The Call of the Weird (19 page)

On the way back to the car, we bumped into Coup’s uncle, a skinny, haunted-looking man in jeans and T-shirt. I told him I was a journalist interviewing Coup about his music. “My uncle
thought I was serving you,” Coup said later, meaning selling me drugs. “Did you see how shocked my uncle was? See how he was smilin’? ‘You rappin’?’”

As we were driving out of the neighborhood, an expensivelooking four-by-four appeared behind us. “Shit, we bein’ tailed,” Coup said. He seemed nervous. I wondered if he was being melodramatic, but I was a little nervous too. There was no question the vehicle was following us. Then it slowed down, stopped, and turned around. Coup’s confidence returned and he said, “Nobody gon’ question Ma-Bay’s son. When the boys realized who it was in the car, now they think I’m serving you.”

Finally, almost out of exasperation about everything he felt he couldn’t say, Coup broke out, “For bling bling, every bling that was on my neck and on my homie’s neck, somebody died for that. Blood was shed for that. And I’m not going to glorify it . . . What you hear in gangsta rap? Our lives is worse than that.” He spat out the “t” of “that.” “So it’s nothing to be glorified.”

It had been a frustrating encounter. I found in my own journalistic attitude and hunger for war stories an echo of the suburban appetite for gangsta rap itself. That ghetto kids should get caught up in the drama of being gangsta seemed eminently understandable when I myself found it so involving, even at third-hand.

Back at my motel, I checked my messages, and found that Mello had called.

I met him down at the studio again, where Ice Cold was recording more tracks for his debut album. We sat at the back while Ice did his vocals. I didn’t like to confront Mello about his disappearance. Something in his manner discouraged direct approaches—a quiet authority which I imagined was one of the things that qualified him as a pimp.

Unbidden, he mentioned he’d been down in Mobile, Alabama, pushing various records he and his “circle” were working on. I took this as a partial explanation for his unavailability. He expanded on some of the themes of our encounter earlier in the week, talking about the tribulations that had been visited on him. “I’m still blessed to be here in the flesh. Hell came to me on Earth the last four years. It’s been a test. It’s like what Job went through in the Bible.” He said he was still “twenty percent” into pimping but he was trying to go straight. “I been playing it under the radar,” he said. “Really my whole thing lately has been surviving. As soon as I get my first record deal, I’m out of everything.” He sounded one other note, to do with our documentary, seeming to say that he felt it hadn’t helped him. He implied that since his career hadn’t been advanced by the show we made, what advantage was there to being in a book? But his manner was so indirect, I didn’t fully understand what he meant until later. We made another arrangement to see his neighborhood.

Then he went quiet again.

By now, I was getting used to Mello’s disappearances, so I didn’t wait around. I made arrangements to go to Atlanta, reasoning I could use the time to meet some of the new stars of the crunk scene.

In particular I was curious to meet David Banner, the subject of US From Dirrt’s dis record. His real name is Lavell Crump, and rather embarrassingly, I’d passed up a chance to feature him in my original documentary back in 2000 in favor of Mello. When I found Banner at the music studio, he brought it up, in a spirit of good-natured badinage. “Five years ago, y’all wasn’t interested in me, I remember that,” he said. A big beefy man, maybe six-feetthree or -four, with an unruly beard, he was putting the finishing touches to his new album,
Certified.
The track he was working on, which he listened to at deafening volume, went, “This is for the
thug niggas / All the pimps and the drug dealers / Thieves and the motherfucking killers.”

Unlike Mello, Banner is someone with whom it is relatively easy to draw the line between persona and real person. On his albums he raps about pimping and stomping bitches, but he is in fact highly educated, a former schoolteacher and student-body president, who is, as he put it, “a semester and a thesis away” from his master’s degree. In between making tweaks on a track where the phrase “that’s why we get crunk in this bitch” was fractionally too low in the mix, Banner lamented the double standard that dictated that rappers should have experienced firsthand the episodes they describe in their raps. “You don’t go to Will Smith and see if he really can fly a flying saucer before he does
Independence Day.
And besides, the person who really did those things may not be the best storyteller.” And yet even Banner, with his studious bent, wasn’t immune to hip-hop machismo. He hinted that he might have a criminal background that he couldn’t reveal (“I would never tell about the things I really did”) and was a little sheepish about having been a teacher.

I asked whether he’d seen the photo of Young Jeezy with a snowman medallion. Banner hemmed and hawed, presumably not wishing to criticize a peer. Then, moments later, Banner said, “Speak of!” and who should walk in but Young Jeezy himself, wearing a long baggy sports jersey with his name on it—though no snowman medallion. He was accompanied by a tall, older man, his manager, Coach K. He’d come to talk to Banner about a track he was producing for his forthcoming debut album,
Let’s Get It:
Thug Motivation 101.

This was an unexpected opportunity: a chance to interview the gangsta of the hour. By now, I was a little exasperated with Banner. I had the sense he wasn’t too sure who he was supposed to be, that
he felt a responsibility to enact certain gangsta poses and express solidarity with the streets, but that they didn’t fit him that well. I was starting to remember why I hadn’t wanted to interview him in 2000. So I took Coach K’s number and a little later we rendezvoused in the lobby of another recording studio. Young Jeezy was indisposed, working in the studio, so I chatted to Coach instead. He seemed proud that Jeezy had done many of the things he described on record. He said the forthcoming album would include a “book” by Jeezy on the “rules of thugging.”

“They makin’ so much money,” Coach went on. “Jeezy does four or five shows a week. That’s $40,000 a week, just from shows.”

As we talked, a very dark-skinned young man with a brooding, suspicious air passed back and forth through the lobby. Coach introduced him as Kinky, the co-owner of Jeezy’s label, Corporate Thugz Entertainment. He was twenty-four, wearing a plain white T-shirt, baggy jean shorts, and a watch that cost $28,000. Finding out I was a journalist, he relaxed a little—I think he’d assumed I was a policeman. I asked how he’d met Jeezy and he said “boot camp.”

“The army?” I asked.

“Jail.”

“What were you in for?”

“Shit I had no business doing.”

Kinky welcomed the resurgence of gangsta rap. “Jeezy doesn’t talk about the glamour,” he said. “He talks about the struggle. People tired of hearing the fake.”

“Do you ever worry it could go too gangsta?”

“Be no such thing as too gangsta,” Kinky said. “Fuck a nigga! When it come to my money, fuck another nigga! If it ain’t got to do with me or my click, fuck a nigga!”

“That seems a little mean-spirited,” I observed.

“It’s not mean-spirited,” Coach said. “When you come from nothing, you’ve got to look out for your own. Beefs in the hip-hop
community are just the same as corporate beefs. Coke beefing with Pepsi.”

It seemed superfluous to point out that as yet no CEOs had been iced in executive drivebys.

The paradoxes of the gangsta rap world were enough to make my head hurt. How odd that of all the worlds I’d covered it was this one, where I was actually a fan of the music, that I felt the most distance and suspicion. I saw the love of gangsta poses as an understandable response to the feeling of disenfranchisement. But to them, I was an outsider. In no other story did I sense so much closing of ranks against me, so much reluctance to criticize any of their own. I compared it with the porn world, where directors, actors, and ex-actors had no problem sounding off on the excesses of the business. Here it was different. Even though I was sympathetic, skin color still got in the way. It was that simple. The trust wasn’t there, because I was white and they were black.

I drove back to Jackson, and two days later Mello called. He was down at a strip club called Babe’s, celebrating his thirty-first birthday. I felt flattered to be invited. I bought some champagne as a gift and headed down. But there was no party. I found him sitting on a stool in a quiet corner, working his way through a bottle of cognac. He was half-drunk, and any misgivings about talking about pimping had vanished. Now his manner was swaggering and unabashed. He gestured at a young blonde stripper named Kay, who he said wanted to join his stable of women. “She call me all the time, but she got to prove she worthy to know me. She fascinated with me. She want to be with me. But if she gon’ be with me, then she got to love money a little bit mo’. Heh heh.” Kay seemed drunk and oblivious to these claims.

“She about to be my number four,” he went on. “I remember at one time I had five living with me and Sunshine. Now I got
Sunshine plus two others. I want seven hundred, like Solomon. It ain’t about force with me, it about choice. If she choose me, cool. If she don’t choose me, that’s cool too.”

As the evening wore on, Mello became drunker and more grandiose. “They can’t lock me up right now because God won’t let’em,” he said. “Anybody that could talk was lined in chalk.” He took a sip of his Hennessy. “I’d love to have a place like this. I got some politicians, I’m going to have to either pay’em or kill’em. I’d rather pay’em, but I don’t have no problem with killing’em.” Blown back and forth by crosswinds of rhetoric, he alternately celebrated and lamented his lifestyle. Having just announced that he lived to make his stable of women greater, he said, “This shit is boring to me. This life is boring to me. I want your life, man.”

“I went to bed last night at eleven thirty and did a crossword puzzle,” I said.

“I would love to go to bed at eleven thirty and do a crossword puzzle, man. I would love that. I want to be square and do crossword puzzles, all that kind of shit. But I’m in love with the game.” I was as confused as ever by Mello, but in a moment of clarity my confusion crystallized into a single, simple question. “Do you hate the game or do you love it?” I asked.

“I hate the game, but I love to do it.”

It was either a profound comment on human psychology and the contradictory impulses we all feel, or it was nonsense, I wasn’t sure which. But I reflected that whether someone is being hypocritical or not is, in some instances, a question of style—by other names, it can be called irony or role-playing. Mello was capable of taking up a variety of opposed positions without shame or guilt because it was never clear how serious he was being. His personas came and went like songs on a jukebox, the theme depending on the occasion. But as long as I found him entertaining, I had to some degree surrendered my right to judge him.

I thought about the frustrations of seeing him again. In the end, he had no interest in revealing his real life. For him, our relationship was strictly show business. Given that he was a pimp, someone willing to subject the most intimate parts of human life to the marketplace, I wondered how I could have expected otherwise. The Mello he might have been willing to show me—the swaggering fancy man of the first visit—was cowed by his run-ins with the law. The Mello I wanted to meet—the behind-thescenes man, the husband and father, whose life was presumably domestic and unglamorous—would have undermined his mystique and maybe hurt his career.

And so I was conceding defeat. He might be a bully or a criminal or a model citizen or someone deprived of other choices in life—but I wasn’t going to find out.

The next day, I began my long journey back West. As I drove, I thought of Coup’s remark, “This is the last great movement for us. This is our political party.” Raised in an environment without money or opportunity, gangsta rappers have created a ruthless code of honor. Observing the code means showing no weakness; being prepared to fight for yourself and your circle; never saying too much. That the lifestyle is seductive is shown by the popularity of the records describing it: Whether it’s lived or listened to, at root the appeal is the same. Only the stakes differ. And so we keep on, hating it, loving it.

O
ne
of the frustrations of Mello’s being so elusive was that it had robbed me of an opportunity to test an idea I had, that the mysterious power a pimp holds over his women is essentially the same as the power of a cult leader or guru over his flock.

Several months earlier, in Los Angeles, around the time I’d been visiting porn sets and scrutinizing male genitals, I’d met up with the reverse side of this equation—an ex-member of a well-known cult—and seeing Mello again put me in mind of his story.

He called himself Rio, and he was one of the last survivors of Heaven’s Gate, a group that made the headlines in March 1997
when its thirty-nine members were found dead in the house they shared, having apparently committed ritual mass suicide.

A striking detail that emerged in the news coverage was that eight of the male “students” had had themselves castrated, and toward the end of our meeting I asked Rio about this aspect of the group.

It was, he said, simply a way of making it easier to “control our vehicles,” meaning their bodies. Class members were supposed to be celibate and pure of mind. Some took pills to keep their hormones in check but that had side effects, so a couple of them researched the procedure, drove down to Mexico, and got snipped. “The ones that did get neutered, were so . . . ”—Rio began laugh-ing—“. . . happy after that. They were almost giddy as children!” The cult leader, Do, went next. He was in his mid-sixties at that time, a former music teacher whose real name was Marshall Herff Applewhite. Do’s procedure was botched and it took him a long time to heal. But heal he did, and after that several others followed suit.

I asked Rio if he’d thought about getting castrated.

“Oh,” he said, “I had control of my vehicle, I didn’t have to.”

We’d met at an organic coffee shop called the Urth Caffe in Beverly Hills, near where Rio lives. He was smooth and poised, wearing an expensive watch and shoes, with a shaved head and neatly trimmed beard. He said he’d just turned fifty but he looked much younger. “I look like you!” he said. Then, crediting the Heaven’s Gate beliefs he still holds, he added, “It’s a higher mind, man!” He cut a rather stylish, urbane figure, but I also had the sense of his having made an effort for me. There was touch of calculation behind it, and I wondered how well life was going for him, as one of the last of the Heaven’s Gate cult survivors.

“It was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me,” he said of his time in the group—the “monastery,” as he called it. He
joined in 1994, having attended one of their lectures in Marina Del Rey. At first they wouldn’t have him. This was one of the misconceptions about “predatory cults”—they could actually be quite hard to join. Rio attended another meeting. They showed him a video of Do. “He seemed like the messenger to me. And that’s what I told them. They got a kick out of that.” The elders phoned Do that night. Then they told Rio the good news. Bring clothes, some camping equipment. That’s all you need. Rio was divorced; he had an eleven-year-old son who lived with his mother. He drove out to Phoenix two weeks later and joined the monastery.

When he arrived, they trimmed his hair, shaved off his beard, and disinfected his whole body. He spent a couple of weeks watching videos of Do’s teachings, getting up to speed. To Rio, Do was the reincarnation of Jesus. “You don’t realize what this was . . . this was undoubtedly a visit from another place. No doubt. Everybody knew.” His voice was breaking with emotion. “It’s, uh, it’s miraculous. Just for me to think that, somehow I was involved with the one that came again . . .” Now he was crying lightly. “That, and the love everybody had. They were like all of my best friends.”

He left a month or so before the “exit”—because of an “irresistible feeling.” It wasn’t that he had any fear of leaving the planet, he said. He was happy about the exit, as was everybody. He just had an urge to do something else. “So I asked Do if I could talk to him and I told him, I’m having feelings like there’s something else for me to do. And it was a very emotional conversation,’cause I loved Do. So he said, ‘Well, let’s sleep on it.’” Do went and spoke to “Ti,” his dead partner, once known as Bonnie Lu Nettles, who’d either died of cancer in 1985 or ascended onto a spaceship or both. “About an hour later, he asked to meet with me again, and he had talked to Ti. He said, ‘According to Ti, you
leaving seems to be part of the plan,’ . . . So he announced it to everybody in the room . . . ”

It struck me that the “something else” Rio felt the urge to do was perhaps simply to stay alive. Some of the other Heaven’s Gate members had been in more than twenty years. Rio had been in three, so he still had a sense of life on the outside. Before meeting him, I’d wondered if he might be more distanced from the group now—that he might have “woken up” and seen Do as a false prophet. But his continuing attachment made sense too. To go through all that, then realize that it was meaningless, would be hard to bear. After the “exit,” Rio went on to become the most media-friendly of the Heaven’s Gate cult survivors, selling film rights to his story to ABC, appearing on the cover of
Newsweek,
being interviewed by Diane Sawyer.

The year after the suicides, another ex-member killed himself in the prescribed style. And the year after that, another. Do’s “brainwashing,” if that’s what it was, reached beyond the grave. Rio said he had no plans to exit his vehicle. Indeed, he was full of projects. A film script, a book proposal about his experiences in Heaven’s Gate. “Right now I’m working on a consumer product for animals,” he said. “PetSmart really wants it bad . . . It’s for cats, dogs, and reptiles. I don’t want to tell you the name because I don’t want it to get out. I’ll just tell you: It’s something that goes on the window.”

They were found lying on bunk beds, each of them wearing Nike sneakers, with a little arm patch saying “Heaven’s Gate Away Team,” under diamond-shaped purple shrouds, having poisoned themselves with a mixture of apple sauce, Phenobarbital, and vodka. For several days, the news was filled with accounts of the group, interviews with ex-members. It was the worst mass suicide
on U.S. soil (the worst in U.S. history was the 900-plus suicides of Jim Jones’s church in Jonestown, Guyana).

In the office where my production team had been researching a documentary on UFO believers, there was a mild sense of surprise at the coincidence that our subject matter, which had felt, truth be told, a little passé when we started looking into it, was now suddenly breaking news again. Then on day three or day four of the media frenzy, we found a FedEx package on the desk of one of the producers, where it had been lying unnoticed. It contained videotapes from the cult, their “exit videos,” press releases, a “Heaven’s Gate Away Team” arm patch, and maps and directions for finding their house. It seemed one of the cult’s dying wishes had been that we should be the ones to find their cast-off vehicles and break the story to the world.

There was a letter that said: “Hopefully, you will be able to get a team to the physical location detailed in the accompanying location document ASAP . . . We are also hoping that this letter could act as a pass onto our premises or as an entrée to the site. We are hereby giving you our permission to enter—if in fact our desires have any bearing on this matter. Perhaps you can present this note to the security guard as authorization. It is our desire that you have first priority to the story.”

It was news to me that we’d even been in touch with the group, but so it was. My colleague Simon had stumbled upon their website, and exchanged emails. Initially they were keen to be involved in our documentary. Then they changed their minds—they said they needed to focus on other matters. In hindsight, this had an ominous tone.

The writer had even been thoughtful enough to highlight the best route to the house, and included details about being courteous to the landlord (“His wife is named Fifi and she has also been
extremely nice to us; she has some idea that we are ‘angels.’”) and how to break into the building—“You’ll likely need to hop the fence and enter the house to open the gate. The entry door between the two garage doors on the SW side of the house will be left unlocked.”

I felt a little peeved at missing such a big scoop. At the same time, I was aware there wasn’t much I could have done with the information. After all, the documentary was supposed to be a lighthearted look at UFO belief. How we would have used footage of me stumbling onto the scene of a mass suicide was far from clear.

Still, it was too intriguing a lead to pass up, so we arranged to interview one of the handful of survivors, a man named Wayne Parker, or “Oscody,” who lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Oscody was far from ideal interview material; he spoke slowly and deliberately, and he wasn’t very enthusiastic about the project, but he was the best we had.

As the interview drew near, Oscody said he was no longer sure he wanted to appear on camera at all. Thinking I might be able to finesse the situation, I called him up. I affected a jaunty manner and attempted to have a jovial conversation. He mentioned there was a swimming pool at his apartment building. I suggested we might go swimming together, an idea he didn’t really take to. “Well, there’s certain things about, um, exposing the vehicle that just don’t feel comfortable to me,” he explained.

“You don’t mind if I expose my vehicle?” I asked.

“Well, um, you know, I’d like to be hospitable. The pool hasn’t been cleaned. I’ll tell you that much. It has some palm fronds at the bottom. It’s not very enticing.”

“Well, my vehicle hasn’t been cleaned. And it isn’t very enticing either.”

This strange attempt at repartee on my part brought no response.

Oscody’s apartment was in a building fairly typical of those you find in the West—two storeys, stuccoed, around a small kidney-shaped swimming pool. Except for a computer in the corner with a flying toaster screen saver, it was totally bare. He looked a lot like the cult members I’d seen on the Heaven’s Gate farewell videotape. Balding, with his hair cut short. Beard. Round face. His manner was so calm and even, he seemed like someone under heavy sedation.

Since he was no longer camera-friendly, we’d left the crew to wait in the van, while my director Debbie, my producer Simon, and I tried to coax Oscody into (as I put it) “showing his vehicle.” We explained that we were interested in his story, that we were a documentary team rather than news and so could afford to be a little more in-depth. We reminded him that we were the preferred media. Oscody absorbed all this without saying a word. Then we pulled out our trump card: the letter that came with the package; the “preferred media” validation.

As Oscody read it, his eyes watered.

“Excuse me,” he said. “The … vehicle sometimes responds.”

Two other former cult members, Mark and Sarah, arrived soon afterward. Mark was friendly and animated. Sarah was low-key and seemed a little wary.

It soon became clear that all three were against “showing their vehicles” on camera, so we spent what was left of the evening driving round Phoenix forlornly looking for a backdrop against which we could silhouette them—a view overlooking the city; a starry desert landscape. There were eight of us in the van, including crew. We made awkward chit-chat—me scrupulously using
all their terminology about “graduating” and “class members” and “the next level” and worrying all the time that Debbie or Simon or one of the crew was going to make an off-color remark.

At one point Mark said, “This whole idea about it being a cult is so off-base. I mean, these were brilliant people. The intelligence . . . We’re talking about doctors, lawyers. One of them was the person who did all the programming for ATM machines.”

We ended up stumbling around a rutted track in the pitch dark in a park somewhere on the outskirts of Phoenix. Mark had thought we’d get a nice view of the city, but we hadn’t banked on the noise of about thirty teenagers drinking and playing eighties hits. “Mickey” by Toni Basil had just come on when we called it a night.

My abiding memory of the whole encounter is how bare Oscody’s apartment was, with nothing in it but that computer and its flying toaster screen saver.

Seven years later, in the Las Vegas university library, I browsed articles on the history of Heaven’s Gate. Marshall Herff Applewhite, or “Herff,” as people called him, had been a music teacher in Texas. Married with two children, he struggled with homosexual impulses. He divorced. In 1970, he lost his job at St. Thomas’s University amid a scandal over an affair with a student. He became depressed, heard voices.

In one version of the story, Herff met Bonnie Lu Nettles in a psychiatric hospital in Houston, where he was attempting to “cure” himself of homosexuality. For a while, they ran a New Age center together. They hit the road in 1973, convinced that they were the two witnesses spoken of in the book of Revelation.

Starting in 1975, they began recruiting. For years, they toured the country, giving presentations, answering questions, winning converts. The dropout rate was high; at no time did they number
more than a hundred. They taught that Earth was a “garden” for growing souls, which would be picked up by a spaceship when they were ready. The worst mistake one could make was to identify one’s self with one’s body, or “vehicle.” All sensuality was shunned. They abstained from sex or even lustful thoughts, wore baggy clothing, cut their hair short.

The kitchen was called the “nutrilab.” Cooking was “fuel preparation.” They could watch certain TV shows:
Star Trek
and
The X Files
were okay; news shows about natural disasters were encouraged, because they fed into the group’s apocalyptic thinking.
Little House on the Prairie
was not, because it was about a family and therefore it “vibrated on the human level.” Students had to close their eyes during scenes that were arousing.