Soulmates

by Jessica Grose

  Sylvia said that Lo had been with Yoni since the seventies, and Lo told me she’d been in the spiritual business for forty years. After that I had a long blank space before Yoni’s resurgence in the nineties. I did a little research, cross-referenced with Ethan’s book, and found that Enlightened LLC was incorporated in 1996, and that they leased the location of the Urban Ashram in 1998. The Vikalpa commune that Amaya told Ethan about, that he talked about in his book, was purchased through the LLC in 1997, and sold in 2002 for a tidy profit. I tried researching Yoni under his real name, John Brooks, to see if he really had made his money through smart tech investing. But his name was way too common to net me any quick results, and it was possible he traded through some other entity I didn’t even know about.

  I tried deep Googling Yoni again, as I had right after I found out about Ethan’s death. Ethan’s and Amaya’s demise didn’t seem to get much national traction after that big story I saw on the cover of the New York Post. There were a few more follow-up articles in the local papers about the investigation, but because there wasn’t any new or salacious information, the updates in the New Mexico press were brief.

  I pushed past those pages, and then the pages of home birthing and vagina power results, and did find some commentary about Yoni’s spiritual leadership. But none that was nearly as revealing as Ethan’s book. All I could find were glowing reviews of experiences at the Urban Ashram and one partial PDF of the pamphlet that Sylvia had me read at the retreat. Someone must have scanned it—incompetently—and put it online. You could barely make out the text on many of the pages, and the last half was cut off.

  There had to be deeper research I could do. I would have grimaced out loud in frustration, but I didn’t want Katie to hear me and come rushing in, ever eager to help. The last time I had done serious historical research on anything was in law school, but back then I had access to an endless array of academic journals and primary sources.

  Like Beth still did.

  I sighed deeply and picked up my phone. I knew she was going to give me a world of shit for not calling her over the past week.

  She picked up immediately. “Goddammit, Dana. Why haven’t you been returning my calls?”

  “Well, hi, Bethy. How are you?”

  “Seriously, Dana. What happened in New Mexico?” The anger in Beth’s voice turned to concern.

  I hesitated. I couldn’t tell her everything, but I didn’t need to totally ice her out, either. “It was actually fine. More than fine; positive. I went to see the sheriff investigating Ethan’s case, and I think I really helped him. Also, I got a break from New York and took a bunch of yoga classes. That was really nice for me.”

  Beth hesitated a moment before saying, “I’m glad. So does this mean you got closure? Can you move on from this part of your life that is so, so over?”

  “Well, that’s part of what I’m calling you about. Could I borrow your password for JSTOR and the other primary source sites you use? I just need to figure out a few more things about the guy Ethan followed to New Mexico, Yoni. The sheriff’s department out in Bumblefuck is woefully underfunded, and they don’t even have the resources to do this kind of search. I really want to help them.”

  “You’re using that voice,” Beth said, clearly irritated.

  “What voice?” I snapped back.

  “The same voice you used when we were kids and you were trying to convince me to trade my Malibu Barbie for a piece of ‘magic paper.’”

  I remembered that. The paper in question had been a piece of purple construction paper with the words MAGIC PAPER! scrawled on it in metallic silver. Beth had happily traded me the Barbie. Ten minutes later she’d realized the error of her ways, sat down, and cried. “This is different, Beth. This is a real thing,” I said quietly.

  Beth sighed. “I think they’re more similar than you realize. But I’ll give you the password, because I love you, and because I know you won’t leave me alone until you get it. Just please, please remember to take care of yourself.”

  I logged into Beth’s accounts and started going through the databases of newspapers and magazines. At first everything I found was info I already knew about: Yoni’s big move to the Zuni Retreat in New Mexico, which was covered in various yoga and meditation journals; old reviews of the Urban Ashram when it had first opened in New York, in Time Out. I found an aside about Yoni in an academic article from the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, but it didn’t give me anything to work with.

  Buried on the hundredth page of database results, I found a headline from the Greenwich Rag, dated 1982: IS LAMA YONI A MONSTER OR A MESSIAH? The subhead read The most popular yoga guru below 14th Street has a sinister past. My heart started racing. There was a short description of the Greenwich Rag in the database: it was an underground newspaper that published in downtown New York from 1959 to 1987. I clicked on the headline and read on.

  Is Lama Yoni a Monster or a Messiah?

  The most popular yoga guru below 14th Street has a sinister past.

  BY CLARK LINDSAY

  Myra Collins was just your typical art history graduate. After matriculating from Barnard last year with no particular plan except a vague desire to eventually find a husband and have kids, she fell into work as a gallery receptionist. “My life had no purpose,” Collins, 23, said. “Until my girlfriend took me to one of Lama Yoni’s yoga classes at the Jane Street Ashram.” By her own description, Lama Yoni changed her life. She quit her job, changed her name to Luna, traded her trousers for a diaphanous robe, and went to live with Yoni and several other acolytes in a dilapidated brownstone on Jane Street.

  The Jane Street Ashram is an exercise in complete communal living. Every morning its residents—except for Lama Yoni—wake up at first light for a sunrise round of sun salutations. They spend their days studying Lama Yoni’s texts, listening to his lectures, and running a macrobiotic restaurant on the parlor floor of the building. That’s where I met Ms. Collins, who was my server. “I always thought I wanted to be liberated from the kitchen,” Collins said as she set down a plate of millet. “I didn’t want to turn into my mother. But Lama Yoni has shown me that nourishing people doesn’t have to be a gendered task, and that sustaining life is the greatest gift you can give to the world.”

  Luna is slender and lanky, with flowing dark hair, bright blue eyes and a creamy complexion. When you learn about Yoni’s past, her beauty is not surprising. In fact, all of the denizens of the Jane Street Ashram are dewy and fresh-faced young women. They bow to you when they answer the door and sit in submissive silence when the Lama speaks. Yoni’s speech—which I have heard at his open yoga classes—is remarkable in its opacity. He talks in riddle-like parables about barnyard animals, but the underlying message of everything he says is the same: only the strong survive.

  Yoni, born John Brooks, knows something about surviving. He came from a broken home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. His father, an out-of-work mechanic and small-time crook, left the family when the boy was two. His mother worked as a waitress until she remarried a local fire-and-brimstone preacher named Elmer Brooks, who legally adopted John. According to locals who knew Brooks as a child, Elmer was equal parts cruelty and charisma. “He did not spare the rod,” one school chum of John Brooks said. “Johnny would come to school with bruises all the time. Once, he came in with a broken arm. He said he fell down the stairs, but it was right after he was caught stealing penny candies from the store, so everyone knew Elmer had given him the whooping of his life.”

  But Elmer was also an electrifying preacher, and his sermons drew hundreds of followers. He stood out from the other local preachers, who subscribed to a more forgiving theology. Elmer’s sermons were about the evils of fornication and drinking, like everyone else’s. But, understanding a primal thirst for bloodlust, he preached about the punishments that would be meted out by a righteous God: lakes of fire and screaming penitents. John listened to these sermons in his Sunday best, and bided his time with petty thievery a
nd other victimless criminal mischief until he was 18 and could hitch a ride out of his hometown.

  Like many other Americans seeking a new life, John Brooks went west. It was 1965, and San Francisco’s counterculture was just starting to bloom. It’s unclear what happened to Brooks over the next two years. There is no record of him getting into trouble with the law, and none of his peers from that time could be found. The next time Brooks surfaced was in 1967. He had a new look—long, flowing robes to match his long, flowing hair and beard—a new name, Aries; and a new occupation: street preacher. He was not alone in this occupation; at that time, you could find a bearded man on any corner in the Haight preaching peace, free love, and brotherhood.

  But Brooks stood out in this morass. He had been paying attention to his adoptive father’s appeal. He had that same charisma, and he was savvy enough to realize he had to distinguish himself. Like Elmer, he knew his audience. But this audience did not want darkness, they wanted light. And Brooks realized that although they claimed to want freedom from capitalism, they were greedy in their hearts. So he combined peace, free love, and brotherhood with the promise of money. He told his followers that if they tithed him 10 percent of their assets, riches—spiritual and worldly—would come back to them tenfold.

  That Brooks is also unusually good-looking explains why his first followers were the beautiful young female runaways who littered San Francisco then. They were drawn to the unthreatening matinee idol face beneath that beard, and he offered them a sense of belonging and protection that they deeply needed. These girls, as young as 14 and 15, left conservative towns and their disapproving daddies behind. But they were still unformed as pancake batter, and so they were the perfect target for Brooks.

  “Aries went after the girls who were bent, but not completely messed up,” one ex-follower of Brooks, whom I will call Rumi, told me. “Fully damaged was too crazy, too unpredictable. But bent was easier to control.” In just a few short months, Brooks had a pack of young women who sat at his feet and hung on all his words. He convinced them that their major contribution to his community would be to bring more people into his fold. And the best asset they had to offer the universe was their nubile sexuality. Brooks sent them out on “fishing” missions, using the pretty girls as bait to draw in male followers.

  Rumi was among the first men caught on the fishing missions. “I went for the girls at first,” Rumi said, “but I was really jiving on what Aries was preaching. I was a little lost myself. I just got out of the army and I didn’t know what I was going to do. This gave me something to do.” The girls kept bringing in more clueless men, fellow lost souls who were bumming around San Francisco doing odd jobs. By 1972, the Aries faithful had swelled to nearly 1,000 people, some more devout than others. Aries called them his children.

  Aries’ Children would have gone on living in San Francisco indefinitely, but that year one of Brooks’s first teen followers ran back to her family in Orange County. She told her parents just the barest details of what happened with Aries, and her father marched up to the San Francisco Police Department and filed statutory rape charges against John Brooks. Instead of facing the charges, Brooks, who by this time had raised nearly $500,000 tithing his followers, bought a parcel of land in Mendocino and took 100 of his most fervent acolytes with him.

  After a few years in isolation at the Mendocino compound, Aries began to get paranoid. “By the midseventies he was taking a lot of speed,” said Rumi, who was in Brooks’s inner circle by then. “And he started to have visions. They were always about us being persecuted for our beliefs. That’s when he formed the watch.” The watch was a group of the fittest men among Aries’ Children. They would patrol the borders of the compound, making sure none of the other young women ran back to their families to report on Aries.

  Rumi is ashamed that he participated in the watch. “What can I say?” he said. “I was swept up in the potential of the movement. I was a true believer.” Until he wasn’t. One night when he was alone on duty, he caught a young female follower trying to leave the compound.

  “This girl was always so devoted to Aries. She was one of his favorites. He loved blondes. So I was surprised to see her face when I shined a flashlight on it,” Rumi told me. The girl told him that while her sex with Aries and the other men she fished had started out consensually, she didn’t want to do it anymore. “She was so young still,” Rumi said wistfully. “She realized she didn’t feel good giving her body up like that.” And that’s when Aries turned on her. “She said he raped her, and told her that unless she wanted to become an untouchable in the community, she would keep having sex with him.”

  The girl was terrified. After hearing her story, Rumi let her go. Though he denied seeing her the next morning, he was nevertheless punished because he was the one on watch when she got away. Aries wouldn’t allow anyone to look Rumi in the eye until the new moon appeared—nearly a month’s time. He never found out if he would have eventually been forgiven; he slipped out one night himself.

  The young woman pressed rape charges in Mendocino County in October 1978. Because of the nature of the crime against her, we will not use her name in this piece. According to another ex-follower of Yoni’s, this woman also carried a secret with her when she left: she was pregnant with Yoni’s child. The woman could not be found for comment.

  By December of 1978, the Mendocino compound had disbanded, and Aries disappeared. After a lost six months, he resurfaced as Lama Yoni in New York in the summer of 1979.

  I called John Brooks several times to comment on this story. Through his lawyer, David Rappaport, he declined to speak to me. Rappaport offered the following statement: “Lama Yoni refuses to dignify the ravings of a disgruntled former friend with any response. The allegations of this ‘Rumi’ person are risible and borderline libelous. If you print any of this, you will be hearing from my office presently.”

  Curious things started happening to me after I received that first message from Yoni’s lawyer. I started getting mysterious phone calls at home and at the office, in which no one would be at the other end of the line. I found a stack of American Funeral magazines on the stoop outside my apartment. Finally, my daughter’s kitten, Mr. Whiskers, disappeared from our fire escape. That’s when I started to get a little scared. Every time I left my office on reporting business, I felt like someone was following me. My wife was terrified, and for a moment I considered spiking the story.

  But I couldn’t sit back and let anyone else’s daughter follow John Brooks without knowing the truth. I asked Myra Collins what her parents thought about her life choices. “My parents are no longer a part of my natural universe,” Myra said. “They had too many inane questions about my life. And Lama Yoni says inane questions are for inane people who don’t understand the importance of the work we do.” I tried to ask her what kinds of questions her family had, but she told me she had to attend to another customer. She bowed deeply to me and walked away.

  When I finished reading I felt like I was covered in a film of grease. I stood up from my desk and started pacing. How had Yoni been able to start a popular ashram out in the open after something like this had been published? Had he been able to bury the coverage? I supposed it was a lot easier to run away from your past before everything was published on the Internet.

  Yoni was also incredibly savvy. He seemed to understand that yoga was a trend that swept the country in the 1990s and 2000s, and he had emphasized the yoga and health food, while keeping the underage women and secret sex games as a clandestine bonus. Lots of people went to his studio and to his retreat and just did yoga, as I did. While some more devoted yoga practitioners, like Sylvia and her friends, also read Yoni’s pamphlets, it sounded like they weren’t privy to anything like what Ethan had described in his book, or like what was described in the Greenwich Rag. But at least what was going on with Ethan and Amaya was basically consensual. What Yoni—or Aries, I guess—did in the ’60s and ’70s was unconscionable.

  I sat back down a
gain. My mind worked methodically, and I needed to finish my timeline before I did anything else. I filled in everything I learned from the Greenwich Rag article, which covered the ’70s and ’80s. Then I jumped back to the ’00s—when Ethan left me, and the Zuni Retreat opened. I looked up all of Ethan and Amaya’s YouTube videos to see when they had been posted. The last one was from a year ago. I put that date down, then I added the years Ethan had been teaching at Zuni. I thought about the “dangerous things” Sylvia’s friend Raina said Ethan and Amaya were allegedly doing at the time, and wished I had been more aggressive in questioning Sylvia and her pals.

  The last thing I put down before Ethan’s and Amaya’s deaths was Ethan’s visit to his dad, which the sheriff had said happened just a few months before his death. I looked at the evidence gathered up before me in my neat, even handwriting, and suddenly it became clear to me: I needed to talk to Ray.

  “Get me Ray Powell of Livingston, Montana, on the phone,” I said to Katie over the intercom about an hour later.

  “Can I tell him what this is regarding?”

  “No!” I snapped, and then felt guilty. “Sorry, no. You don’t need to. He’ll know what it’s about when you tell him that it’s Dana Morrison on the phone.”

  “Sure thing,” she said calmly, putting me on hold. I checked my e-mail six times. I went back and skimmed the Greenwich Rag article again. I looked at my phone to see if any messages had popped up from Beth. I tried to occupy the interminable anxious space until I heard Katie’s voice. “I’ve got Mr. Powell for you,” she said confidently. She really was a very good assistant.

  “Yello?” Ray said. He sounded just like he always did. That he hadn’t changed when everything else around me had was a relief.

  “Ray? It’s Dana. I’m so, so sorry about Ethan.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. I was about to ask if Ray was still there when he said, “It’s a very sad thing.”