Money

I believe I mentioned in the first post, if not in others, that my first impression of Dr G was "Can you pay me?" Dr G was about money.

I need to bring this up because later on, it will become an issue in the narrative. Without this background, what happens later on would not make sense.

Dr G was always talking about money. He wanted to be rich. That was not a big deal. I think all of us wanted to be rich. We were all what could be described as yuppies. Enough money to be comfortable and afford to pay for kung fu classes. He wanted to be a millionaire and do lots of other things involving money. He made all of these statements of his own volition. It was not an act or done for a purpose. That was the real Dr G.

In my mind I classified Dr G as being about money. He said so himself. It seems funny to make such an obvious and simplistic statement with such emphasis. Once we get into the territories of people lying to your face, or word and mind twisting to reach a goal, it will become apparent why the statement was made.

This bothered me internally. I never said anything. In my previous kung fu class, the one that caused me to become ill, the instructor was all about money. I did not discover until I had been there for some time that, unless you paid him for private lessons, you would not learn much real kung fu.

That was devastating to me. I had an idealistic view of kung fu instructors teaching people in an evenhanded and fair way. To believe that a person could only learn real kung fu if they had lots of money to pay for it made me lose respect for the instructor.

That was one of the reasons my relationship with my previous teacher had gone bad. When I realized that unless he got the big bucks, I was not going to learn the real kung fu, I became mentally resentful. I never said anything though I wonder now if my actions made my thoughts obvious.

When I realized Dr G was about money, I was nervous. I was concerned it would be another case of somebody paying their bills instead of teaching kung fu.

Dr G was doing OK. He was teaching a weekend kung fu class for 2 or 3 hours every Sunday. I would guess there were about 35 people. The number varied as people came and went. Just to pick a number, let's say that each person was paying $70 a month. That is...

$70 X 35 = $2450 a month.

Not bad for 3 hours a day, 1 day a week, is it? This is a low ball figure. People who were wealthy, or who were long time students, or some other criteria, might pay him more.

I heard from other people that they would also go to see Dr G during the week. They would go to his psychology practice. That was why I needed to talk about emotions in the last post. Recall I said that Dr G believed that a person could never be good at kung fu unless they had dealt with their emotions. Apparently the purpose behind going to the psychology office during the week was to deal with this aspect of the training on a personal basis.

That was out of the question for me. I did not have a lot of money. It was a strain for me to pay the $70 for the kung fu training. I was stressed and unhappy. I wanted to cure my health problems. I was hearing that I needed to go to these psychology office visits to get the whole health treatment package. I did not have the money for that. That made me stress because I wanted nothing more than to do whatever it took to fix the health problems.

At some point that I do not want to discuss yet, I decided that I would find the money to go to the psychology office. I learned that it would be $70 for an office visit. That was as much as for going to the kung fu class all month.

Now get this. People in class would go to see Dr G every week. Let's do the math.

35 people X $70 a week X 4 weeks/month = $9700 a month

9700 month/psychology + 2450 month/kung fu = 12,150 a month!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Can you imagine? That is loads of money for teaching kung fu and talking to people that were basically a captive audience. This does not take into account the outside patients that Dr G saw at the psychology practice. The figure does not take into account the people who were asked to pay more than $70 a month.

I think you can see why I believed that Dr G had a strong interest in money.

Part of the reason this relates to the ongoing saga is that during the weekly sunday talks before class, the talk usually included things about self sacrifice, charity, doing good by others. I had a very hard time reconciling the two facets of Dr G'.

I had a hard time paying for the kung fu class. People knew that because if they were going to lunch sometimes, I could not go because I had no money. To my way of thinking, if Dr G was really about charity and giving and sacrifice, why did he charge so much money for people? He could have lived comfortably by charging $35 dollars a month. He had no overhead to justify. We practiced in a public park. If we all paid big money because he had to cover the rent of a building, that would be a different story.

I guess the pertinent thing to remember for the coming story is that Dr G was about money and driving towards the future to make more money. That is an honest assessment of his personally stated feelings. Later on this knowledge will explain certain events and actions.