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.

All of life is a competition, for every resource in existence.  We compete for food, for power, for territory, for status, and yes, we compete for our mates.  Our obsession with certainty notwithstanding, there is very little in life that is a sure thing.  We compete to take from others, and we defend to keep what we value.  Over millenia of evolution we have developed behaviors that at first glance are puzzling, even bizarre, but when viewed in the context of survival strategy, make perfect sense.  Life, Nature, the Universe, however you want to refer to it, is attuned to survival of the species, and sex and mating have a high priority because of their essential participation in the survival process.  Most enduring behaviors were successful because they produced a survival advantage.

Here is how I arrived at some of these conclusions.  Most of the women I have known had babies (or children), or wanted babies, or had grown children that they still treated like babies.  In conversation, any conversation, on any subject, within five or ten minutes the topic became their babies.  I think they start thinking about babies when they are very young, maybe only five or six years old.  In the dating scene a male quickly discovers that the fastest way to a woman’s heart (and often into her panties) is to engage her in extended, rapturous conversation about her kids.  Depending on what stage of life a woman is at, her desire for a “permanent” mate will fluctuate.  A provider male provides a measure of safety, survival skills (bringing home the “bacon”), protection for the female and the young.  Sometimes a woman will flirt with someone other than her mate, or even sneak off “into the bushes” for a liaison or tryst with another male, and even this apparently enhances her survival prospects, for if her “hunter-husband” fails to return alive from the hunt, or war, she has a potential replacement for him in the wings.  Sexual jealousy plays a survival role for both the male and the female; the female retains her survival advantage with her successful mate, and the male wants to assure that his limited resources are going to promote the survival of his own offspring, not that of his competition–other males.  In the absence of DNA testing, sexual jealousy played a vital role, and still does.  In terms of survival strategy, Nature doesn’t want a male to sow his seed only when one female is ready and fertile, and then wait until she is ready again, perhaps after giving birth and breastfeeding her infant.  With the high mortality rate of primitive man, the species could easily be extinguished at that rate.  No, the man could continue to sow his seed with many women, because the chances of most of the offspring surviving to the age where they could in turn reproduce themselves was slim indeed.  No, Nature is a study in massive overkill in order to achieve her ends.  So all of this makes sense of sorts, but it also involves very conflicting behaviors.  In my opinion, a study of millenia of human sexual behavior in all cultures does not support a conclusion that we are a naturally monogamous species.    Most, but not all, cultures manifest monogamy at some level, but they also uniformly manifest pervasive “infidelity”.  Women will wander also, although not quite as often, perhaps, as men, and for different reasons. 

As I have written before, men in modern society operate at a significant disadvantage because our Western culture demands an unnatural monogamy when these males are at their sexual prime.  The culture exerts considerable pressure on these males to mate “permanently” or at least to give the appearance of such, and the culture reproaches and sanctions males who “cannot commit” to one female.  Our culture, with the aid of religion, puts a young man at war with his own nature.  The female’s biological imperative pushes her to demand this as the status quo, and the male’s biological imperative is to spread his seed.  In terms of the man’s happiness, it must be said that when he marries he has granted his new bride a monopoly on his sexual satisfaction at precisely the time in life when they have a grossly mismatched libido.  He has to sneak his needs due both to social opprobrium and also because discovery can result in a disastrous division of assets under the jurisdiction of the courts.  Which is a very dicey affair under the best of circumstances.   Because his sexual needs are the more urgent, generally speaking, at a young age, he is at a huge negotiating disadvantage biologically speaking.  Whoever wants sex the most  empowers the other party and most likely loses the negotiation.  The woman wins.

It is all about sexual Supply and Demand.  When they are in their teens, twenties, and perhaps even their early thirties, the male libido far outstrips that of the female.  If he has a girl friend or fiancee or wife, the Supply has been reduced to One!  And she now has other priorities.  Like children, for example.  She has been granted by society a monopoly on his greatest survival need–to produce offspring–lots of them!  Because from Nature’s perspective, who knows how many of those offspring, or indeed, if any of them will survive to maturity.  This is the situation I found myself in when I left Jehovah’s Witnesses, and then my wife of sixteen years.  I did NOT want to go out and immediately get into another monogamous relationship.  I wanted SEX.  I had had all of two sexual partners in my entire life; I was in my late thirties, and I definitely wanted to know what I didn’t know.  And although I didn’t have the language to articulate it at the time, I wanted to find a solution to the imbalance culture and religion placed on sexual behavior.  I felt it was very unfair that society, or at least polite society disdained a young man’s philandering as a manifestation of his fall from grace.  He is attacked by women with condescension and viewed as lacking character, and discussed in soft tones among men with manly knowing chuckles and indulgence.  Although women would be outraged by the errant behavior of their mates, I often found them to be quite indulgent with their own nubile sons.  What, I wondered, was an appropriate way to pursue my goals and feel good about myself, and without alienating the very women I wanted to get to know better?  How to correct the perverse imbalance between the supply and demand of sex? 

Here is what I learned, and would share with young men everywhere: 

The solution is simple.  Expand the supply.  If you are dating several women at one time, and one of them, or even several,  proceed in the usual fashion by playing coy with the goodies, you, instead of feeling angry and frustrated, become ever more conservative and circumspect in your advances, even feigning nothing more than the most casual interest in their sexual readiness.  By doing this, you are reducing demand–on each supplier at a time.  When they perceive that the usual urgency of male demand seems to be absent, the supply becomes more readily available.  Just like the banker who wants to give you the loan you don’t really need that badly.

A word of caution:  You really do need to develop multiple suppliers before you undertake a change in the intensity of negotiations.  You see we men are no good at all at pretending that our need is less urgent; this only works if the  need really has become less urgent.  And that will only happen if we have found additional suppliers.  If you give one person a monopoly lock on the supply of something you value above perhaps everything else except survival itself, do not be shocked if she chooses to use her position of power to advance her other interests.  Unfairly, even.

So I developed my List of Fifteen.  After some experimentation I determined that the most effective number of women to date at one time is fifteen.  Bear in mind that the list is always fluid, with some dropping off and others being added at any given point in time.  Some are unavailable due to schedules, sickness, obligations, or in a few cases, a List of Fifteen of their own.  With such a list of people you casually date, you need never press for sexual favors on any particular date (thereby conveying the all-important message of declining demand.)  You can always get those favors on the next date with the next person.  You can more carefully prepare the emotional terrain on each date with each person.  It will take some time to do all this, and you need to be patient.  Eventually you will build some momentum, and a critical mass will be reached when a majority of your women will have been suitably impressed with your deliberate pace, unhurried manner, all indicating that by some mutation of nature you have evolved to their own high moral plane.  Be careful not to overdo this, however, or they will suspect you are gay.  At this point you will start getting laid with some regularity by a wide variety of partners.  As hard as this is to imagine, you may actually get more than you really need.  Like four different partners in one evening, for example.  As exciting as this might be, it is not a sustainable pace.

Now that you have elevated yourself to the same spiritual plane as your targets, you can afford to be ever more solicitous of their well-being, ever ready to back off at the slightest show of resistance to your ministrations. You will now be more honest about your intentions than you have ever been before, reassuring each one on your list of fifteen that you only want to pursue friendship and see where that leads.  You tell them that at this point in your life you are not looking for committment, but you are leaving your options open.  It is even advisable that you suggest each of them pay their own way, for if you pay for her meal or evening, it might be mistaken for an effort to ingratiate yourself and work your way into her panties, and nothing, you assure her, could be further from your mind.  Your dick is being serviced regularly, the pressure is off, and you can be cool.  

Do not however, be misled into thinking that this show will go on forever.  It won’t.  She will suspect you of duplicity.  From her perspective, something is clearly wrong here.  The roles have been reversed and she senses her loss of power, and since that power means survival, she has to gain it back.  My God, now you are even suggesting she pay her own way, for the most enlightened and spiritual of reasons.  You have placed her at financial disadvantage at the same time that you appropriated her own moral arguments!  A crowning, and absolutely devilish touch is when she finally initiates physical interest (because you haven’t), and you respond with “Are you sure you’re ready for this?  I don’t want to rush you.”  I can almost assure you, from then on she will practically throw herself at you.  Thus begins the Golden Age of the List of Fifteen. 

It doesn’t last.  There is now a dreadful balance between supply and demand of sexual availability that cannot be tolerated.  Female power derives from fostering an imbalance that serves her survival needs.  Since you usurped her power by reducing your demand (by developing alternate suppliers), she can only respond by further reducing supply, and the only way she knows to do that is to eliminate other potential sources.  Bear in mind that at this point she does not know you have other sources; she may not even suspect it yet.  But you can be sure she will move to strengthen her perceived position as the sole supply by suggesting Marriage, thereby invoking the full weight of moral and community pressure to solidify her position.  If you accede to her wishes and get married, (and indeed, why not, for your needs are being readily and happily met, and this is, after all, what you really wanted to begin with)  shortly thereafter you can rest assured she will restore the imbalance between supply and demand that empowers her by backing off the supply.  You are now, once again, reduced to having only one approved supplier for your sexual needs.  As you plead, grouse, and grovel, you once again experience the joys of shame and guilt that accompany your pathetic need.  She may even suggest that going to church a little may help curb your avaricious appetites.  For her, beatifically restored to her high moral perch, the crowning touch is to be generous in forgiving you your maleness.  Life is full of both perversity and irony, and a great irony of the sexual wars is that when women achieve what they think they desire in their men, they often come to despise the result.  They like to control, but don’t particularly admire men who let them get away with it. 

If, when the woman makes her inevitable move towards marriage, you shrink back, she will persist for a time and then, if her efforts prove fruitless, she will inevitably move on.  She will be confused about you, or she will suspect you of being gay, or she will suspect you of having other partners.  In her view, men who have properly submitted to one source of sexual relief don’t behave this way.  And of course, she’s right.  Imbalance must be restored.  And you will need to update your List of Fifteen.

Another irony of the List of Fifteen is that you will experience far less emotional turmoil in your relation-dinghies (thank you, Erica Jong) than you ever did in your relation-ships.  Because the List of Fifteen reconfigures the power struggle in your favor, you will be much more clear and direct in your communication with a woman because you have been relieved of the fear of not getting sex from her.  This is no longer an issue since there is an ample and ready supply elsewhere.  You will be relieved of the endless and onerous effort to not displease her.  You will have broken free of your leash, and even trust ceases to be an issue.  There is nothing to distrust , since you have made it clear that you just want to be friends and see where that goes, and that each of you is free to see others if that suits them.  Trust only becomes an issue when you want the other person to do, or not do, something they have agreed to but that is contrary to their real desires.  If they already want to do what you want them to do, trust is not an issue.  With the List of Fifteen, your stated desires, your real desires, and your actions are all congruent.  You experience no guilt or shame because you have earned none.  You have been forthright, up front, and completely honest.  It is up to your partners to decide how they will respond to you.

In the case of the List of Fifteen, the woman clearly hopes she can deter you from your stated position, but she has lost the power to coerce you.  She can’t even accuse you of misrepresenting your intentions and thereby regain the moral high ground.  She will most likely fall back on the old saw that you can’t commit.  Your answer of course is “Oh yes I can, but just not to you.”  Another thing women may not know but will often sense in a way, is that with some sexual experience under your belt, you have a broader frame of reference in bed.  The chances are you’ve discovered by now what good sex really is.  And you’ve also discovered that not all women are good lovers.  As a matter of fact some are a lot of work.  We men are not stupid, we are simply selfish (there’s that nasty word again).  Frankly, sometimes sex with a certain individual is just not worth the effort.  If we were in love with them, yes, but even then not all the time.  I have had lovers where you simply think both your cock and your hand and your tongue are about to fall off, and she still hasn’t come.  And worse, she obviously doesn’t want you to stop.  Hopefully this is when she will mercifully fake an orgasm in order to end it.  When we are young, men come much more easily than women do, sometimes too easily.  When men have not learned yet to control this mechanism, or are not motivated to do so, this does not make them morally inferior or craven.  If biology were reversed, women would behave the same.  As a matter of fact, nature does in time reverse the roles and men will experience more difficulty coming than do women.  Should we challenge our women’s morality when they lack patience with us?

In an ordinary relationship, when the supply of sexual gratification becomes restricted, your own physical needs become a source of shame and you end up having to sneak your pleasures, going “underground”.  It is deliciously liberating to be freed of all that.  Instead of fighting with your significant other, you apply the fundamental principle of the martial arts and you absorb the energy and impact of her verbal blows instead of resisting.  You clearly state the terms of how you are willing to relate to her, and you can accept rejection because you have an alternate supply of sexual gratification.  You have the superior negotiating position because you can walk away from the deal.  You are therefore imposing your own terms on the relationship instead of accepting the terms imposed on you.  Moral scorn, shame, and unearned guilt are no longer effective as weapons of manipulation against you.  She will only hang around  as long as she entertains hope that she can change you.  When that hope dies, she will be gone.  Ironically, most likely you will remain friends and your sexual separation will not be accompanied by the acrimony and bitterness that usually goes with the break-up of traditional relationships.  I have had ex-members of my  List of Fifteen actually refer me to their female friends as a potential lover.  I still occasionally get Christmas cards and newsletters from alumni of my List of Fifteen that long ago got married or remarried and who apparently remember me with some fondness.  It is my belief that the reason for this is because our relation-dinghies contained none of the unverbalized and unmet expectations and the unwritten I.O.U.’s. that are so symptomatic of the power struggles implicit in a traditional relationship.  The emotional investment and potential for hurt is considerably less.

It has been said, with some truth, that men stay with women hoping they won’t change, and women stay with men hoping they will change.  Perhaps now you can understand why.

Later in life, in one’s forties and fifties, nature commits one of her perversities and engages in gender role reversal.  The female libido matches and even exceeds that of the male.  For a delightful decade or so they are closely matched and if someone has been  lucky enough to have found a suitable partner these can be the most productive years of their life because they are free to focus on  issues and interests other than sexual ones.  If they have not been lucky, they will spend these years separating and looking for a replacement.  If the television series Sex and the City is to be believed, women may even attempt their own versions of the List of Fifteen, although perhaps less consciously and deliberately than I did, and with varying degrees of satisfaction. They are also more likely to have a shorter list, but not always.

There is a tremendous amount of sexual and power programming in the human species that gets acted out largely at the unconscious level.  I experienced a strong need to consciously identify the dynamics of sexual politics and choose my responses, again on a very conscious level.  You may have noticed that in the early stages at least, I operated on the principle of the winner takes all. My feelings were hurt by rejection and the constant effort required to find acceptable sexual release.  The real question is, Who  was the winner, or even, was anyone a winner?  For human sexuality to remain vital in anything more than a casual relationship, it is important that power sharing is consciously and verbally negotiated in a satisfying way in other parts of life, so that sex is not resorted to as an expression of power or control.

There is less stress in a List of Fifteen than in a relationship, for the issue of power has been neutralized, but none of these relation-dinghies can last precisely because the power issues remain unresolved, especially for the female, whose biological program has been denied.  She is programmed that her single greatest asset, the one that is in constant demand, is her sexual availability, and it is never, NEVER to be given away without adequate compensation.  It is to be traded for other resources, and Nature knows that her survival, and that of her offspring depends on her trading well.  So for the female to give this away in exchange for nothing more than a hope and a promise is life-threatening.  This is programming; a woman doesn’t need to think this, it’s in her wiring.  Because the List of Fifteen upsets nature’s apple cart, this situation cannot endure unless unconscious behavior becomes conscious and the individuals involved can choose which behaviors promote their survival and happiness and which do not.  In today’s age, the very programming is vestigial and no longer appropriate.  Many women make more money than their men do.  A Western woman no longer has to depend on a man for survival.  But this programming of sex for resources is still in her wiring, and for her to move beyond this behavioral pattern, she has to bring this up to the conscious level before she can override it.  In conscious power sharing, sex ceases to be used as a weapon, and because each has recognized the other’s needs for empowerment, these needs can be met without resorting to manipulation and unconscious power plays.  This is, I believe, an especially difficult sea change for the female whose programming and modus operandi has evolved to be largely unconscious and intuitive and manipulative.

Of course there are some women who, after moving to a more conscious level, decide to keep the sex for resources behavior.  While no longer necessary for survival, why waste a good thing?  A free dinner is still a free dinner.  Besides, it’s nice to know you’re appreciated.  There are no right or wrong answers, but it is  important to acknowledge the questions.  

I have noticed the female phenomenon of preferring to live life unconsciously in many sexual contexts.  It is as if, if they do not confront the facts of reality, they cannot be held accountable.  A young woman who has access to birth control and knows how to use it, will not take a condom with her on a date and will risk an unwanted pregnancy rather than consciously admit to herself that sex that night is a distinct possibility.  Women will engage in highly exhibitionistic behavior but always need to be coaxed into it to preserve the illusion in their own minds that it wasn’t their idea, they didn’t want it, and therefore surely cannot be reproached for it.  I am not talking about the shyness of the first time in a new experience here; I am talking about women  who, once coaxed into such behavior take it well beyond your wildest imagination once they begin.  Women will fantasize as much as men do, and will act out some of those fantasies, as long as they appear to be “persuaded” by someone else.  This can be tricky territory for their male companions, for if they ever change their mind about anything, you can be sure it will be your fault.  You have to persuade and coax to get them to do things, but don’t be too aggressive or there will be hell to pay later.  Give them space to show their own level of interest.  The fun part of Road Hogs is that they have gotten past all this.  They are not ashamed of their sexuality, and revel in it once they’ve decided to accept you.  A Road Hog who just got breast implants will walk topless to the mailbox hoping her neighbors are looking; a Show Dog will position herself to be seen in circumstances that can be defended as purely accidental.

The List of Fifteen and a monogamous relationship are about equally expensive in terms of money; it takes a lot of money to get laid either way.  Resources will have to be exchanged for sex; it is nature’s way.

In terms of time, a List of Fifteen requires a lot more time because you have to focus a lot on what’s next and also on maintaining the list.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics once again comes into play:  anything in a state of order (the List) will proceed to a state of disorder unless acted upon by an outside force (the Owner of theList).  From the point of view of achieving other of your life’s goals, a monogamous relationship, even an unsatisfying or stormy one, is more conducive to personal productivity.  If you succeed in understanding the dynamics of a monogamous relationship and establish healthy relationship habits, your maintenance of that relationship can become more skilled, more practiced, and therefore less time consuming.

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.

*   *   *

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?

The trading of sex for resources is universal, but is practiced very differently in different strata of society. 

Once, in Cleveland, I and a group of engineers went to an exclusive golf outing where there were two or three naked or nearly naked women attending each hole, and who sold jello shots at outrageous prices.  Some lay on sheets on the greens with bowls of maraschino cherries beside them.  They would place the cherry inside their pussy, with only the stem protruding, and for $15 the men could pull the cherry out by grasping the stem between their teeth.  The booze flowed freely and so did the money.  A lot of resources changed hands that day, and a lot of golfers went home drunk and happy and a lot of pretty women went home financially enriched.   Personally I fail to see where such practices at one level deserve to be called debauchery, and at a more “refined” level a wife extorts unearned millions from her wealthy husband through the services of a clever divorce attorney.  Women regularly engage in the practice of trading up, leaving one man for another in a higher station in life in order to acquire a status or life style they could not acquire through their own efforts.   It is all sex for resources, and it is nature’s way.  In many cases the only resources you walk away with are bragging rights.

Anais Nin of twentieth century literary fame made no bones about the fact that she kept her husband Hugo around because she needed his resources in order to provide her with enough time to write in her journal and chase men, lots of them.  Anais had to practice a lot of deceit over a lot of years to keep the illusion going, and Hugo had to practice a lot of denial.  They had complementary pathologies, and their exchange of sex for resources worked after a fashion.  Unfortunately for Hugo, the poor sap, Anais got most of the resources and the sex.  But they both made their choices.

I have a friend who likes to say jokingly say that he has crawled across the State of South Carolina on his hands and knees in search of pussy.  It is his way of making a point.  I think I can say without successful contradiction that young men experience a more consistently urgent sexual drive than do young women, and this puts them at a negotiating disadvantage, because the first rule of negotiation is that whoever needs the deal the most loses the negotiation.  It’s like asking a banker for a loan when you are nearly broke.  You are much more likely to obtain a loan if you ask for it when you don’t really need it, or your need is not that urgent.  At the very least you need to convince your banker of that, whether it is true or not.

My frustration with the dating game was that I felt women didn’t play fair.  Women would confess, or even boast to me of the evenings when they went to a bar to socialize and drink and check out the men, that they were prepared to purchase only the first cheap beer.  Their drinks for the rest of the evening would be supplied by willing males who stupidly thought this was the fastest route into their panties.  As soon as they had a male on the hook, the women upgraded their drinks from cheap beer to expensive cocktails.  Many women upped the ante in the game by suggesting dinners at expensive restaurants and entertainment to follow.  My friend used to tell me about two different types of women, what he called Road Hogs and Show Dogs.  Road Hogs were generally easier and cheaper, but had a lot of hard miles on them.  Road Hogs were the kind of uncomplicated, unpretentious, and down-to-earth women that Patsy Cline would sing about.  They were simple, but savvy with regard to men.  Show Dogs had the expensive nails and hairdo’s, and were more likely to be found around the country clubs.  They usually didn’t know how to do much, but they certainly knew how to play the part.  These are also referred to in the South as RDW’s, or Rich Doctor’s Wives.  To qualify as an RDW, you didn’t have to be rich or a doctor’s wife.  You didn’t even have to be a wife.  It is more about attitude.  These women apparently associate money, wealth, and assets with men, whether daddy, ex-husbands, husbands, or deceased husbands.  These are women whose financial settlements and inheritances bring them far more money and financial gain than they could likely have acquired in any other way.  In the game of natural selection, they either belonged to the Lucky Semen Club and had a rich daddy, or they selected well themselves in the mating game.  In any event, they are not to be faulted for negotiating well and using their assets wisely.  And their primary asset was that which was in the highest demand—their physical attraction and sexual availability.  They are also known as trophy wives, dates, significant others.  Most women intuitively understand that if they allow their greatest asset to be traded at a commodity level, their negotiating ability and survivability are seriously compromised.  Once I quit looking at cross -gender relationships from a viewpoint of what I thought ought to be, and just started accepting what was, from a biological perspective, the mating game became a lot less complicated, and it gradually ceased to be a trigger for negative emotions.

Show Dogs would never admit to the practice of sex for resources, although they are the masters of the marketplace.  Wealthy men will marry some of them for their social standing in the community; they have high social standing and poor cash flow.  Perhaps the man will trade her standing for his cash flow.  Older men will willingly trade their often ample resources with a beautiful young woman, because they value the prestige that such ‘arm candy’ bestows on them. There is nothing wrong with this, for it is consensual and each party is getting what they want out of the bargain.  When that changes, one or both of them will opt out.  There is no difference between this scenario and the older woman who makes a substantial income and wants to spend it on young boys and men.  The roles have reversed, but people are still trading sex for resources.

For the record, Road Hogs are generally much better in bed than Show Dogs.

So maybe what annoyed me was not that most of them kept the price high by reducing supply, but rather their insistence on their own moral superiority as compared to, let’s say for example, men, who as we all know only have ONE thing on their minds.  So these women would sit at the bars sipping the drinks we bought them, amusing themselves with their derision and contempt for men and our pulchritude and pathetic, nasty needs.  As I’ve mentioned before, I experienced this moral play with my wife Barbara first, with whom I always felt somewhat dirty about my sexual desire, until I discovered that by making none of the usual sexual advances to her, I could, with time and patience, bring her to the same state of neediness and thus penetrate her  moral cloak.  As I have written before, on  some occasions when particularly disgusted with the self-righteous tone of women in conversation at bars when discussing men I would go to great lengths to select and seduce a target, only to walk away at the last minute, leaving them naked and unsatisfied in bed, and always with an unctious remark borrowed directly from the feminist lexicon.

If, in the open market of sexual relations, women guarded their availability jealously, the male solution was to find mulitiple providers.  This only makes sense:  if the supply is being restricted to raise the price, the obvious solution is to introduce competition.  And there’s always competition.  And don’t they know it!  I wonder sometimes if this is why women always go to the restoom together;  maybe they don’t trust their girlfriends back at the seats with their  male partner.

I was genuinely offended when women would  give their lower sex drive a spiritual and moral spin, assuming the moral high ground.  Religion plays into their purposes by portraying both masturbation and prostitution as evil, thereby cutting off all other sources of culturally-approved sexual relief for the male.  Then to top it all off, they invoke the cultural and religious more of Marriage, which accords the female a monopoly contract on all sex forever for her lucky partner.   Now this situation might be considered fair if the sex drive were roughly equal between the species at a young age.  But we all know it is not.  And should any male show any reluctance to submit to this all-encompassing contract, he clearly has a committment problem.  This can only be one more symptom of his generally and terminally depraved condition.  Men!  Yeecch.  Such was the predominant attitude of women in the dating scene in the late eighties and early nineties.

Now I ask you, would we fall for this kind of specious reasoning in any other meaningful human activity?  But wait, there is hope!  I figured out a solution to this male dilemma.  The source of our weakness and the power of the female is clearly the limited supply of sexual availability.  Of pussy.  Our negotiating position is horribly weakened by our greater physical need.  We didn’t ask for our hormonal make-up, any more than women asked for theirs.  We are what we are.  We are no different than the rest of nature, and for the same reasons.  Nature is a study in massive overkill to assure the survival of the species.  The HUGE difference is that in our culture we have overlaid a set of values or cultural mores that labels the male biological identity as a character flaw, an evidence of moral weakness.  To my way of thinking, this is no different than if we males decided that the female menstrual flow was a sign of weakness, a character flaw.  This kind of ignorance, or nonsense,  would be excusable in a primitive society, but not in ours.   Let’s deal with reality and call a thing what it is, and then choose how to deal with it.  

When men do not seek to perpetuate and cement this state of biological imbalance by entering into a binding legal contract,  into perpetuity,  (more commonly referred to as “till death do us part”), we open ourselves up to further character assassination.  In business, I used to tell potential clients that if they had a bad experience with a contractor, it was probably the contractors problem, but if they had failures with multiple contractors, it was probably the client’s problem.  My point was that when there is a pattern of similar results, there is a different dynamic going on.  On the sexual scene, while it may be very self-serving for the female of the species to feel a certain moral smugness when their male of choice is unfaithful, when that behavior is a documentable global phenomenon that transcends all ages, tribes, cultures, religions, and national boundaries; when it becomes so common that it is a cliche,  there is obviously a different dynamic going on here.  So let’s deal with what IS.

I figured if this was God’s riddle for us to solve, I would find a solution.  And I did.  Stay tuned.

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. 

 In time I decided there was no God.  I decided that the existence of God would be a violation of the Law of Identity, which means simply that to be, is to be something.  To be something is have boundaries, as the boundaries are what distinguish one thing from all the other things that it is not.  This delimits God, institutes boundaries and limitations, establishes what he is NOT.    God cannot be everywhere and all things, which is to be without identity, which is to be nothing, not nothing as a kind of something, but nothing as nothing, as non-existent.  This is not the only reason I did not believe in God, but one of the most important.  Coming to this conclusion really simplified a lot of things for me.

I was no longer troubled with defending God’s honor, such as why he permitted bad things.  I didn’t have to make sense out of any of the holy books of the world any more, nor did I have to explain or mediate the contradictions  in their respective messages.  I could simply accept them as what they were:  primitive attempts at an integrated philosophy based on the body of knowledge available to the authors at the time they were written.  I could understand why the churches were often empty, and I could also understand why they were full during times of great stress or confusion.  In times of great change, the appeal of ancient religions is their millenial resistance to change.  I knew enough about most of the holy books, having at least read them if not exhaustively studied them, to know that they borrowed freely from each other and from philosophy extant at the time they were written.  I understood that all of this was a great conversation down through the ages, with many of the same questions and often quite divergent answers.  Most of all I became aware of man’s need for certainty, his need to believe, his need to be right, and his need to kill on behalf of what he believes to be right.   I no longer had to reconcile ancient, and sometimes silly faith-based premises that contradicted what I had already established as truth. I could accept and understand the miracle of the creation of wealth where none existed before, but I did not have to accept or explain the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea or Joshua commanding the sun to stand still.  The one was congruent with reality, the others were not and I was now intellectually free to reject them.

It did of course create some brand new problems for me as well.  I would henceforth have to deal with the arrogance of believers who think all atheists can’t really mean it.  My friends and associates would assure me that I would recover from this phase and eventually return to normalcy.    And of course I would have to deal with those who believed that without God and the supernatural there can be no basis for morality and therefore no meaning to life itself.

My new position did mean that instead of looking for a meaning to my life that had been imposed by a supernatural entity, I would have to create my own purpose for my life, and take responsibility for achieving it.  I would have to decide what direction I wanted my life to take,  and what it would mean for me.  This is an awesome responsibility.  It also meant I would have to give up such cute catch phrases like “Everything happens for a reason.”  No, not necessarily.  The Law of Causality states every effect has a cause, but that does not imply any sort of preordination by some supernatural or supreme somebody.  Many things happen from sheer randomness, and we confound ourselves in our efforts to read order into chaos.  Disorder, chaos, and randomness are all naturally occurring  phenomena that require no explanation.  They simply are.  The concept of randomness is scary because we cannot anticipate everything, and therefore cannot control everything.  That means we’re vulnerable.  Welcome to reality!

Any purposeful activity  in life requires maintenance of some type or other to sustain order and forestall chaos.  Management in any context, whether painting a house to protect it from the corroding elements or creating a rule by law for a nation, like all of civilization itself,  is an effort to maintain order.  Order makes growth possible.  This is every bit as true in a relationship between two people as it is with celestial bodies.  (And so much the better if it is your good fortune to be in a relationship with a celestial body).  Due to the Law of Causality, there can be no surprises if one simply has enough information.  The Law of Causality as applied to women means that even though we cannot divine the inner workings of their non-linear, labyrinthine, chthonian  minds, there is a cause for every thing they do, and if we had enough information about them, it could and would become comprehensible.  I found this vaguely comforting.  Even randomness becomes discernible and predictable if one has enough information to crunch, and quickly enough.  Unfortunately we rarely do, so we always seem to be playing catch-up with reality.

But I digress.  What we believe has a lot to do with our managment of pain.  Pain can be instructive or destructive.  Pain can be an early warning signal of impending danger, in which case it serves our survival.  We each have a different pain threshhold.  We “believe” in what we cannot justify or rationalize, because we need to, and the need is real, just like psychic pain is real.  Anesthetizing the pain can make us less susceptible to genuine warning signals and can in some cases prevent us from growing.  If the pain is too great, however, it becomes destructive, and we cannot function at all.  When we anticipate the pain of reality as being unbearable psychologically and emotionally, we deny reality and invent things.  For some the thought of no great power out there in control of everything is too scary to contemplate.  For others the finality of death without a hereafter is unbearable.  My answer to all is to do whatever your pain threshhold allows you to do.  For me however, there is only one acceptable choice.  I have to go with reality, with what IS.  For those who offer the postmodern thought that our realities are all different, I disagree.  Our perceptions of reality may all be different, but our perceptions do not change what IS.  What is, IS.  It is our job to figure out what that is; to test our perceptions in the scientific method.  If the postmodern concept were accurate, virtually all science would be useless and human progress an unattainable fiction.

This is a committment and a promise I made to myself when I left Jehovah’s Witnesses; that I would never again believe something because another told me I had to accept something on faith.  Faith is only necessary when what we are being asked to believe contradicts other premises we know to be true.   I cannot confuse wishful thinking with reality, and I do not delude myself into thinking I can change reality by willing it out of existence, or by willing it into existence.  Lack of omniscience is not, as Ayn Rand said, a license to invent things.  My future success in life depends on my ability to perceive what is, and respond appropriately.  Nor am I one of those people who would “prefer not to know.”  As disagreeable as the truth may be on occasion, I would still rather know than not know. I do, however, reserve the right to kill the messenger.

There is a point to my digression here.  I have discovered that my committment to reality and to what is, is not, and has not been shared by most of the women I have come to know, sometimes intimately.  Quite the opposite in fact.  They have frequently cherished their misconceptions and held them close even when it did not serve their wellbeing to do so.  A simple example of what I am talking about is that virtually all of the “women’s magazines” on the market today have many ads for psychics and fortune tellers and sections for horoscopes and astrology.  I know of no such man’s magazine that contains the same.  I have asked many women why this is so, and I have gotten many different answers.  The more educated and savvy of them scoff at the ads and horoscopes, but read them nevertheless.  Obviously there is a demand for them or the publishers would not include them. 

In the singles dating scene, I found this desire of women to react to situations at an unconscious level to be quite common, and eventually I decided the reason for this behavior was “if I don’t look at it, I can’t be held responsible for it.”  For example, women very commonly lie to their significant others.  First they try to change their men, and when that doesn’t work, they simply resort to deceit.  I don’t think even women would argue this point, it is such a ubiquitous behavior; but they justify the deceit on the grounds that in a male-dominated world, deceit is the only way they can get what they want.  Well, maybe that was true once, but it isn’t anymore, but many women have not made the transition yet to the new reality; the reality that women earn just about the same as men now, and often more, not to mention the fact that they control all the pussy.  They have options just like men do; the problem is, they may not always like their options, so they resort to deceit.  If you as a woman are trading with a male in the marketplace, and the man disagrees with you about certain values that are important to you, you may find you are incompatible.  If you cannot agree, you may have to disengage and separate.  For a woman though, she will calculate that her standard of living will go down at least temporarily because she will no longer be living on shared expenses, and rather than endure this temporary hardship, she will go underground, lie, and try to have her cake and eat it too.  And this is still justified on the basis of  “it’s a man’s world.”  Nonsense.  It’s a shared world, and the practice of deceit in the marketplace of romance quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns when your significant other(s) figure out what you’re doing.  When trust is gone, it’s gone, unless of course you are living with someone who prefers to remain in denial about what you are doing. But for many women it is still easier to pretend that they had no choice in what they did.  

The Singles Scene

Shortly after I became single again, and during one of many periods when Diana and I were broken up, I found a singles magazine outside the door to my apartment where I lived.  (This was pre-Internet of course)  The magazine was about a dozen pages or so, half devoted to women seeking men, and half vice versa.  I had an attitude that particular evening, and I wrote a separate answer to every single woman’s ad in the magazine.  I got about a dozen responses back, and I dated every one of the respondees.  One of these, when I met her at her home, greeted me with the news that her psychic had told her I would be contacting her.  I laughed and wondered if her psychic had told her I would be leaving too.  During the months that I knew this woman, it never ceased to amaze me how she could so selectively apply what suited her from her psychic and totally disregard what did not work, without once challenging his credibility.  Well, it certainly wasn’t the first time I had witnessed the power to believe.

I came on the singles scene at a most interesting time during the gender wars.  The singles bars were flooded with divorced women who all had one thing in common–male bashing–at the same time that they sought us out.  Their favorite pet peeve was that all men wanted was sex , and that they didn’t really want anything else.  This really annoyed me because it wasn’t true.  Sometimes I was horny and sometimes I wasn’t, but it was never a foregone conclusion that I wanted sex with them.  I thought that was quite a presumption that was only valid just before bar closing time.  And I quickly discovered that many women wanted sex every bit as much as men did, but sometimes for different reasons.  I also discovered that a woman’s wedding ring didn’t mean any more to her in most cases than it did for a man.  I got to know many of Diana’s girlfriends from the office she worked in, and most of them were married.  They all told their husbands they were going out with their girlfriends on Friday night, and indeed they would, but they frequently found someone on the dance floor with whom  they went to a motel room first before returning to their husbands.  .  One woman I knew slept with a different man each night of the week and raised the “Sex for Resources” game to a fine art form, keeping track of the presents each of them gave her.  If they were negligent of their responsibilities, she moved on.  One woman fucked the husband of her best girlfriend for years, at the same time that the three of them  socialized regularly, and she even was their babysitter when the couple went out.  That takes a lot of chutzpah in my book.  I couldn’t do it.  If I slept with someone’s wife, I didn’t even want to know who the husband was, and I certainly didn’t want to meet him or socialize with him.  Not that I went looking for married women, but a lot of them were out there, and if their marriage meant nothing to them, I didn’t consider it my responsibility.  I have never found a man that was as good a liar as a motivated woman.  Generally speaking men are clumsy in comparison.

Also this thing that men hit on women until they give in is a partial myth.  Women are, or can be very direct and assertive, aggressive even.  One supervisor who worked for me told me one night that she was 39 years old and wanted to have an affair before she turned forty.  And she had decided that I was to be the lucky guy.  I saw no particular reason not to oblige her.  The partial truth about men hitting on women is that men rarely know what a woman’s being nice to him means.  She may just be being nice to him because she likes him, or she is having a good day, or whatever.  Or she may be sending him a signal of sexual receptivity which he probably doesn’t want to ignore.  With a lot of guys, especially as they get older the general rule of thumb is Never waste a hard-on; you never know which one will be your last.  So the guy makes a tentative (or not so tentative) gesture and waits to see what the response is.  Depending on his own urgency, anything less than a vehement rejection may be perceived as encouragement.  It is nature’s way that the guy who gets the most rejections gets laid the most–because he was persistent.  Unfortunately this can be a problem  in the workplace, where such persistence can get you fired.

Humans, like animals, have a way of letting the opposite sex know when they are in heat, when they are available.  I don’t know scientifically how we do it, but I do know it’s real.  Many women loved to play a game with guys where they would lead them on, get them heated up, getting half disrobed or whatever, and then at the last second telling them they can’t go all the way, that they’re not “that kind of girl.”  I found many that practiced this little game with malice aforethought and bragged about it to their girlfriends.  I began wondering how the woman would react if the man responded to them in this way, rather than what they had come to expect.  So I decided to find out.  On several occasions I began the mating ritual  by seducing them, getting them naked in bed, working them over until they were close to coming, and then without entering them, I would get off the bed, get dressed, and tell them I just couldn’t go all the way and I was sorry, but this was wrong.  You cannot imagine the look on their face.  I had stolen their line and used it against them.

The irony of all this is that women do not trust their girlfriends with each other’s men, and with good reason.  They may be good friends in all other things, but they will go after each other’s men in a New York heartbeat.  Ladies, if you don’t trust your girlfriends around your boyfriend, you are quite right.  You shouldn’t.  But guys, if your woman’s girlfriend tries to put the make on you, and you tell your woman about it, there’s a 50/50 chance your woman will deny it and be mad at you for even suggesting it.

Losing My Virginity–Again

With these few anecdotes I have probably conveyed the impression that I was a born lothario, and that I burned up the sexual landscape with a scorched earth policy once I was freed from my religious restrictions.  Nothing, actually, could be further from the truth.  I simply didn’t start at the beginning  with this part of my story.  Diana of course, introduced me into another world, and it was a world that scared the crap out of me, even while it fascinated me.  I wanted to know more about women, and I wanted to experience more women, and I wanted to experience the differences between lovers.  I had absolutely no idea how to make this happen.  Since I was traveling extensively teaching management seminars around the United States and Canada, even before my divorce from Barbara, and on one occasionn I flew into Oakland, California on the way to Napa Valley.  I drove by a “health spa” that looked very cheerful and inviting, so I stopped.  I had never been to such a “spa” before and really didn’t know what to expect or how to act.  I was alone and quite nervous.  A woman came to the window and said it would be $60.  She didn’t ask any questions, and I didn’t know any to ask.  Someone let me in, and led me down a hallway and into a room.  There was a small, clean, elevated bed in the room with clean linens and towels folded on it, and not much else.  The girl was oriental in appearance and she instructed me to disrobe and left the room.  I stripped down to my shorts and sat on the edge of the bed.  When she returned, she took one look at me and told me to disrobe.  Since I only had one item of clothing left on, and being a quick study, I figured out right away what she meant and complied.  She handed me a towel, and told me to follow her down the hallway.  I was embarrassed, as I had never walked down a “public” hallway naked before in my life.  We turned a corner, and there were a series of showers along a wall with very small, inadequate curtains hanging in front of them  She told me to shower.  There were two or three of her pretty female colleagues, all fully dressed, standing right there in front of the showers.  I had never been naked with any women other than my wife and Diana, so I was flustered.  I took my shower, toweled off in front of the women, who totally ignored me, and followed my oriental girl back to my assigned room.  The girl was wearing a normal one-piece swimming suit.  I lay on the table and she gave me a rubdown with baby oil.  When she had me turn over on my back, she laid a small towel over my privates.  She did absolutely nothing suggestive or remotely sexual.  I was so disappointed.  I knew I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what.  I asked her if she would take her swimsuit off and she said no.  She was very polite.  I must have been experiencing considerable guilt and talked obsessively about my wife during the massage.  At the end the masseuse dismissed me with “Go back to your wife.”  I dressed and left.  I was so humiliated.  I thought, wow, I’ve got to be the only guy in the world who can’t get laid  in a whorehouse!!

I hardly slept that night.  The next morning I got up, and went straight back to the whorehouse.  I plunked my money down as if I was a regular, and when another girl came out for me, I stripped down quickly, took my shower, and when we got back to the room I politely asked her to strip herself and told her I wanted her to include a hand job in my massage, and how much would that be.  She said $30 without batting an eye.  I paid the money, got my massage and hand job, played with her tits while she rubbed me down, and needless to say, there was no hand towel over my genitals this time. 

I had figured out what the problem was the first time:  I was so awkward and obviously inexperienced, they suspected me of being a cop.  When I walked out the second time, I felt like I was ten feet tall.  However, there were unintended consequences.  My childhood conditioning came back in a rush in the form of paranoia about the possibility of contracting AIDS from the hand job I had just received.  In total,  irrational panic, I called the local Oakland police department, asked for the Vice Squad, and asked the officer who answered the phone if he thought I could get AIDS from a hand job.  He paused, and then without even missing a beat, said he wasn’t sure but he supposed it was possible.  Now I can just imagine what he said to his fellow officers after he hung up the phone!  Anyway, that was the wrong answer for someone in the middle of a full-scale guilt-induced anxiety meltdown like me.  That was precisely why I had ordered a hand job to begin with, because I figured it was the safest sexual contact.  Nobody wore plastic gloves when they gave hand jobs, right???

My sense of guilt manifested itself by an obsession with contracting AIDS.  I read everything  I could get my hands on about AIDS and waiting daily for some telltale sign to appear on my body, a rash or something, that would tell me I had made a terrible mistake.  The media was in full swing alarming the nation about the disease, and to listen to them, virtually anyone who had sex with anyone else, ever, was at risk.  But then I noticed an article that said a law was being passed that made it illegal for someone who was HIV positive to be discriminated against in employment, including public restaurants.  Then I thought, wait a minute, if some guy with AIDS has to be allowed in a restaurant kitchen where he could cut himself and accidentally bleed into my salad, I don’t think I’m going to get AIDS from my hand job.  And if I can get AIDS from a hand job, I can also get AIDS from shaking hands with someone who had AIDS.  So why would the government make it illegal for such a person to be kept out of public kitchens??  Breathing a huge sigh of relief, I decided I was safe.  For the moment.

With my background, sex was obviously a very emotionally charged issue, not to mention who- knows-what that I had suppressed over the years.  I decided to resume my investigative studies.  Soon I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I found a very delightful, modern whorehouse within a stones throw of Harvard,  for the convenience of the students I suppose.  This place was a virtual smorgasbord of services, complete with a menu (seriously) and an album of color photographs of all the girls in the house (about 60 or so).  I looked at the menu and decided on a threesome.  It was some outrageous price like $180 or something.  The receptionist asked me to pick out the two girls I wanted to have my threesome with, and I did so.  I was escorted into a room, stripped, and laid up on the table waiting in a state of high anxiety.  Soon the two girls appeared, and as my luck would have it, they hated each other’s guts and stood there above me arguing ferociously with each other about whatever.  They almost forgot I was there.  Remembering me suddenly, one of them  said peevishly, “well, what do you want?”  I said “I want both of you to play with me with your hands and get me to come.”  Well, I was so distraught with their arguing and my own anxiety attack that I couldn’t get it up.  They worked on me for a few minutes, and then one of them said, “Well, I don’t think this is going to happen.”  And that was the ignominius end to my first attempt at a threesome.  Needless to say, I didn’t qualify for a refund.  But I had learned an important detail in the politics of sex:  if you are going to have a threesome with two women, choose one woman and let her choose the other.  The things your mother never tells you!

The interesting part of all this is that I wasn’t fucking anyone.  Not yet.  I was breaking down internal barriers and prior conditioning.  I was very nervous during these episodes.  I was way, way out of my comfort zone.  Mostly I wanted to see naked women up close and have them touch my body.  I wanted to see and touch their bodies.  I was so inhibited still, at this point, that I walked away from a sure thing several times.  Some times, incredibly, I was too dumb to recognize what I was being offered.

Once I was at a convention in New Orleans and winding down with a few drinks with another contractor.  It was very late, about 2 a.m., and my ass was dragging.  Finally I said to her,  “Well, I guess it’s time for bed, don’t you think?”  And she replies, “You know, I was just thinking the same thing, but I’m not really divorced from my husband yet.”  It took a moment or two for the implications of what she had just said to sink in.  We went up to her room, and she got naked and I gave her a massage.  She had a nice body and I played with it, but we did not fuck.  I didn’t even go down on her, or take off my own clothes.  Actually, this had been her half-hearted idea and I wondered what I was doing there.

On another occasion I was paying my repair bill at a car dealership, and the clerk wore a low-cut blouse that was particularly lovely when she bent over my bill.  I asked her what it would take to get her to go out with me, and her reply was, “Try asking”.  She told me where to pick her up, and when I got there she introduced me to her boyfriend!  This really confused me.  She said goodbye to her boyfriend, and then she and I went to a motel, and once again we got naked and I couldn’t go through with it.  This time it was her turn to look confused.  I took her home.  I couldn’t explain it to her because I didn’t understand it myself.  I hadn’t even gotten a hard-on.  I was starting to wonder if I was gay and didn’t even know it.    Sexually, I felt like I was wandering in a wilderness in my head, with little or no sense of where I was at. 

I began going to strip clubs, but found most of them boring.  Once in a great while there would be a dancer who was truly sensual and it would be a turn-on, but most of them just acted like bored used car salepeople.  Once I was in a bar in Philadelphia where the patrons put their heads on the bar, face up, with a folded dollar bill on their face and a naked dancer would come by and pick up the bill with her pussy as she sat on each man’s face in the process.  Nice trick.  I can still remember her fragrance.  And once I went to a strip club in Montreal with several Parisian businessmen, and the girls would dance nude at tableside, and they were so beautiful that to this day I can remember their fragrance, their bodies, and in at least one case, her name.  She was a gorgeous college student, and her name was Casey, and she danced because she made $50,000 per year, tax free.  She was paying her own way through school and living the high life.  Not bad for a girl of 19.  My French friends, who were my hosts for the event,  dropped  over $400 on tips in there that night.

I also began discovering that partially clothed was often more of a turn-on than nudity.  I found a nudist colony and talked a girlfriend  into going there with me.  It was the most un-sexual experience imaginable.  There were three or four generations of families present, and there is nothing more unsensual than a naked mother wiping the nose of her naked kid.  Surprisingly it was family oriented, and these people just believed in nudity, period.  Neither I nor my girlfriend had ever been to one before, and we rolled up the driveway in my bright red Chevy Camaro convertible, with the top down, and the “receptionist”, a guy, wearing only sandals, walks over to the car on the passenger side, and hands my girlfriend a clipboard with a paper to sign in on.  He was just the perfect height so that his dick cleared the top of her door.  Happily, he did not have an erection, or it would have been in her ear.  She tried not to notice as she reached up to get the clipboard.  Later we met another couple, and the four of us played outdoor shuffleboard.  That took a little getting used to.  On the whole, however, with everyone in sight un-self-consciously naked, you get used to it quickly.  There is a lot of intense eye contact, and I figured this is because there is no where else to look, without it looking like, you know, you’re staring ‘down there’.  We went several times and I never saw a hard-on.  Not once.  They did have a dance one night, and you had to put on a Roman toga for that.  Something else:  most people look better with their clothes on, and a hint of cleavage is often far more inviting than the sagging breasts that are the rest of the story.  And we saw a lot of guys who couldn’t see the tips of their toes when standing upright.

On one occasion a group of us had worked very late, and we were all staying in a hotel for the night.  Everyone else had gone to bed, and there was no one left in the bar but the bartender, me, and this big fat girl.  I hit on her, and she came to my room, and when she undressed I realized there was no way I was going to get turned on by someone with all that fat.  I felt bad for leading her on, so I played with her breasts and the most amazing thing happened:  she had a violent orgasm that shook  her whole body, just from playing with her nipples.  It was a seismic event   Other women can do that too, but somehow it is just a lot more memorable when the woman is that fat.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but so far I wasn’t particularly impressed.  I was collecting experiences, but there was little coherence for me.  Clearly I didn’t know what I was doing; but surely somebody else did??  Compared to this, Jehovah’s Witnesses led a pretty sensible existence.  I was sure that if God had done this, it must have been one huge practical joke, but nobody seemed to be laughing.  I pressed on.

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.

My wife was unhappy with my decision to leave Watchtower headquarters, for in her mind, she was set for life.  And of course she was.  When we left I fell flat on my face economically.  Patience and belief in her man were not among my wife’s primary virtues, and she frequently encouraged me to quit the business and get a real job on the local GM assembly line.  The business start-up years were positively terrifying, and we were genuinely impoverished as I struggled.  It was easier for me because I had been raised so poor, and also because I probably felt a little more in control than my wife did, though to be truthful I can’t remember ever feeling in control of anything.  Barbara got really angry at employees and government, and at how hard and complicated our lives had become because of both of them.

When we had our first children, Barbara’s sex drive seemed to die.  Looking back on this now, I am sure this was partly due to hormonal changes in her body, and also partly because of her sinking evaluation of the man she had married.   The golden-haired boy was looking more like the village idiot.  As the business gradually began to improve and grow beyond subsistence level, I cannot remember one single occasion of her telling me she was proud that I was in fact, moving beyond survival, and building a living organization.  So when we turned the corner, so to speak, economically, and Barbara began to study floor plans for our next house, I resented her for this.

I wanted to move beyond Jehovah’s Witnesses’ restrictions on our private sex life; Barbara either did not or would not.  When I started to “go down on her” her guilt seemed to  increase with her pleasure.  Oral sex, even within marriage, did not produce offspring, and was disapproved by the church.  Sometimes when her pleasure was the most intense, she would push me away moments before her own climax, as if pleasure itself were a dishonor.  And I cannot recall a single occasion when she would allow herself to go for seconds.  For a long time our sex life was limited to once or twice a month, when it seemed to be directly tied to her monthly cycle and the peak of her desire.  Like any woman I have ever known, Barbara instinctively knew how to use sex as a means of expressing her disapproval by the mere act of withholding it.  She did this increasingly during the same time period when my exposure to interesting and dynamic women in the workplace was growing.  These were women who talked about sex frequently and without inhibitions, and who made it clear they were open and interested in men.  I became aware that they did a lot more in bed than Barbara and I did.  At one point, I decided to turn Barbara’s use of sex as a weapon back on her.  I feigned indifference to all things sexual for an extended period of time, and made no advances on her.  After about a month she noticed, and tried to initiate something herself.  I pretended disinterest, until she became visibly disturbed by it and brought it up in conversation.  Then I told her I wanted her to experience first-hand what sexual rejection by your spouse felt like.  It annoyed me immensely that Barbara seemed to equate the significant differences in our libido with superior female moral rectitude; that to want sex less was somehow tantamount to living life on a higher moral plane.

Ritual is an important part of life, and Barbara and I had some reassuring rituals in ours.  Every Sunday night we went to her parents home for dinner.  Besides a free meal that Barbara didn’t have to prepare, we always watched football games, or played ping pong in the basement, or played chess or word games such as Boggle or Scrabble.  I admired my father-in-law and tolerated my mother-in-law.  The evening was invariably comforting.  When I withdrew gradually from association with the local Witnesses, Oma (my mother-in-law) told Barbara that in view of the circumstances we were no longer welcome over on Sunday nights.  I know now that this turn of events made it easier to leave Barbara.  Never underestimate the influence for good or bad, of extended family.

My physical desire was growing, and many nights while out in my buildings I would masturbate into a handkerchief in the car going from one building to another.  The sexual repression of half a lifetime was bottled up inside, and the bottle was being shaken and pressure was building.  My first experience with infidelity came in the front seat of a beat-up pick-up truck with an ugly, aging female biker who looked like she’d clocked more miles than the truck.  I never knew her name.

During the course of work I heard lots of men talk about women and their own behavior with women, so I tended to accept what I heard as the norm, and I wanted to discover for myself what this norm was; I wanted to experience it first hand.  It never occurred to me that much of what I heard was braggadocio and fantasy.  Just as I heard and read a lot of comments about the relative sizes of mens’ cocks, and I used to wonder how men even knew anything about the size of another man’s cock (since a man’s cock size only becomes important when it is hard, I wondered when these men got to see another man’s erection—it wouldn’t be at a urinal because it is difficult if not impossible to urinate with an erection.), so now I wondered about all of these self-proclaimed sexual exploits by men I met and worked with.  So I assumed that as usual I was way behind the times and needed to catch up in this department.  I was sure this was just one more part of life that I had missed out on as a Jehovah’s Witness that I needed to learn about.  I had no idea how many different sexual partners men my age had had, but I was sure it was way, way more than my two.  Listening to other men talk, these sexual exploits were some kind of Shangri-la, something one needed to experience if one were going to fully live one’s life.  So with great trepidation and misgiving, I determined to press forward with my quest to determine what women were all about. 

The Cork Comes Out

The cork of the bottle came off when I met Diana (not her real name).

Diana was a secretary for one of my customers, and she was a pain in the ass for my managers.  It seemed that every other day this one office kept complaining about toilet paper.  Finally my Operations Manager said, ‘You handle her; I’ve run out of ideas.’  So I went to talk to her, and she invited me to lunch.  Several times.  I politely demurred.  Then late one morning I met her in the lobby of her office building, where I was waiting in vain for a business luncheon that had just cancelled, and she said again, why don’t we go to lunch?  So we did.  During lunch we astonished each other by discovering that we both were or had been, Jehovah’s Witnesses.  With profound differences.  I had been a true believer.  Diana was the child of true believers, but had always been more interested in boys and men than in devotions.  To make a long story shorter, we met for dinner and ended up in bed.  Diana was a terribly hungry lover, one of the highest compliments a woman can pay a man in bed.  We were both married, but we made love that first night all night long.  Diana was the first woman I ever experienced female ejaculation with, and it was a shock.  I thought she was peeing on my face in her excitement, except that it didn’t smell like urine and didn’t feel like urine.  It had very little viscosity, and she sprayed it all over my face when I went down on her.  Later I inquired of my physician about this phenomenon, and he said there was very little in the medical literature about it, but it was known that some women ejaculated when they were highly stimulated.  Well, it came as much of a shock to Diana as it did to me.  We were both soaked with sweat, and I could not help but be reminded of what Timothy Galfas had told me so many years before about ‘you really weren’t into it if you hadn’t broken a sweat.’.  I took her home shortly before dawn.  I dropped her off a block from her house so her husband would not see my car.  Her husband was a fringe Witness, a closet pothead, and an occasional wife beater.

We met regularly after that, and the sex never changed.  What Diana told me, however, horrified me.    I was not the only man she was regularly seeing, and her lovers were a Who’s Who of local businessmen and dignitaries.  She would meet with one high ranking banker to give him head.  According to her, they never had normal intercourse.  They used to drink champagne in bed and talk after he came in her mouth.  She was very gratified that a man of his stature in the community wanted to confide in her.  Diana was my first exposure to this particular phenomenon, a woman who finds second-hand validation by fucking someone she perceives as socially above her.  Like the fantasy of fucking a rock star, celebrity, or centerfold.  Although I was becoming a big fish in a much smaller pond, on occasion I was to become the beneficiary of such misguided attempts at self-esteem.

Diana was an exuberant, very high energy person who positively exuded sexual energy.  She did not dress particularly provocatively, but she could walk into the back of a packed classroom  and half the men in the room would turn around to look.  Although attractive, she was not exactly beautiful, but she definitely was a sexual tuning fork in motion. I learned from Diana that sexual attraction is all in the mind.  Diana was very outgoing and playful and made men laugh.  She played to her audience and it came naturally.  Diana genuinely liked men, and they knew it and responded to it.  I did.

She told me of a prior boss she had had in another job, and how he and one of his managers had raped her.  I listened in open-mouthed horror as she told me how he would force her to get down on her hands and knees behind his desk or in his private bathroom in his corner office to give him head.  As I in my fascination probed for yet more details, she told me how she was instructed to meet him and one of his friends at a  local restaurant for a business meeting, and how they got her drunk.  She got in a car with the friend, and they followed the boss’s car up the road to a motel.  Along the way she would bend down out of sight, so that the big boss in the car up ahead would look in his rearview mirror and think she was giving his subordinate a blow job in the car while he was driving.  When they got to the motel, she told me how one of them held her down on the carpet while the other fucked her, and she showed me the permanent scar on her back from the rug burn.  She had nothing good to say about the lout who had done all these things to her, and she spoke with great, violent passion and hatred at the mention of this man’s name.  I was so concerned that I arranged for her to take anti-rape classes at the local university, where she would learn how to physically protect herself from such assaults.  It was a very long time before I pieced together all the parts of the story and figured out that you cannot rape the willing, and that Diana had willingly, eagerly perhaps, placed herself in this situation, and only got pissed off when it turned out somewhat differently than the way she had anticipated.  I certainly don’t approve of what Diana’s employer did to her if it was coercive, but she undoubtedly had many possible alternatives along the way.  With her skills, age, and appearance, she could have found other employment.  Diana and I were a good match for each other at the time, for we both practiced similar forms of denial:  she pretended that all this was forced on her; I pretended to myself how horrible it all was when in fact it appealed to something very primal and urgent in me.  I wished I had been there.  Not to hurt anyone, but for the sheer thrill and excitement, the voyeurism and breaking of taboos.

Several years later, we got our chance to play this out, engineered of course, by me.  I had a friend who came to visit me.  I was in immediate post-divorce circumstances and living in my warehouse.  I told my friend that Diana and I wanted to do a threesome with him, and he agreed.  For the occasion I had bought Diana a $200 diaphanous nightgown.  She and my friend started fucking on the bed, and when I went to join them, much to my surprise Diana waved me away.  Several times.  I guess Diana didn’t like to be distracted in the middle of a performance.  I watched for another hour, got bored, and left and got a sandwich.  When I came back they were still at it.  I left again, and came back again.  Finally after four hours, Diana pulled herself off of my friend, threw herself on me, fucked me briefly, and tearily whispered in my ear, “Don’t you ever make me do that again.”  Uh-huh.  Right. All four hours of it.  With me not even there half the time.

By the way, my friend was a former Jehovah’s Witness also.  After this episode we all went out to dinner, and the two of them met downstairs outside the restrooms and made plans without me.  I had just learned an important truth about threesomes:  you cannot control or guarantee the outcome.  Something may develop between the third party, the invitee, and a member of the core couple.  My friend had told me before that it cost him a hundred bucks to get laid by his wife, after over a quarter century of marriage, counting the cost of taking her out to dinner, a bottle of wine to get her high and in the mood.  He told me she still would only get undressed in the dark in his presence.  So I could understand my friend’s thrall with the sexual encounter with Diana, but it was a long time before I forgave him for trying to get something on with her on his own thereafter.  I had considered my offer of a threesome a gift, not a gift subscription.

Diana was my long overdue sex education, and even with the negatives, I will be forever grateful to her for the discovery of passion; to think that I could have died never having known what was possible to a man or a woman lost in an act of intense passion; a passion that far surpassed lust, a passion that transported, a passion that was ecstasy, that left us both breathless and exhausted.  We dated, off and on, for six eventful, exotic years before our marriage of eight days duration.

Ending a Marriage

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.  I had an affair with Diana for about six months while I continued my life with Barbara at home.  By this time I kept a corporate apartment in another part of the state where we had a branch office, as this was cheaper than constantly paying for motel bills for myself and other managers who went there regularly for business.  One night when I got home about midnight and was undressing for bed, Barbara said to me “So when did you become such a selfish bastard?”  I didn’t reply, but simply started getting dressed again.  She said “Where are you going?” and I told her I was going to our corporate apartment, and she asked “When are you coming back?” and I replied, “I don’t know.”  I never returned to life with Barbara.  And Barbara was, unwittingly, far more right than she knew about the ‘selfish’ part.  For the first time in my life I was discovering I had a self and was just beginning on the awkward journey of what to do with that self.

I had told Barbara a year before that I thought our marriage was in trouble.  Her response was to get pregnant.  Barbara was highly regular with her periods, and we knew virtually the day each of our children were conceived, so predictable was Barbara (and so few and far between our acts of coitus).  So I will never believe that the conception of our fourth child was an accident.  We didn’t have accidents.  The night I walked out Barbara was five months pregnant. 

I didn’t plan it that way, and like many men before me, I would not have had the courage to do it if I had not had another woman, Diana,  to fall back on.  Once I knew Barbara was pregnant, I had figured that I would have to stick around for another two or three years till all the children, including the yet unborn Allison, got a little older.  But once I walked out that door I simply couldn’t bring myself to go back.  Barbara was a very strong woman, and very controlling, and I was very afraid that if I went back I would succumb to her control and never, ever leave.  And I could not envision continuing life as it was.  I knew men who had done this, and they kept their head down for the rest of their lives, and hated both their spouse and themselves.  I was afraid I could be one of them.  I could not accept these terms for my existence.

The good news is that Barbara gave birth to our fourth healthy child, Allison.  Allison is someone you could never regret having brought into the world.  However she arrived, thank God she did!  She is full of life, or as my mother would say, full of piss and vinegar.  She throws herself at life with a willfulness and passion that is invigorating.  With our three prior children, we had done the LaMaze thing, and I had participated in the birth, cutting the placenta and holding the newborn shortly after birth, etc.  With Allison I wasn’t even there.  Someone called my bookkeeper when we were at lunch 180 miles away to tell me Allison had been born.  I saw her for the first time a couple days later when Barbara grudgingly agreed to let me visit in the hospital.

Thus began a two-year period that was the nadir of my life.  My largest business client bought up a number of my other customers, so that I ended up with a very large customer that accounted for 75% of my cash flow.   I ended up with a boss I had never met who worked several states away, and he promptly fired my company with 30 days notice.   I felt that I had lost my kids, I was on the edge of bankruptcy, and for the first time in my life I was feeling suicidal.   Barbara was hurt and angry and kept the divorce going for a year and a half more looking for a secret pot of gold that she knew wasn’t there, and I was looking into the abyss and finding nothing looking back at me.  It was my friend Perry who came to my rescue.  He reminded me that there is no debtors prison anymore, that my children would probably love me anyway, and that if everything fell apart I could come live with him and lick my wounds.  He told me that incredibly, the sun would still come up the next morning.  And he was right–it did.  It is good to have a friend like that when virtually everything in your life seems to be going south at the same time.

During the first year of our separation I sent money regularly to Barbara to use for the kids.  She never filed for child support and neither of us filed for divorce.  Barbara thought I would come back.  She found out about Diana, of course, and was probably gratified at some level that there was another woman involved.  I discovered then, and have had validated repeatedly since then, that cuckolded spouses, both men and women,  develop a certain smug satisfaction in their spouse’s infidelity in that it affirms their victim status and proves their own virtuousness.  I do not agree.  One’s suffering does not prove one’s righteousness.  Sometimes we induce our own suffering.  Making monuments of pain and suffering, and by implication, one’s sainthood and victim status often flies in the face of the brutal fact that there is ample evidence of the death of a relationship long before the infidelity which caps it.  Ignoring this is often an effort at denial and an effort to evade reality that is, at the moment at least, too painful to contemplate.  But in our respective communities, it is much easier to say my spouse left me for another man/woman (the scoundrel) (that bitch) than it is to say, for example, that my spouse left me because s/he doesn’t want to share the rest of his/her life with me or because s/he was bored, or . . . whatever.  Whatever your situation is, no matter how desperate, you can be certain that thousands, millions,  or more have been there before you and felt exactly the same things, thought exactly the same things.

My major emotional problem with my divorce was the issue of guilt.  I also felt bad because I could not justify my having left due to some overriding and socially acceptable cause, such as infidelity.  Barbara was not unfaithful.  I couldn’t excuse my behavior by saying she was controlling or a nag.  Everybody says that about their wife.  The truth of the matter was that I had left because I was unhappy being there and didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with more of the same.  The unmentionable truth was that I left for totally selfish reasons.  Barbara was not a bad mother, or a danger to me.  She was not lazy or slothful.  She was not insipid or stupid.  I just didn’t like her any more, and didn’t like going home.  I was bored, and intensely curious about women in general.  Every value I had ever been taught told me that this was wrong, and that I should endure and sacrifice, if not for Barbara, then at the very least for the kids.  I already felt that I was something like a beast of burden in that my role was to provide for others, and I found the thought of doing nothing but this for the rest of my life as simply unbearable.  When I was home I largely felt like a spectator on the sidelines, and that once I had provided the necessities I was expendable and irrelevant.  You just assume that if you do the right thing and follow the rules, you should be happy.  Except that I wasn’t.

By this time I had become very active in the trade association for our industry, and I traveled and spoke widely at different functions.  At one of these in Washington, D.C., I went out one night with a group of contractors from different parts of the country, and we went to Blues Jazz Alley in Georgetown.  Everyone was a little buzzed and feeling no pain, and a female contractor who was also a good friend of mine shouted into my ear above the din of the crowd “Have you ever read Atlas Shrugged?”  Always one to follow a suggestion for a good read, I later bought and read the Ayn Rand novel.  I couldn’t put it down, and for the first time in my entire life I got a grasp of the single moral purpose of life:  life itself, my life.  To think that the purpose of my life was not to sacrifice for everyone, or anyone,  else, and vice versa, that the purpose of everyone else’s life was not to sacrifice for me, was enormously liberating.  It meant that I did not have to sacrifice my life for Barbara in order to validate myself as moral, as good, as worthy.  It meant that I could seek out my own happiness as a value in and of itself, without feeling guilty about it.  I felt as if the scales had just fallen from my eyes, and I could understand the awful truth of everything I had lived and experienced up to that point:  that everyone was living a terrible, enslaving lie; that they could not feel good about themselves if what they were doing was for themselves; that only service to others was moral.  This was why my family always had to sneak our pleasures, and why we substituted as pleasure the smugness that the pain of our sacrifices exceeded that of our neighbors and friends, thereby making us more worthy and moral.  I understood that this was the reason business and businessmen were always morally suspect in the public’s eye, because business was one of the few arenas of human endeavor that made little or no pretense at altruistic purposes; profit, selfish profit was the goal.  (This was truer before the days when businessmen bowed to cultural pressures and began making feeble attempts at cloaking their profit motives with altruistic and therefore more socially acceptable purposes such as “creating employment”.) 

For the first time in my life I felt free of moral condemnation; that I was not morally obligated to live my life in the service to others, at the mercy of their whims, judgments, and thinking.  I was exhausted from half a lifetime of trying to bow my head and subordinate my thinking to that of others, struggling to suppress my own consciousness in deference to theirs.  Suddenly I realized that my leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses was one of my life’s greatest moral achievements, and that my separation from Barbara was a natural and appropriate  consequence.  It must be hard or even impossible for some to accept these statements as anything other than a very weak argument to justify my desire to screw around.  And that is what I wanted to do, even though at the time I would have been unable to admit or even consciously articulate such a thought.  I was breaking through the walls of sexual repression for the first time, and I entered adolescence in my early thirties with great force, almost violently.  The great achievement of a cult background is that you learn to take over the repression initiated by the group and eventually police your own behavior.  When those psychological walls come tumbling down, you are like a country that has endured a dictatorship for many years and is suddenly liberated.  Such a country is likely to self-destruct, implode on itself, at least for a period of time.  I fear I do a disservice to the author of Atlas Shrugged when I say that it was this book that freed me.  I was experiencing powerful forces within me, compelling me towards freedom, even as I desperately sought some form of moral legitimacy for my behavior. 

I began life over again in that defining moment.  I also knew that I was going to have to re-examine every premise I held, about anything, in the light of this new knowledge, in order to determine what the new Me accepted or rejected.  Reconstruction was going to take time, possibly a lot of it.

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.” 

In the early days in this new city, we attempted to stick with our anticipated wage rates, although such were no longer realistic.  The only people who were responding to our Want Ads in the newspaper were the dregs that no one else wanted.  You tend to lower your standards when you are desperate for warm bodies.  We used to joke during this period about subjecting our applicants to the Foggy Mirror Test:  hold a mirror up to their mouth and ask them to breathe on it.  If it fogs up, they’re hired.  Of course, you pay quite a price when you hire these people.  In one city, we had a contract to clean a 22-story office building, and one night when I walked in about 5:30, my supervisor was standing in the lobby, freaking out, because not one of her nineteen employees had shown up.  I took off my suit jacket and tie, and my supervisor and I spent the next 14 hours removing the trash from the trash baskets in that building and restocking the paper supplies in the restrooms.  I remember we hauled out 112 large bags of trash between the two of us.  We finished up as the tenants started pouring in the next morning.

I had been thrilled with all of our new business in this city.  I was thrilled with the rising numbers of our revenues and employees.  I had felt a rush of pleasure at our successes.  It came as a stab of pain when I realized we were like the man selling millions of oranges, and losing 1/4 cent on each orange, but he was going to make it up in volume.  Another lesson learned:  It’s the money left on the table when all the dealing’s done that matters.  Don’t get too impressed with the wrong numbers.

At the very inception of the business, I had worn all the hats:  cleaner, supervisor, sales rep, buyer, management, bookkeeping, secretary, you name it, I did it all.  Little by little as the enterprise grew I had to take off more and more of these hats.  One of the last hats to come off was that of sales rep.  This was partly because as the founder and organizer of the enterprise, I was its best promoter, and also because I loved doing it.  Eventually though, even that hat had to come off, and it was time to find a sales rep.  As always, I looked around at my existing employees to see if there was anyone with potential sales ability.  I thought I had my answer in an employee we’ll call Peggy (not her real name).  She had been with me for several years, as cleaner and then as supervisor.  I spent several months organizing our sales effort for someone other than myself, and then teaching her, taking her with me, teaching her how to put the numbers together, etc.  Peggy worked partly in our home office territory, and partly in this new city where we weren’t doing too well.  I needed for her to find new business to replace some of our existing business we were sure to lose, and needed to lose if we couldn’t negotiate new, and higher prices to reflect the rising cost of labor.

Peggy faithfully turned in her reports, and developed close relationships with our existing clients, which was important because she would need them as references in order to get new clients.  She did this quite well, in fact much more so than I ever expected.  She frequented our clients in their homes socially and got to know their families.  Peggy was attractive but not beautiful.  She was married and had kids at home.

One day Peggy called to say she had been to the hospital because she had been in an automobile accident.  Someone had rear-ended her while she was stopped at a traffic light.  A short time later, Peggy  showed up with a neck brace on and informed me the small truck that had hit her was owned by a company, and she had found a lawyer and was suing this company for a million dollars.  She assured me she was not filing a Worker’s Compensation claim, which would have damaged our company’s rating and raised our costs.  Over the course of the next few months, she continued to ask me to assign her exclusively to the city 170 miles from where she lived, and I continued to tell her I couldn’t financially justify doing that, since we had territories to consider much closer to home.  Finally one day Peggy  asks me to go to lunch with her, and she shows me a photograph of her and the contact person for one of our largest clients, a middle-aged married man, both of them partially clothed in a bedroom.   She then tells me she has been having an affair with this man for some time, and this was the reason why she continued to ask for reassignment to the large city, for this would provide business “cover” with her husband as to where she was for such extended periods of time, and why.  So she was asking for my complicity, not for business reasons, but a very personal one.

A few days later I declined her request.  She promptly filed a Workers Compensation claim.  Eventually I met with her new boyfriend, my client.  We met in a restaurant, and he asked if I had any tape recorders on me.  I told him no, and then he said he was sorry Peggy  had ever told me about their affair and put me in the middle of it.  He said he was acutely uncomfortable doing business with me because if I reported him to his boss, he could lose his job over this.  He said he would honor my existing contracts, but when they expired he would not renew them.  In exchange for this, he asked me to promise I would not squeal on him.  I agreed, but I felt that I had been fucked and not even kissed.  A few months later he broke his word and canceled our business, so I went to his boss, a major player in a Fortune Five Hundred company, and handed him my paperwork.  He sat there for an hour and a half reading it all, looked up and asked me two questions:“One of our officers has compromised the corporation.  What do you want me to do about it?”

In my judgment, he and his subordinate were tight, and apart from this behavior his subordinate was competent and would not easily be replaced.  I therefore responded to this man that in my opinion if I requested disciplinary action, I would create resentments at several levels in my client’s organization which would in time cost me the loss of the business anyway.  So I was not requesting any action be taken, and I was going to terminate my contract.  I was being a realist about the matter, but I wanted ”the boss” to know the real reasons I was leaving, and that it was not due to performance problems on my organization’s part.  Obviously there was no way his subordinate was going to tell the truth about why a reliable contractor was walking away from valuable business.  The subordinate was going to have to fabricate a cover story, and the cover story would not be favorable to us.

The second thing this executive wanted to know was, ‘Had I banged Peggy too?’ I hadn’t.  I just thought it was interesting that he asked.  I hadn’t expected that.

So we lost the business, about $200,000 per year.  For a long time I never heard from Peggy.  Then one day she called to tell me that in the judgment of her attorney, she was going to need  a strong character reference from me as her last employer of record in order to successfully conclude her lawsuit.  I asked her who was representing the defendant, and she told me.  A short while later, I went to see the defense attorneys, and seated around their conference table, told them Christmas was about to come early for them. 

I met with Peggy, armed with a hidden microphone and small recorder.  We had a long chat in which she told me many details of her lawsuit and her personal life.  She told me her lawsuit included $50,000 for compensation for loss of consortium with her husband due to the accident.  It didn’t seem to occur to her as significant at all that the accident had not interfered with loss of consortium with her lover.  She spilled her guts, and I took the tape to the defendent’s law firm, they transcribed it, and presented the transcription to Peggy and her attorney.  The parties settled quickly out of court for an undisclosed amount that I was informed may have covered her “medical expenses.”

After Peggy was gone, I put the sales hat back on myself and started making prospect calls.  One prospect told me about the last time Peggy had called on him, wearing a very short skirt with a deep slit on the side.  He said Peggy spread her legs suggestively and asked what she had to do to get the contract for his building.  She then told him anything he saw that he wanted was his for the asking. At the time I learned of these developments, I remember being surprised.  The world has changed a lot since then, and it takes a lot more to shock me these days.  And let’s face it, sex for resources is one of the oldest games known to the human species.  Peggy hardly invented that behavior.

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.

Sometimes it took considerable creativity and persistence to win a potential client’s business.  At one point in my business life I had lost a lot of business, was in a world of hurt, and knew I needed to close a significant sale soon or file bankruptcy.  I had been working on this one contract for a year and a half, sending letters, leaving messages, and being generally ignored.  Suddenly one day I got a phone call, they expressed a desire to visit some of my existing clients and to my office.  They wanted to make sure I was big enough to handle their business (the contract would ultimately be worth about $30,000 to $50,000 per month.)  At the time my whole business was smaller than their contract, but I knew I couldn’t let them know that.  I was running my business from my century-house, an unrestored, dilapidated place badly in need of repair.  My office was in the basement of this house, where the ancient floor had ugly yellow linoleum and sloped about ten inches from one side of the house to the other.  I had painted the inside walls of this basement with whitewash, and I had a few filing cabinets and some ugly desks there, and one part-time secretary.  Upstairs I had converted a two-car garage into a living room, with two windows facing the driveway.

On the morning the prospective client was due to arrive, I hired four white, unlettered vans, and I hired four temporary laborers.  I brought them to my property an hour early, told them to back up the vans to an old barn at the back of my driveway that was filled with a lot of junk, and told them to load up some of this junk onto each van, drive around anywhere for ten minutes, and then return to the barn, unload the junk, reload the same junk, and drive around again.  I told them to do this until I told them to stop.  When the prospective client’s managers arrived, the first thing they remarked about was how modest my office was.  I told them I could easily have something more substantial to look at, but of course it would be my clients who would have to pay for it.  They said Good Point!  While they were partaking of coffee and pastries from a table strategically placed by the windows of my living room, they could not help but look out the window and notice the continual stream of white van traffic in and out of my driveway and all the loading and unloading going on.  They commented that I “had one hell of an operation” out there.  We spent a couple hours touring a small account I had nearby, and they went home satisfied that they had found the right supplier for their company.  And they had.  We provided a lengthy list of services to their company for years, earning several million dollars from them in the process.

Working at Watchtower headquarters my exposure to the IRS had been the absolute minimal.  Having virtually no income and no expenses, my tax returns were done for me and were exceedingly brief.  So my first real experience with the IRS came many years later, when my bookkeeper quit unexpectedly.  When I cleaned out her desk, I noticed a pack of unopened envelopes held together with a rubber band.  They were all from the IRS, and when I opened them I discovered to my dismay that we had not paid payroll taxes for quite a few months, the IRS had discovered this and was giving us about ten days to fork over about $140,000 or they would shut us down.  With my heart in my mouth, I looked up the IRS in the phone book, found their address, and went down there for a meeting with destiny.  Eventually I was assigned an agent, an older woman who wore the most unseemly broad-brimmed hats imaginable, contraptions that vaguely resembled a Mexican sombrero.  She peered out at me from the shadows of her hat and asked what I owed.  I told her what I thought, and she agreed.  Then she asked me if I was making money.  I said no, for that was about the time we were losing money on large contracts due to a shortage of labor.  She asked if I could change that.  I said I thought so.  Then she told me I was the smallest of her caseload, and I needed to go out and make a lot of money and then come back to see her in six months.  I thought, well, that was nice of her.  So that’s what I did.  I came back in six months and learned that she had retired.  My case then got caught in a jurisdictional dispute between two IRS districts, and by the time they settled their argument, I had paid them off.  Of my $140,000 bill, over $30,000 of it was in penalties.  I wrote the IRS a 100-page letter complete with a table of contents and appendix requesting abatement of the penalties, and in fact they did cancel about $19,000 worth of penalties.  I wondered at the time if they ever actually read my 100-page letter, or gave me the abatement just so they wouldn’t have to.  I wasn’t about to ask however.

As the founder of a company takes off the various hats he wore at the outset of the enterprise, it becomes imperative to focus on staff development, that is, developing depth on the management bench.  If you neglect this aspect of growth, it gets really lonely on that bench, talking to yourself all the time.  It was largely due to this loneliness, and my desire to develop mentor relationships with those who could help me, I developed a Board of Directors to advise me.  One of the Board members was a faculty member of a local Vocational School in charge of their Adult Education program.  After several years on my Board and impressed with our growth as a company, he volunteered to take  a one-year sabbatical from the school if I would hire him on as Vice President of Operations for that one year at a matching salary.  I agreed, for I knew I desperately needed help at the top.

We both knew within a couple months that this whole thing was a bad idea.  I remember visiting a former client with my friend to do an exit interview, i.e. find out why we had lost their business and where we had failed.  The client explained in embarrassing detail all of our shortcomings.  As we left the place, my friend and V.P. of Operations commented “I could have saved that account, but I don’t have to take that from anybody.”  My poor friend who taught Business Education for budding entrepreneurs at the local school was getting his first exposure to free markets and discovered he didn’t find the sovereignty of the consumer to his taste.  Belatedly, I remembered comments he had made before about the advantages of tenure at his school.  He had even bragged on one occasion that he ‘would have to rape one of the students on video camera to get fired.’  I remember having laughed at his remark, not taking him seriously.  I should have.  He left my company and went back to education, from which he subsequently retired.

That was not my only attempt to look for academic qualifications for senior management staff.  On another occasion I hired a young Ghanian immigrant who had just recently graduated with a phD in Staff Development from a large university.  I thought, ‘Perfect’, just what we need, only to discover that this guy’s idea of staff development was to study the issues for a few years and then write a scholarly paper about it.  He was incapable of organizing three men in a closet, and a sense of urgency was a totally foreign concept for him.  I’m sure he is presently in charge of some large governmental agency back in his native Ghana, and a frequent attendee at large international conferences addressing global issues.

After having been in business for well over a quarter century, it is still hard for me to handle a lawsuit with equanimity.  After all, I work very hard at doing the right thing, more so, it seems to me than most.  So I take it very personally when I get sued, because a lawsuit in business almost always implies some form of willful negligence or heedless disregard for others, something I have never been guilty of.

It seems to me that plaintiff’s attorneys are modern pirates looking for wealth to plunder.  Like politicians, they masquerade as altruists, doing all “for others” and for “society”.  It is an inversion of values when those who produce are pronounced greedy and selfish, and those who confiscate and plunder are selfless and protectors of the unfortunate.  Our tolerance for these pirates is a subject of scorn in much of Western Europe.

My most extreme lawsuit was when I was sued for $19,000,000.  I was one of six co-defendents, and there were about a dozen high-powered lawyers involved in the defense, and one rather sleazy plaintiff’s attorney.  I say sleazy because it became apparent very early in the discovery process that he had few facts and was engaged in a lot of fishing and name calling.  I thought he was lazy, and his shoes always needed shined.  He was always late, and he always looked like he had slept in his clothes the night before.  When we met during the process called “Deposition”, he would ask a question, and you would hear the word “Objection!” echo around the long table a dozen times as each defense attorney had to voice his own version of the word for the record.  When it came time to discuss “settlement”, which is what they call the process whereby they shake down the insurance companies who are paying the exorbitant fees of all the defense attorneys, the defense attorneys simply discussed behind closed doors what the least amount they could offer that would make this guy (the plaintiff’s attorney) go away.  The conversation, as usual, had nothing to do with justice or injury or right and wrong.  As a matter of fact, the plaintiffs didn’t even get discussed.  It was assumed by all that the case was totally without merit, even though it had dragged on procedurally in the courts for five or six years, all of which worked in the favor of the plaintiff’s attorney, for the longer it dragged on, the higher the expenses for the defense and the greater the desire of the insurance companies to settle.  Of course the defendents’ (including me) attorneys settled, and we, the defendents, could not be told what the amounts were.  I added up the attorneys’ fees for just one deposition session, and the total came to more than $10,000 for a few short hours.  My total insurance coverage at the time was $300,000 so this whole case had a surreal aspect to it for me, because no matter how many zeroes you added after $300,000, the result was the same:  I was broke and dead in the water if I lost.  And by that time in my business life, I was fully aware that winning and losing had little to do with right and wrong.  It is a strange feeling knowing that whether or not you keep your home and your ability to support your family lies in the hands of some stranger, an attorney you don’t know, hired by your insurance company, to defend you against charges you can’t believe you’re hearing, for amounts that defy comprehension.  Objection, objection, objection, objection. . .

After almost ten years of being in business, after innumerable setbacks and mistakes, after opening up my first major branch office in another city, with over a hundred employees and inadequate and uncommitted management talent spread too thin, I was losing more money than I ever dreamed possible, and cash flow was a nightmare.  I owed the IRS money, payroll deposit money, and they will take your firstborn child for that offense.  This was 1985 and all the new computers and software we had just purchased weren’t working, and I wasn’t getting the accurate, timely reports needed to turn things around.  It was scary, and my wife, who had been my bookkeeper for years, decided this would be a good time to bail out and be a full-time mother.  The woman I hired as her replacement left to start her own cleaning business and compete with us.  And yes, it was right about then that the local Circuit Overseer decided to have a serious talk with me about my not devoting enough time to the door-to-door canvassing required of all Jehovah’s Witnesses.  He was particularly disturbed because I had recently been  asked by Bethel headquarters staff to give a half hour presentation to about 20,000 attendees at a recent convention at the Richfield (Cleveland) Coliseum, and this while devoting less than ten hours per month in the door-to-door evangelizing activity.  Brother Callai was a man of average intelligence who probably was promoted to Circuit Overseer as a reward for his dogged adherence to policy.  I’m sure he was more than a little annoyed by my prominence locally in spite of my abysmally poor performance evangelically.  I was still an Elder in the local congregation, so he pointed out to me that unless my numbers improved dramatically and quickly, he would recommend my removal as an Elder.

I thought about this for a few days, and then I approached another elder within Brother Callai’s  circuit and asked him to join me as a witness (without a capital “W”) in a meeting with Callai.   At the meeting I told Callai that we must not be reading from the same textbook (meaning The Bible), because the copy I had said that all that God required from his servants was “wholesouled devotion”, meaning the best your soul was capable of in your given circumstances.  I explained what I had been dealing with in the business world, and the setbacks incurred trying to earn a living, and I asked him by what authority he had the right to demand of me more than God did.  Poor Brother Callai was mortified, and he insisted on us joining him in prayer while he prayed for God’s forgiveness, and mine, for his error.  Walking out of that meeting I knew I would never knock on another door as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses again.  I had no feelings about it whatsoever, no anger, no disgust, no annoyance.  No nothing.  Just total indifference.  I was done.  I had been praying for many years to someone who either wasn’t there or wasn’t listening; I had been defending doctrines I didn’t believe and policies I couldn’t practice, I had been rewriting speeches of church leaders to make them palatable and comprehensible to the rank and file.  I couldn’t do it anymore, none of it.  I was done pretending.  I was no longer a believer.  I wasn’t sure what exactly I was, other than a businessman in a lot of trouble.

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.

Some of my most painful business lessons came from the legal system.  I was unaware that a large group of under-employed attorneys had invented a brand new field of litigation that came to be known as contract employment versus employment-at-will.  The theory apparently went something like this:  if an employer said something to an employee that could even vaguely be construed as an assurance of continued employment, it could be considered a binding verbal contract.  Let’s say, one day during a discussion with an employee that you, as the employer say something intended to show appreciation and encouragement for recent good work on their part such as “Keep up the good work.  You have a real future here”, and then let’s say that a few months later their attitude changes and their work goes south and you end up terminating their employment; they could now sue you for termination without just cause, because implied in your encouraging verbal statement months before was a guarantee of some sort of continued employement.  From that point on, in the eyes of the law, you could only discharge an employee for “just cause”.  Well , how hard can that be?  Who would want to terminate someone for an unjust cause?  The problem is, “for just cause” in the eyes of whom?  Of course it was appropriate in your mind to discharge them; you were probably fed up with their behavior, or taking a lot of grief from them and spending 80% of your time trying to correct them and taking heat from both your boss and the customer to get the situation fixed.  But the problem is, their discharge is never  for “just cause” in their own eyes.  When was the last time you heard someone say, ‘I got fired today, and by God, I deserved it.’  So now, under this concept of implied employment contract, this discharged employee can challenge his discharge in court, and you are obliged to defend your decision to let him go.  To a jury.  What if you get a jury that buys into the Hollywood stereotype that businessmen are greedy and corrupt and out to get the little guy?  You may successfully defend yourself, but it’s going to cost you money, probably a lot of it, and the plaintiff’s attorney knows that.  So he launches a paper battle that runs up the bill for the defense.  At some point the insurance company will capitulate and pay off, just to contain their spiraling legal costs.

I learned that it was dangerous to tell new employees they were on a thirty-day probation period at the beginning of their employment, because in the eyes of developing case law, a probationary period ending implied some sort of permanent status beginning.  In the absence of written policy to the contrary, it was wide open to interpretation what the exact nature of that permanent status was, but it came to be interpreted that you, as an employer, could not simply tell an employee you didn’t want to work with them any more, but you were now legally obliged to justify, in a manner that would satisfy a jury in worst-case scenario, what the reasons were for ‘letting them go.’

Such case law is an example of how ideas invade a culture by stealth, like a virus.  At the beginning such concepts are perceived as “extreme” but over time they become the norm.  Over time the employment arrangement ceases to be two parties trading with each other, and employment becomes a “right”, an entitlement, and if the employer as the Buyer no longer finds it in his best interests to continue to buy from, and pay for, the services of a particular employee, he has to defend his actions before a third party, because the act of termination is now seen as an infringement of the “rights” of the employee as the “injured party”.  Rarely however, does an employee have any such obligation to defend their decision to leave employment.  Unless there is a written employment contract stating otherwise, individual employees are free to quit selling their services to an employer, for any reason whatsoever, or for no reason.

When you were terminating an employee for a behavioral problem, it was almost always simpler than it was when terminating them for poor job performance.  If someone got in a fight at work with another employee, it didn’t require a lot of explanation why you asked them to leave.  They always knew it was coming.  But when it came to not being satisfied with their performance, it quickly became a lot more complicated.

As my embryonic organization began to grow and take form, I took my best cleaners and promoted them to supervisors.  I, and they, quickly learned that labor and supervision are very different kinds of work.  When you are promoted to supervision, you tend to lose some friends in the workplace, and you are no longer one of ‘the gang’.  I also learned that the longest mile in the world is from the mind to the muscle, and that people with a lifetime labor orientation often have great difficulty making the transition to being a supervisor.  Their initial solution to almost every problem is usually a knee-jerk effort to work their way out of the problem, with physical work, a solution that always worked for them before.  The problem with that is that as the organization grows, you can only work your way (physically) out of so many situations before you have run out of both time and energy.  When you have run out of you, you have run out of future.   Even when you are exhausted by your endeavors, it still seems easier to just work harder and harder, rather than think your way out of a problem, and by multiplying yourself through other people.  Jumping in and rolling up your sleeves and doing the job yourself always seemed to you before to be the shortest line between two points. 

Also supervision of necessity involves at times trying to get people to do what they don’t want to do.  It can be as simple as trying to stop your cleaners from yanking on vacuum cleaner cords because they are too lazy or rushed to go over to the wall plug and pull it out properly.  By yanking on the cord, they break off the third ‘ground’ prong, requiring a replacement of the plug, and place themselves at risk of electric shock by continuing to use a piece of now damaged equipment because they are in no hurry to tell their supervisor that they damaged it.

Since most of my cleaners were women, most of my supervisors were women promoted from the ranks.  Most of them were mothers, and they invariably tended to supervise in exactly the same manner as they had parented:  endless, usually  fruitless repetition, until they got mad and raised their voice with the subordinate, out of sheer frustration.  They would frequently make threats of dire consequences if the subordinate did not shape up, but they rarely carried out their threats.  I called this the “Baby-sitting Theory of Management” or Mom-ism.    Eventually, when under pressure from above to correct a situation, they–you guessed it–rolled up their sleeves and did the job themselves.  “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”  Well, it might work with a kid or two, but when you are responsible for dozens of employees, it quickly becomes evident there aren’t enough hours in a day to “pick up” after them all; problems multiply, quality deteriorates, and the overworked supervisor starts to burn out.  It is at this point that they either learn to manage, or drop out.

A problem develops when a supervisor’s ego is heavily involved with his/her position and status in the organization, particularly when they have been promoted to their level of incompetence and you have to do something about it.  In a rapidly growing organization, it is frequently possible for a manager’s job to outstrip the manager’s ability to keep up with it.   This is a classical performance problem.  Men and women may handle this situation differently, but in my company, most of my managers and supervisors were women, because they were promoted from the ranks of the women who came into my business as cleaners. When this lead person is a woman, you can expect to see what I call “Queen of the Herd” syndrome.  I gave it this name from the behavior of cows.  Every herd of cows selects a member of the herd to be queen, and it is this same cow that leads the herd out to pasture in the morning, and back to the barn at night.  When the Queen eventually gets deposed by a younger, up-and-coming cow, she gets neurotic and stops giving milk.  That’s when she goes to the butcher.  Humans behave similarly, especially in the cleaning business, which is labor-intensive, and is composed of mostly women.  Status within a group, any group, is extremely important to most people.

I had such a situation with a young lady who had been with me a number of years.  She had started as a cleaner with me when I was tiny, and due to very hard work eventually ended up as an Operations Manager with half a dozen supervisors reporting to her over an area of over a hundred miles.  She was still baby-sitting rather than managing, and was either unwilling or unable to make the tough people decisions that management requires.  She did not hold her people accountable for results.   Management is bloody and is no place for wimps.  When you talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk, your subordinates figure this out, just like any teenager does.  They keep you on their radar screen, but don’t really bestir themselves until they know they have to.  She had become too close personally to her subordinates, and had lost whatever objectivity she might once have had.  Quality problems and customer complaints were proliferating, and it was clear to me that while she thought she deserved kudos for being exhausted from putting out all the fires, she was in fact, my arsonist.  I met with her and told her I wanted to divide her job in half, that there would be no loss of pay or benefits; that we were growing, and that the job had become too big for one person.  She could not accept this, and the perceived loss of status that this change would entail.  I told her the alternative was to continue as we had been, but if the business issues did not turn around, I would have to terminate her employment.  She would not accept my suggested alternative, things did not improve, and I terminated her.

She apparently persuaded her supervisors, who were also her friends, to walk out with her, and for one horrible night we had massive confusion and even a few poor cleaners locked into their customer’s buildings.  During the next few months she began a telephone campaign to my cleaners and customers, neither of whom wanted to be involved.  Finally, she sued me for wrongful termination.

Our small company, now about one hundred strong, ended up hiring a very high-priced labor law firm out of Washington, D.C. to handle our case.  At the time this type of lawsuit was rather unusual.  We ended up paying about $15,000 in legal fees to defend ourselves, and the former supervisor finally dropped her suit when we began asking too many questions about her past dealings with Welfare.  At the time we were doing almost $1 million in business a year, with a 3% profit margin before taxes, so defending ourselves in this lawsuit wiped out about one half the profits earned by the entire company for a full year.

The business lesson I learned is that people’s ego and self-esteem and self-image can become all wrapped up in their job status, and when this happens they are far more traumatized by a change in their job status or the loss of their job.  They can be very vindictive, highly emotional, and unpredictable in their behavior.  They can even be violent and physically endanger others.

I learned even more from another, rather similar lawsuit that came along later, when another supervisor we had discharged also sued us for wrongful discharge.  It eventually went to trial, and on the day of the trial the jury was selected, and I am seated in a small room with my lawyer, who informs me the judge wants me to settle with the complainant.  The judge suggested we offer the plaintiff $3000.  My attorney explained to me that we would spend more than that per day in the trial, which would probably last three days.  I was outraged and said no, I didn’t want to settle for any amount because neither I nor my company had done anything wrong.  My attorney explained that it was a matter of economics, not of justice.  I said I’d rather spend the money.   I was offended by the whole issue.  I thought it clearly was a matter of extortion.  Well, my attorney took my response back to the judge, and when he came back said the judge was not happy with my decision and was not accepting it.  He “strongly encouraged” me to rethink it.  I knew my arm was being twisted, and I also knew that if I refused to go along with the judge, he would find ways to punish us in the courtroom; my attorney made it clear there was no reasonable alternative, so I agreed.  He went back to the judge, and a few moments later reappeared, said the matter was handled, and now we would proceed to the trial!  I said What!!!  He explained the judge was up for reelection, there were twelve jurors who were prospective voters out there in the courtroom, and the judge wanted to put on a good show for them.  So court would convene, the jurors would be given their instructions, there would be a brief recess, and then the judge would inform the jurors that a settlement had been reached and the case was over.  He wanted to put on a dog-and-pony show for the jurors before we left.  And that is what he did.

Once we had a contract with a racetrack.  We were making money and we thought we had a good track record (no pun intended) with the client.  We never actually met the owner(s), but their representatives that we did do business with sometimes left the impression of being sleazy.  One day we got a very brief, and totally unexpected letter from the General Manager of the racetrack canceling our contract.  When I followed up with the client, I asked them who they were going to hire to replace us, he gave me a name of a competitor I had never heard of before.  Within a day or so, one of my managers who oversaw our operations at the racetrack resigned from our company.  I thought this was quite a coincidence, and after a little investigation found out my manager had formed his own company and had cut his own deal with the customer to replace us.  The only problem was that we had a written non-compete employment contract with our manager prohibiting him from doing exactly this.  Our contract with our client also prohibited them from doing this.  Both of these contracts had been entered into voluntarily.  Since the racetrack was in another state, I was going to have to hire an attorney from that state.  I called the state attorney referral service, and as luck would have it, we were referred to an attorney who had retired a couple years before as the State Racing Commissioner.  This guy knew the racing business in his state inside out!!

When I went to see him, we had a conversation I will never forget.  He said to me, “So what’s your complaint, Johnny?”  I told him.  He gets up from behind his desk, walks over and closes the door to his office, goes back to his chair, and says:  “Let me tell you about racing in the good ol’ state of —.  You can have anything you want at the racetrack.  If you want drugs, you can get it at the track.  If you want sex, you can get it at the track.  If you want to play some numbers, you can get it at the track.  If you want someone murdered, you can get it at the track.  All it takes is money.  Now you say you want justice.  For $2000, I’ll see to it by 4 p.m. this afternoon that the judge signs an order forbidding your manager from working at the racetrack, and if he does, he’ll be thrown in jail.  For $5,000, your manager will never work at the track again as long as he lives.  And for $10,000 I’ll get you your contract back.  Now, how much justice can you afford today?”

I told him I could afford $2000, and he kept his promise.  By a few minutes after four that afternoon, I had an order signed by the judge prohibiting my former manager from working at the track for another six months, the time period specified in my contract with him.  I couldn’t afford the $10,000 to get the contract back, and I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to have murdered.  When I went back to see the General Manager of the racetrack (who was also the Law Director of a nearby city) and presented a copy of the judge’s orders to him, he said, “All you’ve done is prevented me from doing business with who I want to do business with.  That won’t get you your contract back.”  And of course, he was right. 

I had just learned another great truth of free enterprise:  no contract will ever keep a customer if they no longer want to do business with you.  I had also begun to learn another important point:  Business trades hands for lots of reasons.  I was in the janitorial business, a very mature industry, a commodity business.  We always had so many competitors that it was easy for our clients to replace us.  So generally our clients wanted to do business with their buddies and often their own ethnic groups.  I was learning that you do business with individuals, not companies, and they wanted to deal on a regular basis with people at their own level, from similar backgrounds, someone they could relate to.  This carried at least as much weight, and sometimes a whole lot more weight, than say, what level of service your organization was providing.  This was very hard for me to handle.  All my life I had been an idealist, and this didn’t fit with my vision of how the world should be.  I thought that if I worked hard and produced a better quality product or service, the rewards should go to me and my company.  We were committed to excellence and believed that if you accept mediocrity you’d never get past it.  It hurt my feelings to find our hard work and determination  thwarted by the mere fact that my client or prospect was looking for someone Italian, or Jewish, or whatever.  I mention these two ethnic groups, because in the areas where I worked, these are the two groups where I bumped into this barrier  the most often.  But never directly, never in so many words.  It was a bitter pill to swallow, but the fact of the matter was it was their money and they could trade with whomever they wanted, for a good reason, for a bad reason, or for no reason at all.  Unlike my employees, I had no special rights.  In most cases my customers came from middle management of their respective organizations and they were playing with someone else’s money.  So it is understandable that they would use their position of power over purchasing to send business to their friends.  It is a very disciplined organization that seeks value over fraternity.  The good news is that when you finally get such an organization as a client, if you do provide superior service, you are far less likely to lose their business for some frivolous reason.

Some organizations, in an effort to create and maintain value-driven purchasing, resort to mind-numbing bidding procedures, with huge RFPs (Request for Proposal).  Buying from the lowest bidder was not done merely to get the best price; it was most often an effort by a customer to keep their own organization honest.    Some even thought that by replacing human judgment with a number, the amount of the bid, they could guarantee objectivity in the awarding of contracts.  My experience is that one should never underestimate the ingenuity of managers intent on thwarting company policy to achieve their own personal ends.  Once I had a customer threaten me with the loss of our contract with them unless I joined his new church.  I didn’t join, and sure enough, he canceled our business with his company.  Sometimes a Buyer would let us know, with a very careful choice of words, how much money would have to pass under the table in order to get a contract.  This most often happened with government contracts.  In Northeast Ohio it happened so often we stopped bidding on government work altogether.  There was enough honest work to go around without getting our hands dirty. 

In one town we served, there was a very prominent Italian mall developer, and his organization would repeatedly ask us for quotes on the cleaning of his headquarters organization.  We would inquire of the middle manager handling the matter for the developer why they were considering making a change, and the answer always was that they were dissatisfied with the quality of the service provided by their current vendor.  Well, everyone in town knew the current vendor was another Italian who had grown up with the mall developer’s son, and they were close friends.  A little more investigation would reveal that they had recently quarreled, and the developer’s son was pissed, and wanted the cleaning contract to go out to bid.  We, and any number of other interested contractors would submit bids, only to be told eventually that the developer had decided to stay with his existing vendor.  We all understood what this had meant:  they had kissed and made up.  This happened repeatedly with this one organization over the years, and so after a while we quit providing quotes.  But we heard through the grapevine that this same Italian competitor, when competing against us at other locations where the client was Italian would pointedly ask the client if they wouldn’t prefer to deal with a paisan, and the answer was frequently yes, they did.  Mom had lied.  Life did not always reward hard work, and who you knew frequently was more important than what you knew.  Eventually we heard through the trade association that cleaning was 25% of our business, and the politics of business was 75%.  We also heard that “a dirty building could lose you a contract, but a clean building wouldn’t necessarily keep one.”  After all these years in the business, I wouldn’t disagree.  There are many reasons other than the stated ones why business changes hands.  As a footnote to this, I have to say that there were enough companies that really did value excellence over fraternity that we grew and prospered, and eventually dominated our market.  At one point, the Italian contractor mentioned above sent word to me through a third party that if I didn’t leave his contracts alone, I was going to end up wearing cement shoes in the local river.  We ignored this threat and stayed focused on business.  A few years later he went out of business, for reasons unknown.

 By relating these experiences, I am not implying that most of the people we dealt with were dishonest or corrupt.  The fact of the matter is most of the business people I dealt with over the years were excellent, principled, and a joy to work with.  We got pretty good at picking our customers, just like they picked us.  We realized that not all business is good business, and some of it is simply not worth the hassle.  However, pain can be an excellent teacher, and we always tried to learn from our failures and painful experiences.   After a while you get a pretty thick skin, and you also gain a lot of confidence as you learn how to handle adversity.  As my friend Dick McKee once told me, “Sons should not be deprived of the adversity that made men of their fathers.”  Building a successful business was one of the most challenging things I have ever done, and every day you start all over again; it  requires a lot of self-discipline and the willingness to delay gratification, patience, people skills, critical thinking ability, the capacity to think on your feet and the courage to act decisively.  Emotionally it can be both frustrating and enormously rewarding.  It is not for the weak at heart, and if you are looking for love, I strongly recommend getting a dog.

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.

My $90/month corporate office 1981

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. 

 I went to all the sessions and greedily lapped up all the information.  I was a sponge.  When I came back, I had more questions than answers.  I knew I needed a mentor, someone to guide me.  While in Orlando, I had asked around about what this trade association was, and who ran it.  I didn’t know anything about the nature of trade associations.  Well, it had members in 25 or 30 countries, including most of the largest operators in the world.  They had a Board of Directors that ran things, and this Board was made up of contractors that had been nominated by an anonymous Nominating Committee that met once a year.  Board members served for three years, were unpaid, and traveled to Board functions at their own expense.  Not a very good deal.  But I figured if I could get nominated to the Board of Directors, I could sit in the Boardroom during meetings like a mouse and learn from these people what I needed to learn.

So I went home and thought, what I need here is exposure.  I need to get my name out there.  I am a nobody.  Well, what do I know how to do?  The answer was obvious, I know how to speak and to write.  So I called the trade journals and asked if they needed writers.  Little did I know that all trade journals need writers, especially free ones.  So I made committments to write on all kinds of cleaning and management issues.  I didn’t need to know about all this stuff, I just had to engage in some journalistic research and then write the papers.  Which I did.  So in the next couple years I got in print fairly frequently, more so I’m sure, than any other contractor out there.  And I always got my byline, John Bechtel, and the name of my company and my location.  When my articles started to get published, I ordered lots of extra copies, and started giving them out to prospective customers to show them what an authority I was on this subject and that.  I got a contract for a whole chain of grocery stores after I wrote an article about how cleaning grocery stores was no place for amateurs.  No one was more of an amateur at the time than I was.  I had already mastered the first rule of journalism:  Pretend you know more about something than you really do.

It was a couple years later that the telephone call came.  I was sitting at my desk beside my standpipe, when the phone rang, and this lady named Carol Dean says she was the Executive Vice President of the Building Service Contractors Association International at a meeting of the Nominating Committee in Toronto, Canada, and I had been nominated for a seat on the Board of Directors.  She explained the terms, and I asked her what I could anticipate in the way of out-of-pocket expenses to accept this position.  She replied $5000 to $10,000 per year for three years.  That was about equivalent to 60 to 100 percent of my annual gross salary.  I tried to be cool and not gulp.  I asked her when I could get back to her, and she said she had to know within a few hours.  I went to lunch and then called her back and accepted.  When I told Barbara about it, she flipped and asked where I thought I was going to get that kind of money.  I told her I didn’t know, but I would find a way.

So they had heard about me.  The Mouse That Roared.  This pathetic, tiny operator in a rural county of Ohio who wrote all these articles.  And as long as I kept my mouth shut in the Boardroom, no one would ever know how little I knew, or how much I was learning.  Now all I had to do was figure out how to pay for it.  I was still going to night school at the local university, and sleeping through half the classes.  Barbara wanted to know why I didn’t apply for a real job at the General Motors assembly plant that had some openings; her brother-in-law Roy had applied and been accepted.  She also had a lot to say about the fact that the water pipes in our apartment were frozen and we were washing the dishes in the bathtub.  Barbara wasn’t the type to suffer in silence.

My fortunes began to change when Alden Foxhall showed up.  He had called a few times, some pesky guy trying to sell some product to clean carpet with.  I had no money, I didn’t know how to clean carpet, and I had my hands more than full just keeping my few cleaning people on the job.  Alden was quite insistent, however, and one night he showed up at our apartment house, and insisted on taping off a little square of carpet and cleaning it as a demo.  I wasn’t particularly impressed with his product either,  but Alden was a nice, older , and very sincere man.

A few weeks later Alden called me; it was a Tuesday morning.  He asked if I wanted to clean 60,000 square feet of carpet in Cleveland that same night.  I said, Alden, I’ve never cleaned carpet in my life, not even with a grocery store rental unit, I have no equipment, and no extra employees.  All my employees had places they had to clean locally that night.  Well Alden says he has a customer in Euclid, Ohio who has to have 60,000 square feet of carpet cleaned that night, and they had called all the large carpet cleaning companies in Cleveland and they had all told this company they were crazy, it couldn’t be done, and certainly not on that short term notice.  Curious, I asked Alden some questions, like how much equipment would I need, how much chemicals, how many people, how long would it take, and so forth.  Alden said I would need a whole truckload of chemicals and equipment, which he could get from Pittsburgh that afternoon, and that I would need twenty people to work all night.  I figured my labor and materials would cost me about $7000, so I doubled that and told Alden to tell the company if they would pay me $14,000 by 10 a.m. the next day, I would have a crew of 20 people on their premises by 8 p.m. that same night.  Alden agreed to teach all 21 of us what to do with all this stuff.  I told Alden I would pay for everything the next morning after I got paid.  I got 20 people up there that night by offering them $100 in cash by 11 a.m. the next morning if they went.  Most of them had day jobs and called off sick the next day.  The company whose carpet we cleaned was Bailey Controls, and they were owned by Babcock and Wilcox, which had just been acquired by McDermott and Company.  The Chairman of McDermott had just informed Bailey Controls that he was coming to visit the next morning, and in a panic, they decided they had to have their carpet cleaned before he got there.  I figured by 10 a.m. the next morning I would own a lot more equipment and have $7000 in the bank.  I had no idea how much 60,000 square feet of carpet was.  It sounded like a lot.

Well, we went up there, did the job, and got paid.  I bet the chairman of McDermott never even noticed the carpet.  And all of a sudden life looked a little differently.  I called up the manufacturer of this carpet cleaning product and signed up for their school in Racine, Wisconsin.  I learned a lot about carpet, carpet cleaning, and marketing.  Quite by accident I had been accepted into their school for Distributors instead of Carpet Cleaning Professionals, where I belonged, and I learned all about Distributor pricing.  Rather than make a fuss about their mistake, they made me a Distributor.

Before I move on with this story, I have to tell you about a little incident that happened that night at Bailey Controls.  As about 20 or so rolled into the lobby of Bailey Controls, a guard came up to me and said, Are you with Bechtel?  And of course, since my name is John Bechtel, and the name of my tiny company was Bechtel Building Maintenance, Inc.  I thought it was certainly appropriate to respond in the affirmative.  The guard continued, Well, follow me.  And he led us to a hospitality suite reserved for the big Bechtel Engineering firm out of San Francisco.  He showed us where the liquor cabinet was, and then left us.  Only a few minutes later, he hurried back and said You’re not with Bechtel Engineering!  And I replied No, we’re with Bechtel Maintenance, and he said, Oh, you’re not allowed in here!!  And he expeditiously ushered us out of there.  Well, we really didn’t have either the time or inclination to drink before working anyway.

Now it just so happened that the landlord of my office, such as it was, was a guy named Don , and who decided to give his wife, who was a gorgeous babe, a new business to play with.  He started a residential cleaning franchising business, and put his wife in charge of it.  They sold franchises.  One day Don and I got to talking about this carpet cleaning product, which is a dry cleaning process, and I threw some coffee on his wife’s new white carpet in her office suite and then promptly removed it, to his amazement.  He said he needed to sell this stuff to his franchisees as part of their start-up package.  So I started selling the equipment and chemicals to Don, and he resold it to his franchisees, with what I thought was an astronomical mark-up.  I asked him what he was going to do when sooner or later one of them read the label on the packaging, called the manufacturer and discovered they could buy this stuff much cheaper than they were paying him.  I told him they were going to feel they had been ripped off.  Also, I listened to the pitch Don’s main operations guy gave on this stuff, and he made claims I would never have made, and I looked at Don with raised eyebrows, and Don’s reply was, “Hey, everyone has their style.”  Style, eh??  Eventually this guy’s “style” came back to bite Don.

But Don bought a lot of machines from me, and a lot of chemicals, and I ended up becoming the fourth largest distributor of these products in the country within a year.  The manufacturer  knew I was a cleaning contractor, so they sent someone down to visit me to find out what the hell I was doing with all this product.  I was buying it 38,000 pounds at a time.  I was selling it to hotel chains, and I was working on a possible deal with Wendy’s fast food franchise, who have carpet in all their retail outlets.  Don was taking the product and repacking it in his own containers, and thereby removing any labeling that would tip his franchisees off where this stuff came from and how much cheaper it could be purchased.  Apparently he and his Operations Manager had very compatible “styles”.

Meanwhile, Don’s wife, who was definitely a Show Dog, got lots of national publicity and their franchising business was booming.  So was mine.  Even Bailey Controls called me back six months later to clean their 60,000 square feet of carpet again.  For the same price.

I managed to pay for my three years internship on the Board of Directors, and my business and acumen began to grow.  Don’s franchisees figured out what was going on, and the franchising business went out of business.  Don’s wife backed up a semi tractor-trailer to the office building one day and cleaned out his offices, and maybe later she cleaned him out too.   I used to hear them yelling through the thin walls of my office.   Don and his wife got divorced.  It was hard to feel sorry for Don.  He reaped what he sowed.   I missed his wife.  I thought she  was unethical and haughty and arrogant, but she sure was nice to look at.  I took the money I had made from the carpet cleaning chemical business and put it into my janitorial business, and for the first time I had some working capital.  Before ever I took my first course in economics, I already understood at a gut level the importance of investment over consumption.  Barbara and I were still poor, but I knew things were going to change.

Looking back on several decades of organization building, I realize that my greatest disadvantage was not having had any practical experience in the “real world” before starting a business.  But to be fair to me, please remember that I had no intention of ‘going into business’; what I had done in effect was create a job for myself.  In the beginning that was all I really wanted; I desperately wanted not to starve, and since I couldn’t find a job, I created one.  My second great disadvantage was the fact that I never had a mentor, someone experienced to coach me, pointing out where the rocks were beneath the water.  So with nothing else to rely on, I turned to my old stand-by:  I would learn how to run a business from the printed page.  Without hands-on training on how to talk to people at the front lines, where the rubber hits the road, I became something of an intellectual business owner, who could spout the principles and who had mastered the lingo of the trade, but couldn’t really make himself understood to the little people who took the trash out at night.  I became what I was later to call an articulate incompetent.  I could think like a Chief of Staff, but I needed the skills of a Drill Sergeant.  So I promoted cleaners to become the drill sergeants, and I tried to teach them skills I had not mastered myself.  I was afraid of my own employees.  The only boss who needs to be afraid of his employees is the boss who is afraid of his employees.  You can never manage successfully from weakness.  If your employees sense that you are afraid they will quit, it empowers them, and it is unrealistic to think they won’t try to use that power to their advantage. 

Periodically I had no choice but to take things into my own hands, and I had to deal directly with the cleaners.  I would sit down with them and discuss what I had on my mind in the most (to me) patient, enlightened manner possible.  I would walk away from the discussion satisfied that I had achieved my goal, usually to discover that they didn’t go to work that night and had quit their jobs without notice.  Or, contrarily, I would learn later that they had been flattered and impressed that the “big boss” had come out to talk to them, but had no clue what I had said. This always came as a great shock and disappointment to me, because I had geared my vocabulary way down and had made a great effort to speak simply and directly.  Sometimes I can’t help thinking that if someone else had looked in on our operation and had known what was going on, they would have laughed, for what I really eventually did succeed in doing was getting my supervisors to imitate me.  Which meant they too could quote the lines from the company handbook, but they too couldn’t really get it done.  At one time I joked to a friend in the industry that our buildings were just as dirty as our competitors, but we were more sincere.  Obviously in time I learned but it was very difficult during the early years to overcome the conditioning of almost three decades; conditioning that told me money was the root of all sorts of ‘injurious things’, that told me to eliminate the self, or the “I” in my language.  Jehovah’s Witnesses achieved what the Communists and the Socialists of the world could only dream about.  In life with Jehovah’s Witnesses, life also revolved around “Society”, but with a capital S.  The Society with Jehovah’s Witnesses meant the theocracy, the church leadership.  In the world outside Jehovah’s Witnesses, “society” , with a lower case s, meant the greater good of the greater number.  Both were utopian concepts, and both involved the use of coercion in one form or another, but always in the guise of altruism.  Obedience in both cases was (and is) achieved through social or cultural pressure, and both cultures encouraged or required self sacrfice as the noblest virtue.  In the one, you sacrificed for God, in the other you sacrificed for whichever gang was running the show.  And in both cultures, the pursuit of material gain was considered selfish.  Of course, the reason people work hard is to advance their personal interests, with the reward of keeping their earnings as they see fit, and to improve the quality of their own life.  If they succeed to a modest extent, it is considered a virtue; if they succeed to an unusual extent, their virtue becomes their vice, and they feel obliged to hide their wealth, apologize for their wealth, or give away their wealth in conspicuous displays of charity.  There is a fundamental and philosophical contradiction between their belief systems and material success.  Like Plato long before, they even split material wealth off from spiritual wealth, and divide man into two selves at war with each other, his upper and his lower self.  For many years a sense of guilt about money and wealth served as a powerful subconscious force that routinely sabotaged my best efforts in the business world.

I came of age at the very peak of the Big Welfare State (the late seventies–the Age of Jimmy Carter), although I had no historical or political sense of what was happening in the world around me.  I couldn’t have told you the difference between a Democrat and a Republican if my life depended on it.  Struggling to survive tends to narrow your horizon somewhat.  During my time as a Jehovah’s Witness, my exposure to civic affairs was limited to a few grade school classes, and whatever Watchtower had taught me about their own organizational successes in seeking constitutional protections.  As I turned to books and periodicals to learn how to run a business, what I learned shocked me.  A lot of what I read was about how to comply with government regulations.  Government regulations???  What could there possibly be to regulate about taking out the trash?  As I attempted to build an organization, little did I know that once again, I was a mirror of my generation and the politics of my time.  My company became a microcosm of my culture, as you will see.

The most frightening magazine I subscribed to was the Harvard Business Review.   I read everything as if it had been written for me, with my tiny little cleaning operation, and I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that the law was the law, regardless of size.  Being the egghead business owner, I clearly understood from HBR the concepts and always set about implementing them assiduously in my operation.  If it was an article about managing the sales function, I set about setting up a sales function to conform to the best authority in the business world.  I would design forms and systems for my sales force, which was me.  I was not being intentionally stupid, for  I knew that when we were ready for a real sales force, I would be ready.  When HBR addressed  PROBLEMS, I read the articles with the avidity of a hypochondriac turning the pages of a medical text on pathology.  Whatever the problem under discussion was, either I was convinced my organization was afflicted with it, or by God, I would see to it that it never was.  If it was an article about employee rights, I wondered if employers had any rights.  HBR often carried ads for further books one could read on any given subject, and I obsessively began to purchase and read management textbooks.  I felt like I was practically a family member of John T. Wiley and Sons, the Harvard publishing house.  The more I read, the greater my vocabulary of business expanded, and the further removed I became from the ordinary problems in my business; problems that begged for simple solutions I sometimes could not provide.  I could not bridge the gap between HBR, Mr. Wiley, and my supervisors.  And always, lurking in the background, the parental and church tapes played in my head, condemning me for seeking material success, pandering to my “lower self”.   I became an organization builder because my church-trained conscience forbid me the indulgence of enjoyment of success.  Virtually all of the profits of my business went to reinvestment rather than personal or family consumption, partly because of fear of failure, and partly because consumption produced guilt, the guilt of success and financial reward.  For me the material world and its blandishments, once I was past the survival stage, were an object of scorn and not virtue.  I was at war with myself; there was a profound contradiction between the value system I had absorbed as a true believer and success in the real world.  It was a very long time before I discovered that many millions of others shared this internal conflict.

Mssrs. Wiley published books on Employee Rights which I read, desiring to be an enlightened employer.  I was also a frightened employer.  As I devoured these, I couldn’t help but wonder, on what basis did employees acquire “special” rights, extra rights, that apparently the rest of us didn’t need?  I thought their rights were the same as my rights, i.e.  freedom to trade with whomever they wanted, for whatever reason, for as long as both parties wanted.  I was laboring under the illusion that my obligations to them were explicit; to fulfill my end of the agreed-upon terms.  Imagine my surprise to discover I had acquired unspecified, unwritten obligations, “social responsibilities” that sometimes took precedence even when the employee wasn’t living up to his end of the work-related bargain.  And I owed him because I was a beneficiary of “society that had made it possible to create and run my business.”  All I saw was other people doing the same thing I was, pursuing their own self-interest in trading with others.  I came to realize that my new undeclared responsibilities were because I was viewed as a “Lord” and my employees were the “serfs”.  Except that this was supposed to be capitalism in a free society, and it seemed to me it was getting confused with feudalism, which was anything but free, but rather existence by permission.

As Mr. Wiley provided me with more and more terrifying information about the dangers ahead, I built in more and more layers into my little organization to prepare ourselves.  We would be ready.  This (or that) would not happen to us.  I overcomplicated things, but in doing so I was postponing a day of reckoning of the contradictions between my religious  conditioning and my efforts to rise above the rat race.  I was philosophically a man at war with himself.

Back when I was at Watchtower headquarters, in the last few years before I left, and when I was clearly influenced by the thinking of Fred Maes (the Rousseau of Bethel),  I was outraged at the seeming callousness of Watchtower management and I was part of the protest movement.  After I left and ended up with a business, I rather subconsciously began to implement a management style consistent with my socialistic tendencies, a reactionary management style that would put the interests of others before my own.  My theory was that if you did this, the profits would be there, somehow.  I was wrong.  People inexplicably kept doing what they thought was  in their own best interests, and my great and noble experiment got me nothing more than negative cash flow and a lot of anxiety.

I was not learning everything from John T. Wiley, however.  I was also simultaneously learning from the book, and school, of hard knocks.  Following are some samples from both.

The most terrifying thing I learned was that not only was I responsible for anything my employees did on the job, and sometimes off the job, I was also responsible, and therefore legally liable, even if I did not know of their behavior, but in the judgement of an undisclosed someone, should have known.  I knew just enough about my employees’ lives that I knew I didn’t really want to know any more.

I was also discovering political correctness for the same time.  I learned that my Employment Applications were legally unacceptable because we asked such questions as did the applicant have a car to get to work (the job site was not served by public transportation), and we used to illegally ask our female applicants who disclosed they had small children about their anticipated baby-sitting arrangements.  I learned through the trade association that we needed to ask instead, “How did the applicant plan to get to work?” since fewer minorities owned vehicles than I presume, white anglos, and also that since we only asked the women about baby-sitting arrangements, this was discriminatory since we didn’t also ask the men.  Of course, we didn’t ask the men because in those days it was almost unheard of for a man to be the primary caretaker for small children.  I learned what things we could and couldn’t do during a union organizing drive (which I never experienced), and so on.  I was continually amazed at how incredibly complicated someone had made of the most simple things.  All I really wanted to know was if the human being sitting in front of me was willing and circumstantially able to show up for work. Whether it was legal or not to ask, we still had to find out what we needed to know to make a good hiring decision, so we refined our skills of “chatting up” the applicant, getting them to tell us what we needed to know without directly asking.  From my small corner of the world, however, our government, in the pursuit of some ideal or to placate some political constituency had long since taken leave of common sense.

The same was true when dealing with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  I learned about this organization because of an old black guy who worked for me named Jim.  Jim had been with me for a couple years and for a long time did good, reliable work.  Then he fell off the wagon and his work began to slide.  I talked to him about it a couple times, and finally I gave him a written reprimand.  Jim said, ‘You know you can’t ever fire me, because I’m black and I’m old, and I’ll turn you in.’  Well, in time I did fire him, and sure enough he turned me in to the EEOC for Age Discrimination and Race Discrimination.  We supplied them with all the documentation for his termination, and I thought that would be the end of the matter.  Then they called and said they wanted to know how many black people I employed and how many people over the age of 40.  I said I had no idea; I thought it was illegal to even ask such things.  They said I had to find out and get back to them with numbers.  So we went around checking out everyone’s skin color and reading their licenses to get their age, and we sent this information in to the EEOC.  It turned out that something like 80 percent of our employees were black, and almost half of them were over the age of forty.  So we clearly weren’t discriminating, and the case was dropped.  However I told  the lady on the phone from the government agency that it was purely an accident that our percentages of blacks and over-40 were so high because we didn’t hire on that basis, and I asked her what would have happened if the numbers had fallen below the acceptable percentage, whatever that was, and she replied that I would have been in a lot of trouble.  Uh huh.

 Not everything I learned about being an employer was from the government, however.  I learned a lot from my employees.  I had always viewed my business engagements, whether with customers or employees, as simply a matter of trading with each other, whatever we had to offer.  My customers understood this also, but my employees certainly didn’t view things this way.  They seemed to think, in most cases, that I was there to take care of them.  If they didn’t keep their end of the bargain, and I told them I didn’t want to do business with them anymore, the standard response would be “ After all I did for you!”, as if there existed some unwritten I.O.U. payable to them.  After a few years, my response would sometimes be, “I think you were paid in full when my check to you cleared the bank.”  I was beginning to realize I needed to focus less on saving the world, and more on saving myself and my family.  As ridiculous as it may sound, it was a tough lesson to learn.

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.

I was turned down for a job by Truck Stops of America because I responded to an ad for someone to pump gas dressed in a three-piece suit.  I’m sure they thought I was overqualified for the job, or else crazy.  I was turned down for a management-trainee position with Arby’s, a fast food franchise that began in Youngstown, Ohio before being purchased by Pepsi.  I had no employment experience that they could understand.  I finally got a position with a company that sold burglar and fire alarms on straight commission.  I worked with them for about five weeks and quit for two reasons:  first, I had trouble getting paid commissions due, and secondly, I experienced great difficulty practicing their standard sales techniques as instructed.  We were told, for instance, to position ourselves on the sofa between the homeowner and his spouse, making sure that  each of our knees touched one of theirs.  Then we were taught when presenting the contract to drop our pen on the carpet, wait for them to politely pick it up, and suggest while they had it in their hand to go ahead and sign the agreement.  I thought it was all very hokey and distasteful.

Barbara got a job as a secretary making $600 per month.  I decided to go down the main street in town, Market St., business by business, and try to get a job as a janitor.  How hard could that be?  My first stop was at a car dealership and I met the general manager named Al Helms.  Al was one of the first, and best, things that happened to me after moving to Ohio.  Al said yes, he did need a janitor, but he didn’t want me on his payroll.  So would I please take a look around and give him a monthly price to do the work  I was to  provide all the equipment and materials.  I told Al I didn’t know how to do that, and he suggested I give it my best shot.  I walked around and told Al $400 per month.  He said that was too cheap and to go look again.  I came back a few minutes later with $600 per month.  He said that was better, that at $400 per month I would have quit after one month.  He asked me to put together a contract for him to sign, and I said I didn’t know how to do that either, so Al suggested something brief, such as  I would clean with my equipment and materials and he would pay.

Elated, I went down the street to another dealership about half as large, suggested half as much, and got that contract also.  I was now up to $900 per month!  This was real income!  Of course, I had no idea what equipment I needed, or materials, or how long any of this was going to take me to do.  But I would find a way to make it work.  I called around to janitorial supply houses, found a sales rep who prepared a list of what I needed and offered to teach me how to strip and wax floors after I bought his products.  The initial outlay was $2500.  It might as well have been a quarter of a million.  I had no money, no savings, no nest egg.  No nothing.  So obviously I would need a loan.  I had never borrowed money before, not even from a friend.  I had no credit history.  I was an unknown who had just moved in from out of state.  I was rejected by five banks; the sixth one loaned me the money.  I found a banker who believed in me.  You have to believe in yourself before you can expect someone else to believe in you.  I was scared, but I was also determined.  Over the years I have wondered if it is easier to be determined when your back is up against the wall.  Maybe it is because your choices seem so limited at the time, but  I also know that is when most people quit, or give up.  You have to keep going in order for good things to happen.

Starting Over 1978

Al Helms apparently felt sorry for me, and periodically he’d ask me how I was doing.  I had signed up for evening classes in Business Management at Younstown State University, and I was busy cleaning my two dealerships and going to class.  Al suggested I go to see Jerry Thorpe at the Automobile Dealers Association and maybe I could get Jerry to put a blurb about me in the newsletter that went out to all the dealerships in three counties.  So I went home and wrote an “infomercial” about my fledgling operation, and of course I understood that I had to make it sound as if I was a company, not a one-man operation.  I went to see Jerry, who I am sure gave me an interview only out of respect for Al.  I told Jerry that if he ever needed some filler for his newsletter, I had some newsy information about janitorial service for auto dealerships that might be useful to the membership, and I gave him my infomercial.  Well, he must have needed filler because he printed it in the next issue, and I ended up with thirteen car dealerships to clean, all over three counties.  I learned to clean very fast and drive even faster.   Except for Al Helms, my customers all thought I had an organization behind me.  So I would spend all night cleaning their buildings, go home and get a shower and put on a suit, and go back to visit them to ask them how “my people did”.  It used to really piss me off when once in a while one of my customers would accuse one of my employees of doing something I knew I had not done.  But I could not tell them it was me doing the cleaning because they wanted to do business with a company, not a cleaner.    So I would swallow my pride and tell them I would talk to my employees about the matter and get it corrected.  Driving down the road I would have a talk with myself.  Even so, it became quickly apparent that I needed to hire someone to help, and that’s when the fun really started.

I had come from a background of dedication, and this was the only paradigm I knew.  So I just assumed that when people responded to my ad in the newspaper and said they needed work, they meant it.  I had no idea how to interview applicants and what kind of questions would get them to talking about themselves and tell me what I needed to know about them.  I just told them what I had and what I was paying and the hours and asked if it suited them.  I saw them pretty much the way Al Helms saw me:  I wanted to trade with them, this amount of work for that amount of money.  I didn’t think I was doing them a favor and I didn’t think they were doing me a favor.  We were traders, no more or less.  I thought they meant what they said, otherwise why did they respond to my ad?  And if they accepted whatever we agreed to, they owed me the work and I owed them the money.  Simple, right?

My first brush with reality was with my first hire.  She was a young, slender pretty woman who seemed eager for the work.  I think I was also influenced by her attractive appearance, and when I stopped in to visit with her on the job site for the first time, I was surprised to find her dressed in a very sheer blouse and she was braless.  I liked it a lot, and so did the mechanics working in the back of the dealership.  About ten days later I stopped in at her dealership late one night, when she should still have been there, and I found the doors to the dealership showroom wide open, with neither my cleaner nor the keys anywhere to be found.  Anyone in the world could have driven off with any new car in that showroom!  Several hours later I found the keys in the grass outside one of the doors.  I could only blame myself; I had confused hormones with character and aptitude.  Over the years I also learned, over and over again, that sexual attraction is a weapon and it is used every day in the marketplace of life.  This is not bad, it just IS.  We are what we are.  Anyone who doesn’t understand this should watch the mating antics of the Bird of Paradise as filmed by the BBC.  It will make you laugh, but sometimes we have to laugh at ourselves too.  We are not all that different.  In time I learned to better understand the dynamics of human behavior without losing focus because of it.

Within several months I had begun to lose business because of the behavior of my employees.  Sometimes I was just shocked at things they would do while at work.  I was equally shocked at how they viewed me.  I had become an employer.  I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, because I didn’t feel any different than before; I just had more car dealerships to clean than I could possible keep up with myself.  I didn’t see Al Helms or any of my other customers differently because I cleaned their places of business; we had just agreed on terms of how this would get done and for what price.  I respected them and their property, and I expected to be honest with them, and I expected to be treated the same way.  But not my employees.  I would walk into buildings and find parts of brand new vacuum cleaners mysteriously missing; they ripped the cords and tore the prongs off the plugs.  When I would talk to them, as delicately as I knew how, they would shrug their shoulders and walk off, or simply tell me they knew nothing about it.  The worst part of all was correcting something they did.  I had no idea how extraordinarily difficult it is for some people to clean a desk top without smearing it.  I would show them, then I would have them show me, and if they didn’t get it right, I would show them again.  I would come back four hours later and they had smeared every desk in sight.   Sometimes if you corrected their work, they just didn’t show up the next night.  They didn’t bother to call either.  But they sure didn’t forget you when it was payday. The smallest kind gesture was often accepted, not as a gift, but as an entitlement, and went without gratitude.  I remember a few years into my business, on a Thanksgiving Day I decided it would be a nice gesture to give out turkeys to my supervisors.  I was shocked that only one out of nine supervisors bothered to say thanks, and the next year most of them asked ahead of time if I would be getting them a turkey, since they wouldn’t buy one themselves if I was going to.

I  discovered that employees lied on their time cards.  I didn’t have time clocks in my client’s places of business, and we weren’t allowed to use theirs, so my employees were on the honor system.  I told them about how long it should take them to do the job, based on my own experience.  I quickly learned that it took them a lot longer to do the same job as it did me.  But I would tell them I wanted them there on the job at say, eight o-clock, and to be finished about 10 o-clock, for two hours of work.  I would come in at eleven and not only not find them there, none of the work had been done either.  Sometimes they had just quit, and sometimes they just decided to come in at midnight that particular day.  Most of them never took a starting and ending time seriously.  Sometimes I would come in at nine, and find half the work not done, the employee was gone, and they had marked themselves out at ten.  So I was paying for time not spent on the job, I had a dirty building, and an unhappy customer.  In an attempt to resolve this problem, when I would hire them I would tell them I would pay them for two hours to do a particular job, because it couldn’t possibly take any longer than that to do the work, not even on a bad day.  .  In this way, I couldn’t go over budget, because I never paid them more than the two hours.  That of course, did not stop them from working for forty-five minutes and getting paid the full two hours.   I still had quality problems. 

Several years later I got audited by the federal Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division, and I learned that paying for a fixed amount of time was against the law, and they called it “stereotyping job hours”.  I asked them how I was supposed to control the abuse and this guy just shrugged his shoulders and said that wasn’t his problem, and he gave me a bill for $17,000 that he said I owed former employees for improperly calculating their time.  Apparently he had called a sampling of them and asked them how long it really took them to do the work, and of course, smelling money, deuces were wild.  I had no documentation to disprove their claims.  And so I came to learn one of my first great business truths that they don’t tell you in business school:  in the absence of proof to the contrary, an employer is guilty until proven innocent.   I was enraged by the injustice of it all, and got a lawyer who told me there was nothing I could do about it.  He did however plead my case with the government people, and they reduced my bill to $13,000.  Very gracious of them.  In the process, I learned that the solution in dealing with the governmnet is usually to be found in semantics, not reality.  As soon as we informed our cleaners that their shift began at 6 p.m. and their shift ended at 8 p.m., and that during this shift their duties included cleaning bank A and bank B, this whole problem with the regulators went away.  It was all in the choice of language!  The trick was to get the regulators to tell you what language, what specific wording, they were looking for.  I doubt that any of these regulators had been English majors in college, and most likely would never have understood Shakespeare’s ironic  Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? implying that what a thing was had greater signficance than how it was labeled.  Not with the regulators!  I also learned that regulators are most interested in their own next performance review, and that they are often measured by how much money they bring in from employers, or how many infractions they can establish.  With tens of thousands of regulations, everyone, everywhere, is violating some aspect of the law or government regulation, knowingly or unknowingly.  Regulators’ jobs are measured by “bringing home the bacon”, i.e. finding some of those regulations you are violating, if for no other reason than to justify their own existence.  Fighting with a government regulator is usually a losing proposition, and you will only incur greater focus on your business, to your detriment.  As with so much else, I learned that when dealing with the government, it is rarely about right and wrong, or justice, or fairness; it is about conformity and obedience and following the rules, and going along in order to get along.  If you are going to fight, pick your fights carefully, unless you want to spend the rest of your life in an unwinnable tit-for-tat war of attrition.  Live your life in your own way, and stay below the radar.  That applies to anyone, not just businessmen and women.  Endless confrontation is a waste of time and of your life.  Take your lumps and move on.

Once we learned the rules, we went out of our way to follow them.  That wouldn’t prevent the authorities from attempting to shake us down once in a while.  Several years after the above episode with the Department of Labor, I got a phone call from their Cleveland office telling me they had a complaint about underpayment from a certain employee.  I said I would check our records and make sure no mistake had taken place.  We did so and got back to the authorities telling them that our records were accurate and we would be happy to send them a copy.  They replied no, the amount this lady wanted was quite small, and they wanted me just to cut a check and forward it to them, and they would pay the lady.  When I retorted that we hadn’t made a mistake or broken any laws, they said if I didn’t cooperate, they had the option of launching a full, random inspection of all my payroll records for the last three years, and such an audit would tie us up in knots for weeks or months, and wouldn’t it just be more cost effective to send the small check requested.   In other words, they wanted us to send this person unearned money just to make the regulators look good!  And we were being threatened with disruption of our business if we didn’t comply!  We stood our ground on that one, and they audited us–for one full day.  The regulator went through our payroll files for over six hours and couldn’t find a thing, and went home, discouraged.  He did not want to commit to even more time wasted with no return for his effort.  That was the last time we were bothered by these guys.

Another problem that drove me crazy was money being reported missing by my customers.  At first I would defend my employees vigorously, because I really thought they were innocent.  And sometimes they were.  Many times they were not.  I remember eventually I got a contract with a K-Mart store where my employees would be locked in all night, and the store manager would unlock in the morning and they would go home.  The store manager in this case called to tell me he thought my guys were stealing guns out of the K-Mart gun case.  So we set up  a sting operation, and he and I stayed up on the elevated  catwalk that goes all around the inside of the building, and from which we could see what was going on in the store through windows with one-way glass.  No one knew we were up there watching them.  And we did catch the thief:  it was the K-Mart Assistant Store Manager.  It was in this way that I learned all the thieves and miscreants were not exclusively on my payroll.  Many years later I hired a young man who, unknown to me, used to be a drug dealer (they generally don’t include this on their resume or application).  He was a good employee and eventually was promoted to supervisor.  Years after he had established a good reputation for himself within our operation, he felt safe enough to confide in me details about his past.  Two things I remember vividly were that he and his cronies never worried about law enforcement for a significant number of local officers got their personal stash of controlled substances from him.  Another item of interest was that he and his friends preferred to get jobs with guard service companies who serviced local retail stores.  Talk about hiring the fox to watch the henhouse!!!!  Sometimes you need to hire and use people who understand the problems from the inside.  That’s why criminals are often hired to catch criminals, and computer hackers are hired to catch hackers.

One of my earliest “lucky breaks” was to get a contract with a local bank that had about 20 branch offices in the immediate area of Youngstown.  I soon had about 30 people employed in these bank buildings, including the main office which was over 10 stories tall.  I was often out late at night checking on the work of my employees, and office buildings were deathly silent in the midde of the night when I would come through.  Being a reader, I never failed to notice what books lined the shelves of executives, and I was eternally curious to learn something new that would help advance my practical education.  In this particular case, I noticed a copy of “In Search of Excellence” prominently displayed on the credenza of the president and ceo of this bank.  I had already read the book, but I picked it up anyway and immediately noticed that it had never been opened before, for it made that ‘new book’ cracking noise when I opened it.  I had to smile thinking that this president had bought this book as an ornament, not to read.  Well, unfortunately, our company had apparently hired a thief and placed him in this facility, and this person was stealing blank checks from one of the tenants upstairs, filling them out and cashing them in local grocery stores.  The police were trying to figure out who it was, and of course I was taking a lot of heat from my client to catch the thief also.  As it turned out, the client caught the thief before I did.  A Vice President of the bank hid in the building after hours (with his own personal gun) and actually caught the thief redhanded.  The next day the  president and ceo of this bank decided that my entire company had to be fired, and gave us half a days notice to clean out all of our employees and equipment at all locations, and the same Vice President of the bank who caught the thief rode shotgun on our truck from location to location making sure we didn’t steal anything else on the way out!  Of course I had a contract, but the bank had all the money, not to mention the fact that they were being bought out by another one of my clients, another bank, and suing them would not particularly endear me to what was to become the parent company.  You can imagine then, my enjoyment of the irony when, nine months later this same president and ceo was indicted by the FBI for embezzling $7 million dollars from his bank.  A few days after this news broke, the parent company asked me to come back and resume cleaning those facilities.  I couldn’t help thinking that maybe this guy should have read the book on his credenza!  Years later when I occasionally did consulting for some companies, it was not uncommon to find that the biggest problem in the client organization was the person who hired me.

On  other occasions I got the bad news about theft long after my employees quit or were fired.  When we cleaned the floors in a K-Mart or grocery store, we used these large walk-behind machines that put soapy water down on the floor, scrubbed the floor, vacuumed up the water, and squeegeed the floor dry, all in one pass.  The machines were quite expensive, about $6,000 apiece.  They had two tanks inside them, one a solution tank, and the other a recovery tank.  When cleaning grocery stores I found out my employees stole wrapped steaks, kept them submerged inside the solution tanks of the autoscrubbers until they got outside the store, when they would remove them and take them home.  I could never understand what they thought was wrong with just paying for them.  One of the problems in the janitor business is that whenever something disappears, in the minds of the client, the shadow of suspicion falls first on the cleaning people.  This is often very unfair, but if your mother told you life is fair, she lied to you.  Every business everywhere has to spend serious money to minimize what is tactfully referred to as “inventory shrinkage.”  They’re not talking about what happens on laundry day.  Stealing is a part of life, and always has been. 

In Ohio, Unemployment Insurance is a government monopoly.  An employer paid in so many cents on the payroll dollar, and if someone lost their job through no fault of their own, such as a business downsizing, they could collect a percentage of their paycheck for about six months or so as a financial cushion until they found another job.  I did not realize that on the street this was viewed as an entitlement, something that was owed them without regard for any efforts they may or may not make to find another job.  If someone lost their job for “just cause” they could not collect unemployment, and it would not be charged against the company’s rating set by the government.  I was quite astonished to discover that many of these people would lie through their teeth about almost anything in order to collect their unemployment.  I would contest their stories, and time after time I would lose.  Once again I discovered that in the eyes of the law, or at the very least in the eyes of the government referee adjudicating the case, in the absence of documentation to the contrary, I as the employer was wrong.  I could not help but wonder why or how the referee hearing the case could not identify the obvious contradictions in their stories and not hear the sincerity and frustration in my own.  Little by little I got better at building documentation, only to discover I was still losing consistently because I had not used precisely the right terminology or phrase to describe my employees’ actions.  As we continued to lose these cases, our unemployment experience rate, the formula by which the government decides how much to assess a company in unemployment taxes, rose considerably.  This made us more expensive for our customers.

It was many years later, when we were much bigger and could afford an outside consulting firm who handled all this unemployment stuff  for us, that I learned from them what the magic phrases and catch words were which had to be used to win a case.  For example, let’s say  you have an employee who is quite unproductive and will have to be discharged as soon as you find an acceptable replacement.  While you are looking for this replacement, he causes a major complaint from your customer, and the next day says he’s quitting at the end of the month.  If, in your frustration, you tell him he can leave right away, he will collect unemployment.  His “Quit” became a “Constructive Discharge” the moment you shortened his resignation lead time.  As a “Quit” he would not have collected (but you might have lost your customer due to his negligence), but as a “Constructive Discharge” he was unemployed through no fault of his own.  The legal concept behind the term “Constructive Discharge” was that some employers would try to create a difficult working environment for an employee in an effort to force them to quit, knowing that when the employee did so, the burden of proof for the cause of the unemployment shifted to the employee.  And of course this is what employers with any sense did, for we all knew how difficult it was to prove to a referee’s satisfaction that a discharge was justifiable.  So many of these job applicants learned the system quite well, and worked just long enough to leave and collect unemployment benefits.  And the attitude of the referees was that these poor people had no job, and someone should take care of them.  Like the people who were working, for instance.  I also think the government referees were well educated and poorly paid themselves, and there was a certain amount of undisguised envy and distrust of employers.  They seemed to have a zero-sum, feudal mentality, that if we had money, we must be taking it from these poor people.  Philosophically the referees simply saw it as a transfer of wealth, and they wanted the employee to be able to collect.  Again, it wasn’t about right or wrong, or justice and fairness, but about entitlement and ’social equality’.  Producers were punished for their virtues, and the indolent were rewarded for their vices.  This prevailing attitude in the culture in northeast Ohio had a lot to do with their inability to make a financial recovery over a period of 40 years.

Another, similarly intractable problem with similar causes was the matter of Workers’ Compensation.  In the state of Ohio, workers’ compensation is a state monopoly.  It is basically an insurance policy for workplace injuries, so that if an employee is injured on the job, the policy will pay for their time off work  and pay their medical expenses.  Because there was no legal competition, the Workers’ Compensation rates were usurious, back-breaking for business.  The system was rife with corruption, graft, and abuse.  Employees flagrantly abused the system, faked injuries in order to collect insurance money while sitting at home, and it was virtually impossible to prove to the authorities that they were committing fraud.  The public in general didn’t realize that the money the government used to pay for these claims came directly from employers, which of course raised the cost of operating a business.  Workers’ Compensation was by far the single largest, uncontrollable business expense, bar none.  I doubt there was an employer in Ohio that didn’t have their own horror stories about employees who claimed they couldn’t work because they had injured their back at work, but who belonged to bowling leagues, played summer softball, and had part-time jobs in construction, getting paid under the table.  And the injuries were always the same:  they claimed they had hurt their back.  “Back problems” were indefinable and indisputable.  No one could really prove you did, or didn’t,  have a back problem.

What made all this dishonesty possible, of course, was the existence of two cottage industries that benefitted by the abuse:  chiropractors and Workers’ Compensation attorneys.  The chiropractors would prescribe virtually endless treatments that rarely produced any significant progress (for then the treatments, and the income from them would cease).  The attorneys got paid on a percentage of the benefit amount you were awarded by the state, so it was very much to their advantage for your treatments, and their income stream, to continue.  I had a neighbor who had been collecting Workers’ Comp payments for many years, and he would tell me how his attorney would rehearse him for a Benefits Hearing, including advice not to shave for a week before the hearing, to wear shabby, rumpled clothing, and to otherwise look down and out.

When we knew a claim was fraudulent, we always reported it, and I can honestly say I don’t know of one single occasion where it was even investigated by the state.  When the state would send us information in the mail about safety in the workplace, and safety training programs, I used to actually get mad.  My problem was not a lack of safety awareness; my problems were fraud, greed, and government lassitude.  Everybody seemed satisfied with the status quo.  Labor unions could crow about how they were protecting the rights of employees, politicians could advertise about how they were the champions of the little guy against those rapacious employers, the chiropractors and attorneys were getting rich from the business, and the employers, well, they would simply pass the costs on to their customers, and the state Workers Compensation fund was awash in cash from high premiums.   So what’s the problem???  And all of this was passed off to the media and the public as altruism; the government authorities looking out for the best interests of the common man.  It never occurred to anyone, apparently, that the government had no money of its own, and merely transferred income from those who earned it to those who preferred not to.  And that the purveyors and facilitators of the system were getting rich from being the middlemen in the deal.

The problem was that Ohio businesses, burdened with this high cost, could not compete with other businesses outside of Ohio who operated under more enlightened and competitive systems.  So business was leaving the state, and new businesses didn’t want to invest in Ohio.  And when the State of Ohio tried to reform the Workers’ Compensation system, they were subjected to a powerful media blitz paid for by the cottage industries that fluorished under the status quo.  For our part, our little company literally staggered under the burden of making the premium payments, and for many years we were under a partial payment plan with the state. 

Eventually the balance of power shifted slightly (and temporarily) from the cottage industries who lobbied to preserve the system, over to employers, for in time people began to realize that if business left the state, there would be no funding for the system.  I always thought of the political process in matters of business and economics as resembling fleas on a dog.  The dog is Business and the fleas are the parasites that live off the dog, and the political process was a system of constantly determining the maximum number of fleas you can load on to the dog without killing it.  In Ohio, the Workers Compensation fleas were killing the dog.  In order to survive Business was leaving the state.  Suddenly, one year, I got a check in the mail from the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, in the amount of $36,000.00 because the ‘Bureau’s investments had been unexpectedly successful.’  My ass.  When you punish your productive people for their productiveness, those with get-up-and-go get up and go.  The State of Ohio had to stop the flight of business and capital out of the state.

I have to say in passing, that the real victims of the WC system were actually the fraudulent claimants.  They usually got caught up in  a spiral of altering their life style to conform to the needs of the fraud they were committing.  They had to be convincing, and I think that for many of them the pretense eventually became reality.  Their back did hurt,  and when they dressed and acted in a manner required to maintain their benefits, their self-image began to conform to what they saw in the mirror. In my experience, they were almost always a very unhappy, depressed lot.  It took far more energy to maintain their benefits than it would have to exercise daily and find a job they could handle, for honest money.  Fraud corrupts the soul every bit as much in the little guy as it does in the fat cat attorney down the street who advises him.  Some of these chiropractors and attorneys made half a million dollars a year working the system. 

Many years ago I had a skinny fellow who worked for me for a few months named Rodney.  Rodney worked hard when he felt like it, and one day he helped me unload some stuff off the back of a van and into a shed in my driveway.  It took us about an hour.  A couple weeks later Rodney quit and I got a Workers Compensation claim in the mail.  Rodney stated he had hurt his back helping me unload the van.  I thought ‘that’s funny, he never said anything, and he seemed fine to me.  What injury??’  Well, Rodney got himself an attorney and got his claim.  He has been collecting Workers Compensation benefits for many years now.  Every year we get literally dozens of pieces of mail from the state Bureau of Workers Compensation with regard to Rodney, and it is an endless litany of hearings, medical evaluations, and negotiations.  It appears the state is trying to get rid of Rodney’s case, and of Rodney, and with great difficulty.  Rodney, all by himself, must keep two or three state employees busy full-time just circulating all this paperwork.  And Rodney, well this must be what he does full-time for a career these days, responding to all this stuff.  I cannot imagine how he can have much time for anything else.  As far as his back goes, I have no idea what’s wrong with his back, if anything.  But there is one thing I do know:  he didn’t hurt it at work with me that day.

What bugged me the most about the Workers Compensation boondoggle in Ohio was that with the exception of employers, everybody was presenting themselves to the public in  altruistic terms; what they were doing to help everybody else.  Everybody, the unions, the attorneys, the chiropractors, the politicians, and the state bureaucracy, were selling themselves as the guardians of public interest and the injured worker, while they were fleecing the system and lining their pockets.  And as always, we employers were the bad guy because we made no bones about the fact that we were there to make money.  For ourselves, and our investors.  For this reason, we were selfish and greedy, and the worker needed to be protected from us.  The lesson appeared to be that all anyone had to do to be believed was to merely proclaim his unselfish, altruistic intentions, and anyone who stated the opposite, that he was looking out for his own best interest, could not and should not be trusted.  Now you tell me, which one would you believe?  Like I said, whenever anyone tells you what he’s going to do for you,  grab your wallet and run like hell.

I was also becoming acquainted with the halo benefit of government:  All government gets a huge benefit of assumed legitimacy.  Maybe that’s why we have 80,000 pages of government regulation in the Federal Register.  For me, the administration of Workers’ Compensation insurance in Ohio during those years was an example of the Lockean Paradox:  The very instrument used to secure one’s rights becomes their greatest threat.  In the face of this vast smothering bureaucracy, does anyone really believe they are in control of their economic life because they vote every four years??

Because the government regulated so many aspects of the employment relationship, I learned over and over again that everything in business related to employees had to be documented.  It was necessary to adhere closely to a system of written progressive disciplinary procedures for employees; the catch for an employer was that from the moment you administered any kind of written warning to the employee, whatever little there might have been of a positive attitude in the employee instantly evaporated.  No matter what you said to the contrary, in their minds from that point on you were trying to get rid of them.  And of course that very often became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

What a far cry all this was from my former utopian world of Watchtower and Bethel.  Was everything really this messy?  Where had all the heros gone?

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. 

My star continued to rise, and soon I was requested to rewrite some of the lectures composed by some of the lesser talents in the Writing Department.  By this time I felt quite free about inserting much of my own philosophy in my writing.  After all it was all going to be reviewed and censored by others anyway.  So I lent my voice to the cacophony of dissent.  I wrote an article published in the Awake! magazine about the etymologies of words, and offered to write an article for the Watchtower   entitled “Are You a Thinking Christian?”  It bothered me that so much of the membership seemed to follow the route of least resistance and looked for a higher authority to tell them what to do when faced with the slightest conflict in their life.  They seemed incapable of abstracting principles from concrete situations and forming independent conclusions.  When I submitted my Abstract for the article, I received a letter in return from the Writing Department strongly admonishing me to build my article around prayer, meeting attendance, and regular door-to-door field service.  Only then did I realize the organization had a vested interest in the membership conforming to policy, and the last thing they needed was for them to become independent minded.  Later still I came to realize that the intended title of my article was in itself something of an oxymoron.  Not entirely however:   there were quite a few of us in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas who were attempting mightily to reconcile faith and intellectual integrity.  I never wrote the article.

Interestingly, many years later when I took some college courses in Aristotelian logic, I learned that Jehovah’s Witnesses routinely but expertly practiced all of the fallacies of both evidence and reasoning.  Let’s say they wanted to publish a series of articles on Belief designed to motivate their readership to question their own belief systems and predispose them to look at Jehovah’s Witnesses’ beliefs favorably.  The writers would not begin by attacking the readers’ beliefs.  Quite to the contrary, they would establish a reasonable tone testifying to your right to believe what you want, and remarking at the incredible diversity of beliefs that this results in.  Then they point out the inevitable contradictions in all these beliefs; how can a truth seeker distinguish between belief and truth?  They will then supply some historical anecdotes showing the harm that mistaken beliefs have caused.  They will then discuss why people believe, such as the influences of your family, education, and media.  In each case, they will point out reasonably how each of these can serve a valuable purpose (for do not Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves teach their children to stay in the religion?) They will point out the disadvantages of uncritical acceptance of what others taught you, and of the powerful forces manipulating the media.  Obviously then, guidance from someone higher than man is needed, and this can be found in the Bible.  As proof thereof, numerous texts from the Bible are supplied.  However, the Bible itself warns against many false prophets that would arise, and therefore it is critical that you check whatever you are being told against the Bible.  And luckily for you, Jehovah’s Witnesses can help you do just that!  And then it will be your decision what you choose to believe.  Of course a truly wise person will believe what God’s Word tells them.  They can simplify this process for you.

In the above example, they set up the Straw Argument to discredit all the traditional secular sources of belief, and then move to the Bible as the only possible truthful source, then with very hasty generalizations discredit all sources of religious belief on the basis of the existence of contradictions.  They might even invoke arguments about all the errors in Aristotle’s philosophy to discredit his writings on logic!  They use the Bible as the only reliable Source of evidence in this context, for it is the value of the Bible as a standard that they are defending. Notice that by discrediting all other sources, both secular and religious,  through the flimsiest of argumentation they attempt to establish themselves as the only available source of reliable truth by default.

Now let’s take another example, this time directed at the members of the congregation, with the purpose of admonishing them against straying too far from the party line.  This argumentation will begin with the valid assumption that their reader has already accepted the Bible as the only valid source of truth.  Again, they might begin with examples of mistakes in the writings of historical figures, especially prominent philosophers of the past.  Then they would quote the Bible verse that admonishes:  “Look out:  perhaps there may be someone who wil carry you off as his prey through the philosophy and empty deception of men . . .”  They might then segue to another Bible verse that says “Woe to those wise in their own eyes . . .”  Can you see where this is going?  Then from there to a Biblical proverb:  “He that is trusting in his own heart is stupid. . . “  Now, let’s see, since we obviously can’t rely on the wisdom of secular sources, and since we can’t rely on ourselves, who should we rely on?  Well, we need to exercise thinking ability.  Sounds good, right?  Hmnnn.  Then we proceed to another Bible verse that emphasizes attaining “oneness in the faith.”  Aha!  Only by “oneness” can we avoid the terrible pitfalls of false ideas and teachings (such as, anything promulgated in contradiction to what the faithful are reading in this article, for example.)  The faithful are then exhorted that to be in “oneness” they must be in full harmony with their fellow believers, and would not advocate personal opinions or harbor private ideas when it comes to spiritual matters.  And of course, once again, the readership is reminded that God works through “the faithful and discreet slave”, their euphemism for the church leadership.  The final exhortation will be to exercise thinking ability by continuing to study church publications and attend all the church meetings, thereby protecting the membership from outside contagion.

Jehovah’s Witnesses are masters of circular logic, and the above examples show how seamlessly they segue from the dangers of your unquestioning acceptance of your current beliefs to advocating your unquestioning acceptance of their beliefs!  And notice in their concluding arguments  how skillfully they equate  thinking ability with conformity, two antithetical concepts if ever there were any!  If these articles had the purpose of defending the church’s own change in position on a particular matter, they would invoke a Bible text about “the light getting brighter and brighter as the day draws near.”  If you read their publications critically, there isn’t a fallacy of language, evidence, logic and reasoning that they don’t commit.

By the way, the examples I offer above are real, drawn from an August 1, 2001 issue of The Watchtower entitled “Is There a Sound Basis for Your Beliefs?”  No wonder my abstract for an article on being a thinking Christian was so heavily amended!

Once you give yourself permission to question the unquestionable, you have opened a Pandora’s box that can never be closed again.  Once I got past the dogma, doctrine, and dictates of an authoritarian and autocratic society, the questions came in a steady stream.  Once you open your eyes to reality, it is amazing to find what was always there.  Belief motivates even as it blinds.  As I gave more and more thought to what I had been taught, the questions and conflicts grew, and severe headaches became an almost daily occurrence on my job.

What I found most remarkable as Jehovah’s Witnesses and mainstream religion, politics, media, and culture traded shots across each other’s bows was that they were all, and accurately, accusing each other of the same thing:  excess, lies, misrepresentation, and hatefulness in the name of ideologically driven “truth”!  It is a daily occurrence that I read something somewhere that is a clear misrepresentation of facts in support of a belief, as the religious Right attacks the liberal Left and vice versa.  I even find parallels in eschatology, as an author of The Coming Ice Age within a generation becomes a rabid proponent of Global Warming.  And yet people marvel that Jehovah’s Witnesses can selectively forget yesteryear’s predictions of Armageddon and apocalypse!  The beat goes on.  Cults are a pejorative term we apply to vigorous groups who operate outside the realm of the politically correct, but who engage in identical behaviors as the mainstream.  In this regard, Socialism is Liberalism in a hurry, and Communism is Socialism in an even bigger hurry.  The Left would control you in the  name of Society, and the Right would enslave you to please God.  Ultimately they are all Utopians with very different versions of the Ultimate Good.  Each of them champions of certainty and final truth, they all believe the end justifies the means, and the “means” is always some form of coercion, including guns or whatever else is available to them.

In December of 1975 a group of fifty prominent elders from around the country were called in to Brooklyn for a high level conference to be overseen by the Governing Body itself.  I was invited to attend.  Seated next to me was my mentor Malcolm Allen, who was moderating this portion of the discussion and next to him, was a member of the Governing Body, Ted Jaracz.  When one of the elders who mistakenly believed the offered mantra of open honest discourse asked why the Watchtower Society kept printing obscure, difficult- to-understand textbooks that bored the faithful, the Governing Body member next to Malcolm kicked him under the table to induce him to change the subject.  The obscure books in question were invariably authored by Fred W. Franz, the theological ayatollah of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he was beyond criticism.  Fred was fond of insisting that the most miniscule details of Old Testament lore were types, or prefigurements, of events in our time, which he called the antitypes.  So a typical question for discussion in one of his works would be, Who is the antitypical Habbakuk (a minor Hebrew prophet and the name of a small book in the Old Testament), and why?  We used to irreverently joke around and add, ‘And who cares?’   It was to be many, many years before I read other authors such as Robert Bly and Camille Paglia and discovered that Jehovah’s Witnesses were not the only ones with a fascination for types and archetypes.

As anticipated, there were casualties.  I was one of them.  Even though the rebels won, revolutions have unintended consequences.  The Governing Body was enlarged from seven members to eleven, and finally to eighteen.  Ray Franz, who was clearly the Che Guevara of the theological revolution, was ousted, as was Ed Dunlap.  There was a merging of sorts of the old and the new.  Brother Knorr, the third president in the organization’s history, lost status, got sick and died.  To me, Dan Sydlik looked less like Georges Danton (who eventually was guillotined for his moderation and opposition to the excesses of the Reign of Terror)  and more like Joseph Fouche who survived four different regimes about the time of the French Revolution, and who conspired against each of them, was a survivor who co-opted to each new regime and rose to condemn his previous co-conspirators.  Fred Franz died of old age, I believe at the age of 101. 

Before everything really hit the fan, I decided to leave.  It was ‘the best of times and the worst of times.’  I told the organization that my wife and I wanted to start a family.  They had difficulty accepting this since she was not pregnant.  They could not grasp why we would choose to leave except for an accidental pregnancy.   It was part of the unverbalized creed that one would never evince any dissatisfaction with life at Bethel, but offer various family responsibilities as the pretext for leaving.  Aging parents in need of care, accidental pregnancy, family emergencies were all acceptable.  It would have been unthinkable to tell the truth and say ‘I’m unhappy here and want to do something different with my life.’  Fred Maes had tried it and was excoriated for his honesty.  So our explanation that we were leaving to plan a family was something of a rejection of the herd.  It implied that life offered us choices we considered superior to our existence there at headquarters.

My wife Barbara was quite unhappy with my decision.  Barbara loved the regimented and secure life at headquarters, and to the best of my knowledge she suffered none of the doubts and qualms of conscience that plagued me.  I don’t think she ever really forgave me for giving up our life there; as far as she was concerned, she intended to spend the rest of her life there.  One of the reasons she decided to marry me was because I appeared to be the quintessential Watchtower man–bright, dedicated, focused, serious, and with lots of potential for upward mobility within the church.

For my part I still don’t know why I married Barbara.  She was smart, attractive, and a committed, conscientious member of the flock, and everyone approved of our match.  Sometimes it almost seemed like an arranged marriage.  Testosterone still hadn’t kicked in, and I was not particularly hormone driven.  Masturbation was a rare experience for me.  I was simply too busy to bother.  Barbara and I started to date, but most of our time together was with church activities, and after a while it seemed as if the next, expected step was to propose marriage, so I did.  I knew that most of the old men at headquarters who had never married were sort of peculiar and I didn’t want to end up like them, so I guessed that meant I should marry someone, and here was Barbara, and there was no particular reason not to pick her, so I did.  Or rather, she picked me. 

Emotionally I was not ready for this, even though I was a textbook romantic and played out my role with seeming enthusiasm.  My body vented the stress through acute bronchitis just prior to our wedding, and I was released from the Bethel Infirmary only hours before our wedding.  I was very sick during the wedding activities, and while enroute to our honeymoon cabin in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, I had to pull to the side of the road and sleep a few hours.  I was a long, long way from knowing myself and being able to articulate the emotional conflicts that I was busy repressing.

When I first met Barbara’s parents, Bill and Jinny Newman, I was impressed with the homespun intelligence and honesty of her father.  He was however a man of deep internal conflicts.  Bill was a very strong man except when it came to Jinny.  He was very tall (6’6”) and very self-confident, to the point of being intimidating.  Few people would pick a fight with Bill.  But Bill wasn’t a true believer.  As a concession to Jinny, Bill would attend all the congregational meetings, but he would not participate in the discussions.  He also would not engage in door-to-door witnessing.  This labeled him as a fringe Witness.  Jinny did not cope well with her husband’s inadequacies and  made her displeasure and scorn felt in many ways, not the least of which was that she taught her three daughters a fundamental disrespect for their father.  Bill just assumed that there had to be something wrong with him that he could not believe as his wife did and he felt self-condemned.  He therefore endured his wife’s displeasure without complaint.  When I first observed my fiancée interact with her immediate family, their disdain for their father became immediately apparent.  Jinny on the other hand was generally regarded in the congregation as a model of faith and rectitude.  Because I admired Bill and because of my prominence in the church, Bill’s stock rose within his family circle for a time.  Thus began a Golden Age of family life within the cult that was to disintegrate when I betrayed the bonds that held us together by choosing to walk away from life at headquarters and eventually the church itself.

It was the best of times in that Barbara and I left Bethel before the final shake-out and before I too came under the intense scrutiny that others suffered.  It was the worst of times because I was about to find out how poorly prepared I was for survival outside my safe cocoon of the last nine years.