Roads Not Taken or How I (Almost) Got Recruited by a Cult
Opportunities lurked around every corner in New York City during 1981
Upon arriving in Manhattan, I checked in at The Chemists Club in Midtown. A sort of hostel for businessmen and scientists, The Chemists Club’s members included my father. James M. Coleman was a chemical engineer who spent much of his career selling sugar-refining centrifugals for an Ohio-based manufacturer. He spanned the globe for his job; from the Caribbean to the Philippines, central Iowa to southern Africa — wherever sugarcane was planted and/or processed. In New York City, he taxied over to the Domino Sugar plant in then-risky Red Hook, Brooklyn (finding a willing cab was never easy), eventually returning to midtown Manhattan for a restaurant meal and good night’s sleep at The Chemists Club. When I left Cincinnati for New York in February 1981, with a headful of writerly dreams, he generously fronted me a room there, though not indefinitely. My younger brother and sister were both in college at the time: finances were tight for our family of five. In ten days I needed to find gainful employment as well as a home of my own.
The Chemists Club stood out on a brusque and efficient block between Madison and Park Avenues. It was about ten stories tall but the effect was grand: columns in front, marble in the lobby. The modest wood-paneled rooms were handsome but small, while the spartan communal bathroom and showers on each floor turned out to be an omen of future accommodations.
Lurking in the vicinity of Grand Central Station, nestled between dirty grey skyscrapers, this stretch of 41st Street lingered in twilight all day long, even on the sunniest late winter afternoons. The neighboring storefronts were claimed by retail outlets servicing the labor force from the towers stacked above: dusty shoe repair shops and dry cleaners, bustling diners and delis.
I couldn’t help noticing on my first evening in town that the sidewalks emptied — same as in Peoria — not long after the workday ended. It makes perfect sense, upon reflection, but back then this sudden retreat into quietude threw me for a loop. Overall, in those early days, the stark urban ambience distorted my senses like a drug; the effect was hallucinatory, like I’d been cast in a moody film noir. Coming off the train at Penn Station, I simultaneously stepped into my future and stumbled into the cinematic past. Flashes of Technicolor inspiration broke through the black-and-white city shadows. Right away the graphic reality of Manhattan stimulated my imagination. And in the gloom I caught glimpses of the potential for self-invention and high adventure that loitered amid the ruins of this troubled metropolis.
People who didn’t live there perceived New York City as a fantastically dangerous place in the Seventies and Eighties. New York was commonly understood by the rest of the country to be the wide-open bazaar for muggers, junkies, gangsters, conmen, pimps, whores and hustlers.
But another collective belief — or conceit — about New York persisted throughout the city’s decline. Perhaps it still exists today, albeit for a privileged few. This popular myth lured hundreds if not thousands of young people to the city during the waning years of the last century. It was the promise (if not the actual existence) of endless possibilities.
There were rumors of buried treasure hidden beneath the city’s bad reputation during the Seventies and Eighties. Young prospectors arrived and unearthed a new identity for themselves in myriad ways. You could assemble a fresh art form from the detritus; make music out of the noise in the street. You could also make a whole lot of money in all kinds of arcane ways. (You could, I’m still working on that one.) And if you were lucky like I was, the greatest inspirations you found were the people you met.
***
I’ve been fascinated by cults since the late Seventies. My college years coincided with the heyday of these new religious movements and their charismatic leaders. Campuses were prime recruiting ground for L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology and Reverend Moon’s Unification Church as well dozens of other lesser-known (but no less infamous) groups. One of my first impressions of Ann Arbor in 1976 was the outdoor Hare Krishna soup kitchen, where shaved-head devotees in flowing robes served macrobiotic gruel to Sixties leftovers and scraggly street people. While I was co-arts editor at The Michigan Daily during 1980, the student paper ran an expose about a new campus organization, a politically conservative outfit called CARP. (Another omen.) The Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles turned out to be a semi-secret arm of the Unification Church — a Moonie front.
To me, the cult movement’s heyday, extending from the Manson murders in 1969 to the Jonestown suicides in 1978, represented the bleak legacy of the hippie dream, an unacknowledged consequence of the counterculture. Social and political upheavals, distrust of authority, not to mention widespread drug use: all these forces colluded in the creation of a new congregation: post-adolescent searchers for spiritual inspiration, and leadership. Thousands of young people yearned for meaning in their own lives, while also feeling an inchoate need to belong, to be a part of something larger than themselves. Educated enough to be credulous, these secular postulants also possessed a gaping internal void, a hole that was easily filled by pseudo-wisdom and psychological manipulation. Not that I felt any such need. In Ann Arbor anyway, my interest in and experience of cults was purely subjective — academic. Another odd sub-culture to contemplate.
Flash forward to February 1981. My third or fourth full day in New York City. In between exploratory visits to a couple of employment agencies, I stopped in a coffee shop. As I laid waste to a hamburger deluxe, the young woman next to me politely interrupted my noisy chewing.
“Excuse me but do I know you from somewhere? Haven’t We Met Before?”
Did I hear right? She actually uttered that old chestnut?
“Well, I doubt we’ve met before because I just moved here from the Midwest.”
“Oh! Where in the Midwest?”
“Uh, Ohio is where I grew up but I just got out of college in Michigan.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“The University of…Michigan, that is.”
“Oh! That’s where I went too.”
Of course her alleged Midwest connection should’ve sounded more convenient than convincing. Careless in my over-confidence, I let the conversation continue despite any half-realized qualms. In retrospect, I was already warming to my new role as wide-eyed rube in the big city.
“What Did You Major In?”
Oh My God there’s no escaping this one, I groaned inwardly.
“More or less, journalism. Actually I majored in psychology but I wrote for the school newspaper, and I was an editor my senior year, so I’d like to get a job of some kind in publishing.”
“Oh! I know some people who work for a newspaper right here in New York City. They’re always looking to hire new people, I could put you in touch with them.”
Since my weirdo early-warning system had yet to be activated, I supplied The Chemists Club’s phone number. She reciprocated the gesture with a business card. Kristine Morgan, let’s call her, employed by an official-sounding organization with a fuzzy altruistic title. Something along the lines of World Peace Foundation or Universal Brotherhood Institute, with an address on West 43rd Street. With her card in my possession and the hamburger platter demolished, I politely said thanks and goodbye.
Two days later, as I lumbered through the Chemists Club lobby toward the stairs, the man in a rumpled uniform behind the front desk made a beckoning gesture, gingerly lifting a piece of paper as if it was dripping something. My first phone message! Upstairs, I retrieved an inky business card from my hand-me-down briefcase and warily took note of Kristine Morgan’s address. A consultation with the Manhattan phone directory downstairs in the lobby confirmed my better-late-than-never suspicion — it was the same address as the headquarters of the Unification Church. I never called her back.
