The Call of the Weird

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Copyright © 2005 by Louis Theroux
Introduction to the American Edition copyright © 2007 by Louis Theroux

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

Designed by Timm Bryson
Set in 12.5-point Fournier by the Perseus Books Group

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Theroux, Louis.
     The call of the weird : travels in American subcultures / Louis Theroux. -- 1st Da Capo Press ed.
p. cm.
     Originally published: London : Macmillan, 2005.
ISBN-13: 978-0-306-81503-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
eBook ISBN:9780786731893
ISBN-10: 0-306-81503-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. United States--Description and travel. 2. Theroux, Louis---Travel---United States. 3. United States--Social life and customs--1971- 4. Subculture--United States. 5. Eccentrics and eccentricities- United States--Biography. 6. United States--Biography. 7. National characteristics, American. 8. United States--Civilization--1970- I. Title.
E169.Z83T48 2007
306'.10973090511--dc22

2006036417

First Da Capo Press edition 2007
First published in the United Kingdom by Macmillan

Published by Da Capo Press
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www.dacapopress.com

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

For Nancy

“You may lie with your mouth,
but with the mouth you make as you do
so you none the less tell the truth.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

I
’m excited and a little nervous about the publication of
The Call of
the Weird
in the United States. For an outsider, there are always going to be hazards associated with trying to explain America to Americans, and even more so when you have a French-sounding name. The goodwill with which Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous
Democracy in America
is regarded seems to have been exhausted by a succession of twentieth-century émigrés—from Britain, France, Romania, and elsewhere—making windy generalizations from Cadillacs. The formula is by now so well established that Garrison Keillor not so long ago derided Bernard-Henri Lévy’s account of his journey in Tocqueville’s footsteps,
American Vertigo,
as yet another example of “the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists” and listed the mandatory stop-offs of such a trip—Sun City, the Mall of America, a megachurch, Graceland, Dealey Plaza, the adult movie awards, a legal brothel . . .

Thankfully, my aim in these pages is slightly different. If anything, this book was conceived as a reaction and antidote to the typical Freaks and Fatties tour—or perhaps a more honest version of it. For ten years I made TV documentaries about offbeat American
subcultures (gangsta rap, the porn industry, etc.), attempting to immerse myself in their unusual worlds and understand their motivations. Over time I had the urge to cover my stories with more depth. I wanted to see the most intriguing people again—partly to find out how their strange lives had turned out, but also because I was curious how I really felt about them . . . and they about me. Instead of a travel book, I would be writing a book about returning, reconsidering—revisiting, literally and figuratively.

I look at America not completely from the outside nor wholly from the inside, as someone born to an American father and a British mother. I grew up in London, but every summer my family and I would visit Cape Cod for two months. For my dad, the writer Paul Theroux, this was a way to counteract the British cultural programming we received the rest of the year. A former Eagle Scout and keen kayaker, he worried we were becoming pale and effete and snobbish—in short, too English. We’d embark on a regimen of outdoor projects—build bivouacs and clear paths through the woods by machete, for example. Oddly, among the inquisitive aunts and uncles of my dad’s side of the family, my brother and I tended to become, if anything,
more
English, conjugating Latin verbs as a party trick, reciting fragments of Shakespeare, and behaving generally like a pair of irritating twerps. But I was at the same time breathing in the local atmosphere: watching American TV commercials, consuming America’s sugary cereals, drinking chocolate milk . . .

And so my dad’s plan worked. To this day, I’m still half-outsider, half-insider. I still admire the American virtues, the spirit of openness, selfsufficiency. (The cereal I’m less keen on.) At the same time, I am, to all appearances, British. I speak with an English accent, I enjoy drinking tea, I remain somewhat pale and effete. The upside of this for me is that, when covering stories in the U.S., I am
the beneficiary of the positive prejudices about Britain that prevail here—that British people are educated and polite (if a little snooty), that we are well-disposed toward Americans because we share a common heritage, that we are maybe more inclined to be open-minded on American issues because we are not directly involved. When I’m on assignment, rather than being treated like a snooping journalist, I am sometimes treated like an exotic relation. And when I’m among extremists and enthusiasts, I find it liberates my inner American—I can whoop and be weird and imagine myself leading another life. It’s like being among family.

When
The Call of the Weird
came out in Britain, I was often asked why I thought America was home to so many weird people. I’d usually make reference to the country’s large population and its wide open spaces. “If you’re a religious leader,” I’d say, “it’s a lot harder to start your commune in a small, semidetached house in North West London. Believe me, I’ve tried.” Then I’d mention the unique history of America’s founding—that it was established by religious extremists as a New Jerusalem—and I’d say that that same spirit of utopianism still exists and informs the religious aspirations of some of the people here. Those extremists, who were Calvinists, and their belief in predestination spawned a capitalistic ethic that has in turn created a consumer culture where anything can be packaged and sold—a great source of weirdness.

But maybe this kind of analysis is better left to Tocqueville. The truth is, as a people, Americans are no weirder than anyone else on Earth. They—or may I say “we”?—are just more open and more organized, and these qualities mean that weirdness is more accessible here—to ordinary people who are tired of their humdrum lives and feel like trying porn as a career, and also to visiting European journalists. The normal human foibles—lust, violence, spirituality— have blossomed and formed subcultures: surrogate families
with topsy-turvy systems of virtue, with their own self-sacrifice, their own idealism. America may not be weirder, but it
is
somewhere you can speak your mind. It is above all a place for letting the world know your desires and being unashamed. For this—as a journalist and as a human being—I am thankful.

And if, after all, I am taken as another Freaks and Fatties rubber-necker, so be it. I didn’t do Graceland, but I
did
visit a legal brothel.

One cold December day in 1996, I met up with an elderly racist leader named Pastor Richard Butler. I was making a TV documentary about right-wing apocalyptic Christians who have retreated to the American Northwest, Idaho especially, in preparation for the end times. Butler’s outfit, the Aryan Nations, represented the far end of that spectrum, a strange racist group that styled itself a Church. It was the most famous neo-Nazi organization in America at the time, much beloved of tattooed skinheads and angry convicts, and linked to at least one White Power terrorist cell that had gone on the rampage in the eighties. Its membership believed that whites were the original Israelites spoken of in the Bible. Nonwhites were subhuman, no better than animals, with the exception of Jews, whom they viewed as irredeemably satanic. A race war was said to be imminent, in which the whites, needless to say, would be the eventual victors.

Butler picked me up in Hayden, Idaho, in a creaky old Cadillac, accompanied by an aide-de-camp, whom he introduced as Reverend Jerry Gruidl. I’d felt a little nervous about the encounter, worried that Butler and his followers might want to jumpstart the race war by attacking an English journalist. First impressions were reassuring, however. The pastor was then in his eighties and pretty decrepit. Jerry was in his sixties, pudgy, wearing thick glasses and a cowboy hat. I reckoned I could take them, if it came to that. But they appeared unconcerned with my racial background. The pastor hunched over the wheel of the car as we sped through the snow-covered countryside of northern Idaho. Jerry seemed more intent on sharing his love of English culture, the comedy of Benny Hill, the scenery around Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, where he’d stayed during his stint in the army in the fifties. If I was ever in Cheltenham, I should look up the Garsides, a wonderful family.

We drove up a rough driveway through a pine forest, past a sign saying “Whites Only,” into a clearing with a church and a guard tower and scattered mobile homes. The walls of the pastor’s office were lined with racist leaflets in metal holders. Cold and cluttered, it was like the office of an underfunded charitable organization, albeit one dedicated to the eradication of world Jewry. A pair of German shepherds called Hans and Fritz prowled around. There was a stack of flyers with Adolf Hitler wearing a Santa Claus hat.

Butler wanted a moment to open the morning mail, so Jerry offered to take me on a tour of the rest of the compound. Icicles hung from the eaves. A sign said “God has a plan for homosexuals. AIDS is the beginning.” The church itself was a perfect combination of mildness and menace, like a village chapel, with pews and a piano and stained glass, but with swastikas on the altar and the wall. “There’s no armed guards or anything,” Jerry said, as though I should be able to see for myself how normal this all was. “Anybody who’s white is welcome.”

We went up a ladder into the guard tower, our feet clomping on the wooden boards. And there, as we stood looking out on miles of white wilderness, me feeling as though I were at the far end of the Earth, a strange moral antipodes where Hitler stood in for Santa and the halls were decked with swastikas, Jerry announced
his great fondness for the TV program
Are You Being Served?
This struck me as surprising on many levels—that an American neo-Nazi should have heard of a relatively obscure British sitcom from the seventies, that he should have enjoyed its broad sexual innuendo-based comedy, that he should have thought it important enough to mention at just that moment, in the Aryan Nations’ guard tower, on the heels of a particularly nasty racist rant.

For a few minutes, we talked about some of the characters. Jerry mentioned liking Mrs. Slocombe, the bawdy old saleswoman in the lingerie department who made frequent references to her pussy. I asked him what he thought of Mr. Humphries, the effeminate sales assistant whose catchphrase “I’m free!” relied for its humor on the implication that he might be available for gay sex. Perhaps sensing this didn’t sit well with the official Aryan Nations policy on homosexuality, Jerry looked confused for a moment, then said he thought he was “disgusting.” In a playful mood, I asked Jerry to say Mr. Humphries’s catchphrase, and the conversation ended where it started, with Jerry saying, “But I’m not free! Because this country’s in bondage to the Jews!”

A little later, having done my interview with Pastor Butler, I left the headquarters of the Aryan Nations and returned to England for my own more traditional Christmas. Time passed and I moved on to other stories, but occasionally I found myself thinking about my visit to the Aryan Nations—and in particular, the strangeness of that conversation with Jerry in the guard tower. I came to realize what probably should have been obvious, that Jerry mentioning a British TV show had been an attempt to bond with me, and that I’d seen him in the grip of two contradictory impulses: his loyalty to Nazism on the one hand, and on the other his desire to make a friend. I found excuses to get back in touch with him. I sent him copies of some of my documentaries, including the one
he appeared in. “I thought you did a pretty good job of making fools of people,” he said, with heavy sarcasm, when I phoned for his feedback. Hoping to get back into his good books, I looked up Sidney Garside, of the Cheltenham Garsides, the family Jerry had stayed with. Sidney was still living in Cheltenham, a retired pipe fitter of conventional political beliefs. I wrote to Jerry and let him know I’d found the family, then put them in touch.

Gradually, I fell out of contact with Jerry, but I never forgot about him. The contrast of his warm human qualities combined with the hatefulness of his beliefs set a kind of gold standard for the kind of journalism I was doing, which followed my attempts to form something more than the usual journalistic relationship with members of weird groups. As the years passed and I made more documentaries, Jerry was joined in my mental scrapbook by a handful of other characters whose fates I continued to be curious about long after the interviews were over: a UFO believer named Thor Templar who claimed to have killed ten aliens; a pimp named Mello T who was pursuing a career as a gangsta rapper; a young porn performer who worked under the name JJ Michaels. As I had with Jerry, from time to time—in the odd idle moment, sipping a cup of tea, warming my feet by the radiator in rainy London—I would phone or email and ask how everything was going. And then I’d lose touch with them, too. But my idle moments returned. After more cups of tea and more musing, my thoughts took shape in an idea.

A Reunion Tour. A six-month trip around the States catching up with ten of my most intriguing “ex-interviewees.” (There is no satisfactory word for the people a journalist covers—his “characters,” his “subjects”—which may say something about the oddness of the relationship itself.) An update on both them and their
weird worlds. The details were vague in my mind, but the urge to do it was quite distinct.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked this idea. I’d been interviewing odd people for almost exactly ten years, since 1994 and a visit to a doom-preaching Christian minister in Oakland, California. I was ready for a break. It would be a chance to work in a different way, getting closer to the people I was covering, without the sense of performance that the camera inevitably brings.

I hoped the changes in their subcultures might say something about changes in the world at large—the “post 9/11 universe”; Clinton’s America versus Bush’s America; the nineties and the noughties. In hindsight, the nineties may have been a kind of golden age for strange beliefs. In that interregnum between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks on the World Trade Center all kinds of bizarre heterodoxies took root: space creatures were abducting humans from Earth, a secret cabal of bankers and industrialists named the Illuminati were running the world; the approaching year 2000 heralded the Second Coming, or the arrival of a fleet of spaceships from a benevolent intergalactic federation, or at the very least some glitches on your PC.

Or it may be that the world was exactly as weird as it always was, but the media, less distracted by the specter of a global menace like communism or terror, had time to focus on less persuasive fears. The truth was, my real motivation was less grandiose. I was just curious what became of some of the odd folk I got to know.

I made arrangements to move to America. I began putting things in storage, clearing out my house so I could rent it out while I was away. I compiled a rough list of the people I hoped to see, adding to those already mentioned a prostitute named Hayley, a UFO cult in San Diego, a neo-Nazi children’s folk group, a militiaman named Mike Cain, an elusive self-help guru named Marshall Sylver, and, as a wild card, the turbulent bandleader Ike Turner. I marked them on a large map of the U.S. that I pinned to the wall of my study, taking pains to cut out little labels which I glued to the map, like a general preparing for a campaign. After an hour or so of work, I’d managed to demonstrate that most of my subjects were in the west of the U.S., a fact I’d been aware of before I started the exercise. But as an act of handicraft it had the virtue of taking my mind off the anxieties about the trip, which, now that I’d made the decision to go, were starting to blossom inside me. And so I found myself sticking on more names, adding people and groups I had no intention of visiting, for the sheer pleasure of doing the lettering and the scissoring and seeing the labels accumulate.

My anxieties took various forms. I’d had the idea of seeing my old subjects because I was curious what had become of them. But it would also be my first visit since making the documentaries, which, now that I thought about it, some critics had regarded as being faintly mocking in tone. Would my interviewees still be as friendly having seen the programs? Would they feel conned? Would they mind that the series of cultural documentaries they’d participated in,
Louis Theroux’s America,
had arrived on British TV screens as a lighthearted romp called
Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends
? Rather than a Reunion Tour, the trip might turn into a kind of referendum on my own methods, as voted on by my ex-subjects.

As my departure date approached, I sent out a few exploratory emails, more in an attempt to reassure myself that my collaborators were out there and available. For the most part, these emails went unacknowledged or came back address unknown. I glued some more labels to my Weirdness Map to calm my nerves. Then, in a bid to add some seriousness to my approach, I tried looking for common themes among my subjects. I drew up a Venn diagram showing the “Four Main Sources of Weirdness” as interlocking
circles, which I identified as “Sexual,” “Racial,” “Religious,” and “Narcissistic.” Though there were some areas of overlap, I was more struck by the variety of the motivations. The militiamen of Idaho would regard gangsta rap as an end-state symptom of our godless society. People in porn generally find the idea of speaking to aliens laughable and bizarre. What, in fact, was “weirdness”? The more I thought about it, the less clear it became.

One morning in April, I packed my last few things into the attic as a taxi waited to take me to the airport. I had a bag with a few clothes and a list of names and not much else. My plan, such as it was, was to buy a secondhand car in Las Vegas, and work outward from there. It was later that day, somewhere up above the American Midwest, that two thoughts formed in my mind. The first had to do with the nature of weirdness. I realized that my long years of interest in the beliefs of my subjects, be they porn performers, neo- Nazis, or UFO believers, may be evidence that I—in however small a way—share those beliefs. I wondered whether taken together the weird mores of the people I’d been covering all these years might represent a negative version of myself—a shadow map of my own most secret nature.

The second thought was about the Weirdness Map I’d made in London. In my rush to get the last things into storage, I’d left it tacked up on the wall of my study; and I imagined it there, the sole item left in that empty house, a rendering in miniature of the landscape I was flying into . . .