Bad to the Bones(16)
They took me up to the ashram that night where I could see with my own eyes the enthusiasm, confidence, and the riches being spread around. I didn’t need any of my own money to join. Immediately I was put into a plush mobile home and helped plant fruit trees. On the ranch I flourished, soon being assigned to repair motorcycles, becoming one of the Master’s chosen ones, living at Wang Cho house. He decided I had surrendered to him and given up my old methods of doing things.
I told Maddy as we sat on her enormous verandah sipping drinks with little umbrellas, “Shakti says marriage is for idiots. It’s slavery, prostitution. However, to help the community, I agreed to be engaged to Bodhisattva.”
“An Indian?” I could tell Maddy was doing her damned best to keep the humor from her voice. It was so wonderful to see her again, I actually was able to put Bihari out of my mind for minutes at a time.
“No, a white guy, but he’s illegal here after spending too many years in India. He gave up his citizenship. He’s a doctor—or was. He needs his green card if he’s to vote.” I shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose.”
“Bodhisattva? He sounds like a Steely Dan song. So you don’t have to actually…do it with him?”
I tilted my head. Good question. “Technically, no. Shakti isn’t big on children. He says they distract us from the important work we need to do on ourselves. But penetration is a part of our daily therapy. Shakti told me I was psychically damaged by my father leaving. In order to heal this wound, we had to reenact the abandonment drama.”
“Your father…abused you? I don’t remember that.”
“No. But Shakti says his abandonment was a spiritual rape, and we have to get close to it, down to the bare bones, to strip everything away to get to the true emotion, the core trauma that was left in me when he vanished.”
“Wow. So you have to be penetrated by this Bodhisattva doctor guy?”
“Sometimes him. Sometimes Shakti. It doesn’t really matter who’s doing it. Sometimes a stranger, if that’s what I need at the moment. Shakti decides, because he knows all, sees all.” Speaking this stuff aloud, it did sound odd. I’d been around only fellow disciples for so long, it never struck me how this would all sound to an outsider.
Maddy was silent for a few seconds before saying, “Well, Bella. I’m sure you know that this seems all weirdly strange. As a nurse, I’ve taken a few of those therapeutic encounter group classes in my time, and I’ve never once heard that reenactment of a trauma is the best way to move on. Why keep peeling the scab off the old wound? That sounds like some sixties sort of gestalt crap. Do you know how many couples wound up divorcing behind that shit? Who the hell wants to hear how f*cked they allegedly are, while their spouse hits a couch with a tennis racket screaming about their mother?”
I had to chuckle at that. I guess it might seem to a “white party member” as though we “hit couches with tennis rackets,” and the image was a funny one. Then I became serious again when I realized we sometimes did stuff like that. To me, it was all so normal. The ashramites were my family, plain and simple. My father had vanished into the wilds of Los Angeles, my mother had become an even bigger nasty shrew who could care less about her children, and everything had basically collapsed. No wonder I was ripe for the pickings. No wonder I had embraced the citizens of Bihari. “Well, we don’t have couples in that sense up at Merry-go-Round Canyon. If someone accidentally has a child, the child is put into a sort of daycare, so the parents aren’t distracted.”
Maddy looked at me over the top of her shades. “What about all your Jewish heritage, all that Yom Kippur stuff you used to do? You just turned your back on that?”
I shrugged. “I guess so. It just didn’t apply to me anymore. That’s my mother’s faith—and my dad’s too, I guess.”
My old friend had a sly grin. “What do you think of Knoxie? He’s buffed up, huh? I mean, he always was a smoking piece of man candy, but the past several years he’s really hit the weight lifting and jiu-jitsu circuits.”
Again, I shrugged. Of course I had noticed how handsome Knoxie was. What difference did it make to me? “We’re not really cut out, or I guess you might say trained, to notice the opposite sex like that.”
Losing her grin, Maddy exhaled loudly. “Bellamy! Do you know how programmed you sound? You sound like a robot reciting a bunch of crap you’ve been brainwashed to think. You’ve got hormones just like every other woman your age. If you didn’t get even slightly aroused when sleeping in Knoxie Hammett’s bed, then f*ck me dry, lady! You’re not just programmed—you’re halfway dead with one foot in the grave!”
I instantly felt bad. I wanted my old friend to like me. Of course it had occurred to me before that we were seen as weirdoes by the white vs. purple crowd, the Arizonans. I’d been back down into town several times over the years to shop for things like ginger, brown rice, olive oil, things we didn’t grow on the farm. Of course Shakti wanted us to go to the dentist and stuff like that, so I wasn’t a complete recluse. I’d heard the whispers about my purple clothes—I’d heard the muttered oaths of “whacko” and “nutjob.” I’d even seen some of Knoxie’s biker buddies, the sort that hung around The Bum Steer, do a double-take when I walked by. I tried to hold my head up high, but like every young woman, I wanted to fit in, to belong. That was why I had moved to the ashram to begin with!