Reefer Madness (Nobody Wants to Fail That Drug Screening)

As a high school and college student I tried a fair share of marijuana, (which, unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale) but my use was what I call in retrospect “situational”; if I was around people who were smoking, I smoked; if I wasn’t, I rarely sought it out. I stopped smoking soon after I “found religion” in 1978, and stayed away from it during the years that my children were growing up, but in 2001, newly single, and apparently going through a second adolescence, I rediscovered the evil weed.

Pam was one of my closest friends during the interregnum between marriages; she used to hang around O’Rourke’s, one of my favorite pubs, writing poetry in the afternoons at one of the back tables, all by herself. She dated my good buddy Drew, who also wrote poetry (as did I) and played a black Fender guitar (as I did not) that he named “Zero”[1]. Drew fancied himself a drinker, but more often than not he fell asleep in the booth or started an argument with the bartender and got himself thrown out. I first met Drew one night at O’Rourke’s as I sat waiting for Sheila (not her real name), a woman who I had been dating for a few weeks, who was also an accomplished drinker. On one particular night Sheila arrived at O’Rourke’s, where we usually met when she finished work at ten on weekend nights to find me deep in conversation with Valerie (possibly her real name), a college girl with whom I often discussed politics and Nostradamus. Even though I excused myself from my conversation about 14^th century prophets and George W. Bush’s alleged lack of intellect, Sheila, who I had not previously suspected of jealousy, reasoning that her profusion of male friends precluded any problems with me having female friends, assumed that I had another girl on the side and let her ire manifest itself by flirting with Drew, who was about 30 years her junior. Drew and I became good pals after this, and happened to be sitting on adjoining barstools when Sheila, after yet another bout of raging jealousy [2] tried to apologize to me as I explained to her my low tolerance for baseless jealousy and psychotic behavior in general. On that night Drew suggested that I find a girlfriend for him, since, despite all evidence to the contrary he thought I was a good judge of women. I began introducing him to women that I didn’t know who came up to refill their drinks until finally one of them sat down with us and offered him her phone number. We ended up sitting with this young woman and one of her friends for the rest of the evening; it was on this night that it sunk in that to most twenty-three year old women, forty-four year old guys were either invisible or “that safe old guy” who reminded them of their dads, or occasionally the “creepy old guy”. Drew never called that woman back because within the next few days he started dating Pam.

Pam was kind of a hippie-chick type. She wore a lot of tie-dye clothes and scarves and purposely stayed out of the sun making her one of the whitest white people that I’ve ever met. With five other people she lived in a sort of a commune south of the city called “The Flying Fish Farm”. Drew and Pam came together through their poetic leanings, though I had met Pam before through other mutual friends, it was by way of my friendship with Drew that we really got to know each other. Since we were closer in age than she and Drew, in some ways we had more in common and often would hang out while she was waiting for Drew or I was waiting for my girlfriend du jour. We would have long rambling conversations about religion and philosophy and in some ways she helped me start down the spiritual path that I now find myself on. She and her housemates at the Flying Fish Farm hosted Equinox and Solstice parties where I was exposed me to a variety of ideas and lifestyles. The first time that I ever saw tarot cards was Pam’s hand-drawn deck.

One evening Pam asked me to accompany her to the home of Mark (his real name, but he has departed this mortal plane), her pot supplier. Mark had an idiosyncratic way of peddling his wares. If you wanted to buy from him, you had to go to his house, sit in his living room, listen to music and smoke a joint or two with him, and then, and only then, would he sell you anything. So here I am, twenty three years since I last regularly smoked pot, sitting cross legged on the floor, blissfully floating through clouds of cannabis smoke and banging a wooden frog with a stick while we all sang The Doors’ Riders on the Storm. Finally Mark brings out his sales kit: a big Rubbermaid© container filled with pot, and closes a sale with Pam, who promptly gets up and leaves me there. To be fair to Pam, she didn’t exactly abandon me, I was pretty happy with the circumstances, and smoked a few more with Mark before getting up on my numb legs, fuzzily trying to recall with my numb brain which direction was home (happily, only about 8 blocks away) and staggered home, my whole body buzzing contentedly.

As it turned out, a lot of the people that I was associating with during this time were heavy pot smokers, so the situation was almost always favorable for lighting up. For something that is illegal, has always been illegal, and will probably remain illegal for the foreseeable future, (crossed fingers on the latest referendum attempt) there sure are a lot of people who smoke pot. During the slightly less than two years that I was engaging in this illicit activity, I was constantly amazed at the number of co-workers, friends, and casual acquaintances who regularly got high. Of course, most of them were amazed when they found out that I got high.

The incident with Pam & Mark was actually the second time that I had lit up during Adolescence Part II. During the first summer that I was single I had been given two tickets to B.B. King, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood & the Destroyers, and Joe Bonamassa, (the opening act before anyone knew who he was) playing at an outdoor venue in Council Bluffs. My buddy Mike and I were sitting in our lawn chairs, drinking Budweisers and enjoying the blues when a guy who closely resembled Jerry Garcia sat down next to us and started rolling joints, lighting them up and passing them around. The first couple of times I just passed it on, happy to be experiencing the music, but after a while I decided to take a hit, then another, and another. Ah, yes, I remember this. Now I only had to get home. As we sat in the parking lot in line behind hundreds of other cars, I glanced in my rear view mirror and was stunned to see that the car behind me was racing toward me up the hill. It was only just before impact that I realized that he wasn’t running into me, but I had let my foot off the brake and was rolling downhill into him. After the impact, the situation was quickly resolved when it was determined that not only was there no damage to either car, but no one in either vehicle was anxious to bring to the attention of the local constabulary the less than legal level of sobriety of all the incident’s participants.

One of my favorite hangouts during my second childhood was O’Rourke’s Tavern on O Street a few blocks from my apartment. One of the things that made O’Rourke’s a destination bar for me, other than Amber, the pretty Scottish barmaid, was that the clientele was extremely varied: all age groups, college kids to retirees; different socio-economic groups, from judges and politicians to people who couldn’t spell “socio-economic” and might even have a problem spelling “group”. One evening my friend Ken and another guy came into the bar, fresh from a discussion group about the Earth as a living, self-aware organism: “Gaia”. When I was told what the topic was I spouted off my own opinion about the subject. Ken smugly looked at his companion and said “I told you that the first person we talked to in here would be able to hold forth on ‘Gaia’!”

O’Rourke’s was also traditionally the last bar to shut down for “last call”; people flocked in from all the other bars to get their last drink of the night at O’Rourke’s. This meant that a seat right at the bar was highly sought-after from 12:45 – 1:00AM, because if you were sitting there, you could easily make eye contact with the bartender, resulting in quick service, while all the latecomers had to stand a row or two back, waving twenty dollar bills at the staff who raced back and forth trying to get everybody served before the lights came on at 1:00 sharp. Now just because O’Rourke’s bartenders were willing to serve you up to the last possible minute, didn’t mean that they were going to jeopardize the liquor license. It’s a City Ordinance that all drinks must be taken away from bar patrons no later than 15 minutes after last call. So, after frantically serving all the last minute drinkers, the bartenders came out from behind the bar, confiscating pool cues, unplugging the pin ball machines and yelling at everyone to drink up, yanking glasses and bottles out of people’s hands and pushing them out the door if it got too close for comfort to the danger zone time starting at 1:15AM. Then we all kind of stood around on the sidewalk outside, watching the cops rough up drunken Huskers fans and laughing at guys making that last ditch effort to get the girl of their dreams to go home with them, and to see if any “after parties” were forming.

One night, my buddy Kevin and I were standing outside of O’Rourke’s at 1:16AM, when we were invited to one of the notorious “after parties” by a couple of our younger acquaintances. Neither one of us had to work the next morning, so, after being out all night drinking beer, we agreed that staying up all morning and drinking more beer was a great idea. After retrieving my car from my apartment parking lot a few blocks away, we took off. Along the way, Kevin and I decided that we should demonstrate that we, two guys in our forties, could keep up with all the younger guys and close down this party no matter how late it lasted. I admit that we cheated a little. Our twenty- and thirty-something party companions were chugging back the cheap beers, while Kevin and I operated with finesse the fine art of nursing a drink. It helps that most beer bottles are brown, thereby disguising the level of liquid in a bottle at any given time, and that nobody checked when one of us put down an almost-full bottle in order to accept a fresh (i.e. colder-than-room-temperature) brew.

One of the guests that morning was Angie, a young woman who Kevin and I had seen around O’Rourke’s but who neither of us knew very well. Sometime close to sunrise, Angie approached Kevin and me with a problem. She had given a ride from O’Rourke’s to Jamie, a guy who had apparently thought taxi service was an agreement for sex; Angie asked if we would give her suitor a ride home, to spare her an uncomfortable situation; we readily agreed. (Of course we agreed – we were drunk and an attractive woman was asking us for a favor) A short time later we heard Jamie; amorous, yet transportationless, badgering Angie for a ride home and being informed that we were his new ride. This was not a welcome revelation to Jamie, as he surveyed us two non-females, and he informed us that no thank you, he was going home with Angie (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, know what I mean squire?[3]). Now at this point, despite the beer-nursing subterfuge, Kevin and I had been drinking steadily for about eight hours, possibly nine or ten, and it’s common knowledge, many really, really, stupid things seem like good ideas after a few adult beverages. Well, our what-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time plan was to pick up Jamie by his armpits, and forcibly escort him to my car, where we roughly threw him in the back seat, Kevin holding him down while I quickly started it up and took off. We thought this was quite reasonable, although, not surprisingly, Jamie did not agree with our assessment, dissenting so thoroughly that he refused to give us his address so that we could drop him off, but not quite bold enough or irritated enough at the circumstances to jump out of the car, which I was driving randomly around downtown Lincoln. The conversation, as one might imagine was scintillating, Jamie’s side consisted of snippets like “You bastards, you kidnapped me!” while Kevin and I alternated with variations of “Did you really think that you were getting laid? Eventually Jamie admitted that the chance that he would have been engaged in sex with Angie was indeed vanishingly small and gave us his address, while Kevin and I allowed that we probably shouldn’t have risked the involvement of the F.B.I. by kidnapping him. We saw Jamie many times after that, but he never, ever admitted to anyone that he knew us. Angie on the other hand made sure that everyone knew that “the old dudes”, as she began calling us, had saved her with an impromptu abduction; she dumped a guy in mid-date when he questioned why she was so nice to us “old dudes”, offered to beat up women who broke our hearts and saved seats for us on busy nights.  For some reason though, she drew the line at me hitting on her mom.

A lot of things contributed to my ending my dalliance with marijuana: drug testing at work, thinking hard about the consequences, both the legal ones and the effect on my relationships, but the very last time that I smoked any was enough to make me kick the habit for good. Kevin and I decided to attend another of the infamous after parties, this time at the home of the notorious Mark, where pot smoking was sure to be on the agenda. By the time I arrived at Mark’s, I had already consumed more beer than was good for me, and downed still more sitting on Mark’s ratty couch. But it was the multiple pipes full of pot that did me in. After a while the room started to spin and I felt an overwhelming need to get some fresh air, because somehow I had reasoned that the sensation that the room was spinning could be eliminated by going outside where the whole street would be spinning. As I sat on the curb across from Mark’s apartment puking, and then puking some more, much to the amusement of the party taking place next door. Eventually Kevin and some of the other guys came out to check on me and it was determined (as much as the word “determined” can be applied to a bunch of guys stoned on top of being roaring drunk at three in the morning) that Kevin would drive me home in my car and get me into my apartment. I was a pitiful sight, throwing up every couple of minutes and curled up in the front seat as Kevin took the wheel. We figured we were safe for the eight block trip back to the Hovel, since they were all residential streets and it was hours since the bars closed, meaning the police were not out in force looking for drunks like ourselves.  It promised to be an uneventful ride home until the white Cadillac driven by a guy who looked like B.B. King pulled out of a side street and in front of us with a patrol car pulling in behind us. This was not an ideal situation, so we turned off west on the next cross street as B.B. and the cops headed north. Kevin took the first available right, carefully aware that downtown Lincoln is a maze of one-way streets, only to have the Caddy pull in front of us again, and again the LPD cruiser pulled in behind us. This time we turned east and meandered around for a few minutes trying to get back on track when B.B. King and his big white Cadillac turned into our path with the police car getting behind us once more. This low speed chase went on for about a half hour, with the cops staying far enough behind the weirdly calm old man that we ended up sandwiched between the two again and again. In my diminished state I became convinced that it was a hallucination. Eventually Kevin navigated my Pontiac 6000 into the Hovel’s parking lot without further incident, other than the front tire having been stolen from his bicycle as it leaned chained up to my back porch.

 I’ve got to move out of here!

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[1] On one occasion I loaned Drew $80 so that he wouldn’t have to pawn his beloved Zero. Holding on to Zero myself while I awaited repayment.

[2] I had walked Sheila home from the bar and then on to my own apartment. I arrived home to find two messages on the answering machine from her and a third in progress, accusing me of cheating on her and demanding that I never set foot in O’Rourke’s again.

[3] Monty Python once again

Nobody Ever Joins a Cult

Nobody ever joins a cult. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any cults, or that there aren’t any cultists. It just means that people believe that they are joining churches, hanging out with cool people, getting involved in worthy causes, attending lectures and participating in any number of innocuous activities, but they never wake up in the morning and, while choosing among their various hibiscus adorned shirts, type in on their Outlook calendar “join a cult”, or “get brainwashed”. Everybody wants to believe that they’re smart enough to avoid getting sucked into a harmful group, and nobody wants to admit that they’re actually in a harmful group until they leave. Either they look back, smack themselves on the forehead and realize that they have been duped, or rationalize that things changed after they got involved and that the group became a cult.

      Now ex-cultists are as easy-to-find as the hair on Danny Davito’s back. The internet and evangelical churches are full of people who used to be in cults. One might then surmise that the cult problem has been solved, everybody has been rescued from the cults and are safe behind their computer monitors or at the First Church of the Holy Baby Jesus in God in Christ the Lord Jehovah United Assemblies of Zion, Yukon Synod, Reformed Covenant of 1923®.

One of the problems with the issue of cults is that there is no universally accepted definition of “cult”. Obviously the people who are in cults don’t think that they’re cultists, but what about those who are vehemently against cults? Well, some folks, notably evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, define a cult as a group that claims to be Christian but doesn’t agree with them on the main doctrinal points of Christianity. Of course, exactly what the main doctrinal points are differs from denomination to denomination[1]. For example, Mormons are considered a cult by some, but obviously not in Utah. These folks, even though they can’t agree among themselves, see the holding of minority opinions as intolerable, reserving to themselves the privilege of deciding what is the correct interpretation of the Bible, because after all, some “good” Christian might get himself fooled by these heretics and put his soul in peril. Another camp among the anti-cultists is the secular cult awareness movement. These people see specific doctrines as irrelevant to whether a group is a cult; it’s the behavior that defines a cult. The secular cult awareness movement has kind of been invisible since the Cult Awareness Network (C.A.N.), was successfully sued by the Church of Scientology, which now effectively owns it. Are you confused yet? If so, you are in good company: 99.99% of America is as confused as you are, but most don’t think that they’re confused.

In December of 1977 I didn’t think I was joining a cult. I did, however, get invited to look at a Christmas card that my cousin had received from a co-worker. I don’t remember much about the card, but it was signed “God loves you and I do too”. That’s pretty dangerous stuff. I should have been tipped off right away that some serious evil was being perpetrated in tandem with Hallmark’s fourth quarter profit and loss statement. I should probably state at this point that we were Catholics. Not “we went to a Catholic Church”, or “we practiced the Catholic faith”, but that’s who we were, Catholicism in great part defined our identities, so anything that was not Catholic was bad. In light of this, my aunt took me aside to tell me that my cousin was attending a bible study in the home of the card guy. I know; it just sends shivers of fear rippling up and down your spine to hear it, doesn’t it? Like I said, this was the day I didn’t join a cult. Anyway, my aunt told me about this bible study and asked me to accompany my cousin to one of their meetings, “just to make sure she’s alright”, so I did my duty protecting my kin from the godless Protestants (surely it couldn’t be Catholics studying the bible) and attended one of the bible studies.

I should probably note at this point that I had long been dissatisfied with the spiritual answers that I had received in church. Although very devout as a youngster, it bothered me that there were competing versions of Christianity, all convinced that they were right. I visited several of the half dozen different churches that were in walking distance of my home, but the difference was among them was less than crystal clear[2]. After being exposed to Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism in college, I became less and less convinced that there was any one, objective spiritual truth, let alone that I had been lucky enough to have won the celestial Powerball Jackpot by being born into it.

Tom & Joe, who ran the bible study in my neighborhood, rented a small duplex apartment, looked pretty ordinary, had ordinary furnishings in their home and had a record collection typical of most guys in their early twenties in 1978. They wore regular clothes without a hint of saffron, although Tom did favor sandals and played guitar, as well as sporting a full beard and little round glasses. If I had been looking to join a cult that day, I would have passed these guys by. These guys were vanilla pudding without the sliced bananas and Nilla wafers. That is until the bibles came out. The participants in this particular bible study were fanatical about the bible, not in a wild-eyed, drooling, the-end-of-the-world-is-coming way, but with a calm intellectual confidence that they knew what they were talking about. Specific questions were referred to specific sections of the bible, contradictions were explained; esoteric truths were unveiled. This was different. Maybe there was a one, objective spiritual truth and unlikely as it seemed, maybe these guys had it.

In line with my plan to not join a cult, I continued to attend the bible studies several times a month. Soon I started hearing about a class that they were offering that would lay out the basics to bible study; the goal being that graduates of this class would be able to research and understand the bible on their own, without needing bible scholars or priests or gurus to tell you what it said. Now this was something that I was interested in. Everybody I knew claimed to believe in the bible, but I didn’t know anybody who could read it and make any sense out of it. Sure, there are parts of the bible that seem to proceed in a linear fashion and tell stories that everyone seems to know, but not really know about, like Noah and Jesus and Adam & Eve, but there didn’t seem to be an easy look up system, an index where you could look up the answers to questions like “Is masturbation a sin?”, or “Will you go to Hell for smoking dope?” (Both were important questions to a nineteen-year old). But these people acted like you could get answers like that after taking this class. By this time I had noticed some differences between what I had learned in Church and what I was hearing at these bible studies, small differences theologically, like how many people were crucified with Jesus and on what day he died and big ones, like was Jesus Christ God or wasn't he? Or were the dead in some semi-alive state after death or consciously inhabiting heaven or hell? My parish priest was no help, pointing out that the Catholic Church had 2000 years of history on its side, but providing real no reason other than longevity why I should stay away from this bible study and stick with The Church.[3] So I immediately went out and didn’t join a cult, but put down $100 and signed a green registration card for the bible study class, which was called Power for Abundant Living.

Unknown to me at this time, there was living in Ohio a guy named Victor Wierwille, a former Evangelical & Reformed Church pastor who had in 1953 started teaching a class called Power for Abundant Living (PFAL). The class, initially titled Receiving the Holy Spirit Today, was about having God’s power in your life. He taught it to friends and relatives, to members of his church, and eventually started traveling around the country teaching it. In 1967 it was put on film. This was the class that I had signed up to take. At the time I didn’t know anything about Wierwille, PFAL, or for that matter, Ohio,[4] so I wasn’t too impressed with this skinny tie-wearing farm guy with the funny accent (That’s right, a New Yorker, complaining about a funny accent) and the cheap seventies rec-room paneled set with the picture of White Jesus with the long flowing hair and the faraway eyes.

PFAL was presented over the course of three weeks, with classes running from 7:00 – 10:00pm Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday. We started out with an orientation, which took place at Jerry McSherry’s house (his real name). We watched a video called Changed which consisted mostly of testimonials about how people’s lives changed after taking PFAL. At this time, some confusion that I had regarding who was teaching this class was cleared up. Jerry was what they called the class instructor. I was under the impression that “instructor” was more or less synonymous with “teacher” which is what they called Wierwille, but the “instructor” was just the guy who made sure that everything was in place, including finding volunteers to cue up the tapes, bring snacks, set up the chairs and make sure that there was plenty of coffee (I did mention that these classes went for three hours?). I had been under the impression that the class was being taught by Jerry Wierwille who moved from Ohio to Flushing Queens!

Now the teacher wasn’t even in the same room, or for that matter the same state as us. The class had been filmed in 1967. This facilitated distribution, since shipping videocassettes was easier than Wierwille driving all over the country personally; but we weren’t even going to get to watch a film, no, you needed 12 people to see PFAL on video, and we had only nine, so we listened for three hours to cassette tapes of a disembodied voice teaching the bible every night, supplemented by slides of the charts that we would have seen in the video class.

Finally the class began. Sitting in metal folding chairs facing a wall where a teacher might have been standing if there was one physically in the room, were the nine students, none of whom were joining a cult. Besides me, there was my cousin Kathy, a year younger than me, who worked with Tom, one of the bible fellowship guys; Tina, a tiny, aspiring dancer; Bernie, who worked in the building trades; Kevin, a fellow Baruch College student; Herminia, an older Puerto Rican lady whose children had talked her into taking the class; a married couple whose names I can’t remember to save my life; and Jim, a tall, dark haired guy who dropped out before the class was over. I don’t know why the other eight people were sitting in those chairs, but I was one of those searchers, people who want to know what’s going on and why, and are willing to put some effort into finding out.

Like most people in the United States, Christianity was the default spirituality for me. I grew up hearing about the God of the bible, Jesus Christ, the saints and all that; it was the background noise of our culture. For most of my life it seemed like there was only two choices: believe in God (and by extension the bible) or don’t; there was no “other” that you could latch on to, not legitimately anyway. From my narrow little world I couldn’t see the incredible array of choices that lay beyond the horizon. Until I went to college, the people that were different from me were the tiny number of Protestants, who as far as I could tell weren’t all that different than us, and Jews, who most Christians viewed as people who just didn’t keep up with the latest developments in the God business. Culturally I was conditioned to believe that practicing Christianity was essential to be a “good” person; exposure to various world religions in college introduced me to the concept that there were other choices, but viscerally I still felt that the biblical God was the God and that if I was going to live a good life, then his way was the way. [5] Tom and Joe’s bible study group with their PFAL class were the first people who offered to show me how and why the bible and the God described therein was the way.

The first several three-hour sessions of PFAL were variations on the theme of “The Bible is true”. There were segments [6] on “The Integrity of The Word”, “The Greatest Secret in the World Today is that the Bible is the Revealed Word and Will of God”, “The Word of God is the Will of God”, “How We Got the Bible”. There were teachings on how the bible was “god-breathed”, i.e. given by inspiration of God, that it interprets itself, not being of “private” interpretation, how “The Word” is faithful, how God gave us the bible…on and on, hour after hour. Even though he wasn’t really presenting much new information in these first several sessions, Wierwille was establishing his bona fides as somebody who knew his way around a bible, as a teacher who cared deeply about what was written in the pages of the bible and whose greatest goal in life was to make the lessons of the bible accessible to everyone, not just the seminary trained, or the great theologians. Wierwille, like all good salesmen, first got us to trust him. And trust him we did when he finally began unveiling the points where he disagreed with most other Christians.

Part of how Wierwille really cemented that nascent trust into place was by his teaching in session four, “How the Word Interprets Itself”. It was presented as a lesson on how to apply certain keys to researching and studying the bible. The keys were simple, even simplistic; they boiled down to “Read What’s Written”, and admonitions to understand the words in the way that the writers understood them, which wasn’t necessarily the way that the same words would be used in the present day. Wierwille starts this teaching off by reading various sections of scripture, sometimes pointing out how what is clearly written contradicts most of he called “denominational Christianity”. He starts out slowly, at first pointing out minor discrepancies, each time taking the students to the bible itself, where it is as plain as the nose on your face that what most Christians believe is not what you can read for yourself in black and white. The whole time you are being convinced, little by little, that Wierwille knows what he is talking about and the churches do not. After all, you’re reading what is written, and what is written contradicts much of what you were taught back at your family’s church. The student is now convinced that Wierwille is trustworthy, that the churches are not, and that you too can be privy to the truth as it hasn’t been known since the First Century when the apostles of Jesus walked the earth clad in sandals, togas and truth.

As the class progresses the stakes get higher and the doctrines deviate from orthodox Christianity further and further as Wierwille dazzles the students with his knowledge of the bible. What the student almost invariably failed to realize[7] is that Wierwille is no longer simply reading what is written, but reading into what is written. He is bolstering his case for novel interpretations not with what is plainly written, but with recourse to translations of Greek and Hebrew words that appear in no lexicon, to documents that no one but he has seen, to texts that he says must exist,[8] but that no one has ever found, in short he is doing what he has accused every other church of doing, putting forth his own interpretation of the bible, but he is doing it while convincing the student thoroughly that he is simply reading what is written.

The details of what these deviations are is irrelevant, after all, disagreements among Christians goes back to five minutes after the apostles lost sight of the bottom of Jesus’ sandals, but this class was billed as a way to avoid the common trap of having to rely on someone else for your knowledge of God, to let the bible interpret itself, to understand it using easy to understand “keys”, but it was just another man’s interpretation.

The biggest pitfall in Wierwille’s teaching was that, since the bible was self-interpreting, then anyone, utilizing the research keys taught in PFAL, would naturally come to the same conclusion as he had since the bible wasn’t subject to “private interpretation”; and since Wierwille had utilized those keys and had come to certain conclusions, and since Wierwille, by the time of the filming of PFAL, had been teaching those keys for 14 years and had been intensely studying for another 11 years before that, if you came to a different conclusion than Wierwille did, you were wrong. While on the one hand Wierwille taught that we were all to read the bible ourselves and convince ourselves of what it said, as a practical matter it was what Wierwille said that was treated as the final word. If you disagreed you either weren’t properly applying the keys, or you just needed to wait until you one day understood it. [9]This would have been bad enough if one’s connection to Wierwille ended after sitting through PFAL, if PFAL was merely a tool used by bible study groups to help their participants along, if people were still able to study and come to their own conclusions, but what you were being recruited to by taking PFAL was an organization, worldwide in scope, with groups of local bible studies being just the tip of the iceberg. Clusters of these bible study groups were organized into local branches, which in turn answered to a state organization usually led by a graduate of a centralized leadership training program. People in this organization from all over the country and world gathered together once a year to hear Wierwille teach live, they sent their people out on one-year missionary program, they joined the leadership training program, and it was all based on the words of one man.

I guess I was wrong, I did join a cult.

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[1] I’ll never forget the textbook that my kids used during their home schooling days. A section on the Catholic Church started with “A false religion…”

[2] Growing up in a Catholic family, attending Catholic school and not having many non-Catholics in the general neighborhood, I don’t think that I realized that there were so many Protestants out there. Martin Luther was portrayed a bad guy where I came from!

[3] I have since heard this argument from other Christians who point out that Christianity has survived while many of the pagan religions of biblical times have died out. When I point out that Buddhism and Hinduism are still around, the longevity argument is usually quickly abandoned as irrelevant.

[4] As a New Yorker I subscribed to the worldview illustrated in Steinberg’s New York, a New Yorker magazine cover which shows everything west of the Hudson River as uncharted wilderness,

[5] Many people practice some form of “Pascal’s Wager”, wherein you gamble that believing in God is relatively harmless if he doesn’t exist, but not believing can land you in Hell if he does. Of course the wager is a false dilemma and assumes that there only two choices, while there are many alternatives to being a believing Christian that don’t involve being an atheist.

[6] Each segment was 30 minutes, six segments made a ‘session’

[7] This is not to suggest that there is some insidious brainwashing going on, many people get uncomfortable with what is being taught and walk out before the class ends. However, in my experience, very few people were able to challenge what was being taught in any meaningful way - it was just different than what they were used to.

[8] One of Wierwille’s signature moves was to present an interpretation that was not supported by any scripture in any existing text. He then, despite talking incessantly about how any doctrine must be backed up by scripture, decides that there must be a lost manuscript out there somewhere that backs up his position.

[9] He called this “holding questions in abeyance”

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[1] 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[2] 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” is 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, highest percentage of police compared to total population. 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 [3] joint where the Iranian workers claim me as one of them,[4] 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[5], 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[6]. That’s enough of a plan for now.

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[7] 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,[8] 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[9] 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. Dennis 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  Bao, a guy who had spent a lot of time in Vietnamese prisons and was somewhat nuts. Bao 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 nonetheless, 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 second 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 Native American woman who stopped by to “borrow a cup of Jack”. [10]

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 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 that I had in the fridge. 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. [11]

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[1] 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.

[2] To be fair, I never really ever witnessed her dealing, but she talked about it a lot

[3] 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.

[4] 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.

[5] Stay tuned to find out that reason in later chapters

[6] 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

[7] Yes, I know that “pastward” is not a real word, but I read a lot of science fiction, especially time travel themed science fiction, and time travel science fiction writers use the word a lot.

[8] I helped elect Jon Corzine to the U.S. Senate

[9] We were paid a per-hour rate of anywhere between $8 and $9 per hour, (I started at $8.25) which was pretty good for 1999, and a commission based on how many sales per hour we averaged for our shift. If we hit our goal of two sales per hour we received $2.50 per sale, if we only averaged one sale per hour we only received $1.00 for every sale. If the holy grail of three sales per hour was maintained over a shift, the commission was raised to $3.50 per sale. What this meant was that if I could maintain three sales per hour I was effectively earning $18.75 per hour, more than I was pulling in at my “main” job.

[10] She had knocked on my door previously, looking to “borrow” ten dollars and spotted the bottle of Jack Daniels on my bookshelf. The next time, she decided to bypass the cash and go right for the booze, saving herself a trip to the liquor store

[11] Not long after I moved out the building was razed and turned into a parking lot. 

Nobody Expects the Inquisition

[1]

 You might ask, as Darren McGavin did in A Christmas Story: “What brought you to this lowly state?”[2] 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,[3] [4] 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 [5] 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 a religious group that we had associated with on and off since the mid-seventies,[6] 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.[7] The difference between regular praying and believing is that with believing, it being a law (I mean, a Law) 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.[8]

This Law was applied to finances by Pat and some of her 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 had 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 (none of them in my mouth). 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 (and still has) 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[9]. 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, and for eating well at various restaurants.

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. Sermons were preached constantly how those who were in debt were cutting themselves off from God, were contaminating the “household”. [10]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 back. 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 $3500 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 the Devil’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. [11]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. 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”[12]^-[13]-[14].  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”, i.e. following the dictates of the Bible, 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”.[15] 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 & 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, maybe 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 & 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 & 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[16]. 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 by definition 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.

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[1] Surely you remember the Monty Python sketch

[2] For Christmas Story fans, this was the daydreaming scene where Ralphie comes home to his parents and they realize he is blind from eating soap as a child. He fantasizes that they blame his “lowly state” on their parental shortcomings.

[3] Mitzi had the coloring and long hair of a Sheltie, but the long body and short legs of a dachshund.

[4] We would not have called the dog Mitzi, but she had been called that for a number of years and didn’t want to confuse her.

[5] A non-profit community radio station where I worked as an unpaid deejay for about eight years

[6] More details about those bastards later.

[7] One of the theories is that God knows better and overrides your prayer – in which case, why bother praying? Just let God sort it all out.

[8] 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.

[9] Our religious group to be named later referred to The Devil, as “The Adversary”, based on an Old Testament reference.

[10] 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.

[11] 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.

[12] 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.

[13] If good things happened to bad people that showed only that the Devil was rewarding them for being his faithful minion.

[14] You just can’t win with this kind of logic, can you?

[15] A “branch” at one time signified a cluster of seven or more local home fellowships, while a “limb” was all the fellowships and branches in a state. Although by the time of these events, the Lincoln branch consisted of only two small home fellowships.

[16] 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.