The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  Butler’s other bits and pieces of “evidence” for his worldview were even more shaky: a supposed remark by Ben Franklin that Jews should be excluded from the Constitution—a well-established hoax, as I later found out. He cited The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which prominent Jews reveal their secret plan to take over the world (also a fake created by anti-Semites). “Jews said it was a forgery. How can you have a forgery unless you have an original?” was Butler’s bizarre logic. What good did it do to try to explain? He claimed that the word “America” came from German—not from the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, as commonly believed—and means “heavenly empire.” And so it went on, all of it unadulterated nonsense.

  As a final thought, I asked about Jerry and why he had left. “I don’t know. He had trouble with some of the people. It’s a problem with our race. We have too many factions. We always commit . . . fratricide, almost. The so-called right wing is the hardest thing in the world to get together. But I like Jerry. We talked on the phone last night.”

  “He didn’t say anything about a computer, did he?”

  Butler quickened. “Yes! He said he’s got it!”

  “I—have—your—computer.” Jerry’s voice in the message was clear and enunciated. Then he said it again: “I—have—your— computer.” A couple, a headmaster and his wife, had handed it in. I picked it up from Jerry a couple of days later.

  I drove back down to Reno, where I stopped for a few days to get my car fixed. With some downtime, I decided to send Jerry a gift to thank him for his help getting the computer back. What do you give a neo-Nazi? I bought him a humorous anti-Bush quiz book. Then I drove to Las Vegas.

  Less than two months after I interviewed him, Butler died at his house in Hayden. It was weird to read an obituary where no one had anything good to say about the deceased. A prominent antiNazi hailed his death as the end of the “big compound era” of white supremacism.

  A New York Times article noted that Christian Identity was on its way out as the religion of choice for neo-Nazis. Skinheads and prison racists were now increasingly turning to Odinism, the worship of Norse gods, which had the bonus of not including that whole turn-the-other-cheek business, which was always a little tricky for Nazis to explain. The article ended by saying: “On Wednesday, after Mr. Butler’s body was taken away for an autopsy, his relatives moved the belongings of his Aryan Nations roommates out of the house in Hayden Lake and placed them on the doorstep . . . Then they took down an Aryan Nations flag from a window.” The funeral would be a private affair. No new leader was announced.

  After I heard the news of Pastor Butler’s death, I called Jerry. An answering machine said in a robotic voice: “I’m sorry but ‘Hi, this is Jerry Gruidl’ is not here to take your call.” It flashed through my head that Jerry might have been so anguished by Butler’s passing that he had killed himself.

  A short while later, he called back.

  “You caught me at home,” he said. He sounded forlorn. “Oh, I’m not doing too bad, I guess. I’m recovering. I just got out of the hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “A real act of stupidity.”

  But it was nothing to do with Butler’s passing, which he regarded with equanimity. He’d had a car accident. He’d been working on his van, checking the rear lights with the handbrake on. Absentmindedly, standing outside the van, he’d revved the engine with his hand on the pedal. The door was open and it knocked him down as the van lurched backward, dragging him along the ground.

  “You ran yourself over?” I said.

  “Yeah. Dumbest thing I ever did in my life. Do you have any more tapes? I’d sure like some more of your adventures. If you happen to have any around, I sure would appreciate it.”

  7

  MELLO T

  In a back room of a Memphis-based record distributorship called Select-o-Hits, a pudgy white promotions man named John “J-Dogg” Shaw was showing me a few of the gangsta rap CDs that had recently passed across his desk. An album called In Remembrance of Thug Chuc showed the eponymous rapper laid out dead on a gurney. An album by the Skrilla Gettaz, called For This Thing Called Skrilla (skrilla being money), featured the titles “We Some Gangsta,” “Organized Crime,” “She on This Pole.” Another album, by Birmingham J, had a track called “Hustlaz and Cap Pellas.”

  “What’s a ‘cap pella’?” I asked.

  “Cap pealer. Pealing a cap is killing you,” J-Dogg said.

  Then he said, “Have you seen the picture of Jeezy with a platinum snowman?”

  “No,” I said.

  He dug out the most recent issue of the gangsta rap magazine Murder Dog. He turned to a full-page photo of the up-and-coming Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. In the photo, Jeezy was frowning and carrying a very large gun, and wearing a platinum snowman medallion.

  “What does it mean?” I asked

  “Snow is cocaine. So it means he’s a cocaine dealer. Or was one,” J-Dogg said. “Isn’t that great for the youth? What a great role model!”

  J-Dogg is a hip-hop historian and a longtime fan of the music, but he’d grown disenchanted in the last couple of years. “All these folks can rap about is dope dope dope, shoot shoot shoot, kill kill kill,” he said. “And then people wonder why youth violence is at an all-time high.”

  I looked at the photo again. I wasn’t quite sure what I felt about it—whether I thought Jeezy looked faintly ludicrous, holding his gun for a publicity shot, or thrillingly badass, and whether I lamented the direction the music was taking or saw it as a harmless bit of provocation.

  This was always the question with gangsta rap. Was it just show business, no different and no more harmful than movies about mobsters or heavy-metal songs about death and mayhem? Or did it represent something bigger? Was it a kind of outlaw code, as much a cause as a symptom of the lifestyle it described?

  In 2000, I’d spent two weeks traveling what was then the latest spawning ground for the genre, the so-called “Dirty South,” for a documentary about the music and the lifestyle. Most of the time I’d been in Jackson, Mississippi, following a pimp and gangsta rapper named Mello T. That trip had taken place a couple of years after the killings of two of the most popular gangsta rappers, Notorious B.I.G and Tupac Shakur, both of them victims of a bizarre musical turf war between the East Coast and the West Coast. Possibly as a result, a mood of restraint had held sway over the industry. But five years later, the period of mourning was over. The most popular style of rap was called “crunk.” Invented in the South, it was raucous and bass-heavy—“meant to evoke, and sometimes accompany, drunken nightclub brawls,” according to an article in that premier hip-hop publication the New York Times.

  Feuding—“beefing” as it’s called—was back, too. Lil’ Kim against Foxy Brown. Eminem against Benzino. Lil’ Flip against TI, beefing over who could rightfully claim to be the “King of the South.” Perhaps the most prolific beefer of all was the numberone- selling artist in the country, 50 Cent. The inside sleeve of his latest album, The Massacre, contained coded death threats on rival artists, along with mocked-up photographs of 50 himself weighing out quantities of cocaine in his apartment and committing a driveby shooting with a machine gun. Though there was something amusingly kitsch about it—the idea of a musical performer reenacting criminal moments from his past—the comedy was somewhat muted by the fact that 50 Cent’s entourage had recently got into a real shootout with the entourage of another rapper outside a radio station in New York.

  Oddly enough, amid all this merchandizing of crime, my old interviewee, Mello T, had moved away from criminal themes. His latest record was an inspirational rap for kids entitled “If You Try You Can Do It.” Supposedly he was no longer pimping. He’d married his “boss bitch” Sunshine, and they were raising a baby daughter. From what I knew about Mello—his casual professions of violence and the eerie hold he exercised over his stable of women—this reformation was hard to credit, but it came from a good source, a Jackson-based hip-hop journalist named Cha
rlie Braxton.

  And to be fair, Mello had always been ambivalent about his life of crime, lamenting it and celebrating it by turns in true hip-hop style. The first day we were together he told me that the pimping was “the money behind the music,” a way to pay the bills until his career heated up. I expressed surprise that he was a pimp. “Because in Britain, that would be looked on as maybe immoral,” I said. “Well, not maybe. Immoral.” The idea of a pimp was so foreign to me that I took the claim with a pinch of salt. I thought perhaps his being a pimp was part of his show business persona rather than his actual job—a character he played, a little like a professional wrestler. Still, I thought it prudent to affect surprise, just in case he really was telling the truth.

  I’d met him in the driveway of a mustard-colored bungalow, the residence of a group he managed, the Children of the Cornbread. He was twenty-seven, wearing a tailored three-piece suit, a bowler hat, Chanel sunglasses. “This is just Mello style,” he said when I complimented him. “This is like worldwide international godfather gangsta pimp style.” He spoke in a deep mellifluous voice, with soft consonants, as people do down in Mississippi, saying “luh” for “love” and “cluh” for “club.” He also sometimes transposed his Ts and Ks. One of his ambitions, he said, was to open Jackson’s first black-owned “skrip club.”

  Mello and I drove out to a field where we took shots at a rusty tin can with a gun he kept tucked down his trousers, while an unworried horse off to the side flicked its tail. I told Mello my theory that rap is like wrestling, with rappers exaggerating reality for the purpose of entertaining the public. “This character I play might just get me killed,” Mello said. “That’s what’s so real about it.” He took a few more pot shots, missing the target wildly, and then said, “When a pistol’s up against a woman’s head, seem like she listen better.” I didn’t really known how to react to this remark. It was so over the top, I had to resist the urge to smile. I suspected he was trying to get a rise out of me. “That’s quite shocking,” I said.

  We spent the best part of three days together, me never knowing where the persona ended and the real person began. On our last day Mello offered to introduce me to two female rappers he was working with, Sunshine and Fantasy. We drove over to a nondescript condo on the outskirts of Jackson; it soon became clear that Sunshine and Fantasy were not really rappers but, in Mello’s phrase, “pleasure entrepreneurs.” It was all a little weird and uncomfortable. The women seemed cowed, or possibly they were just being respectful, as they saw it, to Mello for what they must have realized was a big opportunity for him, his international TV debut.

  The recital consisted of Mello rapping while Sunshine and Fantasy danced in the raw style of a strip club, bouncing their behinds and pumping their pelvises against the floor. Fantasy looked a little distracted; Sunshine gazed moonily at Mello. The song was called “Get Your Beg On.” Sunshine said she was working on an album for release the following year. She was also getting married. When I asked to whom, she said, “My baby over there. My daddy. The number one. My king. My savior. My Jesus Christ.”

  Five years later, I arrived back in Jackson one Friday in July, having driven across country. From the freeway, Jackson looks like other small American cities—the usual gamut of franchise outlets and, off in the distance, a few small skyscrapers and civic buildings. But once you’re on the streets, it’s a different story. The downtown is bombed-out and dispossessed. The back roads run past boarded-up houses strangled with vines, distempered and damp-looking old billboards, nameless gas stations. The roads are humped, as though the fertility of the land on the banks of the Pearl River is pushing up from underneath, straining against the tarmac. The air is damp and everything is green, but there is something morbid about this abundance when the buildings are rundown and dead.

  I’d made a plan to visit a nightclub called the Upper Level, which was hosting a freestyle competition. I wasn’t sure how to contact Mello, and I figured it would be a way to dip my toe back in the scene. Late in the evening I met up with one of the club’s promoters, Chris “Big Yayo” Mabry, at a branch of Red Lobster. Yayo was thirty-three, in a red lumberjack shirt and jeans, wearing a discreet diamond earring. He described his style as “ghetto nerd.” “I’m cool in the hood, cool in the boardroom too,” he said.

  We reached the club at around eleven thirty, when it was hitting its stride: loud, dark, smoky, and packed with two or three hundred people. Everyone was moving, bouncing, waving his arms, rapping along to the crunk records. From time to time, the music would drop out and the crowd would shout the words.

  Back off bitch!

  Get the fuck out the way!

  Whatchoo lookin’ at, nigga?

  Whatchoo lookin’ at, nigga?

  Throw it up!

  Throw it up!

  I made my way across the dance floor, following Yayo like a man trekking across a crevasse in a blizzard, wary of stepping on anyone’s feet, spilling any drinks, making unwanted eye contact. Not that I thought I was in danger of starting any “static,” but I felt self-conscious and slightly foolish: the only white person there, in my western-wear shirt, my scuffed boots, carrying my effeminate satchel and my notebook. I reflected that I couldn’t have looked much more out of place if I’d been wearing my old prep school uniform.

  Yayo and I arrived at the DJ booth, a walled-off enclosure. He introduced me to the manager of the club, Tonarri, and the DJs Zigzag and Ra-Ra. Tonarri offered me a cognac. I knocked it back and my head quivered. Then Ra-Ra got on the PA and said, “We got Louis here from London. We gon’ show him how we represent right here in the Upper Level. We goin’ international tonight, man!”

  A little later Yayo and I made our way back out into the storm to meet some of the contestants in the freestyle competition. He rounded up the host, a towering ex-con with gold teeth called Westside Al Capone, and a couple of the amateur rappers, and we went into a quieter VIP area. One of the rappers, a goofy kid with splayed teeth, gave his name as Wamp. He said it stood for “Whoop Ass Many Places.” He wasn’t competing tonight, though. “I lost my voice,” he said.

  “How did you lose it?”

  “Rappin’. I rap all the time.”

  “What do you do when you’re not rapping?”

  “Rap. Man, I’m twenty-one. I got over three hundred songs wrote.”

  Another rapper, called Charlie Wallace, performed under the name LYLC. “It just mean ‘Lil’ C,’” he said, when I asked what it stood for. Charlie had won the competition for the last two weeks running. Twenty-three, nice-looking, wearing a baggy red T-shirt with the slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. on it, he was there with his “manager” (I use the term loosely) Tommy Watts, who was colorcoordinated in beige tracksuit, beige cap, and aviator sunglasses.

  Charlie said he worked at a supermarket called Sav-A-Lot, stocking shelves and loading trucks. I was grateful to him for telling me his real job, which another, more established rapper might have regarded as damaging to his mystique. Charlie seemed tired of gangsta rap too. “I just think there’s too much of one concept. Ain’t nothing real. Ain’t nobody talkin’ about anything that can enlighten.”

  Then Tommy the manager, seeming to feel he should do some managing, asked me about my project. What kind of book was it? What was it called? Normally I dodged this question, but I was starting to feel the effects of the cognac and I mentioned one of the titles I was considering, May Contain Traces of Nuts. I could see from Tommy’s expression that this was a mistake. “It’s a play on words,” I said. “Because we all like to go a little nuts every once in a while.”

  “You think rappin’ is crazy?” Tommy asked.

  I changed tack and began saying that my book was a kind of follow-up to a TV show I’d done. I mentioned “cultures” that are “outside the mainstream.” Tommy said nothing. I seemed to be digging myself deeper into a hole. Charlie took pity on me, piping up on my behalf, “Out of the mainstream, like he means Jackson rappers are out of the mainstream compared
with a rapper like Ludacris in Atlanta.” Then to me, he said, “But you got to be careful coming from a Caucasian perspective. People are very sensitive about the meaning of words.”

  “Especially, as a member of the quote unquote ‘dominant culture,’” I agreed.

  But even this seemed a dangerous phrase, and as though to forestall Tommy’s objections, Charlie said, “Quote unquote! Quote unquote!”

  The competition started around one thirty. Two rappers at a time went up on stage and took turns improvising verses that insulted their opponents, using the same beat. At the end, whoever got the loudest cheers won the round. The caliber of the competitors was hard to judge, given that the rapping was so fast and raucous many of the words were incomprehensible. In an early round between Brookhaven Pele and Lil’ Tony, Lil’ Tony began, “Well, nigga, first of all, you look like a frog / Long-haired motherfucker, lips hanging down like a dog.” Pele came back with a line about Tony having “shit-locks” in his hair. In a round between Dirty D and Lord Genius Marcel, Marcel began, “My nigga, my take on the rap game is serious / You remind me of my bitch when she on her period.”

  Overall, the crowd seemed to favor the louder, more aggressive rappers, even when the words themselves weren’t clearly tailored to the occasion. A big part of it was intimidation. The rapper whose turn it was would jump around his opponent, bring his face close, getting “right up in his grill,” as the expression has it, while the passive party stared off into the middle distance. In round five, “Jeru” or possibly “J-roo” started by shouting, “Be for real, nigga, you ain’t no thug / That shit don’t fit you like OJ’s glove,” before being disqualified. “I done told you three motherfuckin’ times, no touching,” the host said. The final, between Dirty D and Charlie, went to two rounds, but there was no clear winner. By this time, my second cognac was kicking in and I was having trouble following the proceedings. Then suddenly, the competition was over. A draw, apparently. The music came back on: Lil’ Jon shouting, “Get crunk in this bitch.”