Lughnasadh...halfway between life and death

Lughnasadh, the sabat that occurs at or near the first of August, has always been my favorite. I think the reason might be is that it was one that I had begun to research after I had begun to consider myself an adherent of the old religions. Most  of the other sabats  have been absorbed or co-opted by the larger culture and its religion. Samhain, of course has become Halloween, first transformed into All Souls and All Saints Day as Hallowmas and later into the kids celebration of Halloween. The Winter Solstice, Yule, most famously is recognized as Christmas. Imbolc is not as big a deal, but we still have Groundhog Day associated with it. The Spring Equinox shares many attributes and is reasonably close to Easter, which isn't tied to a single calendar date like the rest, and May Day is recognized in some areas. Of the other three, two, Midsummer and the Autumnal Equinox are solar observances, which leaves Lughnassadh. For some reason I wasn't as curious about the solar dates, but back when I was in a Christian religious cult I had done some research on the non-solar, or cross-quarter days in order to highlight their "evil" pagan origins, giving sermons on the focus on death at Halloween and the centrality of the goddess on May Day. I had noted that a third day corresponded to May Day, but at the time was stumped as to the significance of the mirror date of Imbolc...what was going on at the beginning of August?

This blog entry isn't going to be an exhaustive study of the history and customs of Lughnasadh, but just a few thoughts on what it means to me. Historically it was a harvest festival, the first of several harvests in the ancient Celtic world. It was also a festival of games and sport, with many competitions in honor of Taltiu, the god Lugh's foster-mother.

To me, I look at it in the context of the other cross-quarter days. Samhain is a day to honor and reflect on the dead and our own mortality. Samhain's opposite, its complement, May Day or Beltane, is a day to celebrate fertility, virility, growth, birth...life itself. I view the other two as combinations of life and death. Imbolc is the stirring of life under the cold crust of ice and snow, life springing up despite the appearance of death; Lughnasadh on the other hand is the shadow of death lurking around the corner despite the appearance of vitality. Now I don't see this as depressing or dark, but more a wake up call to leave something behind, to make the world a little better than I found it, much like the death of a plant leaves the world richer in the form of the harvest.

That's how I view Lughnasadh, a reminder that it's not all about me, but what seeds that I plant will grow into and how they will be harvested...the future without...me.

Drug Testing

With all the attention being paid to the Big Brother-ish activities of the government, not a lot of attention is being given to the intrusiveness of the corporate world. And when some attention is given to corporate “curiosity” it’s usually in reference to your boss reading your emails or listening to phone calls over company phone lines. What isn’t given much attention, and is in fact considered right and reasonable, is drug testing.

More and more companies use drug testing as some kind of screening, whether it be post-accident, pre-promotion, random,  or as a prerequisite for hiring. Several different arguments are used to justify this practice. The main rationales fall into several main categories: one of these categories is safety. It could be argued that drug use on the job could cause one to behave in an unsafe manner. For example, employees who drive fork lifts, use knives, or operate heavy machinery (including motor vehicles) could pose a danger to themselves and others if under the influence while at work. Another area would be productivity. An employee who is under the influence of drugs would in general be likely to move slower, and in many cases even think slower than someone who isn’t under the influence.  A third reason given for being concerned about drug use is the legal aspect. Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine are all illegal. A company might assert that employees engaging in illegal activity are a priori exercising bad judgment and should be excluded from employment, or at least from positions of responsibility. Finally there is the moral argument, which in my observation isn't usually said out loud: the moral argument, i.e. drugs are bad.

Let’s look at these arguments, first, the moral. While privately held companies have the right to set their own standards, and the ethical and moral positions of the owners certainly have an impact on a company’s ethics and values, where does that end? There is without question a broad range of opinions on the ethics of drug use, especially regarding marijuana, so it surely cannot be argued that marijuana use is obviously a bad thing. A stronger argument could easily be made for morphine-derived drugs, or “meth”, but a 2012 study indicates that it is marijuana users who are most impacted by drug testing. [1] (More on that later) So with the often unspoken moral revulsion at drug use, we have allowed the values of some to dictate how the rest of us must behave.

            What about the fact that drug possession and use is illegal? This particular argument is usually used when drug testing for management personnel or employees in other positions of responsibility (cash handling, security) is involved. How can we trust someone who is engaged in an illegal activity? First, marijuana use isn't illegal everywhere. (From this point on I will be focusing primarily on pot) Second, if any illegal activity precludes one from a responsible position, why wouldn't tax avoidance and speeding be included? I know very few people who always drive at or under the speed limit. Many people practice the 5 mph grace period – believing erroneously that it is legal to drive up to 5 mph over the speed limit. This is not true; what is true is that most highway police don’t bother with speeding a few mph over the limit, but it is still illegal. I believe that it is the rare person who has never indulged in illegal activity of any kind. “But this is drugs! It’s different!” – That brings us back to the moral argument.

We can look at productivity and safety together, since the arguments for and against are somewhat similar. It is claimed that drug use on the job renders an employee less safe and less productive. With that I have absolutely no argument. Marijuana is by no means a performance enhancing drug…dude. Getting high before coming to work, or at lunch, or in the bathroom is going to slow you down and fog your mind to the point where you will be less safe. However, what is being tested is how much of the drug is still in your urine, or hair or whatever is being tested. Not whether that residual amount is affecting you in any way. An employee can smoke a joint or two at a party and test positive a week later. Someone can get high after work or on weekend and test positive 30-45 days after the last time they smoked. One can smoke themselves into oblivion on a Saturday night and still be sharp and ready to work on Monday morning.

And then, there’s alcohol. You can go out and get drunk every night, be hung over every morning and you’ll test out fine on any drug test. You can test well over the legal limit for alcohol and as long as you’re not actually drinking at work your job is safe. In fact, to fold in the previous arguments for drug testing, if you are above the limit in public or are driving, then you are engaged in illegal activity, if you are coming in hung over, then your productivity is significantly lower and you are likely not as aware of safety concerns as if you were not hung over.

And then there is the question of constitutionality. Is it really legal to turn over your bodily fluids without a court order if there is no suspicion of illegal activity? Aren’t we protected against unreasonable searches and seizures? (4^th Amendment). And how can we be compelled to in essence testify against ourselves? (5^th Amendment) I’m sure in many cases employees sign some paper authorizing the company to do this, but wouldn’t that be coercion? I can understand if there were some suspicion that an employee were under the influence, or to do a test after an accident. But to take and test people’s urine without due process and without real consent, is in my opinion not only unconstitutional, but illegal.

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[1] http://www.freedomisgreen.com/drug-testing-targets-marijuana-users/

Nobody Wants To Be the Creepy Old Guy

Single life: not what it’s cracked up to be. Several married guys expressed envy at the supposed carefree life that I was living during the four years between marriages, but it certainly was a bit less exciting and a bit more stressful than they thought it was. [1]

The first few months that I lived in The Hovel I didn’t have much time for a social life. In addition to my main job at Super Saver I had a second job as a rural paper carrier, getting started around 2:00 every morning and finishing up at about 6:00. It wasn’t a very difficult job, it fact it was refreshingly easy, no one looking over my shoulder; just delivering the papers. I’d drive about 130 miles every morning and after paying for gas and setting aside money for tires and taxes I was netting about $900 each month, which helped me start to get my huge debt paid off, as well as enable me to put aside some money for a vacation to the East Coast. Having to start work two hours after the bars closed didn’t allow for much late night carousing, although I did try it once or twice. One morning, after closing the bar and picking up my papers early, I got extremely sleepy and pulled off to the side of the road to "close my eyes for a few minutes". Six hours later, much more than the few minutes that I’d envisioned, I woke up and finished my route. Many customers were angry that morning. Even though I didn’t have any opportunity for late nights, I still managed to convince one woman to date me during my paper route days.

The Hovel had a washer and dryer on the ground level, but they both seemed to be on the indistinct border between appliance and habitat, so I did my laundry at “LaunDry Land” (that’s right, with the capital “D” right in the middle of the word “laundry”) a few blocks away. Marija, the clerk who ran the place in the evenings, and I hit it off (it seemed to me) after I correctly (i.e. luckily) guessed from her accent that she was from Ukraine, and not Russia or one of the other Slavic countries. Being 20 years removed from active dating[2], I mistook her friendliness for flirting until her husband started hanging around while she was working. I don’t know if she felt sorry for me or thought she was doing me a favor, but Marija set me up with Laura, another LaunDry Land customer. At this point in my dating career, I hadn’t quite developed anything resembling standards, and any primitive proto-standards that I may have had floating about my subconscious apparently didn’t include sanity. Continual ranting about the ex-husband who had thrown her out, the string of jobs that she had been fired from and her complete inability to stay focused on a subject for more than ten seconds should have been a clue that I was hooked up with someone with whom things could go horribly wrong. But I was so thrilled that someone was paying attention to me that I overlooked red flags that would have enraged a herd of bulls. After a couple of dinner-and-a-movie dates I quietly moved on when Laura suggested that she accompany me to New York, where I was going to visit family, in order to scout out ideas for her “business”, the details about which it never became clear. She also asked for me to “invest” in her business. Marija apologized to me profusely.

One of the problems with those paper route jobs is that its seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, no days off unless you find your own substitute. Since I had planned a trip to the East Coast in June of that summer I began looking for a sub for the route in early March, but without any success. Since I was using the paper route to make payments on my credit card debt I figured out, based on how much I was making each month, how much that I would have to save up so I could forgo a second job and figured that I could quit my route at the end of May and take off until August without missing any payments. So I started the month of June with only my main job, with my evenings pretty much free. I had Saturdays off and had been working 2:00 – 10:00PM on Sundays[3], so Friday and Saturday nights were now open, but first, a trip to the East Coast.

It had been eleven years since I had been to New York; I had nieces, nephews and in-laws that I had never met.  I hadn’t been too nice to my family while I had been in The Way; a few months before my trip I started putting together an itinerary that would allow me to visit not only my parents, but also my siblings who lived in other cities and reestablish relationships with them. At the time I was involved with an anti-Way website called Grease Spot Café, which got its name from a remark The Way’s leader made about people who left the organization, predicting that they’d be “grease spots by midnight” and I began working visits to some of my online buddies from Grease Spot into my trip. I left on a Monday afternoon and drove until about midnight, staying overnight in a hotel in Illinois. The Cavalier station wagon was gone, sold to my mechanic after getting in an accident some months earlier. With the insurance money I purchased another rust-bucket, a white 1986 Pontiac 6000. Just as rusty as the Cavalier, the Pontiac had a seemingly unsolvable problem: after driving at high speeds for a while, it would begin to buck and stall when coming to a stop, especially when stopping or slowing suddenly, like when exiting the interstate. Starting up immediately after it stalled was difficult, involving working the brake and gas pedals simultaneously until enough speed could be worked up. This made for constant anxiety regarding the prospects for the car starting each time it was shut off. Parallel parking was out of the question.

Arising early on Tuesday morning I proceeded to Dayton Ohio to spend the evening with some ex-Way folks who used to live in Omaha. Dave and Dana were the first ex-Way people that I had knew who, appeared to be living a normal, even a prosperous life. I had begun feeling like I was destined to live in “a hovel” and have no friends for the rest of my life, so ingrained had the condemnation from The Way and my ex-wife become. So meeting some people who had moved beyond Way-world was an important step in my evolution. I did drink too much coffee and had a hard time falling asleep in the little kid’s bunk bed that they had put me in.

On Wednesday morning, after a hearty breakfast, I drove across Ohio, a slice of West Virginia and most of Pennsylvania to arrive at the home of Gail, one of the WOW’s from my year in Sidney and Kearney over twenty years earlier. About ²/₃ of the way through Ohio the scenery begins to change from “flat” to “rolling” in preparation for “mountainous”, which describes most of the drive through Pennsylvania. This was a long drive. Accompanying me on this trek across the Quaker State was my trusty collection of cassette tapes. Yes, you read that correctly. Although this wasn’t all that many years ago, CD players in cars, while standard equipment in the newer vehicles, were not universally found in the vintage[4] vehicles that I drove. My habit, technologically speaking, is to stay a jump or two behind the curve, hence (that’s right, I said “hence”) a cassette deck when everybody else is laughing at how old fashioned CD’s are. Fortunately for me, the public library lends out CD’s, which I was able to record on to tape for my listening pleasure. So the long miles across Penn’s Woods were made more pleasurable by Mott the Hoople’s Greatest Hits, Dick Dale’s Tribal Thunder, The Who’s Quadrophenia, Oasis’ What’s the Story Morning Glory?, and Birds of Fire by The Mahavishnu Orchestra.

I had not seen Gail in over twenty years and we had only recently been corresponding through email. Gail greeted me at the door with a snarky remark about my car, informed me that she had to go to class and left me in the care of her husband and three daughters, none of whom had I ever met, and gave me permission to use her computer, which one of her daughters kicked me off five minutes later. After sitting around in uncomfortable silence for a while, Chuck (Gail’s husband) decided that what we needed to break the ice was grilled bratwurst, beer and cigars. So when Gail returned from class, there was Chuck and me, sitting out back with a couple of brews, a pair of cigars and with mustard stains on our teeth, deep into some serious male bonding.

After a diner breakfast and a brisk walk to work it off it was back in the car to meet Cindy[5] and her kids in Trenton New Jersey, dinner at Burger King and then off to Jersey City. I spent the night in a cheap motel so that I could be up before dawn on Friday morning to visit lower Manhattan and the location of the World Trade Center. The 9-11 attacks had taken place about nine months previously and the WTC site was still a mess. The enormity of what had happened hit me the night before as I was heading east across New Jersey. At one time the New York skyline, dominated on the south end by the Twin Towers, was visible for many miles to the west. But now, as the lighted skyscrapers hove into view, a prominent gap stood where the steel and glass once soared into the sky. I had to pull off to side of the road; the tears in my eyes made it difficult to drive.

It was still dark the next morning as I made my way across the bridge into Manhattan to visit Ground Zero. It’s fascinating to see New York City in the early morning hours before all the office workers show up. Delivery guys unloading trucks, restaurants firing up the grills, newspaper stands opening up; it’s a different world. It was without a doubt a really different world with the open wound of Ground Zero so prominent a part of Lower Manhattan. With the attacks less than a year in the past, the improvised memorials were still up, photos and notes and flags stuck to light poles and churchyard fences. The atmosphere was at once a great miasma of sadness and a fierce pugnacity and pride that “The City” was still standing, still reveling in its in-your-faceness.

After a few hours I jumped in the car and headed out to Port Jefferson Station, my parents’ home, arriving on Friday afternoon. I had never been to their post retirement home, several hours west of the neighborhood where I spent by childhood, Rosedale, in the borough of Queens. Previous visits, the most recent which had been eleven years before, found me sleeping in the bedroom that I occupied from the age of six to when I moved out at twenty, eating at the little table in the yellow-walled kitchen with the poorly repaired hole where I had once thrown a chair at my brother Mike [6] [7]and grilling burgers on the concrete patio behind the slate blue house on 255^th Street. About a year after my last visit my parents sold the two-family house that I grew up in and moved out to Long Island. Virtually everything else had changed as well. My brother Jim, whose wedding had been the occasion of my last visit, now lived in Rochester and was the father of two rambunctious boys; my baby sister Maryann was married, had a daughter and was pregnant with a second; Mike had gotten a divorce from his first wife and was the proud dad of two girls with his second wife Jean. Patty had also divorced her first husband and remarried as well. Most of my cousins were married and had children also. The family had gotten huge while I was out in Nebraska.

One thing about family that I’ve heard said is that they’re the people who have to take you in, no matter what. I don’t know how literally true that is, but I found my family incredibly open and forgiving, even though I hadn’t treated them very nicely over the past few decades. It inspired me to be more forgiving towards those who I perceived had wronged me.

I stayed until Monday morning on Long Island and headed to New England via the Port Jefferson ferry on that morning. I met another Grease Spot participant for lunch and then continued to Hingham to meet Uncle Tim for dinner and stayed in his guest house, leaving for Rochester on Tuesday morning. Tuesday night I stayed with another Cindy, an old friend from Long Island, and her husband Richard. Wednesday morning I drove up to Niagara Falls an hour away, stopped to see another GS buddy and then to my brother Jim’s. I stayed two nights there and then headed across southern Ontario[8] to Lansing Michigan Friday morning to spend two nights with my friends Leah and John. On Sunday morning I was on the road home, stopping in Illinois or Sunday night before arriving back in Lincoln on Monday, two weeks after I set out.

The crossing back into the United States from Canada was interesting. After waiting in an endless line I was interviewed by a Border patrol officer who asked what my point of origin was, as well as my destination. After telling him that I had started the day in Rochester New York and was headed for Lansing Michigan, he squinted at my Nebraska plates and asked me if I realized that I was exiting Canada. Suppressing my natural tendency to make a smart-assed remark, I explained that yes, I was aware that I was exiting Canada. He once again squinted at me and asked why, if I was leaving one U.S. city for another, I was now leaving Canada. All I could tell him was that AAA had recommended it. I avoided the rectal exam and strip search and went about my business.

It was at this point that I started to develop a social life of sorts. I still had my full-time position at the grocery store, but wouldn’t pick up a second job until late August, and even then it was a one day a week job delivering the free Tuesday afternoon paper; at the store I had Saturdays off and due to my previous gig delivering papers I worked on Sunday starting at 2:00 in the afternoon, so I was free to “socialize” on both Friday and Saturday nights, and made frequent, if not all-night appearances at the local bars during the week. O’Rourke’s, my favorite tavern, attracted a diverse demographic, all ages, multiple income levels, ethnic groups, you name it, and it became like a second home to me. Newly freed from the need to go to bed early in order to deliver newspapers, I often headed down to O’Rourke’s right after work at 4:00PM for a beer or two, going home or to a local eatery for dinner, and then back at 9:00PM for a few more beers and in the sack by midnight. Some of O’Rourke’s regular “old guys” became my buddies and drinking companions. There was Doug, a retired postal worker who sported his long white “cool old guy” hair in a ponytail, and who fancied himself a ladies’ man; Kevin, who became one of my closest friends during this time period; Rob, a fellow New Yorker who spent most of his time whining about how his mother wouldn’t send him money; the two Scotts: “Smart Scott”, one of the most intelligent people I’d ever met, and “Lyin’ Scott”, who always had a tall tale to tell; Clarence, then known as Butch, a local newspaper reporter, as well as many other characters.

Now that I was out and about more, I started meeting more people, including women. Something that I found out relatively quickly was that when you’re in your forties, the dating pool is relatively shallow. So there I was on a weekday afternoon seated at the bar in O’Rourke’s, with a reasonably attractive woman who seemed to know everyone seated beside me complaining about not being able to find anyone to go out with her. Since at this point my dating experience was about on par with your average 16 year old boy with a bad case of acne I innocently snapped at the bait; I struck up a conversation and we made a date for dinner for later that week. I say “innocently” because while looking back I’m sure she was throwing that line about no one going out with her in my direction, I was totally unaware of her intentions and ignorant of the come on. I arrived at Sheila’s (not her real name) home to pick her up at the appointed time, but she wasn’t there. After an extended period knocking on the door, ringing the bell and peaking in the windows I decided to head on down to O’Rourke’s and found her there. No explanation, no apology. When I asked her if we had crossed wires in our communication, she simply said that she’d had a big lunch and was feeling kind of full! I should have run away right then and there, but hadn’t yet developed the bad relationship radar and continued to pursue her.

With the 20/20 vision that hindsight bestows, I believe that I was (again) simply besotted by being paid attention to, by being viewed as a desirable companion after years of being the source of all evil in the world. After a very brief time, things just blew up. Early on in our relationship, I got a glimpse of Sheila’s jealous streak when she got very publicly angry over a conversation that I was having with a woman at the bar. [9] A second, more dramatic display of jealousy, this time in a series of answering machine messages, put an end to our relationship. She attempted to apologize and get back together, but I knew that I had to have some standards and that I no longer had to “just settle”.

Oddly enough, the younger man with whom Sheila flirted, a musician/poet named Drew, became a good friend during this time. It was primarily through Drew that I met Pam. (We met Drew and Pam in an earlier chapter involving buying pot) Drew was dating Pam at the time, despite a twenty year gap in their ages. Drew was about 25 years old, tall and thin and rock-star good looking, Pam was in her early forties and was kind of a latter day hippie, working only as much as she had to and living in a commune south of town. For a while I spent much of my after-work time with them, discussing books, music, poetry and Celtic spirituality. Feeling burned by my experience with Sheila, and valuing my freedom more than desiring any kind of relationship, I spent the rest of my social time hanging out with “the boys” or enjoying live music at some of the local venues, avoiding any attachments with women.

“Surprised” is a huge understatement to describe my feelings when Pam grabbed me in a parking garage one night and kissed me. The three of us were supposed to attend a show at the Zoo Bar, but Drew did not show up, so Pam and I attended without him. I suppose that I should have seen it coming; in the weeks leading up to this the two of them fought frequently, each coming to me to complain about the other, especially Pam, who seemed to be looking for excuses to spend more and more time with me. We both pretended that it hadn’t happened, but shortly thereafter Drew and Pam broke up and we confronted the feelings we had (or thought we had) for each other.

There is a short list of people who I consider to have helped me stay sane during the years when I was living alone, and Pam is close to the top of that list. She is one of the key links in my ever-changing spiritual quest and was instrumental in helping me define what I believed and what kind of person that I wanted to be. The first time that I ever saw a set of tarot cards was a hand painted set that Pam had made, and when I started reading cards myself several years later, I still remember that short one-card reading that she did for me in O’Rourke’s one night that came true several hours later. Pam was one of the few people who did and said exactly what she thought and felt. She made of fun of what she called my “molester moustache”, laughed at the image of the baby on the diaper pail turned dirty sock bucket in my bathroom, and was not shy about telling me that Quadrophenia by The Who, one of my favorite albums, just wasn’t that good. We wrote erotic haikus together, made fun of people and eventually moved apart.

Despite all that we had in common and the affection that we had for each other, it just wasn’t “meant to be”. I was still insistent that I didn’t want to be part of a relationship and wanted to put myself first, still in my “selfish” phase. For me, the biggest obstacle to a relationship was her inability to understand how and why I had gotten involved and stayed involved in a religious cult. This lack of understanding would become the biggest contribution to keeping us apart; I could not give my heart to someone who lacked a basic understanding of who I was and why I was the person that I had become. Eventually we drifted apart and I saw her seldom until she developed a cancer that slowly killed her in the spring of 2008. Another friend let me know that she was dying in a hospice; I managed to see her a few hours before she passed on, one of the last things she said to me was that she was glad that I had shaved off “that molester moustache”.

With a short hiatus to date a woman my own age in the early part of 2003, I moved into a phase where I alternated between “safe old guy” and “creepy old guy”. The hiatus involved a woman who had worked at Super Saver when I first moved to the Cornhusker Highway location. Denise attended the company’s annual holiday party in January 2003 as a guest, having left the company the summer before. During a break in the festivities, as I stood in the hallway smoking a cigar she approached me in order to verify that I was not there with a date, which I wasn’t. We ended up dancing and talking, and left the party to go to O’Rourke’s. I drove her home, both of us aware that there was an attraction and set up a time to meet the next night. While part of me was still in the “selfish” mode and not interested in a relationship, I quickly became caught up with Denise, being told after just a few days that I was “her man”[10], meeting her parents and married daughter, socializing with her friends and without realizing that it was happening, involved in the relationship that I hadn’t wanted, which had become serious on all levels. In a few short months Denise, frustrated by my aversion to commitment and concerned that I would get back with my ex-wife, dumped me in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again.

The “safe/creepy old guy phase” started before and continued after my time with Denise. One of my observations as a single guy in his forties was that with few exceptions, young women view men several decades older than them predominantly in three fashions. The first and by far the most widespread is the invisible old guy. Most of my single guy buddies realized that to college girls, men our age were simply invisible. We would even play a game where we would attempt to make eye contact with attractive young ladies, and when we failed, this confirmed our invisibility. Another type was the safe old guy. This is the guy who women view as a nice guy, easy to talk to, but who is non-threatening, like a father or uncle…or grandfather. This is the guy who young women talk to about their boyfriends, who feel comfortable revealing personal details, even about sex. Women walk up to safe old guy in bars, hug them, kiss them on the cheek and otherwise flirt with them. Sometimes the safe old guy recognizes this situation for what it is and is at peace with it, other times the safe old guy believes that he is really being seriously flirted with. In any case, the attention is flattering. A guy becomes the creepy old guy when he doesn’t understand that he is the safe old guy and starts hitting on the young girls. The creepy old guys are overwhelmed by their non-invisibility and often are confused by it. Often they are in denial about the “old guy” part of the description! Sometimes they just start out as the creepy old guy, flirting with women who hadn’t yet been born when they graduated from college, usually with a distorted view of their own attractiveness. They look in the mirror and see a version of themselves that hasn’t existed for quite a while, if ever. This malady can afflict any guy, but most of us snap out of it, the seriously deluded, however, do walk among us.

I was one of those who started out as seriously invisible and eventually, after becoming visible, morphed into the safe old guy, with brief stints as the creepy old guy. Mainly my transformation to “visible” was due to dating Sheila, who a lot of the college aged girls knew, as well as my transition to an O’Rourke’s regular, which meant that all the bartenders knew me, signaling “safe” to the girls.

During this time I was undergoing some internal transformations. I had learned some lessons from the women that I dated, to have standards, to go slow and not rush into “the next level”, to not put myself at the center, yet to be aware of what I needed as well. I learned that running around with women my daughter’s age was not productive. That despite having a brief fling with a much younger woman, to most of them, whatever my own self-image, I was either the invisible old guy, the safe old guy, or the creepy old guy, but what all these descriptions had in common was old.

At this point I had decided that I was ready for something serious, that I was done with hitting on women in bars, that I was done with settling, done with being selfish. It was at that point, when I had gotten all manner of bad relationships out of my system, I met Susie, who I would marry two years later.

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[1] The grass is always greener, isn’t it?

[2] Which pretty much means I reverted to having the social skills of a teenager

[3] Typically the assistant store director came in at 6:00am on Sundays, but since I couldn’t get my paper route done in time I switched shifts with another manager. After quitting the route I retained the Sunday late shift.

[4] Unlike fine wine, cars usually don’t improve with age.

[5] Cindy was another ex-Way Grease Spot Café regular who had fled an abusive husband from somewhere down south to be with a guy she met on Grease Spot who in no way wanted to have a relationship with her (or four kids). At the time of this trip she was preparing to move to Chicago to marry another guy that she met on Grease Spot, who had left his wife…it all worked out; they got married and are still happily together. (That was true when I first wrote this - they have both since passed away

[6] After throwing the chair at him and seeing the hole, we dropped our disagreement and worked together to repair and paint over the hole, which our parents never found out about.

[7] Years later two of my sons got in a fight and put a much larger hole in the laundry room wall. They could not repair it, but did pay for the dry wall guy to fix it.

[8] I usually gauge the time of my trips by figuring an average speed of 60 miles per hour; so if I have 120 miles to my destination, then I know it will probably take 2 hours. I was thrown off by the signs in kilometers, until I figured that 60 mph is roughly 100 kilometers per hour.

[9] The woman with whom I was conversing was much, much younger. Sheila’s response was to very publicly flirt with a much younger man, who eventually became a good friend of mine. (In the editing phase I realized that this footnote was redundant - but decided to keep it to not mess up the numbering)

[10] This was a surprise to me, especially since on the night we met at that party Denise was living with a guy and had me drop her off a block from her home so he wouldn’t see her. 

Nobody Wants To Move To Nebraska

Here I am, lying on my belly in the weeds in the alley behind my house with my roommate Steve watching as people from the local church march around our block two-by-two. The Reverend Jerry Skinner, pastor of the Sidney Nebraska Foursquare Gospel Church (you can almost hear the “hallelujahs” and the Southern accent as you read that) has staged a “Jericho March” [1]to reclaim for God the block that I live on. Apparently God had abandoned his claim to the block bordered by 12^th, 13^th, Dodge & Cedar Streets so Skinner and his youth group (who we called ‘Jerry’s Kids’) were going to get it back for The Lord by marching around the block seven times, although I don’t recall any shouting, trumpets or walls falling down. Welcome to Nebraska.[2]

Sometimes I’m convinced that some of my New York relatives think that I live in Oz, not Nebraska, they view my adopted home as an idyllic yet backward throwback to a bygone era. People have been amazed that I can get “Saturday Night Live” on television. They make fun of my Nebraska accent, apparently unaware that they have an accent. For years people asked me why I moved to Nebraska from the center of the known universe, new acquaintances still do and I almost always lie.

In the summer of 1979 I was twenty-one years old, working in a May’s department store in the Garden Center, pretending that I knew something about plants, living at home with my parents and four siblings having taken a year off from college since I had done so poorly in the previous semester. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life or where I was going. I had also been regularly attending meetings of a chapter of The Way International, manifesting itself locally as a bible study group. In August of that year, after attending for the second time The Way’s annual event, The Rock of Ages, on their former farm outside of New Knoxville Ohio, I decided to get a better job, applying for and being hired as a clerk in E.F. Hutton & Company, a large stockbroker, and to move into a “Way Home”.

Earlier that year there had been a push, as there was every year, for people to volunteer for the Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program, where Way members could sign up for a year of what amounted to missionary work somewhere in the United States. Assured that I wouldn’t have to wear a tie with black pants and a white shirt adorned with a nametag identifying me as ‘Elder” I signed up, as had my boyhood friend Joe Tully, but I backed out at the last minute. Feeling guilty about not doing my part to “move the Word”, The Way’s jargon for proselytizing, I accepted an invitation to move into a house with three others, called a “Way Home”, where we would run fellowships (called “twigs” after the smallest part of the tree), recruit people into The Way and run Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) classes. [3]

Over a year earlier, just a few months before my twentieth birthday, I had taken The Way’s PFAL class and spent the next year somewhat on the fringes of involvement with the organization. I attended their home fellowships sporadically; the one in my neighborhood of Rosedale had disbanded when local leaders Joe and Tom both moved, Tom to spend a year in Nevada as a WOW and Joe to move into a Way Home in the Queens Village neighborhood, so attending regular fellowships took a little more effort than it had before, but over the next year, for a variety of reasons, I became more and more convinced that The Way was worthy of my support and commitment.

One of the things that helped The Way galvanize support with young people back in the seventies was the perception that it was a counter-cultural phenomenon. The PFAL class emphasized the things that made it different and better than mainstream Christianity. Teachings focused on how those who opposed us were those who were comfortable in their error and that we should expect resistance. Those who stuck with The Way and the PFAL doctrines internalized them in such a way that those who opposed them were seen as opposing the truth, opposing God himself. Many of us reveled in the idea that we were following God in the face of near-universal opposition. When we received the inevitable resistance from our families and friends, it seemed almost like a fulfillment of prophecy. And resist they did. It was a vicious circle (or is it a vicious cycle? – I never can remember which) with our parents expressing concern or disagreement and we kids expressing our newfound spirituality, each round escalating and pushing the sides farther apart, culminating with the parents convinced that their kids were brainwashed, “changed” in some nonspecific way and the kids convinced that their parents stood on the wrong side of the God fence. Everything that our parents did and said was evidence (like Will Smith as the “Fresh Prince” sang) that they just didn’t understand, that they were unwilling to look beyond what they had grown up believing. And there was some truth in that. Most parents didn’t want to know the specifics of why we now believed things that were at odds with traditional beliefs; they were as ill-equipped as we were to discern the real errors in biblical research principles and gaps in logic, but the fact that it wasn’t what they had been brought up on was a good enough reason for them to reject it. On the other hand, everything that we kids did and said was evidence to our parents that we had gone off the deep end. We were arrogant in our newfound knowledge and condescending to those who we perceived as ignorant and willfully blind. Of course our superior and holier-than-thou attitude was going to grate on them, of course our withdrawal from them and everything they had taught us would be hurtful. Parents and children were both basing their decisions on different premises. Both generations remained a mystery to the other, unaware of the other’s motivations and unwilling to find out what they were.

So here I was, in late August of 1979, moving into a Way Home with three other people that I barely knew, the first time that I had lived anywhere other than under my parents’ roof. After spending a year and a half on the periphery of The Way I had made a decision to commit myself more fully to “moving the Word of God”. Bernie, one of my fellow students from my initial PFAL class, would be the Way Home Coordinator and Twig (Way jargon for household bible fellowship) Leader. Two women, Wanda and Beverly, would be sharing the home as well. I was fully expecting to live a lifestyle that centered on God and ‘His Word’, i.e. The Bible, to spend my non-working hours surrounded by people who wanted to serve God as much as I did, and to see ‘signs, miracles and wonders’ come to pass in my life. The reality wasn’t quite so rosy.

Bernie, appointed as our fearless leader by other, even more fearless, leaders farther up ‘The Way Tree’, turned out to be a heavy drinker who had lost his job due to his drinking and spent his 9 – 5’s pretending to go to work, and using our rent and utility money to finance his boozing[4]. It was several months before we found out, but in the meantime, we were far from living a life of Christian fellowship and love. We hardly ever ate meals together and saw each other only rarely. We weren’t sure what we were supposed to be doing or what the point was to this Way Home. Late in the year we found out where our money was going when Beverly, home sick from work, tried to call her employer and found that our phone was disconnected. After walking to the pay phone on the corner, and calling the phone company, she discovered that the phone bill hadn’t been paid for two months; additional calls uncovered the fact that we were also behind on the electric bill, heating oil, water and the rent. All of our money could now be found in the cash drawer at the corner bar. That evening we confronted Bernie with this information and brought in the branch coordinator, who was the leader for about seven or eight fellowships and Way Homes in our section of Queens. It was decided that Bernie would continue to live with us, but would be replaced as leader…by me (yes, that’s as scary as it sounds), and that he would pay us back in full by paying all the bills that had been delinquent over the previous several months. Less than a month later all of the checks that Bernie was using to pay the past due rent and utilities bounced. Wanda, Beverly and I decided to throw him out of the house without any input from our so-called leadership…who supposedly had a direct pipeline to God. 

Even without Bernie around things didn’t get any better, we still didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing or why we were doing it; no one seemed inclined to enlighten us. The consensus among the local leaders and accepted by us was that Bernie had screwed things up so badly that we needed to just start all over, move people around and hope for the best. Besides, with Bernie gone, my mother was nervous that I was living alone with two women!

The New Year began with me being transferred to a different Way Home. Things seemed better, we were organized, ate meals together, witnessed together, pooled our money to pay rent and utilities and buy groceries and we had people flocking to the house to hear us teach the bible. The Way Home Coordinator, Eddie, ran the Spanish language twig while I lead the English language twig. We convinced people to enroll in PFAL classes and experienced things that we interpreted as miracles; I thought I was finally immersed in that “Word-centered” lifestyle that I had been hearing so much about.

One of the things that we believed in The Way was that illnesses and disease could be miraculously healed. Part and parcel of the Law of Believing was that healing was a “manifestation” of the spirit, i.e. if the right biblically specified conditions were met, the desired result would naturally follow. So, not knowing any better, we would often pray for people after our twig meetings and usually they would appear to be healed. Twig attendees started bringing friends and relatives to get prayed for and healed; when they saw results they started inviting their friends and relatives. Eventually, our little group of half a dozen swelled to over thirty. And here I was a twenty year-old college student, ringmaster at the greatest show in Richmond Hill, or at least on Metropolitan Avenue.

Although things looked better on the surface, there were some seamy doings lurking just below the surface. Eddie held down a fairly well-paying job as an electrician, but despite being outwardly stable, spent most of his paycheck on alcohol. Eddie was disrespectful and dismissive of our local leaders, fighting them every step of the way and resisting their instructions, but in turn demanding that the people in his fellowship obey his directives without question. While there was more structure and direction at this new Way Home, there were still the same problems with ego, personality and the huge disconnect between the ideals of living for God and the reality of day-to-day life.

The company line at The Way International in those days was that to really grow as a believer, you had to “go WOW”, that is, serve for a year as a Word Over the World Ambassador, volunteering to be sent anywhere that God supposedly led the leadership of The Way to send you. On fire with some of the apparent success in the God business, and wanting to really grow, I decided that I would indeed “go WOW”, reasoning that I hadn’t yet fully committed myself to service to god and that this would do it. The process for going out as a WOW started with an application that was supposedly reviewed by the Limb (state) Coordinator with input from local leaders, although in practice few if any were ever rejected, including those patently unfit for the program. Applicants who passed this hurdle then were required to attend the Rock of Ages festival, held during the second full week of August at The Way’s headquarters on a former farm in northwest Ohio. WOW Training, the details of which changed regularly, took place at “The Rock”, including a second interview by someone on the staff of the WOW program. At this point in Way history, the WOW’s were the focal point of the whole Rock of Ages. Incoming WOW’s were “welcomed home” during opening night festivities while outgoing WOW’s were treated like royalty or soldiers going off to war. At Rock of Ages 1980, the year I went out as a WOW, we received our assignments on Friday night, the festival’s sixth night, and we were sent off after night seven.

At our training session on Friday afternoon we all received envelopes with numbers on them that corresponded to the seven regions that the Way in the United States was divided into with strict instruction to keep them sealed until told otherwise at the evening teaching in the ‘Big Top’, the huge circus tent where the major events of the Rock of Ages took place. I sat with folks from my twig and branch who were also going out as WOW’s as they opened up their envelopes – “Chicago, Illinois!”, “Denver, Colorado!”, “Dallas, Texas!”, “Seattle, Washington!” and so on, until finally I opened my envelope…“Sidney, Nebraska…?” I sort of knew where Nebraska was, mainly because my old buddy Joe Tully had been sent there the year before, but Sidney? I had no idea what I was in for.

On Saturday morning I met with my new “family”. Steve, from Texas, 20 years old and the appointed leader of our little group by virtue of his status as a student in the Way Corps leadership program; Gail, from Philadelphia and a veteran of a previous WOW year; and Rosemarie, a relatively new follower of The Way from California. Included in the rules and regulations for the WOW program was a restriction on how much money you could take with you. Whether you had a bank account with inexhaustible funds, or didn’t have a dime to your name, you were required to leave the Rock of Ages grounds with exactly $300 in money orders per person. For some people this meant scrimping and saving to collect $300, for others it meant being on the honor system to refrain from accessing their bank account for a year. A recurring figure at the Rock of Ages was the PFAL grad who decided at the last minute to go out as a WOW and spent all week asking people to “bless him” with money so that he could get the required $300 together. I was closer to the scrimping and saving side of things myself, but didn’t have to resort to panhandling.

The first Rock of Ages festival took place in 1971. Called initially “The Return of the Rock of Ages” it was the musical portion of a weekend “advance” (The Way didn’t like to use the word “retreat”) at the end of their summer school series of classes and seminars. At this time The Way was still relatively small, having only made inroads among young people within the previous two or three years. During the summer of 1971 V.P. Wierwille, The Way’s leader, authorized a group of about a dozen people that he called “Ambassadors” to travel around the country “witnessing”, i.e. registering people for his PFAL classes and generally working on increasing The Way’s numbers. He decided to make this experiment a continuing program and during the Return of the Rock of Ages weekend, he announced that he was seeking volunteers to go out for a year as part of this new outreach effort. The volunteers came back to his New Knoxville farm a few weeks later for “training” and were sent out to expand The Way’s base. A year later, the Second Annual Rock of Ages Festival was held to welcome the returning WOW’s back, and to send out a new group. (“Return of” had been dropped and any reference to the 1970 event was called simply “The first Rock of Ages”)[5] This continued every August until 1995. The first several festivals took place at local fairgrounds, until 1978 when it returned to the former farm that was the Way’s headquarters, where it remained until the final Rock of Ages. Starting out as a weekend get together, “The Rock” gradually became a seven-day affair before settling at six days for most of the eighties and into the nineties. Initially just a bare bones music and teaching event, it expanded into the central event of the Way year with specialized seminars, a bookstore, plays and continual entertainment.

My first Rock of Ages was in 1978, a few months after I had taken the PFAL class in New York. A group of people were heading out from Queens and I was recruited to help drive. At this point I wasn’t particularly active in the organization, but I was always up for a road trip. I took off with no idea where I was going to stay, how to get where I was going or what I was going to do once I got there: the perfect adventure! The car I was driving belonged to a couple with several small children who were going to be WOW’s that year. The husband was already in Ohio; my job was to drive the car so the wife could take care of the kids. Three other carloads of Way people travelled with us in a caravan[6]. After about fourteen hours of driving we arrived at the headquarters of The Way International and pulled into a large muddy field that had been converted into a giant parking lot. We slept in our cars overnight and awoke to find that the giant parking lot, relatively empty when we arrived about midnight, now harbored thousands of vehicles with more pouring in every minute. My first “Rock” went a long way toward convincing me that The Way was more than just a local group of bible-thumpers. I was impressed with how well everyone got along and how clean and orderly the grounds were. Two years later I was to enter those same grounds as an outgoing WOW Ambassador.

After our new “WOW Family” met, we had to work out transportation to our new assignment. There was no requirement that a prospective WOW actually have a means of transportation, so many did not. Looking back, it was probably this, rather than any great spiritual insight, that determined who would go where. Of the two groups of four people going out to western Nebraska there were two vehicles with a total of six seats between them. Two of us, Rosemarie and I, would catch a ride with some folks from Grand Island, in the central part of Nebraska, who owned a big yellow school bus. So far so good…until the bus threw a rod about ¾ of the way across Iowa and we were stranded, sleeping on the bus and in the tents that it was a good thing that we had; several folks stuck out their thumbs and hitch hiked back to Nebraska.

I was one of the folks who decided to stick it out and wait until the bus got fixed. We pitched our tents behind the gas station and pooled our resources to buy food at the café that was part of the service plaza. On the second day a flatbed truck carrying a load of pipes landed in a ditch and turned over, dumping its load. The station owner hired all of us guys to help reload the truck, which took all day, and ended up paying for all the food we were eating, if not the repairs on the bus.

Eventually we got the bus fixed and met up with the other half of our group, arriving in Sidney on a Friday afternoon, only five days behind schedule. Somehow I convinced myself that this wasn’t a harbinger of doom.

---

[1] Remember that bible story about Joshua defeating the city of Jericho by marching around it for a week and the walls falling down to sound of trumpets?

[2] More on this in “Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is”

[3] See “Nobody Joins a Cult” for more information on PFAL

[4] Amazing how leaders who claimed to have a direct pipeline to God often missed simple, obvious things like this.

[5] A hallmark of The Way was changing the past to fit in with the present. Rather than a spur-of-the-moment idea, the idea of a “WOW program” was described as well thought through, godly inspired

[6] “Caravans” were part of Way road trip culture

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

So is it chicken, or is it steak? I’m relatively sure that I never consumed chicken-fried steak when I lived in New York, or on any of my subsequent visits back. But chicken-fried steak was my first meal in my new home, Sidney, Nebraska. After arriving in Sidney on an early Friday afternoon and finding a two-bedroom duplex to rent, then doing a little job hunting, we repaired to Dude’s Steakhouse for dinner. With an effigy of a giant steer on the roof, Dude’s is the happenin’ spot in Sidney; the restaurant is in the front and the sawdust-covered dance floor, topped by a mirror ball, in the back. One of the odd things about social life in Sidney in those days was the drinking age. Nebraska, like most states, had recently decided to increase the drinking age from 18 to 21, but was doing it gradually, grandfathering in anyone who was over 18 when the law was passed; if you turned 18 the day before the law went into effect, you could start drinking, if your birthday was one day later, you waited three years until you were 21 [1]. Colorado on the other hand hadn’t raised the drinking age yet, so there was a steady traffic of 18, 19 and 20 year olds south across the Colorado border to The Hot Spot in the town of Peetz, while northeastern Colorado residents flocked north to the greater Sidney metropolis.

For a guy who grew up in New York City, Sidney was on the ass-end of nowhere, a population of about 5000, most of them tobacco-chewing, pickup truck-driving, cowboy hat-wearing rednecks who, if they weren’t dating their cousins, it was because their sisters were better looking. On the day that we arrived, leaving the interstate and heading toward town, the first sight that greeted us was a trailer court, a grain elevator, a gas station and a bar, which for one horrible moment we thought was the entire town. The reality wasn’t much more attractive. Within hours of our arrival, it seemed that everyone knew that we had arrived and what we were doing there. The pastors of the two dozen churches in town had their people on alert for the “cult members” in their midst. The irony of it all was that we weren’t very good cult members; we were terrible recruiters; they really had nothing to worry about.

One of the more common methods of recruitment employed by evangelical groups is door-to-door “witnessing”. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do it, fundamentalist mega-churches do it, the Mormons do it and we did it in The Way. The problem with door-to-door witnessing in a small town is that you quickly run out of doors to knock on. The average number of people per household is usually estimated at 3.5 [2]; for a city of 5000 that gives you approximately 1400 households. If you divide the group into pairs, each pair has to knock on only 700 doors, which you can do in a month if you set the modest goal of 25 houses per day. Since other than working part time, all that you’re supposed to be doing with your time is witnessing, this isn’t too difficult. In the bigger cities, where most of the growth in The Way took place, witnessing other than door-to-door was done in malls, parks and other places where large numbers of people gathered. This obviously was a problem in Sidney, which had no shopping center, and other than churches, no place where people congregated in large groups. One of The Way’s recruiting pitches was that while they were ostensibly Christian, they viewed all other Christians as wrong in the details of their doctrine and/or practice, so if you really wanted to get to know God’s will, you had to get involved with The Way and take their Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class. So, by this logic, it made sense to go after church people who of course would abandon their stale, error-ridden churches for the shining light of truth to be found in The Way as presented by four marginally employed college drop-outs. The first church that we visited was the Sidney Church of the Foursquare Gospel, pastored by The Reverend Jerry Skinner, who would become our main opponent during our stay in the town of One-Horse, Nebraska, also known as Sidney.

One afternoon, the Foursquare Church was going to be hosting a “healing ministry” by a visiting pastor. Several of us decided to attend, mainly, although we would never admit it to ourselves, to feel superior to these poor ignorant yokels and maybe show some of them The Truth. Little did we know that the entire town of Sidney, and especially Rev. Jerry Skinner, was loaded for bear and couldn’t wait to confront us with a little truth of their own . After the service Rev. Skinner stood at the door to the sanctuary, shaking hands, and making small talk. I had no plans to speak with the man, but shook his hand perfunctorily, ready to make my exit, but Rev. Jerry wasn’t about to let me off so easily. He held my hand in an iron grip and fixed me with a steely glare; “You’re Tom, with The Way, your companions are Rosemarie and Gail, Steve isn’t with you today…” he continued to tell us where we were from, who we worked for and other details of our lives, nothing supernatural or anything, but this guy was obviously someone who had done his homework and found out all that he could about his “enemy”. One thing that we didn’t know at the time was that Rev. Jerry had been briefly involved with The Way in the early seventies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the same time and place where The Way’s new leader, Craig Martindale, had first become involved[3]. Unlike most people that we encountered who were against The Way, this guy actually knew and understood what we believed and taught and was on a mission (from God…really) to prevent us from making any inroads into his town.

Part of the W.O.W. Ambassador program was the requirement that you “witness”, i.e. recruit, 6 days a week. You were supposed to take off one day from work and witnessing, preferably the same day! If I remember correctly a W.O.W. Ambassador was supposed to witness 48 hours per week, which equates to 8 hours per day, on top of however many hours you worked your part-time job every day. I don’t know of anyone who really followed that part of the program, we sure didn’t. Let’s do the math: Most places of employment didn’t open until 7:00AM, figuring a 20-hour per week job, that about 4 hours per day. So you’re done about 11:00AM. Go home and have some lunch, be done by say, 12:30PM. You’re probably going to eat the evening meal together as a “family”, so you’ve got to be home by 5:00PM to start preparing dinner. So you’ve only had 4 ½ hours to witness in the afternoon. By the time you make dinner, eat and clean up its 6:30PM. You’ve now got to get 3½ hours in by the end of the day, so you’re out until 10:00PM witnessing, unless of course it’s a “Twig Night”. (Twig is Way-speak for a home fellowship) That takes about an hour, so witnessing takes you out until 11:00PM...in Sidney Nebraska. If you’re out and about from 12:30 to 5:00, who are you going to encounter: Stay-at-home moms, retired farmers and the unemployed? There’s a very small pool of people around during the day in a town of 5000. What about in the evening? Just how late do you think people will be answering their doors before they call the cops? So what does that leave? Considering that you will have knocked on every door in about a month without even trying very hard, cafes during the day and bars at night is where the witnessing action takes place, which brings us back to Dude’s.

Dude’s wasn’t the only bar in Sidney, but it was the only one with a dance floor and a deejay. There was a pool hall that Steve, who was a pretty fair pool player and I (a pretty poor pool player), went to some evenings. The routine was that Steve played pool while I leaned against a table and tried to engage people in discussions about God or the Bible. Although I never played, I could usually figure out what the best shot was since I had been watching Steve play as well as visualizing the geometry in my head. After about a month, guys started asking me for advice on what shot to take and even recommendations on what kind of cue to buy. Since I acted and talked like I was an expert, the habitués of the place thought that I was an expert[4]. Steve very seldom went to Dude’s, since he didn’t like to dance, so I usually “witnessed” over there with one or both of the girls. After a while a weird set of misunderstandings developed regarding our living arrangements. Usually I introduced whoever was with me as “my roommates”. Some folks jumped to the conclusion that I was a super stud based on my having two female roommates, while others assumed that Steve and I were gay, both groups blocking out the existence of the roommates that didn’t fit with their fantasies.

As our time in Sidney crept onward, it became more and more evident that there was a smoldering hatred of “cults”, a visceral fear and loathing that had started about a year before in the wake of the Jonestown mass suicide and related killings and had come to focus on most groups that swam outside the mainstream, which included The Way International, which in Sidney meant the four of us. Several overlapping and mutually exclusive definitions of “cult” exist, and most people don’t have a clear idea of what a cult is, how to recognize one or why they are bad. Especially back in the days before the internet, abuses within new religious groups were as often as not fabricated and a large percentage of anti-cult crusaders didn’t understand the theology behind the arguments against them and people sometimes confused the term “cult” with “occult”[5]. The center of anti-cult, anti-us activity in Sidney was the aforementioned Foursquare Gospel Church pastored by Rev. Jerry Skinner, but a coalition of other churches in Sidney followed along and attempted to make our lives miserable.

One of the strategies that we were instructed to employ in our mission to convert the heathens of western Nebraska was to hold an “open house”. I’d actually seen this work while I lived in New York, but, as I was a bit slow to realize, I wasn’t in New York anymore. In the days leading up to our scheduled open house, the four of us utilized our witnessing time diligently printing up and distributing flyers all around town. What we were unaware of was that the local church leaders were following behind us and just as diligently tearing down our cute little flyers. As a result the only people who knew about our open house were the four of us and all the folks who had already decided that we were a grave danger to the American way of life. We didn’t see it then, but this open house was to be the defining moment for our entire time in Sidney. We spent the afternoon cleaning and scrubbing our modest duplex, arranging the furniture and setting out snacks while Steve prepared a teaching and presentation designed to convince all but the hardest-hearted that we were the purveyors of the truth that Sidney Nebraska had waited its entire existence for. And the hardest-hearted turned out to be our only guests that evening. The attendees that night included several pastors, including our nemesis, Rev. Skinner, and a handful of his youth group members. From an outreach point of view the evening was a resounding failure, but like most things in The Way, we redefined things so that they would fit with our preconceived notions of how the world worked. We chose to interpret the day’s events as proof that we were doing God’s will and that the “persecution” that we were enduring was evidence that “the Adversary” was all lathered up over the four spiritual heavyweights who were speaking the truth to the citizens of Sidney. So our focus became, not recruiting for The Way, not lovingly sharing what we had learned or making healing available, but patiently enduring and standing up to persecution. The good people of Sidney were only too glad to oblige us.

It wasn’t as if we had come up with the persecution complex all by ourselves, The Way’s founder, V.P. Wierwille was more concerned with the Devil and his minions than anyone I’d ever heard of. There was even a class, Dealing With the Adversary, (later, under Wierwille’s successor changed to Defeating the Adversary) that covered what Wierwille claimed to know about “The Adversary” (“Satan” is the English transliteration of a Hebrew word meaning “adversary”) and his “devil spirits”, constructing an hierarchy from what he called buck privates to five-star generals, all under the orders of the commander-in-chief, the Devil. The advanced class portion of the PFAL series of classes, while ostensibly covering six of the nine “manifestations of the spirit” mentioned in Corinthians (the other three speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues and prophecy are expounded upon in the foundational and intermediate classes) the class mainly focused on the manifestation called “discerning of spirits”, specifically,  recognizing devil spirits. Way members were constantly being urged to look over their shoulder for interference by the Devil, to check their thoughts for devilish influences and to listen for their inner holy spirit to alert them to the presence of devil spirits in others. We were seeing the Devil all over the Sidney metropolitan area, but the good people of Sidney were seeing the Devil in just one place, and that was in our little duplex on Jackson Street.  

Back in New York I had occasionally heard the word “cult” and had encountered resistance to our message from individuals and even from some groups, but it wasn’t until I moved to Sidney that people actually started doing something about their opinions. Nebraska values in action. One of the first of many actions took place at my job. We were all required to have a part-time job to support ourselves during our WOW year, since we arrived on a Friday it wasn’t until the next Monday, when most of the businesses were open that I found employment. Ken Pittam, a member of one of those families that had been in Sidney forever, owned a store that sold custom flooring and windows as well as a small café, both on Illinois Avenue, Sidney’s main street. Ken hired me as a kind of go-fer, to clean up around the flooring store, take orders and work as an apprentice to the glass cutters. One of my first jobs was to help remove all the plate glass windows in the town’s Safeway grocery store before it was demolished and install windows in the new building. I was on my way to learning a trade when Ken took me aside one morning to inform me that he was letting me go, not because he couldn’t afford me (20 hours per week at minimum wage), or because I was a poor worker, but because he had received pressure from the members of his church to “fire that cultist”. I was pretty sure that it was illegal to fire someone on the basis of their religion, but I didn’t exactly have the means to file a lawsuit, and my priority was to “move the Word”.

Even though I was marooned in western Nebraska ensconced in the arms of a religious cult, surrounded by a town that was in large part hostile to my very existence, I was still a New Yorker, and the strangeness of the whole environment sometimes trumped the strangeness of being in a cult. One of the first things that I ordered in the local café was a traditional New York breakfast: a roll with butter and a “regular” coffee. Now what I meant by that was a buttered hard roll, you know, the kind with poppy or sesame seeds, and coffee with cream & sugar. What I got was a huge cinnamon roll with a cold pat of butter setting on top, a black coffee and some funny looks from the waitress, especially when I asked “What is this?” One of the things that a New Yorker quickly finds out upon leaving “The City” is that familiar foods are called different things in the outside world. The custom of calling coffee with cream & sugar “regular” is only one among many. Another is that New Yorkers are notoriously picky about what foods are appropriate for mustard and which ones take ketchup. Mustard is for hot dogs (or “franks”) and ketchup was for hamburgers. In fact, Heinz used to sell a ketchup-pickle relish mix called “hamburger relish” and still has one with mustard labeled “hot dog relish”. McDonald’s and Burger King both routinely put ketchup, mustard and pickles on their burgers except in New York City. My first McDonald’s hamburger with mustard on it was actually in Albany, New York, which was not the real New York, but that region referred to as “upstate”. Rueben sandwiches, a New York delicacy, feature corned beef, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, but what is called Russian dressing in New York is called Thousand Island salad dressing everywhere else in the United States (maybe not anymore). And then you have bagels. Thirty years later, bagels have appeared all over the country, or at least round bread that is called a “bagel”, but back in 1980, the farther you got from New York, the scarcer bagels became. Don’t get me started on what toppings are appropriate for pizzas!

In addition to missing the uniquely New York take on food, there were also some Nebraska oddities. One afternoon I stopped for lunch at the Fort Sidney Hotel Restaurant, where Gail worked as a waitress. As a side I had ordered a “Jell-O salad”, which I assumed would be some fruit mixed in with Jell-O. What arrived was a small square of Jell-O with what looked like a little curlicue of whipped cream on top. Except that the “whipped cream” turned out to be Miracle Whip! Augh! As I contemplated this affront to fine dining I was approached by one of the managers of the restaurant who informed me that no members of The Way would be welcome to eat at Fort Sidney. While in theory a business can refuse service to anyone this is the first time I had seen it applied in regard to a person’s religion. Later that day, the daily mail included a letter from our landlord, informing us that we would be required to vacate our duplex apartment no later than December 31^st. A visit to the landlord elicited “I ain’t gonna rent to no cult” as the reason for our eviction. People started accosting us in the street and screaming “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus”; the clerk at the grocery store “rebuked” me in the produce aisle; the bulletin board at my job started to feature notes and articles about the “dangerous cult” loose in Sidney; and a town hall meeting was convened on the subject of “cults” (which we all attended!). Not satisfied with verbal abuse, Sidneyites started swerving their cars to try to run us over, throwing rocks at us and standing in front of our house cursing at us. Finally, there came “The Jericho March”.

Lurking behind all of this was Sidney’s religious establishment, and right in the middle of it all was our old pal Rev. Jerry Skinner, pastor of the Foursquare Gospel Church. Sometime in late January, just as we were finishing up a “twig” meeting, we noticed a yellow Mustang, which belonged to a prominent member of Rev. Jerry’s youth group, circling our block. Shortly thereafter we began to see people walking, two-by-two, past our house, apparently walking around our block. Steve and I snuck out the back door and hid in the darkness of our backyard, which, since it was on a corner lot, had a good view of the participants in this late night stroll. As we lay on our bellies in the grass, we noticed that everyone on this promenade was part of the Foursquare Church. Steve, struck with a brilliant idea, leapt up and joined the parade, which snaked around our block a few more times and ended up back at the church, just a few blocks away. Bundled up in a hat and scarf, Steve blended in with the crowd and was unrecognized as he slunk into a back pew. Rev. Jerry, leading his congregation in prayer, asked them to close their eyes. As part of his prayer, he talked about the purpose of that evening: a “Jericho March”, named after the march around the city of Jericho in the biblical Book of Joshua which resulted in the walls falling down after seven days of marching around the city, culminating in a seventh day march of seven times around the city, followed by trumpet blowing and yelling. They were claiming our block back for God, who thankfully did not see fit to knock down our walls. When the prayer was over, Jerry and his congregation opened their eyes to see Steve, who by this time had removed his hat and scarf in the indoor heat, grinning from ear to ear at the back of the church. Steve waved to the group and walked out. These people were crazy.

Shortly after this incident the leadership of The Way of Nebraska decided that we were being pulled out of Sidney and reassigned. On a lark Gail and I decided to invite Jerry over to the house for coffee. We talked about this and that, discussed the Bible and how he wished that he had people like us in his youth group, that but for our error he admired our commitment. He then went on about how “The Lord” had told him about our reassignment and how did we feel about being split up. Gail asked him what he was talking about and Jerry replied that The Lord had revealed to him that two of us were leaving town and two of us were staying. Gail followed with the best comeback of the year, “Jerry, the Lord threw you a curve; we’re all leaving!” Later that week we began the second half of our year about two hours eastward, in Kearney Nebraska. 

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[1] At the time that I left, drinking age in New York was 18, I was 22 when I arrived in Sidney. The youngest member of our troupe was 20.

[2] According to the Audit Bureau of (newspaper) Circulation

[3] There were several focal points of early growth for The Way in the early seventies, Wichita Kansas was one of these hot spots. The Way leaders in Wichita spread out to Lawrence during this time period.

[4] Oddly enough (or not) one of my sons has inherited this trait and has demonstrated his ability to bullshit his way through anything.

[5] Once a group of high school kids showed up at our door wanting to know if we could conduct a séance for them