Pastor ends up in strip club. Could he be lying when he says he didn’t know how he got there?
“No way would a pastor end up in a strip club. No way could he not know how he got there!”
This summed up the country’s reaction when upstate New York pastor Craig Rhodenizer went missing, only to be discovered 36 hours later at a strip club in Northern Ohio two states and 400 miles west. Most people were “scratching their heads…trying to figure out what happened” and couldn’t believe he was “playing dumb” in not remembering. Yet, the events are perfectly comprehensible when viewed through the lens of alcoholism.
A bottle of rum was found in his car. Strippers at the club said that Rhodenizer spent two hours downing three or four drinks (anyone doubt he was already plastered?), soliciting dances and making threatening comments. When investigators questioned him, he became distraught and hysterical and said he didn’t know where he was.
Rhodenizer’s wife said his bizarre behavior was “totally out of character” and his disappearance must have been a “stress-induced emotional crisis” due to the Lenten season and Easter. It would indeed seem out of character for a long-sober alcoholic whose wife never met the addict. Stress can trigger relapses. We might hypothesize that when he told his wife he was heading to a Best Buy store to have his computer repaired Wednesday afternoon, he decided he just didn’t want to go on vacation with her and the kids the next day to Disney World in Florida without a stiff one. So he heads to a bar and proceeds to get pounded. At some point, he goes into a blackout, during which time alcoholics often travel long distances and don’t recall anything that occurs because the events don’t enter the memory banks. By the time he’s at the strip club, he’s been awake and hammered for two days, which could account for his hysterics. How’s that for making sense of the otherwise incomprehensible?