CHAPTER 13

Robert Belt lowered the boom. In consultation with his Region coordinator, he ruled that if either of the girls exceeded the two-drink limit one more time, they were off the WOW field. He told me first, then he had me put Marty on the phone. He told her the same thing, twice, then had her put Veronica on the phone. He told Veronica the same thing, twice, then had Veronica put me back on the phone. He told me what he had told them, and he told me he had told them twice.

No room for anyone to claim they didn't understand.

With Hank gone, we didn't need such a big house anymore, and the memories associated with it were already rotten anyway. In November we moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a part of town that new people might actually want to come to. I hoped it would be the change we needed to make a new beginning.

But Johnny's was still too much of a temptation. One night I took Maureen to see Against All Odds, which might have been the theme of this WOW year, and after the movie we went to Johnny's to check on the girls. We joined them at their table, and I watched Veronica have one, two, three in a row -- never mind how many she had before I got there.

I called Robert. He asked me to put Veronica on the phone. He told her to pack her bags and be on the road by tomorrow.

He had two pieces of advice for me. One was, "Don't condemn yourself." I wondered why in the world I would condemn myself, since it was his rule. The other was, "Now that you and Marty are alone, don't start fucking." I was aghast at the suggestion. "Sometimes believers get to the place where they'll do whatever it takes to move the Word," he said. "That's just not part of what it takes." I assured him truthfully that I wasn't even tempted.

We took Veronica to the bus station the next day. She was fairly upbeat about leaving, though Marty kept crying and saying, "I don't deserve to be here either." She said it so many times I suspected she was trying to tell me she had broken the three-drinks-you're-out rule herself. But I wasn't going to start interrogating her now. She was all I had left.

She came in late one night and tried to make a beeline for her bedroom, but on the way she veered two feet to her right and ricocheted off the couch before making it to her room, where she collapsed on the bed. I followed her with my heart in my throat. A short conversation made it obvious she was pretty well drunk.

"How many drinks did you have?" I asked.

"About two," she said.

"About two? How many is about two?"

"Three," she said in a tiny voice.

Robert gave her one day to pack her bags and be on the road.

Then he turned his attention to me.

"I have coordinated Branches, I have coordinated Limbs, I have coordinated Regions," he said, "but I have never heard of an interim Corps man losing his entire WOW family. Never. You're the first. There must be some big holes in your thinking, Karl, some major gaps in your logic somewhere."

He went on in this vein for ten or fifteen minutes, never raising his voice, just calmly cutting me down until I felt about a half-inch tall. For all his advice not to condemn myself earlier, he was doing all the condemning now, and doing it far better than I could have alone. I wanted to cry, and I was too ashamed to cry.

I also had the sense to feel falsely blamed. Robert made the damn rule, not me. He didn't check with me before laying down the law. If he had consulted me I would have said that if three-drinks-you're-out was the rule, we could kiss these WOWs goodbye now.

If the WOW year was about toeing the line, upholding the standards, weeding out the weak, then Robert could dismiss as many of my WOWs as he pleased. But if it was about raising people up to be their best, we needed some help. Robert had no help to offer, all he had was a club. And the club -- straighten up or you're out of the program -- was less than worthless for two WOWs who were doing everything they could to repudiate the program. It was like telling prisoners they would be thrown out of prison if they didn't behave.

I had the sense to see this, but I had enough cult programming to know I was supposed to find the problem inside myself. It's easy to blame the leader, but what had I done wrong? If there were major holes in my thinking, one of them probably had something to do with my own accountability. If Jesus Christ had been coordinating this WOW family, would it have fallen to pieces like this? Of course not. I must have blown it somewhere.

© Karl Kahler 1999