The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  In the end, without telling Mike, John stepped in and bought the house on behalf of a “trust.” John seemed a little sheepish talking about the trust. Who was in it wasn’t clear. “We saved it from becoming a biker hangout,” he said. “I just let Mike think it was still going to happen, that the cops were still coming up to get’em.” Mike left in the middle of the night, got a lift down to the bus station and hopped on a bus. He left everything behind—furniture, mementoes, family photos—and went to ground, hiding out from the authorities and from his fellow patriots who felt let down that he hadn’t martyred himself. “So many of his followers were disgusted with him for leaving like that,” John said, “’cause they all had confidence in him.”

  No one was sure where he was.

  Unlike Mike, John was a fan of Bo’s. He used to listen to Bo’s radio show, bought his book, even paid for military-style training for himself and his family.

  “I liked being around Bo because he had such a good character. It wasn’t like we were looking for a guru or some kind of cult leader. Here’s a guy who’s been exposed to so many things in his life. I want to say he was wise.”

  But even John seemed a little disillusioned with Almost Heaven. Now people were leaving, he said. Property values were going down. His lot lost $2,000 in value the previous year. There was no work. Many of those who left sold their property to people who weren’t patriots. “So now it’s like a regular old community.”

  John is a moderate by old Almost Heaven standards. Still, he believes the New World Order and its shock troops, the UN peacekeepers, are on course to take over and annihilate anyone who isn’t cooperative. “America is going down a course right now that’s destined, through immorality and lack of faith in God, that we can’t turn back from . . . I feel we’re going to see Christians treated as terrorists. I don’t think I’d be safe up here but I’d probably be one of the last to die. After they mopped up the cities they might come after these teeny communities.”

  John and Michelle walked me to my car. I was struck by something John said: “Mike Cain didn’t participate. He wanted everyone to participate in his thing.” Mike had his cause; John started a “neighborhood watch,” which he coordinated with the sheriff; down in Kamiah there were the meetings of the Watchmen on the Wall. Everyone wanted his own outfit. Everyone was looking for community, but on his own strict terms. A cooperative of rabid individualists, it was oxymoronic in its very conception, like a social club for hermits.

  Patriots are ornery and paranoid by their very nature. They don’t mix well. Many of the pilgrims up on the mountain were so mistrustful of government, so resigned to the triumph of evil and the globalist octopus, that the only options were to withdraw totally and wait for Armageddon or to go down in a hail of bullets. Bo’s leaving obviously didn’t help. Nor did the priorities of the original sales pitch, which were to do with safety and defensiveness and immunity from natural disasters, and not civic-mindedness and how to influence local government. Maybe if there had been work in the area they might have muddled through, but there wasn’t even that. As the saying goes, the Devil has the best tunes . . . and the satanic system has the best jobs. This was the ultimate irony, in a way. It’s all very well to crave independence, but what are you going to do for a job? Running out of money’s fine if civilization is about to collapse. But what if the end never comes?

  Not long after Mike disappeared, his old patriot brothers-inarms started getting rounded up. Mike’s friend and frequent guest Dave Roach was revealed to be a government informant. Larry Raugust, the live-in legal adviser, was arrested in late 2002. He was charged with manufacturing and possessing “a destructive de-vice”— seven counts. They’d been removed from Mike’s property, as it turned out. (“They were flash-bang things,” Pat said. “You can buy them in Soldier of Fortune magazine.”) At his trial, according to an article in the Lewiston Tribune, he referred to himself as “Larry Eugene of the House of Raugust.” He was sentenced to seventy-seven months in prison.

  Another who lived with Mike, James Newmeyer, nicknamed “Snake,” was arrested and charged with eight felony weapons charges.

  Thanks to Dave Roach, federal authorities have 600 hours of recordings of meetings of Mike and Larry’s group, “Idaho County Unincorporated Posse.” Pat was at many of those meetings, speaking unguardedly. He has good reason to think he might be the next to be arrested. He said he pays his property taxes now. He’s got a hole in the yard where he sleeps when he wants to be extra low-profile. “Like Saddam Hussein,” I said.

  I asked him if he thought they’d come after him.

  “Uh-huh. I think they’re coming after me right now. Because I’ve been a thorn in their side. I think they’re going to put me away for a while. But that’s in God’s hands. I’m not going to change my beliefs. I haven’t used a social security number in over ten years, and I’m not going to start now. I won’t be part of that Luciferian system.”

  Some weeks later, after a series of phone calls to people who knew people, followed by a letter, and more phone calls, I got a call from Chacha. We met for coffee in Las Vegas, where she was living. Forty-eight now, she looked younger and more glamorous than I remembered, dainty and dark-eyed.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said, unasked. “I don’t know what stuff they planted or anything. They didn’t tell me anything. You know how they felt about women.”

  Now the woman who’d once denounced “international banksters” and hosted a cavalcade of guvmint-hating right-wing groupies was hymning the daily miracles of the suburban shopping experience: Starbucks and Borders; the apartment she shared with Mike, its swimming pool and Jacuzzi; her new job caring for Alzheimer’s patients. “And when they get cancer, they don’t die. Because they don’t know they have it. We have one old man, he was supposed to die two years ago, but he didn’t, because he doesn’t know.”

  She’d been in Vegas three years, driving through the night from Idaho to get there. Mike had left Almost Heaven seven months after her. In that time, they spoke every day. Now he was working as a truck driver, registered, back on the books of the beast system. “He was off the grid for a while, wasn’t he?” I said. “I don’t want to talk about that,” Chacha replied.

  She was upbeat and in tune with her surroundings in a way she never was in Almost Heaven. Her face clouded over when she spoke about it. “The worst mistake we ever made was going up to Idaho,” she said.

  They live in a gated community of apartments. Mike was still asleep, so we crept around and whispered. Cream carpet and walls, cute furnishings, flowers, mirrors: as feminine in decor as their house in Almost Heaven had been masculine. Mike was living on Chacha’s terms now. He came out of the bedroom, bleary-eyed, wearing a T-shirt that said “Bum.” He’d been working nights but looked well, still lean and weathered. It was odd seeing him in those circumstances.

  We chatted over coffee. I had thought he might have mellowed in his beliefs, but his obsession with the illegitimacy of most laws, his fixation on weird legal niceties (the difference between “Nevada State” and “the State of Nevada” and so on) was as strong as ever. The only difference was Chacha didn’t participate. Now she disapproved. “She’s had her bellyful. She’s saturated. She doesn’t want to hear about any apocalyptic views on end times. She’s done with it.”

  I explained how I’d wanted to find out what happened to the patriots, him especially. “A rise and fall kind of thing?” he said, a little sardonically. “I chose to challenge the system, and the system just wears you down. It’s not that it comes after you directly; the delays just go on and on and on.”

  “How do you feel about the whole experience?”

  Mike paused and said, “Hmm. Chacha and I spoke about it. Sense of loss, I guess. It’s not the property, you can always get that back. I guess my sense of loss is that I’m no longer surprised at the cunning and contrivances of men. And I’m sorry I lost that, because I’d always like to remain a little surprised when I encount
er evil . . . Something Goethe said, and it impressed me deeply: ‘At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you.’ I have great admiration for Goethe, but in this case it didn’t turn out to be true.

  “I have good feelings about it because I feel like I’ve become more spiritually in tune than I was before, and I’m terribly, terribly sad that I missed out on so many years of my daughter’s life, years that I can never regain. That’s what I’m saddest about. I couldn’t participate as she was growing up from twelve to eighteen.”

  “Has she forgiven you?”

  “I asked her about that. She said, ‘I was angry about that for a long time, Daddy, but I’m not anymore.’ But I don’t think that trust can ever be totally rebuilt.” Mike’s eyes were welling up. “It was hard to leave there. It was a lot harder to leave than it was arriving. At this stage of my life, leaving there was the best thing that ever happened to me.” He paused and said, “What did they say about me up there?”

  I explained that different people said different things; that people had liked him but they wondered why he’d been so inflexible, puzzled that he would make a stand on the issue of property taxes. I also said they speculated that Mike had ended up feeling it was more important to be with Chacha than to make a stand.

  “I lost six years with my daughter. I didn’t want to lose my wife too. Sure, they’re right. I left to be with Chacha. And I’m glad I did.”

  5

  HAYLEY

  A Wednesday night, and in the saloon of the Wild Horse Resort and Spa, Nevada’s newest legal brothel, the working girls sat perched on barstools like mermaids or lounged on comfy chairs and chatted among themselves. Men came in, singly or in pairs, looking around shiftily. They had a beer at the bar. One of the women might go over and make conversation, offer them a tour of the premises. Then they’d pass through a green door at the back of the saloon into the main brothel.

  A year earlier, I’d spent several weeks getting to know the women who work here in the run-up to the brothel’s grand reopening in lavish new premises. On coming back, I’d expected the place to be buzzing, but it was quiet. Windowless, dark, with a small stage in one corner, a pole for pole dancing, a buffet down one side, the atmosphere was somewhere between honky-tonk and a doctor’s waiting room: You found yourself looking round wondering what the other men were there to have done. But then, my experience of legal brothels was that they could be busy without feeling busy. Men might be entering through the side door, bypassing the saloon, going straight into the parlor for a “line-up”— a beauty-pageant-style parade of the available ladies, in which they filed out from the wings and said their names.

  I’d been back a few hours, looking round the house. The old interviewee of mine that I was hoping to see again, a working girl called Hayley, was long gone. She’d taken off one night amid a swirl of rumors. But I’d come, figuring one of the other women or the management might know something. And I was curious about the progress of the establishment, having seen it open with such fanfare and high hopes on my first visit.

  There were several new faces. Cicely, a twenty-three-year-old black woman who was studying criminal psychology at a state university she didn’t want named. She’d been a part-time prostitute for two years. Her parents thought she was working at the Mac counter at Macy’s in Las Vegas. Jane, forties, an Englishwoman from West London—she’d seen my documentary and flown out. She couldn’t get used to being in the desert. “It’s like being on Mars, innit,” she said. “The Yanks don’t get my sense of humor. They’re not on the same mental level.” Debbie, also twenty-three, with dark hair, who’d grown up in North Dakota with an abusive father. “When I’m here I just switch my brain off,” she said. “I make myself stupid . . . Honestly, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I don’t really regard men as human.”

  In the parlor I chatted to Kris, who works in the cashier’s cage, handing out clean sheets and condoms, listening in on the negotia tions over the intercom. Since the working girls are all, technically, independent contractors, they set their own prices, which they negotiate with the customers in one of the three negotiation rooms. The house takes a 50 percent cut; the cashier eavesdrops on the bargaining to prevent the girls from skimming. After the negotiation, the women check the men’s penises for signs of disease. Then they grab some clean sheets—a “set-up” as it’s called—and escort the clients back to their rooms.

  The cage was better stocked than I remembered: sheets stacked behind the fax machine, boxes of condoms, bottles of lotion, massage cream, gargle, toothpaste, shampoo, furry cuffs, dildos called “Big Tool” and “Wild Stallion,” a strap-on called “Purple Delight.” Monique, a tall black woman in a blonde wig, forty or so, came past with an older guy she’d been chatting up in the bar. He was swigging a beer, dressed in a T-shirt, ball cap, and baggy shorts. Her overalls had a smiley face badge and one strap was off the shoulder. They entered a negotiation room and came out a minute later. Then she took her sheets, told Kris to put the timer on half an hour, and said to the guy: “Okay, hon, follow my butt.”

  The Wild Horse was the brainchild of a couple called Susan Austin and Lance Gilman. Susan, the madam, is a former working girl herself, having “turned out” (as the expression has it), aged fortynine, after a divorce. Before that, she was a successful rep for a jewelry company, and she still has the polished manner of a saleswoman. Lance, the owner, is a high-powered real-estate developer and local business leader of some celebrity. They met as courtesan and customer, when Susan was working out of another Nevada brothel in Moundhouse, near Carson City.

  When they opened the Wild Horse in 2002 it was the first new brothel in Nevada in eighteen years and one of the most ambitious in state history. For a year it operated out of a small prefab house at the back of the property, while Lance and Susan built and furnished its eventual home, splashing out four million dollars of Lance’s money on twenty-nine bedrooms, each with its own en suite bathroom (one with wheelchair access), three themed VIP suites (the Marilyn Monroe suite, the Retro Suite, and the Jungle Suite), a small gym for the women, a Jacuzzi room, a swimming pool, and a Hemingway-esque parlor appointed with the heads of African wildlife.

  A few weeks before they were due to reopen in their new premises, Lance and Susan took me on a tour. As I trailed after her, Susan, elegant, petite, her blonde hair nicely coiffed, spoke about her ambition of providing “a quality experience” for their clientele, “Something that they can take back in their memory banks and replay over and over again.” Lance, who is tall, late fifties, used the well-thumbed phrases of his business life. The women would follow “proven success procedures,” he said, adding, of Susan: “She has the compassionate knowledge to interface with people who do a very difficult job.”

  They spoke about wanting to make a healthy environment for the women who worked there. “I had all boys,” Susan said, meaning her four sons. “I have a house full of girls now. I’ve finally got the opportunity to guide a few ladies and get them to a better place in life.” She arranged regular appointments with a financial adviser to help the women manage their money; she ran a program agreeing to pay half the tuition fees of anyone who attended college locally. The high standards of the premises were part of this vision, too: Unlike most other houses, here the bedrooms would be furnished for the women—“like a lovely hotel,” as Lance put it.

  Lance’s and Susan’s enthusiasm was clear, as too was their affection for each other—the new premises were in part a testament to their autumn romance, and their finding each other in such circumstances seemed a good omen for the house. Ultimately, the signature of the house would be the quality of the “parties” the women provided. “We’ve coined a phrase here,” Lance said. “And it’s called the ‘boyfriend experience.’ I mean, you would enter the world yourself looking to meet someone who would treat you with respect and kindness and love as a boyfriend. And our customers who come here to the Wild Horse—we expect them to get a boyfriend experienc
e.”

  “Knowing that he may never see the lady again,” said Susan, “and she may never see him again. But while he is here he has those same feelings of warmth, of companionship, of not being rushed, that it’s not just a sexual game, that he matters. That’s the type of party I’d like to see the ladies give.”

  For several weeks, while filming my documentary, I’d lived in Reno and visited the Wild Horse every day. There were twenty or so women working at that time; each had a different story. Some were brand new to the business, others were veterans of ten or fifteen years’ standing. Some saved their money, some spent it. Their ages ran from twenty to fifty. Many worked straight jobs too, or they attended college and did shifts at the Wild Horse in their spare time. Some stayed at the brothel for months on end. Others came for a few days and then disappeared. Some were married, to husbands who they said didn’t mind, others said they couldn’t see combining their jobs with relationships. One thing they did have in common: They were doing it for the money. In some cases, this might be upward of $3,000 a night.

  It reminded me, in some ways, of being part of a theatrical troupe. When the girls got ready for work, putting on their skimpy outfits and their make-up, it was as though they were about to take the stage. The areas where the clients weren’t allowed unattended— the kitchen, the corridors, and bedrooms—I came to think of as “backstage.” The “front of house” was the saloon and the parlor, where the women acted for the customers—hustled them at the bar, or faced the audience in the line-ups, playing the roles they thought the clients wanted them to play.