A Changed Man (3 page)

“I know how those guys think,” Nolan says. “I know how they wound up where they wound up. And I know how to turn them around.”

Maslow says, “Vincent. If I may call you that…. Help us understand. You’ve spent two years in one of the country’s most vicious hate groups. And now you want to come and work with World Brotherhood Watch?”

“In a nutshell,” Nolan says.

“I see,” says Maslow. “And in that nutshell, I assume, is a major change of heart?”

Change of heart.
That works for Nolan. That’s exactly what it was. A heart transplant, a new pig’s heart for your damaged old one, one of those total blood exchanges you get in Transylvania. Maslow’s native land.

“
Major
change,” Nolan says. “Correct.”

“A conversion experience,” Maslow says.

“Exactly.”

“And how did you get to us?”

“Your Web site,” Nolan says. “Like I said…”

Maslow eyeballs Bonnie a memo: See what the World Wide Web can do! Let’s look into this further. “But something else must have happened—”

“That’s right. Something did, sir.” Nolan’s never called anyone
sir
in his life. Like some lowlife cornball Elvis.

Maslow says, “Vincent, Bonnie, please. Sit down.”

Bonnie sinks into the nearest chair. Nolan takes the other chair, and bingo, he’s back in the principal’s office on one of the many occasions when he and his mom were summoned in for a chat. Nolan’s mom always took his side, patiently explaining why her son might be bored, ignoring the sparks of hatred shooting out of the principal’s eyes. He’s also thinking of the time when he and Celia Mignano got busted for having sex in the art room. Both memories give him a pleasant buzz, like a swarm of mellow bees humming between him and Bonnie.

Maslow says, “Would you mind telling us how this change of heart came about?”

How did they get so far so fast? Nolan isn’t ready. He’d pictured a conversation. This is an audition. Only now he sees it’s useless. He could sit here and blab all day and never explain. Still, it’s not as if he didn’t know that sooner or later they would ask. That’s why Nolan prepared, mentally rehearsed his account of what pushed him over the edge.

“The thing is…I was at this rave…. Two weeks ago, may be three. That last freak hot spell before this one…”

“Rave?” Five seconds into the story, and Maslow’s left in the dust. He smiles and hands this one off to Bonnie, their resident youth-culture expert. “Mrs. Kalen has two teenagers.”

“Girls or boys?” As if Nolan cares.

“Sons. Max and Danny.” Bonnie likes just mentioning them. Something loosens in her face. “Twelve and sixteen.”

“You must have had them when you were a child,” Nolan says.

“Right,” says Bonnie. “A baby.”

Maslow’s fingers drum on the desk. What
is
it with Maslow and Bonnie? If only it were as simple as sex. It’s some neurotic head trip. Bonnie worships the guy. And he digs it.

“A rave?” asks Maslow. “Enlighten me.”

“It’s like a huge party,” says Nolan.

“Well,” says Bonnie. “A little more than that. It’s a whole…underground subculture. Kids get the word out, and thousands of them take over an old warehouse with giant sound systems and paint their faces and dance and—”

“Lovely,” says Maslow. “Do your sons attend these events?”

“Not so far.” Bonnie knocks on Maslow’s desk. The woman is superstitious.

Nolan says, “This one was outdoors. In a field. The dead middle of nowhere. In March. How smart was that? They’d dragged out these gigantic generators and the screens for the lights and…Did I say my cousin Raymond took me?” Nolan wishes he hadn’t mentioned Raymond. The urge to look over his shoulder must be visible on his face.

“Vincent,” says Maslow. “May I interrupt? When you’re as old as I am, everyone under forty looks the same age. But excuse me, I’m wondering…”

“I’m thirty-two,” says Nolan. He knows where Maslow’s going with this. Nolan’s near the top of the age curve for rave and rock-concert attendance. “That’s why I thought it would depress me, hanging out with a bunch of teens jumping around and waving glow sticks and puking. And frankly…I couldn’t see what it would
do
for me to exchange a big group hug with the rainbow coalition.”

Bonnie laughs—a good sign. Maslow doesn’t—a bad one.

“Thirty miles from the rave, the sky clouded over. I started hearing thunder. I figured we were looking at some Woodstock Nation mud fest. I remember telling Raymond how embarrassing it would be to spend years preparing to die with the ARM liberation forces and then get fried by lightning with a crowd of dirt children in a meadow.”

“Did you and your friends in ARM often go to these…raves?” What’s it to Maslow? What ARM members do on their down time is none of his business.

“Never,” says Nolan. “Not usually.” This story has two levels. One is the truth, which makes it easy to tell. The second level is not a lie so much as a highlight, drag, and delete. You don’t have to tell everyone everything. It’s a lesson that comes with age. By now Nolan has learned a few things, and also anger management gave him some useful tips to remember: No need to always have the last word, to unload the last shot in the chamber. No reason to report that Raymond made fun of him for suggesting they bail because of the weather. Was chickenshit Nolan scared of getting
rained on?
What was Raymond supposed to do with those seventy hits of Ex? Shove them up his ass?

“By the time we arrived, a million kids were squirming around under these drive-in movie screens, boom boom, pulsing colored lights. Like some worm-farm lava-lamp cult. They had this huge scaffolding with disc jockeys sitting up top and techno music pounding—”

Maslow says, “It sounds like hell.”

Again the sound of Raymond’s voice thrums in Nolan’s ears. The Jew does not believe in heaven or hell. That’s why he can steal from his neighbors, provided he repents on that one day a year that the Jew sets aside to atone.

“So what happened then?” Hold on. Is Maslow
hurrying
him? Nolan will take as long as he needs to.

“Raymond splits. Disappears. And I’m thinking…Okay, wait. Let’s back up a minute. You’ve got to understand. I was a different person then. I thought stuff I would never think now.” Is that true? Sure it is. Maybe Nolan picked and chose from the crap he was hearing, but he definitely chose
some
of it. The part he agreed with already.

“We
do
understand,” says Bonnie. “You’re telling us how you
changed.
”

Is that what Nolan’s telling them? Peace through change. Where did he just see that? Right. The sign in the lobby. So that’s what they’re selling. Beautiful. Nolan can do peace through change.

“So I’m thinking it’s just like Raymond to leave me alone in this mob of human hairballs. And then this girl starts dancing with me. And she hands me two light sticks.”

Time for another drag and delete. The girl was young and pretty. Nolan would have stuck the light sticks in his eyes if he’d thought it would get him laid. “So okay, I wave them around. The girl’s smiling, everything’s cool, a second later she’s gone. And I’m left with these lights. I’m trying to get to the edge of the crowd, but the mob keeps pushing me back. And it’s confusing, because I’d been hanging out with guys who thought it was your patriotic duty to stomp people like that. Not that the guys I knew in ARM got into those situations much. We always kept it together.”

“Meaning what?” says Maslow.

“We tried to stay in control,” says Nolan. “Our particular unit was not into random violence.” Enough. If they want the details, he can fill them in later. Though maybe what they want to know
most
is how many asses he kicked. Well, the truth is, not any. Which isn’t to say that the guys from ARM weren’t often right on the edge of wasting the next Paki convenience-store clerk who gave them attitude. Problem was, on the nights they were feeling that way, the clerk on duty was always some poor pimply white chick. Maslow and Bonnie don’t have to know that yet. For now, let them dream what they want. Let them think Nolan and his pals kicked a minimum one ass per day.

“So I stopped moving and let my hands drop, and the light sticks are now, like, you know, around, like, my crotch area, and I’m looking down at them, and suddenly I get this feeling like I’m seeing my spirit or soul or something, burning inside me, shining…”

By now Maslow’s got to be wondering what drugs Nolan was taking, and Bonnie, with her two teenage sons, thinks she
knows
what drug he was on. Which in fact he
was
on, but that’s not why it happened. He’d taken Ex before. He did a hit the night he got the tattoos. So what does that tell you? He’s taken so many drugs by this point, his brain’s a wedge of Swiss cheese. But he’d never felt that way before. This was new. Deeper. Higher.

“I heard this roaring in my head. This pounding and thrumming. Like wings. Like that blood pressure thing in your ears, you know? You get it, and then it goes. I thought it might be some buzz in the amps. And then I looked up at the scaffolding, and there was this funny…halo spinning around the disc jockeys. It reminded me of this Christmas card my mom used to have, a painting of the Holy Spirit dove hovering in this circle of pale gold light. And then…this is the hardest part to explain, but I got this feeling of
love
for everyone around me. Everyone. Black and white, Jewish, Christian, Communist, freaks, retarded, mutant, whatever.”

Is this working? Let’s ratchet things up a notch. “It was like I got hit by lightning. I felt like Saint Paul getting knocked off his donkey on the road to Damascus.”

“Horse,” says Maslow. “Saul of Tarsus got thrown off his
horse
on the way to Damascus.”

The Jew thinks he knows more than you do. That’s what Raymond would say. But Nolan is the one thinking it now. It’s time to let go of all that if he wants this plan to succeed. Let go of the long-nosed Jew and the Negro with the big dick. Bye-bye defending the endangered white race, hello peace through change.

Maslow says, “May I ask you something? Did you attend church as a child?”

“Irish Catholic.” It’s mostly true. Nolan’s grandparents were Catholic. This is not the time to explain that after his dad died, Mom dragged him around from one hippie religious clambake to another. She’s been a chanting Buddhist ever since she saw Tina Turner on
Living Legends.
“One of my aunts was a Baptist who used to take me to revivals. I liked the hymns. There was this one hymn, ‘Blessed Assurance.’ And those two words,
blessed assurance,
kept running through my mind while I was having that…experience at the rave.”

The part about the hymn is pure rich smoke Nolan’s blowing up their asses. But sure enough, he can feel Bonnie’s eyes on him. It’s been Nolan’s experience that women love imagining you as a kid with your hair slicked back, all sweaty and hot in your scratchy church suit. They want to go to bed with that kid. That’s how weird women are.

The first time Nolan met Margaret, in a bar in Hudson, a gospel tune came on the jukebox. Nolan knew the words, he sang along.
Trials, troubles, and tribulations…
Nothing corny, like singing in Margaret’s ear, but softly, to himself, like a man remembering something sweet from childhood. The song ended. He’d looked at Margaret, and he knew it had worked. Our man was
in.

Maslow asks, “And did you still feel that way the next morning?”

“What way?” says Nolan. “Excuse me, I…”

“Loving the world,” says Maslow.

Does the old guy believe him at all? It’s impossible to tell.

“Even more,” Nolan says. “I woke up under a tree. Somehow Raymond found me. He drove me home to his place. When I got there, I was still flashing on hate, how I used to hate everything, how hate poisoned the world, how every bad thing that’s happened could be traced directly to hate.”

Most of that came from Maslow’s book. But the basic idea is true: Nolan couldn’t stand one more minute of ARM, or Raymond and his friends. Just turning in to Raymond’s driveway nearly made him puke. Maybe it was the lawn gnomes in Raymond’s yard, or maybe the fact that they looked so much like Raymond and Lucy and their kids. In the end, it was a pit-of-the-stomach thing. An allergy to the guys in ARM, to the sound of their voices. None of them gave a shit about the planet. They made fun of save-the-whales types. You’d think the Ex-high residue would have left Nolan loving Raymond and his friends along with every other human creature. Loving the white race. But somehow it didn’t work that way. It was time to get out of Dodge.

“So what did you do then?” Bonnie says.

“One morning, I woke up before everyone else, and I went to Raymond’s desk. I went online. I typed in ‘Neo-Nazi.’ And then ‘Help.’”

“Is that how you got to us?” says Bonnie.

“No,” Nolan says. “First I got some newspaper site, with this article: ‘Neo-Nazi Helps Foundation.’ About this white separatist brother who saw the light and reformed—” Does
this
qualify as a lie? It’s too small to matter. Nolan
did
look up the story on the Internet, but by then he’d already seen a program about it on
The Chandler Show.

On TV, the former skinhead got the total fashion makeover. He was all duded up in a fancy suit, and they’d waited till his hair grew back enough to look like some hip, faggy buzz cut.

Harrison Chandler was nearly sobbing when the guy explained how he’d turned from the dark toward the light, from the path of hate to the path of love. Nolan would rather not think about that. Because then he’ll have to think about how much Raymond and his buddies liked to watch
Chandler
and yell at the TV, because Chandler is an extremely visible overpaid Negro employed by the Jewish media. That episode really ticked them off. They were throwing beer cans at the set until Lucy shut the party down.

Maslow wants to know what they did in ARM? They watched TV and yelled.

“Oh, that guy who went to work for the Wiesenthal Foundation,” says Bonnie. “Remember, Meyer?”