“You have to bend them, too. Like this.” He gently crooked my knees and caressed my thighs, still smiling down on me, the half moon forming a faint halo around his short Afro. Was he atoning, at thirty-four, for the sins of the drunk, horny, seventeen-year-old, even as he soothed the heart bruise of all those criminal hands up my skirt?
When I nodded I was ready, he entered me slowly, eyes fixed on mine, alert for distress signs. The pain of entry gave way, not to pleasure but to a sense of being filled. So this is sex, I thought. Hmm. Maybe it improves with practice?
When Kro rolled off me, satisfied, I felt as if something momentous had happened, then dissolved before I could grasp it. He stretched out on his back and curled his arm around my shoulders. A chill snuck under the quilt. I nestled into his warmth.
Staring up at the southern stars, I silently blessed the Farm for giving me a chance at sweetness—if not ecstasy—in my first experience of sex. For helping me share this crossing with a man who made me feel more myself, not less. In a far-distant time, when other thank-yous to Zendik would strike me as silly and wrong, this one would still sound true.
Sex at Zendik was both upper and opiate. Its spectrum of thrills and burns—attraction, pursuit, orgasm; envy, censure, rejection—quickened the daily plod while dulling the ache of lost freedom. Selling was similar. Just as we “hit up” potential lovers for dates, we “hit up” potential buyers on the street. Coming with a lover was called getting “off”; finding flow as a seller was called getting “on.” Selling had its own range of lows and highs, all intertwining with our quest for love, our sense of worth, our standing in the tribe.
I’d learned early on that the Zendiks made almost all their money selling magazines, CDs of their music (Wulf’s dirges and tone poems, Arol’s laments and protests), and STOP BITCHING START A REVOLUTION bumper stickers at concerts and festivals, and on city streets, all over the Southeast, Midwest, and Northeast. I’d also learned that all of the women—barring Arol, Swan, and a couple others in the Family—went selling regularly, as did many of the men.
At first, I’d shied away from selling. But every weekend I spent at home, with mostly just the new guys for company, strengthened my desire to be out on the road, fusing with my fellow warriors in the crucible of a covert mission discharged in a war zone. (Sellers risked getting their “ammo” confiscated—or, worse, getting arrested—if they failed to “shield” themselves from security guards and police.) I wanted to depart the Farm in a rush of excitement and return with thick stacks of cash, sheened in fatigue and victory.
The cash—all the sellers had made, less whatever they’d spent on gas, ice, parking, “treats” from the health-food store, the occasional cheap motel room packed with as many Zendiks as could fit on the beds and floor—went straight to Arol and Swan, who in turn rendered regular offerings to their own implacable masters. What each seller kept for herself was pride in having done well or shame for having done badly.
I went selling for the first time, one Saturday in early December, with Loria and Vera, the curly-haired Kore member whose dinner plans had puzzled me my first night at the Farm. On the quaint, redbrick main street of Athens, Georgia, I watched Vera “hit up” passersby with the magazine and a cry of “Underground art mag!” or “Save the endangered humans!” If they stopped to page through the mag, she’d say, “We get donations for it, two to five dollars,” spiel briefly about the Zendik way of life as our sole hope for survival, and then launch her upsell, pulling item after item out of her crammed cargo pocket: “If you throw in five, you get a sticker and a mag.” “It’s ten to fifteen for a mag, a sticker, and a CD.” “For twenty, you get a mag, a sticker, and two CDs.”
After ten or fifteen minutes weighing the agony of delay against the terrifying prospect of seeking money from a stranger, I pounced on a pale wisp of a man who looked as fearful as I felt.
“Hey, have you seen this?” I squeaked, charging in front of him and thrusting the mag in his face. “It’s an underground art magazine. We get donations for it. We’re a group of sixty artists and we live on a farm in North Carolina and we grow our own food and do all kinds of art and music. We think the world’s screwed up and we’re starting a revolution to—”
The man jerked his head—in accord? alarm?—thrust two wrinkled singles at me, grabbed the mag, and scurried off.
“Thank you!” I called after him, both taken aback by how quick the exchange had been and elated to have made a sale.
I’d consummated my relationship with selling. I was now a Zendik seller.
I went on to make $106 that day—about $7.50 an hour, if you discounted the round-trip drive to Athens, Zendik’s investment in the goods we sold, and time spent on “road prep”: cooking and packing food; marshaling ammo; assembling bedding, cookware, water, and other aids to remaining self-contained away from home. Vera and Loria had each topped two hundred—the unofficial border, for a seasoned seller in a decent scene, between pride and shame. I’d done well, for a novice, even if I hadn’t gotten “on.” I trusted that selling, like sex, would improve with practice.
Up in the Addition, Arol and Swan tracked weekly expenses, made monthly mortgage payments, juggled credit cards, and balanced current cash needs against reserve targets for each selling trip. But I witnessed none of this and heard only the occasional tidbit about the Farm’s finances. So I saw my wad of cash not as next week’s egg buy, or last month’s phone bill, or license to add a toothbrush to the communal shopping list, but as a gauge of my value to Zendik.
Later in December, I joined Karma, Teal, and Riven on a two-day trip to Charleston. By the end of our second late night, I’d lost fear of the elegant, clean-cut drunks swarming out of the bars on Market Street. High on contact and loose with exhaustion, I sold multiple double CDs, broke two hundred for the first time, and inspired Karma to dub me Hellion. (I belonged to the small minority of Zendiks who never succeeded at being rechristened; Hellion would remain only a nickname.) I hadn’t “gotten on”—but I had come close.
In late January, I was sent with six others on a trip to Fort Lauderdale that would last five days—two in the van, three on the street. Saturday and Sunday, we’d sell the Las Olas Art Fair—a throng of white tents and tanned couples—till early evening. Friday and Saturday nights, we’d sell Riverwalk—a cul-de-sac packed with glitzy bars and clubs—and A1A, our shorthand for a busy strip of boardwalk lining a highway of the same name.
I was pleased that Rayel, Teal, and the others who set the selling schedule had deemed me fit for such a long trip. I hoped to pick up in Fort Lauderdale where I’d left off in Charleston.
I had not reckoned with the peculiar challenges of selling South Florida.
It was understood that Zendik sellers leaned toward hitting up members of the opposite sex—maybe because selling had started, in the late seventies, as a channel for meeting new people and expanding the dating pool. If you were lucky, you might find a hot guy or girl you could go home with—or, better yet, one you could lure to the Farm. (Back then, the magazine—called the Cosmic Revolutionist—had been a stapled sheaf of mimeographed pages, selling for a dollar; the group relied largely on busking, shoplifting, and welfare for survival.) Or maybe we were acknowledging that people often gave us money out of appreciation for a personal connection; why not enrich that link with a touch of flirtation? With experience, I would learn to approach couples, men in pairs and groups, women in pairs and groups, and single women. But in the beginning, I hit up mostly single men, zeroing in on the disheveled, disaffected, afraid, and misshapen. If they had dreadlocks or a Mohawk; if they wore chains, tie-dye, leather, or anything marked SLIP-KNOT; if they paired superhero trucker caps with Coke-bottle glasses; if they stank of Nag Champa—so much the better. They were all the more likely to stop for a woman with no special gift of attraction.