A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (8 page)

But there was no fence, and the Foundation looked exactly like what it was, a converted bar and nightclub once called the Wilson Cafe. The large parking lot held several buses, vans, and cars all painted red, white, and blue and clearly marked as belonging to the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation. One sign admonished readers to R
EPENT OR
P
ERISH
. There was a fire station nearby, and we pulled into the parking lot.

Cardoso and I worked out a telephone code. If I called and said I was feeling “swell” somewhere in the conversation, I was in no danger. If I said I was “enjoying myself,” I wanted him up there immediately. If I didn’t call within three days, I wanted an all-out assault on the place by local sheriff’s deputies.

We pulled out of the firehouse and coasted slowly by the Foundation. The hills were green this spring after a wet winter, but in a month they would be brown and bare and choking with dust. They were hills, Susan Alamo was to say later, very like the hills of Galilee, upon which Christ walked. And though she didn’t say—and surely didn’t think it—they were the very hills upon which Charles Manson had walked.

F
our-thirty, Good Friday afternoon. Hollywood Boulevard, two blocks up from Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I’m lounging in the entrance to a toy store, unshaven and looking, I hope, profoundly confused. Page is across the street in the VW, camera at the ready. Two brisk but seedy-looking Alamo-ites are coming my way, tracts in hand.

My witness was an exceedingly short Christian named Chris who stared up at me with a pair of smarmy eyes that rippled and glittered wetly behind a pair of thick glasses. Did I know that Christ was coming again, that the world was about to end, and that vengeance belonged to the Lord, he said all in a rush.

I considered the question in silence.

Apparently encouraged, Chris explained that he wasn’t exactly sure when Christ would make an appearance here on the boulevard, but that it was the “Season of His Coming.”

“I know that when the trees bloom summer can’t be far behind. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Well, the Bible gives us certain signs that indicate when Christ will come again.” According to the Bible and Chris, the end would be at hand when the armies of the world were massed around Jerusalem. I nodded. “The waters shall become bitter as wormwood,” Chris intoned, then added reasonably, “that’s pollution.” He paused to let this sink in, then hit me with what I suspect he felt was a boggler. “The Bible tells us that the Second Coming is near when the Jews preach the gospel and … 
the Alamos are Jewish
.”

The evidence, I had to admit, was certainly piling up.

I saw a pattern developing: fire a series of soul-rockers, then hit them where they live with a Clincher.

“The Bible says that Christ is at hand when the cities are enclosed in a smoking haze.” Chris directed my attention to the whisky brown skies of Los Angeles. From the rapt and
worshipful attention on his face, I think he half-expected Christ to descend from heaven, then and there, right through the smog in a blaze of glory, to smite the shit out of all the hustlers and the winos and the Godless shoppers of this choking Babylon.

We talked about the greatest war the earth has known, a war that raged on even as we stood there, in which the Devil battled Christ for the possession of men’s souls. I stared into Chris’s eyes for fully thirty seconds in an effort to determine if he was trying, consciously or unconsciously, to hypnotize me. I think he felt menaced because he took a backward step and stared at the tracts in his hand for several uncomfortable seconds. Hypnotism was definitely not Chris’s forte. He collected his thoughts and came back with a strong verbal blast of fire and brimstone.

“Ah, come on,” I said, “why would a loving God make someone with the express purpose of sending him to hell.”

“You think God is Love,” Chris accused. His voice took on a sneering singsong quality. “You believe in a forgiving God. You only see what you want to see.” His voice dropped an octave. “Well, He is a God of Wrath. He is not a … permissive … God.” I further learned there was no hope for me, that I was surely hellbound, but that God had taken pity on me because I was talking to Chris, and that I could save my soul by catching the Alamo bus at six.

“I put before you this day,” Chris said, “both a blessing and a curse.”

“Here’s the good news and here’s the bad news,” I said, smiling.

Chris did not smile. He apparently disapproved of jokes. His face became pinched and severe. The blessing was eternity in heaven praising God for Christ’s sake and the curse was a burning eternity of hellfire.

We had been standing in front of the toy store, talking for nearly twenty minutes. I would have stayed longer but Chris had better things to do.

“Read the tract,” he commanded, “then come get on the
bus. Remember, the Devil is going to try his best to stop you from getting to the Foundation.”

“I’m going to go drink a beer or two and think it over,” I said. Chris folded his face into an ugly mask of contempt. “That’s the devil talking,” he stated flatly and stalked off down the boulevard to win another soul for Christ.

T
here are, of course, multiple unknowns in the world, and it could very well have been the Devil himself who caused me to almost miss the Alamo bus, but if it was, his agent was photographer Tim Page, who was waiting around the corner for me. Page, a British citizen, was wounded five times in four years as a combat photographer in Vietnam. His brushes with death left him with an insatiable appetite for “scummy bars,” places with what he calls, in GI parlance, a “numbah ten clientele.”

The bar we found pleased Page immensely. At five in the afternoon of Good Friday, it was filled with cheap hustlers and even cheaper hookers. We ordered a couple of drafts and studied the tract, which informed us that Tony and Susan Alamo were the first two to take the gospel to the streets. This was about 1967, when the young people were declaring war on the Establishment, taking drugs, and talking about burning down the churches. So it said. Tony and Susan stopped this nonsense in its tracks and turned the dregs of the drug society to Jesus. The tract hit heavily on the theme of drug temperance and rejoiced that these former stoned revolutionaries now go about “appealing to the Establishment to turn away from their sins.”

Tony, born Bernie Lazar Hoffman, confessed that he was a vocalist, a record company owner, a fast-stepping PR man, and the owner of a chain of health spas. “All highly successful ventures,” it said, but neglected to mention that in 1967 Tony was “broke,” by his own admission. His life “was filled with sin, filth, despair, torture, and torment.” Now, six years later, after committing his life to the Lord,
Tony Alamo drives a black Cadillac Fleetwood with personalized license plates and lives in an elegant hilltop mansion in Saugus.

A bulletproof waitress in a miniskirt arrived with our third beer, and I asked her to look at the picture of Tony and Susan on the tract.

“He looks sneaky and she’s got a face like an elbow,” she said.

“Ah, Sister, that’s the Devil talking,” I said mildly.

She gave me a quick sideways glance and left, I suspect, to tell the bartender to keep an eye on us.

So much for the testimony of sinners.

T
he red, white, and blue bus—with a destination sign reading H
EAVEN
—was right there on the corner of Highland Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard as it is every day at six o’clock. On the way a fresh set of Alamo-ites tried to hand me another tract, but I told them I was getting on the bus anyway.

“Don’t let the Weasel talk you out of it,” another very short Christian told me.

“The Weasel?”

“The Devil, the Weasel, the Old Boy. He’s going to sit on your shoulder and tell you to go have some dope instead.”

“He is?”

The diminutive evangelist thought it best to walk me the last thirty yards to the bus.

“Thank you, Jesus,” he said to no one in particular as I stepped aboard. It looked like a school bus, and a capacity crowd of about sixty was aboard. Perhaps fifty were reading Bibles. The other ten were lost sinners, like myself, on their way to the Foundation for the first time. I sat next to one of the few clean-cut Bible readers, a man of about twenty named Hal, who immediately noticed the beer on my breath. “The services aren’t like any you’ve ever seen,” he told me through an obviously forced smile.
“You
 … 
will
 … like them.” He opened his Bible and said no more. If
Hal was a hypnotist, he had a serious problem with technique.

A Christian cheerleader of sorts made his way down the aisle, stopping every five rows or so to break into song.

The bus, I surmised, was a purchase from the Mexican government. All the exit signs were in Spanish. Someone was reading the Bible verses to the driver and he had to shout them out as the engine labored and the gears rasped on the steep hills of the Golden State Freeway. I caught a startling verse about the “loathsome diseases of the loins,” and simultaneously wished that I had taken the time to relieve myself in the bar. Here I was, I thought, on a Mexican bus, on my way to Heaven, and I had to take a piss.

I began to chuckle softly, and Hal looked up from his Bible and gave me a severe look, a look that seemed to say, “laughter is the Devil’s tool and no Good can come from it.”

“Excuse me,” I offered, and Hal, sorry hypnotist that he was, went back to his Bible. I sat with my legs tightly crossed and bit my lip for the next twenty miles.

The Foundation is a single-story building quartered by a kitchen and a boothed-off dining area where much of the Bible study takes place. The other half of the building might once have been the dance floor and bandstand. It was now a church, set up with a combination of lecture-seat rejects and folding chairs. A crowd of about four hundred were waiting for services to begin and engaging themselves in exalted conversation.

“Christ is so close to coming. I feel it in every pore.”

“Amen.”

“It says so in the Bible.”

“It’s the Word of God, Brother.”

“Thank you, Jesus.”

No one seemed interested in hypnotizing, brainwashing,
or even talking to me at this point, so I circulated aimlessly through the well-integrated crowd. Males outnumbered females vastly, and the typical resident might be described as a male longhair, between the ages of twenty and thirty and dressed pretty much like street folk the country over.

I found myself near a door to the left of the pulpit that said P
RAYER
R
OOM
. Inside I could hear people shouting in undifferentiated syllables, without cadence. An occasional man’s voice leather-lunged, “Oh, God, I wanna be ready.” A hand-lettered sign on the door listed three things to pray for: Susie’s health, someone’s sister, who had “a cancer,” and “that God will stop Ted Patrick and all other Devils coming against the Foundation.”

A young black resident took the pulpit and said, “Let’s hear a mighty Amen!”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-men!” the four hundred shouted.

This was followed by a prayer, and then the band—a disparate collection of about sixty tubas, trombones, saxophones, flutes, and clarinets dominated by an electric bass, an electric organ, and three sets of drums—was off and running, slicing into standards like “The Old Rugged Cross” and country devotions like “My Savior Leads the Way.” People stood and clapped and expressed thanks to God for the music. The orchestra sounded like a tank town high school band.

After “King of Kings,” the big finish, various of the Saved stepped up to the pulpit to give testimony. “I know there’s a burning Hell,” one crisp sister in gingham non sequitured, “because I experienced a little bit of it out in the World.” Hell, in fact, seemed to be the big selling point for salvation and it beat out heaven in terms of mention about ten to one.

The words “born again” and “born again in the blood” were mentioned often. Very big was the phrase
I know beyond the shadow of a doubt
. The theme was drugs, rotten lives, torture, torment, filth, and despair in “the World” as opposed to “Peace” at the Foundation while “Serving the
Lord.” Most testimonies ended “so come on up and get saved.”

“You may think you came here for a free meal,” the leader said, “but God drew you here for a very special purpose.” He hit briefly on the soul rockers: hellfire, the end of the world, judgment before the Lord, and the Prophecy of the Second Coming before revealing to sinners in the crowd that the Biblical promise of eternal life was within our grasps that very evening. All we had to do, it turned out, was to humble ourselves before God—and, of course, everyone else at the service—by kneeling in the little area between the first folding chairs and the pulpit. There we would publicly confess that we led sinful lives in the manner of American POWs taping war crimes confessions before international cameras.

“I put before you this day both a blessing and a curse,” he said.

The organist began a churchy solo, and elect Christians threaded through the crowd, looking for obvious sinners. Another short, rather pleasant-looking man in his mid-twenties stood by my chair.

“Why don’t you come up and get saved,” he stage-whispered.

I shrugged stupidly.

“It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”

A few sinners and their Christians were moving toward the saving block. The organ finished, stopped momentarily, but at a signal from the man at my side, it started again. The same song, from the top.

“I couldn’t say that prayer and mean it,” I pointed out.

“It doesn’t matter. If you kneel and say it with your lips, God will come into your heart in a very special way. Why do you think God brought you here?”

It was difficult to argue the point with every person in the place watching us, so I let myself be led forward to kneel on the hard linoleum floor, under a long fluorescent light. I said the prayer word for word and at no time did I feel God come into my heart, which, I suppose, is as it should be.