Better Red than Red

Some new thoughts for a new beginning

2011-04-27T05:29:00.000-07:00

I have recently completed my graduate school program and currently have some time on my hands which leaves me pondering - should I go back and work on my Ranch blog? Meanwhile, my good friend refers to a mention of this blog on his blog and an extremely damning and somewhat mostly true article appears in the Oregonian. (http://www.oregonlive.com/rajneesh/) So, I have decided to go back again and work on what I started.

----------------------

I have read articles such as the one listed above with detached amusement over the years. One of the things that always surprises me most is the shock and anger given not to the guns, illegal wiretapping, or even poisoning of officials and townspeople (which was real) but to the supposed sex orgies, nudity, and salacious nature of the Commune's inhabitants (which was not). I would like to set the record straight on that score, as well as I can.

Sex was openly spoken of and encouraged as an act of love between consenting people. I knew more about sex by the age of 8 than most high school graduates in the US know, but not because I had seen or even experimented with it, but because it was so openly discussed. I was not grossed out, freaked out, or sickened by it. I was curious. But I did not experiment with it until later (unless you count being taught to french kiss by my older brother's best friend - I'm sure that is shocking to those of you who have forgotten what it was to be 9, 10, 11 years old anywhere).

Also, by the age of 8, I knew more about the transmission of STD's and how to prevent them and how to prevent pregnancy. I knew what a condom was and how to apply it to a banana. I had been tested for AIDS. I am certain all this shocks and dismays many in our society, but I am also certain I will teach my daughter all of this information when the time comes so that she can make her own choices in life.

That brings me around to the other thing I have been pondering of late. I touched on this in a previous post - but it is what has kept me from going on with this blog. When I started documenting my experiences on the Ranch, I hadn't had my daughter. I could look at my childhood with my own memories and value judgments without the veil of the new moral compass given to me when I became a parent. I have felt ambivalent about continuing because I thought that my worldview had changed so much as to make my continuing memories seem disingenuous.

I realize now, after much consideration, that the opposite is true. I now have more to draw from. The experience of being a parent makes me question more to be sure, but it also forces me to accept that though I wouldn't do it the same way with my daughter, I didn't just "turn out OK" in the end as people often say, as though I need just put it all behind me, forget my past and move on in regular society. I am more than that - I not only see my past through the morality of being a parent, but I see being a parent through the magnificent and unique experiences I have had and that makes me better for her, more accepting, more able to see that it doesn't just turn out OK in the end, but that I have more to give for having done things differently.

"I worked on the airplane engines when I was 9," I can tell my daughter, "and learned to fly one on a simulator."

"I gathered eggs and candled them to check for cracks. But I learned to stay away from the guinea fowl, they were MEAN."

My best friends were from Italy, India, England, and Australia. I learned German and spoke with a perfect accent.

I lived in a vibrant and loving international community. That is what is unique.

I lived my childhood under a corrupt dictatorship. That part is not.

Personal Terror

2008-05-13T14:43:00.000-07:00

Due to some difficulties incorporating Rajneeshpuram as its own city, the Rajneeshies took over the neighboring town of Antelope, bought up most of the properties, installed its children in the houses, took over the one-room schoolhouse effectively forcing the remaining local families to bus their children to further neighboring Madras (My god, it's a carbon-spending global warming nightmare) lest they have to spend their days with pink and red clad hooligan children. Antelope was renamed the City of Rajneesh and all its citizens eventually moved away save the one sannyasin family that had bought a home in the town. How could this plan possibly engender ill will?

The kids moved back to Rajneeshpuram shortly thereafter, though we were bussed to and from Antelope each day for school (45 minutes on windy back roads).

It was at this time that the friendly neighborliness feelings some of the very small towns in Central Oregon had afforded us began to dissipate and be replaced with anger and hostility. Sheela, the head "mom" on the Ranch began to become crazier and crazier, hatching nefarious plots in conspiracy with her cohorts. Things in my world began slowly to go awry. First, the enforced nuclear holocaust fear-instilling madness. Then, the AIDS scare - we were all certain to die in the oncoming plague unless we put alcohol on phones and toilet seats.

Then it got personal.

If we kids ever did anything that was "not on" (against the rules), we would be called into Ramakrishna to get "hosed" or "boned" (in trouble and yelled at). Offenses likely to get you hosed included anything from skipping lecture (videos of previously recorded Rajneesh lectures, remember he was in silence at this time) to skipping work. Or stealing, drinking alcohol, or anything our Moms felt was not on.

I was summoned to Ramakrishna for my attitude. I had been skipping lecture every day to play with my friend Sarjan on a tire swing. I also made out with my boyfriend Jeet during times I was supposed to be doing something else. I often skipped worship in order to play.

I nervously went in to the office. You never know whether a boning would get you sent away or merely a stern talking to. I waited anxiously for Shanti B, the Mom in charge of the kids, to come and give me my boning. She finally arrived, sat down across from me and chatted with me for a while about my attitude. I was about to get up and be done with this and was certainly ready to move on with my life.

"One more thing," she said. "How old are you?"
"Nine." I told her.
"Hm... and how old was your dad when his mom died?"
"Nine months."
"Oh, and how old was he when his dad died?"
"Nine."
"I see. Watch it from now on."

She didn't need to say anything more. I knew what it meant. At least what it meant to me. It was a not-so-thinly veiled threat against my dad. If I didn't shape up, my dad was a goner. I honestly didn't think that she meant she would kill him. In my mind, she meant if i didn't shape up, he would just die as a result of my badness.

The Ranch Revisited

2008-04-28T10:31:00.000-07:00

I have been watching recent media attention given to the Fundamentalist branch of the Church of Latter Day Saints (aka FLDS aka those wacky Mormons) with a somewhat bemused lack of interest. And I have been hearing things like "abuse" and "neglect" and "What's with that hair?"

I was at a party yesterday where the FLDS fiasco was the topic of conversation. A friend whose opinion I deeply respect said something along the lines of "those poor kids will never recover (from their experience on this ironically-named "Ranch"). That is when I started to pay attention.

All of my years on the Ranch had me aware of how the Outside World viewed us. But only from the propaganda that came from within the Ranch. It was actually much worse from the real media. I lived in a "sex commune" filled with wacky red-clad people who spent their days working like dogs and their evenings swaying with arms raised exposing hairy armpits or shaking in fits of rapture. And the children, those poor children. How could they raise children in that environment?

I read that over 400 children have been taken away from their families. I can imagine the scene - chaos surrounding a raid, all children torn from their (young) mothers' arms, screaming and pulling at their skirts. Nursing babies were removed from their mothers' breasts. The thing that shocks me is not that this happened. What utterly surprises me is that it didn't happen to us. I can only attribute this to the fact that we were not in Texas, but in Oregon.

I am not saying that my upbringing was right and decent and not at all what is portrayed in the media. On the contrary. There was a sea of red-clad people dancing in rapture at the feet of a bearded man in robes. We did work 12 hours a day to build our city in the desert. But in our land-of-the-free-home-of-the-brave country, I have learned that freedom of religion only applies to the Judeo-Christians. We don't understand "cults" or "sects" and so give them those disparaging names to make us feel better about imposing our values on them. We don't believe the things they believe (and believe me, I have made my share of cracks about the Mormons over the years and I don't plan to stop now. Don't get me started on the Scientologists) and so that gives us as a society the right to move in, take their children, and fix their lives so that we are all more comfortable.

My childhood was just that, it was what was happening when I was a child. It was wild and certainly quite different from the childhoods that nearly all of my friends enjoyed. I have a few friends who grew up in that environment too and at some level, these are the only people who really get it. The only ones who shared a similar experience with me during my isolated and different childhood. But this does not make me less able to bond with people from the Outside World. I did marry a non-sannyasin. In fact, I often find the sannyasin "kids" precious and imperious. It's just that they are the only ones to whom I don't have to answer "What was it like?"

I have a daughter now. I can't imagine taking her to a Commune and giving her the childhood I had. I can't conceive of her living in a Kids' House, apart from me most of the time. I know that this would devastate her and me. She is also a very different kind of kid than I was. She is very attached, very sensitive, very emotional, very intense. I have provided her with an upbringing that suits us. My parents provided me with an upbringing that suited them and me. Some children suffered. Can you tell me that in our American Judeo-Christian society that children don't suffer?

Things get ugly

2006-05-01T21:36:00.000-07:00

The thing about sannyasins is that they are into sex. And all that lovey-dovey stuff that goes with it. And they like to talk about it. A lot. Most of us kids were well versed in the ins and outs (so to speak) of sexual intimacy. I would like to deny all of the media hype that we got - you know you saw some of it - the free love orgies and so forth, but really it all stems from some kernel of truth.

No, I didn't witness any creepy weird public sex orgies, but like i said, people were open and free about sex and they were having a lot of it. There was lots of kissing and hugging going on everywhere, and I'm sure there was a lot of fucking going on behind closed doors, if not in big creepy weird public sex orgies.

Some time in 1983, I went to Maggie's (Magdelena, the cafeteria) to have dinner. Sarv came running up from behind me, hoisted me up into the air, and planted a big kiss on me. Then he launched into this frantic tirade about how he heard it from on high that a decree was coming down that we were all to be prohibited from kissing so he was trying to get his last smooches in.

Some time in 1983, they figured out that AIDS was becoming a problem. They also figured out that it was passed from person to person through sexual contact. Imagine what that does in a free-sex-and-love community.

It was true. Sometime the next day, we all got called in to a meeting. I was still living in Antelope and going to school there. They brought us all in to the little kids' school room and they told us about AIDS. They told us about how it was spread, though they also told us it was spread through saliva. They told us it was going to be the next plague and probably what was going to bring humanity down. They told us how we were to prevent it:

- Always wear condoms when having sexual intercourse (OK)
- Wear rubber gloves when having any sexual contact (?)
- No kissing whatsoever (and now it starts getting crazy)
- Use alcohol on the toilet before and after use
- Use alcohol on telephones before and after use

Alcohol sprayers were everywhere - kitchens, each telephone area, food prep areas, bathrooms, etc. Everyone was paranoid. To this day, I feel weird kissing people on the lips again, though at the time I defied authority somewhat and snuck into the back of an empty bus with my boyfriend Kamal and french-kissed him for hours at a time.

Shortly after that initial meeting, we were called in to another one. We were told that every man, woman, and child living on the Ranch (the kids were moved back to the Ranch sometime during that hubbub) was going to have to have an AIDS test. People that tested positive for the virus were to be quarantined and continue to live separately from the rest of us for the rest of their days.

The panic I felt was overwhelming. I was sure all that kissing gave me AIDS.

I'm a Big Kid

2005-11-22T13:26:00.000-08:00

Still living in Antelope, I had a birthday. For some reason, turning 9 was a huge deal for me. It meant the difference between being a little kid and being a big kid. I was about to be a big kid! All I wanted for my 9th birthday was a new bike. I'd had a bike at the beginning of the Ranch, a nice one, but I'd loaned it to Geet ONCE and he left it in the middle of the road and it got backed over by a truck. Incidentally, this was not long before Pakhi, a girl slightly younger than me, was playing in the middle of the same road and got backed over by a truck. She was in the hospital for quite some time getting patched up.

Anyway, all I wanted was a replacement bike. It had, after all, been nearly two years since I'd had a bike. I dropped incredibly subtle hints to Sarv constantly, whenever I saw him. He had to go to Portland on one of his Donald Bluestone Lone Ranger Spy trips right before my birthday, but said he'd do what he could to come through Antelope on my birthday. The day rolled ever closer. This year Yasha had chosen a much more delicious flavor cake for her birthday two weeks prior to my birthday - white with whipped cream-and-strawberry icing. So of course that's what I was having too.

Nicky took special notice of my birthday. I hadn't been particularly close with him before that, but he seemed to be taking an interest in me nonetheless. I was living in Gorky, a small house at the bottom of the hill with Nicky (a different Nicky), Pramada, and Sanjay - three boys. Nicky (who later became Anshu, so lets just refer to him as that for now to avoid confusion) snuck into our house the evening of my birthday with at least twenty presents for me wrapped in tin foil. I waited patiently for my dad to arrive.

It got darker and darker and I waited and waited.

Finally, I heard his car pulling in behind the house. He came in with a few presents and we all sat down and began the celebration. We ate cake and I unwrapped each of Anshu's carefully wrapped presents - which included an apple and an old teddy bear and several other household items. I think he just wanted me to feel like I had a lot of presents to unwrap. Then I got to Sarv's presents: a book, a mad libs set, some other small trinkets from the Outside World, some candy. Then he said he had to leave. It was late and it was time for him to head back to the Ranch for a good night's sleep.

I think I couldn't hide the devastation on my face. I bit back tears and gave him a terse hug. He asked me to come out to the car to say good bye, so I followed him back fighting every emotion inside. He opened the trunk of the car and of course, I know you saw it coming, out came a nice shiny chrome and black BMX!

I'm pretty sure this was not the last time Sarv was able to fool me in this manner, but it is a lot harder to do nowadays. He does continue to try...

2005-10-26T19:22:00.000-07:00

I returned to Antelope with a tan and a couple of cool T-shirts. "Here today, gone to maui," said one, and the other proclaimed, "Inside this hawaiian t-shirt is one terrific kid", both in a delightful shade of maroon. I couldn't wait to get back to Antelope, kidland, and be with all my friends again.

I had one friend in particular, Yasha, that I couldn't wait to see. I'd known Yasha since Geetam. She was a tough, cranky, no-nonsense individual and she had been my best friend there. When I left Geetam to go to the Ranch, I missed her terribly and talked to my dad about her constantly. When she arrived at the Ranch a few months after me, my dad fell in love with her instantly. They formed a special friendship which lasted for years. She was, more or less, the closest thing I had to a sister or sibling. She looked out for me and challenged me and pushed me to my limits.

When I returned to Antelope, I learned that the people in charge, the Moms, had decided that there should be no further communication between Yasha and my father. So, that was that. I never ferried messages between them, but they maintained their friendship anyway. But Yasha was never one to listen to rules. She smoked pilfered cigarettes and drank stolen liquor. She skipped work and meals and got into trouble in ways I would never dare.

At the Ranch, we would sometimes have these terrifying meetings at Ramakrishna, the Office of Getting Into Serious Shit with the Moms. Usually, we would be called in one at a time to get a stern lecture and punishment and then we would go on with our lives. Well, something unusual was happening. The entire community of kids was being called not into Ramakrishna, but to Jesus Grove, where Sheela, the biggest Mom and Bhagwan's personal secretary, lived and worked. Sheela and Vidya needed to speak with everyone.

I honestly have no idea what that meeting was about. But at the end of that meeting, several kids were singled out. This one had better "Shape Up Or Ship Out," that one received a warning. But one kid, one Deva Yasha, had gone beyond the line. She was singled out and used for an example. She did not get a second chance. She was to pack up and leave the Ranch. Her mom and dad were both living on the Ranch, so I think she went to live with her grandparents, also sannyasins, in San Diego. I didn't see Yasha again until shortly after the Ranch dissipated and she visited my dad and me in Northern California.

The kids were then unceremoniously removed from the town of Antelope and replaced onto the Ranch. We attended school at Ko Hsuan, a new building near the housing and we were farmed out to either kids houses - double-wide trailers that most people lived in - or to regular adult housing. I was kept in a kids house near Magdalena, the cafeteria. We were then all given new jobs on the Ranch and that was how we spent the rest of the time. This time, I was placed on a cleaning crew with Nicky, Sadhu, and Sanjay, three boys my age.

the OUTSIDE WORLD

2005-09-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

On the Ranch, we were well trained to consider ourselves special and chosen. We referred to non-sannyasins with disdain and were simultaneously fearful and curious about the Outside World. Certain things from the Outside World were coveted: candy, pocket video games, meat, the color blue. Others were terrifying: bomb threats, nasty flyers constantly being dropped from airplanes to litter the Ranch, hateful looks and comments about our red clothes and malas.

At 8, I usually wanted to leave and get the candy and movies from the Outside World. I missed my mom, who lived in Berkeley, then Maui, then Laguna Beach, then Venice CA. I visited her first in Berkeley, where she lived with Akul and a group of other sannyasins. She drove a tiny beat-up Datsun and was cleaning houses I think. I was going to visit her for one week. Before I left, I was told that you weren't allowed to swear in the Outside World, it just wasn't accepted the way it was at the Ranch. I decided that I would have to get the swearing out of my system.

I rode a bus to California, all the while gazing out the window first at the high desert, then smalltown America, then cityscapes. I chanted to myself "shit. fuck. piss. goddamnit." If i could get it all out of my system before my arrival there, I wouldn't have to curse any more. The Dalles: Motherfucker. Portland: Shitkicker. Eureka: Tits. And so forth. It didn't work.

I enjoyed my time in Berkeley. My mom spoiled me for a week. Took me out to dinner and let me eat chicken, bought me candy and a new t-shirt with a batik dinosaur on it, got me a new book for the ride home and sent me on my way. The next time I visited her was later that same year on Maui.

I went for a month and she greeted me at the airport with a kiss and a candy lei. On that trip, I was reading "Forever" by Judy Blume. It was one of Judy Blume's forays into writing for adults, or at least older teens and it had a racy sex scene in it that I read over and over again. I didn't want anyone on the plane to know I was reading such a taboo novel, so I actually hid my teeny-bopper book behind the spine of a comic book.

My time in Hawaii was a challenge for my mom and me. I was in between being a boy and being a woman - I still dressed and looked like a boy, but I was just beginning to get interested and excited by sex. I read a lot of Judy Blume and was beginning to get crushes on boys. At the same time, I refused to wear a girl's bathing suit at the beach in Hawaii. We had an enormous fight over that one. I won. I wore trunks and read Judy Blume on the beach. Go figure.

My mom and I spent a lot of time at the beach. She bought me a boogie board which i used to scrape myself silly under the surf. She taught me to play solitaire and peeled my back after i got my first nasty sunburn. I spent a month living with and fighting with her and continuing to despise Akul. I also learned about tsunamis and combined that with my already disturbing preoccupation with death. To this day, I have nightmares about oncoming tidal waves.

After all the chicken and candy I could stand, I couldn't wait to get back to Sarv and the Ranch. I wouldn't visit my mom again until I was nine and would go live with her in Venice.

Fear and loathing in Antelope

2005-09-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

There came a time when the kids were still exiled at Antelope that the word came down from on high that the world was ending. We were told to expect nuclear holocaust at some undetermined future date and that we would be chosen to survive and that, of course, we would build caves in which to live. I'm pretty sure several religious cults have had this same notion, but at age 8, this was the first I'd heard of it.

They began to fill our heads with visions of horror. First, I remember them reading a book to us. It was written from the point of view of a young girl who had survived the attacks on Hiroshima, but who now had leukemia and was dying. They told us to prepare. Finally, the thing that pushed this 8-year-old psyche over the edge, was the movie "The Day After". They often showed us movies, bootlegged copies of various VHS tapes that they'd managed to score, but they were usually flicks like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "the Incredible Mr. Limpet". Maybe not all appropriate for children, but none scary and usually funny.

Anyway, we were told to meet at the cafeteria to see a movie. We were told we didn't have a choice, it was required. We had been paired with "big brothers" or "big sisters" and it was their job at this time to make sure their charges sat through this movie. So, we unwittingly piled into the sitting hall at the cafeteria and gathered to watch this movie. As I remember it, it was about World War III and the aftermath of nuclear winter. All I remember is the sight of people's bodies being vaporized into ash. I was terrified. Mouna and I spent most of the movie hiding in fear in the bathroom together. It was awful. After that, I became obsessed with death.

I began to think about death constantly. I worried that Sarv would die. Then I worried that I would die and Sarv wouldn't survive without me. Then I wondered what happened to me when I died. Then I worried that I would never kiss a boy or get my period before I died (I was reading a lot of Judy Blume books at the time). I do think that it was a little weird that I was so constantly obsessed with death at such a young age, but being Jewish by birth anyway, I think it was in my genes.

Soon after the constant end-of-the-world hype, all the talk about it disappeared. It was like they realized, OK maybe the end of the world is coming, maybe it's not, but lets get back to the business of living. In any case. no caves were built and no further plans were made for our survival. I guess they decided that the shit had been sufficiently scared out of us.

Exiled in Antelope

2005-08-12T13:24:00.000-07:00

The nearest town to Rajneeshpuram, which was by now an incorporated city in Oregon, was an infinitesimal town in Central Oregon named Antelope. The entire town had a population of 41. They had a little post office, a one-room schoolhouse with a playground and several little houses lining 2 streets that ran the length of the town. On the main drag, there was a café that was owned by the Ranch called Zorba the Buddha. For a while, it served as a welcoming restaurant for people arriving at the Ranch on their way from Portland. Antelope was about 15 miles from the ranch and it took 45 minutes to drive the winding roads from there.

At some point, the Ranch leadership decided it would go about taking over the town of Antelope. It had a public school so they decided that they would send their red-clad kids, all of us, to Antelope to go to school. The people of Antelope freaked out, and bussed all of their kids to the next biggest town, Madras, so that their kids wouldn't have to go to school with us. There was one kid who stayed, but her parents were sannyasins anyway, and they'd moved to Antelope in order to be closer to the Ranch in the first place. So, we took over the school.

Not only were we to be sent to school in Antelope, but we were to take over the town completely. We were not living on the Ranch any more, all the hundred or so kids on the Ranch were living in various houses we'd bought from the townsfolk or trailers we put there. I lived in a little house at the bottom of the hill with three boys (remember I was still under the impression that I was a boy), Pramada, Nicky, and Sanjay. Our house was named Gorky, and it was an adorable little one-bedroom shack where we shared 2 bunkbeds.

The deal was, all the kids lived in communal housing in Antelope, ate in the community kitchen in Antelope and saw our parents on a "babysitting" rotation - they would rotate in once a week or so and have the duty of watching their child's houseful. It was different for me, though. My mom was living in Berkeley with Akul, she'd had attitude problems with authority, I think. And Sarv was working in the legal department as a spy, well, not so much a spy as a researcher, but with the stink of spyhood around it. He would go to Portland once a week or so and dress in blue and take off his mala and pose as Dr. Donald Bluestone, PhD working on some book or other and he would nose around trying to find things out for the "moms", the powers-that-be at the Ranch. In any case, this special situation meant that I rarely saw Sarv, but that I was allowed to go and spend the night at the Ranch in his trailer in lieu of him coming to babysit.

We literally took over that town. I barely ever remember even seeing any of the locals around any more and we purchased most of the real estate there. We gutted the school and remodeled it into a 3 room school house. It was in quite a shambles, I remember going through with a broom and trying to avoid hundreds of wasps' nests hiding in all the ceiling corners. Instead of classes, we spent weeks going through and cleaning windows, sweeping floors, dusting chalkboards, and moving furniture. Finally, we had a school.

We even had bona fide teachers. And a principal. All certified to teach in the State of Oregon. We were a real live public school. The principal was Suraj. He was one of the adults I'd had run-ins with at Geetam when he was in charge of the kitchen. He was a tall, gray-haired and bearded, stern PRINCIPAL. I think he may also have taught the older kids, the teenies. Pranesh, a warm funny loving bearlike man also taught the older kids.

Then there was Nura. She was actually from Oregon and was a teacher by trade - always was and probably still is. She had these weird twin boys - Dave and Gabe, later named Jalesh and Prasana' who adored the Police and had these gorgeous high-pitched voices so they could actually sing the entire Synchronicity album just like Sting. My dad always called them the aliens. Nura taught the middle kids, me and my friends. She taught us about Oregon things like Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce and Lewis and Clark. I also remember her reading us a wonderful novel about kids who end up in Egyptian mythology. I wish I could remember the name of the book, but i had fabulous visions of Nefertiti and an Oracle.

Sambodhi taught the youngest kids. She was a small person (dwarf? midget? I'm not sure what we called them then or even what condition she had but she was very very short). She had one leg significantly shorter than the other as well and had this giant shoe and brace to make up for it. She was a wonderful teacher and person with whom you would not want to fuck. I'm not sure if she was mean or cruel, but you knew, you just knew you didn't want to get on her bad side.

The school was run like this: We were divided into the three groups. The teacher made every attempt at actual lessons, which probably lasted a half an hour or so each day. Then we had free reign to learn about whatever we wanted. We were given math workbooks, novels to read, and journals in which to write. We were all extremely possessive of our journals and all the kids, male and female, wrote in them religiously. I became quickly recognized as the smart one. I was always quite enthusiastic about learning and I loved the workbooks. Many of the kids never did any school work, but when they tried, they would all come to me for help with it. I enjoyed that there, it didn't have any of the stigma attached to it as it later would in the outside world public school.

At 4 each day, we would break for "tea". This meant snacks and playtime outside. There were swings, a rickety jungle gym and an even ricketier mint green merry-go-round which was always the most popular item. One or two kids would climb into the middle of it and push hordes of kids as fast as possible until one of us would ineveitably fly off. After tea, we would go inside and do chores. Cleaning, organizing, etc. It was our job to keep the place tidy since we were no longer on the official ranch with our official jobs.

Then we would all go down to the cafeteria for dinner and gachamis. Every day before breakfast and dinner, everyone on the Ranch and by extension, in Antelope, had to bow down kneeling and do gachamis. "buddham, sharanam, gachami," means "i bow to the feet of the awakened one". It goes on for 3 separate refrains, while bowed down for each. Before gachamis, we had "reminders". These were insipid little things that one person was assigned to announce twice each day. "Beloveds. Please remember that our bodies are temples. Please treat them this way."

"Beloveds. Please remember not to gossip. It hurts all involved and noone is interested anyway."

And on from there. It was intolerable.

None of the kids were particularly spiritual or pious, and we all did this because we had to, not because we were reverent and felt like bowing to the feet of the Awakened One. Well, all of us but one. Mouna, my friend from Poona, would look very meditative and awestruck with each refrain. At the final one, "Dhammmmaaaaaaaam.....Sharanaaaaaaaaammmmm.... Gaaaaaaaaaachaaaaaaaaamiiiiiii....", she would stay bowed on hands and knees until she knew nobody was still down before she raised up and slowly opened her eyes while taking a deep sustained breath.

I always thought she was full of shit.

Butcher, baker, electronics soldering monkey

2005-07-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

At the Ranch, all kids were required to have jobs. Adults worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. We kids went to school a few hours and spent the rest running various errands at various departments. A trait that started then and has unfortunately stayed with me all my life is the perpetual desire for a better job. I started in the warehouse. I listened to my John Lennon tape on my walkman over and over and over again, really "getting" it: "I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and rooooooound/I really love to watch them roll" as I loaded up pallets of kleenex, reams of paper, endless boxes of red dickies and hoodies. I really hated that one. I don't think it lasted long.

Then, when I was 8, I was transferred to the kitchen. I sat around these huge vats of, I'm not kidding, cookie dough and tried to leave some of it for actual cookies. They got rid of me pretty quickly out of that one. I was sent to Atisha, the chicken farm. I actually enjoyed that for a while and stayed. I collected eggs from the chickens every day. That was usually OK, but for some reason, we had a cadre of guinea fowl, I think they were used to protect the chickens from coyotes or something (I'm not a farmer, clearly, but we had them for some godforsaken reason and that's what sticks in my head). The guinea fowl lived amongst the chickens and they were vicious. If they thought I was reaching for *their* eggs, (and they thought all eggs were their eggs) they would peck the living shit out of my hands. I always felt lucky to get out of there alive.

Another thing I did at Atisha was "candle" the eggs. I would take all the eggs I had collected and I would place them one at a time over this light to check for cracks or embryos (we had a rooster, but he was kept separate from the hens. I suppose there's always the worry that he would find his way over and have his way with the henhouse, but I'm pretty sure I never found an embryo.

After that, I was sent to Edison, the electronics department. This was in the summer of 1982, right before and during the First Annual World Celebration (FAWC). The Celebration was a weeklong event in which sannyasins flew in from all over the world, descended on our little community in Central Oregon, making it a bona fide city. The city of Rajneeshpuram boomed to around 10,000 red-clad, swaying, eyes closed, namaste-ing, singing, dancing freaks. My job at Edison was to dupe tapes. Osho had stopped speaking publicly several months prior, but all his discourses had been recorded on tape. We expected to sell several tens of thousands of tapes of previous lectures throughout the course of the festival. I had to dupe tapes, peel off the sticker from a roll, put one on side A, one on side B and stick it in the labeled box. Over and over again. It was pitiful.

Luckily, I befriended Puneet. He was an older boy, a teenie as we called them at the time, but he was always friendly with me. He was one of the few Indian kids there and he had a sister named Richa. She had a very whiny pitch to her voice and was quite bossy so of course everyone always called her "screecha". Anyway, Puneet had very interesting work, which was mostly top secret. Later, of course, we learned that his job involved bugging people's rooms and some real spy shit, but at the time, it was just something new and fun for me to do. He taught me how to take circuit boards and solder things on to them. I don't remember anything, like was it a transistor? A resistor? A capacitor of some kind? I also have absolutely no idea what sort of circuit boards I was working on. But I do remember how to solder.

So by the time I was 8, I had been a warehouse worker, cafeteria cook, farm girl, and electronics geek.

My Crime Spree

2005-06-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

Sometime shortly after I healed from my broken leg, I began to get into trouble. We were often left to our own devices, us kids, and for me boredom + freedom = big big trouble. It started innocently enough. There was a "purchasing trailer" which at the time was located right next to Howdy Doody for some inconceivable reason. Inside the purchasing trailer were all sorts of goodies not regularly doled out to kids or other people at meals. This time, we discovered that the trailer contained variety packs, packs of those tiny boxes of delicious sugary cereals like froot loops and sugar smacks. We usually had cornflakes. Every day. Breakfast was cornflakes. So these variety packs were very enticing.

Jonas, that redheaded demon from my Poona days, told me how to sneak into the purchasing trailer to obtain the goodies. I did it and I stashed them under the sink in our makeshift communal kids' kitchen that was never in use. Yasha somehow found out about it and squealed. For that transgression, Sarv told Arun and me that we were not allowed to participate in the upcoming cookie and lemonade sale. The kids were busily baking cookies and fixing lemonade to sell at a stand, and we were all to share in the profits to buy candy and soda at the vending machines. No cookies, no lemonade, and no money for me.

I really wanted that money. I had been looking forward to lemon drops from that machine for a long time. That's when a plan sprouted in my tiny 7-year-old brain. I talked Garima into sneaking into people's trailers and searching for money. We would steal the money and buy candy. It was simple, yet brilliant. We started in this man's room, which was in the house nearest the kids' house. Jackpot. He had about $40. We took it. We decided that it was easy and we should move on. We went to Garima's mom's trailer and sacked all the rooms there for whatever we could find. On a commune, as you would expect, people didn't usually have much money, but what they had laying around, we found and took. We got excited.

We went to my dad's trailer and went around to each and every room in his trailer. We got greedy. And that, as it often is, was our downfall. One of the women that lived in my dad's trailer had a lot of gum and candy. The money wasn't enough, we decided to go through her candy and split it up. We got comfortable on her bed and began to divide the candy evenly, making sure nobody got more of anything. We were careless. The woman walked in and busted us. We ran out thinking we were lucky for only being caught stealing candy.

Unfortunately, the woman also told my father about our little adventure and he probed further. Someone else knew about the whole thing and told him about it. He was FURIOUS. I don't think I have ever seen my dad that angry, before or since, not with me. He called Garima and me into the school, which was located adjoining the kids' house. He spoke with Garima first and then sent her out. She looked stricken, though still alive. Now it was my turn. He took me inside and gave me a spanking. For the third and last time in my life, I received a spanking (the first was from my mother who spanked me after a friend and i drew with pen all over the walls of a room I had moved out of and into my "big girls' room" when I was four. She spanked me and said to my friend "i'd spank you too if you were my child, but i can't!" and then she made us clean it up with windex. The second spanking was from my dad when we lived in Poona and I was six. I was just being obnoxious, he couldn't tolerate it any more and he spanked me. He was admonished by my mom for that one.)

After the initial corporeal punishment, we were both told to go and give the money back to each and every person from whom we'd stolen and apologize to them. All told, we had stolen $82 and the gum and candy. We'd only spent about $1 each on lemon drops and soda when we were caught. Thus ended my crime ring.

My 15 minutes

2005-06-07T11:39:00.000-07:00

In the early days of the Ranch, there were still relatively few people and everyone knew each other. We were still friendly with people in the "outside world" and we still knew how to have a good time. One night in early January was slated to be "Kids' Night". We were all going to get our opportunity to get on stage and perform songs, skits, dance numbers, whatever we wanted. My particular talent was and always had been, jokes.

I was still bedbound, but I was strongly encouraged by my favorite nurse, Debal, to put together an act. She promised to help me on and off stage, all I had to do was, well, something. For weeks, I perused all my favorite joke books, I made some up, I tried them out on Sarv (much to my daddy's dismay, I had started calling him Sarv when i returned to the Ranch - he was a teacher and that's what all the other kids called him and I didn't want to stand out, so Sarv it was and Sarv it stayed). I came up with a few jokes I knew I would tell, but for the most part, I planned to just wing it.

Finally, the night arrived. There were several skits by Hiroshi and Vishranta, they were all pretty raunchy, but some were actually quite funny. Gyana and Sonal screeched several off-key versions of Pat Benetar songs with a real rockin' back up band. Finally, after intermission, it was my turn. It took about 5 minutes and 3 people to hoist me on stage and prop me up and fix the mic, but finally I was situated.

I had a very hairy white monkey puppet, one of those ones whose hands and feet have velcro on them, wrapped around my neck. His name was Snowy and someone had given him to me while I was in the hospital in Madras. I started with some monkey shenanigans, he ate the mic, my hair, etc. And then I got into my best 7-year-old jokes: What's white and goes up? A retarded snowflake. How can you tell a happy motorcyclist? The bugs in his teeth. I'm telling you, the jokes were crap, but these people were eating them up! It must have been my expert timing and delivery. I finished up and got a standing ovation. I was beaming.

I enjoyed my fame for a few months. People were constantly harkening back to Kids' Night. I had been the star, they said. There was a tape and all the other kids always fast-forwarded to my section and listened to the jokes. Then the trouble started. Everyone always wanted me to tell jokes. Kids and adults alike to start, then finally the kids left me alone. For YEARS, I would go around the Ranch and there would always be some loser that would approach me and say, "hey Hira, got any good jokes today?" I began to hate jokes. I loathed jokes. Don't get me wrong, I love good humor, and I would still never miss an opportunity to make people laugh, but I despised preformed punchline humor.

Kids night marked the end of my confinement. It wasn't long after that I was out of traction for good. At first I was given crutches and I had to go to Physical Therapy with this awful German stereotype of a Physical Therapist fraü. The whole time I was in traction, people kept telling me that I was going to have to "learn to walk again", which I really thought meant that I was somehow going to completely forget how to put one foot in front of the other. I didn't. I really didn't need that much PT, and really I could walk again quite quickly, but this Nazi kept forcing me to come to her torture sessions.

Sarv finally took my crutches away when he'd discovered me playing the incredibly fun and moderately dangerous game I'd invented with Nicky. We would each take a crutch, climb up on a chair and essentially pole vault off the thing onto the floor. It was hilarious fun. Nicky became a very close friend after my leg was broken. Previously, he'd been one of my worst, if not the worst, tormentor. He was a couple years older than me and had a permanent limp due to a tubercular hip, whatever that means. We were told he'd had polio or tuberculosis and rumors about it were certainly more prevalent than the truth, so really I don't know. All i do know is that he'd lived in India when he was really young and caught a disease that was more or less treatable or even disappeared from the Western world, and that it had damaged him for good. Anyway, I think he was more sympathetic towards me after my accident and he became a very protective older brother to me.

After Sarv took my crutches, I had to enter the trenches with everyone else. I went back to school and was given a job in the warehouse sorting things. Mostly I walked around with my Walkman and listened to my John Lennon tape. But i think i did some actual work. Things were finally back to normal.

Xmas in Madras

2005-04-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

So, after 3 weeks at the Ranch, I was confined to my bed in somewhat nearby Madras, OR, a small town in Central Oregon with a smalltown hospital. It was such a smalltown hospital, that at Christmastime, the local children would take up a collection to buy toys for kids in the hospital. I was the only kid in the hospital, so come Christmas, I was bestowed with a bounty!

When she heard that I was in the hospital, my mom came up from Geetam and moved into the Ranch. Believe it or not, despite the fact that I lived in a commune, traveled to India, knew about and fiddled around with sex, cursed like a sailor constantly as I told dirty jokes, and am by birth Jewish, I still believed in Santa Claus. On Christmas morning, my parents came in with sacks of presents, presents the town children had gotten me and presents they had gotten for me themselves, and told me that they had run into Santa out on the street, he was in a huge hurry and had given them the gifts for me to save time. I was thrilled.

One of the things I got that year was a tape recorder. One of those little handheld jobs with one speaker and those buttons that you had to practically sit on to get them to push down. I also got a tape, "Urban Chipmunk" - the Chipmunks sing country and western songs. I'm not sure if I had any other tapes, but this is the one I listened to constantly. "Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be Chipmunks" and a rousing rendition of "Off the road again" floated down the hospital hallways day and night.

Another prize possession in my hospital days was the complete set of Garfield comics. I had books #1 - 6 and I read them over and over and over again. Thus began my obsession with Garfield. At Geetam, I'd already established myself as premier joke-teller, but with my new joke books (there were several) I really honed my repertoire. I worked on my act with my fuzzy velcro-footed monkey, Snowy, and dreamed about a time when I would be released from my bed prison so that I could share my humor with the world.

I was truly bedbound. I lay in bed day and night, a nurse would bathe me with a crusty sponge every other day. I had to ring a bell if I had to take a shit so that they could put a bedpan beneath me and then ring it again when I was done. I held it in as long as possible before ringing that bell, believe me. And all the time, I seethed. I said I would never speak to Madhu again. I never wanted to SEE her ever again. How could she have been so reckless, jumping on me and forcing me to live this life in a bed so far away from everyone I knew. So, who decides to leave the Ranch and pay me a visit? Madhu.

She arrived, trembling with fear and remorse, with her mother bearing food from A & W. As soon as I saw her, I grew weepy, greedily ate the junk food and hugged her tightly. How could I ever have been so mad at my friend? She caught me up with all the news from the Ranch, which kids were getting in trouble, which kids were getting beat up, who talked about me and who sent me their love. It was great. I told her my latest jokes and was very very sad to see her go.

After a month in the hospital in Madras, they had finally gathered enough material at the Ranch ward to build me a traction there so that I could come home. They loaded me up into the back of a van, surrounded my sandbags and my parents, and we drove the 45 minutes back to the Ranch where I lived in a new traction among familiar maroon-clad people.

Upon our arrival back at the Ranch, they lowered me into a tub (again surrounded by sandbags) and gave me my first bath in a month. I still recall the disgusting state of the water I was in - a month's worth of dead gray skin floated around me. They drained the tub and refilled it twice before I was finally deemed clean and loaded back up into traction and into bed. In some ways, it was a relief to be back home, but mostly I just wanted to get out of bed.

2005-04-21T18:36:00.000-07:00

I loaded up into a van with Gyana and her dad, Deva. We drove for a couple days through the California desert and along long dark highways. I asked Deva what those bumps were in the middle of the highway and he told me they were to wake up drivers who fell asleep at the wheel. At that, I was totally terrified that you could actually do that and I kept my eyes constantly on him to make sure that didn't happen.

After 2 or 3 days of nonstop driving, we began to wind our way through miles of mucky, sloppy, middle-of-nowhere, freezing cold, dirt-roaded land. This was it. This was the oasis everyone was trying to get to. It was 64,000 acres of overgrazed sheep-farming land sold to sannyasins at a very reasonable price. After what seemed like a horrifying eternity of driving along icy mountainside cliff paths beneath looming teetering rock formations, we finally ended up in the center of what was heretofore known as "The Ranch". The property had previously been known as the Big Muddy, which was certainly a well-deserved moniker.

My dad met me when I arrived, we were so thrilled to see each other. I was then immediately installed in Howdy Doody, the kids' house. (All buildings, work departments, cafeterias, etc. were given names. Usually the names belonged to well-respected philosophers, authors, etc, but the kids house was an exception to that, I suppose.) There were 13 kids in the kids house, including me. We were mostly kids who had been in Poona, several of whom I knew there, but there were some new ones, as well. Also, there were two non-sannyasin, blue-jeans wearing teenagers there. They were the daughters of the previous caretakers of the property and they remained behind to help out - Becky and Kim.

The kids' house was a big farmhouse in the center of the "town". We were set up in makeshift bunkbeds - there were beds on stilts that lined the walls, like one big long bed , and then the bottom bunks were mattresses on the floor that lay perpendicular to the top bunks, parallel to each other. My dad was a teacher at the Ranch and was in charge of putting us to bed and waking us up each morning, which he chose to do with an annoying loud wail of reveille. Sagar, a British boy a year or two younger than me was the soundest sleeper and the loudest complainer about it.

I arrived in the beginning of December, it was freezing cold and the Ranch wasn't exactly equipped to handle so many people in terms of housing, heating, etc. Howdy Doody had two tiny floor vents that released miniscule portions of heat. We would all remove our soggy moonboots and cram together around the vents and try to thaw our toes, fighting and pushing constantly.

The showers were in a separate building and we had to go out into the freezing cold to an outhouse to go to the toilet. One night, I had to pee so badly and I really really didn't want to go to that disgusting outhouse in the dark. So, after what seemed like hours of deliberation, I finally snuck out and into the the showers, pulled down my pajama bottoms and squatted over a shower drain. Thankfully, none of the other kids noticed, I would never have heard the end of it.

The thing to do those days to show your daring and ingenuity was to jump off the top bunk and land on the floor mattresses in exciting and creative ways. One evening, after my dad had put us to bed and there were no adults around, I was folding my clothes and putting them into the cubby next to my bottom bunk mattress. Madhu, a tiny-for-her-age and even younger than me girl, was showing off for her mentor, Deepa. All I heard was, "look Deepa!" and the next thing I knew, I was writhing on the floor in agony, screaming my head off.

"IT'S BROKEN! MY LEG! IT'S BROKEN!!!"

Nobody believed me. I cried louder.

"OH MY GOD. IT'S REALLY BROKEN!!!!"

Finally, Vishranta got the kids away from me, I guess he believed me, and he sent Nicky out to get somebody. Thankfully, my dad hadn't gotten into the car yet and came back to fetch me. After a harrowing drive on dark dirt roads, we got to the doctor. He pushed on my leg.

"Does this hurt?"
"AAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!"
He pushed again in a different spot.
"Does this hurt?"
"OH MY GOD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Again....
Finally, he decided there might be something wrong with my leg, so they loaded me up into 4 X 4 and drove me to Madras, the nearest town with X-ray facilities, and we drove 45 minutes in the middle of the night along the country bumpy roads.

When we got to the hospital, they X-rayed my leg and my femur was completely broken through and compressed. I was told I had to stay in traction and there I stayed for a month.

Trouble behind

2005-04-06T14:05:00.000-07:00

I did manage to make friends and have quite a lot of fun while I was in Geetam. Yasha was my best friend there, and though she was known as a rowdy, tough little trouble-maker, I was the one who seemed to get everyone in trouble. Kiran was a year younger than me and was a whiny, insecure little girl who had warts on her hands and was always sucking on her two middle fingers. Geet was also a year younger than me and was obsessed with sex. Sometimes, we would sneak away from class and hide in a tent to get naked and fool around. Kind of like what i did with Chana in Poona, but there were more of us girls involved. Lalit was also younger than me, we were friends, though he just tended to go with the pack. Forest was the same age as Geet and Lalit and was well-known for throwing amazing temper tantrums - full blown breath holding arm flailing wailing tantrums. Madhu was a sweet shy thing - again, about a year or two younger than me, small for her age, as was I.

There were also the older kids. They were teens or acted like them and were often put in charge of us "kids" in the kids house. Gyana was about two years older than me and always acted like she knew everything and was in charge of the world. My brother was there, at age 11/12 running around with older women and getting laid from what i heard. All of us kids lived together in a small house with bunk beds. We got to choose special kids sheets: Holly Hobby or Peanuts - I had Peanuts. Every Saturday morning, they brought in a TV so that we could watch Saturday morning cartoons together. It was sort of Lord of the Flies meets the Brady Bunch at that point.

At around this time, I turned 7. The school threw me a little party where they served a cake of my choosing: Chocolate cake with butterscotch frosting and my name spelled out in M & M's. Actually, I think this is what Yasha had for her birthday two weeks prior, and for this and several subsequent birthdays, I generally got the same cake as she'd had for her birthday. Actually, it was rather disgusting - too sweet even for me. She had better taste later.

It was also at about this time that I decided to be a boy. I had my hair cut short, wore only boys clothing, including boys underwear and bathing suits. I introduced myself to people in a generic way and let them draw their own conclusions. I never corrected them in either case. I wasn't a tomboy, i didn't scrape my knees, get dirty, play baseball, climb trees, or do tomboy things. I was never active or daring. My thing was my sense of humor: I told jokes. Dirty jokes, kid jokes, made up jokes, generally, I made people laugh. But I was now a boy who did these things and I stayed that way for a few years, pretty much until I started having real crushes on boys.

My final act of rabblerousing at Geetam was quite a feat. The commune was preparing for some sort of feast following a monthly meeting or something. They created this enormous spread of fruit, baked goods, drinks, etc. The adults for some reason had abandoned the site for an hour or so prior to the event and left noone to watch over the goods. I got Yasha, Kiran, Geet, Lalit and Madhu to follow me down and we decided to hit the fruit. We took all the grapefruits out of the baskets, cut them open, made juice and drank it all. We made a gigantic mess. We ate some of the cookies, but i think the biggest damage we did was to the fruit.

We got caught.

We got a stern talking to, had our TV-watching rights revoked, our allowances withheld, and were not allowed to go on next week's field trip to the mall nearby to get new shoes. We were commanded to stay in our bunkbeds, but when the others were watching TV, we were not allowed to look. Gyana made sure that none of us did. Lalit kept trying to pretend he wasn't watching but kept getting busted facing the tube. Gyana took it upon herself to tape his eyes shut with masking tape to make sure it didn't happen again. I faced the wall the entire time, eating an apple (we weren't allowed our weeky ration of candy) and letting the seeds drop behind the bed in my final act of defiance.

Meanwhile, back at the Ranch, Daddy had been asking permission for me to join him there. Word came back after my shenanigans, something along the lines of, "your daughter has to learn that she can't get her way by throwing tantrums." The next day, word came back again, "Sarv, your kid can come."

Trouble ahead...

2005-04-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

My sole purpose in life while I was at Geetam was to get kicked out so that I could go live with my dad at the Ranch. I went out of my way to get in trouble, piss people off, and torment others - well, torment adults - so that I would be forbidden to live at this so-called "center" in central California and sent off to live with Daddy in Oregon. Actually, now that I think about it, most sannyasins were probably trying to get accepted into the Ranch, but none of them in as clever of a fashion, I imagine. I turned 7 at Geetam, and for me that meant the age of hellion.

Mostly, as I said, I tried to annoy the adults. I'm not sure of all things I did exactly, but annoy the adults I did. The first time was with Suraj, the head of the kitchen. (that he was actually a certified teacher I didn't know that at the time, I grew to know him much later when he bacame the principal at the school in Antelope). One thing sannyasins were adept at was rules: creating them and following them. It's ironic, really, in a community founded on rebellion and outrageousness, that we were all living by so many rules... more and more as the years went by. Many years after the commune in Oregon was over and done with, a friend of my father's was asked what he learned from his experience. His reply: "we learned that we could live under fascism." Anyway, in Geetam, there were rules about when we were allowed into the kitchen for dinner. Not before five.

I was hungry. I snuck in past the vestibule with its water tap and lemons so that I could take some dinner rolls or something. Suraj caught me and kicked me out. I snuck back in. Was caught. Kicked out. Each time this happened, closer and closer to five o'clock, Suraj became more and more red in the face, more angry, louder and louder. Finally, right as everyone began to arrive for dinner and the kitchen was open for business, Suraj lost his mind and left to speak immediately to my mother. My mom wasn't really too worried about this little act of mischief and pretty much let me on my own.

Several incidents closely followed.... I tormented Rajan, another kitchen staff member. I tortured him to the point of hitting me on the bum with a broom. He got a stern talking to from my mom about that one. There was one man who hated me most. His name was Michael and I'm not sure what his job was, but wherever there was trouble, there was me. And Michael invited me... I couldn't NOT torment the poor guy for some reason. I think it's because his fuse was so short. I wanted to see how far I could drive him.

One day, he was working on a thatched roof that sloped to within 3 or 4 feet of the ground. I climbed up next to him and to be honest, I don't even remember what I did to provoke him, but I'm sure i did it over and over again. Finally, he grabbed me by the wrist and threw me off the roof. I plummetted that 4 feet to the earth and bounced back, though not without screaming bloody murder that i'd been thrown off a roof! Can you believe that asshole threw a little girl off the roof?!

That was not the worst I got from Michael. Geetam had both a swimming pool and a hot tub. I didn't know how to swim, so i spent most of my time floating around in the hot tub while the other kids played in the pool. I was there with my best friend, Yasha, and we enjoyed having the jacuzzi on. Michael decided it was time for him to have his relaxing tub while Yasha and I were fooling around with the bubble timer. Michael turned the bubbles off. I turned them on. He decided fine, he'll have bubbles. I turned them off. He turned them on. I turned them off. And so forth. Finally, he grew so incredibly angry, he grabbed me by the torso and dragged me out of the hot tub threatening to throw me in the pool. I hollered and hollered that I couldn't swim, he would drown me, I CAN'T SWIM YOU CAN'T TOSS ME IN THE POOL GODDAMNIT! But I'm pretty sure he didn't believe me.

Michael threw me in the pool and then walked away! I'm serious, I didn't know how to swim, I was thrashing around like a maniac in the deep end of a pretty big pool with no adults around. Thankfully, Yasha did know how to swim, so she jumped in and at 8 years old, dragged me to the shallow end of the pool where i climbed out, puking water. You might think I'd have learned a lesson of some kind about provoking people to the breaking point, but I'm sure I didn't. I just knew that Michael was an even more incredible asshole than I had previously thought and I told EVERYBODY what he'd done. I'm not sure if he left Geetam shortly after that, was told never to have contact wtih me again, or if he just decided that would be best for himself.

from Ashram to Center

2005-03-27T11:29:00.000-08:00

When I think of my time in Poona, I barely think of adults in my life at all. It's like the Charlie Brown cartoons, you know they are there, but you can't ever see them, and when you hear them, it's "mwah mwah mwah MWAH mwah...". For me, life was all about me and all about running wild with my friends and having a good time. My parents had a lot of gatherings at the house with other adults, but I barely remember any of the particular adults. Jason was there too, he had taken sannyas before he arrived in Poona and was now known as Madhav, but he had his own life at age 11 and I rarely had anything to do with him.

Bhagwan had gone "into silence" not long after we arrived in Poona. When previously he had given daily lectures in Buddha Hall, a large open auditorium surrounded by "far out" birds - they shouted a constant cry of "farOUT farOUT farOUT" -- he had decided for reasons unknown to me that he would no longer speak except to his most trusted advisors and would instead sit for silent "satsang". For me, this meant i didn't have to sit still for an hour during a lecture and could run amok at all times. For most adult sannyasins, it meant sit silently with eyes rolled back into heads, look divine and stricken with intense love and devotion and occasionally laugh or cry hysterically.

This time was short lived, though. Our forever in Poona lasted roughly six months and we were all informed that the master would be moving to the States to start a commune there. My mom and Madhav packed it up and moved to a temporary commune in California called Geetam. My dad and I went back to Long Island to deal with the last of our things and figure out the next move.

Bhagwan settled in what was know as the Big Muddy - overgrazed sheep farming land in Central Oregon. It was about 45 minutes drive from the nearest town - Antelope, OR population around 50 total, i think. My dad was summoned as one of the few people to be allowed to live at the Commune there - renamed Rajneeshpuram - I wasn't. I was sent to Geetam to live with my mom and brother. I was not happy about it.

There were about 10 kids in Geetam, none of whom I had known in Poona. I made friends quickly however, but I was not given the same freedoms I'd had in Poona. I could not come and go all day, I was made to attend school with the other children, and there were other frustrations as well. The worst agony was the new "lover" my mom took. He was a cold serious tall lanky Brit named Akul. At Geetam, the kids all lived together in a kids house and most adults lived in tents on platforms. I would often spend the night in my mom's tent only to wake up to them writhing around in a sleeping bag. I detested Akul. Each morning upon waking up, I would punch him in the nuts.

He took me pretty well in stride, now that I think about it. I mean, here he was dating this woman with two kids, one of whom was barely around - Madhav had discovered his sexuality and was getting it on with various Commune women - and I was a little brat trying desperately to get kicked out of Geetam so i could go live with my Daddy at the Ranch (the sannyasins all referred to Rajneeshpuram as "the Ranch"). He never raised his voice to me or even tried to get me to like him, really. He just took his daily punch and went on with the business of sleeping with my mom. Oh well.

Friends, lovers, and not-so-nice people

2005-03-18T11:25:00.000-08:00

My life in Poona was great fun for the most part. I made some friends my own age, I made some grownup friends, I ran around the city in rickshaws. With my friends, we scammed people for candy cigarettes and then "smoked" them while sitting on top of the motorcycles that were parked outside the ashram.

One of my closest friends was Virochana - he was 4 and a half but I'd known him from New York. We were the only two kids at the Center in New York, so we'd been through a lot of the same things together. Our tormentor was Jonas, a year older than me, and a real redheaded, freckled, mean bully. He used to follow us around and tease us about being boyfriend/girlfriend and dare us to go have sex.

One day, i said, "fine!" and i dragged Virochana to a hiding place I'd discovered in the roof rafters of Miryam, the workers' cafeteria. We took off all our clothes and I made him lay on top of me while Jonas watched. Nothing happened. I made Chana (what we called him) go up there with me a few more times, but finally decided the whole thing was futile and I didn't really hang out with him much after that. I think he was pretty reluctant to hang out with me, probably the whole sex idea disturbed him a little, as did my enthusiasm for it.

One of my best friends was Garima. She also didn't go to the school, so we ran wild together at the ashram during the day. One evening, we went to see a play that the school kids put on. It was a fantastic rendition of Peter Pan, complete with wonderful costumes and song and dance. Garima and I loved it so much, that the next day, we had a grownup fashion some wooden swords for us and we ran around all day fighting each other with them, singing at the top of our lungs, "we are the pirates, we are the pirates, we are the pirates of the RED SEA!"

Jonas was jealous of our playtime and our nice swords. He hid behind the marble wall that ran the length of the ashram and jumped out in front of us, yanking my sword from my hand. He didn't want to play with it, he just wanted us not to play with it, so he ran around flaunting it while we tried to wrest it from him. When we finally got close to him, he threw it on the ground and broke it with his foot. Asshole.

Another of my good friends was Mouna. She was an Indian girl whose family lived inside the Ashram. She was the first person in Poona to invite me for a sleepover. I was thrilled. At home, we packed up my overnight bag and my dad went with me in the rickshaw to the Ashram. I was going to sleep at the ashram! In a sleeping bag! There weren't even going to be any grownups there, just us with Mouna's older sister, Karuna, and her best friend, Gitika.

The thing was, that while I was an independent little runabout during the day, I was daddy and mommy's girl at night. (My mom and Jason had arrived in Poona about a month after we did - and we all moved into a nice apartment in a complex called "the Mayfair" on Boatclub road.) Each night, Daddy would tell me a story and tickle my back. Mommy would give me a bath and play games with me. They would tuck me in and say goodnight. I was used to it. As soon as it got dark at Mouna's house, I totally freaked out. I cried and whined and I wanted my mommmmy!

Karuna and Gitika agreed to bring me home, so Mouna went back to stay with her parents and I climbed into a rickshaw with the teenagers. We went to Boatclub road and climbed the steps to our apartment. The lights were out. Nobody was home! I hadn't thought that maybe my parents might use this night of freedom to go out and do something fun as adults. Of course I had assumed that they were fixtures at home, probably even more upset that I wasn't home than I was. Oh no!

So I went back with Karuna and Gitika, but then we couldn't find Mouna! We looked all over, but it seemed she had gone to bed already so I spent the rest of the night with them. I had a blast! They treated me to ice cream and played games with me. They took care of me in a way that a big sister would and then they put me to bed. The next morning, I got to eat with them at Miryam, where residents and workers ate, and they brought me to my parents. All was well.

Not everyone was my friend, though. There were a couple people I had battles and feuds with. Asha was the Ashram bitch. We hated each other with a poisonous venom, but we never got that close to each other. Of course I've already mentioned Jonas. But there was one, even worse enemy. Her name eludes me, but we had several run-ins.

She was a hulking brute of a girl, Italian and way too big for her age. She had a smaller Italian boy sidekick that followed her around and did her bidding, but he didn't scare me too much. She was one of those people who resent you for anything that you might have and hate you for anything you might not. For me, it was my smarts. (smart-ass?)

I was with my friend Nevedita, and we were just hanging around. I noticed a sign posted in front of a shop about where to wait, it said "cue here". I was laughing about the misspelling when mafiosa showed up. I told her that queue was misspelled, and told them how to spell it, which she took as her cue to beat me up. She had her little sidekick hold me still while she grabbed my arm and twisted a little bit. I said, "doesn't hurt!"

She twisted more.

"Doesn't hurt!"

A little more.

"It DOESN'T HURT!"

At which point, i saw my dad watching the whole scene. He was standing there in his mexican poncho, looking bigger than his actual amoeba-ridden body was. As soon as I saw him standing there, I broke out into sobs, broke free and wrapped myself in his poncho.

I could be strong-willed and fiercely independent. But I was also first and foremost a little kid.

School of the flies and working girls

2005-03-16T10:23:00.000-08:00

The ashram had its own school for its own misfits. Imagine a school full of children dressed in shades of red, unkempt and barefoot. Children who for the most part had never been given limits or rules - either because their parents thought that was the right thing to do, "the divine child should be free in his innocence, man!" or because their parents were too busy bettering themselves in encounter groups (beat each other up and bash pillows), primal groups (scream and discover why your childhood is to blame) or other meditations to know what their kids were up to throughout the day. These kids were wild. They were mean. They were in control. At least that's how i saw it on my first day at Hem Hira, the school. (I did think it was cool that we mostly shared a name)

There were some crafts and reading and some sort of loosely held lessons going on, but I didn't know anyone and I didn't fit in. I didn't like it. I had loved my regular old Huntington Elementary school with its orderly story time and free time for me to read, its crayons and paste. This wild free-for-all did not suit me at all. I attended school for exactly one day.

My Dad, on the other hand, was recruited to be one of the teachers. So after that first day, Daddy went to school and I went to work. I went to the ashram and found myself a job. I was a runner for Sushila, a loud haughty jovial and very loving woman who had been best friends with my mom when they were children. They rediscovered each other quite by accident at the ashram in Poona years later. Susie and Marci shrieked with delight to discover they were in the same place together, as Sushila and Premrup.

Sushila was the boss at the groups department, the department that oversaw the aforementioned groups and meditations. It was my job to be the runner, or messenger. Sushila thought i was delightful, and always introduced me as her friend, Hira "6 going on 36". I took that to be a great compliment, I was her compatriate! It was my job to deliver messages from her department to anywhere else on the ashram. It was a great responsibility, but there were few messages to deliver, so mostly I sat around in the office, making up stories and drawing pictures for my own books. The books I wrote were a perfect indication of the crossover between my old life and new one. Things that move: motorcycles, cars, school busses, and rickshaws. Diseases: chicken pox, measles, amoebas.

I did get a message to deliver every now and then, and depending on who it was for, I was either thrilled or terrified. I loved going to the main office because Vidya was there, and she adored me and often gave me sweets. I was terrified to deliver messages to Teertha, the pious, self-absorbed group leader, one of the high mucky-mucks in Poona. He didn't seem to like children, though he had a daughter slightly older than I was, and he took himself very seriously. Also, I had to deliver his messages to Lao Tzu, where Bhagwan lived, and I wasn't allowed in, so i always had to deliver it through a gate, which was intimidating, to say the least.

After some time, I did make some friends among the children, mostly others who didn't want to go to school, and I had an independent life inside the ashram gates with my own job and responsibilities. I had my own life and I loved it! By day, I was grown-up and busy. At night, I went home with Daddy and was still his little girl. What could be better?

Lord of the flies and other vermin

2005-03-14T13:46:00.000-08:00

After a few days in Poona (since re-spelled Pune in the great re-spelling revolution in India that also re-spelled Bombay to Mumbai), I felt quite at home. Well, at least I was getting used to my new home. Daddy and I checked in to the Hotel Dreamland. Let me just start by explaining something about Indian naming conventions.

The more elaborately delightful and regal a name sounds, the more pleasant, clean, or resplendent, the more you can assume that it's a complete shithole. They have taken wishful thinking, applied it to advertising, and added little creative embellishment on the side. Another thing to note is that over the many years we went and lived in India, my Dad never remembered this little fact and thought, "hey, maybe this won't be as fabulous as it sounds."

Years later, when my family returned to India in my teens, we arrived bleary-eyed and exhausted after an 18 hour flight from the states in the Bombay airport. A sketchy hotel "employee" approached us promising us a lovely stay in a lovely hotel not far from the airport. I tried to talk my dad out of it, but to no avail. We stayed at the King's Hotel. Sounds nice, no? It was a pretty horrific, cockroach-infested stink-o-rama.

The following year, I returned once more with my father. This same man approached us even more enthusiastically in just as deep of a middle-of-the night. I tried to talk my dad out of dealing with him, but he told the guy we didn't want any crappy hotels. The "employee" gets on the horn yelling (in English, of course) that his customers don't want any crappy hotels! They want a nice clean hotel! My dad buys it and we are installed at the grandiosely named Imperial Palace. Even better! No no! Even worse, if you can believe it. Not only were there holes in the dingy sheets and cockroaches emerging from every smoke-filled crevice, but the lightbulbs were either blown or on the way, crackling and dimming. The piece de resistance was the telephone. It was missing the cover over the mouthpiece and reeked, and i mean REEKED of cheap men's cologne. It was absolutely amazing. But again, I digress.

We were living the Dreamland Hotel. I'm not sure if this was a permanent plan, or just a longterm solution to lack of funds and/or planning on my Dad's part. In any case, the Dreamland Hotel was a seedy flophouse in Downtown Poona, about ten minutes rickshaw ride (and no, these are motorized, three-wheeled scooters, not wicker packs on the backs of overworked Indian men) to the Ashram in Koregan Park. The room we shared at the Dreamland Hotel was the first of our insect and rodent-infested abodes. I didn't hate it at the time, though I imagine my dad did, he's not so crazy about vermin.

We did have one run-in with an insect, if you could call it that, that borders on horror-movie-slash-comedy scene. I went to the bathroom one fine morning for my daily ablutions. Crawling out of the toilet was the most incredibly large centipede. One end of the critter was ordinary, if large, but the other end divided into two fully-functioning heads. It was monstrous. I shrieked and dum-daNA in came Superdaddy to the rescue! I have this distinct memory of my father being simultaneously heroic and terrified as he chased around this very speedy bus-sized animal with a trashcan clad only in his underwear. I'm not sure if he ever dispensed with the animal or if the creature escaped, but I do know that I felt safe and sound after that, despite the accommodations.

And we're off!

2005-03-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

In 1981, my family decided to move to Poona, India to live on the Rajneesh Ashram. We were packing it all in and going there forever. At least most of us were. All but David, who had some legal problems at this point, had been arrested for theft and at age 17 was battling all this and the guru who was taking his family away. He and Jason had both become sannyasins by then as well - David became Vedaprem and Jason became Madhav - but when we decided to move to India, it was decided he would stay behind alone and he became angry and denounced the whole sannyas thing.

The official title for deciding not to be a sannyasin any more among sannyasins is known as "dropping sannyas". David flushed it down the toilet. Literally - he flushed his mala down the toilet. I'm not sure how that worked, but that's how the story goes.

I was excited to go to India, it sounded fun and new and I am all about fun and new. I was horrified at leaving David behind. I loved him so much and we were very attached to each other. Every time we would greet, he would give me such a big hug that i would fart. He would laugh and then he would threaten to squeeze the farts out of me again. I squealed with delight and ran away. He was my hero.

But leave we did. And I didn't see David again until I was 9.

I went first with my dad, but left Madhav and my mom behind. I had given Madhav a killer case of chicken pox that entered his throat and lungs, so they had to stay behind a little longer so he could heal and they could take care of some other business. I've always considered that to be payback for all the torture he'd dealt me my whole life. After that moment, I felt we were even, and that part of our relationship was over.

Daddy and I went to spend a week in London and then on to Poona, India. I was so excited to see the world and meet all the new people i was meeting and I was incredibly anxious to start our new life. It all sounded so fabulous! In London, I met some of my Daddy's old friends and then he taught me to play chess. My dad prides himself on the fact that he's never "let" me win at any game. Suffice it to say that as proud as he was that i learned to play chess at age 6, i never got beyond knowing how the pieces move and what they're called and i have never, ever beaten him at a game of chess.

Finally, it was time to go to India. We climbed aboard our Pan Am 747 and flew for what seemed an eternity. I made a new home on that plane, the stewardesses all loved me and gave me extra playing cards and little plastic wings and fun paks. After 12 hours or so, our plane landed in Bombay. I peered out the window with glee and impatiently bounced up and down trying to get out. We climbed down the stairs and were hit with a wall of Indian air: Pollution, piss, cowshit, curry, sweat, and death. I jumped into Daddy's arms and began to cry.

"I wanna gooo hoooooome."

In Betweeners

2005-03-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

Those two years between four and six were a checkerboard transition between the old life and the new one. I still went to preschool, I started kindergarten, made new friends, learned to read, and did all the regular kid things.

We also had quite a busy sannyasin life. The most important part of being a sannyasin for me at that stage was the weekly Friday trips into New York city to the main sannyasin center for sufi dancing. I adored sufi dancing. The music was usually flutey-pseudo-spiritual in nature and there would be lots of whirling.

But at the end, for the last hour or so probably, the New York sannyasins kicked up their heels, raised their arms to reveal their hairy armpits, and cut a rug to Bob Marley, the Beatles, the Stones. It was so much fun! I would dance and dance and dance until i collapsed into Mommy's arms as she dragged me half asleep to the car where i slept, exhausted, the whole way home. I looked forward to this all week long.

Usually, I would drive in with my parents and I would be so excited that I would refuse to nap even a little bit. One day, I was at home alone with David and his best friend Davy (we called him wavy Davy since he was so flaky, and later he became a sannyasin, got a new name - Dayananda - and I would still taunt him with the wavy Davy moniker. But i digress....) and they were smoking a lot of pot.

My brother thought it would be funny to hold me down and blow pot smoke into my face to see what would happen. Of course, this was only after I was admonished to never ever tell mom or dad. I agreed, being five and completely worshipful of him, he knew he could trust me. Well, bong hit after bong hit, I was completely stoned. All that felt like to me was completely exhausted - like someone was sitting on my whole body holding it down and I couldn't move even a muscle.

This was a Friday, so shortly my Dad came home to pick me up and take me into the City. He loaded me into the car whereupon I fell asleep immediately, and stayed asleep for the entire hour and a half ride into Manhattan. I woke only when we pulled up to the Center and Daddy hoisted me up out of the car, commenting over and over again on how remarkable it was that I was so tired.

"You must have had a BIG day today! I can't believe you slept so long!"

I smiled quietly and conspiratorily to myself and agreed with him.

Look at me! I'm a sannyasin!

2005-03-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

I was four years old. Everything novel is cool when you're four. I got to change my name and proudly correct anyone who continued to call me "Julie".
"My new name is Hira. You can call me Hira. It means diamond. The first part, Prem, means love so I am a love diamond!"

It was fun to dye all of my clothes red, pink, and purple. And I had that pretty necklace! When my parents came back from India with my new name and all the accoutrements, I was thrilled. They also drilled into me the importance of caring for my necklace, using my new name, and wearing the colors. If I didn't do all those things all the time, I was no longer really a sannyasin. I took this very seriously.

When I was about five, I started ballet lessons with most little girls in the western world at that age. I was so excited. I LOVED to dance! Daddy took me to the studio for my first lesson, dressed in my tights leotard (pink, of course), and I was dying to get going. We walked in the door and there were all these prim little girls, hair in tight buns, sitting quietly on chairs with their hands folded across their laps. I leapt down out of my father's arms and into the dance hall spinning wildly and dancing about. Hey, I thought this was dance class!

I looked forward each week to my ballet lessons. I never really made any friends there, none of the girls talked to me all that much, but it didn't bother me a bit. I had plenty of friends elsewhere, I just wanted to dance! One thing that was difficult, though, was wearing that mala. With 108 beads, it was very long, about down to my belly button, even with the smaller kids' locket. When I was a little older, i learned the trick of putting it over one shoulder, wearing it kind of like a bag, the way the sweaty grownups in Pune would do when they did dynamic meditation or encounter groups.

Anyway, I finally decided it would be OK to take the mala off once in while when i really needed to, like when i was dancing. I took my mala off, carefully put it, well, somewhere, and went off to dance. After my dad picked me up and took me home, i realized it was gone! I looked everywhere and finally remembered that I must have left it somewhere at dance class... We went back to look for it, but we couldn't find it anywhere. I was so ashamed. I had one responsibility in life - to be a sannyasin - and i had blown it.

The mala did eventually turn up, but i don't remember how or where. All i remember is the tremendous feeling of guilt and responsibility i felt i had blown. I knew my parents would be disappointed. I don't know if they were disappointed or how it all ended. All I know is that it did end, i had my mala, and everything went back to normal. I know Rajneesh is not an organized religion, but hey look at me! I had all the appropriate guilt of a good little catholic girl!

Later that year, I wanted to wear my favorite blue dress. It was important to me. That's what i wanted and that was that! There was no talking me out of it. My mom sat me down and told me that it was fine for me to wear the dress, but that i must then give up my mala and new name and go back to being Julie. I was ecstatic! I could wear whatever I wanted and all I had to do was go back to how things were before! Hurray! So for the rest of that year until I was almost six, I went back to being Julie and wearing blue dresses.

Young life with family

2005-03-09T14:38:00.000-08:00

When i was very young, I knew we were different from most people. I regarded these differences in terms of tangible things, like food, toys, etc. While all of my friends were eating froot loops and cocoa puffs, we were only allowed cereals with little or no sugar, no preservatives, and no artificial colors or flavors. The raunchiest breakfast cereals in our house were rice krispies or cheerios. Mostly I ate kasha with yogurt or fruit compote. While my friends had Star Wars action figures and guns, I had only stuffed animals and other nonviolent toys.

There were the intangible differences, too. My parents had intellectual friends over all the time and they had very serious discussions after they thought i'd gone to bed. Usually the discussions included words like "manipulate" and "fascist" and "agenda". I had no idea what those words meant. Their friends thought I was great. Like everything i said was divine and fabulous in its childlike innocence coupled with precocious wit. At least that's what i thought.

I was different.

And yet, while I secretly worried about our family's weirdness all the time, I really enjoyed life with my family for the most part. I was the baby of the family and my dad's only, so really I was spoiled. David took me with him on his illicit excursions often because he knew i could keep a secret. My mom loved me from the ground to the sky, through the clouds to the sun, back down again and so forth. I danced around the living room every day singing at the top of my lungs "DA DOO DA DA DE DOO DEE DA DOO". Jason was the bane of my existence. Once he discovered that while it wasn't right to beat up a girl, he could torture her with psychological warfare: tickling, farting, namecalling, etc. It was a family.

Every Sunday we would have bagels and read the paper (I couldn't quite read yet until i was 4, but I would fight over the funnies with my brothers just the same, and then move my eyes side to side like i could see they were doing to pretend). I drove around a lot with my dad and played games, watched Saturday morning cartoons with my brothers, went to the beach with my friend Jesse, and lived a somewhat ordinary child's life within the realm of our weird family.

When I was 4, my mom discovered Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Before I knew it, she sent away to become a disciple. She got a new name, once Marci Strieker - now Ma Premrup (all women were Ma this Ma that, men were swami this and that). I immediately renamed her "prempoop". Not only that, but she started wearing all orange and a mala - a necklace of 108 wooden beads and a locket with Bhagwan's picture. My dad thought she was crazy at first, then slowly but surely came around. He sent away for his new name - from Donald Bluestone to Swami Sarvananda "sour banana", of course.

Our house was soon filled with orange dye, orange clad people, and tapes upon tapes of Bhagwan. When he spoke, his voice would trail off at the end of each phrase or sentence with a swooshhhhhy exhalation. We three kids went around the house constantly mocking him and applying this affectation to all of our requests: can pleasssssssssss have some macaroni and cheesssssssssh tonightssssss? Get your asssssssh out of the bathroomssssssssssssh alreadysssssssss! and so forth.

My mom went off to Pune, India to get up close and personal and do some groups. My dad soon followed, but not before i had a chance to beg and beg and beg to get a new name and mala too. Some kids ask for puppies or horses, but no, not me! I wanted to be a sannyasin! Please, can I, please please please!!! I wanted a new name and to run around in orange clothes. And oo that necklace! It all sounded like a lot of fun.

They promised to ask on my behalf when they went to India. I waited 5 weeks (staying with family friends) with bated breath. I daydreamed about what my new name would be. I invented lots of beautiful names for myself, mostly floral in nature: rosa, rosulie (my name was Julie), daisulie, and on like that.

Finally, they returned. They came with a message, that I could be a sannyasin, but that i had to be responsible and always wear the colors, now expanded to include reds, purples, and maroons - "shades of the sunset", and the mala and to use my new name: Ma Prem Hira. Hira. That was my new name. I think my brothers had the hardest time switching to my new name, but of course Jason came up with "hira there-a everywhere-a went to bed in her underwear-a".

Second day

2005-03-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

My family had always been on the odd side. My dad was a pinko-commi-historian-professor who always wanted a baby. He was married to a woman who seemingly couldn't have children and that's when he met my mom, a recent divorcée with 2 boys. She was wild, brassy, beautiful, and wanted him. So what if he was married. He fell in love, went back to his wife, and after a little "coaxing" on the part of my mother, he left wife #1 to be with mom #1.

My mom was, as I said, a wild, brassy, beautiful woman - also: brilliant, driven, and angry. After spending a fun summer with my dad, roaming the country high on acid, almost getting arrested on the Canadian border, they settled in to Long Island, where my dad was teaching. She quickly became pregnant with me and my brothers came to live with my parents. She was a therapist and started her practice and they went back to a regular life. Later, she used her brilliance and anger to become a lesbian-feminist-activist and formed a women's group that met in the house. David was 9 - already also very angry, delinquent, and adolescent in many ways. Jason was only 4, a sweet, shy, emotional boy who always wanted to be someplace else.

When I was born, David loved me dearly. He took care of me constantly and while he drove most everyone else away, he cherished me and I grew to worship him. Jason was another story. David had always beat him up, tortured him, and generally made his life miserable in ways that only a mildly sociopathic older brother can do. When my mom informed him she was going to have a baby, he was ecstatic. Finally, a younger brother he too could torture and maim! Finally, it was time for payback!

When i was born, my dad called home to tell them the news. "Jason, it's a girl! You have a baby sister!"
"Oh, rats."

First blog, yo

2005-03-08T21:19:00.000-08:00

I'm getting started on my memoirs - i thought to call it something along the lines of "better red than red" - heh. Not sure about that. I'll start from the start and I just want it to be my life - my REAL childhood and growing up stories against the backdrop of Rajneeshpuram and all that business. No history or research, philosophy or spirituality, just MY story. My memories. It's funny. It's real. Now i just need to figure out who will play me in the movie, right?

My memories start at about age 2. They're hazy and each significant story just sort of punctuates the haze. As i progress towards 4 and 5, the haze is filled in with more and more insignificant memories until about age 6, which is when i can remember EVERYTHING (sorry folks).

Age 2, daddy was a teacher at college and he would bring me to his office from time to time to hang out before dropping me at the college day care. He had one of those horrifying monkeys with cymbals that crashed away sitting above his desk on a shelf. That thing totally freaked me out - i made him move it and under no uncertain terms turn it on if i were in its presence. What sadistic asshole invented that terrible toy?!

I loved day care. The teacher, Sylvia, loved me, probably because i was cute and smart (i'm not sure at what age being cute and smart becomes a liability, but at age 2, everyone loves the smartie) and she called me apple, because of my giant red cheeks i guess. I liked her, I remember singing songs, and having a couple friends (both boys - grownups would always ask about my boyfriends and would get all giggly and weird, and i never understood why).

I was always annoyed when grownups would talk to me like an idiot - like hey, i'm a kid, not a moron. Guest teachers and helpers would come in each day - they were probably students - and they would explain in great repetetive detail how to color, how to put toys away, how to eat my snacks, for gods' sake and I always had this feeling that they were WASTING MY TIME! Lets get going already!

Anyway, I went happily through life at ages 2 and 3, going to day care and waiting anxiously for daddy to pick me up every day. Each day he would be done with his day and would come and pick me up, always one of the first to arrive, and i would yell and scream and drop everything and run over to him "daddy daddy daddy!" He must have loved that.

One day, I had an accident. I had been doing so good and hadn't peed or pooped in my pants or in bed for some time. It wasn't even a thought, really, any more. But this one day, something happened, i got excited or laughed a little too hard or had mexican food for lunch, anyway, i pooped. In my pants. I was horrified! Daddy would NOT like this. To be honest, I didn't really like it, but i didn't want to tell anyone, it was too embarrassing.

So I went around for the rest of the day with this weighing down my pants and worrying about what i was going to tell him when he arrived to pick me up. I didn't want to disappoint him or mommy or david. We'd all been working so hard! Thus my first lie was born. I had a whole story. I knew it was going to work, i just knew it. I had traded pants with my friend Matthew. He pooped in mine and then we traded back at the end of the day. It was foolproof.

When my dad came to pick me up, instead of rushing over to greet him as usual, i skulked over slowly, head hanging low. He was concerned, "what's the matter, sweetie?"

All I could get out was "somebody poopied in my pants."