Chapter 14. The Door of Dionysus

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

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

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

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

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.