CHAPTER 10

Martindale was so eager to impress the South American believers that he had his teaching translated and read it to them in Spanish, which he admittedly did not speak. At one stop he was given a pair of shoes as a gift, and he stood on his hands on the stage so all the believers could see the shoes. The believers were duly impressed.

But Craig fell ill during the tour from a recurring problem he had suffered since childhood. He told Maria it was some kind of sinus pressure that caused tremendous pain in his gums and throbbing in his head. There was no treatment other than pain relievers. Eddie Goebel did everything he could for Craig, trying to make him comfortable, running a vaporizer in his room. Maria, ever the Florence Nightingale type, wanted to do whatever she could to help.

"It was definitely not a conquest," she said. It was just that between Eddie, Gary, Michelle and the pilots, there was nobody else who could do anything for him.

"I am a bleeding heart, I love people, and there was no line to draw," she said. "If you love someone and you're ministering ... I made myself available to him in my desire to make him feel well."

Eddie set it up so they could be alone. Craig was sitting in a chair, Maria was rubbing his shoulders. Eddie dimmed the lights. Then he took Maria aside to say he was leaving and to ask her to lock the door on her way out.

"And the shoulder rub turned into a body rub, and the rest is history," she said with a laugh.

Afterward Craig was guilt-stricken and ashamed. It was obvious to Maria that he hadn't been unfaithful to his wife very often. "He was so nervous, even to look at me after that. He wouldn't look me in the eyes. He was visibly nervous, very uncomfortable."

Maria found Craig's attack of conscience both endearing and confusing. She felt hurt when Craig started avoiding her, and then she started pursuing him. He didn't want to talk about it. She tried to get used to it and couldn't. It was her first rejection.

She made the mistake of telling Wierwille about this, and he was furious that she had been with Craig. "It was a pride thing," she said. Craig had already taken over the presidency of the ministry; Wierwille wasn't prepared to hear that Craig was taking his women too. "He wanted to be the big stud, but he was being replaced by a younger stud," she said.

Around this time, Wierwille suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed one side of his body. He was also found to have ocular cancer, and one of his eyes was removed and replaced with a prosthetic eye. The cancer spread anyway.

Maria paid him a visit in 1985, shortly before his trip to Scotland and his death. She went with the fellow entertainer and ex-Limb leader who had also been a lover of Wierwille's. They brought him flowers.

He looked like a man barely clinging to life. He had no strength, no color in his face. He looked sickly, pale and ugly, a ghost of a man. He was allowing hardly anyone to see him in this state, but he admitted Maria and the other woman. They stepped aboard the motorcoach with their flowers.

"And he just started crying," she said. "All he could do was cry, he couldn't even talk. I think he must have begun realizing: these are just young, sweet girls and they really care about me as a person, and I'm such a fuckup -- what a jerk I am."

© Karl Kahler 1999