Nick Nolte was shocked to find all his old pals were in Alcoholics Anonymous after he checked in for meetings after a lost weekend.
 
The actor decided it was time to stop raising hell because he was setting a bad example for his son - and so he took a pal up on his offer to attend an AA seminar.
 
Nolte tells the Los Angeles Times, "You have to do that... to really break the back of an obsession. I grew up in a generation when the parents drank. I didn't think anything of it until I was 48 and another actor said to me, 'Are you still doing that? If you get tired of it, we have these meetings...'
 
"Finally, I had a weekend when I hit the bottom. My wife had to slide food under the door. I had a boy by then. It was flat-a** wrong. So I went to that meeting and I was scared to death. And when I walked in, there was everybody - I had wondered where they all had gone. There was everybody I knew."
 
Nolte admits the meetings have been helpful but he faces a daily struggle to stay sober: "You never overcome any of these defects of character forever; they're always with you. You have to learn to live with them."