I have never written this story down but with a little encouragement from Craig, I decided to write it. He seemed to think it may help a few people here. I have mentioned bits and peices of it in a few threads but never have put it all together in one post.
It was the Absolut beginning of the end for me and at the end of it I made the biggest decision of my life. I have only one regret about this whole story. My mom.
This story's main portion spans the time over a the week and a half I spent at Bethel, but over all it has effected my whole life. I am going to break it down into several parts, two now, the rest when I have time to write it. For those who care to take the time to read it, and if you get a little something out of it, then it makes the experince as well as what came out of it a little more worth it.
Dave
In late 1983 I owned a company that I had started two years previous that made and marketed art materials. I had invented a couple of products for the commercial art material industry and spent a lot of time writing articles for art related magazines and doing lectures at trade shows and college universities on the subject of commercial illustration.
One day I got a call from a purchasing agent for the Watchtower society inquiring about a new kind of Airbrush paint my company was introducing to the art market. At the beginning of the conversation I told the purchasing agent I was a JW. He got excited about this, especially after I told him I would give free paint to the Watchtower society.
A few days later I got another call from him and he told me that I had been the subject of several conversations back at Bethel and asked me if I would be interested in coming back to help out with some consulting and training. He of coarse had to check me out with my local body of elders to see if I was a good little JW boy. Since half of them ended up at my house on Friday and Saturday nights I was given a very shining report card. Even though I traveled every few weeks on business the elders were still grooming me for the next ministerial servant spot. Half of me wanted it, the other half of me wanted nothing to do with it.
A couple of weeks later I was on a flight to New York. I had been to New York on business several times before but never took the time to see the dog and pony show at Bethel. Before I left I had called my mom and told her about the society's request for me to come and help out. She was so happy, she was in tears. It had always been her dream for me to work in the art department at Bethel. She knew I would never have the hours to achieve her dreams because I hated going out in service ever since I was a kid. As the years went on, I became a constant disappointment to my mom. Little did she or I know that her life's dream for me to work at Bethel would be the one thing that finally persuaded me to leave the religion for good.
To me, I looked at the trip as something that would finally make me a spiritual person and show me some miraculous revaluation that would for the first time bring god and the JW religion solidly into my heart. I had been a back and forth JW my whole life. To me, this was exactly what I needed. It was like going to the safest place on earth if and when Armageddon came. It was the Mecca of all JWdom.
As I got off the plane at Kennedy airport I walked out to the waiting area and there was the brother who I had originally talked to on the phone the first time. We had got to be friends over several conversations and he wanted to personally pick me up from the airport. I recognized him because he was holding up a copy of the Watchtower so that I could identify him. I had to admit, it made me cringe just a little walking up to him. I could also tell he was holding the magazine close to his suit coat and slipping them in and out as people walked by him. I don't blame the guy, it was a bit embarrassing.
After we picked up my luggage I was hit with the first of many little rules that would slowly slice away at my expected feeling of joy and brotherly love and open my eyes to the reality of Bethel. As we were walking he looked at me and said "Dave, I hope you don't take this wrong but you can't ware those boots or jeans while you are working in the administration building". I never traveled in suits when I flew and told him I did have a suit or two in my luggage and it was fine with me. In actuality, it pissed me off a little. I hate warring suits, I wore them every Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday of my life. In business I only wore them when it was absolutely necessary. I have always been a jeans and cowboy boots or jeans and Nike's kind'a guy.
A little knot started to develop on the back of my neck. As we drove to Bethel my new friend and fashion consultant began to tell me how things were going to go. I would be dropped off at the societies VIP building and have my own room with my own bathroom. I looked at him like "that's nice" and then he went on to tell me how special it was for them to do this for me. He then told me that he would knock on my door bright and early in the morning to take me to breakfast with him and his wife. After that, I would be turned over to a personal escort and be taken to the administration building to meet Dean Songer and the heads of the different departments I would to be working with.
I was dropped off in my room and my new friend walked into it like it was a suite at the Plaza. He looked out the curtains and showed me the view of the harbor and the statue of Liberty. I wasn't impressed, I had seen it before. He looked through the room and checked out the bathroom. He was very impressed. To me, it was a little bit of a dive, but I didn't say anything. Later I would come to realize why he thought this tiny one bedroom box was so special. The first thing I noticed was the faucets in the sink. It had been cleaned so many times the chrome was rubbed right down to the shiny brass. Even though it was small and in my opinion a bit dark and gloomy, it was clean enough to eat off the warn down wooden floor.
Morning came too soon. Because of the time difference from the West coast to the East and getting in on a late flight I only got a couple hours of sleep. I woke up, took a shower and put on my less expensive suit. I thought the Armani might have been a bit too much. Like advertised he was knocking at my door as I was slipping on my calf skin Italian shoes. Since I had grown up wearing my older brothers hand-me-downs that were hand-me-downs from some other fashion victim brothers in the kingdom hall. Once I started making good money, I started wearing nice clothes. Unlike most guys, I now owned about twenty pairs of shoes. This didn't mean much to me at the time, but shoes become an interesting matter in later parts of this experience. The clothes I wore made me feel very much out of place here, but it was just the beginning of me having that feeling at Bethel.
We walked down several sets of stairs and ended up in some underground tunnels. Hundreds of people were walking around through the what seemed to be a maze of tunnels under the streets. For just a second, a vision from the movie 1984 flashed through my mind as I watched hundreds of people waking through these tunnels like they have been preprogrammed to go from point A. to point B. like lifeless, emotionless robots. I was starting to get a little freaked.
After walking through a couple of tunnels we walked into a huge dining room. There was room after room and long table after long table. Rows and rows of them. As we met up with is wife we walked over to a table that was toward the middle of the room next to a wall. As I looked around the room I saw several TV's sitting on little shelves that came out of the wall toward the top of the ceiling. We sat down and within a minute or so an older male figure appeared on the TV screens. We stood up again as the man on the TV began to say a prayer for the morning breakfast. Once again the image of the movie 1984 flashed through my mind.
The long lecture/prayer ended and the sound of several hundred people sitting down at once was defining. Within a minute or two, another guy shows up on the TV screen and starts in on the daily text. I couldn't eat. All I could do is look around and think to myself "what in the hell am I doing here? Was this what living in the new system was going to be like? Was this really the Mecca of the JW kingdom? Was this supposed to be as good as it gets? Was I eating breakfast in a bomb shelter with sewer pipes flowing above my head? I hadn't even begun to start working on what I was asked there to do there and I was already feeling suffocated.
The up and down robotic movements of the people started to remind me of the military. Everything done on cue and everything done exactly as the generals wanted you to do them. The only thing that looked even half way out of step was after the short breakfast was over, several people were dishing the left overs up and putting them into little plastic containers to take back to their rooms. I could understand that, it seemed like we only got five minutes to eat. That knot on the back of my neck started to get a little tighter.
I was then taken over to meet the brother who was going to be my escort for my time at Bethel. Talk about men in black! The guy had the personalty of a desk. As we headed out for the administration building My escort said we had to make a stop and pick someone up. We met up with our co-escotee in the front of another building. He was a little old man in a tattered suit and scuffed up worn out brown shoes who was talking to his feet as we met up with him. I was introduced to him while he was still looking at the ground and mumbling to himself. The little old man was Fred Franz. He shook my hand but didn't look at me face to face. He just turned and headed out like the rabbit from Alice in wonderland. I watched him walk in a very fast New Your kind of pace and I kept thinking to myself "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date."
As we walked to the administration building he constantly looked at the ground while he talked to himself. I couldn't take my eyes off his shoes. They looked like they had gone through a meat grinder. I thought to myself, this isn't a poor religion. Their real-estate on the edge of the New York harbor alone had to be worth tens of millions. Why can't they give this old guy a decent pair of shoes. The only thing I could figure was he had a very long, close and personal relationship with his shoes because he kept looking down and talking to them as we walked. For just a half second I wondered if Jehovah was not an all seeing all knowing God, but instead, he was an old warn out pair of brown shoes.
Maybe it was that pair of shoes where Fred got his inspiration and direction to run a religion and write prophecies that never came true. I mean if a talking snake can convince a couple of naked people to commit the ultimate culinary sin that would doom the entire planet to destruction, why not a talking pair of old shoes?
I had to keep telling myself that this wasn't weird. I was just not spiritually minded enough to look at things in a better light. A gang bang breakfast, a stroll through the tunnels of George Orwell's mind and walking with a senile old man with an old warn out brown shoe foot fetish. The bad thing about all this is, it would get worse and many things that were revealed to me would open my eyes a lot more. It made me realize I was not crazy, nor was it my lack of faith that kept my head spinning. It was the bit by bit hidden truth about "the truth" that slowly became revealed to me that would finally do me in.
End of part 1