Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult Read Online Free

go of her hand, I never understood. I only know that my father, and everyone in his family, were alcoholics by the time I came around, on June 27, 1953.
    My father, John, was a tall, trim, handsome fellow who had served in World War II. Since he was a very good Linotype machine operator, he could always get a job wherever he went. But he could never hold on to it because of his drinking. Maybe that’s why we moved across the United States and back, and I never went to one school for a whole year until I was in ninth grade. Sometimes we lived in nice suburban houses, and then we would move to a tiny apartment in the inner city.
    Often my mother sent my older brother, Steve, and I to the bars to look for my dad. If he did not come home from work, we went to remind him that he had a family. Since we didn’t have a TV (it was too heavy to move around), this was always an exciting adventure for us. My memories of that early part of my life include Planters peanuts, bright orange soda, and dart boards, set around the many lounges my dad frequented. In the really bad days, they were on skid row.
    My mother, on the other hand, was a fundamentalist Christian who had been raised in a loving family. Mother had come to America as a sixteen-year-old escaping Nazi Germany. Her father worked hard and made a good living for his family, and although he had been a prosperous carpenter in Germany, he became a gardener for wealthy German industrialists when he moved to America. Shrewd and frugal, he managed to buy five homes in America and became a landlord. My grandmother instilled strict Christian ideals in her daughter. She was a sweet, caring lady, but I never had a conversation with her since she never learned to speak English. She was blind when I was old enough to know her.
    My mother and her family settled in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1939.
    She eventually attended Temple University, but she left to work at a newspaper office, where she met my father. Although she had six children with him, she was not the typical 1950s housewife. When I was younger, I was always embarrassed by my mother because she spoke with a German accent, didn’t perm her hair or wear makeup like other moms, and her name was Elfriede. Most of all, she did not know how to take care of the house.
    “Why don’t you know how to cook, or keep house?” I often asked her when I was a sassy twelve-year-old. Since I was the oldest girl among six children, many of these chores fell on me. “You were raised in Germany, and all the German women we know cook very well and keep spotless houses.”
    “You see, I went to the better schools in Germany,” she explained unashamedly. “And girls who went to those schools did not have to learn household chores since they would have maids to do them!”
    Obviously, being a housewife was beneath her since she had been given the dream of marrying above her middleclass status in Germany. But this was America, Mom. Wake up, the middle class here is huge.
    Our family was a study of contrasts. We were often poor, but we usually lived in nice neighborhoods. My father drank, smoked, and cursed, whereas my mother was very religious and would not allow us to say so much as “Oh my God,” which was taking the Lord’s name in vain.
    My older brother and I, who bore most of the traveling hardships, excelled at school. Unfortunately, my brother used his extraordinary intelligence to obtain money through illegal methods, such as burglary and the unauthorized withdrawal of other people’s bank money.
    Consequently, Steve spent most of his adult life in prison, while I spent most of my life trying to serve the Lord. Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin.
    I entered McCaskey High School, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1968. By this time I had convinced my mother that for the sake of my four younger sisters, she should separate from Dad. I was fourteen years old. Steve was already in a reformatory, and I was beginning to get angry