Boys in Gilded Cages (13 page)

The recent boom in
Methamphetamine use in the Midwest is no secret, particularly in
Southern Missouri. A nickname for Meth in Hawthorn’s area is “417”,
the area code for much of Southwest Missouri. A little more than 10
years ago,
Glamour
Magazine featured the Southeast Missouri town of Sikeston,
and named it, somewhat sensationally, the “Meth Capital of the
World”. Strangely, Hawthorn had remained unscathed by the Meth
epidemic, until about four years ago. Conspiracy theorists and
message board users on topix—an anonymous board for small-town
citizens to gossip about their neighbors, have connected the
arrival of Father Redmond with the boom in Meth use. Bobby Faust
seems uncomfortable with this line of thought. “Redmond’s not
innocent, let’s put it that way,” he offered, declining to discuss
it further. He did imply that Redmond’s son, Eric, was a notorious
drug addict and that for some strange reason, Father Redmond
ignored the problem, and was hostile to anyone who brought it to
his attention. “Every Sunday service, prayer requests are called
for,” Faust said. “One morning, Eric’s aunt Tina said something
like, ‘Please pray for Eric, that he is cured of his illness.’ Eric
was never at church, as long as I could remember. Redmond got real
red-faced, and one of the Ushers whispered into her ear. She wasn’t
escorted out or anything, but she never came back after that.’”
Tina, seemingly ostracized from the church, became mostly isolated.
“We weren’t told to stay away from her or anything, but she was
gossiped about something fierce,” Faust remembered. “Horrible
things that probably weren’t true; a game of telephone, really.
Eventually we never saw her at the post office or anything. Then
about a month later she got a job offer in Springfield, and blew
out of Hawthorn.” That was the first time, Faust said, he became
acutely aware of the quiet control Father Redmond had over the
town. “It was a weird feeling. It was the first time the word
‘cult’ entered my mind. I couldn’t think of it any other way after
that.”

After Tina’s departure
from Hawthorn, virtually everyone in Hawthorn was put on the
church’s mailing list for a monthly newsletter,
Hawthorn Times
. Tabloid esque
headlines splashed across the front page, most often with a
celebrity or politician that Redmond deemed a target, usually on
account of so-called perversion or liberal politics. ‘Lesbian Lohan
Makes no Apologies for Demonic Behavior!!!’ one headline read, with
a tweet-length blurb. Even Brandon Bennett, Hawthorn’s other claim
to fame, was not spared. ‘Possessed Bennett: Rehab Can’t Save Me
Now!’ It read.

“
I had a serious problem
with that,” Faust said. “I went to middle school with Brandon,
shortly before his family moved him to L.A. We were all so proud of
him when he got famous, and a lot of people didn’t like Redmond
tearing him down. He was one of ours. Redmond didn’t even know
him.” On topix, and eventually talk in the town, suggested that
Redmond actually did know Brandon and his mother, and was
instrumental in getting him an agent in Nashville. “I don’t know
anything about that,” Faust said.

Brandon Bennett, in an interview with Howard
Stern, laughed off the church when he was asked about Father
Redmond. “So who’s this kooky pastor from your town? You know
anything about him? People are saying he knew your mom, in
Nashville,” Stern asked him. Bennett said simply, “My mom knew a
lot of people. She would have set herself on fire to get me an
audition with Nickelodeon.” Stern pressed, “So you never went to
this church…what is it, this Baptist Church?” Brandon flatly
replied, “I was born in that town. You don’t exist in Hawthorn
unless your family is in church. But this asshole was not there
when I was,” Bennett said. “To answer your question, it’s possible
my mom knew him, but as far as I know, I’ve never met him.”

In his Op-Ed for ManChild New York, Bobby
Faust said he considered himself an agnostic since age 18. It
started with a simple google search.

He had broken the ‘no internet’ rule by
going to the library in the nearby town of Oak Tree Bluff, and
started reading topix, which he had heard about from one of his
friends. “Some of these posts were alarming to me, because they
were obviously written by people I knew, and they were saying some
pretty horrible things.” One topix user, whom Faust says he’s
friends with, claimed that an unnamed teenage boy, we’ll call him
Darrin, sold drugs for Father Redmond. “It didn’t say ‘to’, it said
‘for’,” Faust said. “Selling ‘to’ Redmond would make sense to me,
because the man is off his nut. But ‘for’? That one word made me
physically ill.” Another replied to this post: “Redmond’s his pimp!
If you’ve ever seen the T.V. show Cops, you know that pimps get
their hookers on drugs. Control. Duh!”

Faust said he was most disturbed by the fact
that these people seemed to keep attending church every Sunday,
despite knowing these things about the pastor. “I had never known
anyone to gossip, or back-bite. That was the thing that killed me
at first: The gossip. I didn’t even entertain the thought that the
things being said could be true. It was kind of funny, though,
because they thought they were anonymous,” Bobby said. “In fact, I
figured out who most of the five-or-so posters are just by the way
they wrote, so I know they show up every Sunday and Wednesday. I
have to wonder why,” he said. “Of course, they’re all
tweakers—every single one of them. So I guess there’s my answer.”
Most of the posts were gleefully catty, and nothing more. “Did you
see Father Redmond’s brow today? Sweaty pig,” one user posted, in a
typically-gossipy thread. “His face looked like a glazed ham.”

His online investigating prompted him to
tell his parents what he had found. Unsurprisingly, his father, who
had, for all purposes, been betrayed by Redmond, wasn’t interested
in what Bobby had found, but that he had gone against orders and
surfed the web. “That was the last ass-whooping I ever took from my
father. I was 16 years old, getting beaten by a belt for what I saw
as looking out for my family and my town,” Faust said. “I figured
that he wouldn’t necessarily believe what I found—I didn’t. But he
had an axe to grind. Not only that, but wouldn’t you at least want
to look into something this serious? This was serious.

“
I was thinking, what are
you, brainwashed? Does he have something on you? I saw my dad as a
little bitch. I couldn’t even look at him after that.” Bobby Faust
ran away from home two days later.

The Hawthorn Sherriff, Clay Hamm, found
Bobby sitting under an overpass on Highway 60, smoking weed with
Darrin--the unnamed teenage boy said to be a drug dealer and
prostitute on the topix board--while coming home from a dinner date
with his wife. Bobby was picked up, and brought back to his
parents’ house. “I was kind of relieved,” he said. “I was hungry,
and I’m not really built for survival without a roof.” But what
really struck him about this encounter was that Sherriff Hamm
wasn’t interested in picking up Darrin. In fact, when asked why he
didn’t give Darrin a ride, Sherriff Hamm snapped, “He does this
shit all the time. He’ll be fine. Your parents asked me to find
you. Darrin’s none of your business, and you shouldn’t be hanging
out with him.”

“
Darrin wasn’t pissed,”
Bobby said. “He seemed to just have an understanding that he was
not to be picked up. He waved goodbye as we drove off. He was
smiling. It was kind of weird.”

“
So after that,” Faust
continued, “I doubted my own mind about the whole thing. It was
just too weird…it was surreal, the way people were acting. But that
Darrin was some sort of drug mule for Father Redmond was just too
weird to be believed.” Faust can’t bring himself to go there, even
now. “I still just don’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, [do I think
they] sat by and watched this boy go downhill, maybe turned a blind
eye? I absolutely can buy that. But to think this dumbass [Redmond]
can pull off a big drug operation, and the whole town goes along
with it, or doesn’t know? Nah, no way. Not to mention child
prostitution? It’s a neat story, but there’s no way.”

Once Bobby Faust was back in his parents’
house, he wasn’t disciplined. For about three days, it wasn’t
mentioned. Neither was anything else. “I got the silent treatment.
Or what I thought was the silent treatment. The whooping I got from
my dad was the last time he has spoken to me,” Faust says. “It’s
been about two years—the last words my father said to me were ‘bend
over.’” Faust hesitated, seemingly to hold back tears. “Talk about
fucked up.”

On the third day of eerie silence, his
mother coldly told Bobby to get in the van. “I thought about
telling her no, but I had a bad feeling about what would happen if
I did,” he said. “These were the first words she had said to me
since I came back. I thought it best to just do as I was told.

“
I got the feeling
something fucked up was about to happen, but I had no control over
it. I thought ‘Okay, I’ll just take my punishment, whatever it is’.
I thought the worst case scenario was a lecture from Father
Redmond. This whole thing was because of him. My intuition was
right, in a way.”

Bobby was carted to Father Redmond’s office.
They weren’t alone. There were two men there he didn’t recognize.
One of them was an older man dressed in a suit, who didn’t look up
from his computer once, and who was typing every time Bobby said
anything. The other man was tall—over six feet, standing at the
back of the room with his arms crossed, staring hard in Bobby’s
eyes, rarely blinking. “I thought, ‘Okay, this is that bouncer from
the [local bar]. And he’s gonna fuck me up if I don’t do whatever
it is I’m here to do,’” Bobby said. “All that crap I had heard and
read online was in the back of my mind, I’m not gonna lie.”

“
He looked me in the eye,
and said, in a real sad voice, ‘I’m really disappointed in you,
Bobby,’” Bobby recalls. “And I said, ‘for what?’ He sighed, and I
thought he was being kinda phony, like this was
scripted.”

“
He said he wanted to send
me to this place in Springfield, this sort of Job Corp place, but
religious. I told him he was full of shit. That’s when he told me I
couldn’t go home, that my parents gave him control of this
decision.”

“
I started to ask if they
made it official, on paper, through the courts or whatever. Then I
realized it didn’t matter that much. So I just said, fine, I’m not
going home, but I’m sure as shit not going to some group boys’ home
or whatever. Not one he was involved with.”

Harold Redmond, unlike the
spokespeople of the Westboro Baptist Church, did not court media
attention. On the contrary, Redmond is known as a bit of a recluse,
shunning even local media. He has, so far, refused all requests for
interviews, and when the local paper wanted to profile Hawthorn
Baptist Church for a series of features on local churches and
non-profits, he agreed—with a truckload of conditions. The editor
of the
Springfield
Sentinel
, Jane Marley, says that what was
to be a fluff piece meant to bring exposure to Hawthorn, became a
nightmare. “I don’t usually get involved with reporters’ pieces
until difficulties arise. So mostly I don’t even see them until
there’s a draft on my desk, especially ones such as this,” Marley
said. “But after he had turned in the necessary paperwork to get
this story started, it became a daily barrage of voice mails that
were increasingly bizarre.”

Marley recalls her phone
going off in the middle of the night on several occasions. “I’d
wake up and look at my phone and realize it had been Redmond
calling me. Sometimes three or four times. Sometimes at two o’clock
in the morning.” As for what he could possibly want at such an
hour, Marley seemed exasperated while talking about it. “The thing
is, at first it was the most inane things; the photograph we’d use,
for example, or certain church-related events we could promote.”
When she didn’t return his calls within 24 hours, he got irate. “I
have messages from Mr. Redmond that are just vile.
Vile.
Name-calling.
Profanity. Accusing the paper of a conspiracy against Hawthorn
Baptist. Extremely paranoid ramblings, at times,” Marley said. “I
just told the reporter, who was a sophomore in college, to forget
it, I wasn’t going to put her through that.” Marley chuckled a bit.
“Unless she wanted to do a completely
different
story. In the end, I
thought it better to just leave Redmond alone.” Marley paused for a
second. “I did think about calling a hospital, though. Maybe I
should have.”

“
I don’t know if Father
Redmond is on drugs,” Bobby Faust says. “I do know he is batshit
insane, for one reason or another.”

Ironically, what Bobby Faust is most known
for condemning, he wasn’t around to see. “The Westboro comparisons
started after I was kicked out. I know from other people that
Father Redmond started corresponding with Shirley Phelps around
2006 or 2007,” Faust says. “I think what Redmond saw in Westboro
Baptist Church was a good business model. People think the two
churches actually believe the shit they say on those signs. To me,
as far as I can see, it’s a racket.”

It has long been suggested that the protests
that have made Westboro Baptist Church infamous are nothing more
than a scam to the system. Bobby seems to think that’s what
attracted Redmond to WBC, not the ideology. “Think about it. No one
ever talks about the gazillion law suits both churches have been
involved with,” he says, becoming more animated as he tries to
collect his thoughts. “They are their own lawyers. Every time
someone tries to stop them from protesting, or assaults them in
some way—it happens,” he calms himself mid-sentence. “It’s a
payday.” He shakes his head. “The best thing you can do with
Westboro is ignore them. But the best thing you could do with
Hawthorn is to start paying attention. Knowing Redmond, this is
just a phase in a crazy, fucked up plan.”