The Call of the Weird (9 page)

Later, he recalls a time he “spanked” her with a coat hanger. Overall, Ike seems to feel that the relationship was no more physical than most people’s, and where he expresses remorse, it’s over his womanizing, which he scores in the three figures. If he had his life to live over, he writes, he’d still sleep around but “be more discreet about it.”

I arrived at his house one spring morning, driving down from Los Angeles. Though he grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Ike now lives in a smart development of ranch-style homes not far from San Diego. This time the door was answered by Ike’s agent, a jumpy, slightly frazzled little guy named Dennis Rubenstein. Dennis ushered me into a bedroom he was using as an office, where he booked dates for Ike’s band.

Dennis made conversation in an over-caffeinated way about his long association with Ike and Tina. I asked his impression of their relationship. He said he’d never seen Ike be physical with anyone. Then he said, “Let me tell you something. She used to push his buttons. I was around them twelve hours a day, okay? She knew what she was doing.”

Something in Dennis’s manner reminded me of someone. Later I realized it was the Dennis Hopper character in
Apocalypse Now,
the spaced-out photographer who buzzes around the deranged Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. Not that he was as crazed as that, but the situation felt similar: the vague sense of waiting for a kind of royal audience, and being chaperoned by a zany hanger-on.

Ike emerged a few minutes later, wearing a zebra-patterned shirt, and colorful patent-leather shoes. He took me into his back room, where he has a small home studio—several synthesizers, a mixing desk, expensive-looking guitars on stands. As a party piece, Ike threw together a short blues instrumental. Because he’s shy, this is his way of playing host, and he does it with the casual panache of a chef cooking up a dish, adding instruments like ingredients. First the drum machine, then layers of keyboards, then bass. When he was done, he erased it without ceremony.

As he worked, I concentrated on smiling and maintaining eye contact, concerned that Ike should understand how much I appreciated being there and that I didn’t do anything to cause offense. I felt privileged to see him making music; I also felt a little afraid.

We went out for lunch—he, Audrey, and I—riding in Ike’s smart Mercedes with its IKE TNR license plate. I sat in the back with a new stack of Ike’s latest publicity shots, which showed Ike smiling broadly, the tip of his tongue poking between his teeth, the ill-named fan club now omitted in favor of his website. Ike was in a good mood and he reminisced about losing his virginity to a middle-aged next-door neighbor named Miss Boozie when he was just six years old.

“You know, man, today you guys talk about starting sex at that age.” Ike put on a prissy voice. “‘Oh! That’s child moles—’ What’s the word?”

“Child molestation,” Audrey said.

“Child molestation. Man, that’s crazy! I was enjoying myself! Miss Boozie was somewhere between fortyfive and fifty years old. And, man, she would show me how to move and stuff.” Ike raised his arms. “How to roll my stomach.” Ike rolled his stomach. “And then say, ‘Hit it! Hit it! Hit it!’” Ike said “Hit it!” in a high-pitched voice—I wasn’t sure if it was meant to be Miss Boozie or possibly a man whose voice had gone up in a moment of passion. Ike laughed and then yelped, “Yrowgh! Aigh! But everything today is all screwed up, you know?”

Over lunch, he shared stories about his days “orgying” in the seventies. One of the hazards of being a Don Juan, Ike said, was that you couldn’t always remember the people you’d orgied with. “It’s not that you’re being snotty. It’s just they change . . . One girl walked up to me and said, ‘You don’t remember me?’ She did this on Geraldo’s show. I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘I orgied you for three days!’”

“You ‘orgied’ with her—what does that mean?” I asked.

With glee, Ike said, “That, man, it were her and a lot more girls and I was doing them all.”

“Have you ever orgied, Louis?” Audrey asked innocently, and pressed her wig with her hands.

“I don’t think I ever have orgied,” I said.

“You never had five or six women at one time?” Ike asked. “Hey, life passin’ you by!”

I remarked that I could see maybe orgying with two women at the same time, but that five or six seemed excessive.

“Yeah! I’m excessive with everything. That’s why I don’t do dope no mo’. I was excessive with it. I don’t do a lot of women no mo’ because I was excessive with it. I don’t gamble any mo’ because I was excessive with it. I go to the extreme with everything. Now I’m a good guy.”

Seeing Ike so relaxed and expansive, I thought I’d hazard a Tina question. I knew from Ike’s book that one of Ike’s mistakes during his drug addiction was to sign away his rights to sue Disney, the studio that made the movie, over his portrayal. I asked about this. “That’s how they did it,” he said. He chewed his lamb chop. “fortyfive lousy thousand dollars. To assassinate my career.” He forked some vegetables into his mouth. “But that’s in the past now. So let’s go forward.”

Back at his house, Audrey made tea, and Ike and I went into his little studio.

I asked about
Here and Now,
the record I’d seen him promoting. I was surprised to hear that, despite winning critical acclaim, it had sold poorly. “It really wasn’t played,” Ike said. His recording contract had lapsed now, but he was excited about his new music, which he described as “blues with a twist.” One song went, “Gimme back that wig I bought you and let your head—your head go bald!” “This is Tina!” Ike said. In another track, he sang, “They made a movie’bout me and what they said in some parts ain’t true.” The last verse talked about people turning up their noses at him, ending, “I can’t live forever, and how long do you think I’m gonna wait?”—the music dropped out—“For forgiveness!”

During a break in the music, I asked, “For people who only know you from the movie, what would you say to them?” I’d already asked one Tina question and to ask another was pushing it. Ike’s eyes flicked to the side, and he took a very long pause, sixteen seconds when I counted it on my tape. I couldn’t tell if he was irritated or just considering the question carefully. Then he said, “I’m sorry that they didn’t get to know me themselves, rather than know me through a movie, where they had to make somebody the demon and somebody the god. I ain’t the demon that I’ve been portrayed to be.”

He cued up a last track. He pointed at the CD player. “This song here tell you my real feelings.” He hit pause and called Dennis in from the bedroom. The song was the tortured thoughts of an addict in the depths of his addiction. “It’s a crime and a shame that I call myself a man!” it went. “I’m down on my knees beggin’ please!”

Dennis swiveled back and forth on his chair holding his glasses. The song put Ike in mind of all the time he’d wasted on drugs, all the money, all the lost relationships, and after it was finished he let loose about his wilderness years. “I done slept on damn near floors in Los Angeles. I went from riches to rags. And then when I got ready to come out from under it, here come a movie to stomp me further back down in it. People look at me and hate me, man. And they don’t know how much love in my body. Like what I got from you and you?” He pointed at Dennis and me. “They don’t know! And I can feel the hate from them. And they don’t know what this soul has got and how I am inside. All they know is how I’ve been portrayed to be. And the me that they portrayed me to be, that’s not me. This is me.”

I felt moved by Ike’s cri de coeur. I was no longer thinking about what he might or might not have done to Tina, or how he felt about it. I was encloaked in his world and his pain.

Ike’s tale of ill use had made Dennis excited. He stood up and pointed at me. “Ike, he asked me today about that. And I said to him, ‘I was there all these years, ten years.’ I said, ‘Look, Tina knew how to push your buttons!’ He’d be in the studio recording with a roooom full of musicians, okay? And Tina wants to go shopping and has got to come in in the middle and stop everything and he’d say, ‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ And she’d go outside and she’d stomp around. I watched it and—”

Ike broke in. “You know, but I don’t even talk about it, man. I never said nothing about whether she good or whether she bad.’Cause let me tell you something. I could let go on her and I could do a movie about Ike and Tina, a true one. But I wouldn’t do that. Because like I said today, man, I feel like a powerful—you name it, if I want it, I can get it. And man, let me tell you, this is the Jesus Christ. I ain’t lookin’ for shit. I got no pressures, none, nowhere. I’m just free. I just release myself to God. I say, ‘Take me where you will.’ And that’s me.”

“That’s beautiful,” Dennis said.

“That’s great, man,” I said, and, without really knowing what I meant by it, I applauded.

I
was a world away from Ike’s suburban bungalow, standing outside a ramshackle old house in northern Idaho.

Seven years earlier I’d stayed here when I’d been making a program about the patriot movement—that fierce and paranoid sect of self-styled freedom fighters who believe that the end times are imminent and that the world is being taken over by a shadowy cabal of evildoers.

Back then it had belonged to Mike Cain and his family. Mike had been one of those dedicated to resisting the onslaught. He’d moved up to Idaho to be part of a patriot community called Almost Heaven, stopped paying his taxes, and awaited the armed showdown with the government that he regarded as inevitable.

But Almost Heaven was little more than a memory now. Mike and his family were gone, and the house was in the hands of Mike’s ex-neighbor John Moore, another Almost Heaven pioneer, though of a less radical stripe.

“We turned it into a gymnasium and a community home,” John said, with a trace of defensiveness, perhaps wary of being seen to capitalize on another man’s misfortune. “It’s called the Woodland Acres Community Center.”

The metal frame of a trampoline I’d once jumped on was rusting in the yard. The plywood porch looked dirty and weather-beaten. Inside the house it was dark. The blinds were down over the windows, and in one corner were a drum kit and some gym equipment. The kitchen was full of stacked boxes. In the old master bedroom mats were laid down for wrestling. It seemed less a community building than a storage area for John and his wife, Michelle, and a clubhouse for their kids. “We replaced that stove,” John said, as if to assert his rights over the place.

I looked in on the bedroom I’d stayed in nearly eight years earlier, when the community was still full of idealism. I felt oddly moved being back. Of all the shows I’d made about weird people, this one had been my favorite. I’d assumed that was partly because it was the first I did, when I was fresh and excited. But coming back, I realized there was more to it than that. There was something deeply romantic about these strange bearded renegades who carried guns and quoted the seventeenth-century English philosophers John Locke and James Harrington, and were willing to lay down their lives for their vision of correct living, even if it came to nothing. “It’s a little sad,” I said. “Thinking this was his dream.”

“It coulda worked out right for them if Mike hadn’t got involved with the wrong people,” John said. “I think he wanted to be the guy who made that stand. I think he wanted to be the guy that did it. I think he wanted to be famous . . . He was supposed to be the guy who died in his house trying to keep his home from the nasty government. That was the philosophy of these people. They really thought this would make a nationwide show of how bad the government was, to take this man’s home.”

I tried to think why I felt sad. The community had been founded by gun nuts and Bible thumpers. When they talked about the slide into immorality, they meant people like me and my friends: drug takers and fornicators, supporters of welfare programs and socialized medicine. George W. Bush, the born-again president, who to me seemed far-right, to them was another socialist, a puppet of the New World Order. But they also spoke for intransigence, idealism, a refusal to take the world on the world’s terms. There was clarity in their simple notions of discipline and justice. In a childish way, I’d like my world to be a story with goodies and baddies. Every time I used to read about a patriot group declaring themselves a sovereign country, as they sometimes did, my heart gladdened. Though undoubtedly weird, it’s also a kind of maverick statement to ask a notary to witness your own personal declaration of independence. A little part of me would have liked to be the sovereign state of Louis.

On a frosty morning eight years earlier, Colonel Bo Gritz unfurled a map and explained his concept for the community. A highly decorated Special Forces commander, supposedly the real-life model for Rambo, he’d run for president in 1992 and found many Christians were paranoid and fearful. They believed America was off-track
and needed to return to the core ideals of the Constitution and the Ten Commandments. This was at the end of Clinton’s first term, at the height of paranoia about gun control. “Billary” was hatching plans to take everyone’s firearms away so the government could impose martial law. UN peacekeepers would be in charge; it was all part of the New World Order promoted by the first George Bush and masterminded by a shadowy cabal of bankers and industrialists. Many thought we might be close to the “end of days.”

The same evidence tended to get circulated, often at gun shows and “preparedness expos”: supposed sightings of black helicopters conducting surveillance; signs of concentration camps being built; Soviet tanks on maneuvers; markings on the back of roadside signs that would direct the foreign-born troops during the takeover. One militiaman in Florida spotted government plans in a map on a Trix cereal box. Doubters were directed to consider Waco, the government’s heavy-handed siege of a religious community in Texas that ended in the deaths of about eighty congregants, or Ruby Ridge, another federal standoff that resulted in several fatalities.

Now, Bo’s idea was to go further, found a whole community dedicated to mutual support and safety, a place to sit out Armageddon. Using data from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he’d figured out that north-central Idaho was the safest place in America. He and a partner had bought up 200 acres there on the mountaintop. They’d subdivided it and called it Almost Heaven. It was as though, having failed in his bid for the presidency, he’d decided to be chief executive of his own little republic, a secessionist state within a state.

Bo had only recently moved up there full-time when I arrived. We spent the day chatting at his house, which was some way from being the frontier redoubt I’d expected, more like a spacious suburban home, sitting on a bluff with a beautiful view over a sheer snowy valley. He drove me down to one of the lots that was available. He was a thick, sturdy man, with snowy hair, and a deep growling voice—warm and friendly enough, though I suspected he was just happy to have an audience and anyone might do.

But even then, there were ominous signs for the community. I got the sense Bo didn’t like it up there. He complained about the cold. He seemed to have misgivings about being the leader, perhaps rattled by the hostile media coverage. After the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City by far-right anti-government terrorists, the climate was even less friendly toward people viewed as “militia types.” Where before he’d bragged about the military advantages of his mountaintop position, and written in his memoir,
Called to Serve,
“It is exciting to be Americans during this time of prophetic reality,” now he downplayed the idea of any confrontation or the imminence of the apocalypse. He sounded offhand when he said Mikhail Gorbachev might be the Antichrist. He was exasperated with some of the more volatile personalities he’d attracted up there, a handful of radical “noodles” who were looking forward to an armed standoff with the government.

Mike Cain was one of the “noodles.” Bo warned me he might try to shoot me if I went and saw him. I went anyway, finding him rolling out insulation with his friend Pat Johnson for a house they were building up on the hill. A tall, thin man, aged fifty or so, a heavy smoker, he’d been a building contractor in Las Vegas. He’d sold everything to be part of Almost Heaven, bringing his family with him. He’d bought an acre and built a house in 1996.

He spoke about wanting to “take America back under the law.” “I’m not opposed to taxes, I’m opposed to forced taxes,” Mike said, as though there were another kind. He objected to paying for services he didn’t use, like upkeep of the cemetery. Like some others up there, he’d signed a “covenant” agreeing to stand firm and protect his neighbors should the government ever try to invade and enslave them.

He told me about Almost Heaven, how they wouldn’t use money, preferring a barter system. “We’re aiming for total selfsufficiency, so we need all skills. We need everybody up here.” I asked whether they might need a TV host.

He invited me back to his ramshackle cement-block homestead, with its free-standing stove, gun rack, and log-cabin extension, and I met his Mexican-born wife, Chacha, and two of their daughters, Vanessa and Tamara. The media had depicted the militia movement as racist, so Mike’s being married to Chacha seemed a good sign. He told me he was an old hippie. I pointed out that hippies put flowers in the ends of guns.

“See that’s when you’re young and dumb. When you get to be my age you learn that it’s better to put bullets in guns.” Over a Mexican dinner cooked by Chacha, I asked him to explain as simply as he could what he was doing up there. “There has been a conspiracy for some years by a group of people that has become known as the New World Order,” he said. “The problem with the New World Order and the one-world government is it requires a benevolent dictator. You show me in history anytime that there’s been a benevolent dictator. Ever. And if you don’t have a benevolent dictator then you have a tyrant.”

I spent two days under his roof. I liked him more than I ever expected. He was friendly, modest, and, only occasionally, when he had a glint in his eye speaking about the government, scary. He told me he no longer paid taxes. He didn’t register his pickup, didn’t carry a driver’s license. “Those are all New World Order items,” he said. It was only a matter of time before the government came looking for him.

On my last afternoon at Almost Heaven, he took time off from his house-building for some target practice. I’d been planning to have a conversation discouraging him from provoking a confrontation. In the event, he brought it up himself, saying, when I asked about earmuffs, “You don’t wear earmuffs in a war.” It was as though he’d been waiting for his moment to declare himself. He got that strange look in his eye and said, “It’s all-out war . . . maybe before the year 2000.”

I told him how sad I’d be if I heard he’d got into a shootout. “Louis, I appreciate what you say, I really do,” he said, hoisting his gun onto his shoulder. “I guarantee, if you hear anything, it won’t be because we started it. My refusal to pay taxes is my right as an American. It’s the out-of-control government that wants to put me in jail for that or take my home or harm my children. It isn’t correct that because I refuse to pay my taxes I am sentenced to die. I should have my day in court . . .

“And it’s not just me saying it. There’s tens of thousands of Americans just like me all across this country. I’m not in any way unique. Perhaps even millions of Americans that are ready for the war. We’re ready. We pray daily that it doesn’t take place. We lift a banner of peace always. But if they would have a war, then let it begin here.”

As I left Mike for the last time, I said, “Don’t do anything silly.”

A year or so after my filming trip, in 1997, I received a letter from Mike. “It’s been a long year for us and very busy. There have been legal battles; some won, some lost, as the NWO continues in its efforts to control us . . . I was arrested and jailed on Nov 8 for the crime of asserting my rights as secured by the Constitution for the united [sic] States of America. My brothers acting under inspiration from our Lord were able to secure my quick release. The dragon is now showing his teeth, and I feel an armed assault against us is imminent. If it takes place, please remember us as a people who feared and loved our God, our country, and our families.”

An officer had pulled him over for driving without plates. Asked for his driver’s license, and not recognizing his authority, Mike said: “I neither admit nor deny but leave you to your proofs.” He was charged with resisting and obstructing justice.

Hearings followed. One of the beliefs of the patriots is that because the flags in U.S. courtrooms have decorative gold fringes on them, it means they are illegal admiralty or martial-law courts. Mike showed up to the hearing with a U.S. flag sewn onto his shirt, with no gold fringe. “This is the flag of my country,” he said. To all the judge’s questions, he replied: “Sir, I do not understand a foreign language.”

Around that time, I spoke to Mike on the phone. It was a little odd. there’s a part of me that half expects contributors to “become normal” after we’ve finished filming. Conversely, Mike seemed to expect me to “become weird.” “We’re not on film now, Louis,” he said. “You know what’s going on. You’re a journalist. You know what the New World Order’s about.” I assured him that I was aware of no satanic globalist conspiracy. I urged him to work through the courts. “I don’t care to be arrested, Louis. I’ve broken no law! . . . I cannot and will not compromise with the Devil. And that’s who we’re dealing with here . . . The compromise is that they should acknowledge the law. And by their own law they’re treasonous.”

In September 2001, I emailed Mike, wondering if the attacks on the World Trade Center might have caused him to realign his priorities. He wrote back: “‘Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger,
real or pretended, from abroad.’ James Madison, 1798. Louis, Bin Laden didn’t do it!” He viewed the attacks as a kind of Reichstag fire, to justify a suspension of civil liberties.

Meanwhile, Mike hadn’t been paying his property taxes. The county had sold his house, valued at more than $30,000, for $3,500 at auction. Mike, who didn’t recognize the county’s right to levy “forced” taxes in the first place, also regarded property ownership as absolute: The way he saw it, no government had the authority to take his home, tax bill or not. So he was still living there, but the new owner wished to take possession, and the county authorities were rumored to be poised for a SWAT-style attack.