Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    Then I met him in the “AT.” With sounds from a blues group called the Black Cat encircling the dark, smoky room, marijuana joints were shared and Boone’s Farm wine flowed freely. I danced solo to the music, oblivious to anything but the movements of my body, and, finally exhausted, I sat down on the wooden floor with a group of boys passing around a pipe, surprised to find Jay among them. We talked until closing time about the ideas we had learned in our class,