

"I was a huge pothead," Tom said. In 1978, his wife took him to a treatment center, but he only lasted 13 days. When he left, though, he stayed away from pills for awhile and instead became addicted to gambling. He did pretty well at it for a few years: 70 to 80 hours a week of seven card stud, Texas Hold ´em, five card stud. He also worked as a basement waterproofer when he wasn´t playing poker. Then he tried horse racing. "I hit a 50 to 1 shot at Longacres and that was the end of my poker career. I fell in love with horse racing."

That was life for the next eight or nine years, till his wife became pregnant in 1985. "She never smoked or drank again, and she began making plans for me. We bought a house, due to her hard work, and I got a job with the Puget Sound Blood Bank setting up donation sites." The pills and the marijuana continued to control his life, though. He came within two credits of an associate of arts degree as a substance abuse counselor when he dropped out and returned to pot and gambling.He was in two more treatment centers before the light began to dawn. When he came back from the second one, to comply with the program, he got a sponsor and started going to A.A. regularly. That was Sept. 18; 1995, his sobriety date, the date he was finally clean and sober. Because of his drug use, he doesn´t count the previous 18 years he´d gone without a drink.

"I struggled for a year trying to feel the program. Then I found the Burke Avenue Men´s Group, and the magic of A.A. set in for me at last. I felt welcomed and supported. I was finally able to let other people than my sponsor find out who I was." Once on board, he became an active member of the group. "I started out as coffee maker, later as treasurer and secretary."

It was there that Tom struck up his close friendship with the late Bob F., who was profiled in these pages three months ago. Bob and Tom answered the phones at Seattle Intergroup every Wednesday for the next eight years. Tom has continued that activity since Bob´s death.

Three years into sobriety, Tom became critically ill from his hepatitis. "The urologist was astounded I was still alive, and I would not be had God not helped me not to drink. I was given the gift of life by God." And help from Larry J., Jill B-D, and his sponsor. (The first two are the present and former office managers of Seattle Intergroup.)

Tom treated his hepatitis with a course of self-injections of chemotherapy, and says he has been clear of the virus for nearly nine years now. "My immune system is compromised, but I´m still here, sober by the grade of God and the miracle of A.A.

"A.A. is my deal. The fellowship means the world to me."

Interviewed and written by Dick S.