The next morning, I reached the Farmhouse early enough to avoid the shower line. Once clean, I repaired to the living room to read while I waited for breakfast. From a stack of Zendik magazines in the bottom drawer of a scratched filing cabinet, I chose an issue published a year earlier. I skipped over the Zendik philosophy and stopped at a personal essay by Kro, the only Black man at the Farm.
The essay begins, “It is a Friday night like any other and I am drunk, horny and 17 years old.” At seventeen, Kro leads a double life: by day he’s “senior class Most Studious, three-time Student Council member, Youth Advisor to the local Congressman”; by night, he’s “a hormone-crazed, clueless cruiser of parties, searching for something sane, something sweet, some reason to live my life.”
After one such party, he finds himself giving a ride to a floppy-drunk fifteen-year-old girl in a short skirt. When she, for no apparent reason, “suddenly sits up and turns around, raises herself up onto her knees and leans over the tilted front seat,” he reaches over and grasps her leg, then inches his hand up to her crotch and under her panties. Not even sure she’s conscious, he recoils when she makes a slight shift. That’s when the guilt and shame set in, “the unending refrain… What am I doing? What have I done?”
Kro had kept his trespass secret for more than a decade by the time he drafted the story and read it aloud to his “friends here at the Farm” at lunch one day. He implied that their empathy had helped him shed the spiritual analogue of “a leech fastened to tender flesh” and revise his view of his actions: “I was really just a sweet child, caught in a cultural vortex of ignorance and diminished expectations… designed to get your head spinning so badly that you’ll settle for anything—date rape, molestation, or just your basic, sloppy, drunken fuck and tumble.” His ideal was “a culture where sex is accepted as the benevolent pulse of pleasure… a culture where no one—no one—has to give up her wasted body to a stranger in order to obey the stirrings of sexual love.” He lived at Zendik Farm, he said, because “there’s no other way for me—or anyone else—to ever feel the awesome beauty of clean, sweet Love.” Here was a variation on Karma’s lament that “sex in the world isn’t friendly yet.”
Kro’s tale gripped me with its precision and honesty. I was there in the driver’s seat, quick with the thrill of transgressing, there in the passenger seat, stilled by near oblivion. But when play-by-play gave way to interpretation, the story line turned at once too blurry and too sharp.
What—I wonder now—had happened to transmute a repentant sexual predator into a “sweet child,” blameless in the whirl of “a cultural vortex”? Why did Kro imply that his passed-out victim had complied in her own violation—that she, too, had been “obey[ing] the stirrings of sexual love”? How did he know that no one beyond Zendik had ever felt, or would ever feel, “the awesome beauty of clean, sweet Love”?
After I’d flipped to a different story, the door from the porch groaned open and Kro trudged in, looking sleepy and grumpy. He was in charge of starting and tending the fire that burned in the woodstove throughout the day and into the night. Once he’d crumpled newspaper for tinder and coaxed a flame from the kindling, I wished him good morning. I had questions for him—not about his essay, but about East Wind, where he’d lived for three years. I’d considered going there instead of Zendik.
East Wind, a twenty-five-year-old charter member of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, lay cradled in the Ozark foothills a few miles from Tecumseh, Missouri. The same day Zylem had told me I was welcome to visit Zendik, I’d received an invitation—handwritten, adorned with stars and butterflies, signed “Twilight”—to participate in East Wind’s upcoming three-week visitor period. Visitors worked a set number of hours per week—gardening, cooking, cleaning, weaving rope sandals, grinding nuts into butter. After three weeks, they became eligible for provisional membership; six months later, they could apply to be full members.
After reading Twilight’s note, I weighed the sheet of loose-leaf in my hand against the phone conversation I’d just had with Zylem. East Wind’s offer was defined, time-bound, something I could touch; Zendik’s was ethereal, open-ended, an echo of a man’s voice saying, “We don’t have set work hours; we all pitch in to do what needs to get done.” Saying, “Some people stay a couple weeks; some decide this is where they belong and stay for life.” Saying, “We’re not an intentional community—we’re a new culture.” The gaps he’d refused to fill with facts, I filled with fantasy: I saw comely, weathered young women—long hair flying, peasant skirts flaring—whirling in dance with ember-lit, rugged young men. They reveled in a rough barn, open on one side to a night sky misty and rainy, dark with no stars. I laid a veil of romantic longing over this tribe I’d never met, on this farm I’d never seen. While I appreciated East Wind’s warmth and clear guidelines, I found my vision of Zendik far more enticing.
Having chosen Zendik, I was wondering what I’d miss if I stayed and didn’t visit the other groups on my short list.
I waited for Kro to rise from his crouch in front of the stove door. “I heard you lived at East Wind for a few years. How’d you like it there?”
He grabbed a chunk of oak from a stack beside the stove and tossed it on the fire. “East Wind,” he snorted. “Escapist hippie bullshit. It’s just a hideout for a bunch of babies who won’t face themselves. Sure, they live together and compost their shit. But they don’t get straight. They take another drink, another hit.”
Kro’s indictment surprised me. (Maybe it wouldn’t have if I’d spent more time with his essay—if I’d paused on the clause “there’s no way for me—or anyone else.”) Hadn’t Zendik and East Wind both sprung from the sixties impulse to drop back to Earth and rebuild the village? Didn’t Zendik at least owe East Wind a comrade’s respect?
But maybe Kro was right. Maybe East Wind—along with Twin Oaks, Acorn, Sandhill, Dancing Rabbit—was just a crash pad for the average misfit. Hadn’t I applied early action to Harvard and only Harvard, sure I’d get in and sure I belonged? Maybe I’d already found the elite advance guard of the commune movement. Maybe I didn’t need to bother vetting other options.
“Oh,” I said. Then, for lack of a better response, “So I guess you don’t recommend visiting.”
Kro scowled as he chucked another oak chunk into the stove, then banged the door shut. “Do what you want,” he said. “I’m just saying, if you wanna be with people who are actually trying to change the way they relate to each other, you’re not gonna find them at your average back-to-the-land ‘egalitarian community.’”
I didn’t ask Kro about Twin Oaks, the Virginia commune where he’d spent his second hiatus from Zendik. I didn’t ask why he’d fled—twice—the one place where he thought love was possible.
Cayta strode into the living room and dropped onto the couch across from me. Dinner was over; the shower line had petered out; those going on “walks” and “dates” had gone on them. I was paging through another Zendik magazine. I had nothing else to read—I’d brought a journal but no books with me; the Zendiks had yet to unpack their library—and I didn’t want to return to the plywood box in the barn loft, which felt to me like a ghetto. I looked up. She lasered me with her gaze. “You have to figure out why you hate men,” she said. “Rebel says you’re not social with him or the other guys at all—you dive into your mummy bag the moment you get back to your room, and then you get the hell out first thing in the morning. No wonder you’ve never had a serious boyfriend. You’re gonna have to get to work on yourself if you want that to change.”