[This is the true story of my life. I'm posting it in installments. The final installment will include post-script-type thoughts, with acknowledgements to those who've helped me along these last two years, as well as those who've been an inspiration. I hope you enjoy reading. -dp]
Chapter One
I was raised in the truth. It was all I ever knew. I have no relationship with God, or any concept of the Creator, outside of it. Jehovah was the reason for everything, from why the Earth turned and all the animals live and breathed, to why I had to tear myself inside out and deny my own reasoning ability.
I was born at home, in the country, in a rural state. We were very poor, although I wouldn’t have known it since I had no exposure to anything else at the time. We ate apples and crackers for weeks. My mother would scour the country roads looking for vegetables that had fallen off trucks to feed our horses. My father would shoot a deer once in a while. He also drank. My mother always said he was an alcoholic, but to this day I’m not sure of the difference. All I knew was that he was weak in this way and also in others.
We moved to California when I was a toddler. My father knew someone in a small town where work was available. There was a Kingdom Hall with two congregations; it was here where I would form my first memories of worshiping Jehovah. My first was when I was caught peeing in the flower bed out front. I was a country boy, and this was the natural way for me. The Sunday meeting had just ended and the brothers and sisters filed out while I did my business. Of course, it was the source of many laughs and a little embarrassment on the part of my family while my older brother ran out of the Hall and hitched my pants up.
The Hall had a faded brick exterior, shag carpet, cheap wood paneling, and a popcorn ceiling. There were narrow and tall windows on either side of the entryway where I used to fit myself into and stand like a pillar. The back room was typical of any Hall in the eighties: metal cabinets, a typewriter, shelves filled with every book the Watchtower Society published in the last fifty years, a card table in the center, and not much else. There were always the same men going in there, with one other person who might be different. Sometimes they emerged with smiles and laughing and back-slapping, and other times they came out with in tears in their eyes.
We lived in a trailer out in the country in the midst of vineyards. One day my mother and father got in an argument, screaming at each other. This wasn’t unusual, except this time it was to have a different outcome. My older brother was out on the porch, walking away with his head down like he did whenever this sort of thing happened, while my older sister retired to her room in the back and closed her door. I was left in the living room, staring up at my parents shouting with red faces. My mother grabbed a broom and used it as a sort of lance, jabbing my father in the ribs, and then beating him over the head with it as he retreated out the front door. In a few seconds he came back, stormed around the house, and then walked out with his sleeping bag over his arm. He paused as he passed my brother on the porch, looking back to tell him something. My mother thumped around in the kitchen for a minute, and then went into her bedroom and slammed the door, sobbing. The shouting had ceased, but the echoes reverberated throughout the house and every house we lived in thereafter. What I was told later was that my father had committed adultery.
My mother forgave him the first time but not the second. He rented a house in town and continued to attend the same congregation we went to. There were judicial meetings, as well as secular legal proceedings. My mother sought a divorce and was granted one, but my father wasn’t disfellowshiped. The first time I heard the phrase “he escaped by the skin of his teeth,” was in reference to him and his repentance. To me, none of this made much sense. What was repentance? The damage was done, and nothing could repair it. The household they had built was destroyed, and each child had to find their own way out of the wreckage. I was five years old at the time.
The next few years were blissful for my sister. She was not the daughter of my father and had suffered most of his verbal abuse; she was relieved to have him gone. Now it was just the four of us; my mother and her three kids. She had to take a job in town, for which she was paid $3.15 an hour. My father was ordered to pay $300 per month in child support, although to the best of my knowledge this was never paid. He came by once in a while to pick my brother and me up and take us somewhere. However, most of the days he promised to take us somewhere he didn’t. My older brother would sit out on the porch, waiting all day for him to come, his chin on his elbow.
I needed my father, but I was younger and didn’t have the relationship with him like my brother had. One time my brother and I got to spend the night at my dad’s house in town, which was very exciting. Of course, it didn’t feel anything like home; he didn’t have any furniture except for a TV on a cardboard box and a bare mattress with his sleeping bag on it. That night the three of us huddled up on the mattress and slept through the cold night, until I woke up vomiting the cheese sausages we ate for dinner.
Attending the meetings with my mother was an arduous thing; fidgeting in my seat, falling through the empty space between the seat and the back and having to be pulled out, having my shirt un-tucked and messy and trying to maintain some semblance of dignity, and also being pulled to the back with her finger jabbing into my chest instructing my to sing the song or else I would be spanked. This same admonishment was to happen a few years later when I was about nine or ten. Except that time she threatened to throw me out of her house. I had gotten the point both times, but it still didn’t absolve my shyness about singing.
At around eight or nine years, I was farmed off to study with an older brother in the Hall. We sat in the stale study room of his house, our knees almost touching, and went over several of the Society’s publications. I don’t recall the names of them, but one was blue, one was orange, another was green, and all of them pretty much had the same things to say. One had a few extraordinarily embarrassing chapters on bodily fluids and marital “relations.” The older man raised his eyebrow, cleared his throat, and asked me if I knew what sex was. I said yes, because even if I wasn’t aware of all the ins and outs, I could tell it would be an excruciating experience to have him tell me about it. Even then, he said a few words about penises and vaginas and how a man and a woman would lie close together. In retrospect, this was probably not much more than what he knew himself. How would I know this? Well, this man later became my step-father.