Life at 28

28 is known in astrology as Saturn return - the year that planet regains its position in the heavens relative to Earth. This ends the first, and begins a second cycle of one's destiny, IF one grants any credence to this set of knowledge. A mundane way to look at it is to conceive of each cycle as a part in a roughly 3-part TV series. Our move to Texas represented my transition to part 2, and with that it is appropriate to flesh out the rest of the story about the Adelphi Organization.

Denise and I attended the studies, lectures and social mingles which were set for every Sunday in Garland. Richard Kieninger was always present, though he wasn't made the focus of attention, and to be true he didn't seek such fawning. Now that I had the opportunity to observe him over a longer span of time, I could see he was every bit the introverted engineer type, just as he had characterized himself in his writings, and it was this lack of egocentric behaviors gave his claims even more credence in my mind. The lessons were satisfying, the social interactions fun, and despite the gaps in the internal logic of the enterprise, we continued to support the group with financial donations. We invited Richard to dinner sometime in this summer of 1986, and he accepted our suggestion to meet at a German restaurant in Dallas. The conversation was lively and stimulating, and we left that night with even a more solidified opinion that he was without guile and to the extent that we could verify, he believed what he had written in The Ultimate Frontier .

Sex is often the catalyst that triggers volcanic-like eruptions in human affairs. I had no reason to expect that this would be the case with our group of truth-seekers, but alas this all-too-predictable event happened. Richard had been living with the groups secretary since the group had relocated to Texas some years prior. Her name eludes me; she was a likable person but otherwise just a fringe element of my memory. She was perhaps 20 years younger than Richard, which may have been the source for gossip among others in Adelphi but to us was just a fact we accepted without question. Well, she apparently caught Richard making moves on a significantly younger female, and then brought accusations of inappropriate behavior to the board members. Faced with a brewing scandal, they decided to be completely open about this bad cloud and called for an open meeting of all members to discuss it. That Sunday in early winter was an emotionally-exhausting one, as in essence this nexus of ideals and future hopes we had shared with so many others disintegrated within several hours.

For a great while, I felt foolish about these few years of my life when I believed in something enough to devote my time energy and money to it. 30 years after this, those emotions are gone and I can freely summarize the downfall of the Adelphi Org. Richard was a human complete with the accompanying frailties; for him, a proclivity toward beautiful young women. When one is a prophet/messenger of anything remotely resembling a faith, this frailty is not acceptable. Right or wrong, these are the rules of the game. That December day in 1986, dreams collided with rules and it was game over. The fallout was swift and severe - people we had spoken to at length every week became non-existent, though not from our choice. The schism divided the majority of the group who supported the choice to sever ties with Richard with the minority who felt that without the messenger, there was no message. That left a small space for just a few of us who basically said "hat the fuck is going on?" The board became aggressive and quickly adopted a "our way or the highway" attitude. We rejected that out of hand, but neither could we accept the notion of joining yet another splinter group created from scratch with Richard's twenty or so loyalists (as he was to do a few months later, with the new association being called "Builders of the Nation"). One of the handful of those like us who refused to join either warring faction was John, a lanky thirty-something computer programmer, who took the initiative of driving to Illinois to interview a person who could shed some insight on events since she had been at the forefront of the first group split-up a decade prior - Richard's ex-wife. When he returned, he accepted our invite for dinner at our apartment, and he shared his findings. Gail told John that Richard was a man-whore, a narcissist, and a manipulator, but despite every possible motive to hammer the final nail in his coffin, she still believed that the information he shared came from a supernatural source. Her reasoning? Three decades before, living in suburban Chicago, he had stayed up for 72 hours and had written every word of The Ultimate Frontier without reference works or outside agency.

This one night allowed us to put the entire Stelle/Adelphi/Richard era of our life to bed. Despite this tantalizing last nugget of info, the ordeal was too painful and we wanted to make a clean break with all of it. We dropped all contact with the members and of course Richard, and began contributing our funds to various charity works we identified as being legitimate and worthy instead of what turned out in the summation of things to be a metaphysical Ponzi scheme. The Adelphi board and their supporters lasted perhaps another year before dissolving, and Richard's new enterprise never gained much traction. May 2000 came and went, but no pole shift or ice age occurred.  I discovered perhaps a decade ago that he became affiliated in the 1990's with a separatist group in Texas, and some obviously bad decisions were made in this regard as he ended up in prison for fraud, serving two years and then dying soon after. The Pharaoh didn't fare well this journey around, unfortunately.

Denise left the drug-den hospital for a oncologist's lab in Fort Worth where she was the assistant supervisor. After the string of temp or truncated career choices I had been faced with, I finally secured a temp-to-perm job at a hospital in Bedford about 12 miles away. It was a midnight 10-hour shift, 7 days on 7 days off. It was an insanely stressful job, since for the majority of my stay there I had to not only do the lab work but draw blood as well, which lead to impossible pressures to be two places at once. Still, I was happy that we had some sort of financial equilibrium, so I determined to survive no matter the stresses.

My week off allowed me to recover from the intensity, and I spent many of those days playing pickup full-court basketball at a rec center in Pantego, a neighboring burb. There were a group of regulars that were there most days, a few of them teenagers who wore "Iron Maiden" and "Judas Priest" t-shirts. These guys had friends who never played but hung around watching the action, one of them a burly guy with long hair. It was a few years later when I was reading a "Dallas Observer" touting a new metal band taking the area by storm that I realized I had been playing ball with future members and friends of "Pantera" while we were watched by the late Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul!

If I had thought the female sexual overtures during my cable sales days were intense, working with 95% female co-workers at Northeast Hospital amped this into the stratosphere. Suffice it to say that if I had been willing, I could have had a different sexual partner for every day of the week. My marriage was cold and I was unhappy, yet I still couldn't rationalize crossing the line. Two women almost pushed me there though. Gwen was a morning-shift phlebotomist who I had perhaps 15 minutes of interaction with periodically. Yet, even in this short amount of time I somehow, without a single question from me, became aware that: her sex life with her husband sucked, that he cheated on her constantly and left her at home managing four young kids, that her therapist told her she should have her own affair, and that she had chosen me! Gwen was waif-sized, very cute with incredibly seductive eyes. Despite multiple attempts to offer me sex, I managed to say no without being an ass about it. Larissa was even harder to resist. She was an ER nurse on nights with me, with a slender lionine frame and sexual energy bubbling out of her pores. She too was married, but separated and was as unhappy as I was. Our interaction became a little closer to the line, with physical contact that almost became full-out wildfire for both of us. We decided to take a drive one morning after work in her truck, parking at a levee overlooking the Trinity River. As the sun rose, we confessed our desire for each other, and shared our one and only kiss. She asked that if we were to go any further, I would have to leave my wife. It was a huge dilemma for me that I couldn't resolve then nor in the following times we worked together, and I suppose this indecisiveness was the answer for her, as with few words we backed into the distant co-worker relationship which we maintained for the rest of my time there.

With not even a year at her new job, Denise was recruited to join the Texas Department of Health as an inspector, and the money was enough of a difference to make her say yes. Little did I know that this decision was to drive many dramatic future events in the next few years. The job was 80% travel which meant that if her travel week overlapped my off-week, I would go 10-14 days barely seeing her. This enforced separation increased my sense of alienation from her, and for the first time I began to regret marriage not only with her but in general as a limiting constraint on human freedom.