Peter smiled at people while I finished the fried ice cream myself.
“What do you think about cults?” I asked.
“I’m… uh… against them as a rule?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Why?” he asked.
“I think Ellie lives in one. I mean, Richard—the guy I had lunch with—he thinks Ellie lives in one.”
“Oh.”
“I always saw cults as some sort of bigger thing—like, you know, Jim Jones or Jonestown or something,” I said. I’d read all about Jim Jones in the eighth grade. He killed nearly a thousand people, but the media made us believe they all committed suicide. Jim Jones got the last laugh.
“Well, shit,” Peter said. “Doesn’t she live across the street? You’d know if it was like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. Yeah. I guess I would.”
When I said good-bye to Peter that day, I decided to treat him as if we’d know each other for a lifetime. He did too. He asked if I’d see him the next day. I told him I probably would, but if not, I’d call him. He smiled. I smiled. And then, on my way home, I really tried to fathom it. Jasmine Blue: cult leader. It didn’t seem plausible.
If Jasmine Blue Heffner believed a microwave oven was an atomic bomb, then I wondered what she would think of HC-110 developer or worse yet, photographic fixer with its 97% hydroquinone. I bet she’d think a darkroom was a Nazi gas chamber and I was a willing victim, walking in as if it was a shower, all the while holding my mother’s hand.
If Jasmine Blue gave naked pictures of herself to men, then how would she answer Darla’s final question?
Why do people take pictures?
Or, in this case, why do people take naked pictures?
Is it to fasten that moment in time? The moment when your thighs are still consumerist-perfect and your hair is consumerist-styled right and your body is just like all the bodies in the consumerist magazines people buy? Anyone who tried to convince me that Jasmine wasn’t a gorging consumerist on the inside from today onward wouldn’t succeed.
The woman was fat with consumerism.
And nobody in that commune knew it.
Richard of the USS Pledge was right—maybe the commune was a cult in a way. Jasmine controlled when the kids would graduate. She controlled when people did anything. Star parties. Day trips. Local protests. But I didn’t see her going all doomsday like Jim Jones at Jonestown. I didn’t see her killing anyone. I didn’t see her using mind control or making anyone miserable.
Jasmine needed to be liked. That’s all. And who doesn’t need to be liked, right?