Waco

by David Thibodeau

  His words scared me. I simultaneously absorbed them and buried them in my subconscious: This cataclysmic scenario was too tough to swallow whole. My old habit was to live day by day, chewing on morsels of experience and information as they came. Like many of the people at Mount Carmel, and maybe David himself, I kind of hoped the prophecies would be modified somehow, and his followers wouldn’t have to suffer the total annihilation predicted in Scripture. But the words of Revelation 6:12, that on the opening of the Sixth Seal, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood, echoed in my mind. In other words, the place was primed for martyrdom.

  David represented himself as the intercessor between humanity and a wrathful deity. Sometimes he compared himself to Noah, warning of the flood to come and being scoffed at by everyone except his own family.

  When David spoke like that my nape hairs prickled and my palms got clammy. Was I really ready to accept an inevitable, possibly violent death? Was what I was learning from David really worth such a risk? These questions hovered in the air, never really answered until the final period of the siege of Mount Carmel.

  In David’s view, every one of us was connected to his body, physically as well as spiritually. The community was, he said, one collective entity, and he could be in great pain, even get ulcers, because someone was doing something wrong, like giving way to lustful thoughts or sneaking a hamburger in defiance of the dietary rule that forbade eating meat—lapses I tended to indulge in. When Marc broke away, for instance, David had been stricken with a high fever, his body racked by sweat and chills. We were his family, his body, members of his heart, David said, and his vulnerability to our derelictions touched me deeply. “I’m suffering this pain because of the sins you’ve committed,” he told us. “Don’t fret, it’s my role.”

  Though David was only ten years older than me, I respected his voice. Maybe I didn’t immediately understand all the implications of his message, but there was something about him that seemed very genuine, very human. If I hadn’t liked him so much as a person I most likely wouldn’t have listened to him.

  Following David wasn’t the result of lengthy deliberation. To be sure, I’m not someone who thinks everything through logically in advance. I’m more instinctive, following through on things that seem intuitively right for me at any given time without too much critical examination. For instance, I never really stopped dead in my tracks and said to myself, “Holy shit, I’m living with the Messiah!” People in the community rarely spoke of David as the Messiah; when they did, he corrected them sharply.

  “You people may claim I’m something special,” he’d say. “But thank heaven you guys don’t bow down and worship me. That’s the last thing I want. I don’t want you to worship the person but the teaching. I’m just a messenger of the truth. I’m like a Dixie cup that God will crumple up and throw away when he’s done with it.”

  Sometimes David half-jokingly referred to himself as the “sinful” Messiah of the Psalms, a conquering figure “anointed with the oil of gladness,” one who marries virgins and has children who become “princes in all the earth.” Jesus, he said, was the saintly Messiah who had never, like himself, lived out the life of a fallible human being, warts and all.

  All the same, it troubled me a whole lot that I’d be sacrificing my sex life if I committed myself to David’s teachings. Sure, the sacrifice was for some higher purpose, something I might come to believe was more valuable to me, but it was a tough call. I thought long and hard about this, but in the end it came down to whether I trusted my instincts. I could not, like Steve or Wayne, come to accept David’s way through a searching, intellectual self-scrutiny. Compared to them, I was sloppy-minded, but I did honor my intuitions. Then and now, they’re all I have, when it comes right down to it. If I ever lost faith in my feelings, I’d be totally at sea.

  David was a lot like me in this respect, I recognized. He’d found his way intuitively, fumbling through the dark of his unhappy childhood and adolescence, following his feelings without the benefit—or hindrance—of a good formal education or abstract mental discipline. The evidence that his native instincts had led him to such profundities was a great example to me.

  In a way, perhaps, I suspended disbelief. Maybe it was the old habit of tolerance I learned growing up around my mom and her friends, where no one was ever condemned for being different or “deviant,” whatever the mainstream might say. This applied particularly to sexual preferences. I’d been brought up in a seventies atmosphere of erotic liberation, everyone doing his or her own thing without moral judgment, so long as nobody laid a bad trip on anyone else and nobody got hurt.

  As I listened to David, in the public studies and the private moments we had, I began to connect the more deep-rooted part of myself that David had begun to open up for me to the high I had as an artist. It struck me that there was a kind of kinship between spiritual excitement and the surge in my soul when I was really on a roll with the sticks. David was showing me how to make a pathway for my raw, instinctive energies—for what Jack Kerouac called the “crazy dumb-saint of the mind.”

  However, I still had a hell of a lot more questions than answers about his religion. I couldn’t quite accept that David was the Lamb. And if he was, he was in for a very bad time, as he himself explained. He made a point of emphasizing that the messianic figure mentioned in Revelation would provoke some terrible reactions. “The entire world will hate him,” David said, quoting the Bible, “and all his followers.” It troubled me that David seemed to have elected or been elected to play out a terrible fate. When I was a kid, listening to Grandma Mim go on about Jesus, I’d think that if Christ ever did come back to earth he’d be crucified all over again. No one would ever believe his claim to be “anointed of God.” It seemed to me that if a man actually chose this scary scenario—especially a down-home man like David—it must mean that he had a very interesting soul.

  Either way, I thought, maybe I should get out of here right now, before I’m hooked. But my innate curiosity countered with, Let’s just hang around for a while and see how things work out.

  “I’m really glad your mother raised you the way she did, no religion, no preconceived ideas,” David told me. “Your openness makes it easier for you to listen to what I’m saying without having to shove your way through a web of religious half-truths and hypocrisies.”

  I was flattered, but also wary. A little signal went off in my head, reminding me that I could be very gullible as well as open, so I’d better go slow with this man.

  Being shrewd, David intuited my reservations. “Faith isn’t so easy, Thibodeau,” he murmured. “We’re supposed to struggle to understand. Give yourself time. I’m not trying to con you into believing anything you find incredible. But if you begin to glimpse the outlines of a powerful plan developing here, maybe you’d like to stick around and find out what it’s all about.”

  My sensible side said: You’ve grown up questioning everything, and here’s a guy giving you a bunch of weird stuff. Was he subtly twisting my mind, using his skill in adapting his style to different temperaments? Were David’s extraordinary stories turning my head, like a missionary in Africa bamboozling a heathen with Bible anecdotes?

  Reflexively, I wanted to surrender to my fundamental doubts. But I had to ask myself if my old habit of disbelief had served me all that well and if there was something in this man that could help me root my life in a deeper ground than any I’d yet discovered in myself.

  Certainly, during the last few years—maybe always—I’d been skating on the surface of things, trying to find a way into my true nature. My weeks at Mount Carmel had shown me that I was acquainted with hardly more than a fraction of myself; that my sense of the world and my own true character was that of a creature barely clinging to reality. Would letting go, dropping off into space under David’s guidance, really be so stupid?

  Actually, I had no problem with the concept of a spiritual force guiding h
umanity, a powerful dynamic driving destiny. However, the notion that David was imbued with that force, that he claimed to be its direct instrument, was hard to swallow. His low-key, unbullying style worked both for and against him. If he’d come on gangbusters like the TV holy rollers, I’d have dismissed him instantly. At the same time, he was so ordinary, so much one of the guys, it was hard to see him as holy. Yet I felt he was utterly genuine.

  David was outlining a destiny meant for a select group of people, and despite doubts and apprehensions I found his message fascinating. Would I be cheating myself if I didn’t go along with it? I wondered. Was I capable of the kind of commitment it required? And did I really want to have my life wrenched from its previous meandering path?

  If it took me a while to grasp the intricacies of David’s theology, I trusted my connection with the human being. I’d never met anyone like David in my life. The people I’d come to respect at Mount Carmel, like Steve Schneider, Wayne Martin, and Livingston Fagan, were convinced his inspiration was genuine, so who was I to dismiss him offhand as a phony?

  In Texas, like the song says, the stars are incredibly bright. Looking up at them after hours of Bible study, I sensed eternity and could easily imagine flying up there on David’s energy. All the while, though, I could hear my mother’s concerned voice whispering in my ear: “Davey, is this really you?” I knew that if I ever did decide to stick with Koresh, I’d never be able to explain my motives to her, and that made me sad.

  David didn’t push it. After my first two weeks or so at Mount Carmel, when the festival period was over and the other visitors had departed, he told me to return to Bangor and think about all this before I made a decision whether or not to come back.

  “Speak to priests, rabbis, scholars, whoever,” he urged. “Ask them what they think about what you’ve heard here. If you feel, after all, that Mount Carmel is your place, I’ll be happy to have you back.”

  He paused, cocking his head at me, and his tone toughened. “But if you do decide to be here, your commitment must be total. The more you learn, the more you’ll be responsible for that knowledge. There’s no room for tourists at Mount Carmel.”

  Then he smiled. With much wisdom increaseth much sorrow, he said, quoting Solomon. “It may be already too late for you. Maybe you’ll never see things the same way again, even if you don’t come back.”

  The moment he said it, I knew it was true. I’d begun to view the world differently, and that both gladdened me and made me melancholy.

  “Don’t be put off when people you talk to think you’ve gone goofy with all this ‘Seals’ stuff,” David said. “That’s the way of the world, Thibodeau, and you’ll have to make up your mind which side of the fence you want to live.”

  Apart from the theology David was offering, I sensed that what I required right then was a male counterpoint to the powerful feminine presences in my background: the kind of close, intimate father figure and teacher my own dad never was. I was strong on intuition and feeling but weak on self-discipline, a structure to shape my character. But I wasn’t going to accept just any structure or discipline. It had to be a very special person, someone I would have to feel I could trust with my life.

  Knowing myself, however, I wasn’t sure I’d be capable of following the path that David offered me all the way through. When it came right down to it, could I actually walk the walk?

  The last night before I was due to leave, I had a disturbing dream. I saw David sitting on a throne, hovering above ground, giving a study, just me and him. I resented his instruction, my mind fatigued by all the complex and challenging information I’d absorbed in the past few weeks. Gimme a break, I thought, as I felt the earth roll in on its constant rotation and David’s image began to vanish with it toward the horizon. I rejoiced that I was getting my wish, until I heard his voice grow louder as the earth came full circle.

  When I awoke, I felt the dream was telling me that, like it or not, I was already caught up in the character of Mount Carmel. It gave me a strange feeling—part elation, part apprehension—and I nervously began to mumble the words to the Eagles song “Hotel California”: You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.…

  5

  SLIPPING THROUGH THE FENCE

  After the intensities of the past few weeks, it was a relief to get on the bus in Waco and just drive away. Mount Carmel and David had disrupted my old continuity, and I felt like a displaced person, especially in that rough area of Texas.

  My generally positive feelings about the Mount Carmel community were jolted by something Catherine Matteson said to me as I was leaving. “Keep the faith,” she called out, and somehow this friendly phrase, with its ring of old-time religion, jarred me.

  On the bus, heading through Texas and Louisiana, listening to the radio, I was happy, thinking about seeing my family and old friends in Bangor. The heaviness of Mount Carmel was set aside by my innate tendency to take things as they come, to delight in things both serious and silly.

  Along the way, a long-haired freak around my age got on the bus and sat down beside me. We immediately started talking rock and roll. In a burst of enthusiasm, I began to tell him about Mount Carmel. Suddenly, it all poured out of me in a jumbled rush: the proverbs, the Seals, the feminine Holy Spirit, the Mother, King Solomon. “‘The angels carve out our paths every day,’” I quoted, excited by memories of the fascination I’d felt listening to David.

  As I ran on, I saw that my companion was getting angry.

  “I’m a Christian, and I don’t like what you’re saying about the Holy Spirit, especially, ‘She was daily his delight,’” as he pointed to Proverbs 8 in the book we had open. “You don’t like what I’m saying, or you don’t like what we just read for ourselves out of the book?” I questioned him. He burst out: “You don’t need to read that book. Faith is simple, just believe in Jesus Christ.” I was amazed at this Christian hypocrisy. “You believe in Christ,” I started to argue, “but you don’t need to know His word you claim you believe?”

  But he just turned his back on me, then went to the toilet at the back of the bus to cool out with a joint, leaving me upset and shaken. David had warned me that people might react to me this way if I tried to tell them about “the message,” but this was the first time I’d actually experienced such a thing. It was a caution, I reflected, warning me to say as little as possible about Mount Carmel when I got back to Bangor.

  Right then, I decided not to tell my mother or my family anything essential about my experience in Texas. I knew that whenever I went home I automatically reverted, in my own and my family’s eyes, to the clown with nothing going for him but drums and dreams. Any talk of my recent discovery of a desire to be “spiritual” would be taken as a confirmation that I was an unredeemable fantasist.

  My mother was my main hurdle. She knew me so well, read every nuance of my moods, shared the same nerves and hectic energies. When she hugged me and looked deep into my eyes, her anxious voice asking, “What’s up, Davey?” I countered with a casual, “Hey, Mom, I just met this cool guy who has a band in Texas. Don’t worry about it.”

  But, of course, she did. As the days went by, and I got back into my old Bangor ways, my mother kept probing. “Is Mount Carmel a commune?” she asked. “Like that place in New Mexico I lived in for a while, a few years back? I know that life,” she said, rushing on to delay a possibly dangerous answer. “Fun for a month or so, but not for restless characters like us, eh?”

  I answered vaguely, avoiding any talk of religion to deflect her reaction against “Bible stuff.” She was a feminist, opposed to any version of what she might consider a patriarchal authority. Mount Carmel, under David, had a structure that would surely have raised her hackles.

  Finally, though, she wore me down, and I had to tell her about David and why I’d grown to respect and admire him.

  I tried to explain that I was drawn to David’s disciplined yet affectionate authority. “He’s teaching me things I need to know,” I
said, aware that I was fumbling. “He’s an awesome guy, but not a bully.” Balenda was skeptical, so I just kept repeating my stubborn, he’s-an-awesome-guy mantra, hoping to fudge the awkwardness between us.

  “I know you’ve been having a tough time in Hollywood,” my mother ran on. “It’s hard dealing with the streets, the brutal music business.” Then, in an outburst that was typical of my mother’s tendency to let her tongue run away with her, she added, “You’ve always had one foot in reality, the other in pie-in-the-sky!”

  “Get off my back, Balenda,” I growled.

  She flinched, and I felt like shit, but I couldn’t bear her close scrutiny. Not then, when my own feelings about David were still so new, so unformed, essentially inexplicable.

  My father’s questions were, typically, more guarded and more oblique. Knowing his vehement antireligious views, I just told him I was playing in David’s band. “Mount Carmel’s a fun place to be, Dad,” I said, leaving it at that. I sensed that he preferred not to know too much about something that might be “messy,” something that might upset the equilibrium of his life in nearby Isleboro with his new wife and his safe teaching job. About five years earlier he had finally gone on the wagon, and he still struggled to maintain his fragile balance. Since he and my mother didn’t communicate much, I knew they’d never put their heads together about me.

  In quiet moments I thought over what I’d learned at Mount Carmel. Before I left, David remarked that I had more information than I realized about his teachings, that I’d taken a deep plunge into Scripture. “You’re already beginning to view the Scriptures as a key to history and the future, as words and wisdom from God,” David said. However, in Bangor there was no one, apart from my Uncle Bob, who’d gone through a born-again phase in his past, to comfortably talk with about all this. But remembering the reaction of the freak on the bus, I wondered if that very fact might prejudice even my Uncle Bob.