A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (13 page)

She had met Tony just as the tract said. He joined her Bible class: one of about twenty-five. There was a romance. They were married. Susan wanted to preach to the hippies. One night a dealer named Ed, who lived in “an insidious crash pad right in the heart of Hollywood,” called from jail wondering if the Alamos could bail him out. God told Susan to do it.

Ed became a Christian. He and some friends asked the Alamos to “come over to the dope den and talk to the kids down there.” Susan said, “We told them that they had souls that were created by God and that they were destroying their minds, their souls, and their bodies. Everything they were doing was a sin, it was destruction. We said, ‘You know the kinds of lives you are leading. Where can the next stop be: a marble slab, the prison yard, a mental institution? How far can you go like this?’

“We asked to see the hands of those that believed what we said, and all of them raised their hands and … so I looked at Tony and said, ‘My God, when do we go from here? We just inherited a dope den full of hippies.’ ”

The first church was in the Dope Den. The “kids” flushed all the dope down the toilet and vacuumed the rugs. Soon it was too crowded. Tony and Susan begged the churches to take the born-again hippies, but it was no dice. Prejudice, Susan feels, was behind the refusal: too many were long-haired or black. They moved to a bigger building on Crescent Heights Boulevard. “Tony and I were going to the back doors of the bakeries and markets begging for food.”

As Biff Alexander remembers it, the Alamos called the markets, and the brothers drove down to pick up spoiled food. “Is that feeding the hungry or is it feeding garbage?” he asked angrily. But as Susan Alamo was to say in a different context, she never met anyone who left a church without having a destructive attitude toward it. As a general
rule, that seems to be true, and perhaps Biff Alexander’s testimony should be tempered with that knowledge.

When Crescent Heights got too crowded in late 1969, the Alamos scraped $2,000 together and put a down payment on the old Wilson Cafe in Saugus, situated on seven-and-a-half acres of land. They acquired property number two, for the women’s and children’s dorms, soon thereafter. They now own both. The house, on five prime acres, was built during most of 1972. Men from the Foundation had built a needed set of bleachers for the high school, and the local jaycees had paid them back by pouring the cement for the foundation of a house in which none of them would live. Much of the lumber was donated, Susan says.

Biff Alexander says that Tony Alamo personally told him that the president of a Santa Clarita bank estimated the worth of the house at $100,000. Susan says they borrowed on it to make a down payment on some other property, and that, because they didn’t fully own it, they could only get $20,000.

There is, in addition, a 160-acre ranch under lease with option to buy. It houses a small cattle ranch and, until recently, about two thousand laying chickens.

In a previous call to the local chamber of commerce, I learned that prices for nearby plots of land ranged from about $3,000 an acre to almost $9,000. I wondered where the finances came from.

Susan mentioned donations: an anonymous Newhall man had given $40,000. Some fundamentalist churches gave them money, as their missionary work. Virtually no money came from the people in the church, she implied, though Biff Alexander, a former finance overseer, says everyone was “pressured” to give to the Foundation. Tony, he said, suggested Biff turn a small trust fund—about $500—over to the Lord, in the keeping of Tony Alamo.

“Tim,” Susan said, “you sit here until that bus comes in, and every hippie that comes in here holding money that gets off, I will eat every ounce of money he donates, if you will eat his shoes.”

It sounded like a bad deal to me, and I told her so. “Anyway,
what I’m trying to get at is the total worth of the Foundation, which I understand is a nonprofit California corporation.”

“What is the net worth of the Catholic Church?” Tony shot back. “Why don’t you come out and pick grapes with us. I want you dragging cotton bags!”

I directed my questions to Susan.

“Do most of your finances come from the Fundamentalist churches?”

“A lot of them, yes.”

“The rest from donations?”

“From citizens … citizens’ groups.” She mentioned a Christian businessman’s group in Orange County. In addition, there were proceeds from speaking engagements, and money from the sale of the Tony and Susan Alamo Big Band Gospel Sound Records.

“What are the names of some of the churches that pay—”

“I’m not going to tell you that, Tim, ’cause that’s putting my business on the street.…”

“Well, that leaves a substantial mystery as to where—”

“If it’s a mystery, then it’s a mystery.”

The conversation was getting heated and was leading nowhere. I changed the subject, asking Tony if he distrusted the press because he manipulated it so well at one time.

“Oh, those days,” he said, describing a weary parabola with his right hand. “No, I was just shocked to find out that anybody would ever …”

Susan finished the sentence for him. “That they can’t tell the truth!”

“That they can’t tell the truth and not only that but …”

“They’re looking for sensationalism, and if it isn’t there, they’re going to create it.”

“The biggest story,” Tony said, “is the
truth
. If they’d go out and tell the truth, that’d be the most sensational story that ever happened.”

Later I made a call to the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Office in which I learned that the population of the Saugus-Newhall fringelands is sixty thousand and was
projected to triple by 1990. Land prices could be expected to do the same. Biff Alexander had told me that the Alamos said that if they were to die, everyone would share in the church, but that they had never signed any papers to that effect. I reflected that if Susan Alamo were to pass on first … that would leave Tony Alamo—the man who used to take “complete unknowns” to stardom, who likes Cadillacs and “yes men,” who met Jesus the Nazarene while borrowing money, who joined Susan’s small Bible class when things were simpler, who allegedly skipped out on a $14,000 bill after being Saved—the pastor of a very wealthy church.

H
oly Saturday evening at the Alamo Foundation: a tomato stuffed with beans for dinner, a brief chant in the ratbox, followed by some Bible study and a course in political science.

The communists, I learned, were harbingers of the Apocalypse: the very chaos the Bible prophesied for the last days. Frank had looked into politics “pretty deep below the surface.” While the rest of us have been treading water, trying to assimilate a mass of conflicting facts and opinions, Frank told me that he had seen clear to the slimy bottom. A nice lady from the John Birch Society—very interested in the Bible—occasionally stops in on Monday afternoons to give a slide show and a talk.

The conspiracy, as Frank related it to me, was this: A group of international bankers got Nixon—a sympathetic dupe—elected so that he would continue the war and decimate America’s great storehouse of young soldiers. Those that weren’t killed would be rendered useless by heroin. With the nation teetering weakly on its depleted base, the commies could march right in and take over.

In the 1972 election, all the Christians at the Foundation had registered and voted for John Schmitz, who took the injured George Wallace’s spot on the American Independent slate. “He was the one who came closest to what the Bible says,” Frank informed me. I got the impression that,
in the end, Frank didn’t think all this made too much difference anyway, what with the end of the world just around the corner. He seemed resigned to imminent communist takeover; and though he didn’t say it, I think he felt the Fall of America and the End of the World would likely happen simultaneously.

I wondered how Frank had gotten to the bottom of things—like the real reason for the Vietnam War—when, as I had noticed, there was only the Bible to read. No Congressional reports, no Washington newsletters, no newspapers, no magazines. Aside from the speaker in the bathroom, the only electronic device in the place was a grandpa’s antique tube-type record console that played scratchy Gospel records at 78 revolutions per minute.

Frank told me that he read certain carefully selected books. “Tony screens our reading,” he said offhandedly.

“Tony censors our reading?” I exploded.

“He just makes sure that what we read is the same as what’s in the Bible,” Frank replied reasonably.

“He censors our reading?” I repeated, incredulous.

“We wouldn’t want to have a lot of pornography up here, you know.”

I said I guessed that we wouldn’t and asked Frank which books Tony found in accord with the Bible. Two titles that came up were
None Dare Call It Treason
, all about communist spies in the very highest echelons of our government, and
None Dare Call It Conspiracy
, concerning itself with overwhelming evidence of a massive secret plot on the part of international financiers and politicos to overthrow the government of the United States of America. The book makes the point that there have been conspiracies throughout history that have overturned governments; but that recently there has been a very clever and subtle campaign to invalidate the
word
itself. Today, even when one presents irrefutable evidence to the typical American dupe, he is likely to be treated as an out-and-out raving paranoid crazy.

After another bout with the Bible, Frank told me that as overseer, he had to prepare for the coming Easter sunrise service. I wasn’t to worry though, he’d find me another
older Christian straight away. He just didn’t want me wandering around while he looked. “Stand right there,” he commanded.

Since the beginning, I had been beset with short Christians. I am not an outsized man: I stand six foot one at the most. But I estimated neither my witness nor teacher had been over five foot six, a fact of no special significance in itself except that it made our teacher-pupil relationships somewhat awkward. This last of my Christians was by far the smallest. His name, fittingly enough, was Tiny.

Frank disappeared to his duties as I mentally sized up Tiny. Intensely sparrowlike, he looked like the kind of teenager who handed out towels to the high school basketball team and was forever being described as having “a lotta school spirit.” He had a bright, chirrupy voice which had the same effect on my teeth as the sound of crushed Styrofoam.

Tiny pegged me straight off as a chronic doper with a bad wet dream problem. “I used to sit around and do dope, just like you,” he said. “Boy, I never thought I’d be serving the Lord.

“You can give up dope real easy. If your friends don’t like it, they’re not real friends. If they tell you you’re crazy, that’s the devil talking through them. The devil is such a liar. You know what he does? He gives you filthy dreams at night and then in the morning he comes and sits on your shoulder and tells you you’re evil. See what I mean, see what a liar he is? He’s such a liar he—”

“Hey, Tiny,” I interrupted, “I think I’ll invite a friend to the service. Maybe see if I can get him born again.”

Tiny started to object, but I was up and out of the booth, on my way to the phone. He fluttered up beside me, jabbering away about how the devil works through the unsaved.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, dialing.

Cardoso, my outside contact, sounded as if he were in an extraordinarily good mood. “Hey, Bill, I’ve been born again in the blood and there’s going to be an Easter service here tomorrow at five o’clock in the morning. I want you to tell my friend Tim Page to come up.”

“Jesus, it’s twelve-thirty. He’s at some drive-in movie with his wife. He won’t be home till late. And he’s sure not going to want to get up at three to get out there for any of that shit.”

“Witness to him,” Tiny whispered.

“Look, Bill, tell him it’s an assignment to meet Jesus. An assignment. I’d
enjoy
it if he could be here. I’d be
disappointed
in him if he missed it: Tell him to consider it an assignment.”

“Remember,” Tiny piped in, “the devil might be working through your friend.”

“I’ll tell him you sound pretty frantic.”

“Praise the Lord.”

“I’ll tell him to get his ass up there.”

“I’d enjoy that.”

“Tell him how it felt when God came into your heart when you were Saved,” Tiny suggested.

“Who’s that?”

“Just my older Christian, Bill. He wants me to tell you that God came into my heart the other day. Hey, didn’t Tim just get his Brownie fixed? I’d enjoy it if he brought that one camera up.” It had occurred to me that it might look suspicious if Page arrived decked out like a professional photographer.

“I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you, Jesus.”

Later Tiny told me during Bible study that I’d make a better witness when I got more experience. It was about two-thirty, I was exhausted, and my temper was getting short.

“You know,” I said, “I got about two hours sleep last night. I think I’ll go over there and rest awhile.”

Tiny smiled and shook his head. A definite no. “We don’t punch a clock around here. We serve the Lord day and night. Sometimes it isn’t easy, but it’s pretty darn rewarding.”

It was about that time when I began thinking of him as
the dwarf
.

“Look, I gotta get some rest.” I curled up under a fluorescent
light in the back of the church area. Shortly thereafter Tiny was tugging at my sleeve, pulling me reluctantly out of dreams of food: Visions of gluttony they were, raw meat orgies. “Thank you, Jesus,” I muttered and was incoherent for fully three minutes. The place was suddenly empty but for Tiny, myself, and a Christian guard at the door. Everyone else had piled into the buses, on their way to the Alamo house and a nearby field where the services would be held.

“It’s four o’clock,” Tiny announced brightly.

“Why,” I asked with what I thought was icy self-control, “did you wake me up? My friend isn’t supposed to be here for another hour.”

“I thought we should talk.” The dwarf’s intention soon became evident. “Your friend hasn’t been saved, has he?”