Chapter 16. What I Could Teach Tiger Woods

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their Bethel headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

Warning:  Chapters 14 through 19 contain sexually explicit narratives, told in the language of the street as I learned to speak it.  I discuss these adventures, not in a spirit of narcissism or exhibitionism, but in the wider context of a former Jehovah’s Witness  who was seeking new meaning and purpose after leaving a cult-like church that had defined every aspect of my existence virtually from birth.  I was determined to experience life for the first time on MY terms, and I was going to draw my conclusions from first-hand experience, not hear-say or the value judgments of others.  If you have been following from previous chapters, we pick up the thread here as I enter the dating scene in earnest at the age of 36.  I share my observations and conclusions more or less in the order in which I formed them, and they evolve over time, as you will see.

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Eventually of course, I moved beyond sheer anatomical curiosity.  I was still nervous about sexual activities and unsure of myself, but I was also developing a sense of annoyance and sometimes downright anger and frustration with the dating game.  It was obvious we were all, men and women, constantly negotiating, and the Grand Prize was either sex or the resources it could be traded for.  It was equally obvious that the women made the decision as to whether or not it happened.   Feminists who loudly bemoan what they perceive as male dominance and women’s victimhood overlook this one single indisputable fact:  women control the pussy in the world, and that is power.  Real power.  And like youth itself, this kind of power is wasted on the young.  Most young girls seem to be trying to find out what it feels like to be in love and they are trying out their emotions on their boyfriends, which really confuses the boyfriends, who are trying to find out what it feels like to get laid.  The boys end up thinking the girls are nuts.  And the girls think the boys are obsessed with sex.  Neither gender has enough information, or they wouldn’t be so surprised at the behavior of the other.

A woman’s beauty is a major source of her power.  This is not about vanity or a male-dominated culture.  Quite the opposite:  in cultures where women are truly powerless, such as in certain Islamic countries, women are veiled and covered from head to toe to deprive them of the power of their looks.  In a free society, women spending a lot of time on their appearance is a survival tactic, and this one, believe me, is not vestigial!  Pretty women  receive advantages throughout life:  babies like them better, and so do men, who are often just bigger babies.  We will pay their way, change their flat tires, and open their doors.  Women  will spend endless hours on their hair and cosmetics, not to mention plastic surgery in order to attract men, tempt men.  Male lust for women is a  source of great female power.  It is nature’s way.  Should it surprise men then that women don’t give away the goodies for free?

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15. God and Women

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

Warning:  Chapters 14 through 19 contain sexually explicit narratives, told in the language of the street as I learned to speak it.  I have made no effort to be politically correct in the telling of this story; and I seek neither approval of my choices nor the expiation of guilt.  I would remind my readers that upon leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses I had made a committment to myself to never let the judgments of other humans, traditions, and cultures get between me and my quest to understand existence, to discover reality, to know what IS, and to find or achieve meaning in my own existence.  I was not interested in adopting other people’s meanings; I was done with all that.  I was continually in shock at the pervasive human need to BELIEVE.  Belief came first, reality was always a distant second.  For a short while I was convinced that this was a phenomenon unique to Jehovah’s Witnesses, or maybe cults in general.  As time progressed I came to the same conclusions as scientists who coined the term CONFIRMATION BIAS.  Belief trumps reality–at all levels of all societies. At this point in my story, women and sex were very high on my list of unresolved internal conflicts.  I wanted to know who they were, how they thought, what they believed, how they viewed men, and why they had  sex (or not).  I also wanted to become better acqauinted with myself as a sexual being and how this  related to my larger quest for meaning.  I attacked this challenge with my usual gusto and determination, and relate events herein without regard to saving face or winning approval.  In doing so I understand that I am foregoing any chance of ever running for political office for the rest of my life.  The things I did , you do AFTER getting in office, and standard operating procedure when suspected of such activity is to deny, deny, deny.

When you are growing up, you are taught that there are certain things that are never discussed in polite society; politics, religion, money, and sex.  I have discussed all of them in considerable detail in this and my blog www.financialliteracysource.com, so let’s finish what we’ve started.  I do not wish to offend, so if you find the subject of sex, as learned by a middle-aged neophyte and related in an honest but not intentionally salacious manner, to be offensive, you may want to resume with this narrative with Chapter 20.  I offer my observations in the light of what I understood at the time the events took place.  Some of those conclusions evolved over time, as you will see.

The Three Great Questions

 At this point all the confusion in my life distilled down to three great questions:  (1)  Was there a God?  (2)  If there was a God, and the Bible was his Word, why was He such a lousy communicator?  (3)  If there was a God, was woman his practical joke on men?  It just seemed to me that male and female natures were custom designed to nurture disharmony and aggravation.   Bear in mind that at this point in time I did not have “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” to guide me. 

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Chapter 14. The Door of Dionysus

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

Warning:  The following six chapters contain sexually explicit narratives, told in the language of the street as I learned to speak it.  I have made no effort to be politically correct in the telling of this story; and I seek neither approval of my choices nor the expiation of guilt.  This is a little hard to explain, but I felt like the church deacon who preached fire and brimstone sermons about sin, but was secretly curious what it would feel like to experience it.  I was determined to find out for myself, and I did, often with my heart pounding from both fear and excitement.  With the exception of divorce, my experiences were always consensual.  The results varied.  Sometimes I experienced a sense of compulsiveness, and sometimes a sense of the bizarre.  Sometimes I wondered why I was in certain places doing certain things, and sometimes I was surprised at the conclusions I drew.  Sometimes I laughed–usually at myself.   I cared not what judgments I might receive from others; I cared a great deal about my own judgments. No longer would anyone, any culture, any institution, group, or person, stand between me and reality.  I wanted to experience what was out there on my own:  I wanted TO KNOW.  I cared about other people’s feelings, but I no longer considered their wants, wishes, traditions, and expectations a blank check on my life.  I was now responsible for my life and happiness; they were responsible for theirs, and our lives interfaced where our interests overlapped.  For those who may wonder:  in toto, I have very few regrets.  I learned a lot that I could have learned in no other way that I know of.  That does not mean, however, that with the benefit of the rear view mirror, I would not skip some parts a second time around.  Like Dionysus of Greek legend, I was grateful to have gotten this far, eager to be freed from my former self, and in search of both ecstasy and meaning.

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By the time I had opened my first branch office in another city, I had over a hundred employees and had also been married 13 years.  Not only were both of us virgins when we married, my wife, Barbara,  was the only woman I had ever kissed.  I had never been around girls in a social context, and I was both mystified and intrigued by their differences.  When my wife and I went on our honeymoon, it took us all night the first night to figure out what to do and to get the job done.  For the next week we hardly ever left the cabin we had rented for our honeymoon.  Our sex life was routine and healthy for as long as we stayed at Bethel, Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in New York City.  Our paradigm was that marriage was forever.  I don’t think any thoughts of adultery or promiscuity ever crossed our minds once during that time.  I was a ‘golden haired boy’ at Bethel, and my wife had selected well in the minds of her family and friends.

I can remember only once, at Bethel, when I worked in the Service Department and was assigned a temporary secretary named Eva who was drop-dead gorgeous, that I felt distracted and uncomfortable.  I was both disappointed and relieved when after two weeks her assignment was changed.  I didn’t know what to do with the unfamiliar  emotions I felt with her around.

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Chapter 13. Sex for Resources

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

In time we exhausted, and dominated the market in our part of the state, and I decided to enter the market of a major metropolitan area about 170 miles away.  

I spent about six months doing market research on the cheap, which meant asking what local fast food restaurants were paying their help in order to get a frame of reference what the current wage rates were in this new city.  At the time most fast food restaurants were paying $3.45 per hour, so I based my quotations on that wage rate.  What I did not know, was that at the time, there were over ten million square feet of new office space under construction in this city.  When all that office space was completed and was occupied, there was going to be a major surge in the demand for new housekeepers.  With the supply of labor more or less fixed, and the demand for cleaners surging, the result was quite predictable:  a surge in the price of labor.  Which meant that all those new contracts I had just sold in this city were going to lose money, because we were going to be unable to staff the buildings at the wage rates we had quoted, and if we raised the wages, we could not raise the prices, and so were going to take a serious financial hit.

 We tried to hold the line on our wages at the level we had quoted the new business at:  remember we were in the cleaning business, and labor is by far the largest cost of doing business.  As we tried to hold our wages at the levels we had quoted the business at, the competition for labor was intensifying in the city, and our competitors were slowly offering more money.  And so were the fast food restaurants, and every other enterprise that operates with entry-level labor.  I would often pass the same Wendy’s unit on my way to work, and they constantly had Help Wanted signs in the window, and I noticed that the offered rate of pay went up about $.25 per hour every two months or so.  The significance of this had not quite seeped into my consciousness, but I woke up at a trade show in St. Louis later that same year.  I was talking over cocktails with one of my Jewish competitors from back in my home state, and he said about one 22-story office building we cleaned:  “My cousins run that building.  Don’t you think I’d have that contract if I wanted it?  Why do you think I don’t have it?  Because I don’t want it, because I can’t make any money at it.” 

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Chapter 12. When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

One of the hardest things to accept about business, and maybe human behavior in general, is that most behavior doesn’t seem to be rational, but whimsical, irrational, and emotionally driven.  Decisions are based on emotion, and then the intellect is summoned to justify them.  Business could be gained and lost for some very arbitrary reasons.  My response to this was mostly terror.  On any given day I knew the wrath of the gods could descend on my head for reasons far beyond my control.  Since all of my contracts were on a month-to-month basis, I understood that on any given day I was only 30 days from bankruptcy court, if enough of my clients were to cancel my contracts at the same time.  No business was guaranteed, even if you were doing an excellent job, and the specter of economic death hung over your head all the time.  It was imperative to build relationships inside the client’s organization on at least three different levels.  Whenever possible I would build a relationship with the CEO of the corporation, my manager would build a rapport with his peer in the client’s organization, and we would try to match up our cleaners with the personalities of key people on each floor.  Generally speaking, it took all of us as a team to keep a tight grip on business.  Everyone was important, and I always told our people to avoid stepping on hands when climbing up the ladder, because those same hands could expedite the way down (or out the door!)  A disgruntled secretary in a client’s building could make our work life miserable.

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Chapter 10. Save the World, or Save Myself?

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

 

I apologize to my readers, for I have gotten ahead of myself in this story.  Picking up where I was at the beginning of Chapter 9, I had twelve part-time people working for me, and I was taking $800 per month out of the business to live on.  I had this dinky little office in the basement of a building near the apartment where Barbara, I, and our first daughter Meghan lived.  The office was about the size of a closet, one room, and there was this deep ditch outside the basement door to the building, with a wooden plank thrown across it as an entrance.  I paid $90 per month for this.  There was a large standpipe from the floors above that went right past my desk, and whenever anyone upstairs flushed a toilet, you could hear it whistling right past my desk on the way down into the sewer.  I had an old metal battleship desk I had bought from a customer for $25.  I was drowning in problems and had no idea where to turn to for help.  And I couldn’t think of whatever else I could do if this failed.  It was not uncommon at all for me to work 24 or even 36 hours straight before collapsing in bed.  I did not consider myself a businessman at all; I felt totally incompetent and foolish.  What kept me going was desperation and fear of failure.  Barbara and my combined, adjusted gross income that first year was $5600.  We were below Appalachian poverty level.  I’m sure we qualified for all kinds of government Welfare, but we didn’t even know it existed and it never occurred to us to ask.  It never occurred to us that we were anyone’s responsibility but ourselves.

I went to the town library and looked up trade journals and sent in a card to one of them.  I started getting junk mail, and eventually I saw an advertisement for a trade association convention to be held in Orlando, Florida.  I figured out what it was going to cost for Barbara and I to go down there, and it was about $600.  I don’t remember where we got the money from, but we went.  I was shocked.  I expected to meet a whole bunch of miserable sods like myself trying to stay alive, and there were some.  But I also met many very successful operators, some of them multi-national,  with literally tens of thousands of employees each. 

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Chapter 9. Starting Over: From Rags to Regulators.

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During the last few weeks at Watchtower, I began preparations for entering the outside working world.  Since I loved to write, I sought a job as a writer.  It took no time at all to discover that writers with  phD’s were falling out of trees.  My first obstacle was how to explain how I had spent the last nine years of my life.  Life in a monastery?  A waiter, bookbinder, letter writer for Jehovah’s Witnesses??  How to explain why I left?  To have children?  On the outside, people didn’t have to quit their jobs and relocate in order to start a family.  What was I qualified to do?  How much did I have to earn to survive, to support a wife and possible child?  I had no idea about any of the above.  I had never bought a car, established credit, learned a trade, or gone to college.  I was twenty-seven years old.  During the few disastrous  job interviews before we left Brooklyn, I did learn the short answer to why I left my last “position”:  “Career redirection.”   My first lesson in spin control.  Substance and unnecessary detail were not nearly as important as a few words that created a brief image.  I also learned a quick lesson right out of law school:  Never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.  Also,  never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

Suffused with early rejection and a sense of impending disaster, Barbara and I decided to move to Youngstown, Ohio where she grew up.  Her parents encouraged us to stay with them until we got on our feet.  Our timing was impeccable.  Unknown to us, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, a steel company that was a pillar of the economic community was about to announce its closing, the first in a string of dominoes due to fall in quick succession and ultimately to devastate the local economy.  Unbeknownst to us, the biggest business in the Youngstown area appeared to be organized crime, and the economy was so bad even they were leaving town.  With tens of thousands thrown out of work, we came to Youngstown like two immigrants just off the boat and looking for work.  And like first-generation immigrants, because of being sequestered for over nine years in near-monastic existence, we couldn’t speak the language of the new world in which we found ourselves.  I couldn’t even begin to comprehend their thought processes.  It was massive culture shock, and we were too ignorant and innocent to even feel sorry for ourselves.

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Chapter 6. Early Socialist Yearnings

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During the first six months at headquarters we were enrolled in Primary School, later more aptly named Bethel Entrants School.  During this period we were required to read the entire Bible verse by verse, and annotate it, i.e. make notes on the meaning of each text in longhand.  We were also enrolled in the Bethel Theocratic Ministry School, which was exactly like the one I had grown up with, except that at Bethel, we had two counselors, the regular one and the Silent Counselor.  The Silent Counselor met with you after the program was over, and he was the guy you had to impress, for a very important reason.  If you obtained three consecutive good ratings from your Silent Counselor, you were appointed to the Bethel Speakers List.  Once on this list of approved speakers, you would be assigned once a month to visit a congregation within two hundred miles of Bethel, all expenses paid.  You represented headquarters, and you were considered one of their best speakers.  You were held in very high esteem, if not awe, by the locals in the congregation you visited, and it was not uncommon for many of them to show their appreciation by putting cash in your pocket.  So this privilege brought prestige, fun, travel and time away, and money.  The money issue was never discussed but it was always appreciated.  Generally speaking I’m talking about a few hundred dollars total from a visit to one congregation.  Ironically it was my experience that the poorest congregations usually contributed the most.  Later, in the real world, I was to make a similar observation that the wealthiest patrons in a restaurant were often the stingiest tippers.

The best part of being on the Speakers List is that on each visit to a congregation, you gave two one-hour speeches, one on Saturday night and one the following Sunday.  The one on Sunday was standard issue, written by headquarters writers.  The Saturday night speech, called a Service Talk, was a topic and content of your own choosing.  My first such presentation was “Are You Happy?”, and the second one was “Are You A Thinking Christian?”  It turned out that both subjects have been core elements of a lifelong spiritual quest–for rationality, purpose, achievement, and meaning.  With both subjects I found my audiences universally hungry for answers to the same questions:  It was easily apparent I was hitting a mother lode of interest.

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Chapter 4. Poverty, Up Close and Personal

he column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in t

 

Sometimes being a Witness kid was painful, sometimes not.  What I personally hated the most was being required to sit during the national anthem at school.  I felt so conspicuous and I felt it was one of the harder beliefs to defend.  Sometimes I would be derided, even kicked in the back by other kids.  I also got beat up a lot on the school bus.  My father had taught me that if I ever got in trouble at school I would get a whipping at home.  This was my introduction to justice, but I accepted it because it made about as much sense to me as Original Sin (you’re condemned from birth for something you didn’t do).  My solution eventually was to walk the two miles to and from school.  I told my parents I wanted the exercise.

Our school life had three basic groups of kids:  Academic (college preps), Commercial (secretaries and beauticians), and Vocational (the dumb kids).  At least that’s how things were perceived.  Kids can often by cruel, and since I didn’t fit into any of the three groups, I really had no group or clique to attach to at school lunches.  So school lunches became hell for me.  I obviously belonged to the preps, except I wasn’t going to college, so I was ostracized by them.  As a minority of one, without any support group, I became an open target to the VoAg boys, who delighted in throwing food at me or whatever other mischief they could think of.  The school faculty was not particularly sympathetic since they felt I brought this on myself, and my request for permission to spend the lunch period in the library was denied.  There was this one particular kid who took  delight in making my life miserable.  He had flunked two or three years and I found him very intimidating.  I had heard a story about how he had beat up a kid with a lead pipe.  One Sunday afternoon while participating in door-to-door activity, I was up in rotation in the car to take the next house and there was this same guy out in the front yard.  I expressed considerable concern, but agreed to take my turn.  I gave this kid my entire spiel and he stood there and said nothing.  When I concluded with an offer of some publications, he politely refused.  The following Monday he sent one of his cronies over to me in the lunchroom to tell me never to come to his house again.  The harassment in the lunchroom stopped from that day forward, however.  There was, however, the sense of total alienation from the outside world; we knew we did not belong.  And we knew that same sense of alienation was our badge of honor, proof positive of our righteousness.

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Chapter 3. The Sex Police

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

It was easier for those of us who were born into a Witness family than for converts.  We never missed the holidays because we had never celebrated them.  We saw everyone around us celebrating them, but that is not the same as having had to give them up.  Which brings me to the subject of making converts.  Many churches build on pre-existing ethnic, tribal, or racial ties.  For example, if you are Irish, you are probably also Catholic; if you are British, you are probably a member of the Anglican church; if you are an American  Southern black, you are probably Baptist.  Jehovah’s Witnesses have no such ties working for them.  The basis for their fellowship is therefore totally contrived.  Intellectual belief then is supremely important.  Jehovah’s Witnesses use an intellectual hook to catch their converts.

They want to show you the contradictions and misrepresentations common to all other belief systems.  They want you to question why you should stick with a belief system that didn’t bring you the truth.  And if they can demonstrate that part of what you believe is patently untrue, how can you have confidence in the rest of it?  It is for this reason that Jehovah’s Witnesses frequently know more about what your religion teaches than you do.  They have to study your beliefs to discover their flaws, so they can point them out to you. In most cases if they know as little as five Bible verses they can hit a home run against an adversary. 

As conscious beings, we humans have a spiritual need for meaning to our short lives.  For most of us, we accept what our familial culture has handed to us without subjecting our beliefs to much scrutiny.  This provides fertile soil for Jehovah’s Witnesses to cultivate by planting seeds of doubt.

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