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Christian academy and I absorbed this part of their teaching as much as any other. By the time I graduated I had been “saved” four times—once by Billy Graham himself when I attended one of his crusades—and I even considered becoming a missionary. But seeing my kid sister ravaged by this disease challenged my beliefs. How could a just and loving God do this to someone so young and so innocent? To me it didn’t make any sense and my faith was badly shaken.
    By all accounts the terms of my parents’ divorce settlement were fair but the custody arrangement was a little unusual. While Mary Jean would be in my mother’s care, my dad insisted that he retain custody of me. I was eighteen years old and in college so this stipulation didn’t make much practical difference, but it was further evidence of my father’s intention to mold me to follow in his footsteps at the billboard company. All summer, I dutifully put in my forty-two-and-a-half-hour weeks at Turner Advertising.
    After that tumultuous summer I was relieved to get back to Brown. As a sophomore, I was now in the second year of a bet my father had made with me before sending me off to college. If I didn’t drink or smoke before turning twenty-one he’d give me $5,000. My dad was an alcoholic and smoked two packs a day and he didn’t want his son to make the same mistakes. Seeing what the booze and tobacco were doing to his health provided incentive enough, and $5,000 was a ton of money—probably more than a year’s room and board back then—and I decided to go for it. He also agreed to send me a weekly allowance of $5 as long as I wrote a letter home every week. This was a woefully small stipend even then and being surrounded by guys with so much more money was tough. They’d go off on ski weekends and other adventures while I’d be stuck back at the dorm. Still, I counted on that $5 and never missed a week of letter writing my entire freshman year, but a month or so into my sophomore year I became distracted with academic and social commitments and missed one or two weeks. Always one to hold up his end of a bargain, my father let me know that my allowance was suspended. I was really upset. I felt like I’d been working so hard—on my schoolwork, my sailing, the billboard company in the summer, everything—and now he was cutting off my measly $5.
    Making matters worse I was surrounded at Brown by guys who were constantly after me to drink. As best I can remember I was the only guy in my entire fraternity who didn’t drink and, as a result, if guys wanted to put a bottle somewhere for safekeeping they’d leave it with me, knowing I wouldn’t touch it. It so happened that right after I got the letter cutting off my allowance, somebody dropped a bottle off in my room. To the guy’s surprise, I asked him if he minded if I had a drink and he said no. I had just turned nineteen and on that night I got drunk for the first time and I smoked my first cigar. I’d lost the bet with my dad.
    I’m sure there were plenty of guys in my class who assured their parents that they were little angels and they wouldn’t have dreamed of telling them the truth about their social activities. I, too, probably could have gone on with my new lifestyle and my father would have been none the wiser, but withholding that information from him would have been a breach of trust. I’d spent my formative school years following strict honor codes and I didn’t think twice about what I needed to do.
    The very next day, nursing my very first hangover, I let my dad know what I had done. He was already disappointed by my letter writing lapse but now he kicked into a higher gear and got
really
mad. Not only could I forget the $5 allowance, I could kiss the $5,000 goodbye, too. I was disappointed by his response but not at all surprised.
    During summers at the company my father had taught me basic principles of amortization and I decided to apply them here, doing some quick