Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (3 page)

Often my mother sent my older brother, Steve, and I to the bars to look for my dad. If he did not come home from work, we went to remind him that he had a family. Since we didn’t have a TV (it was too heavy to move around), this was always an exciting adventure for us. My memories of that early part of my life include Planters peanuts, bright orange soda, and dart boards, set around the many lounges my dad frequented. In the really bad days, they were on skid row.

My mother, on the other hand, was a fundamentalist Christian who had been raised in a loving family. Mother had come to America as a sixteen-year-old escaping Nazi Germany. Her father worked hard and made a good living for his family, and although he had been a prosperous carpenter in Germany, he became a gardener for wealthy German industrialists when he moved to America. Shrewd and frugal, he managed to buy five homes in America and became a landlord. My grandmother instilled strict Christian ideals in her daughter. She was a sweet, caring lady, but I never had a conversation with her since she never learned to speak English. She was blind when I was old enough to know her.

My mother and her family settled in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1939.

She eventually attended Temple University, but she left to work at a newspaper office, where she met my father. Although she had six children with him, she was not the typical 1950s housewife. When I was younger, I was always embarrassed by my mother because she spoke with a German accent, didn’t perm her hair or wear makeup like other moms, and her name was Elfriede. Most of all, she did not know how to take care of the house.

“Why don’t you know how to cook, or keep house?” I often asked her when I was a sassy twelve-year-old. Since I was the oldest girl among six children, many of these chores fell on me. “You were raised in Germany, and all the German women we know cook very well and keep spotless houses.”

“You see, I went to the better schools in Germany,” she explained unashamedly. “And girls who went to those schools did not have to learn household chores since they would have maids to do them!”

Obviously, being a housewife was beneath her since she had been given the dream of marrying above her middleclass status in Germany. But this was America, Mom. Wake up, the middle class here is huge.

Our family was a study of contrasts. We were often poor, but we usually lived in nice neighborhoods. My father drank, smoked, and cursed, whereas my mother was very religious and would not allow us to say so much as “Oh my God,” which was taking the Lord’s name in vain.

My older brother and I, who bore most of the traveling hardships, excelled at school. Unfortunately, my brother used his extraordinary intelligence to obtain money through illegal methods, such as burglary and the unauthorized withdrawal of other people’s bank money.

Consequently, Steve spent most of his adult life in prison, while I spent most of my life trying to serve the Lord. Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin.

I entered McCaskey High School, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1968. By this time I had convinced my mother that for the sake of my four younger sisters, she should separate from Dad. I was fourteen years old. Steve was already in a reformatory, and I was beginning to get angry with my mom for allowing us to live such a dysfunctional life. My mom explained sweetly that she didn’t believe in divorce but she might consider separation. I think she talked it over with her pastor, and since her six children were all in school now, she got a job and eventually bought a house in the town of Lancaster. She separated legally from Dad, but it only meant we didn’t move so much.

He still came around drunk.

Lancaster County, known as Amish country, was removed from the massive social upheaval sweeping the nation at the time. People in Lancaster were content. Many of them were Mennonites, and the ones who were not lived rather well with the traditional lifestyle encouraged by Amish and Mennonite philosophy, with little exposure to modern life.

However, even Lancaster would not escape the unrest that infected American youth like a plague.

I was among the first to catch it, or perhaps my unrest was just waiting to express itself. I had thought it was my family’s unusual gypsy lifestyle that was preventing me from feeling like one of the crowd among my peers. However, now that I had lived in one place for more than a year, and still felt like an outsider, I began to wonder.

I always made good grades, but I could not find a niche. In addition, *** missing text *** it.

I was beginning to be known as a rebel. Popular girls were wearing miniskirts at that time, and I thought it was more practical to wear pants. I remember being sent to the principal’s office.

“Miriam, you are a smart girl. You will probably get some good scholarships to college, if you don’t cause any trouble. Now you know the rules—girls cannot wear pants.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, that’s the rule.”

“I know, but why was that rule made? I mean, don’t you know that the boys spend half their time trying to look up the girls’ dresses? And I believe some of the teachers do, too. With hemlines six inches above the knee, do you think it is a good rule to require girls to wear dresses?” The principal was a sincere man.

“No,” he answered,“perhaps it is not a sensible rule anymore, but until it changes, you must obey.”

“I believe I must protest it. If the rule is ever to change, sir, someone has to challenge it.” I protested by wearing my unfashionable farmer jeans to school, and the principal suspended me for three days. That was the rule. But I continued to wear pants, and he never suspended me again.

I have always suspected that the real reason I wore pants was because I could not afford to dress fashionably. Wearing dresses or skirts meant having a different outfit every day. With jeans, I only had to change my shirts. However, the very next year the rule was changed. Girls could wear pants. By then I had discovered that thrift stores held a wonderful variety of lovely old dresses for literally nickels and dimes. For five dollars I could buy a wardrobe that lasted for months and was one-of-a-kind. I was especially fond of the 1940s-style silk dresses and anything with lace or bead work. I became a hippie before I knew what it was to be one.

Since the hippies had not yet come onto the scene in Lancaster, I had only one good friend until my junior year. She was a Jewish girl who was extremely intelligent, and though we came from completely different backgrounds, we had similar interests. I would ride my bike over to her upper-class neighborhood in my thrift store clothes and spend the evenings discussing existential thought. We remained in contact throughout high school.

By the time I was in eleventh grade, a group of hippies started to form at my school. They dressed like me, or I dressed like them— I’m not sure which—and other people lumped me in with them. Teachers knew that if I did not agree with a viewpoint, I would discuss it publicly. I had also taken to hitchhiking around town, since my brief tenure as a driver had resulted in the wreck of my longawaited car. Most of all, I began smoking dope, on my own. I smoked it religiously, alone in my room, with candles and incense burning and music playing. It was a personal ritual, almost sacred, and I was reluctant to include others at that time. I also had been dabbling in philosophy and Eastern practices like yoga. I was at the door of discovering myself, when the hippies called at my window. They looked colorful, exciting, and adventurous, like I wanted to be. I guess I wanted company after all.

I soon met Jan, a classmate who had recently given up her role as cheerleader and boy-with-car-chaser to experiment in the sixties happening. A tall, thin, pretty, and stylishly dressed girl, she approached me one day out of the blue to ask where she could buy marijuana. I was surprised she thought I would know this information, but we became friends and we spent the next two years together sampling the culture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll that was born during the famous decade of the 1960s, and had come to Lancaster a few years later. Our hippie group was small, and for a short time I was under the illusion that we were sensitive, open, and caring. However, I soon discovered that these wonderful free freaks were just a new teenage clique. As in all cliques, it could be very alienating for anyone who did not fit in, and after a short time, I knew I did not belong here either. I believe that realization came from going to the Spruce Street house.

Someone, I never found out who, had rented a house on Spruce Street, near Franklin and Marshall College, which we used as a winter hangout.

A fantastic stereo system was set up where the main bedroom should have been. I usually went to the music area, where there were bright pillows thrown around the wooden floor and candles pouring their multicolored wax over empty wine bottles. In the first months of its short existence, the Spruce Street scene was innocently experimental, but soon drug use and underage drinking began and decadence set in. It was a time of deep observation on my part. I noticed that free-loving hippies were never free from one high or another, and were certainly not very loving at all. When the music became too hard rock, I would slip down to the kitchen to sit with the hard drug users. In my naive state, I never knew what drug they were taking, and they never offered me any either.

I first went to the kitchen because it was the only room where I could practice guitar. I was not very good, so I did not want anyone to hear me, and being with the dopers was like being alone. However, after a while, I started observing them. Candy was a few years older than me, but she looked like a Holocaust survivor, all skin and bones, with stringy hair and dark bags under her eyes. I knew she had been in and out of the “nuthouse,” a place they sent junkies before rehabilitation homes became popular. These were the kind of people my older brother knew, and their lifelessness was horrifying to a budding flower child.

For a student who had studied Timothy Leary’s theory about drugs bringing one to a higher level of consciousness, I found these people consciousness-less.

The only person I became relatively close to at Spruce Street was another recluse called Mick. I was sixteen then, and Mick had already graduated from high school, but I found out that he did not use drugs often because they made him freak out. He had trouble handling real life, let alone the strange world of psychedelics. Slightly short and muscular, Mick hid behind a beard and long hair, rarely looking anyone in the eye. His primary love was music, and he was famous for his record collection. Ask him anything about music, bands, songs, musicians, or songwriters of the 1960s and 70s and he came alive.

Otherwise, he hung around like a wet sock slung over a shower curtain rod. His vulnerability made him the object of childish pranks. I was unwittingly involved in one of these.

Spruce Street had lately become a place for lovers to try out their wings. I was still, surprisingly, a virgin, so I never made use of the room reserved for youthful experimentation. Neither did Mick. It was not long before some of the prank-playing boys thought Mick and I should be together. I can’t remember how we got into the room, but Mick and I found ourselves facing one another over the disreputable bed. Mick was much more flustered than I, and what had seemed like an innocent joke suddenly had tragic implications. I saw that Mick’s precarious position within this group could be at stake. In addition, his own bottled-up self-esteem was about to crack wide open before my eyes.

“Mick,” I said, being careful not to look directly into his eyes, “What do you want to do?” He blubbered something unintelligible, and I felt uncomfortable witnessing a blatant display of raw vulnerability. I walked over to the door and locked it from the inside.

“There, no one can come in. Why don’t we pretend that we are doing it? Can you pretend?” His face lit up in disbelief, but I detected a sense of relief.

“What do you mean, Miriam?”

“You know, we’ll turn off the light and make a lot of noises as if we were in bed, doing what they put us in here to do. They’ll believe it, and I won’t tell them anything. Okay?”

He was game. He drank all the wine that was left in the bottle on the floor, and after loosening up, we play-acted without ever touching one another. Now our tormentors were knocking at the door, trying to get in.

After a while they just left, seemingly content to believe that they had instigated a love affair. We waited until all was quiet outside the door, and then we swore ourselves to secrecy and exited the love chamber. We have remained friends ever since that uneventful night.

Soon, I tired of Spruce Street. The sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll scene was a dead-end street as far as I could discern. I drifted toward the music coming from Franklin and Marshall College. The campus was alive with high-bred, well-fed antiwar protestors. After attending evening classes at the underground “FREE” University to learn the truth about the Vietnam War, I became a full-fledged social activist. As a good revolutionary, I started wearing a black armband to school and inviting my friends to either quit smoking or steal their cigarettes, since everyone knew that most of the tax money went to the military-industrial complex. My idealism had caught fire.

By the end of the spring of 1970, the protest movement at Franklin and Marshall had degenerated into free concerts on the campus green. Music became the medium, but I doubt that many of the listeners understood the message. When it was time to go to a march, I was usually alone.

Always looking for something new, I drifted toward the blues music that a small group of intellectuals started on campus in a place called the “AT.” It was there that I would cross that last barrier that kept me from being one with others. I did the drugs, the protests, the music scene, but I had always avoided the “free love.” Pot, I believed, was opening my mind to new truths, and I began to feel that love would connect me with the community of truth seekers. Since I was fairly smart, I practiced birth control, and then waited for the opportunity to experience “free love.” The first time was disastrous. It hurt—in every sense. Jay had been in my philosophy class and captured my attention with his brilliant theories on thought, but I never saw him again after the class ended.