Aes Duir

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

Nobody Expects The Nebraska Inquisition

The Hovel (Nobody Would Want To Live in That Dump)

Here I am; it’s Friday night, sitting in my new apartment, one which I will later dub “The Hovel”. I’ve got my clothes hung in the closet, my mattress on the floor (I couldn’t squeeze the box spring up the stairs so it didn’t make the cut) and my one plate, one spoon, one knife, one fork, a pot & a pan and a handful of ceramic mugs (and tea, I’ve always got to make sure that I have a supply of tea) stored in the kitchen cupboards where I’m pretty sure that I saw mouse droppings. The guy who lives in the Porsche repair shop next door yelled at me earlier for blocking his driveway with my late 80’s Cavalier station wagon (After being convinced by my ex-wife to sell my road-worthy yet ugly Chevy Celebrity, our other car threw a rod in central Nebraska a few weeks later. The only thing we could afford to replace it was a $400 rust bucket.) that has rusted spots in a far greater proportion of total surface area than the white paint that hangs on precariously, while I unloaded my meager furnishings without any help from anyone other than the meth-dealing single mom (To be fair, I never really ever witnessed her dealing, but she talked about it a lot) who lived one flight of rickety stairs festooned with bare wires below me on the ground floor. Darren, my new landlord, gave me a discount on the rent so that I could buy cleaning supplies, but I hadn’t gotten around to cleaning the greasy dust that looks like one of the aliens from the first season of Star Trek: Voyager off the overhead fans, the unidentified motile brown stuff from the top of the stove, or the sentient mold from the bathroom. I open the door to the oven and quickly shut it, horrified by the scene within, vowing to never open it ever again.

“The Hovel” was located on the corner of 17^th & N Streets in downtown Lincoln: twelve one-bedroom apartments on three floors; once a hotel for railroaders, possibly built when the golden spike was being driven and great herds of buffalo still darkened the plains. Lincoln Nebraska, home of the then-powerhouse Cornhuskers football team, Tree City USA, home of The Good Life. Or so they tell me. Or maybe it was on the “Welcome to Lincoln” sign. Next to the Porsche garage is BB&R pawn shop and behind my building is a parking lot that is used by the HMO across the street during the day and us hovel dwellers after sundown. Despite the dismal immediate surroundings, it’s a pretty good location —if your standards are somewhat negotiable. Russ’s Market grocery store is less than a mile away, and Klein’s Grocery is even closer if you don’t mind the smallness, lack of selection, and panhandlers, but they do sell the New York Times. A block and a half away the bars start sprouting. I’ve never counted, but there’re probably several dozen drinking establishments within walking distance; with the University of Nebraska about five blocks northwest, it probably isn’t enough. There’s also the public library, The Gourmet Grill — a gyro joint (Gyros are considered by some to be the perfect food, if by “perfect” you mean a lamb-like substance, dripping with grease and containing enough salt to start your own ocean.) where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them, (After a few months at The Hovel I found that I could often get some free food by bussing a table or two and mopping up some spills.) and a variety of other small restaurants all within a stone’s throw. Of course the State Capitol and the Governor’s Mansion are nearby if you want to hobnob with politicians. Or protest something. Or bribe somebody.

I’d lived in Lincoln at this point for just over twenty years. I spent six months in Kearney, and before that, six months in Sidney after moving to Nebraska from Queens New York, where I was born and had spent the first twenty two years and six weeks of my life, other than brief excursions to Ohio, New Jersey and a couple of trips to Washington D.C. I got talked into coming to Nebraska, and I’m still here due to inertia, or perhaps momentum; I’m not sure which is metaphorically correct in this case. Entropy definitely figures in.

It’s pretty quiet here in The Hovel, since I have no radio, no television, no CD or tape player and no one to talk to. I’ve got a bunch of my books, but they don’t make much noise. There’s some activity outside, from the gay bar across N Street and the constant drone of traffic on the main drag, O Street, a half block to the north. Considering my options, I briefly consider blowing my brains out. The problem with that idea is that I have no gun and have no idea where to get one at this hour. The idea itself, from my squalid corner, looks like it has some merit though. How about jumping off a highway overpass? They’ve got those things all over town. Surely I can jump off a high one, hedge my bets by doing it into oncoming traffic, but I still have enough of a vestige of good citizenship that I don’t want to land on the hood of some poor bastard who hasn’t had his life slide into a pool of crap in the last couple of months. How about sticking my head in the oven and turning on the gas? Hell no! I had made a vow not to open that thing ever again! As I thought up and rejected idea after idea, I fell asleep. One of these days I’ll get better at making a timely decision.

So I wake up the next morning. Apparently I didn’t kill myself. If I was dead surely I wouldn’t be able to smell the, shall we say, unique aroma of The Hovel. Okay, change of plans: I’ll not kill myself and do something about that smell. That’s enough of a plan for now. (I never really did do anything about the smell other than leaving the windows open, even when it was really cold, lighting candles, spraying Ozium® and discovering the masking properties of sandalwood incense)

Before getting moved in the previous night I had stopped by my part-time job and found out that they were closing down. I still had my full-time job, Assistant Store Director in a local grocery store chain, but it would have been convenient to keep the income from that second job. Two years pastward from the events of this paragraph I sold my soul to the Devil for a dime and became a telemarketer. That’s right, I was the guy who, no matter what time you had dinner, called right as you sat down, the guy who was seemingly oblivious to your repeated ungrammatical assertion that you “didn’t want none”, the guy who apparently didn’t understand the meaning of the word “no”. I sold something called ASDC, which stood for Auto Savings Discount Club, but since it had nothing to do with autos, savings or discounts, and wasn’t a club, changed its name to American Savings Discount Club, (yeah, I know it makes little sense, but they thought that changing that one word solved the problem); but we just called it ASDC. We called people who for one reason or another couldn’t get a credit card, who had effectively killed their credit, and who had credit scores that were expressed in fractions. We called them and sold them “The Plan”. “The Plan” consisted of a “line of credit”. For a nominal fee of $180, ASDC members could draw on a line of credit, instant cash that they could “access at any time by calling the toll-free number”. All that they had to do was give us their social security number, their bank account number, and be recorded giving us permission to draw out the $180 from their checking or savings account. No way! No one would be stupid enough to do that! One would think not, but there were enough idiots out there that a couple of dozen of us made pretty good money selling this questionable scheme. We used to talk about the “ASDC Continuum”. On one end were the people who were too smart to ever buy anything over the phone in the first place, and certainly not this plan. You could hear it in their voices even before you identified yourself, they were skeptical, they were suspicious, and they were smart. On the other end of the continuum were the dolts who were incapable of understanding what you were talking about. They couldn’t have told you what was wrong with ASDC, but they also couldn’t follow what you were saying. You might have been offering to send them a shoebox full of $100 bills and they’d say ‘no’. The people who we sold to were right in the middle of the continuum; stupid enough to have ruined their credit, stupid enough to talk seriously to telemarketers, but smart enough to know what their checking account number was and to have a job of some sort. Okay, maybe not right in the middle; closer to the stupid side would be more accurate.

For two years and then some I labored on the phones peddling ASDC, sometimes also doing political polling or surveys, but ASDC was our bread and butter, at which I was extremely good at selling to the cerebrally deficient and congenitally desperate. During training they taught us that we were to stick strictly to the script. If someone offered an objection we were to reply using a list of predetermined answers. We were to talk to whoever answered the phone, whether it was our target or not, and try to sell them ASDC. There were several problems with that last part. No matter how carefully you explained that you understood that Mr. John Smith, the person that you asked for, was not home, and that you were now making this incredible offer to Mrs. Smith, or John’s brother Ray, or whoever, and that you were pitching directly to them and not merely leaving a message for Mr. John Smith, they would inevitably say, at the end of the long and complicated spiel, “John’s not home”, so I stopped trying to sell to secondary residents. I stopped pushing for the sale to belligerent people and those who were plainly stringing me along. This meant that I was breaking the rules; it also meant that since I was eliminating a large percentage of almost-guaranteed rejections without taking time to talk to them, my sales per hour went up and I was making a large amount of bonus money, despite only working part time. Every time they hired a new quality assurance monitor, I’d get written up for breaking the rules, until they figured out that I was making everyone a lot of money precisely because I was breaking the rules. Eventually they left me alone completely, and even stopped scheduling me, just letting me show up whenever I pleased. It was a pretty good until some regulatory agency whose initials I forget shut down ASDC, and since ASDC was our biggest client, we were shut down too, just when I could really use the money. Crap.

So it’s back to The Hovel, since it’s a Saturday and I’m unlikely to find a job on the weekend. I still have to clean this place and it still smells pretty bad. Even though The Hovel was, well, a hovel, there were always an interesting cast of characters. Right across the hall was Denis the meat cutter, seemingly the only other person in the building who had a job of any kind. Denis always had some down-on-his-luck guy sleeping on his floor, but he often was one of the few people who seemed reasonably sane. Although I suppose that there are different ways that you can define “sane”. After all, he was living in The Hovel too. In the first floor front apartment was a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. He might have been a South Vietnamese general. He could often be found walking up and down 27^th Street shouting at passers-by in a mixture of Vietnamese and English, or buying drinks for people with a large wad of bills (I never inquired about their source). One time he fell asleep and left some food cooking on the stove; it caught fire, coming close to burning the building down. Several of us were finally able to wake him up after banging on his door and windows for fifteen minutes. There was Dana, the gay born-again Christian, who moved in after the meth-dealing woman downstairs moved out, and owned two big pit bulls. His church’s position on homosexuality was that it was a sin, but he was still gay, so his was a very confusing life. He lived there until one of his dogs ate a small dog in the neighborhood and they went on the lam from the Humane Society. On the third floor were a father & son who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support. The son would come down to my apartment to borrow my phone, then leave messages that he could be reached at my number. When they moved out two guys who owned guitars & drums moved in; they played loud music and jumped out of the windows into the alley. From the third floor. One day I came home to find them handcuffed and being led away by the Lincoln Police Department, the pieces of their meth lab laid out on a table in the parking lot. And who can forget the woman who stopped by to “borrow a cup of Jack Daniels”.

I lived in The Hovel for about two years. Most people were horrified by my living conditions. But it was cheap, it was close to the bars, and I was too lazy to move. What eventually motivated me to move stemmed from the water being cut off. I came home late on Friday night, in dire need of a shower, and found that I had no water. The next morning I bathed and shaved using some bottled water. After returning home from work the next day, and finding that the water was working, I went about my business, doing laundry, showering, using the toilet, and making tea. After about 45 minutes I heard a horrific screaming from one of the downstairs apartments, followed by its inhabitant, Leroy, running into the hall with murder in his eyes. Apparently the reason that we had no water was that a water main had cracked and every time someone flushed the toilet or the washing machine drained, it flowed into Leroy’s apartment, geysering soap and human waste up through his toilet. I can see why he’d be upset. Everyone in the building had been cautioned to not flush the toilets, not use the washing machine, and use water sparingly, but since I was one of the few who actually worked, “everyone” didn’t include me. I persuaded Leroy to refrain from killing me and got the classifieds and started looking for an apartment. My landlord couldn’t believe that I’d want to move.

The "Nobody" Series:

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

Nobody Expects The Nebraska Inquisition

Friday, July 17, 2026

Nobody Expects the Nebraska Inquisition

You might ask, as Darren McGavin did in A Christmas Story: “What brought you to this lowly state?”

Approximately 24 hours before moving into The Hovel, I sat in my five-bedroom house with my wife Pat who I had been married to for almost twenty years, two-thirds of my six children and our Sheltie/Dachshund Mitzi, in a situation that had become all too familiar: listening to Pat enumerate my many shortcomings. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have any shortcomings, like most people I had, and still have, a lot. Somewhere, packed away with my high school graduation pictures, old KZUM radio program guides, vintage Chuck Taylors and 3-ring binders from years of management classes, are yellow legal pads with lists of things that she told me that I needed to work on, change, fix, or line up with the Bible. And these were just the things she knew about. But this time it was different. I was being given a choice: either move out and “get my shit together” or she would move out and take all the kids with her. Not much of a choice.

Due to a variety of factors, including lack of a college degree and scant evidence that I had any skills that someone would be willing to pay me money for, meager finances was frequently a problem at our house. Food Stamps and government cheese were familiar sights. It was less of a problem when we recognized that we didn’t have a lot of money and therefore couldn’t spend a lot of money, when we shopped at thrift stores and day-old bread outlets and, although paying the bills often required the skills of a Barnum & Bailey center ring juggler, the outgo was always less than or equal to the income, no matter how small. The expectations were also less than or equal to the income. This all changed when (cue echo effects) The Law of Believing reared its ugly head.

The Law of Believing as we experienced it was promulgated by the religious group that we had associated with on and off since the mid-seventies, which taught that whatever you “believed for”, you would receive. Now this went well beyond the normal person’s concept of praying, which usually included the possibility that God would say “no”, the creator of the universe working in mysterious ways and all that deep theological stuff. Most people, although they don’t say it out loud, understand that praying is an iffy proposition at best. When things turn out the way that they wanted to, then prayer works, when they don’t turn out that way, well, prayer still works but…um…okay, the great silent majority generally hasn’t worked out the theology of that just yet, although there are theories. The difference between regular praying and believing is that with believing, it's a law, i.e. it works all the time, in every situation, for everyone, as our group’s founder was fond of saying “For saint and sinner alike”. It’s kind of like gravity, momentum and other laws of physics: they always work; it’s woven into the fabric of the universe. So what happens when it inevitably doesn’t work? It’s the fault of the person doing the alleged believing of course; he or she must not really be “believing”, or, like any good glob of circular reasoning, the result would be there. (In some ways, this was more logical than regular praying, in that it posited an answer to “why didn’t I get the result that I wanted?” that didn’t involve an arbitrary, capricious deity who wasn’t all that clear about the rules.)

This Law was applied to finances by Pat and some of her "believer" friends. Over coffee and cigarettes one afternoon they all agreed that they would hold their husbands to this law. No longer could it be stated that we couldn’t afford something, no matter how little money we actually had. (And we always seemed to have money for coffee and cigarettes) I was to “take believing action” and receive that which I believed for. Now I know that I should have been thrilled to have the opportunity to receive all that I ever wanted or needed, delivered upon demand by a compliant deity ready to supply that pony that I asked for at Christmas, but something happened between the believing and the receiving, and that was reality.

Our expenses grew, our income didn’t and any attention that I drew to these facts was derided as “lack of believing”. It’s difficult if not impossible to reason with someone who deals in dogma rather than facts, and that was certainly the case here. It didn’t make it any easier that in addition to our precarious financial situation, we were giving at least 10% of our income to the aforementioned religious organization, which was supposedly a form of believing that was to guarantee financial abundance. Keep in mind that no one in this religious organization was prepared for or trained in any kind of financial counseling to show people how to have that financial abundance; they just pointed out that if you didn’t have it you weren’t believing.

In the early nineties, with rapidly mounting expenses on one side and the Law of Believing on the other side, I made the fateful decision to get a credit card. The initial reason for getting the card was related to my job. I worked as a circulation sales rep for a statewide newspaper and often had to pay for meals, gas and hotel rooms out of pocket and wait up to a month before being reimbursed. The plan was to use the card to pay the expenses; then pay off the bill with my expense check. All in all, this was a brilliant plan, except that I followed part one (use the credit card) faithfully, but never got around to part two (paying off the bill).

It didn’t take long for me to start using the card for non-business expenses, and since they obviously weren’t reimbursable as the business charges were, I never got around to paying them. At first it was something small, a ninety dollar lawnmower that I swore that I’d pay for on the next paycheck, then it was a $200 clothes dryer, then it was a $750 used car from Weird Wally’s. I’d charge them, or withdraw cash and put it in the bank account and then write a check. We appeared to be “prospering” according to the Law of Believing, but a simple look at our bank account would have revealed that income hadn’t gone up, yet we were spending more than ever before. It’s a miracle! Praise God!

Soon I got a second credit card to help cover dental expenses since the kids were starting to require expensive dental work, including orthodontics not covered by insurance for every one of my children and possibly a few neighborhood kids who just stayed overnight, and maybe even a stray cat. The first credit card initially had a credit limit of $1000, which was soon raised to $1500, to $2000 and eventually to over $3000. The second card started at $3500 and eventually was raised to $12,000. I maxed out both of them. A third card was quickly maxed out and then a fourth. By the time all was said and done I had racked up approximately $21,000 of credit card debt with little to show for it except an abundance of straight, white teeth. Now at this point you might be saying to yourself: “Dumbass, get a second job, cut back on your spending, tell your wife to get a job (she was home schooling the kids and didn’t work outside the home) — do something”. That, I would answer, is easier said than done. (Since you brought it up)

Part of the problem that I got myself into was that I was afraid of two things: the wrath of God and the wrath of my wife. If you’ve ever met Pat, now my ex-wife, you might be scratching your head in puzzlement. First of all, she was tiny, with the upper body strength of a parakeet, and a pack-a-day smoker to boot. Her lung capacity on her best day couldn’t support a good sustained yell. Although she had many good qualities, she was just one of those people who never compromise on anything; everything was black and white; everything could be boiled down to either (cue echo chamber again) the Will of God or the Lies of The Adversary. (Our religious group referred to The Devil, as “The Adversary”) A lot of my waking hours were spent trying to avoid conflict and confrontation, without any success worth mentioning. I was between a rock and a hard place. Speaking up and saying that we didn’t have the funds to buy an item that the appearance of “abundance” demanded, meant being harangued incessantly for not trusting God. So more and more I took the coward’s way out and used the credit card with no real plan for paying it off. For a while I was able to use the mileage reimbursement checks that I received from my employer to pay off the minimum balances each month. I made sure that I drove enough miles each month so that I would have enough extra to make the payments. But as the balances continued to rise and the interest charges drove them up even higher, I despaired of ever even beginning to pay the cards off, let alone totally eliminate the debt. I stopped pretending to limit the use of the card to things that I was pressured by Pat to buy and started using it to get cash advances which I used to hit the bars late at night when I was supposed to be working.

The wrath of God comes in to play with a relatively new teaching by the leader of our organization that debt in any form was a sin. Pressure was being put on members to eliminate all debt: house loans, car loans, credit cards and any other agreement where you owed anyone anything. (One of my sons, after filling out his tax return, found that he would owe a few hundred dollars, rather than receive a refund. He was chastised for “being in debt” to the government.) Sermons were preached constantly how those who were in debt were cutting themselves off from God, and were contaminating the “household”. No surprise that I was hesitant in the early days to admit to anyone that I had started accumulating debt, and when it got as huge as it did, I was terrified of being found out. Eventually, my master plan to pretend that we didn’t have financial problems, that I was getting along with my wife and that everything would somehow fix itself, came crashing down with a call Pat received from one of my creditors.

The minimum payments on the four cards had gotten so large that I was no longer able to cover them using the mileage reimbursement checks and had started using our family checking account to make payments, faking the account balance in the checkbook to make it look like there was more money in the account than there actually was. At no time during this crisis did Pat ever ask to look at a credit card statement (I had them sent to a post office box) or attempt to balance the checkbook. She was totally in the dark when finally one of the credit card companies called the house to inquire about an overdue payment. Immediately following that call, Pat called the local “leadership” of our little group. Three of them confronted me in my living room about lying to my wife, being in debt, and, most importantly in their eyes, lying to the leaders of this group about being in debt (and lying about lying too). The fact that my hidden debt was now out in the open was a great relief to me, a great burden was lifted from my shoulders. I had gotten myself in so deep that I was afraid to ask for help, help from my wife, my co-religionists, or anyone. I was afraid of the reaction that my wife would have and the action that my church would take against me. But now what I had been afraid of had come to pass, and as bad as it was, it didn’t seem that it was the end of the world.

When I was keeping it to myself, when I was lying to those around me, I couldn’t do anything to reduce the debt, because that would make everyone aware that there was a problem. Now I had the opportunity to pay off the debt and repair the damage that had been done to my marriage (Or so I thought). I admitted to the $21,000 in debt that I was in (Pat had only found out about approximately $3,500 from the creditor who had called) and to lying to Pat and to my religious leaders. The local leadership then contacted the next higher level in the hierarchy and convened another meeting. They considered my actions to be bringing Satan’s influence into their fellowship. Like many biblical literalists, our church leaders practiced a form of “shunning” that they called “mark and avoid”, based on a bible verse that said “mark them that cause divisions among you and avoid them”. They used this verse to justify cutting off all contact with people who didn’t adhere to the group’s standards or even with people who questioned them. Those who had been marked & avoided were considered by those who stayed loyal to be as good as dead. Active participants were not allowed to have any contact with those who had been marked & avoided. (Ironically, in the years leading up to this event, I had been called upon to sit in on many “confrontation” sessions that ended with people being marked and avoided. Not a period of my life of which I am proud.) An intermediate step, called “spiritual probation”, also cut off the offenders from contact with the faithful, but had a time limit, usually six months, after which the probationer would be evaluated as to their fitness to return to full participation. During this time the probationer was required to write a monthly letter to the state leader, outlining what was being done to correct whatever the problem was that got them put on probation and to continue to tithe, i.e. pay 10% of total income to the organization. This was the action that our group’s leaders took against me.

The fact that I managed to tally up $21,000 in unsecured debt confirmed Pat’s long-held suspicion that I was the cause of all evil in the western hemisphere. She had been critical of my fitness as a father and as a Christian for several years and had been regularly been complaining about me to our leaders; now she had something solid. She fully expected that these leaders would come down hard on me or perhaps put me in stocks before the village gate or at least entertain the possibility of burning me at the stake; when they meted out the same punishment to her that it had to me; she was shocked.

Looking back, her inclusion in my punishment was as much to blame for our future problems as was my own transgressions. It made her bitter, angry and that much more determined to blame me for any and all problems. But I didn’t see that at the time. I was so relieved that I had shed the burden of living a lie and having been given the opportunity to make things right that I didn’t perceive how bad things really were, how irreparable the situation actually was. Things seemed to be looking up. The problem with looking up is that you don’t notice the big steaming pile of shit in front of you until you step in it.

During the next six months I got a part-time job to begin paying off the debt, wrote my letter every month to the state leader, paid my tithes and attempted to heal the rift between me and Pat, who was adamant that I was doing nothing to change and was convinced that at the end of the six months the leadership would clearly see how depraved I was and permanently mark and avoid me, welcoming her back with open arms and vindicating her judgment that I was The Antichrist in training. Imagine her surprise when we both were released from probation with no conditions, convincing her that either the leadership of our organization was blind and stupid or that I had diabolically pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

Our church preached the point of view that good things happened because you were “doing God’s Word” and that bad things happened because you were “off God’s Word”. (Although if something bad happened to one of the leaders, it was proof that they were so godly that the Devil was after them in a special way, targeting them for an extra helping of devilishness. If good things happened to bad people that showed only that the Devil was rewarding them for being his faithful minion. You just can’t win with this kind of logic, can you?)

Those who fully believed this doctrine therefore had to assign blame somewhere when things went wrong, you could either blame yourself, or blame someone close to you who was “a conduit” for the Devil to cause problems in your life. Pat seldom if ever looked to herself as the source of problems and was extremely good at was identifying shortcomings in others; she had very definite ideas regarding what constituted “doing the Word”, and wasn’t shy about pointing fingers at those whom she felt were falling short. For years she had bullied and bad-mouthed the local leadership of our group regarding their failings as Christian ministers, and was very vocal about correcting those in the congregation who she felt didn’t measure up. In the mid-nineties she gained any ally in Fred, the newly appointed “Branch Coordinator”. Fred was a graduate of the group’s leadership training program and was assigned to our city as the coordinator of all their home churches in Lincoln. Fred’s graduating class had received specific instructions to “weed out weakness”, to “clean up the household” and essentially to purge those who were not meeting the standards that the head of the organization had set down. Interference in people’s private lives became the norm, and one by one, those who weren’t toeing the line were marked and avoided and thrown out of the organization. Pat happily went along with all of this; that is until they started coming after us. We were being accused of being “spiritually weak”, of being a “conduit for the adversary” and poor housekeepers, possibly even poor spellers. It was at this point that Pat, unable to bully this particular leader, unable to believe that she could possibly be responsible for any of her own problems, and convinced that somebody had to be the scapegoat, decided, since all her other targets had been driven away, that I must be the reason that we were being harassed and constantly reproved. It was into this atmosphere that my secret of the $21,000 debt was dropped. Her belief that I was a source of spiritual contamination for our family was finally confirmed.

About eight months after we were reinstated into full participation with our fellowship, a bombshell was dropped. The top leader of our group, who we viewed as the “Man of God”, who taught and interpreted the Bible for us, was accused by a former member of sexual abuse and in short order resigned his position as President of the organization. Shortly after that he was put on “spiritual probation” like so many others had been and expelled from the organization. This started for me a careful examination of all that I had been taught, leading to doubt in the correctness of the group’s teachings. I began to communicate with people who had left the organization and had been marked and avoided and participated in an internet forum where the group’s teachings and practices were questioned. Eventually I was told by the leader of the multi-state region that included Nebraska that I was no longer welcome at any of the group’s functions. I was being permanently marked and avoided. This was the opportunity that Pat had been looking for. Before my expulsion, if we had a serious disagreement, we would ask one of our leaders to mediate and help us come to an agreement. (Although looking back, even though she was often the one to initiate mediation, if the answer did not conform to what she already had decided, the advice was ignored.)

Despite my many problems with this organization, I believed that occasionally they had good advice, and mainly just urged us to see the other’s point of view and to find common ground on our disagreements. Now, since no one in the group was allowed to have any contact with me, Pat took the position that in any disagreement, she was right by default, since she was the one who was “standing with the household of God”, her interpretation of events, her take on what the Bible said and how it applied to a given situation was by definition the correct one; anything that I said, was therefore wrong due to my expulsion from “The Household of God”. She began openly telling the children to not listen to what I said and eventually to not even talk to me, reasoning that she and the children were to “have no fellowship with darkness”. The smallest things became evidence that I was bringing evil into the house and the pretext for “confrontations”, where she would bring in one or more of the children as “witnesses” to the “reproof and correction”. In order to avoid this constant confrontation I withdrew more and more, working extra hours at my first job and putting in as many shifts as I could at my second, and not coming home until I absolutely had to after work; even saying I was at work and just walking around town. When I had a day off I would stay up late watching videos and drinking beer so I would be tired and hung over the next day so as to not have to interact with her.

Finally, after coming home from work on a Thursday evening I found the whole family sitting in a semicircle waiting to “confront” me. As usual the charges were non-specific and vague, the justifications quasi-biblical, but it boiled down to me being thrown out of my own house and most of my children having nothing to do with me.

Well, at least the credit card companies still wanted to talk to me.

The "Nobody" Series:

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)

Nobody Knows Where Sidney Is

Thursday, July 16, 2026

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 (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). 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 5,000, 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 effective 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 according to the Audit Bureau of (newspaper) Circulation. For a city of 5,000 that gives you approximately 1,400 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 and bars, 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 of their own truth. 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 (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). 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 (according to him) 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, assuming you got right out the door after lunch. 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”. 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 5,000. 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 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 (Oddly enough (or not) one of my sons has inherited this trait and has demonstrated his ability to bullshit his way through anything). 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 out 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 fabricated as often as not 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” (Once a group of high school kids showed up at our door wanting to know if we could conduct a séance for them). 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” (aka The Devil, Satan) 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. 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.

After this episode I moved on to other life adventures. My experiences in Sidney and in The Way were chronicled in the So, You Want To Join A Cult series

The "Nobody" Series:

Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants To Fail That Drug Screening)