A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (14 page)

“No,” I said flatly.

“You know the Bible says that Light shall have no Fellowship with Dark.…”

“So?”

“Well, your friend is of the Dark. You are of the Light. See what I mean?”

“No.”

“OK.” Tiny spelled it out for me. “The devil may be speaking with his tongue. He may try to tell you you’re crazy. He’ll say, ‘Why do you want to waste your life up here?’ and it’ll be the devil talking. I’ve seen times when friends came up and people turned away from God! They ended up in mental hospitals or the morgue.”

“Not me.”

This went on for an hour, Page becoming more and more identified with the Weasel until it began to appear that we had a date to meet the cloven-footed deceiver himself. At precisely five, a Volkswagen pulled into the lot. “Remember now,” Tiny said, “the devil isn’t always the guy with a tail and a pitchfork.”

The car had a big American Society of Press Photographers sticker on the windshield and I cringed when Page stepped out into the parking lot hoisting a leather bag containing $4,000 worth of Nikons. Tiny, however, was intent
on spiritual matters, and Page’s first sentence confirmed his Satanic suspicions.

“Bloody fucking five o’clock in the fucking morning,” he grumbled by way of greeting.

“Brother,” the guard said, “we’re Christian and our ears are
not
garbage cans.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do our ears look like garbage cans, Page?”

He declined comment, and Tiny smiled a secret dwarf smile. We piled into the VW and drove five miles to the Alamo house. I got into an inexplicable witness binge while Page stared at the road in a pained silence and Tiny beamed from the backseat.

We were late. The band was hammering away at the gospel favorites, shivering in their new blue uniforms. Tony, dressed in a vanilla ice-cream suit, sang all the songs. He held one leg crooked at the knee, bouncing slightly with the steady mechanical
thunk
of the drum. His crooner’s voice sounded corroded in the fringeland stillness. Susan stepped forth to deliver a ringing sermon. She wore a fine, flowing white dress—Tony’s fine lady—that reflected the subtle colors of the Easter sunrise. Behind her, the hills, for the first time, looked soft and sweet and untainted. And Susan looked holy.

“Hallelujah,” the brothers and sisters shouted, feeling, I thought, exalted in the clear desert morning.

And yet, for all this, the house was no more than five hundred yards away, and the sleek Fleetwood with
ALAMO
plates rested in the parking lot. To the rear, there was a much smaller house, built like a windmill where, I had heard, select overseers lived. The main house was boxy—pillared and plantationlike. It was big enough to contain all that Biff Alexander said it did: immense bedrooms, a piano, a large home-entertainment console, an office with a fireplace, sinks that worked. It was perched fat on a nearby hill, there for all to see … seeming somehow symbolic to me, in my exhaustion. But none of the brothers and sisters shared my interest. They had, after all, seen it all before, and their minds were focused on Jesus.

Immediately after the service, we drove back toward the Foundation; Page and I in the front, Tiny once again in the back. He was twitting on merrily, telling us about politics. “We are all registered Republicans and voted for John Schmitz,” he said at one point.

Page didn’t take the bait, so I couldn’t resist asking Tiny why he didn’t vote Republican.

“Schmitz was the Republican. Anyway, the thing—”

“Tiny, Schmitz did not run as a Republican in the presidential campaign.”

“He did.”

“What was Nixon then?”

Tiny hesitated, perhaps catching a note of challenge in my tone.

“Oh, Nixon. He was just a loser. You want to know how he got elected? He became Rockefeller’s lawyer and Rockefeller got him elected.”

“Rockefeller,” I spluttered, genuinely amazed. “Governor Nelson Rockefeller? He got Nixon elected?”

“One of the Rockefellers. Or Rothschilds. They knew that Nixon would continue the war and deplete …”

Tiny took us down under the surface, right to the bottom causes of the war. Which brought him somehow to the mansions of heaven and the fires of hell.

“I don’t know how hell could be any worse than some of the things I saw in Vietnam,” Page offered, innocently I think.

Tiny snorted, a short derisive sound. “It’s so much worse, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

“Were you there?”

“I didn’t have to be. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that hell is the worst thing there is.”

Page, who spent seven painful months in the hospital after losing half his brain to a mine in some soggy rice paddy, passed me a look that I read: maybe we could strangle him and no one would be the wiser. The look was not lost on Tiny who likely began to feel some unholy alliance between the two of us. He trotted out the vision of hell that Frank had told me, ending up with the same hoarse croaking effect on “mercy, Lord, mercy.”

“I already heard that one,” I said.

At this point, Page and I later decided, Tiny had worked himself into a dither that was reaching fast toward panic. I suspected he would have someone to answer to if he lost a soul entrusted to him, especially after the big Easter fandango.

“Your friend,” he said sternly, “will have to go home.”

“So will I,” I added.

“What?”

“I’m going back with my friend.”

“You can’t do that after you’ve known God. It’s just like pounding another nail into the cross of Christ!”

“No, it’s not,” I pointed out.

“Why do you want to turn your back on God? Why?”

“For one thing, I prefer to sleep in a bed. For another, I came up here to see what your church was like, and you tried to tell me that it says in the Bible that John Schmitz was the Republican candidate for president.”

“I didn’t say … I said … you’re just using politics, that’s what you’re doing. Using politics to cop out on God.” We were pulling into the parking lot. “You’ll go straight to hell,” Tiny chirped bitterly.

“I don’t think so.”

“Where do you think people go when they leave the Foundation? They wind up on a marble slab, in mental institutions. They go to hell.”

“Tiny,” I said evenly, “we have a serious difference of opinion.”

I got out and pulled the seat forward for the dwarf. We faced each other on the gravel beside the Volkswagen. “You are going to hell,” he hissed with terrifying intensity, then turned and stalked up the steps of the House of God with the insensate fury of a very small man.

I
t was still early, before eight, when we reached Page’s Los Angeles apartment. He cooked up a mighty breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages, and a great mound of hashbrowns, which I washed down with a couple of icy Heinekens. There was plenty of time for me to grab a plane back to San Francisco, so we drank a few after-breakfast beers, and Page—an aficionado—offered to take me on a classic Los Angeles scum-bar tour. It seemed unwise after a couple of sleepless nights, but we quickly decided that it would be the best thing to do—a sort of personal deprogramming session.

By about ten o’clock that evening, we had worked our way to within three miles of L.A. International, to a nudie bar on Century Boulevard. It was no place to be exhausted and full of bourbon and soda on top of beer. Nonstop porno films bounced off great wall mirrors, surrounding the drinker with disconcerting images: giant erupting phalluses on poor color stock; unfortunate vaginal closeups like open heart surgery. There was a naked girl dancing on the platform, and I tried to draw a steady bead on her. It seemed very significant, this music, Stevie Wonder: “When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer.…” Impossibly, the girl who had been naked a few seconds before was standing at my side, carrying a tray with two more bourbons and sodas.

“You are a … very special person,” I told her, suddenly sentimental.

She took our money and kissed me chastely on the cheek. “You’re sweet,” she said. That could very well be true, I thought, sinking into a sloppy, exhausted melancholy. I was thinking about Susan Alamo at the sunrise service. In my vision, I was floating above the crowd, like an angel, or a helicopter. The voices of the choir and the sound of the orchestra were a lost, discordant whisper in the stillness of the dawn. From above the crowd was a vague, bluish blotch on the green hillside. So very few had been chosen.

Susan stepped again to the pulpit, resplendent in her swirling white gown. I saw her, quite suddenly, as a Biblical matriarch—a prophet unheeded—preaching her brave Gospel of wrath and doom to an uncaring world. Her words pierced the sky, and I listened properly this time, as she told the bare hills about the signs of spring, and the summer that must surely come. She knew too, from the poisoning of our waters and from the death throes of our seas, that the Savior was at hand. She had seen it so many times there in the Book of the Living God who gave his Word to those with the courage to truly read it.

The tides of communism were at this moment washing our shores, I heard the voice of Susan Alamo say, and it trembled on the words, “America, this great eagle, going down for the last time.” She paused and glanced upward, through me, for I had no substance in my vision. I wondered if she would ever know—really know—why the devils were coming at the Foundation. Or why so few seemed to listen. And in my vision, I imagined I saw Christ coming again to Susan, as he had when she was so young: the bright red cape, the dark hair flowing in the wind, the big black eyes.…

I imagined I saw Susan Alamo, sitting at the right hand of the Father, hearing him say, “Well done thou good and faithful servant,” and “Susie, you were right all along.”

I imagined I saw Susan Alamo, dressed in lace and linen, looking down from her heavenly mansion, smiling on her children.

Leaving Tony behind to carry on the Work.

Postscript:
This story was written in 1973. Shortly afterward, Tony and Susan moved the Foundation to the Ozark region of Arkansas, because of its reputation for religious tolerance. Susan Alamo died of cancer in 1982. Tony refused to bury her. Instead he had the corpse embalmed and kept it in a casket in his living room where he held twenty-four-hour prayer sessions, sessions that were to last until she rose from the dead. The most requested song at a local radio station was “Wake Up, Little Susie.”

After two years—and some thought—sources inside the Foundation said that Tony stood before the congregation and declared that God had appeared to him in a very special way and that he, God, was sending Susan back to Tony “in the body of a younger woman.” Presumably one with great knockers. There were many defections.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Labor Department filed a lawsuit alleging that the Foundation exploited church followers who worked twelve to sixteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, for no pay. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers were entitled to minimum pay, or its equivalent in food and board. Tony had followers distribute tracts asserting that the Labor Department and Supreme Court were controlled by the Catholic Church which, inexplicably, he said, was out to get the Foundation.

In 1985, the IRS revoked the Foundation’s tax-free status. Tony and Susan, the IRS report stated, had accumulated tens of thousands of dollars worth of South African Krugerrands, silver dollars, and gold coins. The Foundation had purchased scores of antiques, a grand piano, many pieces of jewelry—including a $49,000 gold nugget diamond ring and a five-karat emerald ring. The IRS said the couple had traveled in several Cadillacs and shopped for their fur coats at Neiman-Marcus. Tony, who is contesting the IRS action, said that the Cadillacs and diamond rings, the fur coats and $285 silk shirts, all of it, were investments on the Foundation’s behalf.

In late 1987, there were reports that Tony had been bragging a little: “I am,” he allegedly told a real estate agent, “worth over a hundred million dollars.” This is not a clever thing for a man with tax problems to say. My guess, in the summer of 1988, is that the next episode of the Tony and Susan story will be heard in tax court.

The Weasel, as always, is ever present.

T
he others were already in Guyana. Stuck in the Miami airport, through no fault of my own, I paced. I was a journalist, a ghoul, with a desire to go where no sane man would wish to go. A smiling woman with large, syrupy eyes tried to pin a candy cane on my shirt. She explained that the Hare Krishnas were feeding people all over the world, and she had this record album and a book and a magazine—“Like, it’s
rully
ecstatic”—and would I like to cough up a donation.

“Doesn’t this Jonestown stuff make you wonder about yourself?” I asked.

“What?” She looked up at me in shock.

“Selfless commitment,” I began.

“It’s the oldest—”

“They killed the babies first,” I said.

“—religion in the world. We have—”