The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

Jerry looked concerned. “But are you still connected?”

  “I still know people in TV, sure.”

  “Good, good.”

  It was a little like talking to an elderly relative. I’d told Jerry I was heading up to Hayden for the World Congress. He’d been of two minds about going too, deciding against it in the end. Money was tight and he had a doctor’s appointment he didn’t want to miss. “Oh, while you’re here, have you seen the Aryan Nations homepage?”

  He woke up his computer. The background on his screen said: “I’m out of bed and I made it to the keyboard. What more do you want?” We read the line-up of speakers: Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance; Billy Roper, the leader of White Revolution; some other names I didn’t recognize. “If you do go up there, plan on getting a hotel. I wouldn’t stay in a tent in the campsite with all the idiots up there. I wouldn’t trust’em. See, these people’s mindsets: news media; Jew. They’d be suspicious from the get-go.There’s nothing you could do to stop it.”

  “You think they might be hostile?”

  “I don’t know the people that are up there. Oh, I’ve got an email!”

  I could see it had something to do with a high-school reunion.

  “Friends Reunited?” I asked.

  “Supposedly,” Jerry said.

  Five minutes’ drive away, on Payette’s main street, a quiet few blocks of independently owned stores, we got a tuna melt and a glass of wine each at a local bar. We made chit-chat.

  “You think Rodham’s not a Jew? Wake up and smell the roses!” Jerry said. “They’ve been hardcore communists since their school days, both Rodham and Clinton. And communism is Jewish. You show me a commie, I’ll show you a Jew.”

  “Stalin?”

  “His wife was.”

  “Castro?”

  “He’s one of their puppets. He’s got to be a kiss-ass to keep his job.”

  “What if I was Jewish?”

  “Shit! Are ya?”

  “I’m not saying yes or no. Would it change your attitude?”

  “Yeah, it would.”

  “I bet you’ve had friends in your life that were Jewish.”

  “Not that I know of. But Prince Philip has Jewish ancestry. So Prince Charles does and little Harry. And I think that’s why God’s working it around so they can’t become king . . . Are you Jewish? Tell me please you’re not. Lie to me if you have to. Please.”

  I changed the subject.

  Through the next couple of days, I got to know Jerry a little, finding myself in the slightly uncomfortable position of being treated in a grandfatherly way by an unabashed neo-Nazi and anti-Semite. He had grown up in East Oakland, where his father had a neon-sign company. The second of three boys, with a younger sister, Jerry had been the black sheep of the family. He’d worked as an Electrolux vacuum-cleaner salesman for twelve years, delivered Winnebagos, driving them across country, and installed neon signs. Like many on the neo-Nazi fringe, he’d started out a member of the John Birch society, a right-wing anti-communist group that wasn’t explicitly racist, then drifted into the Klan, then into the Aryan Nations. He married four times (“number two and number three were the same one: I had to go back for seconds”) though his wives hadn’t shared his beliefs.

  Now he was retired, he said, having been drummed out of the Aryan Nations amid a vicious hate campaign, orchestrated by unnamed enemies within the organization. Ousted as chief of staff, he worked for a while on their web outreach. “But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted me out of there.” One of the new members of staff put sugar in his gas tank, then challenged him to a pistol duel. “Pastor Butler can’t have that crap around the place!”

  Rumors spread—that Jerry was gay, that he was a child molester. “I was being attacked from all sides. I was being smeared so bad. And I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. They’d make up anything. They had Pastor Butler hire a private investigator to do a background check on me. And he never did that to anyone else I know of. I had to sign consent slips to let the investigator do the investigation. But it didn’t stop the rumors, and the Pastor finally gave in to the pressure.”

  Now, with no hate group to help run, Jerry spent his days playing mah-jongg on his computer with only the guppies for company. “I’m still waiting for Pastor Butler to have a change of heart and call me back to work.”

  On our first morning, Jerry gave me a tutorial in the strange racist religious faith that underpins the Aryan Nations.

  Called Christian Identity, it holds that white people are the real Israelites spoken of in the Bible and that modern-day Jews are impostors, “Edomites,” descendants of a sexual encounter between Eve and Satan. It was all there in Genesis, if you knew how to read it. The cosmic story of humanity was a kind of Star Wars saga, with Anglo-Saxon whites as Jedis, and Jews collectively standing for the Empire. Nonwhites were inferiors, “mud people,” dupes of the Jews, used to keep the white man down. But the Jews weren’t inferior: They were diabolically cunning. There was a kind of negative flattery of Jewish people in the cosmology of Christian Identity.

  On his wall, Jerry had a color poster showing the supposed descent of Jews and Anglo-Saxons on different colored lines, with the relevant biblical verses. There were also predictions for the end-time, around the year 2000: growing United Nations influence, out-of-control immigration, concentration camps all over the U.S. for the purposes of imprisoning the true Israelites.

  “We’ve got the United Nations already, but we’re not totally enslaved yet,” Jerry said. “America has the most prisoners incarcerated anywhere in the world. And those prisons are going to be for us. They’re not building them for the blacks. They’re telling the poor blacks, ‘You’ve been picked on too long! You go out there and take what you want from the white man that’s persecuted you!’ They’re going to turn’em on us. And we’ll have to fight’em. And if we do, then we’ll go to jail.”

  I asked Jerry about nonwhites. To my surprise, he said it was possible they might be able to get into heaven. “God says that anybody that believes and obeys, can.” I asked about Jews. No, they were irredeemable. Their ultimate fate: to be vanquished by Jesus at the Battle of Armageddon. “They’ll be totally eliminated. There won’t be any left. Maybe God’ll send rattlesnakes to do it. In many cases it’s an earthquake, a flood, all kind of things that do the job. But God gets it done.”

  “So you haven’t changed your beliefs since I interviewed you in 1996?”

  “No, the only thing I’ve changed is some of the people that I was around.” He paused. “Where did all these Jews come from that are running our government? Every school’s full of Jews. Every college is full of Jews. Our medical profession is full of Jews! Our legal profession is full of Jews! Our politicians are almost all Jews! The Jews are occupying this country. Now if Hitler killed’em all—”

  “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,” I interrupted. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.”

  “Listen to this point! Listen to this point!”

  “Something weird happens to you when you talk about this.”

  Jerry chuckled. “May-bee.”

  “What is that?”

  “Well, ah.” Jerry fumbled and looked away. Then his manner became sinuous and knowing. “You wanted to find out about me. I guess you’re finding out about me, huh?”

  “Where does that come from? What are you thinking about when you think about Jewish people?”

  Jerry paused. He looked down. “The Devil. Satan. That’s where Jews come from. They’re the ones that are oppressing us. They’re our enemy.”

  “They’re just people, Jerry. Just like anyone else.”

  “Not true.”

  When he spoke about Jews, it was as though a sickness came over him. His whole manner changed. We went back and forth on this several times. Had Jerry ever actually met any Jews? What did Jews mean to him?

  “It’s so obvious!” he said, pointing at the chart. “Jew
s are those people following the red line! It’s the opposite of those following the blue line!”

  And yet, as hateful as they were, his views somehow didn’t shock me as much as they should have, maybe because they were couched in religious terms—it was all about what God was going to do, not what Jerry was going to do—maybe because it was hard to imagine Jerry himself physically hurting anyone. None of it seemed quite real. A little later, he started foraging in a small storeroom in the back of his apartment. He dug out some of his old certificates of rank from his Klan and Aryan Nations days. On being made a “Kleagle.” An “Exalted Cyclops.” Photos of Jerry receiving a trophy for his work as a door-to-door salesman of Electrolux vacuum cleaners. In his younger days, Jerry wasn’t bad-looking. Finally, he came out holding some sacks.

  “You know, since you’re going to Aryan Nations,” he said, “would you do me a favor and give these to Pastor Butler?”

  “Okay. What are they?”

  “Burlap sacks.”

  “Okay.

  “They’ll use them for the cross-lighting ceremony. I never got around to mailing them. And I never had the opportunity to go up there.”

  “Is he expecting them?”

  “No, but it’s hard to find them anymore. Especially up there. Anybody that does have them won’t give them to’em, because they know what they’re going to use them for.”

  I took them and put them in my car.

  Why did I take the sacks? In hindsight, it was the wrong thing to do. But I was blindsided. I’d agreed to take them before I knew what they were for. Then once I found out, it wasn’t exactly too late, but it would have been a little awkward to give them straight back. So I thought I’d say yes for now, and figure out the right thing to do later. And maybe I was enjoying the irony of his entrusting the sacks to me, a liberal journalist, figuring it would be “good material” for the book.

  A little later, we went out to a Mexican restaurant called Fiesta Guadalajara. I asked Jerry about Butler. “I like him but he’s getting old. And I think he’s going a bit senile. Sometimes when he’s speaking he’ll be in the middle of a story and he’ll forget what he was saying.”

  “What if he gets so senile that he forgets who he’s supposed to hate?” I said. Jerry ignored this remark.

  “I suppose there won’t be any Mexican food in the whites-only homeland,” I said.

  “Hmmm, I’d never thought of that possibility,” Jerry said. He paused. “They wouldn’t be allowed to vote, but they could cook and clean for us. After all, we’re not extremists.” Jerry paused again. He made a Benny Hill face of coy mock-seriousness. Then he giggled: “Hee hee hee hee.”

  I asked about Jerry’s kids. Did he see his son, forty-six-year-old Jerry Junior?

  “Not very often. Sometimes I run into him at the grocery store.”

  “He’s not listed, is he?” I knew because Jerry was the only Gruidl in the Idaho phone book.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Me. He doesn’t want anything to do with it. He’s got a kid in high school, and he doesn’t want him getting grief from other kids. We’ve been fishing a few times, but we’ve got less and less to talk about. He’s going left and I’m going right. I feel sorry about it, but I gotta do my thing and he’s gotta do his thing.”

  What about Velma, his eldest daughter? “I haven’t spoken to her in years. She won’t let me have her phone number . . . She knows my views on race and she’s dead set against it.” Janet, the youngest? “No, but I’ve been over at Barbara’s house when she’s called and I’ve spoken to her. We get along. She’s just distant . . . I’m right and some day they’ll understand.”

  That evening, I dropped Jerry off at his apartment. The other apartments were dark. “They’re all asleep,” Jerry said. “I feel like I’m in a mausoleum here.” Then he said, “Thanks for a great day.”

  But it wasn’t the end of the day. Back at my motel, I realized my laptop was missing. The last place I’d had it was Jerry’s apartment. It was only a few months old. More to the point, it contained numerous irreplaceable photographs and documents. I went back to Jerry’s. He was solicitous and concerned. “First thing to do, file a police report,” he said. An officer named Sergeant Jack Hart came round to Jerry’s apartment. I filled out a form, describing the computer in detail. I explained about the photographs and the documents. Sergeant Hart said, “My wife does little books when we go on vacation, so I know how upsetting that can be.”

  One of my first thoughts, oddly, was that it was karma for the sacks. In that self-flagellating mode people sometimes go through after they’ve made a blunder, I blamed myself for toying with the idea of bringing them—flirting with ideological obscenity for the sake of a piquant comical moment. Not that I imagined Butler would be burning crosses on anyone’s front lawn—not that I would ever have really brought the sacks, for that matter—but still.

  If the loss of the computer had given me some moral clarity in one way, it had also thrown Jerry and me together. He now wanted nothing more than to be helpful.

  “I’ve had a couple of ideas,” he said the next morning. He suggested printing up flyers and leafleting door to door. Jerry said locals would be unlikely to call a long-distance number, so he said to use his. He also presented me with a brand new microcassette recorder, and some maps of Idaho and neighboring states for a detour into Yellowstone Park he was encouraging me to take. We asked around his apartment building. One of his neighbors said she’d seen me driving off with a computer bag on top of the car, where I must have absentmindedly left it. We made a tour of the town, retracing our route from the previous day. Jerry was being so helpful, it crossed my mind that we were getting into a Pastor Butler type of relationship: He was acting as my chief of staff.

  Another day passed, and no sign of the computer. By now, Jerry’s casual anti-Semitism was routine. Most of the time I ignored it, but I was aware of the unseemliness of having a virulent neo-Nazi as the contact person for my lost computer. I wondered if I could trust him—didn’t the monstrousness of his beliefs suggest a fundamental dishonesty? But I was fairly sure I could rely on Jerry, and found it all the more odd that, for all his hatefulness, Jerry could also be thoughtful and decent.

  On our last morning together, at his apartment, I asked Jerry if he’d ever thought of trying to be less racist.

  He looked serious for a moment.

  “If I had my choice, my ultimate choice, if I had all power and all immunity, I would exterminate them. Every last one. And anyone that had any traits of it. Because for as long as there are any left, they’ll grow and multiply and there’ll be more discord.”

  Jerry looked at me. His tone changed.

  “Straight-up question. Are you Jewish?”

  “Is that really important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you were, I would feel that all this time you were deceiving me and stringing me along. It never crossed my mind until you asked if it would bother me. But even if you said yes, I’d think you were lying, just to test me. You’re not Jewish, I know you’re not.”

  “I just don’t see the big deal. When I think of Jewish people, I think of people like Woody Allen and Bob Dylan and Marcel Proust. People I admire.”

  Possibly these weren’t the examples most likely to bring Jerry round. “The Devil is beautiful,” he said. “Lucifer was an angel of light. So yeah, they’re good at beguiling you. You’ve got to understand, Jews have this satanic seed and they cannot overcome it.”

  “You must see that there’s good and bad in all people, so why not try not to be racist?”

  “Because I am racist.”

  It was hopeless. With Jerry, the alleged “satanic” qualities of Jews were not something that could be proved or disproved. It was simply an article of faith. It was hard to believe he was serious. But he was. I told Jerry I hoped he wouldn’t be offended that I didn’t want to bring the sacks up to Pastor Butler
for the cross burning. “It’s not a cross burning, it’s a cross lighting,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Jerry, I know I owe you a favor, but let it be something else, not this.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Jerry said. Then he took a stack of flyers advertising the lost computer and said he’d keep handing them out around town.

  I drove up Highway 95, the same road that had brought me all the way from Las Vegas, and that stretched south from there to Needles, California, past Yuma, Arizona, and into Mexico. I was heading north. On my folding map of Idaho, I was only a few centimeters from Canada. Coeur d’Alene was a genteel tourist town situated on a lake. Population 34,514. Because it was tourist season, rooms were expensive. I booked into a horrible overpriced motel next to a gas station, among a cluster of other corporate motels and chain restaurants. I called Jerry and thanked him for his help. “I feel so sick about your’puter,” he said. I’d never heard the word “’puter” before. Its cuteness lodged in my head.

  The next morning I shaved off the beard I’d grown, leaving a handlebar moustache. I was hoping to look less Jewish. Though I’m not, I’ve been told I look Jewish, and tanned and bearded and wearing glasses and my leather flip-flops, I looked like I’d just stepped out of a yeshiva. If nothing else, with the moustache and contact lenses instead of glasses, I looked a little less bookish. But driving to the march from my motel, the contacts started irritating my eyes. The package said they expired in 2001, which may have had something to do with it. I took them out. I checked my mirror. Glasses/handlebar moustache appeared to be the worst of all combinations. I looked like a German sex tourist.

  The Congress was in two phases, a parade through the heart of Coeur d’Alene followed by speeches at a campground forty miles out of town. Several blocks were cordoned off for the parade. Police officers stood at junctions directing traffic. I parked and walked across the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant called Zip’s where I saw twelve or so beefy men in smart-casual clothes discussing something. One was chomping a cigar. Too well-fed and smug-looking to be regular people, they’d have been recognizable as federal agents even if they hadn’t been having their staff meeting in the parking lot.