[To all those who followed the first eight chapters of my story, thank you. It's very healing for me to write all this. I had fooled myself that my story was done after Chapter 8, but it really wasn't. Please bear with me as I see how many more it takes to finish this where it must be finished. Love, -dp]
Chapter 1: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/155373/1.ashx
Chapter 2: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/155429/1.ashx
Chapter 3: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/155490/1.ashx
Chapter 4: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/155940/1.ashx
Chapter 5: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/156292/1.ashx
Chapter 6: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/156570/1.ashx
Chapter 7: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/156717/1.ashx
Chapter 8: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/6/156949/1.ashx
Chapter Nine
I don’t know how this story ends.
I hardly know how to tell it.
All I know is that somewhere along the line I began to become more and more troubled about the beliefs I had about the Watchtower Society and the control they had over the lives of millions of people. And although I may be able to pick out important changes here and there, none of the changes went to my core: I now see myself as a fresh discovery of a man by his former self; the same man, but seen with the lights on.
We returned to where we both grew up in northern California: a small, isolated agricultural valley with few economic opportunities other than construction and pot-growing. Nearly every brother in the congregation worked in the trades, including James, who by this time was engaged, and working as an apprentice carpenter.
Angela’s father had renovated a part of the garage, putting in a couple walls, plumbing for a small bathroom and kitchenette, laminate, carpet, and everything we needed to make it our cozy little “love nest,” as they called it. It was a place for us to crash land and to catch our breath after all we had been through the previous year.
I was still getting used to the fact that I had another chance to live, and because of this, couldn’t immediately focus my energy on finding a permanent job and building a livelihood. My head was still spinning; I was turning round and round, but going slower and slower, trying to get my world to stop with me. Connecting with this new world meant many successful and failed experiments. Angela’s mother cooked food that wasn’t uncommon, but it tasted like I were an alien on earth for the first time and was just beginning to discover all the culinary wonders of our planet. The friends I had before were now changed; or else the eyes which I judged them with were now different. My skin was still pale, my hair not yet grown in from where the radiation removed it, the dark burn mark on my face not yet faded, and my weight still below what it used to be.
Getting used to sleeping in the same bed with someone was challenging. It was a twin-size mattress; my feet dangled off the edge, and the only way for us to stay on was to entangle ourselves in each other. Learning all the nuances of marital communication presented its own never-ending challenges: so many things to remember, so many words to say at the right moment, and so many not to say at the wrong ones.
She wore furry pink slippers and would sit with her legs crossed, one slipper dangling on the tip of her foot. She spoke into the air; in that way that never tells me if she’s talking to herself or to me. I typed on the computer, writing something, and asked her how the word “piece” is spelled, and she said it’s like a piece of pie, with “i-e.”
It soon became apparent that my libido was much lower than hers, and was perhaps another side-effect of the radiation that hadn’t yet resolved itself. For that and a few other things, she consulted an old health remedy book and concocted a thick drink that I struggled to get down. It had just about everything in it, including raw eggs, soy protein powder, and several capsules of Vitamin B-6. I drank one each day and very soon my hair began growing back and my strength seemed to return.
We grew together fast. We picked out a couple of kittens at the pet store in town, a little brother and sister small enough to hold together in my hand, and one day a few weeks later we took them outside in the garden for their first outdoor experience. The little girl stayed out of the grass on top of a little rock and swatted at butterflies, while her brother tromped around below, his huge belly swinging and dragging beneath him.
I was soon re-appointed as a ministerial servant; this was, after all, my old kingdom hall where I first left to go to Bethel. They were always in dire need of servants in the congregation. I gave at least one talk every weeknight meeting. I assisted with one congregation book study and was then assigned my own as an interim conductor for a few months. I enjoyed serving, but the endless weekly talks began to burn me out. I told myself that if I felt burned out, then certainly the two elders in the hall felt it, too. So I never complained, because after all, being used by Jehovah was a blessing and even though it could be exhausting, he would give us the strength to do what we needed to do.
For the first year of our marriage I floundered around economically, helping with this brother and helping with that brother, making a few bucks here and there. Several older ones in the hall tried to give me ideas for starting a business of some sort, but none of the ideas seemed very plausible, much less attractive options of making a living. I didn’t feel strong enough to jump into learning a trade, and neither did I want to build a career out of it only to have my body fall apart again. In the meantime Angela resumed a job she had a couple years before at a restaurant in town, as a server. She was going on eight or nine years as a food server, and while the money was good, it was one of the least satisfying things she could do. Every night she went to work was a night I tried to brainstorm about how I could make a living for us.
But for some odd reason, I felt like the right thing to do was to begin regular pioneering again. I don’t know if it was because we were always told pioneering was the right thing to do in times of transition, or because I wanted to take refuge in the busy work of witnessing and forget about making important decisions. In any case, I didn’t last long. Angela didn’t start pioneering with me, because for one reason or another she didn’t know if she was capable of doing so, or wanted to do so. I went out in service for only a couple months before I realized that, not only was I too physically exhausted to make my time, my heart wasn’t in it; I had no reason to push myself as I had done before as a young single man trying to get into Bethel.
At about the same time as this, a couple very old friends of Angela’s were beginning to have spiritual trouble. The husband was considering disassociating himself, and few knew why. I think Angela knew why, however, because this couple had been in her old congregation (which happened to be the very first one my family attending when we moved to California, when I was a little boy peeing in the flower bed) and there had been a huge debacle of child molestation many years ago. The offender had been sentenced, but because it occurred before he was an adult in the court’s eyes, I think he was pretty much let go. He was disfellowshiped for a time, but was reinstated later. His father was an elder for many years, stepped down during the trial, and then reappointed later. The mother of the boy and girl who were molested disassociated herself. The offender, who pleaded guilty, was now going to all the meetings, being his old self, picking up other people’s children and playing with them. When I learned of all this—when Angela first told me about it—it beat around in my head for only a few days and then lay down in the back of my head along with all the other little bits and pieces of uncomfortable facts I had collected over the years. She thought there was some sort of elder-mismanagement of the case, and that was why her friends were distancing themselves from the congregation. One time, she explained to me that she was having doubts and that “she didn’t like it.” I didn’t like that she was telling me. I told her to do what she needed to do to get over it.
Meanwhile, after many conversations about our livelihood, Angela proposed the idea that I give college a try. She had taken a few classes off and on over the years after she first moved out of her parent’s house, and although she never completed anything or went in any real academic direction, she had enjoyed it. We decided to both take classes in the Spring 2003 semester. I was nervous, but soon found that I was so far ahead of everyone else in terms of maturity and motivation, that my confidence grew to help me meet the challenges of learning new things. I had to take algebra again, because graduating from the correspondence school left be with only an understanding of arithmetic. I also took a college-level English course. Teaching it was man whom, due to his style and the things he taught, I quickly learned to appreciate, and even love, because of his personal honesty and passion for truth. He wasn’t an old man, but had experienced life. Half his face was paralyzed; the emotions translated through the rest of his body registered minimally there, imbuing everything he said with an additional earnestness because by my seeing the absence of expression, my mind was constantly filling in the blank, matching one side to the other, making his points my own. And, he was gay. Being taught by him wiped clean all my previous images of homosexuals, and threatened all the mild prejudices I had acquired growing up in an absolutist religion. It was one of the first cracks in my identity as a Jehovah’s Witness, because by knowing someone personally you are equipped to defend them in your mind against all the other things in there which would condemn them.
He told me I had a talent for writing, but it took a long time for me to believe what he was saying. After all, wasn’t that what teachers were supposed to say to their students? Like pasting a little yellow smiley face on your paper and patting your back? The things I wrote for his assignment we either pathetically diversionary or the first real things I wrote about myself in years. The exhilaration of surmounting the first hill of a rollercoaster ride pervaded my body and mind; all the things I had experienced up to then were just beginning to order themselves so that I could see them in clear light, feel them with my hands, turn them over, knock them together, and tell where they had changed me. I’m still doing so, and even if it’s been over six years since I almost died, I have yet to reach the bottom of that first hill.
Angela and I went to school together, had one or two or the same classes, and would part ways in the yard, kissing. The oak trees dripped with the dew of morning, and the sun come over the west hills, glancing through the tall green blades of grass at their ancient feet. Nameless flowers pushed to open themselves. The cool air went into my lungs… recalling both my body and mind to life.
I excelled, receiving straight As the first quarter, the second, the third, and so on. I won scholarships, was nominated for several by my faculty, and began tutoring English in the learning center. I’m afraid I may have not been much help though, since most of the ones needing it were learning English as a second language, and I found it challenging to teach the more basic aspects of grammar and spelling. I knew how to structure a sentence, but not why it was done that way. But I continued to write on my own, starting and hardly ever finishing many short stories and poems. One semester I took a drama class and was talked into playing the lead role of a farce, where I was a Russian anarchist intent on either blowing up the theatre with a homemade bomb, or disseminating my ideals of how the stage should be directed and played on. The little production was just for our class with its small audience, but never did I feel more alive than when I was on that stage, throwing my hands about, shouting and pointing a gun, and then, whispering into the ear of the famous actress at the edge of the stage, gazing out into the vacant seats, telling her what made theatre worth dying for.
I regret that Angela wasn’t able to come see me on the stage, because I’ve always found it challenging to be as passionate in day-to-day interactions as I am able to be in my writing, or, in this case, playing a character in the Ladies of the Camellias.
Angela only attended school the first couple of semesters. When I started grasping ideas for my academic goals and potential career, she decided to just work and help me through while I treated school as my full-time job. No one else in my congregation was going to college, or had even done so in recent history. My elders were not entirely pleased that I was going, but eventually laid off the mild reprimands as they saw I carried on all my congregational duties. My service suffered, but then again, there wasn’t much to it in the first place. The presiding overseer always, without fail, went with his own family on Saturday mornings, and I never once worked with him in the near decade I was in the congregation. Depending on whom I went out with and what we did, field service was either excruciatingly awkward, or completely pointless. The lack of substance in this activity starkly contrasted with the nature of learning in my college classes. But it had always been that way. Field service, especially in my home congregation, was just about the last thing on earth I ever wanted to do, and only by threat of never leaving that place did I push myself through the day-to-day drudgery of it.
Eventually, I began getting more and more flack about attending college from those in the congregation and especially my family. The presiding overseer gave a local needs talk, pin-pointing me (as the only person in the hall going to college) by admonishing all the young ones to not look up to anyone putting higher education before Jehovah. Of course, there were dozens of people working full-time jobs and going out in service less than I was, and who were not giving several parts a week in the meetings along with numerous behind-the-scenes tasks. But it didn’t matter. All I was doing for the congregation was a drop in the bucket compared to the difference I presented among them by going to school. It wouldn’t have mattered what I was learning or how much I was doing in the congregation, all that mattered was that I was doing something different than they had done. They said they were only concerned for my spirituality, but their extreme narrow-mindedness regarding learning in general belied their supposed concerns. Because of the resistance I was getting, I sent a letter to the writing department at the Watchtower headquarters, asking them if there was anything wrong in what I was doing. Their reply basically told me that my decisions were up to me, that there were dangers in going to college and acquiring “worldly wisdom,” but that in the end, it as my decision. They neither condoned my actions nor demonized them. While the letter had a tone of open-mindedness in it, overall it reflected their not-entirely ambivalent stance they had on the issue for years, warning young ones away from college without telling them outright that Jehovah would not approve.
I continued school and tried to continue all my other congregational assignments, although my passion for them was waning. My favorite thing was to give talks, because, in a way, it felt like when I was that play: alive in a collective performance; being a conduit for something larger than myself. I believed those things I said, believed especially the points I struggled to make, while downplaying and avoiding more hard-line interpretations of scripture. But I couldn’t avoid the basic message: the end was coming, millions would die, the line would be drawn, there was right and there was wrong, we were with Jehovah or we were with Satan; that Jesus came to divide families, and not unite them.
Then, one semester, I took a critical thinking course. I quickly realized, angrily, that every single line of reasoning I had defending my faith was illogical. I forced myself to make sense out of my faith, and this, I believe, was the beginning of my final un-winding.