Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (5 page)

I was too busy observing this profoundly concentrated boy. He left for California when the Moratorium was over, and I don’t even remember his name. But I remember the determined look on his face. I admired his dedication to a cause, and I thought to myself that I wanted to be as serious about an ideal as he was. Now, with a standard to measure up to, I just had to find the right ideal for me.

Sonny was there for me when I returned, but he didn’t press for conversation. He just held me in his arms like an ever-present father.

Sex was nothing for me to give in exchange for his masculine kindness.

After graduation from high school in June 1971, I went to Wildwood, a New Jersey beach town frequented mainly by young people, to look for a job in order to earn money for college. I found work in a restaurant as a waitress, all of the waitresses had to wear hot pants and I hated the idea. While in Wildwood, I met a boy from Pittsburgh who told me he had been born again. He witnessed to me about being a good Christian, saying that I should not give love freely, drink or smoke, or even listen to rock music. I should read my Bible every day and that would give me strength to resist evil. My roots were still in Christianity, however, Christians were always so close-minded and usually boring. But this boy was exciting, and he hung around with me, an obvious hippie. Why? Maybe there was still hope in this Jesus stuff he talked about. Since he did not say anything about going to church, I decided to follow his counsel. It wasn’t hard for me to give up drugs, sex, and music, and soon I felt I was on the path to dedication—a higher ideal. Why I was such an idealist, I will never know.

Returning to Lancaster before summer was over, and before Sonny came back, I called Mick, my only friend left over from the Spruce Street gang. Mick had started hanging out with the Jesus People, a traveling group of ex-hippies who preached about Christ. Following their lead, Mick had destroyed all his “worldly” albums and listened only to Christian music.

When Sonny returned to Lancaster, I related the story of the Christian boy and the Jesus People. He was not impressed, but he respected my decision to start living a more “godly” lifestyle of no drugs or sex.

We didn’t sleep together after that.

A few weeks later, Sonny dropped me off at the Penn State campus in Schuylkill Haven where I would spend my freshman year. In a few days, he would be leaving for Europe, where he planned to stay for an extended period of time, while I was feeling safe at a small campus, with a renewed faith and two parttime jobs. We made no promises about the future, and it was an uneventful parting.

Dorm life was terrible. The girls who lived there were frivolous and uninteresting, and I did not make friends until I met Daisy. Living off campus, she supported herself by singing folk songs at a local coffeehouse and took classes at the college. She was a short, quiet girl who hid her bright blue eyes and rounded face behind long blond hair.

Her whispery voice never held a hint of aggression. And her independent spirit was in complete contrast to her seemingly submissive attitude.

Daisy and I became good friends. I told her about my renewed belief in Jesus, and she confided that as a Catholic, she had always believed in God. Since she had such fantastic memories of a visit to the Greenwich Village hippie scene, we decided to go to New York during our winter break.

A little while before the semester ended, I saw a sign on a church saying that a film about a Christian commune would be playing that night. I rode over on my bike to watch it.

The documentary film, called The Ultimate Trip, was an episode from the weekly television news program First Tuesday. It documented the lifestyle of a group of Christians in Texas called the Children of God.

I watched in awe as ex-hippies gave their testimonies about being lost and finding peace with God and one another in this commune. They sang songs and danced. They read their ever-present Bibles and quoted scriptures by memory. They ate together, watched each other’s children, cooked, cleaned, worked, and farmed collectively. They said that no one had need of anything because everyone shared all they had—and it was enough. Here was pure communism, but these people were happy, not severe, like that boy at the Moratorium in Washington.

These people were Christians, yet they looked like hippies in long skirts and flowing hair. And they had a vision—to change the world!

Leaving the church as soon as the film was over, I tried to hide the tears in my eyes. I felt I had just seen the living purity of Jesus’ words. I wanted to be like these people—to love everyone, to give my life for others, to be part of a true community. Maybe, during the summer break, Daisy and I could go out to Texas. The thought of meeting the Children of God gave me a new vision. Life had always seemed so strange to me and somehow I had become addicted to the unusual, the extraordinary, the mysterious. I felt like I was searching for meaning constantly, and for the first time, I thought the search would soon be over.

Through the Looking Glass

Daisy and I took the bus to my house in Lancaster on the way up to New York. We hitchhiked the rest of the way with about twenty dollars between us in our pockets. I had a change of clothes in my backpack, and Daisy carried a guitar and an old army bag with a few things in it.

After spending the first day looking for fellow bohemians in Greenwich Village, all we had found were drug users, drug pushers, prostitutes, busy people going back and forth without glancing at anyone, and college students on their way back home. No one offered the peace and brotherhood that Daisy remembered from a few years ago. I spent the little money we had that first day buying food.

Soon it was getting dark, and we still had no place to go. As we walked aimlessly along a street, a burly man with coarse features asked us if we were lost. He was the only friendly person we had met all day.

“No, but we really don’t have a place to go to,” I said.

“Well, I have a place, if you want to come with me,” he said with a sly smile. Something in his manner made me feel uneasy.

“Both of us?” I asked, thinking that I was being prudent.

“Sure, it’s right around the corner.” We followed him to a doorway that opened onto a dilapidated and trash-littered hallway. He led us up three flights of stairs, each landing became darker and more dismal.

On the third floor he stopped to talk to a girl who reminded me of the grotesque groupies I had seen at big rock concerts in Philadelphia. A feeling of despair swept over me, since those heavily made-up groupies exposing their bodies had shattered my idealism of rock stars. She passed him something, and he turned and opened a door to the right.

“Here we are,” he said, showing us the way into a room full of smoke and old dumpy chairs. There was a roll-away bed pushed up against one wall where another girl was slouched like a rag doll someone had discarded long ago. As she looked at us with mascara-laden, glazed eyes, I realized that we were not among hippies.

“Where did you pick these fresh apples?” she murmured, coming out of her drug-induced nod.

“Get off the bed, Mona. What are you doing all f’d up in here?” he barked at her like a dog.

“I brought your bag. It’s over there under the chair,” she said, too spaced out to break the gaze she had fixed upon us. She seemed quite transfixed with our presence, but after a few minutes of indiscreet staring, she got up and slithered out the door like a snake who had decided we were not worth her time or energy.

Our host sat on the bed and took a bag of white powder out from under the chair.

“Sit down,” he said, patting the bed beside him.

Daisy and I took the chairs that were nearest the door. He noticed our move to safety.

“You aren’t afraid of me, are you?” he asked as he walked past us and locked the door. “I just want to be sure no one comes barging in here.”

He looked more like a bear than anyone I’d ever seen, but a dirty one.

Plumping himself down again on the bed, he put the bag under the mattress. Looking us over with a mischievous grin, he pulled out a joint and lit it up, passing it to us after taking a long drag. “I pretended to take some and passed it to Daisy, who I knew never took any drugs. She did the same and passed it back.

“Hey, you girls aren’t taking any. Come on, you can’t be like that. You want Uncle Charlie to get angry?” For the first time, I began to be really afraid. I didn’t know what Uncle Charlie did when he got angry, but I did not want to find out.

“Well, we’re just very hungry, and this gives you the munchies, you know.”

“oh, you want some food? I’ll find out what we have. Food is not our line of merchandise, you know, but I’ll see what I can scrounge up.”

Charlie swaggered to the hallway and summoned Mona.

“Hey, get these girls something to eat. What do we have here anyway?”

“What are you talking about? There ain’t no food here,” she replied.

“Well, go the hell out on the street and find something.” Charlie came back in and was puffing away until Mona returned with some hot dogs.

By now, Charlie was so stoned he forgot to lock the door after she left. We ate our hot dogs and kept an eye on Charlie, who was talking about the great stuff he could get for us— anything we wanted.

Now he was drinking from a bottle, and he lit up another joint as he lay back on the bed, totally wasted. I nudged Daisy, and we grabbed our stuff and bolted out the door, down the steps, and out onto the street without looking back. We couldn’t hear Charlie or anyone else behind us, but we still ran through the street in the direction of any light.

Finally, we found ourselves in front of a well-lit college dormitory.

By this time we were so desperate, we did not care what anyone thought.

We started banging on all the doors until someone answered.

“Please, let us in,” I asked. “Some man is chasing us, and we don’t know where we are.” The boy who answered the door didn’t seem to believe us, but he reluctantly agreed to let us stay. We bedded down for the night on the floor.

The next day we were back on the street. I suggested that Daisy sing in the cafes so we could make some money to get a train out of there.

After searching in vain all morning for places to sing, we decided to give up on that idea and just bum money instead by panhandling on the street.

By nightfall, we had only collected about ten dollars. We decided to go to the train station, spend the night there, and start panhandling again in the morning. On our way we passed an art gallery, and I stopped to look at the paintings.

“Hi, do you believe in Jesus?” someone asked.

It was a boy about my age carrying a guitar. He had a short, smiling girl with him.

“Yes. In fact, I carry a Bible with me all the time,” I responded gaily, happy to hear a kind voice.

“You do! Wow! What version is it?”

“New Revised.”

“Oh,” he said, looking disappointed, but his face quickly lit up again.

“I have a King James Version with me. Do you want to compare verses?”

I looked to Daisy, who was engrossed in conversation with the girl.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Here, I’ll show you a verse in my Bible, and you look for it in your Bible, and we can see how they’re different.” I thought he had some point that he really wanted to make, so I joined in. We sat on the edge of the curb and he took out a three-by five-inch King James Bible.

I took out my paperbound New Testament.

For the next half hour, we looked up scriptures, which he was much better at than I. He explained the beauty and purity of the King James version, which is written in Shakespearean English, and I felt my puny New Revised Version was totally inadequate.

Daisy and the girl she was talking to came over to participate in the impromptu Bible study. The girl’s name was Praise.

“Should we go get some coffee?” said the boy. “It is cold out here.”

Daisy and I agreed, and we walked together to a diner, where we spent the next hour listening to their explanations of Bible verses over cups of hot coffee.

“Why don’t you girls come home with us?” Praise said. “We have a big campground upstate, and there is plenty of room.”

“Who are we?” asked Daisy with a commandlike quality to her voice.

“Oh, we’re a group of people trying to serve the Lord. Maybe you heard about us. The papers call us the Children of God.”

“You are with the Children of God?” I asked. “The ones I saw in a documentary?”

“Yes, that was our camp in Texas. We have a camp here in New York now. Do you want to come up with us tonight?”

“How far is it from here?” asked Daisy.

“oh, not far,” said Praise. “We have a bus taking us up in about an hour.” Daisy seemed okay about it, so we followed them to an old yellow school bus surrounded by a large group of noisy young people.

One boy from the crowd came over to us.

“Praise the Lord,” he said, giving Praise and the boy a quick hug. “You found some sheep!”

“Yes. This is Miriam, and this is Daisy,” piped up Praise, pushing her long brown hair out of her eyes with tiny cold fingers. “They want to come home with us.”

“Hallelujah! Are they saved yet?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking that this seemed to be the criterion for visiting them. I was thrilled to be going to a real Children of God commune.

“Great,” said the boy. “Well, take them on the bus and get them filled with the Spirit. Oh, and give them some food if they are hungry.” He seemed genuinely happy and concerned for us. This was a pleasant change from the treatment we had received since coming to New York.

I entered the bus with excited apprehension. All the seats had been taken out, and there were blankets and pillows all over the floor.

Someone was handing out sandwiches from a cardboard box at the front.

I took a sandwich and followed Praise to the back. Daisy had been taken by a girl to another part of the bus.

Once we sat on the floor of the bus, Praise quickly took control of the conversation. She was a totally spaced-out girl who punctuated every sentence with “Praise the Lord,” or “Hallelujah.” She talked to me nonstop about the Bible, the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ message of telling the world about salvation, loving others like yourself, and every other spiritual lesson I had ever heard about in connection with the Bible.