Sunday, January 26, 2014

Smoke and Mirrors

The influence of my past on my present life is subtle. I get flashbacks and there are triggers. Sometimes I just seem to step into another time and place for no reason at all. Frequently it is seemingly unrelated to what I am doing at the moment but often it is. I can be sitting in my living room and all of a sudden I am on a particular street corner in New Delhi or driving in my car and I am on a bus somewhere by myself and I am not exactly sure where it is but I think it might be the south of France. Tonight I found myself in a little yarn store in the west of Ireland. These are all places I have been…

I was making grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for my family for dinner last night. As I was stirring the soup, suddenly, I was in T’s kitchen in New Jersey and we had burned the tomato soup and M made us all eat it as a punishment for burning it. All except for G who refused to eat it. I took a few sips and put my spoon down. I thought a few spoon fulls would suffice but it didn’t cross my mind that I could get away with outright defiance like G and live to see another day. That was also the weekend that G and S took me into a back bedroom and spanked me and made me swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone else. I didn’t tell anyone for years. Not even my best friend. What kind of people do things like that to other people? What kind of person submits and stays silent? Did Sharon tell them to do that? Why?

We spent two weekends in New Jersey working on renovating T’s house. Why am I thinking about this now? I have no idea. My mind has become a mysterious place that goes where it wants to out of my control at times.

There was a joke: “We are going to another state.” Get it? Not 'state' as in New York or New Jersey but 'state' as in state of mind. Not so funny, huh? I don’t for the most part remember which weekend was which but I do remember that we didn’t sleep for two whole nights either weekend. One weekend they rented two cheap motel rooms (one for the women and one for the men) and we slept in two shifts: midnight to 4 am and 5 am to 9 am. There were probably about ten or fifteen women crowded into one motel room. We all slept on the floor except, of course, for two people who were the favorites and they were ill. They got to sleep all night in the bed. I was grateful for the floor. One of those weekends we had to cook all the meals outside on a grill (they were renovating the kitchen and it was unusable) which was fine for some meals but for breakfast they wanted an iron frying pan on the grill with tomato sauce and eggs. Ugh. There was no shower and one toilet for about thirty people.

Then also there was the question about why we were renovating T’s house. Why did T get the free labor of thirty people working non-stop for two weekends to renovate his house and no one else did? Why did certain people get things and others didn’t? When was it going to be my turn? Would it ever be my turn? Exactly what did you have to do to get all the goodies? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I wasn’t angry at the time. At the time I was made to feel grateful for the opportunity of helping my “friends”. “Friends” is a very big misnomer here. I can feel the anger and other emotions welling up in my now. There is still the humiliation for the spanking – they never told me why I deserved it but only said that I needed to change the way I was thinking and maybe this would help.

We stapled fabric to the walls all that weekend until my hands ached and I couldn’t even lift the staple gun no less shoot it. Stapling fabric to walls was one of their standard decorating methods. It was a smoke and mirrors solution: easier and faster than painting because it didn’t matter what shape the wall was in and you could just cover everything up.

What else do I remember about that weekend? I remember driving in the car and making up names for my pregnant friends’ baby such as “Hennessy Courvoisier Rubinstein” and laughing hysterically. I remember waiting at a gas station on Sixth Avenue in the Village for hours before we got going.

I remember that one of the weekends we did sleep at different peoples homes who lived nearby. I didn’t realize it then but the “older students” all were encouraged to buy houses near each other to form a small community. We were all assigned to different houses at different times. We spent part of the night snooping in the house and trying to find clues to the identity of the people who owned the house and something about their lives. We did find out that weekend that we were at A’s house and that he had been married to J at one time. Slowly, we were piecing together the truth about the group and our situation.


When I say “we” here, I am speaking of myself and two friends. I think we were luckier than others because we did talk amongst ourselves (very much against the rules) and we did share information and we did break the rules on occasion. It wasn’t the norm to break the rules and as in any totalitarian society you had to be really careful who you talked to for fear of being turned in to the authorities for unsanctioned behavior.

Friday, January 3, 2014

Once Upon a Time or My Initial Encounter with the “Cult” (Chapter One)

I graduated from Architecture school in New York in the Spring of 1985. One of my professors had submitted a few of his student’s final projects to the 3rd International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. My drawings were selected to be included in the show and the catalog. In a fit of exuberance, I asked my boyfriend if he would like to accompany me to Venice to see the exhibition.
That summer, I went to Berlin, Prague and Budapest with my best girl friend. Afterwards, I took a train from Budapest to Venice where I met my boyfriend. We planned to travel in Italy for 2 weeks.  One night, over a candlelit dinner in Verona, he asked me to marry him and I said yes. I remember sitting in the bathroom of our pensione the next morning thinking:  “He wants to marry ME!!” I was thrilled. We climbed the hills behind the city of Verona the next day and looked out over that ancient and beautiful city which had once been a part of the Republic of Venice. I was happy and in love. Life was good.
We were married the following Spring in a small rural inn surrounded by family and friends. I wore an antique white gown and my husband’s mother who is a minister married us. A friend recited the Sheva Brachot (seven blessings) of the Jewish wedding ceremony and my new husband broke a glass under his right foot. We had a toast from a bottle of Mumm’s that my mother (who had passed away) had saved for me.

I had my first architectural job in a small firm located in midtown Manhattan. My husband had a job at a firm that specialized in low-income housing. We were living in my mother’s old apartment in the Village. We had lots of friends. We traveled abroad frequently. We went to a friends wedding in Karachi and then spent a week in Kathmandu, we visited friends in Cyprus. Life was good.

For years, my dream had been to go to Europe, buy a VW van and travel overland to India. After our first year of marriage, we decided to sublet our apartment in Manhattan and spend a year traveling the world, looking at architecture and thinking about writing a book. We didn’t have any children and the timing was perfect. My husband took a leave of absence from his job and I quit my job (architecture jobs were plentiful in New York in the mid 1980’s).

We planned to leave in September and had picked the date because my husband’s parents were planning on traveling to Hong Kong then. What better way to start our trip than in Hong Kong (where my husband had lived for several years growing up) with his parents who still had many friends there and spoke fluent Mandarin? It had long been my dream to travel to Asia and now that dream was coming true.

We bought two around-the–world airline tickets and planned our itinerary: Hong Kong (with a side trip to mainland China), Singapore, Jakarta, Bangkok, Rangoon, Kathmandu, New Delhi, Karachi, Cairo, Cyprus, Paris and lastly Dakar, Senegal as my brother-in-law was in the Peace Corps there.

In July before we were to leave, an old girlfriend of my husbands (who I had also known in architecture school) called him and invited him to meet her and some friends at a bar to discuss a class that she had been attending that she thought he might be interested in. He asked her if I was invited as well. She told him that she would have to call him back. She called back later and said that I was invited as well.

At the appointed time, we met our friend in an Irish bar on Third Avenue in the mid 30’s. We sat with her in a booth in the front of the bar sipping our beers while she told us of a wonderful experience she had with a group of people she had recently become involved with. She said that it was very rare that the group was open to new people and this was one of those unique moments. She told us that it would be a shame to miss this opportunity. It seemed very mysterious.

She was vague. I had a vague sense of unease but there was also an element of excitement. I asked if the group was associated with the philosophy of one person and she said that it was associated with Gurdjieff. The name was familiar but I think (having recently been a graduate student in psychology) I had him confused with Georg Groddeck (the “wild” analyst) or Erving Goffman – I had books by both of them on my selves at home. She said it was a study group and that they read and discussed great works of literature. I asked was kind of things they read and she told me: Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dante, Plato, the Bible – nothing that was out of the ordinary.

After we talked for a while, our friend asked if we would like to meet another friend of hers from the group who was in the back of the bar. We moved to the rear and there was a group of five or six people assembled. Two of these were women from the group. I will call them A and J. J was a fiery redhead and she was speaking very passionately to a man who seemed to be a friend of someone else. She had asked him a question and after he had answered she said very bluntly that what he had said was bullshit. I was impressed with her forthrightness, her no-nonsense attitude, her willingness to speak up for what she thought was the truth and to put herself on the line. She had a quality that I was attracted to and I wanted to be like her – sure of herself, well grounded and in control.

J told us that it was unusual for a married couple to join the group so she wanted to be sure that we each made our own individual decision. She told my husband and me that we were not to talk to each other about the group. If we were interested in giving the group a try, we were to come a bar in Tribecca named Magoo’s on Sixth Avenue near Walker Street between 6 and 7 pm.

I didn’t speak a word to my husband about it. I was agitated about my decision but did I really wrestle with the choice of going or not going? I don’t think so. For one, my curiosity had definitely been piqued. Secondly, my husband’s parents belonged to a quasi-religious order where people lived communally and dedicated themselves to community development all over the world. Since my husband had grown up in this group, I had the sense that he was drawn to groups of this type and that he was definitely attracted to this one. I felt, even then, that if we did not do this together, that our marriage would suffer. I did immediately feel a wall that went up when my husband and I were told not to talk about the group together. It was a wall that the group would strengthen over time.

I had always been interested in the occult. I grew up in the Greenwich Village of the 1960’s. Starting in high school, I used to spend hours in Weiser’s Bookstore when it was on lower Broadway in front of the 8th Street BMT subway entrance just below Astor Place. They had reading chairs and ashtrays throughout the store (long before Barnes and Noble) so it was a comfortable place for me to spend hours on end reading.

I also perused the classified ads in the Village Voice – there was a particular page (either at the beginning or the end of the paper) were among other things there would be advertisements for esoteric groups. My mother was friendly with a man named Rudi who was a spiritual teacher and oriental art dealer and I used to hang around his shop on Seventh Avenue and then later on Broadway near 10th Street. I was sure that there was a guru or a teacher somewhere in my future.

The recruiting practice is not at all the same today as it was back then. In the mid 1980’s, it was kind of like an open house. If you liked the class you stayed and if not you went on your way. Probably hundreds of people came through the doors in those days but only a few stayed. Now there is a very rigid system for recruiting new students – there are 5 rigidly proscribed meetings and everyone has to have certain qualifications such as they have to make over $60,000 a year, not be employed in or have any relatives or close friends in law enforcement or journalism, they have a “magnetic center” and a longing for something that life is not giving them. The recruiter also needs to prepare a detailed summary of their life history (among other things).

The next day, after work, I made my way to Magoo’s. A, one of the women who I had met the previous night was sitting at a table waiting for me. She said that my husband had already been there and had gone on to the space where the group meets with J and that she would take me there. At this point, my memory is not serving me very well. I think that they had asked us to bring money (cash) to the bar for our first month’s experiment. I know that now they do not ask for money up front and the first month is free. You are not asked to start paying regular tuition until the end of the experiment. I also seem to recall that as we sat in that bar, A outlined for me one of the main exercises that we were expected to do on a daily basis. I was to get a small notebook for my self-observations that were to be done on the dot of 10, 2 and 6 every day. There was a special formula for how it was to be written out which changed periodically.

We were also to get a copy of Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution (later referred to as the “little book”) and cover it with paper so that no one could see what we were reading. She also told me that I would be assigned a “sustainer” who would call me after the class to answer any questions I had and to see how I was doing. She said that whatever I said to my sustainer was entirely confidential and I should not be afraid to speak freely.

We left the bar and A escorted me to a building on the south east corner of Broadway and Franklin Street. Later they moved across the street on Broadway between Franklin and Leonard Streets above P&S Fabrics. We went up a rickety little elevator to the 4th or 5th floor. The elevator opened up onto the whole floor. There were large windows all along the Broadway side of the building. The rest of the main space was outfitted with chairs in a semicircle on three tiered risers with an aisle down the middle. There were perhaps 100 chairs in the room.

When I arrived, no one was sitting down but everyone was in the middle of the floor doing strange movements and there was a man in the middle of the room calling out what was to be done. I was told to take off my shoes and try to follow the movements as best I could. When they were over, we sat down on the chairs and waited. There was an area in the back where there were two bathrooms and a place where people could help themselves to coffee (one of the five major food groups). The women who tended the coffee and seemed to be organizing everything that went on, were all dressed in black. For a long time I called them “the women in black.” I didn’t see any of the people who had been in the bar the night before.

In the center of the semi-circle of chairs were two chairs with a small table in between them. On the small table between the chairs was:
          What appeared to be two matching glasses of water
          A small plate of fresh fruit and chocolate
          Two cloth napkins
          A small container of toothpicks
          A small vase of fresh flowers
          An ashtray and matches (EVERYONE smoked in those days)

After a few minutes, a man and a woman entered the room from the back and sat down at the chairs in the front of the room. The “women in black” immediately followed them in and they all had a hushed conversation. The women left and then returned with a mug for each of them and set them on the table.

Later I would know this drill so well I could prepare it in my sleep.  I would learn that the cups did not always contain coffee (frequently it was Vodka) and the snacks were selected on S's authority and never ever varied.  I would learn that the "women in black" were all single, and that after becoming a "woman in black" one could never quit (unless you got pregnant.)

These two people were the "teachers". The male teacher I will call Mr. Twitch (Mr. T) and the female teacher I will call Ms. Head Hunter (Ms. HH). People began to speak at random, asking questions of the people in the front who I later learned were the “teachers”. All sorts of things were talked about and the teachers seemed to be the final arbiters of all questions. Mostly, I had no clue about what they were talking about except when people asked for personal advice. It seemed so odd to me that people would speak about their inner most secrets in front of 100 people they didn't know. I was not then and am not now a big fan of confessions. Especially public confessions. It reminded me too much of the the Cultural Revolution in China. After awhile, Mr. T said that there were a number of new people and he wanted to give everyone a chance to speak. He went around the room counterclockwise asking everyone what they had thought of the class and why they had come. I was at the far left so I was one of the last to speak.

I don’t like to speak in public. There were quite a few new people that night (many of them I never saw again) and it was a while before they got to me. I had a long time to try to calm a mounting anxiety about speaking and to think about what I would say. Of course, most of the people eventually said what I had thought of saying so I was constantly changing my idea about what I would say. This was a situation that was to plague me throughout the time that I was in “school”. I always wanted to say something brilliant and original but the anxiety was too great and by the time they got to me I mumbled something about being interested in what was being said that night and not wanting to pass up something that might be unique. What I was constantly thinking, of course, was about if these people really were above board and if this was the genuine article.

Later, of course, I learned about many things. I became one of those "women in black" and prepared meals for the teachers and served them during class. It was considered a "third line of work" and the only way to get off it once you were on was to get pregnant. Starting with Mr. T,  I would never have guessed so many things about him that I later came to learn were true. In short, that every thing he presented about himself as a spiritual being was downright absurd.