The Call of the Weird (14 page)

With nothing better to do, I sat at the bar until late in the evening. No customers came in. “Wednesday is no-hump day,” Marie said. A TV in the corner of the bar was showing a cable channel—an eighties thriller with actors I half recognized. It was muted but from time to time as we sat there at the bar our eyes flicked over at it. The quiet, almost mausolean atmosphere; the gloomy decorations. I couldn’t work out if it was depressing or cozy, a little outpost of humanity or one of the most desolate places I’d been in my life.

Back in Vegas, I called Sheri’s and a couple of the other big brothels in Pahrump, asking for Hayley. No luck. I thought about driving up there, but I’d already spent longer than I intended creeping around brothels, and I was keen to move on to other stories. I called Marie in Elko a few times to see if she’d managed to leave a message for Hayley, but I assumed it was the end of the line.

And then, in mid-August, she called.

She was at Sheri’s—she’d got my message from Marie. “I can’t believe you went all the way to Elko,” she said, sounding a little drunk. “What did they say about me at the Wild Horse?” I wasn’t sure whether to tell her about the rumors of her throwing fits and taking crank. Then she asked if I believed in God. I said no. “You’re going to have real hot feet one day,” she said. “What about the connection with the infinite?”

She was now going by her real name, Tammy. She lived in Marysville, northern California, a small agricultural town a few hours east of San Francisco and west of Reno. She had a boyfriend, Walter, who was twenty-five and a mechanic. They met as roommates in Sacramento. She was happy to meet up, but circumstances were such that it was October before I was anywhere close. One afternoon, having made an arrangement to see her, I drove up from Los Angeles and booked into a cheap motel patronized by Hispanic field laborers who slept seven or eight to a room.

I called her at around seven. Walter answered. He sounded friendly enough, though Tammy had told me he’d watched the documentary and been a little bothered by the massage scene. He had a slow voice—Tammy had said he was a hippie and I imagined a sleepy, bearded dude with long hair. I could hear her in the background, saying in an English accent: “Is that Louis? Is he getting cold feet?” She was on her way out, Walter said, then put the phone down.

I called back but got no response. I tried not to worry too much about it. I went into town, got something to eat, and an hour or two later, I was writing my notes at the motel when there was a knock. I peered through the window. It was Tammy. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail. She was wearing make-up and a skimpy top. “You look bushed,” she said. “Why are you staying here? This place is a fleapit!”

“I’m trying to save money,” I said.

She said she’d been on her way to a strip club when I called, as a last-minute thing to make money. “Girls are supposed to book, but usually I can just show up because I’m the hottest one there and they’ll let me dance. But tonight they had eleven girls there and would’ve had to bump one, and they didn’t want to do that.”

I asked about Walter disconnecting me.

“No, no, he’s fine. I mean, yeah, he’s a little threatened. He’s never lived outside this little town. I think he meant to put you on hold and he disconnected you by accident. But I said to him, ‘He’s a BBC journalist, for God’s sake! Why would he be interested in someone like me?’ This place is a dive.”

I looked around, seeing it through her eyes. I had my notebook on the table and a glass of red wine in a little plastic cup. It looked a little depressing. Lonely journalist on the road. Sad empty little life. I felt unmasked. She reached for my cup of wine. I remembered her problems with alcohol and became nervous that she was going to drink it. She brought it over to me.

“Do you want to go out to the strip club?” she asked. I said I wasn’t keen. The truth is, I didn’t want to go out at all very much:

I wanted to sip my wine and watch TV and recover from the long drive. But I thought I’d better seize my chance with Tammy.

We went instead to a diner called Lyon’s, just outside the town center. As we waited in line to be seated, I asked how she’d wound up in Elko.

“I was kind of enjoying mixing with the dregs. Maybe part of it was self-abuse. I wanted to hit rock bottom so I could see that this was what my life could be.”

Our waitress seated us in a booth. I asked about Hayley’s new life. She said that she danced occasionally, waited tables, and volunteered at an animal sanctuary. Then she said, “I might go back into it but I don’t know. Especially with my commitment to God. I just wish I’d saved more money. I think how lucky I am. There’s not too many people in the world who have the option of making $3,000 in one night.”

“So that’s still there as an option for you?”

“No, I shouldn’t have said that. It doesn’t exist. No. Because I made a commitment to God.”

God had come into her life not long after I left the year before. She was back in Marysville, “feeling low, emotionally bankrupt, not fulfilled.” She went to the New Life Assembly Church. “I had an experience, and it felt right, and I prayed, and that motivated me to go to church.” She asked what I’d been doing, and I told her about meeting the porn people and the UFO believers, and my plans to meet up with a pimp in Mississippi and a self-help guru.

“You want to be careful with all that negativity. I couldn’t do that. You must either be really strong mentally or else you’re just very cold and you view it in a voyeuristic way.”

This surprised me. I don’t think of the stories I cover as particularly dark or negative. But later, I wondered if she might be right, and whether I was a little detached. It suggested sensitivity on her part that she picked up on it—the sixth sense she’d claimed she possessed. And at the same time, how strange, I thought, that she would regard doing stories on subjects like prostitution as requiring more mental strength than actually being a prostitute.

“Do I seem weird to you?” she asked a little later.

“No, not really,” I said. “Maybe a little chaotic. I guess you like to party too much. But you probably knew that.”

We took a drive round downtown. It looked like a lot of old town centers in the West, with a few blocks of red-brick buildings, some posh little businesses, a store selling musical instruments, a craft shop, a barber’s. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” she said. “Before, I hated it. But since I straightened out, all the things I didn’t like, I like now: how quaint it is, and little, and old.”

On the way back to my motel, I told her what they were saying about her at the Wild Horse, being on drugs, having sex in the negotiating room, calling one of the staff a cripple.

“That’s a lie. I hate drugs. I’m totally opposed to drugs. And that guy, I never called him a cripple. And I challenged Susan to find that on the security camera where I said that, and they didn’t even look for it. I didn’t have a fit. I’d been drinking lemon drops and B-52s, and my eyes were going in and out of focus. The person at the hospital said, ‘It looks like you’re having a stroke.’ She had me panicking. It’s because I’m borderline diabetic.”

The next day, we met at a little alternative coffee shop with bare brick walls. It was hot out, in the nineties. I’d been hoping to meet Walter, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. We had lunch at an upscale eatery of her choosing in the neighboring town of Yuba City. By now, some of the air had gone out of my attempts to interview her, and our time together was starting to feel uncomfortably close to a date.

At three or so, we headed back to the coffee shop. I bought her an expensive novelty coffee and we read out Trivial Pursuit ques
tions. “Was the first note broadcast by Sputnik 1 a B flat, C flat, or D flat?” “Who was the first U.S. president to visit all fifty states while in office?” An attractive young woman, Bohemian-looking in a long skirt, mid-twenties, came in with a little boy. “That’s Natalie,” Tammy said. “Walter had sex with her when I was in Vegas. I wanted to come and see if he was meeting up with her.”

I knew “When I was in Vegas” meant “When I was working as a prostitute at Sheri’s.” An act of revenge on Walter’s part, presumably. Either way, it was time to go. We walked out back, where a Volkswagen camper van pulled up. “There he is, that fuck!” Tammy shouted, and flung a handful of Trivial Pursuit cards through the driver’s window. “I can’t fucking believe you!”

I’d been expecting a long-haired dude, but he was short-haired and skinny. He looked a little like a student—mid-twenties, in a western-wear shirt of a kind I sometimes wear. Though we hadn’t exchanged a word, I immediately felt I liked him. He seemed perfectly friendly, and I wondered if Tammy had exaggerated the sensitivities of my meeting him, and if so, why? To keep us apart, to make him more insecure?

“Hi, Walter,” I said.

“Hi, Louis,” he said.

But Tammy’s sudden rage was embarrassing, and I didn’t want to watch an argument unfold. So I drove off.

That evening, the phone rang. “I just wanted to make sure you got what you needed with the interview,” Tammy said. She and Walter had talked it through. She’d apologized to him. Apparently he’d only stopped off because he’d thought we might be there, and he wanted to meet me. Nothing to do with Natalie. “I have a number of issues I have to work on. My big one is trust.”

“What was it that got you out? Was it meeting Walter? Was it quitting drinking? Was it finding God?” I asked.

“All three.”

She said she wouldn’t be dancing tonight. “I can’t do that anymore. It’s one of the things we agreed.”

It had been a strange encounter, revealing in some ways, in other ways a non-event. She had wanted to keep it on terms she understood—sexual—and I had wanted to keep it on terms I understood— journalistic. Two professional manipulators, I thought, trying to manipulate each other. Several stories I was chasing dealt with deceivers and con artists, but only in this one was the con difficult to see through, and only in this one did my own inquiries feel like grappling with air. But perhaps this said less about Tammy’s subtlety than it did about the more persuasive forms of influence peddled by working women, where the sales job was a facsimile of affection, and, from time to time, the real thing.

On the last night of my return visit to the Wild Horse, Susan had told me, “Once you’ve stayed in this business a few years, you don’t get out.” This fatalism was surprising coming from the person who’d planned to help women get an education and move on. But she seemed a little chastened by her first year of business in the new premises. In general, Susan’s ambitions for the women to change their lives hadn’t borne much fruit. The house pledge to pay half the college tuition of the women had found few takers. “I still offer the same program to everybody, but I have to be realistic that most of them won’t take it,” she said. “I have had some success stories. It’s just that they’re few and far between.”

Still, business was great, she had said. “I always said, to run the house we’d need a pool of three hundred ladies. Right now we’re at two hundred.” And they were expanding. A clump of new pink buildings, the carcass of the long-closed Mustang Ranch, a historic Nevada brothel, had been helicoptered onto the property. Lance
had bought it on eBay. They would be using it as the premises of a brothel museum and adding another thirty rooms.

When I left that night, the working women were in the saloon killing time between customers by taking turns at karaoke. There was something touching about how uncomfortable they were in the spotlight. It spoke of a modesty, a decorousness that, not knowing better, one might hesitate to ascribe to the profession. Shyly shuffling on the spot, giggling, singing softly and out of tune, they took turns at the microphone. “Private Dancer.” “Natural Woman.” A country song about an angel flying with a broken wing. All songs of romance and heartbreak, I thought. All love songs.

B
efore
leaving London, I’d read that Pastor Richard Butler, the aging führer of the Aryan Nations, would be hosting a World Congress for his fellow Aryans later in the year. It was over seven years since my visit to the headquarters and my conversation with Jerry Gruidl about his fondness for
Are
You Being Served?.
Since then, the bits of news I heard suggested the organization was on the skids. Hate groups as a whole were being clamped down on in the post-9/11 anti-terrorism climate. In 2000 Butler had lost his compound, bankrupted by a court judgment after his bodyguards attacked a woman and her son at his gates, allegedly mistaking the sound of their car backfiring for a
gunshot. Given how doddering he’d been, I kept expecting to hear that Butler had expired. He appointed a successor, a neo-Nazi called Neumann Britton, but Britton predeceased him. Butler found another candidate, Harold Ray Redfeairn. Then Redfeairn died too. Perhaps fearing a jinx, Butler stopped appointing successors. “Rasputin’s got nothing on this guy,” one hate-group expert commented.

The latest news concerned a trip Butler made to Phoenix in 2003, when a young female partisan he’d been traveling with was arrested at Spokane airport on an outstanding forgery warrant and unmasked as “Bianca Trump,” veteran of more than 180 hardcore adult movies, including
Barely Legal Latinas, Brassiere to Eternity,
and
Little White Girl, Big Black Man.
In a group for whom “race mixing” was the ultimate no-no, it was a spectacular misstep. Aryan Nations Chief of Security Rick Spring issued a press release quashing the idea that Butler’s relationship with the woman whose porno nickname had been “the Latin Princess” was anything more than platonic: “She had only been staying in Idaho a few days, helping around the house,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less; and if anyone wants to make jokes about anything else, then they do not know Pastor Butler.”

Perhaps because of his poor health, Butler had held no World Congress in 2003, and so the 2004 event was being thought of as a last hurrah.

I found Jerry in the phone book. I called him up from Las Vegas, reaching him by coincidence on his seventy-first birthday. He sounded a little frail. “Barbara?” he said, to someone I hoped was in the room with him, “’bout how long was it that I came down from Aryan Nations? It’s been a while. Uggh! It’s close to five years.” Barbara was his daughter, he said. I told him I was following up on stories I’d covered over the years. “Well, can I be on your list of people to visit?” Jerry said. “It’s good to hear your voice. There’s been a lot of changes at Aryan Nations. Pastor Butler was sued and lost his crown . . . Have you ever had another contact with the Garsides?”

I visited him some weeks later, driving east from Reno, where I was staying at the time, turning north at Winnemucca, into Oregon. The high desert softened into prairie. Flat and empty, the land stretched on for miles to the pale brown hills in the distance, with no trees or houses in sight. Farm towns appeared, with John Deere dealerships and feed stores. After the clamorous hoardings and hotels of gambling country, these towns seemed spooky and aloof.

No longer in Hayden with Pastor Butler, Jerry lived 400 miles south, in lower Idaho in a town called Payette. I arrived late in the evening. He seemed pleased to see me: He looked as though he’d made an effort, in a smart pinstripe shirt. He still wore thick glasses, and he’d put on quite a bit of weight round the middle, quite literally “going pear-shaped.” He’d swapped his home in a neo-Nazi compound for a one-bedroom suite in Louise Garden Apartments, a singlestorey motel-shaped building, where the main corridor was decorated with cute rustic ornaments, Raggedy Ann dolls, scarecrows in dungarees sitting on chairs. The residents were mainly elderly. “The lady next door is dead. She just hasn’t laid still yet,” Jerry said.

I’d never seen inside Jerry’s home before. I’d been expecting swastikas and pictures of Hitler, but the apartment was mostly bare. There was a computer on one side, a table serving as a desk with medication on it, a bookshelf with videos, and photos of loved ones on the wall. A TV, muted, showed the History Channel. He had a couple of fish tanks with guppies in them. “They’re quite small, aren’t they?” I remarked. “Well, they’re only fifteen-cent fish,” Jerry said.

I sat on the sofa. Jerry sat at his desk. “I enjoyed the shows you sent me,” he said. “I bring them out if I have visitors. I was kinda shocked by the one where you were in the porno thing. I laughed my ass off. I thought that was really gutsy.”

He showed me photos of his family. Then he said, “I thought you were going to have your crew with you.”

“No, just me. I’m taking a break from TV.”

Jerry looked concerned. “But are you still connected?”

“I still know people in TV, sure.”

“Good, good.”

It was a little like talking to an elderly relative. I’d told Jerry I was heading up to Hayden for the World Congress. He’d been of two minds about going too, deciding against it in the end. Money was tight and he had a doctor’s appointment he didn’t want to miss. “Oh, while you’re here, have you seen the Aryan Nations homepage?”

He woke up his computer. The background on his screen said: “I’m out of bed and I made it to the keyboard. What more do you want?” We read the line-up of speakers: Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance; Billy Roper, the leader of White Revolution; some other names I didn’t recognize. “If you do go up there, plan on getting a hotel. I wouldn’t stay in a tent in the campsite with all the idiots up there. I wouldn’t trust’em. See, these people’s mindsets: news media; Jew. They’d be suspicious from the get-go.There’s nothing you could do to stop it.”

“You think they might be hostile?”

“I don’t know the people that are up there. Oh, I’ve got an email!”

I could see it had something to do with a high-school reunion.

“Friends Reunited?” I asked.

“Supposedly,” Jerry said.

Five minutes’ drive away, on Payette’s main street, a quiet few blocks of independently owned stores, we got a tuna melt and a glass of wine each at a local bar. We made chit-chat.

“You think Rodham’s not a Jew? Wake up and smell the roses!” Jerry said. “They’ve been hardcore communists since their school days, both Rodham and Clinton. And communism is Jewish. You show me a commie, I’ll show you a Jew.”

“Stalin?”

“His wife was.”

“Castro?”

“He’s one of their puppets. He’s got to be a kiss-ass to keep his job.”

“What if I was Jewish?”

“Shit! Are ya?”

“I’m not saying yes or no. Would it change your attitude?”

“Yeah, it would.”

“I bet you’ve had friends in your life that were Jewish.”

“Not that I know of. But Prince Philip has Jewish ancestry. So Prince Charles does and little Harry. And I think that’s why God’s working it around so they can’t become king . . . Are you Jewish? Tell me please you’re not. Lie to me if you have to. Please.”

I changed the subject.

Through the next couple of days, I got to know Jerry a little, finding myself in the slightly uncomfortable position of being treated in a grandfatherly way by an unabashed neo-Nazi and anti-Semite. He had grown up in East Oakland, where his father had a neon-sign company. The second of three boys, with a younger sister, Jerry had been the black sheep of the family. He’d worked as an Electrolux vacuum-cleaner salesman for twelve years, delivered Winnebagos, driving them across country, and installed neon
signs. Like many on the neo-Nazi fringe, he’d started out a member of the John Birch society, a right-wing anti-communist group that wasn’t explicitly racist, then drifted into the Klan, then into the Aryan Nations. He married four times (“number two and number three were the same one: I had to go back for seconds”) though his wives hadn’t shared his beliefs.

Now he was retired, he said, having been drummed out of the Aryan Nations amid a vicious hate campaign, orchestrated by unnamed enemies within the organization. Ousted as chief of staff, he worked for a while on their web outreach. “But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted me out of there.” One of the new members of staff put sugar in his gas tank, then challenged him to a pistol duel. “Pastor Butler can’t have that crap around the place!”

Rumors spread—that Jerry was gay, that he was a child molester. “I was being attacked from all sides. I was being smeared so bad. And I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. They’d make up anything. They had Pastor Butler hire a private investigator to do a background check on me. And he never did that to anyone else I know of. I had to sign consent slips to let the investigator do the investigation. But it didn’t stop the rumors, and the Pastor finally gave in to the pressure.”

Now, with no hate group to help run, Jerry spent his days playing mah-jongg on his computer with only the guppies for company. “I’m still waiting for Pastor Butler to have a change of heart and call me back to work.”

On our first morning, Jerry gave me a tutorial in the strange racist religious faith that underpins the Aryan Nations.

Called Christian Identity, it holds that white people are the real Israelites spoken of in the Bible and that modern-day Jews are impostors, “Edomites,” descendants of a sexual encounter between Eve and Satan. It was all there in Genesis, if you knew how to read
it. The cosmic story of humanity was a kind of Star Wars saga, with Anglo-Saxon whites as Jedis, and Jews collectively standing for the Empire. Nonwhites were inferiors, “mud people,” dupes of the Jews, used to keep the white man down. But the Jews weren’t inferior: They were diabolically cunning. There was a kind of negative flattery of Jewish people in the cosmology of Christian Identity.

On his wall, Jerry had a color poster showing the supposed descent of Jews and Anglo-Saxons on different colored lines, with the relevant biblical verses. There were also predictions for the end-time, around the year 2000: growing United Nations influence, out-of-control immigration, concentration camps all over the U.S. for the purposes of imprisoning the true Israelites.

“We’ve got the United Nations already, but we’re not totally enslaved yet,” Jerry said. “America has the most prisoners incarcerated anywhere in the world. And those prisons are going to be for us. They’re not building them for the blacks. They’re telling the poor blacks, ‘You’ve been picked on too long! You go out there and take what you want from the white man that’s persecuted you!’ They’re going to turn’em on us. And we’ll have to fight’em. And if we do, then we’ll go to jail.”

I asked Jerry about nonwhites. To my surprise, he said it was possible they might be able to get into heaven. “God says that anybody that believes and obeys, can.” I asked about Jews. No, they were irredeemable. Their ultimate fate: to be vanquished by Jesus at the Battle of Armageddon. “They’ll be totally eliminated. There won’t be any left. Maybe God’ll send rattlesnakes to do it. In many cases it’s an earthquake, a flood, all kind of things that do the job. But God gets it done.”

“So you haven’t changed your beliefs since I interviewed you in 1996?”

“No, the only thing I’ve changed is some of the people that I was around.” He paused. “Where did all these Jews come from that are running our government? Every school’s full of Jews. Every college is full of Jews. Our medical profession is full of Jews! Our legal profession is full of Jews! Our politicians are almost all Jews! The Jews are occupying this country. Now if Hitler killed’em all—”

“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry,” I interrupted. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.”

“Listen to this point! Listen to this point!”

“Something weird happens to you when you talk about this.”

Jerry chuckled. “May-bee.”

“What is that?”

“Well, ah.” Jerry fumbled and looked away. Then his manner became sinuous and knowing. “You wanted to find out about me. I guess you’re finding out about me, huh?”

“Where does that come from? What are you thinking about when you think about Jewish people?”

Jerry paused. He looked down. “The Devil. Satan. That’s where Jews come from. They’re the ones that are oppressing us. They’re our enemy.”

“They’re just people, Jerry. Just like anyone else.”

“Not true.”

When he spoke about Jews, it was as though a sickness came over him. His whole manner changed. We went back and forth on this several times. Had Jerry ever actually met any Jews? What did Jews mean to him?

“It’s so obvious!” he said, pointing at the chart. “Jews are those people following the red line! It’s the opposite of those following the blue line!”

And yet, as hateful as they were, his views somehow didn’t shock me as much as they should have, maybe because they were
couched in religious terms—it was all about what God was going to do, not what Jerry was going to do—maybe because it was hard to imagine Jerry himself physically hurting anyone. None of it seemed quite real. A little later, he started foraging in a small storeroom in the back of his apartment. He dug out some of his old certificates of rank from his Klan and Aryan Nations days. On being made a “Kleagle.” An “Exalted Cyclops.” Photos of Jerry receiving a trophy for his work as a door-to-door salesman of Electrolux vacuum cleaners. In his younger days, Jerry wasn’t bad-looking. Finally, he came out holding some sacks.

“You know, since you’re going to Aryan Nations,” he said, “would you do me a favor and give these to Pastor Butler?”