The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  When I watch the documentary about Marshall now, the moment that strikes me isn’t Marshall’s anger with Michael, but what happens next. Michael’s called back in to see Marshall, and we hear Marshall’s voice again, captured by my sound recordist.

  “Please forgive me for kinda biting your head off just now,” Marshall says. “I grabbed you and I just thought about that and my heart was heavy. That wasn’t handled well. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Michael says. “I’m here to support and—I’m learning!”

  “Okay! Back again!” Michael says when he reappears, beaming from ear to ear, like a fool in love. “Everything’s fine! We’re going to have some fun!”

  10

  APRIL, LAMB, AND LYNX

  It was mid-October, and I was riding through the hot, flat farmland of California’s San Joaquin Valley, on a family outing. At the wheel of my car was April Gaede. April is in her late thirties and she has light brown hair. She grew up on a ranch and she looks a healthy, outdoorsy type of person. Sitting in the back were Lamb and Lynx, April’s twelve-year-old twins, pixie-faced little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes.

  April was telling me about the twins’ debut CD, which they had finished recording a few months earlier.

  “We’ve been making sure there are no National Socialist emblems on it so it can be sold in Germany,” April said. “It’s okay to have the word ‘Aryan,’ which is good because one of the song titles has ‘Aryan’ in it. ‘Aryan Man, Awake.’ But, like, we won’t have pictures of Grandpa’s cattle brand in there.”

  Grandpa’s cattle brand, I knew, was a swastika.

  “And then there’s a really cute picture of Lamb and Lynx saluting,” she went on. “We’ll take that out.”

  “Sieg-Heiling?”

  “Saluting. ‘Sieg Heil’ is what you say. Saluting. It’s a Roman salute.”

  The name of the twins’ band is Prussian Blue. A folk band, but no ordinary folk band, Prussian Blue specialize in White Power music. They play a repertoire of cover versions of songs by skinhead groups, some traditional German songs, including the “Panzerlied” (the anthem of the German panzers), and a few original compositions by Lamb, “Aryan Man, Awake” being one of them, another called “Skinhead Boy.”

  I’d spent several days filming April and the twins the previous year and been struck by the intensity of April’s beliefs and her readiness to recruit her daughters into the cause. In the months afterward, I’d stayed in touch with the family, curious how the girls were growing up, how fully they were absorbing their mother’s message, and how they were enjoying their growing status as White Power celebrities. I was also keen to meet the newest addition to the Gaede clan, little Dresden, named in honor of the city in Germany that was firebombed by the Allies during the Second World War.

  Earlier in the day, on the way back from the restaurant where we’d had lunch, I’d asked about Dresden.

  “It’s not like we named her Aryana or something,” April said. “To me that would be more extreme.”

  “Yeah, but at least Aryana is a name,” I said.

  “Well, Dresden’s a name. What about Paris? Paris Hilton?”

  “If someone says, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting name,’ what do you say?”

  “I say it’s a city in Germany. And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, okay. And you’ve been there?’ And I’ll say, ‘No, they make fine china and porcelain and stuff.’ And we’ll leave it at that. Unless I’m in a particularly ornery mood and then I’ll say, ‘It’s where the real holocaust happened.’”

  Naming a baby Dresden was a little weird even to some other members of the white racist community. “It would be kind of the same thing if I had named one of my sons Adolf,” one concerned fellow racist had posted on a White Power discussion forum. “All young people—and especially girls—want nothing so much as to fit in and be accepted by their peers and friends . . . I worry that something like that could have the opposite effect and make her reject your beliefs, simply because they had been thrust without question upon her so completely in the form of her own name.”

  “I don’t think it carries anywhere near the load that ‘Adolf’ does,” April had replied, “though I wouldn’t mind naming a son that either. My husband said no when I suggested it for a boy, and we settled on Wolfgang.”

  My road back into their lives had not been easy. I’d called after I touched down in Vegas, months earlier. I’d called again in July, after I’d been to the Aryan Nations World Congress. But April had taken issue with aspects of the finished documentary. It had bothered her when I asked if she ever considered going into therapy to help overcome her powerful racial antipathies. “I had several emails from people in Britain saying they would kick your ass if they saw you because of that remark. They thought that was waaaay out of line.” She’d seen discussion on the Internet to the effect that social services should intervene and take the kids away from her. Not surprisingly, this had given her pause.

  In September, I’d spent several days trying to negotiate my way into a “Pro-White” festival that April and the twins were attending, and where Prussian Blue was due to perform. It was called Folk the System. The website promised “a variety of folk-building and camaraderie-enhancing activities.” Sack races, ax-throwing, and caber-tossing were mentioned.

  I wondered what a “Pro-White” festival might look like. I couldn’t help admiring the quirky idealism of taking a creed linked in most people’s mind with hate and trying to make it the basis for lighthearted social intercourse.

  But April had not been won over by my numerous pleas and phone calls. Folk the System had come and gone, and I’d more or less given up hope of seeing April and the twins again. My suggestion, via email, of an outing to a theme park had been a last throw of the dice. April said she would think about it, but I was not optimistic. I told myself that her unwillingness to expose the twins to further publicity was a good thing. I’d always felt the twins were too young to be held responsible for ideas their mother had imposed on them. Though I was keen to see how they were changing, it was more important that they should have their anonymity and be allowed to lead a normal life.

  I settled into an apartment in Hollywood and began writing up my notes from the other re-encounters from the trip. And then, having resigned myself to not seeing them, I received a message from April saying she liked my idea of an outing. She had a place in mind. A Halloween theme park. I wasn’t clear on the details, but it took place every October, with a large cast of ghosts and ghouls. Whatever twinges of conscience I had suddenly evaporated in the heat of opportunity. I bought Lamb and Lynx a couple of small Halloween gifts and drove up from Los Angeles one Saturday morning.

  I’d first met April at a skinhead music festival in Riverside County, in Southern California. The event was called the Gathering of the Gods and featured six or seven “hatecore” groups. Brutal Attack, Final War, and Extreme Hatred were all on the bill. There were maybe 300 skinheads in attendance, dressed mostly in white vests, with tattoos. I’d hoped I might be able to interview one or two of the skinheads, and I gamely tried to engage them in conversation. “Hi, are you media-friendly?” I would ask. The reaction was not favorable. “What’s the point?” asked one. “You’ll just kike it up.” I, my director Stuart (who is Jewish), and our two-man crew had consulted with a pair of “security experts” from Pinkerton’s earlier in the day. The experts had explained that the skinheads would probably be members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a prison gang that would think nothing of attacking a couple of supposed “Jew journalists.” Unfortunately, the experts from Pinkerton’s couldn’t come with us into the event—that would have meant giving up their weapons at the gate, which they refused to do. They remained in a van down the block from the festival. In the meantime, we were to stay alert at all times and make sure we had a clear route to the exit.

  As a result, the whole time I was at the festival I was in a state of anxiety, afraid one of the skinheads might try to “Je
w-bash” me, looking about, like a driving-test candidate checking his mirrors. At first I didn’t notice when Prussian Blue took the stage.

  Dressed in tartan skirts and boots, the two girls played a version of “Road to Valhalla,” a ballad by the British skinhead Ian Stuart about white racists in the afterlife. They accompanied themselves on the guitar and the violin. The audience of skinheads, who until this point had been moshing and giving Nazi salutes, stood still and listened. One or two wiped tears from their eyes. The girls beamed, and Lynx did a little jig in excitement.

  I approached April, not realizing she was the twins’ mother, merely because, with no tattoos, and in her late thirties, she seemed one of the less intimidating people there. She said she would be happy to be in a documentary, and mentioned she was the mother of the two girls. Several days later, I drove four or five hours north to the small city in central California where they lived.

  I arrived on a beautiful, cloudless day. Most of the days are beautiful and cloudless in that part of California. The only evidence of anything unusual about their house was a row of three pairs of skinhead boots by the front door, two small, one big. Had I been more observant, I might have noticed the bumper stickers on the battered white pickup truck parked in front: “Stop Hating My Heritage,” “Member Of The Ladies Sewing Circle And Terrorist Society” and “My Boss Is An Austrian Painter.”

  The house itself was part of a new development on the outskirts of the small city where they live. It was a singlestorey, stuccoed building, with a tidy little front lawn and shrubbery (April was working part-time at a garden center). April answered the door wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with “Resistance” on it, the name of the skinhead record label that would be putting out the Prussian Blue CD. She introduced me to Lamb and Lynx.

  The house was sparsely decorated. It had pale beige carpets and off-white walls and IKEA furniture made with blonde wood (even in matters of home decor April favors Nordic looks).

  We agreed we might as well start with a recital, and so in the front room, Lamb and Lynx sang an a cappella version of a song by the British skinhead group Skrewdriver:

  I wanna tell you’bout South Africa And the so-called fight for freedom The much-praised black resistance And the communists who lead them . . . Strikeforce! White survival!

  Strikeforce! Yeah!

  Strikeforce! Gonna kill our rivals!

  Strikeforce! Into the Devil’s lair!

  Each time they said “strikeforce” the girls gave a Nazi salute. When the song ended, I clapped, a little uncertainly.

  “They don’t seem old enough to really know what that’s about,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve explained it to them,” April said. “What’s the ANC?”

  “It’s, um, African . . .” Lamb began, “National . . . ”

  “Congress,” April said. “And what’s happening in South Africa?”

  “The blacks are killing whites,” Lamb said.

  “And in Zimbabwe?”

  “And in . . . Bim-zah-bwe,” Lamb said, and looked out of the window.

  “They seem a little young to get into politics and racial issues,” I said, adding “maybe” when I noticed April glowering at me.

  “Yeah, but they’ve got to start sometime,” she said.

  They had given their first performance at age eight, singing a White Power song called “Ocean of Warriors” at a “Eurofest” organized by the National Alliance, the neo-Nazi organization that April and her fiancé both belonged to.

  In April’s version of the story, Lamb and Lynx had wanted to go onstage and sing a White Power song, having seen a woman perform “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and figuring they could do just as well. The National Alliance leaders had been so impressed with the vision of the two little blonde girls singing racially charged songs, they’d offered to pay for the recording of a CD. How two little eight-year-old girls had happened to know all the words to a White Power song was another question. “I think they learned ‘Ocean of Warriors’ because I’d given my brother a copy and he just loved it,” April said, “and they wanted to sing it for him.”

  Lynx gave a marginally different account: “My uncle liked it and Mom suggested learning it and we were okay with it. So she wrote out the lyrics, and when we were driving somewhere we’d have a little singing session.”

  Either way, the band was born. The name Prussian Blue came a couple of years later. The girls read the name of the color in a magazine, April said—“and since their eyes are blue and my dad’s side of the family are Prussian Germans they thought it would be a good name for the group. Prussian Blue is also a compound that should be present in the residue left over from Zyklon-B and which is not present—get this—not present at the so-called ‘gas chambers’ in Auschwitz. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek.”

  They would promote racial pride among young white teenagers, an alternative to mainstream pop music, which April views as propaganda for the Jewish-dominated Establishment. “They’re going to show how being proud of your race is something that would be very appealing to young teenage girls,” she said, as Lamb flopped over the back of the sofa and Lynx giggled. “Especially as they get a little bit older. I mean what red-blooded American boy isn’t going to find two blonde twins, sixteen years old, singing about pride in your race . . . very few of them are not going to find that very appealing.”

  The girls did not go to school. April educated them herself at home, according to a syllabus of her own devising. She used text books from the fifties. In her study, April showed me an ABC book she was working on for toddlers, entitled A is for Aryan. “Every letter has a word that is important to the white race or represents the white race,” she said. “So B is for blood, C is for creativity, D is for Dixie, E is for eugenic . . .” The artwork was being drawn by white prisoners, some of them incarcerated for hate crimes against nonwhite victims.

  Lynx and Lamb were in the same room playing on the computer. I asked Lynx what she thought of April’s ABC book.

  “It’s cool,” she said and smiled politely.

  I spent two days with April and her daughters on that first visit. In those two days, she barely stopped talking about race. She inhabited a world in which every action was assessed according to how it would either help or hurt the cause of white nationalism.

  A handful of times, I found a topic that might divert her for fifteen minutes or so into a race-neutral zone: the Beatles and Monty Python, Thomas Hardy (The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native are her favorite books). The rest of the time, April was a one-woman White Power radio station, finding a racist dimension in the most innocent topics: The Lord of the Rings (“For me, it was totally racial”), Young Frankenstein (“by Mel what’s-his-name— that Jew”), the Harry Potter films (“When the goblins in the bank came on, Lamb turned to me and said, ‘They look just like Jews!’”). It struck me that she is not only a racist, she is also a racial fundamentalist—someone for whom loyalty to race was the guiding compass of her life.

  April said she had been racist all her life. Her parents had raised her that way—though she allowed that she’d passed through a “brainwashed lemming” phase in her late teens and early twenties. She studied journalism in college, but dropped out and worked as a horse trainer. She only got serious about White Power politics around 2000, when her second marriage was breaking down. (Her first, the one that produced the twins, ended after her husband, a musician, got hooked on crack and crystal meth; now clean, he was totally supportive of her beliefs, she said.) In 2001, having shopped around and compared a few different racist groups, including a visit to the Aryan Nations in Idaho, April joined the National Alliance. Since then, she had been a tireless and dedicated white activist, leafleting local schools, writing letters, recruiting any white people she thought might be sympathetic.

  We spent our second morning driving up to see April’s father, Bill, a cattle rancher who lives a few hours north. Bill grazes 500 head of cattle, every one of them branded
with the official registered ranch brand—a swastika. I had been struggling to understand how April had become the way she is, and I was hoping Bill might provide some context.

  Bill was seventy years old. He was wearing thick dark glasses, a cowboy hat and a torn Wrangler shirt. “Right now, all the people are so politically correct that they wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouth full of it,” he said, standing by his truck, which had a big black swastika on the side of it. I told him I was a multiculturalist. “Are you? When you get married, are you going to marry a white person or a nigger?”

  This took me by surprise and all I said was, “Ugh.”

  “What do you usually date? Do you usually date white women?” April asked.

  I paused, and sighed, and said in a small voice: “Do Jewish women count as white?”

  “No,” Bill and April said together.

  “Not in our books,” Bill said.

  “I think we should hope he marries some Jewess,” April said. “Won’t that be funny? A Jewish princess. She’s gonna have you right there.”

  “Twisted right down,” Bill said. Then adopting a strange high voice he said: “Louis! I want a new ring, Louis! Flush the toilet for me, Louis! I can’t push the handle down!”

  Bill went some way toward explaining April. But still, for singlemindedness, she was way beyond him. “My whole family agrees with all my beliefs,” April said, “but whereas they’re just believers, I’m an activist. They’re racialists. They’re nationalists. But they haven’t taken it to the next level.”

  I wondered what it must be like for Lamb and Lynx, being exposed to April’s beliefs every day. To be fair, they seemed, much of the time, charming and well adjusted. But their mother’s skewed worldview would occasionally peep out. “Did you know Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and he liked to sleep with white prostitutes?” Lamb remarked on our first morning together.