pop culture and politics for the new outcasts

The Kerista Town and Country Club

Now in his eighties, this former Jewish kid from Brooklyn came of age as the Depression was ending and the war in Europe was spreading. While serving in the Air Force during World War II, Jud got into swinging. He says he loved sharing his wives (he was married four times), and when he returned to New York after the war with a sizable inheritance in his pocket he plunged into an upscale swingers scene full of socialites and showbiz types. During the late 1940s Jud got his first taste of the life he spent the rest of his days attempting to recreate in various forms. He joined a group that called itself the Kerista Town and Country Club, "full of movie stars, producers, and wealthy guys with beautiful apartments."

The group would get together on Friday nights in somebody's Upper East Side penthouse. At ten o'clock, Jud remembers, "We'd lock the doors, cook a wonderful meal, listen to some of the musicians play, and take off our clothes." The best part wasn't the sex. It was the companionship. Jud adored being surrounded by glamor and talent, beautiful "liberated women" and powerful men, people who could afford to spend all weekend talking philosophy. Perhaps this is why Jud used the name "Kerista" to describe every commune he created thereafter.

During the mid-50s, Jud became fascinated by the burgeoning Beatnik movement. He "dropped out," moved to Italy, and started taking a lot of drugs. But he was struggling with more than how to buck the establishment. "I was in the Philippines during the war, and I was responsible for a lot of killing. A lot," he says. "I tried to block it out, but I couldn't." He was plagued by terrifying flashbacks, nightmares, and insomnia. Then, in 1956, Jud had an experience that he sometimes calls a breakdown, and sometimes a revelation. While reading the Koran and smoking pot, he heard a chorus of male voices in his head telling him that he would be the leader of the next great religion. He still takes those voices very seriously, although he never heard from them again.

When Jud returned to the States, he created a short-lived commune in New York called Kerista. Like the version of Kerista which lasted for 21 years in San Francisco, the New York commune was based on free love and shared resources. The hipsters who populated it inspired countercultural writer Robert Anton Wilson to immortalize them in a 1965 article that spirals in a pot-induced haze around their dingy apartments in the Village. Wilson, like many observers of the Keristan community model, is fascinated by Jud's ever-expanding list of rules that every member of the group must follow. Jud may be a Beatnik, but his mind cannot unstick itself from the Air Force: the guy believes in order, and will brook no disobedience.

And yet his strict principles are hardly militaristic in flavor - they're full of exhortations to be "honest," "polite," "sensitive," "funky," and "non-sexist." Although adhering to Jud's principles was an often-painful process, Eve believes they're what held the Haight-Ashbury Keristans together long after other local communes fell apart.

We Come Bearing Apples

Money was handled as collectively as possible. Each Keristan had his or her own bank account, but in general expenses were paid out of a communal checking account for food, housing, and incidentals. Most of the Keristans worked in the commune's own businesses; the few "hunter-gatherers" like Luv who had outside jobs happily gave large chunks of their salaries to the group. "I felt great that the majority of my check went to the commune fund," says Luv. "I thought that everybody was pulling their own weight, working on publications and the cleaning business. I thought it all evened out." When somebody new joined Kerista, the group took careful inventory of all the money and other items he or she brought in - people always left with everything they had come with. People who joined with no money were given $600.

Unlike many communes of the era, including the kibbutzes that Jud admired, Kerista always embraced capitalism. "We were trading just like everybody else," says Eva Way. "Instead of doing it to support a family, we were doing it to support a community and tribe. Nobody saw our business as subversive."

With the money they made, the Keristans were able to fund their creative projects, throw parties, and go on frequent group vacations. There were always cool people around their flats to do things with - nobody ever lacked a big posse of friends who were ready to go dancing, catch a movie, or just sit around and talk about the meaning of life over dinner. It was like the best parts of family life had been rolled up together with the best parts of romance and friendship. Everybody shared the burdens of creating a decent living for themselves, and they did it out of a sense of fun and adventure rather than duty.

Kerista's modest entrepreneurial ventures went into high gear in the mid-1980s. Wild with excitement, Jud told the family that he had a new plan for their future - the commune would remake itself as a kind of Utopian marketing firm. They would earn as much money as they could and put it into exporting their way of life to people all over the world. With extra cash and a more corporate spirit, they could change society even more quickly than they had planned.

How would they do it? Apple computers.

At the time Jud announced the group's new direction, the family was already enchanted with Apples. Eve used them for graphic design and layout for their newsletters. Luv was using them for his financial spreadsheets. Other people just used them for games.

Leander Kahney, author of The Cult of Mac, says it make sense that the group gravitated to Apples, which were marketed as the the countercultural alternative to products from uptight IBM. Apple's power as a company was expanding just as the Keristans decided to go into the computer business. "They rode [Apple's] popularity into the stratosophere," says Kahney. "They became the biggest computer business in Northern California."

Several Keristans began doing computer-related work out of a storefront on Frederick Street that they called "Utopian Technology." A Keristan named Larry wrote a contact management system for them, which they sold bundled together with Apples in order to become what was called a value-added reseller. Eventually, Eva Way brainstormed a plan to get Apple's then-CEO John Scully to turn them into an Apple dealership. She walked straight up to him after he'd given a keynote at a conference and said, "Hey, if you want to promote women in your business, why don't you help us become the first women-owned dealership in the region?" Within weeks, they'd been granted dealership status, and soon had service contracts with several extremely large corporate customers.

What turned their small business into a 3-million-dollar-a-year operation was the Keristans' flair for educating people. They never set up computers for a customer without tutoring each employee for at least three hours in how to use them. "We'd send our people in to deliver computers, and they were all cute hippies," Luv recalls. "Word spread like wildfire about this company called Abacus - it was great viral marketing." Formerly a gardening and housecleaning company run by cultural rebels, Abacus became one of the top 20 Apple dealerships in the nation.

Their high tech business, so rare among hippie communes, also revealed something even more unusual about Kerista: women were given as much authority as men. Although men helped run Abacus, it was owned and steered by women. And everyone knew that Eva Way was a big part of their financial success. This respect for women spilled over into other parts of their daily lives. Men were expected to cook for themselves, and to participate in childcare as much as the women were. (The Keristans had two children, and occasionally other kids visited.) When the family decided that two children were enough, the men made the unusual decision to take responsibility for birth control and got vasectomies. After a certain point, men couldn't join Kerista unless they had had a vasectomy.

Eva Way says she and many of the other women took 1980s rock icon Joan Jett as their female role model - Jett was tough, sexy and took shit from nobody. "She represented freedom and expressing yourself," says Eva Way, who ran the Haight-Ashbury Joan Jett fan club. But Jett's appeal wasn't just as a kind of accidental feminist. She also represented a new, more exciting kind of popular culture. "By that time, we had blue hair and stuff," Eva Way laughs. "We were sick of hippie bullshit and understood punk. You can't stay stuck in the 70s forever."

Next: Cult of the Family

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