The Call of the Weird (15 page)

“Okay. What are they?”

“Burlap sacks.”

“Okay.

“They’ll use them for the cross-lighting ceremony. I never got around to mailing them. And I never had the opportunity to go up there.”

“Is he expecting them?”

“No, but it’s hard to find them anymore. Especially up there. Anybody that does have them won’t give them to’em, because they know what they’re going to use them for.”

I took them and put them in my car.

Why did I take the sacks? In hindsight, it was the wrong thing to do. But I was blindsided. I’d agreed to take them before I knew what they were for. Then once I found out, it wasn’t exactly too late, but it would have been a little awkward to give them straight back. So I thought I’d say yes for now, and figure out the right thing to do later. And maybe I was enjoying the irony of his entrusting the sacks to me, a liberal journalist, figuring it would be “good material” for the book.

A little later, we went out to a Mexican restaurant called Fiesta Guadalajara. I asked Jerry about Butler. “I like him but he’s getting old. And I think he’s going a bit senile. Sometimes when he’s speaking he’ll be in the middle of a story and he’ll forget what he was saying.”

“What if he gets so senile that he forgets who he’s supposed to hate?” I said. Jerry ignored this remark.

“I suppose there won’t be any Mexican food in the whites-only homeland,” I said.

“Hmmm, I’d never thought of that possibility,” Jerry said. He paused. “They wouldn’t be allowed to vote, but they could cook and clean for us. After all, we’re not extremists.” Jerry paused again. He made a Benny Hill face of coy mock-seriousness. Then he giggled: “Hee hee hee hee.”

I asked about Jerry’s kids. Did he see his son, forty-six-year-old Jerry Junior?

“Not very often. Sometimes I run into him at the grocery store.”

“He’s not listed, is he?” I knew because Jerry was the only Gruidl in the Idaho phone book.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Me. He doesn’t want anything to do with it. He’s got a kid in high school, and he doesn’t want him getting grief from other kids. We’ve been fishing a few times, but we’ve got less and less to talk about. He’s going left and I’m going right. I feel sorry about it, but I gotta do my thing and he’s gotta do his thing.”

What about Velma, his eldest daughter? “I haven’t spoken to her in years. She won’t let me have her phone number . . . She knows my views on race and she’s dead set against it.” Janet, the youngest? “No, but I’ve been over at Barbara’s house when she’s
called and I’ve spoken to her. We get along. She’s just distant . . . I’m right and some day they’ll understand.”

That evening, I dropped Jerry off at his apartment. The other apartments were dark. “They’re all asleep,” Jerry said. “I feel like I’m in a mausoleum here.” Then he said, “Thanks for a great day.”

But it wasn’t the end of the day. Back at my motel, I realized my laptop was missing. The last place I’d had it was Jerry’s apartment. It was only a few months old. More to the point, it contained numerous irreplaceable photographs and documents. I went back to Jerry’s. He was solicitous and concerned. “First thing to do, file a police report,” he said. An officer named Sergeant Jack Hart came round to Jerry’s apartment. I filled out a form, describing the computer in detail. I explained about the photographs and the documents. Sergeant Hart said, “My wife does little books when we go on vacation, so I know how upsetting that can be.”

One of my first thoughts, oddly, was that it was karma for the sacks. In that self-flagellating mode people sometimes go through after they’ve made a blunder, I blamed myself for toying with the idea of bringing them—flirting with ideological obscenity for the sake of a piquant comical moment. Not that I imagined Butler would be burning crosses on anyone’s front lawn—not that I would ever have really brought the sacks, for that matter—but still.

If the loss of the computer had given me some moral clarity in one way, it had also thrown Jerry and me together. He now wanted nothing more than to be helpful.

“I’ve had a couple of ideas,” he said the next morning. He suggested printing up flyers and leafleting door to door. Jerry said locals would be unlikely to call a long-distance number, so he said to use his. He also presented me with a brand new microcassette recorder, and some maps of Idaho and neighboring states for a
detour into Yellowstone Park he was encouraging me to take. We asked around his apartment building. One of his neighbors said she’d seen me driving off with a computer bag on top of the car, where I must have absentmindedly left it. We made a tour of the town, retracing our route from the previous day. Jerry was being so helpful, it crossed my mind that we were getting into a Pastor Butler type of relationship: He was acting as my chief of staff.

Another day passed, and no sign of the computer. By now, Jerry’s casual anti-Semitism was routine. Most of the time I ignored it, but I was aware of the unseemliness of having a virulent neo-Nazi as the contact person for my lost computer. I wondered if I could trust him—didn’t the monstrousness of his beliefs suggest a fundamental dishonesty? But I was fairly sure I could rely on Jerry, and found it all the more odd that, for all his hatefulness, Jerry could also be thoughtful and decent.

On our last morning together, at his apartment, I asked Jerry if he’d ever thought of trying to be less racist.

He looked serious for a moment.

“If I had my choice, my ultimate choice, if I had all power and all immunity, I would exterminate them. Every last one. And anyone that had any traits of it. Because for as long as there are any left, they’ll grow and multiply and there’ll be more discord.”

Jerry looked at me. His tone changed.

“Straight-up question. Are you Jewish?”

“Is that really important to you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because if you were, I would feel that all this time you were deceiving me and stringing me along. It never crossed my mind until you asked if it would bother me. But even if you said yes, I’d think you were lying, just to test me. You’re not Jewish, I know you’re not.”

“I just don’t see the big deal. When I think of Jewish people, I think of people like Woody Allen and Bob Dylan and Marcel Proust. People I admire.”

Possibly these weren’t the examples most likely to bring Jerry round. “The Devil is beautiful,” he said. “Lucifer was an angel of light. So yeah, they’re good at beguiling you. You’ve got to understand, Jews have this satanic seed and they cannot overcome it.”

“You must see that there’s good and bad in all people, so why not try not to be racist?”

“Because I
am
racist.”

It was hopeless. With Jerry, the alleged “satanic” qualities of Jews were not something that could be proved or disproved. It was simply an article of faith. It was hard to believe he was serious. But he was. I told Jerry I hoped he wouldn’t be offended that I didn’t want to bring the sacks up to Pastor Butler for the cross burning. “It’s not a cross burning, it’s a cross lighting,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Jerry, I know I owe you a favor, but let it be something else, not this.”

“Okay, no problem,” Jerry said. Then he took a stack of flyers advertising the lost computer and said he’d keep handing them out around town.

I drove up Highway 95, the same road that had brought me all the way from Las Vegas, and that stretched south from there to Needles, California, past Yuma, Arizona, and into Mexico. I was heading north. On my folding map of Idaho, I was only a few centimeters from Canada. Coeur d’Alene was a genteel tourist town situated on a lake. Population 34,514. Because it was tourist season, rooms were expensive. I booked into a horrible overpriced motel next to a gas station, among a cluster of other corporate motels and chain restaurants. I called Jerry and thanked him for his help. “I feel so
sick about your’puter,” he said. I’d never heard the word “’puter” before. Its cuteness lodged in my head.

The next morning I shaved off the beard I’d grown, leaving a handlebar moustache. I was hoping to look less Jewish. Though I’m not, I’ve been told I look Jewish, and tanned and bearded and wearing glasses and my leather flip-flops, I looked like I’d just stepped out of a yeshiva. If nothing else, with the moustache and contact lenses instead of glasses, I looked a little less bookish. But driving to the march from my motel, the contacts started irritating my eyes. The package said they expired in 2001, which may have had something to do with it. I took them out. I checked my mirror. Glasses/handlebar moustache appeared to be the worst of all combinations. I looked like a German sex tourist.

The Congress was in two phases, a parade through the heart of Coeur d’Alene followed by speeches at a campground forty miles out of town. Several blocks were cordoned off for the parade. Police officers stood at junctions directing traffic. I parked and walked across the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant called Zip’s where I saw twelve or so beefy men in smart-casual clothes discussing something. One was chomping a cigar. Too well-fed and smug-looking to be regular people, they’d have been recognizable as federal agents even if they hadn’t been having their staff meeting in the parking lot.

I was waiting at the starting point when a van pulled up and Butler hobbled out with four bodyguards, young men in combat boots and dark glasses. Now aged eighty-six, he looked stooped and oblivious, a hearing aid in his ear, as he sat on a bench by the side of the road. It was hard not to feel the customary indulgence that one extends toward the elderly, even the racist elderly. I sat down next to him and said: “Hi, Pastor Butler, I’ve been staying with Jerry Gruidl in Payette. I think he may have emailed you about me.” His reaction was hard to read. Could he hear me? I
asked him how it was going. “It’s been pretty rough, but we get by,” he croaked.

The route of the parade ran down Coeur d’Alene’s main shopping street, with fancy streetlights, flower baskets, and a parade of smart shops. Later I was told Butler had hoped for 300 marchers, to represent the 300 fighters chosen by Gideon in the Old Testament. (Given that experts put the group’s membership at about 200, this was optimistic.) I counted thirty-three marchers. They were spaced three abreast, thirty or so feet behind each other, to take up more room. The permit from the town was for an hour; with only a few blocks to cover, the marchers made frequent stops to fill out the time. Butler, too feeble to walk, was seated on a deckchair on the back of a pickup truck, like a May Queen, looking back on the parade.

The marchers began by taking turns stomping on an Israeli flag. “Kill! Kill! Die! White race!” The flag was then dragged by the pickup truck. Onlookers and reporters were kept behind the barriers. A talkative old gentleman wearing a neckerchief remarked to no one in particular: “I’m trying to figure out what type of people are drawn to this.” Then, out of the side of his mouth, he said: “I think they’re a little screwy.”

A dark-haired man with a broad Midwestern accent, aged fortyfive or so, herded the marchers. He wore the Aryan Nations uniform, modeled on the old Nazi one: pale blue shirt, twin breast pockets, blue necktie. I was pleased to see he also had a handlebar moustache, so I hadn’t misjudged the grooming code too badly.

With a few exceptions, the marchers fell into two main categories: skinheads and religious eccentrics. The eccentrics tended to be older, with beards and/or dirty T-shirts. One, in straw hat, little dark glasses, and Nazi armband, looked exactly like the Gestapo villain in
Raiders of the Lost Ark.

An Old Testament–looking patriarch carried a placard that said: “Jews will not repent for the cross.” This was Ken Gregg of the
“Knights of Yahweh.” A chubby, geeky guy, who I later found out was Billy Roper, a rising leader in the movement, had a poster that said “Keep your brown hands off our white children.”

A bystander shouted: “God created them that way!”

“He also created yeast infections. You treat those,” Billy Roper shouted back.

With Butler so aged and feeble and the organization bankrupted, anti-racism groups had for the most part elected to stay away. One local spokesman called it the Aryan Nation’s “swan-song.” there were a few protesters with their own placards, locals and out-of-towners, with signs saying: “Jesus is colorblind” and “Hate is a bad lifestyle. Get out now!” The gaggle of protesters shuffled alongside in an impromptu and untidy counterparade.

“Are you going to reimburse the city for the cost of hiring all these extra police, Butler?” shouted an aging hippie in tie-dye shirt and ponytail.

“Hey, dude, Jesus wasn’t white!” a black bystander shouted. “Give me a break! Get real!”

“He was a direct descendant of Adam, and Adam was a white man!” said the Knight of Yahweh.

“Please do not feed the nonwhites,” Billy Roper said.

“Where are your fucking clothes made? Taiwan?” said one protester.

“Get the fuck out of my town!” said another.

“Why don’t you come here so I can sock you!” said a third.

One or two onlookers expressed support for the parade. “God bless ya!” said a woman carrying a Confederate flag. “Thank you!” A big, strapping, bearded blond-haired guy, who had a young daughter on his shoulders, Sieg-Heiled. “White Power! Right on, man! Keep this town real!”

The most vocal of the protesters was a middle-aged woman who appeared to be deranged. She denounced the marchers as “white
negroids.” She held two densely worded placards, which were impossible to make out.