I got stationed in the Presidio when the war was winding down, probably ’75 or ’76. It was like living in a dream. King City was just a few hours south, but I grew up so poor I’d only been to San Francisco once, when I was about eleven. All I remembered was the wind whipping off the Pacific. King City was so stifling in every way—I was trapped by the stink of farm animals and the lack of opportunity for me there. I wanted to live in that clean, eucalyptus-scented air.
I was posted with the Military Intelligence Group, and my office overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes I would just stare at it for hours, watching the fog roll in and out. At night, I’d be lulled to sleep by the repetitive sounds of the foghorns. Those were the first good nights of sleep I’d had since I joined the army right out of high school in 1970.
No, the war wasn’t so hard on me. It wasn’t a goddamn tea party, but it was my job to serve my country and I did it to the best of my ability. I was not affected in any major way, at least not compared to some of the other guys I came across. I saw some of the worst cases coming into Letterman hospital in the Presidio. Guys so mentally messed up I didn’t think they’d ever get back to regular society. They’d pass through the Presidio and then end up on the streets of San Francisco, where they were vulnerable to guys like John Brooks.
What? Hold your horses, I’ll come back to him in a minute.
I did love being in San Francisco, but I was a little lonely. A lot of guys on the base were married and starting families. There was one neighborhood nicknamed “Diaper Gulch” because there were so many kiddos running around. I had a few girlfriends here and there, one who worked with me at the base. But nothing serious, even though I was ready to settle down and really start my life.
Most evenings, I would go over to a bar right outside the Presidio gates with some of my buddies. The bar was called Yacht Harbor. It had an old maritime theme and was festooned with rusting anchors and musty circular life buoys. There was even some nasty old netting here and there. Don’t get me wrong: despite the nice name, the place was a dump. But we were comfortable there. Most of the gals I met there were employed by the base in some way, usually by the hospital. Which is why when I saw Rosie, it was such a shock.
Rosie was wearing a hippie-kinda dress, a dirty purple thing that nearly dragged on the floor because she was so petite. She had a single long blond braid that snaked around her left shoulder. It sounds silly to say, but she glowed. Her skin just had this freshness and newness. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. And her face was just so beautiful, and she looked so scared.
I wasn’t usually very good at talking to women. My buddies had to push me into it, and I’d only let them after a coupla beers. But I was just drawn to Rosie. She sat down at a table near the front of the bar, and I figured some guy was going to sit down with her any minute. But no one did. And the one big thing that being in Vietnam had taught me was to seize opportunity, because you don’t know when your time is up. So I took a shot and went over to say hello.
I never believed in it before, but it was love at first sight. From the second Rosie looked up at me and said, “Oh, hello,” I was smitten. She was so sweet and gentle. I thought she might want to leave, because she kept looking out the front window of the bar. But she stayed and talked to me for a very long time.
What did we talk about? Oh, a lot of things. She talked about a dog she’d had as a kid, named Chief, and how she missed him. We talked about Jefferson Starship. I don’t know. It wasn’t so much what was said as how it was said. We just had a bond from the get-go.
Eventually it was getting late and I had to get up at zero six hundred. So I asked Rosie for her number, and she clammed up. “I don’t have a phone right now,” she said.
“Well, can I come by your place and take you out sometime?” I asked. This was much bolder than I usually was, but I just couldn’t let her vanish into the fog.
She hemmed and hawed in that sweet, high voice of hers, and eventually admitted that she had no place to stay.
I told her she had to stay with me that night. At first she refused, she said she was perfectly happy sleeping in Golden Gate Park. But I was not about to let her spend another night homeless. I snuck her into my room on base, just for the evening. I let her take the bed while I slept on the floor. To this day I can still sleep anywhere, in any situation. Ethan used to make fun of me because I would fall asleep standing up at his orchestra recitals in high school.
C’mon now, you can’t get that run-over-puppy look every time I mention the boy’s name. That was meant to be funny.
I couldn’t keep Rosie hidden in my room, so the next morning I asked a civilian gal working at Letterman if Rosie could stay with her for a little bit, just so she could get on her feet again. She had a sweet little apartment in Cow Hollow and she said sure, she had a Murphy bed that Rosie could sleep on. I went over there every night to take Rosie out. We ate Chinese food in Chinatown and Mexican food in the Mission, and went to North Beach to hear music. I’d try—gently—to get Rosie to tell me what brought her to San Francisco, why she didn’t have any place to stay. But whenever I tried to pry, her mouth would crumple like Charlie Brown’s. So I backed off. I was happy just to spend time with her. There was a lightness about her, a singular joy. I can be a real grump, and I was the same as a young man. Rosie made me laugh at myself.
After two weeks, my friend in Cow Hollow said Rosie had to find her own place. Her sister was supposed to visit, and I guessed Rosie was cramping her style. Rosie still hadn’t been able to find a job, and I didn’t have any money to pay for her to get her own place. When I told Rosie we’d have to come up with another option for her, she was trying to fight back tears. “I have no options,” she kept repeating, getting more frantic each time she said it.
I couldn’t stand to see her feel so trapped, so without really thinking about it, I got down on my knee and said, “You do have options. You could marry me and come live on the base.”
She laughed it off at first, but I realized I was dead serious, and told her so. I was head over heels for her. She said she was in love with me, too, but she didn’t want to rush into anything. “I spent a lot of time not being my own person,” she explained. I asked her what she meant, and she shook her head and went silent.
“How’s this,” I said. “We’ll get married, just so you have a place to stay. We’ll get married housing, which is much nicer than the sorry little room I’ve got now. You don’t have to stay any longer than you want. You don’t even have to sleep in the same bed with me. I’ll sleep on the couch. Hell, I’ll sleep on the floor, like the first night.”
It took a few hours of pleading, but finally Rosie agreed. We made plans to get married that weekend at the Presidio Post Chapel. I know it sounds hasty, but you have to understand it was a different time. Lots of people got hitched after knowing each other for only a little while. I had a buddy in Vietnam who married a local woman after spending a single night with her.
To celebrate our engagement, I got us a hotel room where Rosie could stay the night, though I had to be back on the base before my morning call. We made love for the first time that night, and when we were lying there after, Rosie started to cry. She finally broke down and told me where she’d been for the past several years. It wasn’t at all what I had expected.
Rosie grew up in Sacramento. Her mom and dad were Catholics, but not the fuzzy, gregarious kind. They were conservative in every possible way, especially sexually. When Rosie turned twelve, her mother started measuring her skirts before she left the house. If they were more than a quarter inch above the knee, she was sent upstairs to change. She was not allowed to wear modern bathing suits, even at the beach. Her mother found a 1920s bathing costume at a thrift store and made her wear it for years. Rosie ultimately burned it in a trash can on her way to school.
Rosie graduated from high school in 1970 and left home the next day. She had one friend who had moved to San Francisco, a gal named Sandra, who promise
d to give Rosie a place to stay if she could just get a bus ride out there. Sandra had written Rosie a letter inviting her to come on down to visit. Said she was living with some guy in the Haight who she said had “blown her mind.” After eighteen years in that household, Rosie was ready to get her mind blown.
She showed up at 715 Haight Street with her little Samsonite suitcase that matched the white shift dress she had picked out for her first day as a grown-up. I remember the address even now, because Rosie took me by once, to show me her past. It was an unremarkable Victorian, slightly shabby like the other buildings in the neighborhood, and painted a dark green. Rosie remembered the dress she was wearing that day vividly because she had spent so much time fantasizing about leaving Sacramento, and because she felt so silly when Sandra opened the door.
Sandra had gone fully counterculture. She had grown her hair long and stopped shaving her armpits. As Rosie remembered it, Sandra basically answered the door wearing underwear. Rosie almost turned around and ran back to Sacramento, but she had put so much stock in this moment that she pressed on into the house, determined to adjust to her new surroundings.
That very first night, not wanting to ruffle any feathers, she smoked pot with Sandra and her man. The guy seemed really interested in her thoughts and feelings, much more so than any other guy—or, hell, anyone else at all—had ever been before. They talked about philosophy and religion, and how her parents’ conservative values were inimical to spiritual progress. He made her feel like the light of the world was shining on her face. Rosie was nervous that Sandra would be upset that her boyfriend was paying so much attention to Rosie, but when she glanced at her friend, Sandra nodded encouragingly. Sandra’s boyfriend even kissed Rosie, and Sandra just watched, smiling, as it happened.
Yes, it does sound creepy. But you have to understand that Rosie was real naive when it happened. She’d barely left her parents’ house before. I remember she told me, “I thought this was just how people in the city behaved.” She was also a teenager hell-bent on rebelling. So the last thing she wanted to do was embarrass herself in front of her old friend by making a fuss.
A few men and a bunch of women lived at 715 Haight, and Sandra’s boyfriend was their leader. Rosie realized this pretty quick. The women all hung on his every word, and the men acted like they were his bodyguards. You know where this is going. The guy’s name was Aries at the time. I don’t think Rosie knew his real name was John Brooks until after things went sour and she filed those charges.
At first, being part of the communal living experiment at 715 Haight was incredibly freeing for Rosie. She bought into what Aries was selling, hook, line, and sinker. He was big on free love, which wasn’t that original back at that time in San Francisco. But Aries was building something bigger than most of the street preachers back then. He claimed he was starting a full-blown utopian society, which he was calling Aries’ Children.
But Aries couldn’t create his new utopia with the few resources he had. So he convinced all new followers that they needed to sell their worldly possessions and start fresh. Conveniently, he said that the commune needed the funds from their personal yard sales to keep the community going. For the greater good and all.
One of the ways he got those followers was by sending pretty young girls like Rosie and Sandra out on fishing missions for men. They’d seduce guys and bring them back to the commune.
What? I’m not going to tell you what kind of sex! Was it “weird”? Well, I reckon it was. I didn’t really want to know the gory details about that one, Dana, as I’m sure you can imagine.
I don’t want you to think that Rosie was a total fool, though. She said she loved the fishing at first. It made her feel in control of her body and her life for the first time. Of course, she wasn’t really in control. Aries was the one pulling the strings of the whole operation. He even gave her a new name. He gave everyone new names, because he said that being part of the utopia meant shedding not just your possessions but also your old identity.
Rosie embraced the illusion fully. To Aries’s credit, he was a very successful community builder. His acolytes were varying degrees of faithful—the ones who lived at the commune, like Rosie, were the most devoted—but a thousand people had given Aries some kind of money, which earned them official status as Aries’s children. Their official status was marked by that necklace you found, the blue one with the asterisk.
By this time Rosie had become a true believer. She thought they were building an important new society, a respite from the judgmental world of her parents and Richard Nixon. So Rosie followed Aries without question when he said they had to leave San Francisco in the middle of the night for some land he had purchased in Mendocino County. He said that the San Francisco police were persecuting them because of their unconventional beliefs, and that the only way to continue their beautiful, intentional community was to leave the city.
Even though he had so many other young women, Rosie was always one of Aries’s favorites. That’s why she helped Aries pack the most faithful hundred or so into a series of vans and trucks one unsettlingly hot evening. She didn’t know it then, but that was when things would start to go downhill for her.
Rosie said the land in Mendocino was the most beautiful she’d ever seen. It was surrounded by redwoods, and near enough to the Russian River that in certain spots you could hear a faint rushing sound. Aries had a bunch of locals make huts for his followers to live in. They were basic dwellings, but they suited Rosie just fine.
In the beginning, Aries’ Children grew vegetables to eat and weed to smoke and raised their own chickens so they would have as little contact with the outside world as possible. That’s how Aries liked it. It was idyllic for a month or two, but after that Rosie started hearing scary rumors about how Aries was treating some of his less favored followers.
So many believers had been left behind in the initial move to Mendocino, and a lot of them wanted back in. But there were whispers that these lesser children were allowed to join the Mendocino group only after they’d proven themselves to be devoted to Aries through a series of increasingly sadistic tests. One of the stories Rosie heard was that Aries made some of his children brand themselves with a special symbol they weren’t allowed to show anybody else. She also heard stories about followers walking over burning bricks, and others having to stand alone in a room for a full day. If Aries caught them sitting or, God forbid, lying down, they would be banned from the Mendocino compound for life.
At first Rosie didn’t believe that those stories were true. Sandra told her that anyone who would tell a story like that about Aries was probably a narc sent by the San Francisco police to infiltrate the community. I know, it sounds nutty to me, too. You have to understand how sheltered Rosie was. She had gone right from her parents’ home to Aries’s commune, and she was still in her early twenties then. She didn’t have enough experience out in the big world to be skeptical of an explanation like that.
Later, after she left the commune, Rosie reconsidered those stories. Aries’s sermons had broadened to include parables about turncoats and deserters. She told me one that had stuck with her because it scared the bejesus out of her. She started getting so upset when she repeated this sermon that it stuck with me, too, all these years.
This parable was about a sacred monkey who lived in the mountains. Both humans and gods revered this particular kind of monkey. The monkey dutifully brought food back to his father for years, until he started getting ideas. “Why am I serving my father when I could strike out on my own?” the monkey wondered. He started hiding extra food at the bottom of a mountain, planning to make his own way when he had built up a big enough store. On his way to hide more fruit one day, a lightning bolt struck that monkey down. It left a burn mark in the side of the mountain, reminding others not to follow in his path.
After Aries told that story, he started up his night patrol. Aries told the rest of the followers that the patrol was there to keep them all safe from disruptive outside
forces, but really what the patrol did was make sure no one ever left the compound. The few people who managed to get away and into nearby towns were always discovered and brought back. They seemed resigned when they returned, as if they’d assumed this would happen.
Despite the night patrol, Aries was also getting really paranoid about people leaving the fold, becoming “unfaithfuls,” as he called them. Rosie suspected he was taking a lot of speed, because she’d seen a few speed freak-outs at the commune before and Aries was displaying all the signs: he wasn’t sleeping, he was alternately grandiose and depressed, and his pupils had receded to little pinpricks of black in his cloudy eyes. But she never fully believed the stories about Aries’s violent side until she saw it for herself.
Why? Well, I think Rosie didn’t want to believe them. She had given all of her adult life to Aries, and it was humiliating to admit she had made a mistake. Rosie also didn’t know what she would do if she left Aries. She wasn’t about to go back home to Sacramento, and that seemed like the only option, in her blindered view.
But one night Aries called her into his personal cabin, which was much grander than the humble cabins everyone else in the commune shared. It had electricity, for starters, but it also had a real king-size bed, while everyone else slept in cots or hammocks.
Yes, Dana, Rosie was still having sex with Aries. Jesus. Like I said, free love was a major part of the commune’s foundational ethos. When Rosie started to think about it, she realized the love was freely flowing only in one direction: toward Aries. Because she was one of his favorites, when Aries started getting more paranoid, he barred Rosie from sleeping with other followers. He told her that her energy was getting too depleted from all that connection, and that saving herself for him was for her own good.
That night, though, Rosie just wasn’t in the mood. She was tired and had pulled a muscle in her back in the vegetable garden that day. She had never turned Aries down for sex before, but that night she looked around and saw Aries’s amenities, and she thought about how he was going to sleep on a nice, comfortable mattress while her back injury worsened in her lumpy cot, and she just wasn’t in the mood to give him anything else.
Soulmates Page 14