By late February, I’d charted enough cycles to know I couldn’t get pregnant in the first few days after my period. I’d also absorbed the Zendik imperative to “communicate”—not seeking advance feedback on your plans meant you were a “loner,” locked in the Deathculture pattern of “running your own show.” Surely, having sex for the first time was too big a leap to take on my own.
I’d need permission. Which was what I was seeking when I squeezed onto the last spot of bare floor near the front and center of the quickly filling living room, one night when I knew I wasn’t fertile and was set to get together with Kro. Just a few yards away, claiming an entire couch, sat Zar, the Family member with the power to say yes or no.
I’d tried to get cleared for sex by a woman, in a more private setting. But when I’d put my request to Rayel, in the kitchen before dinner, she’d advised me to ask Zar at the sex meeting instead. I didn’t see why she’d defer to him—she, too, wore a purple wristband—but I wasn’t about to challenge her judgment. So I recast my nerve-racking task as a chance to enact the promise of Karma’s Woodstock story: that here I could pursue sex openly, with the blessing of my community.
I knew how sex meetings worked, since I’d been to a couple already in my four months at the Farm: With Zar presiding, lower-level Zendiks took turns spilling their sexual struggles. He might give feedback of his own; he might solicit it from others in the Family or from the group as a whole. Sometimes the subject’s face lit up as she listened. More often it burned with embarrassment or crumpled like paper held to flame. Though Arol sometimes mentioned issues raised at these meetings, she did not attend.
Zar sat with knees apart and brawny, tattooed arms crossed over his broad chest. Chin raised in challenge, he scanned the crowd, quick with apprehensive chatter.
Zar, now pushing thirty, had moved to the Farm from Los Angeles at sixteen. In a magazine piece titled “Zar’s Story,” he’d laid out the Deathculture tribulations that had readied him for the redemption pledged by Zendik: His parents divorced when he was two. His dad died of cancer when he was six. His grandfather molested him when he was little, then hanged himself when Zar was twelve. To vent his latent rage at life, Zar clogged the toilets in his school’s bathroom, causing a flood, and “beat the shit out of” a kid who’d insulted his grandfather. He flipped through his first porn mag at twelve and ran away to Hollywood at thirteen. There he joined a gang, shot speed, and got used to violence: he “was beaten up and did a lot of beating, too.” A drug arrest at fourteen landed him in detention, then a rehab program that treated him with heavy sedation. At that point, he said, “I didn’t give a fuck about anything. I had no hopes, no goals… . I knew it was all a lie, their whole stupid world. I couldn’t join that. I bailed, came to the Farm.”
At Zendik—then located in Boulevard, near San Diego—Zar found hip, hard-line surrogate parents in Arol and Wulf. He took up music, sculpting, and drawing while learning welding, knife making, and mechanics. He spent a few years in a relationship with Swan, who gave birth to their son when he was twenty-three and she was seventeen. His myth cast him as a diamond in the rough—a troubled kid whose move to Zendik had revealed him as a fine young man.
Zar never said what qualified him to lead a sex meeting. I assumed his authority flowed from his time with Swan—the one adult Zendik whose sexuality had not suffered corruption by the Deathculture—and his reputation as a virtuoso lover who’d try anything to pleasure a partner. Now I see his credentials more clearly. His air of menace. His bond with Arol. She could trust him to snuff errant sparks, then lead her to the tinder.
Zar cleared his throat and surveyed the thicket of faces tilted up at him. The talk stopped. The room stilled. A sardonic half grin deepened the knife scar on his right cheek. “So. Does anybody have any questions?”
A dozen hands shot up. Zar pointed to Blayz, a Kore Apprentice. Six five and ripped, Blayz stood a good foot taller than Zar—but not when he was cross-legged on the floor, a few steps from Zar’s feet.
“I haven’t had sex in eight months,” said Blayz, “and I’m just so fucking frustrated.” He scowled. “I keep trying, but all the girls say no when I hit them up. I don’t know what to do. I just wanna have sex. With somebody.”
Eight months earlier—before my arrival—Blayz and Teal had broken up, under pressure. Most likely they’d been found guilty of the usual charges: You’re in a bubble. You’re fucking with our survival. If you can’t commit—first—to the revolution, you don’t belong here. Get an apartment.
“What do the girls think?” Zar asked. “Why doesn’t anybody wanna fuck him?”
“It’s his anger,” Karma said, tossing her smooth blond mane and flashing Blayz a sneer, safe in the knowledge that her blue wristband trumped his brown one. “He’s mad at all of us up front ’cause he’s sure we’re gonna say no, and who wants that vibe coming at them? It’s like he’s asking us to reject him.”
Zar shrugged. “Sounds right to me.” Jaw tight, eyes hard, he turned to Blayz. “If you wanna get laid, you better get friendly.”
“Fuck,” Blayz muttered, and punched the rug. A month later, he and Teal would leave together, around midnight. Zar would escort them off the Farm at gunpoint—supposedly to keep Blayz from stealing a costly camera and tripod. Blayz claimed the equipment was his; he’d brought it with him. Hearing about the standoff the morning after, I would applaud Zar for defending Zendik.
More hands shot up, mine among them. Zar nodded to me. My cheeks burned; my heart pounded. “I haven’t had sex in twenty-three years,” I said, riffing on Blayz’s intro, to a ripple of chuckles. “I’m having a date with Kro tonight, and I’m not fertile. I was wondering if it would be okay for us to have sex.”
Zar blinked. Most questions posed at sex meetings resembled Blayz’s: saturated with anguish, ignited by pain. Zar squinted into the back of the room. “Is Kro here? What does he think?”
I turned to look where Zar was looking. Kro emerged from the shadows by the stairs, a gleeful-yet-bashful grin on his face.
“I’m into it,” he said.
Lying naked with Kro under his quilt, on the thickest patch of grass we could find in the lower field, I realized I did not understand the mechanics of sex.
The one sex scene I’d viewed on-screen, at twelve or thirteen, had only confused me. As the parents of the boy hero in Empire of the Sun coupled beneath coarse blankets on a cot in a refugee camp, I’d squeezed my eyes shut with each gasp and shift, to block what I thought was coming: blood, oozing through wool. I’d been sure that one of the two heaving shapes was struggling to stab the other.
In college, I’d found my vagina, clitoris, and G-spot with the help of diagrams in Our Bodies, Our Selves. But the book did not show how male and female limbs intertwined during intercourse. To fill the blank, some renegade part of my brain doodled a crude placeholder: two pencils, one atop the other, the top pencil popping a spring-loaded chip in and out of the bottom pencil’s slot. (Why pencils? Why not?)
Maybe I’d never bothered to learn how sex worked because I’d assumed the man I was meant for—once he’d found me—would provide all the guidance I’d need.
Across the creek, the bucks snuffled and grunted. A half moon lit the field, the ridge, the dim hulk of the bare mountain. A low wind skimmed over us. As on the nights of my first dates with Kro and Estero, other couples had snapped up the rustic wooden shacks. And I refused to make this passage in the trailer or a van.
When Kro climbed on top of me, I was playing the pencil role: legs straight, knees closed. He grinned at my ignorance. “Helen, you have to open your legs. So I can get between them.” I complied, glad the light was low enough to hide the blush creeping toward my ears, neck, forehead.