We'll see how long this lasts...
I'll write a chapter each day. Every day.
When there is nothing left to say.....it is over.
It could end up being a book nobody will every read.
Or, it might be read by a few and it might mean something to somebody. Who really knows?
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CHAPTER ONE
(Memoirs of mangy ex-cultist)
I would sit in my mother's living room staring off into space with the phonograph turned up to peak volume; a skinny, tall, 20 year old still living at home. No college, no girlfriend and no employment. I didn't own a car and I certainly didn't think any of the usual "worldly" preoccupations amounted to a bucket of goat urine.
I cradled a small book in my lap memorizing scriptural argumentation. "Make Sure of All Things" the title admonished. Okay, I shall!
A wash of sound splashed around the room and spilled off into the rest of the house.
Annoyingly, for sure.
Lillian Ivey (my mom) would appear in the doorway and complain about something else.
"Terry, are you depressed? I keep hearing you heave these long long sighs! You're thinking about going to jail--aren't you?"
Now I didn't want to have any such conversation with my mom or anybody else. That was not my way. I'd internalized my problems. I just didn't have the temperament to 'talk things out' and 'work them through'.
This was especially true when it came to the looming prospect of going to prison. It was religious grandstanding disguised as persecution- my ridiculous choice. I wouldn't agree to be drafted. I was a---um--Minister! I was entitled to deferrment as a conscientious objector--so I reasoned. The fact I had no Seminary training was beside the point. My credentials? These were...well...self-described as ordained by Jehovah. (Jesus never went to Seminary! You expect me to? Hardly!)
My decision was that of any male Jehovah's Witness. My ministry was knocking on doors and ringing doorbells. Watchtower and Awake! or a colorful "bible study aid" was my offer. Hand me your donation and I'll hand you the "meat in due season" whipped up by the "faithful and discreet slave" which mysteriously pumped out millions of words we called THE TRUTH! If you aren't a Jehovah's Witness all those crazy phrases don't mean anything to you at all. Jargon. Inside baseball, as the saying goes. Don't worry. I'll explain slowly...eventually...
Let me back up and start where all things start--at the beginning. Just to make things clear about The Truth, prison, faith and Jehovah god.
The Fabulous 50's
If you watched Billy Graham crusades on the black and white television set there would come a crucial invitation near the end of the broadcast. Billy would beseech his vast stadium filled with eager faces. The orchestra behind him played a stirring background as the emotional altar call reached a mounting climax. This was the moment of truth; the point of the entire sermon worked toward a call to action aimed at listeners and viewers alike.
Billy all but demanded that everybody within earshot make a "decision for Christ" at that very moment by standing up and coming forward for a prayer and a heartfelt commitment.
My own family would watch this earnestly and respectfully. There was a detached fascination in much the same way a family of oveweight slobs watched Jack LaLanne exercising himself into an ebullient frenzy of total commitment to health. It was all going on in our head and didn't reach any other part of our person. Almost like watching a Walt Disney documentary as a tiny ant struggles to carry a gigantic morsel of food up an impossible hill with extraordinary effort and determination.
"Hmpf! Look at that!" (What else is on? Gunsmoke?)
Billy Graham, Jack LaLanne and the tiny ant might be worth the trouble of our attention span--but--not our participation. It wasn't a judgement against or for. It was simply....idle curiousity. I was part of a 1st generation of TV watchers hynotised by anything we found on that tiny black and white screen.
Ours was not a religious household. Nobody in my family went to church. The word "Jesus" simply never came up in conversation. Yet, somehow, had you asked my grandmother, grandfather, mother or uncle Jack they would tell you they were christian. It was more a default setting than an elective decision.
True, my grandmother, Lillian, had come from a Catholic family. It was the same family that kicked her out and turned their collective back on her. She had gone to a dance and came home a few minutes beyond curfew. Judgement Day descended upon her! All the pleading was useless. Her horrible "sin"(curfew violation) was to be punished by the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
And this came to pass. She married her date, Jack Hybarger, a sailor on a tramp steamer from New Orleans to Cuba.
I exist as a result of this terrible family curse upon the errant daughter. Five minutes late from the dance=4 children and 2 grandchildren.
I am the RESULT of a sailor who couldn't afford a wristwatch!
Friends and other dangerous influences
If you want to know in a nutshell what the 50's decade was all about you had to be a kid. Baby Boomers! G.I.'s came back from the war and made up for lost time by impregnating anything with ovaries! My mom had ovaries! But, not for long. In her 65 years of total life on planet earth she would have cancer 3 times. The first time targeted her ovaries. I was about 5 when the hysterectomy came along. I'd remain an only child. My dad left when I was 6 mos. old. My mother drove him out with her sudden flip-outs. (There was no such thing as counseling back then for our economic status.)
Life consisted of sitting in front of, as I mentioned, a very small TV set with an awful, jiggly, unpredictable image. The illusion of control over this technology was grabbing "rabbit ears" and twisting them in all directions until the picture more or less settled itself into steady view.
Howdy Doody, Captain Video, Boston Blackie, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, Have Gun Will Travel seeped into your little kid's brain day and night. It was the ultimate answer to babysitting! When you were fed, at least in my household, food was served on a "TV tray" of aluminum. You sat by yourself munching and staring at the tube. In the heat of summer it was boiling hot inside the non-airconditioned house. I'd play out of doors until it was pitch black outside. Or, once a week, my grandmother and grandfather would take me to the movies. Horror movies, science fiction, musicals--it didn't matter.
Every family was trying to avoid thinking about the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annhilation by Russia. Some lucky families dug bomb shelters.
Other families had a better strategy: Jehovah God!
The first coming
I met my soon-to-be best friend, Johnny because of horror movies.
The downtown Fort Worth 7th street was devoted to three large and lavish movie palaces. The Worth was the most palatial. It was an Egyptian style vaudeville theatre converted into a movie venue. About once a year movie director William Castle would present some gimmicked publicity laden
horror flick for kids like myself. The Tingler (buzzers under your seat!), House on Haunted Hill (skeleton on a wire in the audience!) Macabre (1 million dollar life insurance policy against death by fright) all pretty corny and ridiculous---unless you were a kid. I was and so was Johnny Santa Cruz.
William Castle Fan Club was somebody's idea. I don't know how I heard about it--but, I showed up at the worth theater to join. Johnny was there too.
Months later Johnny recognised me and stopped me on my way home from school. We renewed acquaintance. In fact, we took to each other for probably no greater reason than our mutual love of monsters, horror and science fiction!
Johnny was a Jehovah's Witness, too. I had no clue what that meant. He was only too happy to tell me all about it! Once he started in talking it would never end! I sometimes wondered what meant the most to Johnny, the Creature from the Black Lagoon or Jehovah! It was all the same to me.
Did You Know Jesus didn't have a beard?
Out of any context whatsoever, Johnny would ask really ridiculous questions that I was supposed to answer on the spot!
"Did You Know Jesus didn't have a beard?"
He may as well have asked if I knew that a bear didn't shit in the woods. How do you reply to something as crazy as that?
"I give up--why didn't Jesus have a beard?"
And--off he'd go on a boring little mini-saga that droned and droned until he finally stopped with a huge labrador smile on his face.
Was I supposed to pat him on the head and say, "Good boy!" As though he'd fetched a duck from a deep pond?
Did You Know there is no burning hell?
Did You Know we don't have a soul--we ARE a soul?
Did you Know....Did you Know....Did you know???
I tolerated this to exasperation and then I started pushing back and challenging him.
But, Johnny had an advantage. His advantage? He'd reach for his hefty copy of the bible and flip-flip-flippty-flip to an onion skin, well-marked passage and read aloud.
Now, I don't know if you have the same problem with this that I do and did back then. If you begin reciting---let's say: Shakespeare aloud, it may sound great. However, the sense of it is very hard to extract--unless you are FAMILIAR in advance!
I didn't "get it". This touched off his exasperation with me!
I won't say he was trying to one-up me; maybe he was and maybe he wasn't. But, it turned oppressive in a hurry. I resented what amounted to intellectual bullying. What if your best friend, who is a math whiz, constantly chided you with "Quick--what is 27 times 54??"
I knew next to nothing about the contents of scripture.
My mother had often sat me upon her knee and read from the Book of Revelation for some kind of spooky thrill. "And the fifth angel sounded, and a star fell from heaven and blah blah scorpion....blah blah..angels...blah blah...torture....blah blah blasphemy...death...bottomless pit...."
Theatrics. Stuff and nonsense. Like I said: spooky.
Johnny, however, was like a used car saleman who could tell you how many cubic centimeters the overhead cam of your nitrous oxide flamdoodle was.
Impressive, overbearing, irrepressible.
I began counter-arguments with common sense questions. But, you may as well throw a punch at Cassius Clay and expect to connect before finding yourself on the canvas staring up at the tweety birds overhead! Useless....non-productive....feeble.
I relented.
Johnny wanted to "study the bible" with me and we set some time aside each week.
He'd come over to my house and we'd sit across from each other at a table. It was formal, embarassing and weird! He would ask that we
bow our heads as he starting talking one-on-one with "Jehovah God" this and "Jehovah God" that until the amen rolled around. What had I got myself into?
This bible study was a hoax as it turned out. We had a garish Watchtower published book titled "Paradise Lost to Paradise Regained" in day-glo Orange in front of us INSTEAD OF the bible!
It was an "aid". Sure.
I would soon discover that all Watchtower published books were basically the same book over and over again. They all more or less began in the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve and the serpent went through their charade which was used to explain EVERYTHING BAD that ever happened through ALL of human history! And so on...
I balked. I argued. I asked too many exasperating questions. I fought back. I resisted. Johnny was apoplectic.
The study lasted maybe.......3 weeks? Yeah, that sounds about right.
Instead of bible study---I got invited to "meetings". It was never called "church". Jehovah's Witnesses have a thing about useful easily identifiable words such as "church"---they don't like them! They change all useful ordinary words into something else.
Instead of church, Johnny and his family picked me up 3 times a week to attend the local Kingdom Hall.
I confess, I liked my first experience!
People were introduced to me and they treated me as though I was IMPORTANT to them!
I was smiled at and patted on the back and my hand was shaken over and over again.
We sat on uncomfortable folding chairs in a rectangle of a building facing a slightly elevated platform.
Strictly amateur hour! This was my first impression.
The Jehovah's Witness worship service was more like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on a show in their father's barn!
Not a professional in the house. Most speakers were like farmer Bob doing his first TV interview. I stifled many a chuckle.
Oddly, it was entertaining. The best thing was that I didn't feel that ostentatious pagentry you see in big stain-glass window cathedrals.
Did I learn anything? I doubt it.
Jesus didn't have a beard. I kept hearing that over and over. It was important to them that THEY knew that and the churches of christendom seemed
totally ignorant about it! I quickly learned they thought they knew the bible extremely well but all others did not. As a matter of fact, much effort went into proving that. People in the Kingdom Hall constantly demonstrated how to get one up on the "other guy". Hey! Just like Johnny was constantly doing with me!
Oh, I get it now!
He TRAINED for his little demonstrations of superior bible knowledge! Aha. Gotcha!
If he could do it---well, so could I.
Training to whoop ass
As a very young teenage boy with few prospects other than acne and embarassment--I began to see the Jehovah's Witness view of things as an advantage.
I could gain respect if I mastered the skillsets offered in the Theocratic Ministry School.
For free!
(No collection plate was passed before, during or after the services which were called "meetings")
I could receive an education in public speaking, argumentation, history and overcoming objections.
As a shy person with few social skills this seemed like an awesomely attractive proposition.
Johnny was very confident of his intellectual prowess. That was certain.
Secretly, I felt I was every bit his superior in that regard--but, damned if I could demonstrate it when the topic turned to religious matters!
Johnny made sure I completely understood that knowledge of Jehovah was vastly more important than knowledge of ANYTHING else.
Therefore, no matter how skilled I was at anything at all other than JW teachings--it was simply fecal matter to god.
Okaaaaay.
Young men are competitive with each other. In every personal dynamic there are followers and there are leaders. Winning was everything.
It simply was not in my nature or in Johnny's to knuckle under. So, I determined to use my excellent memory to advantage. I would memorize all the Society's information and keep it at my disposal. At the ready, you might say. Once I mastered it--Johnny would never win another argument.
However petty and childish this blind ambition may seem now--I never got a chance to use it. I had not forseen that the real opponent was some sleepy householder awakened by a knock at the door on a weekend morning way too early for a late sleeper to appreciate!
Door to door combat!
There are many categories of householders summoned to their own door by your obnoxious pounding. Half of them are wary of a grinning stranger with a green bible and a bookbag filled with primary color books for sale.
Others are combat ready. Hand to hand ju-jitsu is nothing compared to verbal jousts between a Baptist with his back up and a sly-fox JW waiting to pounce.
The object of the game is to spring a scripture on the unsuspecting and crush their false premise and then offer a magazine subscription.
A fools errand, if ever there was one!
You are more likely to sell porcupine pillowcases than to push a Watchtower subscription off on an irate Trinitarian.
The theory was all wrong. Getting converts won't happen if you are slicing and dicing the deeply held beliefs of devout people!
It takes the gentle touch of a pretty young sister to win them over with a blush and subservient deference. The distaff side of witnessing is the successful branch of the ministry. The other half breaks down into people who will stare off into deep space as you recite your nonsense or interrupt with an abrupt, "Not interested!"
You may counter with, "Not interested in what?" as the door slams...if you want to feel clever.
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Next up: Sex and the single witness...