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return to Kerista Home Ed. - It is misleading to insinuate that the Kerista Commune managed 'seduction squads' of women who would sleep with men at parties. This story sounds more like Morehouse than Kerista. The phrase 'seduction squads' WAS used in Kerista to represent Keristans who would imagine themselves as 'seduction squads' to try to entice new members, but I have never heard of any Keristan sleeping with a non-member in order to get them to join. We were fidelitious, remember polyfidelity? I know nobody slept with me before I joined, otherwise I may have joined a lot sooner. Michael Cummings, 1996 A Tale of Two Communes Robert Anton Wilson, 1965 The Religion of Kerista and Its 69 Positions Ed. - This article is a priceless story of Keristans in the 1960's, with many standards of the later commune in primitive form. Pamela Des Barres - 1987 - I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, page 45. "Haight-Ashbury wafted south and I longed to stand on that very corner, breathe the unwashed hippie air, see all the dirty bare feet, and even if it was only for the weekend, I wanted to live in a commune and eat brown rice off communal dishes, maybe meet some pretty hippie boy and discover the true meaning of life. I didn't want to go alone, especially since my '59 Chevy convertible bit the dust, so I invited my one remaining Beatle friend, Linda, to make the trip with me. I was hoping she wanted to expand her horizons about four hundred miles and accompany me to San Francisco. As it turned out, she moved into the first commune we entered and became 'housemother', which means she did all the cooking and cleaning. Very communal. ... Linda and I walked back and forth and up and down the streets and let it be known that we were looking for a commune. Everyone seemed to panhandle from everyone else, so we asked a bespectacled, pimply blonde guy for some spare change just to see how it felt. It was our cosmic luck that we chose this particular guy, because he asked us to come to his commune, Kerista House, and share dinner with 'the family'. The way I imagined communal living was a far cry from what greeted me after our journey across the bridge into Oakland. In the living room were about six or seven funky sheetless mattresses and a couple ripped-up chairs, and people were lolling around, dressed in those hand-painted Indian bedspreads that should have been on the bare beds. Tacked up on the peeling walls were numerous curling posters for the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore, announcing such major acts as the Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Strawberry Alarm Clock. The girls gave us serene know-it-all smiles and the guys just looked us up and down just like regular guys in L.A. always did, which was disconcerting. I thought there might be another level of communication in the land of peace and love. The towels in the bathroom looked like Salvation Army rejects and had obviously been the target for all the Kerista House feet. I tried to avoid looking at the little piles of pubic hair hair adorning the once-white sink, and concentrated on the true meaning of communal living. These people had deeper things on their minds than Mr. Clean and Spic and Span. After our meal of sticky brown rice and smelly old vegetables, which I consumed with a joyous show of good vibes, I itched to get back to Haight-Ashbury to enjoy the night life. Linda chose to stay behind and become one with the pimply guy and the rest of the family. She had recently been traumatized when her air-force father burst out of the closet, where he had been lurking for many years behind his collegiate crew cut. He totally shattered his large family's foregone conclusion that Daddy would love Mommy forever. Linda wanted to believe that it was OK for him to be gay, since we were all one anyway, but she was having trouble convincing herself. At this moment, all she wanted was to feel like she belonged somewhere, and to create another family to merge with. By staying at Kerista House, she was flipping her father the big bird." page 49 "Saturday January 4, 1967 ... I slept that night on a stinky, smelly mattress at Kerista House with two other people I'd never met, and had the best sleep of my life. Linda had turned into housemom overnight, and when I asked, "Are you sure you'll be happy here?" she staunchly defended her new station in life. We hugged and I told her I would be back soon and we could share hot apple pie at the Doggie Diner, which was directly across the street. She was beaming as I bid farewell, but in a tremendously spacy way. Maybe she had taken acid." Ed. - This sounds (& smells) like standard Keristan housekeeping practice. Judging that Miss Des Barres seems to have slept with most every cute famous guy she could find, it is quite a statement that she slept so well in our sex cult. |