Bert and I, me being Arthur, started the Fellowship of Orion a few years after I’d graduated college. At that point in time we both shared the same bleak outlook on life. I’d known him since High School, he’d been waiting tables ever since. I had an English degree, but couldn’t stand kids so teaching was out of the picture. Bert’s uncle gave us the idea of starting our own Shiitake mushroom farm, supposedly it was a growing market; needless to say that fell through. A never-ending series of dead-end jobs is what we faced, something you don’t anticipate when you’re younger.

The big idea came to Bert while he was watching a show about fanatical cults. Featured were a slough of nuts like David Koresh and Jim Jones-the guys behind Waco and the Jonestown Kool-Aid massacre. It was hard to believe how one dedicated person could generate so much money and power, regardless of his or her sanity. Each respective cult had thousands of members followed by cars and property-some were as big as small countries. There was an opportunity in there somewhere, and given our current state of mind we were destined to find it.

“We’ll get a decent amount of followers, collect some dough, and disappear. No violence or mass suicides,” Bert explained.

“I get it, you think that this’ll get you a few girlfriends or something,” I said.

“And no sexual coercion,” he said.

Eventually I began to believe in his plan. It was a money thing. And I know. Where were our morals, right? I guess we didn’t have enough of those at the time.

We lived in Florida, plenty of lost souls there. The funny thing is that Bert was an atheist and I considered myself spiritually-impaired, meaning I hadn’t the slightest clue what to believe in. Nevertheless I did have a bachelor’s degree and Bert was a preacher’s son so we figured we were surely qualified.

In order to be fully-functioning brain-washers we needed some groundbreaking principles of enlightenment, so we went to the library and researched stuff like string theory, alternate dimensions, astronomy, out of body experiences, and anything else that we could relate to our cause. We read about different religious sects and their leaders, including a guy named the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and decided Bert would be Bhagwan Bert from now on because it meant “holy one” in Indian. Then we sat down at the round wooden table in the kitchen of our low-rent two-bedroom duplex and started outlining our beliefs.