The Call of the Weird

by Louis Theroux

  Lamb, who had been strumming chords on her guitar, announced that she had just written two new songs. With some deliberation, looking down at her fingers, she played a set of chord changes, and then said: “That’s the second one.”

  “We could get some lyrics that someone sent us,” April said.

  “Who sends you lyrics?” I asked.

  “Racial people,” April said. “People in the movement. Prisoners.” “No, Mom. I want this song mainstream,” Lamb said. Then her tone softened: “So we can have some mainstream songs for shows.”

  “Would you like Prussian Blue to be a mainstream band?” I asked Lamb.

  “Somewhat, yeah. Um, we could also make a mainstream band, and that would be completely different.”

  “What would you sing about in your mainstream band?”

  Lamb was sitting on the sofa with her knees up inside her baggy T-shirt, like a tent. “Well, I’m writing a song about how you don’t have to do stuff just because other people say it’s cool. Like smoking and drinking. It’s called ‘You Don’t Have To.’”

  There was one other big change in the twins’ life. They would be going to school the following year. April had found one that she was happy with. It was 70 percent white. She seemed excited at the prospect of sending Lamb and Lynx to school full of white racial propaganda. She had an idea that the diary of Anne Frank, which is part of the curriculum in California, had been written in ballpoint pen, which wasn’t widely available until after the war, and that therefore it was probably a forgery. “I’m certainly going to support them if they want to challenge their teachers, and if they want to write a paper about the Anne Frank diary being questionable or Martin Luther King being a degenerate,” April said. “I’ll go speak to their teachers and if they get downgraded for including stuff that’s factually accurate, I’ll go in and call’em on it.”

  “What if they don’t want to do that?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What if they don’t want to challenge their teachers. Would you support them then?”

  “Yeah! Whatever they want to do.”

  My own sense was that they’d probably want to make friends with classmates and get good grades rather than offer a National Socialist–influenced critique of the school curriculum, but I was no longer surprised that April might think otherwise. It reminded me a little of a fantasy I sometimes used to have myself of going back to school as a grown-up and knowing more than everyone else, putting the teachers in their place, except hers was a White Power version and she was living it through her kids.

  I wondered how the baby would grow up. Lamb and Lynx were already eight years old when their mom became a “racial activist.” But Dresden would never know anything else. From her very conception, she was a kind of breeding experiment. A test case of racist child-rearing.

  The twins were watching Green Day, whose videos they had on TiVo. April was holding Dresden in her lap and moving her like a puppet in time to the music. “Yeah!” she said in a baby voice. “Hopefoowy, she will get some musical tawent fwom somewhere!” Dresden danced around, seeming to enjoy it. Her hair was wispy, strawberry blonde. Her arms and legs were like marshmallow. She poked her tongue out and gurgled.

  Lamb and Lynx said they were hungry. “What are we going to eat?”

  “We could always stick a Jew in the oven!” April said. “Ha ha ha!” But she was still thinking about Dresden and her musical future. “You know what would be fun? You could have a bluescreen and make her dance and make her play all the different instruments and make it look like she was doing it all on her own.”

  EPILOGUE

  Late in the year, in my rented Hollywood apartment, I began writing.

  Within days of moving in, it had become clear that, from a creative perspective, my new home couldn’t have been worse. I’d been in a rush when I viewed it, and I’d failed to notice that it overlooked a motorcycle dealership and an alleyway favored by the drivers of heavy trucks. It was possibly the noisiest apartment anywhere in the city, a kind of ongoing chamber concert of urban sounds.

  During lulls in the cacophony, I worked. But even as I wrote I kept phoning my old subjects, updating my notes, interviewing new people, attempting to disclose some secret that lay at the bottom of my ever mounting heap of material.

  I checked in with Art, the hapless Marshall Sylver follower, finding he’d lost his job at DirecTV and was now selling Las Vegas timeshares. I chatted to Pat, the pro-stoning patriot I’d seen up at Almost Heaven, and was surprised to hear he’d relaxed his scruples about remarriage and shacked up with a woman he met on the Internet— raising the question of whether he might have to stone himself.

  I spoke to April, still hoping I might attend a Folk the System event or a “Eurofest.” And so it went on, with calls to Hayley, JJ, Mello T, Ike, and others.

  As the months passed, some of the stories I’d been covering made headlines again. In January, a federal judge threw out the obscenity indictment against the “horror porn” director Rob Black. In March, after a court ruled that the husband of Terry Schiavo, the woman who’d been in a “persistent vegetative state” for fifteen years, was within his rights to remove her feeding tube, Colonel Bo Gritz was arrested in a quixotic act of protest, attempting to bring bread and water to the invalid, who naturally was in no position to consume them.

  The following month, a nationwide manhunt was launched to capture the neo-Nazi hitman who’d killed the family of a judge in Milwaukee. I called April for her thoughts and learned she was among those caught up in the investigation—four SWAT-type federal agents had arrived on her doorstep, she said. I began to wonder whether I’d underestimated the threat posed by the White Power movement when I’d written them off as mere windbags. A few days later, the real culprit was caught: an out-of-work electrician with an obsession about his failed medical malpractice claim. In early summer, I escaped my noisy apartment and flew back to Britain. But even then the stories I’d followed kept unfolding. April and the twins gave an interview to a network news show, and for a brief moment they became a coast-to-coast talking point. Photographs appeared in British newspapers which showed the girls smiling broadly and wearing sweatshirts with Nazi logos—smiley faces with Hitler hair and moustaches.

  One of the last calls I made was to Harold Camping, the Oakland-based Bible scholar who’d been the subject of my first-ever TV interview in 1994, back when he was predicting with 99.9 percent certainty that the world was about to end later in the year. He’d based his conclusion on a painstaking analysis of the “jubilees” mentioned in the Old Testament, and publicized it in a book entitled 1994? (the question mark being an acknowledgment of the 0.1 percent possibility that everything would be fine). Though his scholarship was emphatically non-mainstream, Camping actually had a large following. His radio ministry, Family Radio, owned stations across the U.S., with listeners in the millions.

  For that first interview, I’d visited him at his headquarters in Oakland a few months before the predicted apocalypse. In the flesh, he had seemed a kindly man. He was in his seventies, with a deep voice and a craggy face. It being my first assignment, I was nervous. I still wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there and so I was relieved when he did most of the talking. I recall him saying that the end, when it came, would be “super-terrible.” He went through some of the events mentioned in the book of Revelation, marking them on a calendar: last chance for salvation is on Wednesday the ninth . . . a third of the waters turn to bitter wormwood on Thursday . . . Jesus returns on Saturday . . . and so on. Among the questions I asked was, “Let’s say I worship the Devil. Should I be worried?”

  What I was expecting when I called him again, I don’t know— I wasn’t even sure whether he was still alive. I suppose I just hoped that, since my book was about following up old stories, I might learn something by checking in with my oldest story of all.

  I found his offices in the phone book and reached a doubtful-sounding receptionist, who grudgingly put
me through. He sounded much as I remembered—warm and friendly and indulgent of my ignorant questioning, with the one difference that, at eighty-three, his hearing seemed to be going. Naturally, he didn’t remember our interview; nor was I keen to remind him, since the show in which I’d done the segment had been satirical in tone. “It was for the BBC,” I said, breezily, and changed the subject.

  If I’d been expecting him to be apologetic or defensive on the small matter of Jesus’ nonappearance and the failure of the waters to turn to bitter wormwood, I was disappointed. It was possible, he said, that He’d rushed the printing of 1994?. There was a verse in the Bible he thought he might have misread. But to be fair, he said: “I didn’t make a prediction. I said there’s a high likelihood that 1994 could be the end.”

  We chatted about his ministry. He said it was lucky I’d called. He’d been studying the Bible ever more diligently since our last conversation, and his latest scholarship indicated that we were at the end of the “church age.” I wasn’t sure what this meant, except, apparently, that we no longer needed to go to church—a liberty that I’d been allowing myself for some time. He had one other piece of news, however. He said that while he’d been wrong to predict the apocalypse in 1994, all the evidence now pointed to the end coming in 2011. He’d just finished writing a book on this very topic, and it was important that as many people as possible should be forewarned.

  “Aha!” I said.

  “It’s based entirely on a very careful reading of the Bible . . . The last twelve years I’ve been working very very hard on this, and I have a whole lot greater information today than I did first time around.”

  “So what advice are you giving to people?” I asked.

  “Oh, the advice I give to people is to get ready to meet God. It’s a super-terrible future that awaits mankind unless they become saved.”

  “And you don’t see it as an obstacle that you said the end would happen in 1994?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s like when you first try to ride a bicycle. You fall off the first time and then you get back on and you ride again.”

  When I embarked on my Reunion Tour, it was with the idea of seeing how the lives of my ex-subjects had changed and how they were faring in their various strange commitments. Weirdness, as I understand the word, is a form of belief or a practice that isn’t merely outside the mainstream but is also in some way self-sabotaging. Having sex on camera for a living violates the most intimate sphere of life; to pay someone money to hypnotize you into being a millionaire is foolishness; preparing for an apocalypse that never comes is, among other things, a distraction from the more important business of life. To me these things are axiomatic. And so, I went back, in a spirit of curiosity, inflected, perhaps, with a little Schadenfreude, to see whether the disappointments of age, the censure of the straight world, might have forced them to rethink their outlook. I thought it was possible that with time they might see the light; they might shake off their beliefs and start to become more normal.

  The months that followed threw me up against a cast of people, all with different visions of the world and different ideas of self-fulfillment, but all of them energetically pursuing their destiny. A few, in the overheated worlds of rap and porn, had found some measure of success. Many had faced challenges and setbacks, especially those true believers, like the pioneers of Almost Heaven and the racist empire-builders of the Aryan Nations, whose uncompromising faith-based vision had set them at odds with reality.

  But people don’t change their beliefs easily. Even when their deepest convictions are challenged—by the failure of the world to end, for example—they continue on their way, sticking to the old routine: They get back on their Weird bikes and ride again.

  The same applies to me. I’d hoped the trip might be an opportunity for me to get in touch with my own weirdness. Without a camera, I wondered if I might become more immersed in my stories and therefore more open—forced to acknowledge my shadow side. But if anything, I found myself less susceptible to the call of the weird the second time round. The Nazis seemed more lamentable; the gangsta rappers more irresponsible; the gurus more manipulative. Instead of an inner weirdo, I was surprised to find an inner curmudgeon. Perhaps it’s understandable to be more jaded on one’s second exposure to something strange. I also suspect the protection of the camera and crew on my first TV-making sorties had allowed me, in a dilettante-ish way, to imagine I had more in common with my subjects than was really the case. In going back unarmed, as it were, I was forced to be more realistic. As Mello T himself said, when it comes to pimping he’d rather go to bed early and do a crossword puzzle.

  And yet in one important respect I did start to recognize a kind of weirdness in myself. Occasionally, I saw parallels between the seductions of some of the strange worlds I was covering and my own journalism. In reporting these stories over the years, maintaining relationships partly out of genuine affection and partly out of the vanity of wanting to generate “material” for a program or a book, I realized I too had created a tiny offbeat subculture, with its own sincerity and its own evasions. A little like a cult leader or a prostitute, I had been working in a gray area somewhere south of absolute candor . . . but like the other cults and subcultures contained in these pages, I have also been pleased to find a depth of feeling in our group. Though occasionally I’d been rebuffed by my old subjects, or shocked by their beliefs, and though I’d sometimes questioned my own motivations, in general I was more amazed by their willingness to put up with me a second time, and surprised by my affection for them. I’d been moved at times, and irritated, and upset, but the emotions had been real.

  This is my Weirdness. If the lesson of Harold Camping is any guide, it is my destiny to live it to the end. “Have you ever argued with a member of the Flat Earth Society?” a self-help guru named Ross Jeffries once asked me. “It’s completely futile, because fundamentally they don’t care if something is true or false. To them, the measure of truth is how important it makes them feel. If telling the truth makes them feel important, then it’s true. If telling the truth makes them feel ashamed and small, then it’s false.” My experience on my trip has borne this out. On the list of qualities necessary to humans trying to make our way through life, truth scores fairly low. Why do people believe and do weird things? Because in the end, feeling alive is more important than telling the truth. We have evolved as living creatures to express ourselves, to be creative, to tell stories. We are instruments for feeling, faith, energy, emotion, significance, belief, but not really truth.

  As noted by both Shakespeare and Elvis, the world is a stage we walk upon. We are all, in a way, fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.

  As I worked away on my notes, thousands of miles from America, I realized that this might be the secret I was hoping to disclose. I would never stop phoning around my old subjects. I would never stop musing over cups of tea, and wondering what became of the people I met; the journey was ongoing and endless. And I became aware of that vast continent of human stories that lay stretched out under the overarching sky: the UFO believers and porn performers, and cult leaders and rappers, and somewhere a neo-Nazi playing mah-jongg on his computer in a room he shared with fifteen-cent fish. And for now, I put down my pen.

  London

  September 2006

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Everything in this book is faithful to the way it was, except for a few elisions of time, for the sake of the narrative, and two names: Dave Roach and Art Eagle.

  Though I wrote the book on my own, the TV shows that inspired it were made collaboratively. In the interest of economy, throughout the text I have referred to “my documentaries,” but the hard work was done by the many producers, directors, editors, and assistant producers that I’ve been lucky enough to have as my collaborators. Special thanks to Michael Moore, for giving me my break, David Mortimer, for giving me my own show, and to Kevin Sutcliffe, Ed Robbins, Geoffrey O’Connor, Kate Townsend, Will Yapp, Simon
Boyce, Jim Margolis, Maria Silver, Karen Morton, Alicia Kerr, and Stuart Cabb, for making sure the show stayed on the air. In going back, I was helped enormously by Charlie Braxton, Luke Ford, Rob Balch, Rick Ross, and Ron Faulk. I was also helped, of course, by the many contributors whose stories are the subject of this book. Thanks also to Mike Oehler and Ken Kurson, for their hospitality, Majestik Magnificent, for helping me find a car, my editor Richard Milner, for his patience, Philippa Brewster, for her editorial notes, ScottGalloway, for his advice, and Brett and Alison Clevenger, for finding my laptop computer by the side of the road in Idaho and returning it safely to me. Thanks most of all to Nancy. Without her valuable insights and her constant support and encouragement there would be no book. I owe her more than words can say.