The Call of the Weird (25 page)

The use of a racial epithet surprised me. Likewise, the description of the nonwhite doll as ugly. There’s a kind of decorum practiced among certain white racists that dictates they don’t put down other races. Their beliefs, they maintain, have to do with pride in one’s own race. Hence, they style themselves “white separatists” rather than “white supremacists.” This was how they talked when their guard was down. And was Final War really Lamb’s favorite kind of music?

The photo of Lamb and Lynx in short skirts on the cover of
Resistance
spawned a lively discussion on White Power message forums on the Internet.

“Breaking News: National Alliance using kiddie porn now,” ran one post, with a copy of the cover pasted into the message.

“Who is running
Resistance
?” asked another. “Aryans? Or filthy kike pimps in Tel Aviv?”

“Do you think Hitler would have allowed his little girl out dressed like that?” asked a third.

Using her online name SheWolfoftheNA, April responded: “I would like you to understand exactly the aim of the cover of
Resistance
magazine this time. We are hoping to get the attention of young girls who are being bombarded with images like Britney Spears and the like. We are competing against the Hilary Duff/Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen phenomenon, and girls dressed like
Little House on the Prairie
won’t cut it. We need to be able to attract young women to our way of thinking in a way that will be timely as well as maintain our cultural and racial identification. The one thing that we lack more than anything are women in our white nationalist community. I believe that we need to attract them as young as possible and to do it in any way that works.”

It was true, I reflected, that teen idols on the Disney Channel dressed in a grown-up way and wore make-up; but as a rule, they also smiled in their photographs. The girls hadn’t smiled, I think probably because they wanted to look tough. But the combined effect of the short skirts and the not smiling gave them a kind of
come-hither look that on twelve-year-old girls was, to say the least, disquieting.

When I saw them again the following year, on the way to the Halloween theme park, I asked April about the
Resistance
cover. I put it to April that she’d dressed the twins provocatively on purpose.

“But there’s no flesh showing!” she said. “I mean, they’re wearing leotards . . . At the very most, you could have said okay, maybe their skirts were a little short. But for them to claim it was kiddie porn? Did you see that? Isn’t that bizarre?”

“Well, I think they were trying to make a point by exaggerating.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s stupid. That’s like what the Jews do. That’s what we accuse the Jews of doing all the time, exaggerating figures and stuff to make a point.” “They said you were acting like a Jew,” I pointed out.

The Halloween theme park, when we got there, turned out to be a kind of epic version of the haunted houses they have at funfairs. There were walks through dark woods, a large spooky house, and a “hayride,” all of them staffed with people dressed up as ghouls and ghosts, looming out of the shadows, cackling, howling, and hooting.

I’m unusually sensitive to sudden loud noises, and I found the only way I could make it through the haunted zones without completely jangling my nerves was if I put my fingers in my ears and squinted. The idea of the outing, of course, had been to give me a chance to chat to Lamb and Lynx about the changes in their lives and about their beliefs. We’d done a little of that in the car. Lynx talked about the need for “real” diversity. What if lions and tigers interbred until there were none left, just a mixed-up species of half-and-halfs? Listening back to the tape of my conversation with the girls, I was surprised to hear myself say to Lynx, “Good answer.” Then I
mentioned that “lygers” were real animals but that they, apparently, suffer from weight problems, as I’d learned on a TV documentary. I said this in the spirit of making a concession to her argument.

The truth was I felt odd soliciting incendiary remarks from Lamb and Lynx. Their comments about White Power had a rehearsed quality—they didn’t seem quite real. I had a feeling they would rather be listening to their Sony Discmans.

I was looking out for changes in them. They had both grown a couple of inches while I was away. They were a little more ladylike, wearing tiny amounts of make-up. Lamb had earrings. They had braces on their teeth.

“We have tickets to go to a Green Day concert on November 20,” Lynx said. “We know they’re not racial. They’re probably a communist band. But it doesn’t matter because it’s still good music and stuff. And it’s kind of upbeat and they’re talented musicians.” April’s mother had been waiting for us at the park. Her name was Dianne. She wore glasses and had short white hair. She grew up in England and came to America when she was fourteen. She babysat Dresden while we explored the park. After we’d done the walks and the hayride, we sat round in the concourse eating hot dogs while a rock band played and people dressed as zombies and ghouls mingled with the paying public.

“Are there still gaps where the buildings were bombed out in the Blitz?” Dianne asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“I was in Bristol. It was bad. So many derelict buildings. You’d see a bathtub two storeys up, just sticking out of the wall. They bombed Bristol pretty badly.”

“April likes him,” I said, meaning Hitler. It seemed rather an important point—destruction of Europe by April’s dear leader—but Dianne didn’t hear. “What do you think of April’s views?”

“I think the races should be separate. I’m not a fighter the way my husband is. You don’t want a khaki nation do you? I had a friend over in England. He said everyone was khaki!” She squeezed Lamb’s cheeks. “Look at that face. Isn’t it beautiful? Blonde hair. Peachy complexion. Why would you want to go and ruin it?

The following morning, dandling baby Dresden on her lap, April played me a song from the new CD that Lamb and April had written together called “Sacrifice,” about martyrs to the cause of white nationalism. “Sacrifice, they gave their lives, all those ones who died.” It mentioned Rudolf Hess and William Pierce, the founder of the National Alliance. There was also another cover of a song by Ian Stuart, called “The Snow Fell.”

“I can’t wait to do the video on this,” April said.

“You’re doing a video?”

“Yeah! And a DVD!”

There were microphone stands in the front room. The girls sang “Green Fields of France,” a song about the First World War, which had also been covered by Ian Stuart. It had been drizzling, and when they finished Lynx went to the window and said, “I like the smell after it rains.”

“Do you think you might be a stage mom?” I said to April.

“Do you think I’m a stage mom?” April said, with sudden intensity. “What is a stage mom? Is a stage mom someone who buys their kids musical instruments and hauls them off to lessons every goddamn week when she has laundry and a thousand other things to do? And gets them to an open mike night so they can perform and books them into a recording studio? Isn’t it someone that’s overwhelmingly controlling and overbearing? I don’t think you could accuse me of that.”

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 question
able 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.”

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 enti
tled
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 funda
mentally 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