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

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.