Free Jesus Freaks by Don Lattin Page A

she recalled years later. “I’d never been away for very long from my parents, and I thought, ‘How can I bear this? It’s bad enough leaving home and my parents, then having to go back to that boring job again.’”
    They arrived at the Light Club after midnight. “The kids were still in the club,” Karen recalled. “I walked in and there was a group of people there singing. The thing that really impressed me was Aaron standing there with his guitar. The light was shining on him and his beautiful blonde hair and it looked like he had a halo around his head.” 15
    Karen started typing letters and other secretarial work in the Huntington Beach garage Berg had inherited from his mother. VirginiaBerg had been dead now for almost a year, and her fifty-year-old son was finally coming into his own. One day, David wandered out into the garage to see Karen.
    â€œIt was winter,” Berg recalled. “I was afraid she was cold, so I went out there to make sure she had heat. She said she was cold, so I think I put her sweater around her or something.”
    â€œI wish you’d pray for my back,” Karen said. “I’m having backaches lately.”
    â€œWell, where is it? Is it here? Higher? Lower? Is that it? I’ll give you a little massage.”
    After a few minutes of back rubbing, Berg had made his diagnosis. “Your backache sounds to me like maybe it’s your kidneys. Of course, a lot of women get backaches from congestion back here because of sexual tension, they don’t have any sexual release, and you’re not married.”
    At that point, Berg says, Karen confessed that she had an attraction toward Jethro, the husband of Deborah Berg, the prophet’s eldest daughter. “He’s married and has got five children,” Karen wept. “I couldn’t steal another woman’s husband!”
    â€œWell, that’s true,” Berg replied. “You certainly couldn’t have him.”
    Berg and Zerby related this account of that winter day in Huntington Beach nearly a decade after the event in a 1978 letter entitled “Our Love Story!” 16
    â€œOf course,” Berg recalled in the letter, “I hadn’t boned up enough on our doctrine of having an additional wife in those days, but I got around to it real fast after I got hooked on [Karen]. So I didn’t know enough then to tell her, ‘Well, you wouldn’t have to steal him, maybe you could just be added!’”
    By the time Karen Zerby walked into the Light Club, Berg was plotting his next move. Concerned parents, police, and school administrators were worried about the beatnik prophet and his diehard followers. Then, suddenly, in the spring of 1969, he and his flock disappeared from the streets of southern California.
    They resurfaced when a convoy of cars and campers were spotted in the parking lot of the Sears Roebuck department store in Tucson.Berg consummated the affair with Zerby in April. They made love in “The Ark,” the twenty-six-foot-long 1962 Dodge camper that slept twelve and served as Berg’s mobile headquarters in the early years.
    â€œMostly we were just doing what we used to call ‘necking,’ just kissing, cuddling, fondling and petting. She was a virgin, so it took me a little while to get her opened up. But, finally, one night we got it together!”
    Jane Berg was suspicious of her husband’s young secretary. “Once or twice dear little mother came home early and came bursting in the door,” David Berg said. “All we had was a little curtain across the aisle to hide the beds. Suddenly we heard mother coming and Maria [Karen Zerby] would scramble out of my bed as fast as she could and go back up in the top bunk and pretend to be asleep.
    â€œWe used to park a whole convoy there [in the Sears parking lot] on the weekend when there was nobody there,” Berg explained. “It was a good place