`hen they say it it sort of means like what you said was good for them, it helped them out somehow,' he says, `but plus now also I like saying it myself because if you think about it it also means it was good to be able to hear you. To really hear.' He's trying subtly to alternate and look at Erdedy and Joelle both, like he's addressing them both. It's not something he's good at. His head's too big to be subtle with. `Because I remember for like the first sixty days or so I couldn't hear shit. I didn't hear nothing. I'd just sit there and Compare, I'd go to myself, like, "I never rolled a car," "I never lost a wife," "I never bled from the rectum." Gene would tell me to just keep coming for a while and sooner or later I'd start to be able to both listen and hear. He said it's hard to really hear. But he wouldn't say what was the difference between hearing and listening, which pissed me off. But after a while I started to really hear. It turns out--and this is just for me, maybe-- but it turned out hearing the speaker means like all of a sudden hearing how fucking similar the way he felt and the way I felt were, Out There, at the Bottom, before we each Came In. Instead of just sitting here resenting being here and thinking how he bled from the ass and I didn't and how that means I'm not as bad as him yet and I can still be Out There.'

ne of the tricks to being of real service to newcomers is not to lecture or give advice but only talk about your own personal experience and what you were told and what you found out personally, and to do it in a casual but positive and encouraging way. Plus you're supposed to try and Identify with the newcomer's feelings as much as possible. Ferocious Francis G. says this is one of the ways guys with just a year or two sober can be most helpful: being able to sincerely ID with the newly Sick and Suffering. Ferocious Francis told Gately as they were wiping down tables that if a Crocodile with decades of sober AA time can still sincerely empathize and Identify with a whacked-out bug-eyed Disease-ridden newcomer then there's something deeply fucked up about that Crocodile's recovery. The Crocodiles, decades sober, live in a totally different spiritual galaxy, inside. One long-timer describes it as he has a whole new unique interior spiritual castle, now, to live in.