Bonnie laughs—a good sign. Maslow doesn’t—a bad one.
“Thirty miles from the rave, the sky clouded over. I started hearing thunder. I figured we were looking at some Woodstock Nation mud fest. I remember telling Raymond how embarrassing it would be to spend years preparing to die with the ARM liberation forces and then get fried by lightning with a crowd of dirt children in a meadow.”
“Did you and your friends in ARM often go to these…raves?” What’s it to Maslow? What ARM members do on their down time is none of his business.
“Never,” says Nolan. “Not usually.” This story has two levels. One is the truth, which makes it easy to tell. The second level is not a lie so much as a highlight, drag, and delete. You don’t have to tell everyone everything. It’s a lesson that comes with age. By now Nolan has learned a few things, and also anger management gave him some useful tips to remember: No need to always have the last word, to unload the last shot in the chamber. No reason to report that Raymond made fun of him for suggesting they bail because of the weather. Was chickenshit Nolan scared of getting rained on? What was Raymond supposed to do with those seventy hits of Ex? Shove them up his ass?
“By the time we arrived, a million kids were squirming around under these drive-in movie screens, boom boom, pulsing colored lights. Like some worm-farm lava-lamp cult. They had this huge scaffolding with disc jockeys sitting up top and techno music pounding—”
Maslow says, “It sounds like hell.”
Again the sound of Raymond’s voice thrums in Nolan’s ears. The Jew does not believe in heaven or hell. That’s why he can steal from his neighbors, provided he repents on that one day a year that the Jew sets aside to atone.
“So what happened then?” Hold on. Is Maslow hurrying him? Nolan will take as long as he needs to.
“Raymond splits. Disappears. And I’m thinking…Okay, wait. Let’s back up a minute. You’ve got to understand. I was a different person then. I thought stuff I would never think now.” Is that true? Sure it is. Maybe Nolan picked and chose from the crap he was hearing, but he definitely chose some of it. The part he agreed with already.
“We do understand,” says Bonnie. “You’re telling us how you changed.”
Is that what Nolan’s telling them? Peace through change. Where did he just see that? Right. The sign in the lobby. So that’s what they’re selling. Beautiful. Nolan can do peace through change.
“So I’m thinking it’s just like Raymond to leave me alone in this mob of human hairballs. And then this girl starts dancing with me. And she hands me two light sticks.”
Time for another drag and delete. The girl was young and pretty. Nolan would have stuck the light sticks in his eyes if he’d thought it would get him laid. “So okay, I wave them around. The girl’s smiling, everything’s cool, a second later she’s gone. And I’m left with these lights. I’m trying to get to the edge of the crowd, but the mob keeps pushing me back. And it’s confusing, because I’d been hanging out with guys who thought it was your patriotic duty to stomp people like that. Not that the guys I knew in ARM got into those situations much. We always kept it together.”
“Meaning what?” says Maslow.
“We tried to stay in control,” says Nolan. “Our particular unit was not into random violence.” Enough. If they want the details, he can fill them in later. Though maybe what they want to know most is how many asses he kicked. Well, the truth is, not any. Which isn’t to say that the guys from ARM weren’t often right on the edge of wasting the next Paki convenience-store clerk who gave them attitude. Problem was, on the nights they were feeling that way, the clerk on duty was always some poor pimply white chick. Maslow and Bonnie don’t have to know that yet. For now, let them dream what they want. Let them think Nolan and his pals kicked a minimum one ass per day.
“So I stopped moving and let my hands drop, and the light sticks are now, like, you know, around, like, my crotch area, and I’m looking down at them, and suddenly I get this feeling like I’m seeing my spirit or soul or something, burning inside me, shining…”
By now Maslow’s got to be wondering what drugs Nolan was taking, and Bonnie, with her two teenage sons, thinks she knows what drug he was on. Which in fact he was on, but that’s not why it happened. He’d taken Ex before. He did a hit the night he got the tattoos. So what does that tell you? He’s taken so many drugs by this point, his brain’s a wedge of Swiss cheese. But he’d never felt that way before. This was new. Deeper. Higher.
“I heard this roaring in my head. This pounding and thrumming. Like wings. Like that blood pressure thing in your ears, you know? You get it, and then it goes. I thought it might be some buzz in the amps. And then I looked up at the scaffolding, and there was this funny…halo spinning around the disc jockeys. It reminded me of this Christmas card my mom used to have, a painting of the Holy Spirit dove hovering in this circle of pale gold light. And then…this is the hardest part to explain, but I got this feeling of love for everyone around me. Everyone. Black and white, Jewish, Christian, Communist, freaks, retarded, mutant, whatever.”
Is this working? Let’s ratchet things up a notch. “It was like I got hit by lightning. I felt like Saint Paul getting knocked off his donkey on the road to Damascus.”
“Horse,” says Maslow. “Saul of Tarsus got thrown off his horse on the way to Damascus.”
The Jew thinks he knows more than you do. That’s what Raymond would say. But Nolan is the one thinking it now. It’s time to let go of all that if he wants this plan to succeed. Let go of the long-nosed Jew and the Negro with the big dick. Bye-bye defending the endangered white race, hello peace through change.
Maslow says, “May I ask you something? Did you attend church as a child?”
“Irish Catholic.” It’s mostly true. Nolan’s grandparents were Catholic. This is not the time to explain that after his dad died, Mom dragged him around from one hippie religious clambake to another. She’s been a chanting Buddhist ever since she saw Tina Turner on Living Legends. “One of my aunts was a Baptist who used to take me to revivals. I liked the hymns. There was this one hymn, ‘Blessed Assurance.’ And those two words, blessed assurance, kept running through my mind while I was having that…experience at the rave.”
The part about the hymn is pure rich smoke Nolan’s blowing up their asses. But sure enough, he can feel Bonnie’s eyes on him. It’s been Nolan’s experience that women love imagining you as a kid with your hair slicked back, all sweaty and hot in your scratchy church suit. They want to go to bed with that kid. That’s how weird women are.
The first time Nolan met Margaret, in a bar in Hudson, a gospel tune came on the jukebox. Nolan knew the words, he sang along. Trials, troubles, and tribulations… Nothing corny, like singing in Margaret’s ear, but softly, to himself, like a man remembering something sweet from childhood. The song ended. He’d looked at Margaret, and he knew it had worked. Our man was in.
Maslow asks, “And did you still feel that way the next morning?”
“What way?” says Nolan. “Excuse me, I…”
“Loving the world,” says Maslow.
Does the old guy believe him at all? It’s impossible to tell.
“Even more,” Nolan says. “I woke up under a tree. Somehow Raymond found me. He drove me home to his place. When I got there, I was still flashing on hate, how I used to hate everything, how hate poisoned the world, how every bad thing that’s happened could be traced directly to hate.”
Most of that came from Maslow’s book. But the basic idea is true: Nolan couldn’t stand one more minute of ARM, or Raymond and his friends. Just turning in to Raymond’s driveway nearly made him puke. Maybe it was the lawn gnomes in Raymond’s yard, or maybe the fact that they looked so much like Raymond and Lucy and their kids. In the end, it was a pit-of-the-stomach thing. An allergy to the guys in ARM, to the sound of their voices. None of them gave a shit about the planet. They made fun of save-the-whales types. You’d think the Ex-high residue would have left Nolan loving
Raymond and his friends along with every other human creature. Loving the white race. But somehow it didn’t work that way. It was time to get out of Dodge.
“So what did you do then?” Bonnie says.
“One morning, I woke up before everyone else, and I went to Raymond’s desk. I went online. I typed in ‘Neo-Nazi.’ And then ‘Help.’”
“Is that how you got to us?” says Bonnie.
“No,” Nolan says. “First I got some newspaper site, with this article: ‘Neo-Nazi Helps Foundation.’ About this white separatist brother who saw the light and reformed—” Does this qualify as a lie? It’s too small to matter. Nolan did look up the story on the Internet, but by then he’d already seen a program about it on The Chandler Show.
On TV, the former skinhead got the total fashion makeover. He was all duded up in a fancy suit, and they’d waited till his hair grew back enough to look like some hip, faggy buzz cut.
Harrison Chandler was nearly sobbing when the guy explained how he’d turned from the dark toward the light, from the path of hate to the path of love. Nolan would rather not think about that. Because then he’ll have to think about how much Raymond and his buddies liked to watch Chandler and yell at the TV, because Chandler is an extremely visible overpaid Negro employed by the Jewish media. That episode really ticked them off. They were throwing beer cans at the set until Lucy shut the party down.
Maslow wants to know what they did in ARM? They watched TV and yelled.
“Oh, that guy who went to work for the Wiesenthal Foundation,” says Bonnie. “Remember, Meyer?”
The old man doesn’t want to remember. There’s something about this he doesn’t like. Better wrap up this part and move on.
“Anyway,” says Nolan, “I read about this skin who had a huge…change of heart because he heard his four-year-old daughter calling someone a nigger.” Bonnie and Meyer flinch. “Excuse me. Which, frankly, would not have been enough to make me turn—but then, I don’t have kids.” He smiles at Bonnie. She has kids. “The guy signed on to help with this tolerance group in L.A. And I thought if I could find a place like that, I could do something similar.”
Bonnie says, “Meyer, I don’t believe this. You were just saying before—”
Maslow gives her a look. He means her to shut up.
“So you know who we are? From the Internet.”
Didn’t Nolan just say that? “I read your books,” he repeats. “The Kindness of Strangers. And the new one. One Heart at a Time.”
“That’s still in hardback,” says Maslow.
“I ordered it from Amazon.” Nolan intends to, when he finds a way. That is, as soon as he figures out how to get his own credit card and an account.
“We no longer patronize Amazon,” says Maslow. “Not until they agree to stop carrying The Turner Diaries.”
Normally, Nolan’s proud of how much he reads, but for once he suppresses the desire to say, “I read that!” Of course he read The Turner Diaries. It was the only book, besides the Bible, that Raymond had in the house, which made sense, since Pierce’s novel is practically like the Bible to the ARM guys, who can quote it, chapter and verse. Despite all the violence and the stuff about the major race war finally breaking out and the black people—or was it the white collaborators or race-mixers?—strung from lampposts, Nolan thought it was boring. Will it earn him points to say that? Not likely. He thinks not.
“Anyhow,” says Nolan, “that’s how I wound up here. I thought I could help out. I know how ARM functions, and what those guys want, why the whole Aryan thing works for them. I was one of those guys, so I know what makes them so vulnerable, so open to having their heads turned around.”
Maslow says, “This is very interesting. Why don’t you phone us in a few days? Mrs. Kalen and I and our staff will try to figure out how we can use your experience—”
Is that what they tell the ladies who volunteer to lick envelopes and make calls for the charity drive? All this hard work, and Nolan has failed to get his point across.
“I don’t know how to say this, but I can’t go back. Leaving ARM is not like quitting the Boy Scouts. I can’t wait for you to call and have some guy at the tire place where I work, where a bunch of ARM guys work, say, Hey, Nolan, phone call. For you. World Brotherhood Watch. Those guys don’t just let you go. They’re not real fond of…defectors. This one guy who left Wyoming ARM. They found out where he was and put him in the hot seat and cut off three of his toes. They would track me down, is what I’m saying. As it is, I’m risking my life. If they knew I was here…”
Only when Nolan hears himself say this does he realize that it’s true. If Raymond ever found out where he was, Nolan would be dead meat. Will Raymond bother to hunt him down? Probably. Sooner or later. The shiver Nolan feels makes him want to pass the fear along to someone else.
“I mean, like I said, the guys I knew in ARM, they weren’t really all that violent. But they were always one step away from seriously breaking heads. The slightest insult, one word of back talk from someone of another religion or race, would have been all they needed to get things rolling. They were always jealous when they heard about guys who actually torched a synagogue or something. Or encouraged some lone wolf who went on a shooting spree.”
Torched a synagogue. Shooting spree. Nolan’s taking a risk here. On the one hand, he doesn’t want to make them think that taking him on will be more dangerous than it’s worth. On the other hand, he’s hoping that the element of threat will make them want to prove how gutsy they are, and rise to the scary challenge. He looks at Bonnie and Maslow. Bonnie’s gone white. The old man’s harder to read.
Maslow says, “We’d be discreet. We wouldn’t try to reach you at your workplace.”
“We can call you at home,” says Bonnie.
How could she still not get it?
“I’ve been staying on my cousin’s living room couch,” says Nolan. “I have no home. I’m homeless.” He hears his voice rise. “Which could get inconvenient. Listen, I was even worried the guys in ARM would find out I’d checked out your Web site on Raymond’s computer.”
“Maybe they’d think you were learning about your enemies,” says Maslow.
“That’s not how their minds work.” What’s making this trickier are the details that might have supplied the filler to plug up the holes in his story. The fifteen hundred dollars, the truck. The contents of Raymond’s medicine chest.
“What I need is something like the Federal Witness Protection Program. Only…not so extreme. The Kindness of Strangers was what gave me the idea.” In fact, Maslow’s books were what convinced Nolan that he might be able to do this. Starting with the first line: “This is a book about being taken in and saved by ordinary people of courage and conscience.” In the second book there’s a conversation between Maslow and some Japanese Zen master in which they agree that history is the stick God uses to whomp you on the head. Then there’s the new book—which Nolan hasn’t actually read, except for the summary on Amazon—about changing one person, one heart, at a time. What he read was enough for him to understand that Maslow is working toward sainthood. So let’s see how saintly you are, pal. Save me, like those strangers saved you.
“I read how you survived the war because people—even people who didn’t like Jews—had consciences and hearts and souls and pitied you and took you in. And I figured you would remember. I mean, I know you must hate neo-Nazis even more than the—”
Oops. Nolan stops in mid-sentence. He can practically watch the steam pour out of Maslow’s ears.
“We don’t hate anyone,” Maslow says. “Hate is not what we do. And young man, let me tell you that if you think protecting you from your hooligan hate-monger friends is anything like being saved from the Nazis—”
Bonnie startles, visibly.
I’ve blown it, Nolan thinks.
“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry if that’s how it sounded. But I thought that since it…since something like that happened…I mean, I know that what’s ha
ppening to me is nothing like—”
Maslow’s eyelids droop. He nods wearily. Let it go.
“I thought you would understand and find some way to help me lay low till the dust settles. Plus…don’t you think the newspapers will love it? ‘Nazi Turns for Brotherhood Watch.’ There were always reporters and freelance writers swarming all over the Homeland Encampment, wanting to take us out for beers and listen to our life stories. Every creep was writing a book about the white-power movement. After that skin in L.A. turned himself in to the Wiesenthal Foundation, he was on all the talk shows for a while, it was a big deal. Not that this would just be about the media. It would be about changing one heart at a time. Like you say in your book.”
Nolan’s had to spell it out for them. And he’s had to bank on the fact that Maslow and Bonnie are no different from anyone else.
“Forgive me.” The old man looks tired. Has Nolan blown it again? “It’s late in the day. Somehow it’s taken me all this time to understand what you’re offering—and what you’re asking. Which is quite a lot.”
Nolan shrugs. “Offering mainly.”
“And asking. Quite a lot,” repeats Maslow. “You’re asking us to shelter you. To give you a new life. And if we had any brains at all, or if our brains were as big as our hearts, we’d refuse. Anyone would understand. No one would know we’d turned you down. But maybe you know that Sufi story about the man who steals a chicken and goes out to the woods to kill it where no one will see, except that he knows God sees—and so he can’t kill the chicken.”
Nolan takes a little break during the chicken story. It’s the same spiritual jive he used to hear from his mom and her friends.
“Well,” explains Maslow, “God sees into this room today, and I would have to answer to Him if I turned away a young man in need, perhaps in danger, a young man determined to change—and help us. Which reminds me. One thing we ask. And that is the truth. No reconciliation, no progress, can happen without it. This is something I learned from Nelson Mandela, from the Truth and Reconciliation Program. Bonnie, do we have that film on tape? I think our friend should see it. It’s very moving, what they’ve done in South Africa. They believe that healing cannot happen without total honesty and full disclosure. As do we. Which is why we’re asking you to be completely forthcoming. We’ll need to know who you are, and what you’ve done, and what you believe.”
A Changed Man Page 3