The way in never looks like a trap.

Within five minutes, he'd convinced me I needed another shower.

Santa Monica, 1984. Frederick has a three o'clock meeting with Sylvester Stallone, and has decided the new kid needs to shower first.

I undressed. Pulled back the shower curtain.Two inches of water sat in the bottom of the tub.Brownish. With green leafy stuff floating in it."Uh, Frederick? The tub's backed up. And the water's dirty.""Oh, don't mind that. It's just vegetables, dear."He explained. The pure diet. The powerful tea. His body was so clean that what came out was just vegetables. Nothing to worry about. Perfectly safe.And then he reminded me we had to hurry. Lord Stallone was waiting.
I got in the tub.I stood in Frederick's "vegetable water" and took a shower I didn't need.

That was the second time Dar Dixon met Frederick von Mierers. The first was a week earlier, in late 1984, at a Hare Krishna restaurant on the coast highway in Leucadia, California, where Dar was prepping the lunch buffet and Frederick walked in with an astrologer's ephemeris. Frederick called himself a walk-in: an alien soul from Arcturus, arrived in a borrowed body to guide the chosen through the coming pole shift and train them as Leaders of the New Age. He was working a bestselling author into writing chapters about him, with a gemstone necklace in the mail. It worked. He had two apartments in Manhattan, then six, and a following. His real name was Fred Meyers, from Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn.Dar was twenty-two. Curious, not desperate. He had already walked away from the Hare Krishnas that month because he could smell the con on them. He could not smell it on Frederick. Ten days before Christmas he got on a plane to New York with two suitcases and no money.

"I told myself I was just curious. The truth? I was already gone."

What's in the book

The Tea, the Diet, the Gems.

A con laid out from the inside, by someone who drank the tea for years and helped sell the stones.

The South Bronx at twenty-two.

Four dollars, a chrome barrel in his face eleven minutes off the train, and five years of eighteen-hour days for which he was never paid a dollar. They called it karma yoga.

He was warned.

A friend on a street corner at ten at night. A Ford model who lost eighty thousand dollars. His mother, through her teeth, at the airport gate. Then the word itself, in print, in a 7-Eleven. What it takes for a warning to land, and why landing isn't the same as leaving.

He went back.

Four years after Frederick was dead, into what the group had become in the North Carolina mountains: sovereign citizens, paper license plates, a traffic stop, a gun on a gravel driveway.

Marianne.

A blind woman in Massachusetts the military had tested as a remote viewer. She would not take a penny. She worked on him for twenty years.

Daddy and Uncle Martin.

Two hundred photographs on a bungalow floor in Beverly Glen, and the family that took him in while he was still pulling Frederick out of his head.

The same animal.

Why a man who once filed sovereign-citizen paperwork against a sitting governor recognized January 6 on sight, and says so out loud.

Who this is for

You watched Bring Me The Beauties and want the account three episodes could only begin to tell, from someone who was in the loft.You have been inside something that controlled you: a group, a relationship, a workplace, a family. You may not have called it a cult. You will recognize the mechanics.You read Educated, Bounded Choice, or Cultish and want the view from inside rather than the analysis from outside.

From the Book

It was night. The blinds were closed and the lights were down and the TV was dark. We were just talking. Unpacking things.Then: "You know, I've been reading these books. There's this one book, Combating Cult Mind Control. If you change his story, I was reading through it, if you just change the names and story with Eternal Values and Frederick, it's identical, Dar."Hoyt said it: "Dude, I think we were in a cult."Just remember: couldn't hear his voice anymore. Could see his lips moving. But the sound cut out completely, like someone pulled the plug on the world.Then everything disappeared.Not tunnel vision. Not darkness. Not closing in.Everything just gone.No apartment. No Hoyt. No couch. No chair I was sitting in. No walls. No carpet. No dining room behind me.No me.Just white. Endless. Empty. Weightless void stretching in every direction with no edges, no horizon, no up, no down. Like standing in the middle of nothing wearing nothing being nothing.Hollow.No feeling. No sensation. No body to feel it in.Could have been five seconds. Could have been eternity.No way to measure time when there's nothing to measure it against.Then: slow. So slow. Sound coming back but wrong.Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.Charlie Brown teacher voice from those Peanuts TV shows, coming from somewhere I couldn't locate because there was no location, no direction, just sound appearing in the void.Then: words. English. Familiar shapes. Still didn't make sense but I recognized them now as language, as something I should understand even though I didn't.Then: furniture. Carpet. Walls. The dining room materializing behind me like it had been there all along and I just hadn't been able to see it.The chair under me. Weight returning to my body. Hoyt on the couch eight feet away. His mouth still moving.The apartment assembling itself around me piece by piece until finally I was back inside it, back inside myself, back inside whatever this was supposed to be.I'd been told I was in a cult several times. Jacki Adams mentioned it. John Andreadis mentioned it. My ex-wife mentioned it. My mother called him a charlatan.But those words had landed on a different person.

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Story Axis Collective Inc · Los Angeles