A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (12 page)

The Jesus People have launched an unorganized legal campaign to stop Patrick. Daniel Voll, twenty-two, a member of the East Coast’s New Testament Missionary Fellowship, filed assault charges against Patrick on February twenty-fifth. He alleges that his father, aided and encouraged by Patrick, grabbed him on a New York street and tried to force him into a car, dislocating his finger in the process. The Children of God have filed a $1.1 million libel suit against Patrick. Joel Mandelkorn, twenty-two, of the Children of God, filed a $200,000 damage suit against various deprogrammers after he was “rescued” and put through several vigorous sessions.

Mike Pancer, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer working on the Patty Thorpe case for the Alamos, generally handles criminal law in his private practice. He is an efficient, precisely spoken young attorney of no conspicuous religious bent. There is very little, in fact, that Pancer seems sure of beyond the shadow of a doubt. But he is deeply committed to a certain principle: “Whenever people start to enforce their ideas on others, when one person’s tactics are illegal, in violation of the civil liberties of the others involved, you have to take a stand against them. You have to protect the free choice of the individual involved.

“People may pick a very stupid way of life to lead, or believe in a stupid set of ideals—I’m sure Republicans think Democrats are stupid—but they have their rights. It’s really important to identify the principle that’s involved, which is coercive activity—the use of force—by one of the parties involved.”

On May 5, 1973, Esther Diquattro, thirty-one, a Columbia Teacher’s College secretary and member of the New Testament Missionary Fellowship, was abducted during a prayer meeting near the Columbia campus. Two days later, her husband and Ted Patrick were arrested by Briston, Pennsylvania, township police and charged with second-degree kidnapping, conspiracy to kidnap, unlawful imprisonment, and assault. Patrick pleaded not guilty and is currently free on a $5,000 bond.

A
fter a lunch of bread and soup, Frank and I stopped off into the prayer room for a few hours. I asked about the sign on the door: Why should we pray for Susie’s health? In sepulchral tones Frank told me that she had “terminal cancer.” We babbled in tongues for an hour or so with about ten other Christians. Someone began shouting, “Heal Susie, oh God, heal her.” Others shouted along.

Suddenly the prayer room seemed to erupt with emotion. It started as a plea, “heal Susie,” and ended as a demand, “heal her God.” A man on my right held his face in his hands and sobbed. I felt a lump growing in my throat as I chanted along. Somewhere, back in an objective corner of my mind, I remembered aged friends of my grandparents: folks who knew the end was near. Minds fixed on the glories of heaven, they withered and died.

Psychologists are familiar with this tendency on the part of the ill to confuse their bodies with the cosmos and their own death with the end of the world. Susan Alamo, I was to learn later, had little use for this kind of worldly and irreligious blather.

Later Frank and I sat in a booth and read another tract by Tony Alamo. I was surprised to see my teacher close his eyes and ask God to “burn the words upon our hearts”—the same blessing he had lavished on the Bible. But as Richard had told me in an answer to a question, there has never been a time when Tony or Susan were wrong, “because, their judgment is the Word of God and God is not wrong.”

Frank read aloud. Some highlights from the tract: “I had no respect for women at all. Every one I encountered was worse than the one before. I actually hated them and decided for some reason that I had been put here to punish them because they were so evil. All my former friends break up now when they see little five-foot-two Susan bossing me around, and believe me, I love it.”

Tony’s routine, in the old days, was to take “complete unknowns” and “promote them into big stars.” He liked
limousines and enjoyed having an entourage of “yes men,” people, apparently, who treated his orders as if they were the word of God. It was during one of his most outrageous “promotional extravaganzas” that he met Jesus of Nazareth. In the midst of an important business meeting, in which Tony was going to have to borrow money, his ears went completely deaf. People were speaking but Tony only saw their mouths moving. “Suddenly I heard a voice: a voice that came from every direction.” It told Tony, “I am the Lord thy God. Stand up on your feet and tell the people in this room Jesus Christ is coming back to earth, or thou shalt surely die.”

Tony struggled against the voice. He tried to excuse himself, claiming sudden illness. But God would not allow this and began playing with Tony’s soul “like a yo-yo.” He yanked it half out of the body, then put it back. “No, God, no,” Tony screamed. “Please don’t kill me.… I’ll tell them, I’ll tell them.

“I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but Jesus Christ is coming back to earth again.” No one said anything. It was a weak effort, and once again God yanked Tony’s soul.

“Repent,” he screamed. “Jesus is coming.” He lurched about the room, knocking spindles from desks and backing people against the walls. The attorney Tony had come to see yelled, “Get him out of here, he’s nuts.”

Tony could no longer work because he was “afraid that God would come down on me in front of people.” He was broke, at the nadir of his career. His former friends thought he had cracked up, and the God of Wrath gave him visions of a burning hell. One day, alone in the rain, he walked into a restaurant where Susan was sitting. Though they had met one another casually, Susan had generally refused to speak to him. “I always knew there was something different about her.” He sat at her table, and her first words were, “Tony, do you know that the Lord Jesus Christ is coming back to earth again?” Tony jumped up and knocked all the silverware off the table.

“How do you know?” he demanded. “Did God come and tell you too?”

Tony subsequently joined one of Susan’s small Bible classes, and presently “God spoke to Susie’s heart in a very supernatural way,” and they were married. God let Tony do one more big promotion so nobody would think that he was crazy, but Susan prayed for him to go broke and God obliged. “She wanted to go out into the street and bring the Bible to the hippies.” Against Tony’s better judgment.

The Jesus Movement, Tony averred, began one Saturday night in Hollywood when he and Susan started handing out tracts. It was not the product of “some youth with psychedelic lights flashing in his head.” In the penultimate and most powerful paragraph, Tony says, “the price has been high. Oh my God, so high. Higher than human flesh wants to pay.… I am glad that the Lion of the Tribe of Juda, the eternal keeper of the Lamb’s book of Life, knows when and how the Jesus Movement began and that he saw my sweetheart as she went into the street with cancer eating through her body and took the Gospel to the hippies.”

Frank looked up from his reading. “A lot of people got saved on account of this tract,” he said. I told him that I didn’t doubt it and kept to myself some further information about the business conference in which Tony met Jesus.

His unknown at the time was a singer-composer named Bobby Jameson. Tony had taken out ads in the music trade papers touting Bobby as the star of the century. At the conference, a very important one, Jameson says that Alamo leapt to his feet and shrieked to the man behind the desk, “You must give him [Jameson] all your money because he is Jesus Christ and if you don’t he’ll point his finger at you and you will die.”

Billboard
magazine claims that the bill for the Alamo-Jameson ads is still an unpaid account—$14,000 worth.

A week after I left the Foundation, I was back in one of the booths, talking to Tony and Susan Alamo. It wasn’t the way I had planned it. “The press only tells one half of the story,” Tony was saying. “If you want a story, you want the A side and the B side.”

My original scheme had been to visit the Alamos in their controversial house. Biff Alexander, the deprogrammed
Alamo-ite who claimed to have been inside many times, told me what to expect: “three bathrooms. Three brand-new bathrooms with bath and shower facilities. On the lower level there’s an office, about twenty feet by forty feet and it’s got a fireplace in it. They’ve got a huge living room and a small section off to the end where they have a big grand piano. There’s a dining room with a chandelier. And a kitchen and then two large bedrooms, say fifteen feet by twenty feet or bigger, and closets that are immense, running three-quarters of the length of the room.” Alexander said that the older overseers sometimes stay at the house upward to a week at a time, “answering the phones for them, catering to them, and so forth.”

According to Alexander, “Tony was instrumental in making the plans for the house, but one of the guys there who had some experience really drew up the plans, and I think it took two guys along with one of the county engineers, who was a tremendous amount of help.” Alexander swears, “with God as my witness,” that while helping to build the house, “we … got up at five in the morning every morning and we slept on the floor there with what blankets we could muster up and it was filthy. We wouldn’t get to go home and wash every night … people who were really needed were forbidden to go to services … because that house had to be built.” Alexander says he spent over a month, working twenty hours a day, on the house.

“A lot of times I would think, How could Tony and Susan have so much and we have so little? We were told that when such thoughts come to our minds to say, ‘The blood of Jesus is upon you Satan’ and ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’ … that that was an accusation brought by the devil.”

Two of the Foundation men, however, couldn’t quite get Satan out of their minds and brought this accusation to Tony. According to Alexander, Tony told them that a woman of the Lord should be dressed in fine clothes, linen, and silk. “As far as I’m concerned,” Alexander remembers him saying, “the Bible says that Elders who do well are worthy … you should have built twice the size of the house you built for us.…” The two men were asked to leave the Foundation.

It is Tony who seems to be the disciplinarian, probably because he deals with the men, who are more numerous and more troublesome. “One time Tony got so mad,” Alexander says, “that people were using too much toilet paper, so toilet paper wasn’t put on the finance list that week … then another time he had the water shut off [on property number two where the women and children live] and neglected really getting it repaired quickly enough and the littlest babies and the women had to defecate in buckets and we actually had to bury it.…”

When I talked to Tony Alamo, he was wearing expensive cowboy-styled boots and slacks. Even in the church he wore dark glasses, and this, combined with a paunch he has developed since his crooning days, gave him the unfortunate appearance of the stereotypical nasty southern sheriff.

I had set the interview up the day before and driven up to Saugus that afternoon, calling the Alamos from a nearby phone booth, telling them I would be right up.

“Meet us at the Foundation,” Susan Alamo said.

“I’ll save you the drive. I’m about two minutes away.”

“We’re on our way over to the church now,” she said breezily. “Just meet us there.”

I had very little desire to meet her there since I had left under unpleasant circumstances—consigned to hell, actually—not a week before. Still, I drove up there and arrived the same time as the Alamos’ Cadillac. There is probably some significance in the fact that not one of the people I spoke to (or saw) in my second visit recognized me. I was wearing different clothes, but probably more to the point, I was talking with Tony and Sue.

Susan Alamo was wearing slacks and a frilly blouse. Her hair was dyed stark white, Southern California style. She spoke with conviction, in a voice that might be called lilting were it a bit less pointed. She gave the impression of “just talking sense.” When we agreed, she had the disconcerting habit of cutting in on the end of the sentence to say, “uuhv course,” as if to suggest I might be the slightest bit dim, stating such an obvious point. She did most of the speaking, with Tony lounging at the far end of the booth, looking both wary and bored.

Susan was talking about Ted Patrick. “Tim, the man is criminally insane. He is taking people and
abducting
them because he doesn’t agree with them. He uses force on them. My God, it won’t be long before someone is murdered. Because he can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas.…”

“You deny his charges of kidnapping and brainwashing?”

“Tim, that is such nonsense I wouldn’t know where to begin to answer that. Why, Patty Thorpe here is in fear for her life because of that man.”

Later, on the subject of the marketplace of ideas, I asked, “Is it true Tony screens the reading material?”

“Well, of course he screens it,” Susan said quickly. “For heaven’s sake, we wouldn’t have a bunch of pornography passing around in here. Or we wouldn’t have books advocating Devil worship …”

In contrast to Ted Patrick’s muscular brand of argument, Susan Alamo seemed quicker, more nimble. She bobbed and weaved, ducking in and out of corners, taking a hard question on the chin only to come back with an apt Biblical quote. In the few times her answers were without substance, she had the knack of insisting on them passionately. She was clearly the spiritual leader. Tony sat silently; I suspected he had heard much of this before.

Susan had been born in Southern California, and, at the age of five, she had had a vision. “I was a little child.” Here her voice lost its glibness. I gathered this was something she didn’t often speak about, because for once, there was no practiced quality to her words, and she hesitated, waiting, I thought, for the most precise and honest descriptions to occur to her. “I saw Christ as he was coming back to earth again.” She became, for a stunning moment, a wistful child: “I saw him in a beautiful bright red robe, long hair flowing in the wind and … his eyes were … very big and … very black. That’s the one thing I remember most distinctly. That his eyes were big.” Suddenly she became the Susan Alamo that deals with accusations. “It disturbed my family and they took me to doctors and the doctors said that they felt that it was because I had lost my father when I was two and a half years old and evidently someone had shown me
photographs or talked to me about Christ and that he,” she hesitated, “he had become a father image.” A pause. “Which, of course, wasn’t true.” Her common sense voice: “Wasn’t true at all.”