Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (23 page)

On one side was the land of milk and honey promised by God and the COG, and on the other was the filth and despair of the world. Which side would I jump into? It all depended on which side Thor lived, and that was never revealed to me. All I could do was hang on to those pointed slippery spikes until I could see more clearly.

“I know, Peter. Please pray for me,” I said, more because I knew that is what they wanted to hear than because I really wanted prayer.

We actually spent the next few days in prayer, which was the usual procedure when a big move or initiative was about to be made. The Children of God, for all their hypocrisy, seriously believed in prayer, and those who made it to the top were often people who publicly spent many hours in prayer. During my hours of silent praying, I would try to hatch a plan to find out where Thor was staying.

I had learned that Cal and the whole colony had moved someplace in the mountains between Nice and Antibes. Breeze and the men had been playing at restaurants along the coast, and Mara was soon due to deliver her baby. Through constant and careful maneuvering, I finally persuaded Sheila to ask Cal to call me. I waited by the phone anxiously the night he was supposed to call. The ring of the phone made my heart pound heavily in my chest.

“Hello,” said a distant voice, evidently calling from a badly connected public phone,“is this Jeshanah?”

“Yes, it’s me. Cal, is Thor with you? Can I talk to him? Please let me talk to him. Don’t do this to me! Please?” I started sobbing uncontrollably, which I had told myself not to do.

I felt that Cal’s silence meant he was considering my feelings, but I was wrong.

“No, Jeshanah. Thor is doing very well without you. He doesn’t even ask about you anymore. You know it has been over three months now. He calls Mara Mommy.” It was the most hurtful and hateful thing he could have said to me. I could not hold back the sobs, which made me unable to talk any further.

“Well, maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” said Cal coldly.

“No…pleeease don’t hang up. Pleeeease, Cal, don’t hang up. “

“I’ll call you tomorrow at the same time. I have to talk to Mara,” he said and hung up the phone.

I knew that Sheila was just outside the door, but I could not help myself. I just fell on the bed and cried and cried.

When I finally got back to reality, I wiped my face and went to see Sheila. Despite her years of following Family rules of leadership, which could harden the most tenderhearted people, Sheila still seemed somewhat sympathetic. In any case, she was all I had for a friend at this moment.

“I can’t live without at least seeing my son,” I explained, trying not to become overly emotional. “I just want to see him. That’s all. ” Sheila had no children, and it was probably hard for her to understand the deep mother instinct I was feeling.

“But if he is doing fine, and he is in God’s hands, taken care of by the Family, why would you have to see him too?” she asked.

Fortunately, I had cried all my tears for the day, or so I told myself, and I was able to answer her dry-eyed.

“I must be weak in this area of my life, Sheila. I can sleep with anyone. I can stay up all night and go out every night and witness, you know that. You know how much I sacrifice, that’s why you want me here. I will do anything you ask me to do, I promise! But Sheila, I just need to see Thor, that’s all. I can’t stay here and do this if I don’t see him.”

“I’ll talk to Peter about it,” she replied. “But ultimately, it is Cal’s choice. We are not allowed to dictate those things anymore.” I knew that was not the full truth. The only way they could not dictate was if Cal left the Family, and I doubted that he had at that point.

Whether they talked to Cal or not, I did not know. I heard later that Abe had heard me crying over the phone and tried to convince Cal to let me see my son. Mara also told me many years later that it was the leaders who had told Cal and her that I was needed for fishing and that they should keep Thor. The next night Cal called and said I could meet him and Thor at a public park in Nice, but only for one hour.

I will hold every minute of that one hour in my heart for the rest of my life, next to where the minutes of Thor’s birth are stored. The meeting was to be at a park near Place Massena, in the center of Nice.

It was a sunny day, and I wore a light jacket and a long skirt. On my way to the park, I looked anxiously around, mistaking any little red-haired boy for Thor. He was nearly five years old, and I wondered how much he had grown in three months. I thought that he might not recognize me. I was twenty-five years old and had been told I looked much younger, but I felt like a broken, old woman who had lost her child in the Holocaust and now had heard he was alive. It was melodramatic, but it was real to me.

I saw Thor when I was still a block away. Cal held his hand by the fountain.

“Thor!” I cried, running toward him.

He turned around at the sound of my voice, and letting go of his daddy’s hand, he ran toward me.

I fell down to one knee and held my arms open wide while he ran full-force into my embrace. A little taller and more robust, he still had a baby face and was smiling brightly. I had tears in my eyes, but for a few minutes, I was happy.

Cal was touched by our display of raw emotion, and he conceded to allow me periodic visits with Thor. It was a promising start, and I did not see that I had any other recourse but to agree and thank him profusely.

Walking home after that emotionally charged meeting, I felt that God indeed loved me. After spending three days in the belly of the whale, I must have said something that pleased God, because now He let me out of the darkness. I could again enjoy the blue of the sky, the softness of the gentle wind against my cheeks, and the sound of my son’s laughter in my ear. God must love me, I thought, and the Family was so good to me.

No matter what the sacrifice, I was thankful to be called to do a special service for Him and His work, because I now knew that ultimately, He would give me the desires of my heart, as He had promised in His Word! And if I thought about it honestly, giving God’s Love to strangers was certainly not a sacrifice for me. In fact, it was the easiest work I ever did in the Family.

Casting the Net

Sharon was chosen to join me in Monaco. Recently arriving from Paris, Sharon was just as I remembered, only a little thinner. She had been our lead female vocalist, but she was one of the few performers who never got a big head. Tall, blond, and largely built, she always reminded me of a Valkyrie opera singer when she was on stage. Offstage, she was shy, insecure, and absolutely loyal to friends and family. The only self-gratifying action that I ever knew her to indulge in was when she had a private affair with one of our songwriters. She was very much in love with him, so it surprised everyone when instead she married Timothy, a skinny, feminine-looking brother years younger than she. I never knew if their marriage had been suggested to them, or if they fell in love, but they were a strange combination in everyone’s eyes. Timothy absolutely adored Sharon, and she treated him with love and respect.

Timothy, Sharon, and I got along wonderfully, and within days we were singing in the best restaurants in old Monte Carlo. When we needed more privileged contacts in order to get into Jimmy’z, the fishing hole we had our eye on, Sharon’s friend Pierre, a movie producer, helped us out.

“Sure, bring along as many girls as you wish,” Pierre said enthusiastically when Sharon queried if I could come along on their evening date. He met us at the Cafe de Paris dressed in flashy clothes. He was a large, ruggedly handsome, and extremely jovial man, and I could not help but notice what a striking couple he and Sharon made. Sometimes I wondered what she would have done had she not joined the Family.

Certainly her strict Catholic upbringing had not prepared her to sleep with French movie producers in order to gain entrance to a private club.

As we stood before the small, dark, almost hidden entrance to Jimmy’z, the guardian of the door peeked through the sliding aperture and gave her decision whether access to the private club would be denied or not.

Before it was our turn at the door, a group of colorfully attired “beautiful people” walked right past us, knocked on the door, and were ushered in. I noticed that one of them was Andy Warhol, recognizable by his white and distinctively styled hair. We were next, and although I was beginning to doubt if Pierre could get us in on this evidently superprivileged evening, he gave no sign of concern.

Pierre knocked on the door. The slide was pushed back silently while those now familiar eyes scrutinized our group of three. Pierre said something I could not hear to the guardian and she quickly opened the door and let us pass through. Entering the vestibule, I followed Pierre and Sharon into the next room, looking around at the other tables for any faces I knew, but it seemed that everyone had eyes on us instead. We were led to the V.I.P tables, which were curved booths that sat directly next to the small dance floor. The lovely lady at the table who greeted Pierre was Catherine Deneuve, the most famous actress in France. We were introduced as we all sat at her table, and I found her more elegant, gracious, and beautiful than could ever be revealed on the screen.

After being seated with the celebrated actress, we were never denied entry to the private club again. With access to Jimmy’z, we decided to get a table for ourselves, since without one we would always be dependent on some man from another table inviting us over. Standing at the bar in Jimmy’z signified a lower status, with our own table, we could pick and choose from our vantage point. We knew what we were doing there, and the fish did not. Using money we had left over from singing, we bought a bottle of vodka and took a table.

It is not possible for me to list all the men that I went to bed with during this time. Much later, when I was out of the Family and trying to get rid of what I thought were ghosts, a Christian pastor told me to name each man I had been with, or visualize him, and then cast him out of me. I found that it was not only impossible, but tiring and depressing, and I abandoned the practice of casting out demons as soon as I arrived at the Monte Carlo days in my mind. I have never regretted the decision to abandon that technique for ridding oneself of recollections, for I found it guilt producing and totally in conflict with what I really felt for these men at the time. They were not demons, or even bad spirits that possessed me, in fact, if I believed in possession at all (which I’m not sure I do), I possessed these men with a good spirit. What I did was in love and for love, and I think that faith is what protected me from the horrors and degradation that I witnessed in all the high-class call girls whom I met during that period of time.

The Children of God firmly believed that we lived in a different world from anyone else, and we merely stepped into this mundane world of material things and sinful natures in order to save more people from ultimate spiritual death. In fact, death itself was just a stepping-stone to a higher spiritual reality—a doctrine held by many religions. But we believed that dying without accepting Jesus’ salvation would mean hell. It’s very hard to say how much I really believed this, now that I am so far removed from it, but I know that my motives were not flesh induced or emotionally inspired. For many years, I did not feel physical pleasure during sex or even desire while flirting. I took on the role of a vestal virgin, offering my body as God’s gift of love, a perverse combination of the purity of sacred devotion and the intimacy of marriage bonds. Although I eventually came to realize that not all our girls were so innocently naive about sex, I was able to keep my emotions and my mission so carefully separated that I lost the key to romantic/soul-mate love without ever having used it.

The men I was with were not aware of my mission, however, and they each reacted differently. Nevertheless, I could group these men into the following categories, (1) those who simply made use of the free sex (these were the men I have generally forgotten), (2) those who genuinely liked me or who felt a romantic inclination toward me (these are the ones I remember best), (3) those who found my spiritual message sexually stimulating (these were the ones I recall with pity or disappointment), (4) those few who fell sadly in love with me but not the Family. These were the men I did not share with sexually, as soon as I found out that their concept of love was not compatible with the one I was preaching. Perhaps these were the men who could have truly helped me, who cared enough about me to want me out of the Family’s control, but I was too detached from my emotions to recognize real love.

Within a few months after starting our little “home” of three in Monte Carlo, we found an apartment in the plush, private residential area of Cap Martin. Among the exclusive millionaire mansions that lined the coast of the last French peninsula before Italy, ours was one of the few modest houses, and it had been divided into two apartments. We rented the one downstairs, aided by a large security payment from Timothy’s father. Sharon and Tim had a beautiful baby girl now, so Tim’s father wanted to see them more settled. The house was in walking distance of a bus stop, which could take us to Monaco, the principality that considered itself separate from France but which was served by French public transportation. Carrying a guitar or two, neatly enclosed in a case, and dressed in stylish clothes that we had collected over the years in Paris, we usually hitchhiked, in order to meet more people. At night, after singing or going to the clubs, we had to ask a man we met to take us home, or use one of the taxi drivers who had been a client.

Since Mo’s photo had been taken in Tenerife and published widely throughout Europe, Mo lived completely underground now, but from the speed with which we received his encouraging messages, I suspected he was somewhere nearby. That made me rather nervous. I knew that Mo pulled women out of their homes at will to live in his “harem.” I imagined life in his home to be terribly restrictive and embarrassingly open about sexual activity. This sounds sanctimonious, considering what I was doing, but there were a few things happening at his house that I felt were past the limit of what I could do, such as walking around naked in front of all the children who lived there.