The House of Rumour A Novel

13

the devil





Haven’t you noticed how aliens always seem to look like pre-pubescent girls? Their heads too big for their skinny little bodies. You see them naked with no hair, no external genitalia. These are the ones called the Greys. I was ten years old when I became one. For them. They took off all my clothes and put a nylon stocking over my head, covering my hair, making my head bulge a little. My ears were flattened, my nose became two nostrils, my mouth a slit. Then they put dark goggles over my eyes and dusted me all over with talcum powder. Becoming a Grey was just one of the many rituals I performed for the cult that ran Operation Paperclip.

This was just after the war in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County. Mother drove me out to a big house there one evening. She had spent years pimping me out as a child actress. I figured that this was just another job.

Larry always thought I was making this stuff up. He never called me a liar to my face. He couldn’t. Lying and stealing, that was his job. He stole all my life experiences for his stories and novels. Fantasy, that was his racket. He admitted it. He told me once that he had developed this problem with reality. And he said himself that science fiction was a ridiculous conjunction, a contradiction in terms. I mean, how can fiction be scientific or vice versa? No, I know the truth. He took it from me. And he used it to give his stuff credibility.

I know now what happened in that mansion in Manhattan Beach. At the time I was a confused child, made to think of it all as a game. They took pictures of me. Some as a Grey alien, some of me naked. I was made to pose with other kids, with adults. Then there were parties where me and other children were made to work the room. The cult used blackmail as control. Operation Paperclip was a secret mission to recruit Nazi scientists after the war. Their files would be sheep-dipped. That meant they would falsify their employment records, clear them of war crimes, cover up the fact that they had been Nazi Party members.

Most important of all were the rocket scientists and the ones who had been experimenting with anti-gravity technology. That’s why they needed pictures of aliens: to spread rumours about the Greys, to hide the fact that the Nazis were in possession of advanced interplanetary knowledge and had now established themselves in America. That was the cult that used me and countless other children. And every new religion needs a new devil to blame the bad things in creation on. Something to frighten people. The Grey alien became a sort of scientific Satan.

And when they had finished posing me and the other children as Greys, they would take pornographic photographs and get us ready for the evening parties. It has taken me a long time to recover the awful memories from that time. For many years I suffered from traumatic amnesia. Now I can recall everything, just as I can recall many of my past lives.

I was abused not merely for pleasure but as a form of control for the people who attended the parties. Influential figures that the cult could use: the rich, the powerful. I remember how I watched them and felt their desires, their ambition. Their fear. They weren’t necessarily paedophiles; often our job was to trick them. Drunk or drugged, the guests could be fooled into incriminating positions. I remember Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun. I remember Ronald Reagan and Howard Hughes.

And I remember the devil. I mean, the real devil. He ran the show and sometimes he would appear in person. In disguise. He wore a lounge suit and dark glasses. He had a little goatee beard. He smiled and spoke softly but when he took his sunglasses off you could see the infinite cruelty in his eyes. Red-lined, the whites yellow as brimstone, jet-black irises like scorch marks burning into you, making you do whatever he pleased. He cast a spell with a simple gesture, a sign of abominable power.

The devil’s device is a five-pointed star, inverted so that the two points stick up like horns. Like legs in the air. You see, the pentagram is a benign symbol when it is the right way up. It represents humanity. A human figure, star-shaped, with the head on top, two arms, two legs. But when it gets turned upside down, it loses all reason. Its genitalia are exposed and above all the other organs of the body. Then the head is at the lowest point, where the private parts should be, the mind hanging down, all dizzy and shameless. Every man and every woman is a star but when they get turned over they become a fallen star, a fallen angel, a demon. A slave to desire and debasement. This is how the devil exerts his power. The devil knows all about sex, you see.

The devil taught me. Just as my mother and my stepfather did. And all the casting directors that Mother told me to be nice to. Dexter Roth was the first person I met in show business who didn’t want to demean me. He cast me in Fugitive Alien because he said I had a luminous kind of innocence. He saw that I could have been the right kind of star. By that time I had forgotten all about the cult in Manhattan Beach, but when we started rehearsing all these strange flashbacks came to me. I got to know Larry Zagorski when he was doing the rewrites. He seemed to understand me. Dexter encouraged me to go deep into my character, to imagine what it would actually be like to meet someone from another world. I know now that this was a message because one night after filming I saw my first flying saucer hovering over the Hollywood Hills.

The film itself used actual footage of a UFO. It’s become quite well known; people still remember me from it. A ‘cult’ movie, they call it: now, doesn’t that tell you something? Mary-Lou Gunderson who directed it was a bit cold towards me. Maybe she knew that I had been involved with the house at Manhattan Beach and Operation Paperclip. It was those people who killed her ex-lover, the rocket scientist Jack Parsons, by blowing up his laboratory. He knew too many of their secrets and had planned to use his technical skills in Israel. The Nazis certainly didn’t want the Jews to have their own missile programme.

But wait a minute, no. This was after we’d finished filming. No, I think Mary-Lou was hostile because she and Larry had had something in the past. Larry always claimed that they’d never slept together but he was certainly still in love with her when we started dating. It didn’t bother me to begin with but I didn’t realise then what a mess Larry was in.

At first, you see, he’d listen to what I had to say. He’d let me talk without interrupting. And I thought he understood. I read everything that he wrote when we first started seeing each other and it all made sense to me. The problem was that he didn’t understand his own writing. He didn’t understand how he was being used. They had got to him and were using him to send messages. He didn’t even know it.

I saw all the good things in Larry then. We fell in love and got married. But it was me that supported us both, before he’d had any real success with his books. I’d imagined that writers could make good money just by getting their stuff into print, but this wasn’t the case. Larry worked like a demon: he sold stories to magazines and wrote the occasional script for the Dimension X radio programme. But they didn’t pay that well. Then he had a couple of short novels published. Larry complained that they paid only a five-hundred-dollar advance with little chance of royalties. He hardly made enough money to keep going without me.

I was struggling to make some sort of career for myself. I was the female lead in a couple of B-movies: Dead Men’s Tales and Dangerous Juvenile; I got a small part in The Blue Gardenia. All the time I was preyed upon by directors, producers, studio men. I even tried to get Larry more screenwriting work but he wasn’t interested. Oh no, he always had a story to finish or a great novel to start.

I’d come home from work to find him unshaven and barely dressed, hammering away on his typewriter in a sort of trance. He hardly noticed me when he was inspired. I often wondered where all this writing came from. It’s all out there somewhere, isn’t it? You have to tune in and it all gets typed out. But I learnt this only later when I met the Watchers.

I know that people now think of me as the crazy one in that marriage but both me and Larry had psychological problems. And it was Larry who was taking all those drugs, drinking all the time. Gin or vodka or both, with lime juice and lots of sugar. He’d picked up a reefer habit, too, from Nemo, his Cuban friend he wrote the film with. Then there was all his prescribed medication. Semoxydrine for his anxiety, Nembutal to help him sleep, and any number of other drugs he tried along the way. He became quite the pharmacist, knowing all these pills with names as curious as the alien life in his fiction. It became a running joke that he would be ‘on planet Dexedrine’ or ‘in the fabled city of Pentobarbital’.

Larry tried to blame his mental instabilities on his wartime experiences but I knew that his problems were deeper than that. Neurotic conditions, labyrinthitis, vertigo, agoraphobia. He’d been seeing a psychiatrist before the war. He had all these confused feelings of guilt and anxiety, mostly about his mother who, of course, never approved of me. And I had my own troubled childhood to deal with. An irresponsible mother, who taught me to always act seductively towards men. A stepfather, transformed from a kind and gentle man into a monster after a few drinks. When Larry was in liquor it would sometimes bring back awful memories.

‘There ain’t no devil, Sharleen,’ Stepfather would slur with bleary and lustful eyes. ‘It’s just God when he’s drunk.’

I went to a Dianetics therapist once. They did something called ‘auditing’ with this funny little machine like a lie detector called an ‘e-meter’. They said they could clear me of all the bad stuff in my head from the past. Larry didn’t approve. He said it was all baloney. He made me promise not to go again but he also asked me all these questions about it, like he was really curious. It was from the auditing that I first learnt about my past lives and started to have a clear idea of what had really happened in my childhood.

Nineteen-fifty-six was a really big year. I got a small part in the television soap opera A Family Practice. I played Nancy, a new character to the series, a secretary in the Henderson law firm. It was hard to know whether Nancy would become a regular or not: there were hints of a romantic storyline between her and Adam Henderson, the son of Buck Henderson, the gruff patriarch of the show. But Buck didn’t approve of his son’s interest in Nancy, the flirtatious blonde, so it could go either way. There was a chance of some stability in our lives for a while. Back then I was happy to work so that Larry could write at home and not worry about the bills. That was before I found out what was really going on.

Nineteen-fifty-six was a big year all right. It was the year of the flood.

It was in November that me and Larry went along to a meeting of a local flying saucer club. This was unusual: Larry had cut himself off from all sorts of social groups that might have interested him in the past. He had long since stopped attending the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society that met at Clifton’s Cafeteria. He said that he didn’t want to get stuck in what he called the ‘SF ghetto’. But a member of this club had written a charming letter, inviting Larry to talk about his work. I think it gave him some encouragement. Anyway, we were treated like celebrities. Larry pretended that he didn’t care for all the attention but you could tell that secretly he loved it. Actually, I think that he was even slightly resentful of the fact that more people knew who I was that night. Some of them had seen me in Fugitive Alien; a few recognised me from A Family Practice. And after Larry had talked, as many of them wanted to ask me questions as they did him. I saw him frowning when I told everybody that I had seen a flying saucer. So I got him to talk about the strange ‘foo fighters’ that he had witnessed during the war when he was in the air force.

At the end of the meeting a woman called Martha came up to me and Larry. She said that she was part of a group called the Watchers who met in a community church near by. It was a kind of study group for people who wanted to know more about the visitors from other worlds. Martha said that they had already made contact and there were warning signs of some great disaster ahead. She invited us along. Larry was very polite but I caught this kind of mocking half-smile on his lips.

It was like he always thought that he knew more about these things than anybody else. But he was curious enough to come with me when I went to the next Watchers meeting. It was here that Martha first explained the different beings located in ‘the astral’. She said that there were good and bad forces out in space. Knowing that she had the power to make contact with them, she had prayed very diligently that she might not fall into the wrong hands. I understood this at once, especially when she mentioned that Lucifer was actually a star being who, under his guise as the ‘bright one’, was intent on bringing chaos into the astral as well as here on earth. Lucifer is abroad in the world, leading our scientists to build ever greater weapons of destruction. In the past, Martha explained, there had been a great apocalypse when the two great lost civilisations – Atlantis in the West and its sister continent Mu in the Pacific – were destroyed with ancient atomic weapons.

Martha stated that two kinds of alien have been visiting earth: the ‘Space Brothers’, who seek to help us, are from Sirius and from the constellation of Pleiades; the bad aliens (who I know now are the Greys) are from the fourth planet of the star system Zeta Reticulum. She told us that she had been in contact with the Space Brothers and that they had some important information for us. When I asked her how she communicated with them, she told me that it was done psychically. This made sense to me as I remember clearly, when I saw the flying saucer over the Hollywood Hills, a distinct feeling of an unintelligible message being transmitted directly to my mind. Martha demonstrated that she could decipher these signals with automatic writing. She went into a sort of trance. Then, with a simple pencil and paper, she wrote down what the Space Brothers wanted to tell us. That night their announcement was: ‘We are coming soon to gather up the Chosen Ones. But take heed: those who instruct the people of earth in slaughter will soon meet a dark and awful justice.’

On the way home Larry didn’t say much. When I asked him what he thought about the Watchers, he said: ‘Well, they’re pretty good material for a story.’ He was working late that night. He often wrote through the hours of darkness and slept during the day. I had this strange dream that the whole city was in a panic about a great catastrophe that would occur any day now. I woke up and went to get a glass of water. The study door was open and I caught sight of Larry at his desk, pecking away at the typewriter. I crept up and stood in the doorway to watch him. He didn’t notice me there and in that moment I felt a grim knowledge creep over me. Larry’s face was blank, an empty mask of strange intent. I realised that what Larry did was automatic writing also. He claimed his work as his own but I knew then that he was being used to send messages just as Martha was. And I feared that it might not be the Space Brothers who had made contact with him. Maybe he was possessed by the star being Lucifer, or the Greys, or even the devil himself.

I went to the next meeting of the Watchers on my own. It was there that I met Dr Headley, another leading member of the group. He was a retired physician who had served as a medical missionary in Africa. He had studied theosophy and told us that all the world religions revealed sacred evidence of extraterrestrial life forms that had visited earth in ancient times. He led the meeting in a group meditation, imploring us to ‘tune in with each other’s frequencies of spirit’. Afterwards he passed around a letter that he had composed, addressed to President Eisenhower, calling upon him to make public the secret information that the air force had accumulated on flying saucers. We all signed it.

Then Martha announced that a special message was coming in from the Space Brothers. We all sat around her as she started writing. It took her over half an hour to finish the communication. She then handed it to Dr Headley and he read it out loud. The news was shocking. Los Angeles and the whole of the Western seaboard were going to be destroyed in a great flood and the lost continent of Mu would emerge from the Pacific once more. The Space Brothers were to send spaceships to save the ‘Chosen Ones’. I remembered the dream I had had about the commotion in LA and of a great disaster coming, and it all suddenly made sense. Martha told us that the Space Brothers would give us more information next week. The meeting broke up with everyone feeling shocked and a bit elated.

When I got home Larry asked me about my evening with the Watchers. At first I didn’t want to tell him about the prophecy. I was worried that he would think it was all nonsense. I also had this feeling that it was dangerous knowledge. I remembered the panic in my dream. But Larry was gently insistent and in the end I told him everything.

But I was right to be cautious. Soon there were complaints to the community church about the Watchers and it was decided that from then on we would meet at Martha’s house. All the group’s energy now went into preparing for our evacuation from the city in the flying saucers sent by the Space Brothers. At first there was a message that they would come on Christmas Day, but later Dr Headley amended that to 21 December. This was the date of the winter solstice, when the earth’s axis is tilted on its furthest point from the sun, creating the best conditions for spaceships to land. He also added that this was the day on which ‘the Essenes left their house and went looking for a new master and teacher. It was on the twenty-first, you know, not the twenty-fifth, that Jesus was born.’

This was only two weeks away! I didn’t know what to say to the studio. My shooting schedule had started to get hectic; there were big scenes coming up between Nancy and Adam Henderson. And Larry started to pester me about when we would visit his mother over Christmas. I told him: ‘How could any of this matter now?’ We had a row but after he had calmed down I told him that he could be one of the chosen ones too. You see, I really wanted to save him.

But he just got more and more angry with me. In the last few days I did everything I could to prepare us both for the coming of the Space Brothers, even though I was very busy recording A Family Practice. Dr Headley had told us to remove any metal from our clothing because he said that, while we were travelling in a flying saucer, contact with metal could produce severe burns. When Larry came home one night to find me cutting the zip fasteners out of all of his trousers, he went crazy. I tried to explain to him but this just made him worse. In the end I decided that I would stay at Martha’s until the solstice.

We all gathered together on the evening of that day. The final message had been sent through Martha, telling us that the flood would come on the twenty-second, and that we would all be picked up at the hour of midnight on its eve. There was a small crowd outside the house, some of them press reporters as there had been some reports of the Watchers’ prophecy in the newspapers and on the local radio stations. The phone kept ringing and Martha or Dr Headley had to answer all these questions from people about the coming flood.

Midnight came and nothing happened. We waited in silence for nearly an hour and then Martha stood up and said that another message was coming through. There had been a delay, it read. We must wait for a sign. As the hours passed some of the group got up and questioned Martha and Dr Headley. There were arguments and a few people left the house. Then, at six-thirty in the morning, Martha announced that something wonderful had happened.

She wrote out a communication from a supreme being called the Creator, of a higher power over the Space Brothers. He told us that the great cataclysm had been averted and earth had been spared by his intervention. The Creator and the Space Brothers thanked the Watchers for holding vigil and keeping faith. More information would follow but in the meantime the Creator and his astral brotherhood were sending a message of peace for all on planet earth. Martha went out to the few reporters that were left outside to give them this as a sort of press release. Everybody else started to get ready to go home. Some people were taking pictures. I didn’t want to be recognised so I put on a headscarf and dark glasses. Dr Headley gave me a ride back to my house.

Larry was in a silent rage when I got in. The studio and my agent had been on the phone all morning, wanting to know where I was. It was the day of the big scene between Nancy and Adam. I tried to explain to him the good news, that the whole city had been saved from disaster, but he just stared at me, dumbfounded. When I told him that this miracle proved the power of the Space Brothers and that the Watchers had been right, he lost his temper.

‘No, Sharleen, no!’ he shouted. ‘It proves the opposite, doesn’t it? It proves that the prophecy was wrong. And now you’ve lost your job with the studio and your agent says he never wants to see you again!’

Larry loved to think that he had been proved right about Martha’s prophecy. This sense of righteous anger was far more important to him than the possibility that the world had been saved from an apocalypse. But I had lost my job. So I promised Larry that I would find a new agent and not get too involved in anything like the Watchers for a while.

In the New Year we had some good news. A novelette of Larry’s that had run as a magazine series was reprinted in an Ace Double, a cheap paperback format where two stories are bound together. And, more encouragingly for him, a publishing house offered him a hardback deal for a novel he had submitted, with an option on a second. The Translucent Man got him a thousand-dollar advance and came out in June 1957. We still had to struggle that year but it wasn’t nearly as bad Larry made out. He was half in love with the idea of being the starving artist.

And I soon found myself another agent. For glamour photography at first, then later for these odd 8mm films. It would be me and another girl, both in corsets and suspenders. She would tie me up and gag me, then make out that she was spanking me hard with a hairbrush or a riding crop. In another one she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform and I was on an examination table. She would put on rubber gloves and do all kinds of physical tests on me. I found that I could act in these scenes really easily, as if I was meant to do it. I secretly felt that the devil was punishing me, laughing at me for being a bad actress. I kept the truth about this work from Larry. I told him that I had been making ‘training films’.

I didn’t want to disturb him. He was working so hard trying to finish his next novel, American Gnostic. He would shut himself away for long writing sessions, fuelled up on amphetamines. He could go three, even four days without sleep. Then he would collapse into bed for forty-eight hours or so, occasionally waking to eat something or scribble notes, then he would be up and at it again. I worried about his health but Larry kept going, writing obsessively, convinced that this thing was to be a major work for him. It was as if there was some evil force driving him on. I suspected even then that there was something bad about this book.

And I felt lonely. I even considered making contact with some of the Watchers again, just on a social basis. But the group had completely split up. Martha had gone to join a Scientology centre in Arizona. Dr Headley had sold his house and was travelling the country, spreading the word of the Space Brothers. He had joined something called the College of Universal Wisdom and had spoken at a flying saucer convention at Giant Rock, California.

There was a kind of panic that October, when the Russians launched Sputnik. Fear that the Reds had beaten us into space. Along with many others, we went out to watch the night sky and try to catch a glimpse of this artificial satellite. Larry seemed pleased that the Soviets had been the first to put a spacecraft in orbit. He told me that it felt good to see the masses shocked out of complacency. And as he gazed up into the heavens I saw something of the Larry I had known when we had first met: a childlike wonder at the universe. He had just finished the novel and was happy and calm for once.

I remember being more affected by the second launch a month later. Sputnik 2 was sent up with a dog inside. Laika was a stray mongrel bitch that had been found wandering the streets of Moscow. She was chosen for the space mission because of her resilience. The American press called her ‘Muttnik’, but I didn’t see the joke. I felt a strange kinship with this poor creature. When I thought of her trapped in that metal capsule, hurtling through the cosmos, I was overwhelmed by despair and emptiness. When Larry asked why I was crying I told him: ‘Laika. I’m like her. I’m a bitch in space.’

Larry decided that we should go away that Christmas. I think it was because he felt that the previous December had been so traumatic and he was determined to avoid any memory of it. He also had delivered his novel and had received part of the advance. So we spent two weeks in Honolulu. The time passed like a dream: warm sea and cold cocktails, the palm trees fracturing the sunlight. But I felt a static charge, a fuzzing in the head; the distant surf was like TV interference in the next room. Anxiety in paradise. A growing fear of going home.

I don’t know quite what made me so dread the publication of Larry’s next novel. Maybe it was because he didn’t talk to me about it while he was working on it. Larry would usually show me something of what he was writing or read out sections to me. But not this one. Oh no, this one was a big secret that he wanted to keep from me. And when it came out in the spring of 1958 I could see why.

American Gnostic is as confused and rambling as any other of Larry Zagorski’s works but there were whole chunks of it I got straightaway. The mystery of Seth Archer, the rocket scientist with occult knowledge assassinated in a laboratory explosion; Lucas D. Hinkel, science-fiction writer and founder of the now-established state religion, the Cult of Futurology; obvious ‘borrowings’ from his past. As usual it was hard to understand what Larry really believed in. He portrays John Six, a humanoid visitor from another planet, arriving at the Sunday Mass of a ‘flying saucer chapel’, using language and information similar to that of the Watcher meetings. It was as if all along he had known that the Space Brothers existed, but he could deal with it only on his own terms. Worst of all for me was the character of Bella Berkeley, a naive and credulous actress in a ‘holovision blip-opera’ who falls in love with Six. It seemed a malevolent transformation of my personality. Bella is a constant victim of cruel comedy, of morbid sexual fantasy. And I realised with horror that this was what Larry really thought of me.

Of course he insisted that it was fiction, that he had merely used some aspects of my life, that Bella wasn’t me at all. Writers think that they can write what they like and just by changing the names they can get away with it. And they actually think that they can control it all. Whatever you might think of Martha and her automatic writing, at least she was honest, admitting that she just wrote what came to her. As I said before, Larry stole. He took all these ideas and experiences and claimed it as his own work. His own fiction. His own great novel.

And we had terrible arguments. He shouted at me that he had to be free to write what he wanted. So I told him what this freedom had cost. I told him what I had done to pay the rent and the bills. I saw the look of disgust on his face.

I couldn’t bear to be with him any more after that. I told him I was leaving him but he said that I should stay. He would go and live with his mother until he found a new place. It was pathetic.

So he left. He took a few things, put them in his car and drove away.

I was alone.

I started to feel scared. Someone was watching the house.

Someone was listening in.

I took some of Larry’s pills that he had left behind. Nembutals. They helped me sleep but when I woke up it took me a long time to work out where I was. What time was it? The sun was going down. I had the vision of an inhuman horizon. A star descending on a distant planet. A dead planet.

I went for a drive downtown. Bright lights. Messages. A movie-house marquee spelling out: I Married a Monster from Outer Space. I had to get out of the city. I kept driving. I didn’t know where I was. There was a bright light in the sky. Following me. I had that same feeling that I’d had when I saw the saucer over the Hollywood Hills. A message beamed into my brain from the spaceship. Except that it wasn’t the Space Brothers. Oh no.

Oh no.

It was the Greys.

They had come for me. I drove faster but the light kept up with me. Hovering. Waiting. I knew then that I had to get out of the car. I swerved off the road and got out. I was in the desert, running, running. Then I fell. I blacked out.

I woke up three days later in Camarillo State Hospital. I was told that I had been found wandering by the side of the highway by a state trooper. I had been examined by a doctor and was diagnosed as suffering from ‘involuntary psychosis and paranoid-type schizophrenia’. I had been sedated and brought to Camarillo as a mentally ill person.

It was awful there. I was kept in a locked ward. They fed me with liquid medicine that made me feel like a zombie. They gave me electric shock treatment. They were trying to make me forget what had happened to me. I found out later that one of the doctors there was a memory expert and had been a chief psychiatrist at the Nuremberg trials where he tested these top Nazis who claimed to have clinical amnesia. He was part of MK ULTRA, a secret CIA research project into mind-control techniques. It all came out a couple of years ago, in 1975. A congressional committee revealed that the CIA had experimented on ordinary citizens in state institutions without their knowledge or consent. They used truth drugs and brainwashing techniques on them. I was one of these guinea pigs, I’m sure of it.

But they didn’t stop me from remembering what had happened to me before I had been found by the side of the road. You see, there was all this time unaccounted for, twenty-four hours or so. It came back to me slowly, like all these memories do. There was a beam of light. Then I was inside the alien ship. I was naked and on this sort of platform. All around me was a group of Greys. God, I was scared. The chief Grey came forward and spoke to me telepathically. He told me that they were going to do some tests. They put tubes in my mouth and in my ears. They put these suction cups over my breasts. They stuck probes in my vagina and in my anus. Then the chief Grey picked up a long needle and pierced me right through my navel. I screamed with pain, then he put his hand in front of my eyes. The pain went. I blacked out.

I was in Camarillo for three months until Larry came to take me home. I was released on ‘extended home convalescence’, given some drugs and a prescription to take to a doctor. When he drove me back Larry said: ‘I can’t go on, Sharleen. It’s all too much. I’m the one who should have been committed, not you.’ He was a weak and useless man in so many ways, but at least he was honest about it.

We finally divorced in 1960. By then Larry was a big success. The paperback edition of American Gnostic was a best-seller. I saw the cover everywhere. A mock-up of that famous painting of the farmer with a pitchfork, standing next to his spinster daughter, their heads replaced with those of aliens. So Larry could afford alimony. It took a while, though, before I got regular payments, so I had to find work to make ends meet.

I was in my late twenties and already getting a bit too old for the glamour game but I decided to use it while I still could. Besides, I knew little else.

I met Cato Johnson when I was working as a go-go dancer in a seedy club on Sunset Strip. He was a guitarist in the house band. Cato acted cool and confident when he was with the other guys but he was shy and nervous really. Sensitive. Beautiful. Such smooth skin that seemed to be pulled tight over his forehead and cheekbones. Bright, sad eyes and a thick pouting mouth that was always slightly open. I’ll admit that I was attracted to his blackness, but he was drawn to me in the same way. I’m so white, after all. It was an electrical charge, you know, magnetic. We were like opposite polarities. And it was a natural thing. I think nature wants us to mix, I really do.

But society always wants to keep us apart. And the atmosphere in LA at that time was pretty bad. So much race hatred below the surface. I hardly noticed this before I went with Cato. Things were supposed to be getting better but they weren’t. There was just more hypocrisy. That’s the problem with Los Angeles: the people there pretend to be sophisticated but they can be just as prejudiced as in the South. Especially the LAPD.

When Watts went up in flames in the riots of 1965, I feared for his life. And though Cato acted like he was some kind of soft-spoken tough guy, I knew that he was scared too. Scared of me. It’s a deep-down thing. Going with a white woman can give a black man a little bit of power but a hell of a lot of danger. And besides all that, he thought I was a touch crazy.

Getting pregnant by Cato was a big mistake. But it was the best mistake of my life. I never resented Cato going away, because he left behind such a wonderful gift. Martin Stirling Johnson was born on 13 June 1966. For the first time I had a real purpose to my life. A gorgeous baby boy to bring up. And having Martin to take care of took care of me too; it gave me a centre to my existence.

And I just about managed to make ends meet. The alimony cheques now came in regularly from Larry; he even offered to pay me a little extra. We got back in touch with each other and found that we could actually get on quite well as friends. He was living in this sort of commune in Venice Beach. Larry’s books had become a big hit with the hippies and he became one of them. He was well into his forties but the look kind of suited him, an ambling figure in beads and baggy clothes, long hair and a beard. He was with this young woman called Wanda. Half his age, yet he seemed the child of that relationship. Happy though. He wasn’t taking speed or downers any more; he was a lot calmer. He still smoked dope, though, and had been experimenting with LSD.

Larry loved Martin and he was very good with him. He confided in me that he was sure he couldn’t have kids of his own (something about side-effects from the mumps he’d had as a child). He asked me if I wanted to move into the house in Venice, saying it would be easier than bringing up a child on my own. But I couldn’t do that hippie thing. I mean, it works for guys because that style can suit any old slob but it’s not a very flattering look for women. It’s fine for the young chicks but I didn’t want to look like an old witch just yet.

You see, I never got back my figure after Martin was born and I put on a bit of weight. It was a relief, to tell you the truth. People didn’t look at me in that way any more. It made me feel much more relaxed about myself. So, no more glamour work. I certainly didn’t miss it much. When Martin was old enough for school I got a job cleaning houses and apartments. It was simple, easy work that I did part time.

Now I just had to get used to the looks I would get when I was out with my son. The cold stares that fall upon a white woman with a black child. I started to worry about the world he was growing up in. Poor Martin was only eight when we heard that his father had been shot dead by the police in Detroit. They said that Cato was part of a bank hold-up but I wasn’t sure about that. I think he was involved in something political. Muthaplane, the funk band he was in, recorded songs with secret messages in their lyrics, signals to a mothership from some distant planet.

I started to get scared again. I didn’t want the fear to get the better of me. I felt that if I didn’t find the right path, the devil might come for me once more. I had managed to keep one step ahead of him for a few years but now he was catching up with me again. Martin would soon be a teenager and I dreaded him getting into trouble and ending up like his father.

I was on medication for my nerves. I had tried all kinds of therapy to make sense of what had happened to me but nothing seemed to work. I was looking for something to believe in, a simple life, somewhere to settle down, to raise Martin and grow old in peace. I asked the heavens for guidance and I was shown the way.

A friend took me along to a Peoples Temple service at a big old church in Alvarado Street. I was never much one for church but there was so much joy and hope in that place, I was overwhelmed. And Martin loved it. He was singing along with the choir before long, being very musical just like his father. What really impressed me was the mix of peoples. The congregation was mostly black and coloured so they could never feel that they were a minority at the Peoples Temple. But there were plenty of white folks too. This was the sort of integration white liberals had been going on about for years but had never made happen. And Jim Jones, the leader, had this incredible aura, full of righteous energy. A handsome man with Native Indian features: high cheekbones, jet-black hair. All the young members of the Peoples Temple called him Dad. He wore electric-blue robes and sunglasses.

He and his wife Marceline had experiences I could share. They have what they call their ‘rainbow family’ with Korean and coloured children. They were the first white couple in the state of Indiana to adopt a black child. Marceline told me that she had been spat on in the street when she had carried him as a baby.

So after a while we got on a Peoples Temple bus and came to San Francisco. I’m glad to have left LA behind. I really do believe it’s where the devil lives. It’s certainly a city that promises heaven and gives you hell. Me and Martin are having a much better time up here. We spent a summer in the commune in Redwood Valley. It was pure joy to see my son run free in the countryside.

It’s 1977 now and I feel that we’re at the start of a new beginning. Martin has been listening to a lot of reggae recently and he tells me that there is a Rastafarian prophecy that great changes will come the year that the two sevens clash.

A spacecraft called Voyager has just been launched. It will visit the planets and eventually leave the solar system and in thousands and thousands of years’ time it may reach another star. On it is a long-playing record of pure gold that has music from earth: Beethoven, Mozart, Chuck Berry. It also has recorded voices in different languages sending greetings to whoever might be out there.

I like to think that my voice will float up through space into the heavens. That one day, a million years from now, somebody might hear this story and remember me.

But that is for the future. Right now we have great plans. A new community has been set up in Guyana, the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project. We’re calling it Jonestown and it will be a chance to make a utopia, to go back to Eden. Me and Martin are going to live there real soon.

Jim Jones is already there. I remember the last time I saw him preach, talking about the Cause and how we have to free ourselves from bondage. The choir was singing: Soon, yes, very soon, we are going to the Promised Land. Jim Jones was burning with a fierce light and calling out: ‘We can’t wait for it to come out of the sky! We’ve got to make heaven down here!’ He has this maniacal charisma. And I had a strange vision of his impish face transformed. The dark lenses of his shades like empty eye sockets, rounded by high Cherokee cheekbones and the bright white teeth in his wide mouth smiling like the skull. I saw the death’s head grinning at me, at the whole congregation. It should have been frightening but it wasn’t. I know now. And I fear no evil. Even if I cannot escape the devil, he cannot escape either. Angels bright or angels dark, all are messengers of God and the great astral purpose. Though the devil may will forever evil, he does forever good. I don’t have to fear him any more.