Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

We stopped at a counter along the boardwalk to have Cokes.

“Oh, that is so good!” Mary said. “I know it’s not healthy, but I love soda. It is one of the things I miss living in the ashram.”

We were sitting on old-fashioned stools with metal bases and round vinyl-covered tops, sipping our Cokes through straws like two high school kids on a first date.

“So Baba allows prostitution at the ashram, but not soda?”

“Lighten up,” she said. “It’s not prostitution, not exactly.”

“What is it, exactly?”

“Have you ever heard of the Magdalene Order?”

“No.”

“You know what tantra is, though, right?”

“You bet.”

“Okay, what is it, then?” She used her taunting tone as if she didn’t believe me, but I think she just wanted to hear my definition before continuing her explanation.

“You tell me,” I said.

“It’s fucking for God,” she said.

I laughed out loud, and a Sikh drinking tea at the other end of the counter turned his turbaned head to look at us.

“What?” she said. “Isn’t that what it is?”

“Yes, that is a great definition. I kind of knew that’s what it was, but I couldn’t have put it so neat.”

She gave me a dazzling smile then, young and happy. I reached out to put my hand on hers, but she pulled her hands back into her lap before I could touch her.

“Let’s hear your definition,” she said.

“Tantra is when a man and a woman engage in sexual intercourse to achieve a sense or state of union,” I said, looking deep into her fairy eyes. “Instead of making love selfishly for physical pleasure and to gratify the ego the way people usually do, tantric lovers do it to transcend the ego. Becoming one with the other person is like practice for becoming one with God. Just what you said. It is a way of breaking out of the bounds of the little, socially constructed self and becoming part of something larger and better.”

“You really know this stuff, don’t you?” she said, trying out the admiring-girlfriend mode again.

I shrugged. “So, where does the Magdalene Order come in?”

“Mary Magdalene was the chick in the Bible that Jesus saved from being stoned to death for sleeping around,” she said. “Baba says she wasn’t a hooker because she was a bad person but because she was full of love and didn’t know what to do with it. He says everyone is like that underneath, but society suppresses it and makes it into something bad if people express it without permission. Jesus saw all the love that Mary had inside her and chose her for his companion. Then she found the right focus for her love and helped Jesus do his thing.” She spoke in an excited enthusiastic manner, proud of her esoteric knowledge and something more.

“How did she help him?”

“Through tantra.”

“You mean she slept with him?”

“Yeah. She helped him find God, like what you were saying.”

“This is what Baba teaches?”

“Sure. I know it’s not what they say in Sunday school, but it kind of makes sense, you know?”

“And that’s what the girls at the ashram do?”

“Kind of. Baba says most of the men that come to the ashram aren’t ready to find God, but that the girls are helping them by healing their hearts. He says everyone is wounded because they haven’t received the love they need and deserve and that that’s what’s wrong with the world. That’s why people are so angry and mean. He says the Magdalenes’ unconditional love helps the johns feel better about themselves and become better people.”

“But it’s not unconditional.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t the men have to pay to have sex with the girls?”

“Yeah, but they have plenty of money. They are all important people, big businessmen and politicians. I’ve seen some of them in the newspaper. And Baba uses the money for a good cause.”

“Where does he get the girls?”

“I don’t know. They were all there when I came.”

“What do they get out of it?”

“Baba says they grow spiritually by giving love.”

“Does he have sex with them?”

“Why are you asking so many questions about this? Are you trying to figure out how to get laid up there? Because it’s not hard if that’s what you want.”

“I’m not trying to figure out how to get laid. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on over there. Operating a string of call girls out of an ashram, no matter what you call them, doesn’t fit with what I know about Vedanta. I don’t want to start taking classes there if it is really just a whorehouse.”

“So what if they are whores?” She spit the word back at me angrily. “What’s so bad about that? Isn’t everyone a whore in one way or another?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You aren’t part of the order, are you?”

“No,” she said, calmer. “Baba wants me to join, but I won’t do it.”

“Why not, if it’s such a good thing?”

“Like I told you,” she said in a tough tone, “no one turns me out. And there is something strange about those girls. It’s like they are on something.”

“You think he is feeding them drugs?”

“No,” she laughed. “I don’t think he’d do that. He is really not as bad as you think. It is more like he is using tantra and psychic powers to control them. He has some kick-ass siddhis . I’ve seen him do some amazing things. Like with you at the beach yesterday. He really turned up the juice on you. I know you felt it.” She paused, giving me a curious look. “Why is he interested in you?”

“I’m an interesting person,” I said lightly, but her question made me uneasy. Why had he focused on me? I didn’t like the idea of his mental powers probing my subconscious when it contained a crystalline image he would be quick to recognize. “Did Baba start the Magdalene Order, or does it exist in other places?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do men call and make dates or do they join a tantra yoga class or what?” I was counterprobing.

“There’s no class. It’s more like private lessons. I’m not sure how they set up the appointments. There are a couple of guys that run the girls for Baba, a creep named Jimmy, and some other muscle-bound jerk who goes by Namo. I can’t stand either one of them. Can we talk about something else now?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?”

Instead of answering, she noisily sucked the last of the Coke from her vase-shaped glass, then rattled the ice and tilted the glass to her lips to get another drop or two. I could tell she came from a lower-middle-class background, same as me. Soda is one of our favorite things.

“Let’s keep walking,” she said, standing up. “I’ve never ridden on that Ferris wheel before. Might be fun.”

As we continued north on the boardwalk I looked back and caught the Sikh sneaking a peek at the pink shorts and shook my finger at him.

It was a bright, breezy three-quarters of a mile from the snack stand to the pier where the Ferris wheel was revolving slowly against the backdrop of the Santa Monica Mountains. I took the hint and didn’t ask Mary anything else about herself. As a reward, she gave me the Cliffs Notes version of her life story.

She was twenty-four, a Gemini born in May 1971, as I was stumbling through the second semester of my drug-blurred freshman year at Hazel-wood High School. She grew up in a two-bedroom, one-bath tract house in Anaheim half a mile from Disneyland. Her mother, like mine, was an alcoholic. Her father was a mindless Catholic churchgoer who beat her when she started getting interested in boys. She ran away from home in her early teens and had always been with older men, starting with a thirty-year-old pot dealer when she was fourteen. After that it was a little vague. She had traveled, worked at different things. She had quit drugs and alcohol two years earlier when she got interested in Eastern religion, gone back to school fifteen months before, in the fall of 1994, after passing the GED test.