Waco

by David Thibodeau

  A part of me said I should walk away from the biblical thing, just go back to being a drummer, a regular rocker. But a powerful attraction drew me, rooted in an instinctive quest for self-knowledge and a recognition that I needed some discipline in my life. Maybe, as my mother implied, I was simply looking for a structure; but I wasn’t going to accept just any structure. It had to be provided by a very special person, like David, a man I was beginning to feel I could trust with my life. Still, I feared I might disappoint both of us. Perhaps he and I might discover that my spirit had no unrevealed depths; that maybe I was as shallow and immature as my family and friends seemed to think.

  Oddly enough, I had a premonition that David wasn’t going to be around too long, that the dark fate described for the Lamb in Revelation would soon catch up with him. He wasn’t harming anyone that I could see, but the biblical predictions were scary. If I turned my back on him I might miss out on something extraordinary and I’d be forever haunted by my refusal to pursue a rare and exceptional path that might give me a key to my deeper nature.

  And what were my real alternatives? To fall back into that aimless, competitive Hollywood rock scene, struggling against the inertia of my old musician pals who couldn’t focus on making it in that tough business? Or maybe stay in Bangor, get some joe job, settle into the rut my lack of education fitted me for? At the very least, Messiah Productions offered me a place in a really professional outfit backed by David’s talent and Steve’s management. And because the Messiah Productions band was still based in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t immediately have to commit to living in Mount Carmel.

  In those floating Maine days, I found myself slipping through a hole in the rickety fence dividing my old, easy disbelief from a new and difficult faith. My instincts urged me on, but I still had to shed my protective sheath of skepticism. During the transition I felt naked and vulnerable, and my dreams were filled with visions of hungry wolves and circling birds of prey. All the same, I had a surge of certainty, a quiet excitement. The word “apocalypse,” David had told me, was Greek for “revelation,” literally “uncovering,” and I felt I was on the edge of my own private discovery.

  David called me one night from Los Angeles. “Hey, Thibodeau, how’re you doing?” he asked amiably, his twangy tone capturing my ear. “Are you going forward with us?”

  “I’m with you,” I said at once, and my heart sank. In that instant I knew that life would never be the same for me, that I was giving up my old, light ways for a heavy new reality. My spirit was lumbered with a guilty reluctance I couldn’t shake off. I wanted to pass the point of no return, drawn by a sense of mystery I felt compelled to explore, yet the lazy part of me resented the tug implicit in David’s cheery, “Are you going forward with us?”

  “I’ll be on a plane to L.A. next week,” I promised, and he rang off happy—happier than I was, in truth. I knew what I had to do, but I wanted to have just one more party, sleep with a girl one last time, before committing myself to the existence of a monk.

  A few hours after I got off the plane in Los Angeles, David gave a study session in the house he rented in Hollywood just off Melrose Avenue. We sat in a circle on the floor while David talked, and as he was speaking I fell asleep. His voice droned on in my dreams, and suddenly I was surrounded by all the women of my past, like zombies from the grave, a night of the living not-yet-quite-dead. They backed me into a corner, threatening, and I had to talk fast, putting on the old charm to save my newfound chastity.

  Suddenly, one girl I’d once played around with was kissing me passionately. I bent her over and began to make love to her. All this was so graphic and so absolutely real I had a hot, rushing wet dream, right there in the middle of the study.

  I woke up with a start and, horribly embarrassed, hurried off to the upstairs bathroom to wash up. In that single, shameful moment, staring into the mirror, I knew I had to learn to discipline my feelings, to deny or delay gratification, not remain the passive victim of my sensuality. This aspiration had nothing to do with religion, though the spiritual path could be the way I might have to go to achieve self-control. Rather, it was a deep urge to be better than I was. I needed David’s tough drill for both my body and my soul.

  Once I came to that conclusion, everything seemed clear. I left the bathroom and rejoined the circle downstairs. David gave me that sappy grin of his, continuing his flow of talk, linking me back to the community. In the guilty act of dreaming, I’d slipped farther through that hole in the fence.

  For the next few months David remained in Los Angeles to deal with some business affairs, and a group of us camped out in the Melrose Avenue house.

  I tried to explain to my Hollywood friends why I’d committed myself to David Koresh as a musician and a Bible student. In their laconic way, Ryan and Scott were upset with me. Their “Father Dave” mockeries sharpened, but I knew that they were concerned for me. Why? Why? Why? they asked over and over as we partied one last time. “I never figured you for a Bible junkie,” Ryan said. “What’s the angle?”

  I had no clear answer. I knew I would never be able to explain myself in the language of faith, a tongue I was still fumbling with. And as we would learn during the siege of Mount Carmel, one man’s spiritual discourse is another man’s Bible babble.

  “I feel it’s right for me,” I said lamely.

  I could see from Ryan’s dubious scowl that he wasn’t convinced, but we lifted a few more beers and passed on to more pleasant things.

  Along with Steve Schneider, Paul Fatta, Jaime, Greg Summers, and Pablo Cohen, an Argentine-Israeli bass player recently arrived from Tel Aviv, the group living in the Melrose house included a few women, like Kathy Andrade and Nicole Gent, a nineteen-year-old Australian whose brother, Peter, I’d met at Mount Carmel. Back home, Peter had dabbled in drugs, booze, and gangs, but he’d reformed in Mount Carmel and had, like his sister, stayed in the community even though his parents had turned against David and left after the 1989 New Light revelation.

  Nicole, a beautiful young woman with strawberry-red hair and gentle eyes, had a baby son named Dayland, fathered by David. He’d taken her as his “sacred wife” on a visit to Australia during 1988, with the consent of her parents, who were at that time David’s disciples. “David wants me to be his teddy bear for the night,” she’d told her father and mother. “I want to have a baby for God.” Her son was born a year or so later. To me, it was obvious that she adored David.

  “Nicole’s so lovely, I wanted to just run off with her and forget everything else, Mount Carmel, the message, everything,” David confided to us in a study session. In the near distance was the hum of people, traffic, and loud music from Melrose, a street lined with trendy boutiques for the young, hip crowd. As he described his momentary yearning for a “normal” life, maybe somewhere in the Australian Outback, his eyes filled with tears and his face seemed about to melt. I had a glimpse, then, of the penalties David suffered in being this apostle of “truth.” It was clear he had no choice but to follow the inner voice that drove him, whatever the cost to his happiness as a man.

  At that moment he seemed very open, and I had an impulse to question him more thoroughly about his relationships with the women in the community. At Mount Carmel I’d learned that there was a group of ten or so women and their children known as the “House of David.” They were the nucleus of the group that would inherit the future. “It’s like winning in the bedroom,” David joked when I asked him about his children. “If you don’t win in the bedroom, son, you’re not going to win on the battlefield.”

  Despite my doubts about this notion, I didn’t probe farther. Actually, I was more concerned with my own struggles to accept not being close to a woman, physically and emotionally. For those first few months, desire prickled me continually, an itch I longed to scratch—but managed not to.

  Most evenings we hung out in Hollywood, scoping out the clubs on Sunset Strip. For me, it was like living in a college dormitory, sleeping casually on a couch or on th
e floor, getting an education, playing drums, all expenses paid. I knew this was a kind of interval between my old life and my new life, that Mount Carmel and Texas loomed in the future, but at the moment it was pleasant enough.

  I was impatient to perform in public, though, needing the energy rush that only a live audience can give you. But David said the band wasn’t ready. He was forever tinkering with the meters and the melodies, aiming for a perfect marriage of music and message, and sometimes I was irritated with him, suspecting he was on a head trip that might squeeze out the spontaneity essential to my way of playing.

  The music was vital to me; it provided a continuity between my old life and my new one. If, back then, David had said that giving up the drums as well as sex was a condition of joining his community, I would definitely have turned him down. Not having sex was one thing, not drumming quite another.

  In quiet moments I strolled around the neighborhood, thinking as I went. I told myself I still had a lot of friends outside the community; so if I decided, in the end, that David’s message was way too much for me or if he turned out to be someone other than I thought he was, I could just travel a few blocks to Hollywood Boulevard and resume my previous existence.

  “I’m not burning all my bridges,” I mused, excusing my lingering reluctance with the argument that, even if you totally believe in something, there’s always an element of doubt. “Keep a way out, Davey,” my mother had said as I kissed her goodbye in Bangor. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” I was irritated with her caution then, but the thought that I could walk away any time eased my concern that I might be in the grip of an inexorable process.

  Before I first bumped into David that fateful evening at the Guitar Center, I wasn’t a conscious seeker. But in listening to David, and by visiting Mount Carmel, I’d begun to realize that a whole other dimension of being existed within me—a deeper level of my own soul. Though many of my friends told me I’d flipped out, I knew I was still the same old Dave Thibodeau, but more so. I felt I was growing, maybe in a way my friends and family hadn’t expected, yet true to myself all the same. However, I still had a hard time accepting David’s claim that he was the Lamb from Revelation. And some of David’s prejudices bothered me. For example, his classification of gays as “sinful” jarred me when I first heard it. When I was a child my mother had many gay friends, and his implication that homosexuality was an aberration provoked a sharp objection. David tried to counter with a story about his father-in-law, Perry Jones. Though Perry had been married his whole life and had fathered children, he’d long been troubled by “tendencies,” as he called them, that ran counter to his deep religious beliefs. As a young man, Perry had made the decision to suppress his homosexuality. He was, David said, an example of a man who resisted his tendencies because of his belief in Scripture; his devotion was charged by a denial of his natural inclinations, amounting to his own personal kind of “withering experience.”

  “But I notice you hold back certain studies from some of the people here who are gay, who can’t or won’t deny themselves,” I accused. “Isn’t that pure prejudice?”

  “I don’t condemn people for what there are,” David replied. “I have friends who are prostitutes, for example. Some of them are the way they are because they’ve been abused or brutalized. The bottom line is, mankind is sick. Promiscuity, perversion, and prostitution are forms of that sickness.”

  I didn’t push it any farther. But David’s views on homosexuality as a perversion rather than just another way of being human did give me pause. It revealed that, under the skin, he was still the child of his Texas redneck upbringing, still the old Mr. Retardo who’d suffered so much humiliation at the hands of others. I hoped he and my mom never got into an argument over this issue, or the sparks would really fly.

  During those early months, the strongest challenge to my growing commitment to David came from my old friend, John. We’d been roommates while I was at the Institute, two struggling musicians, always broke, forever hopeful. He was a serious guy, very intelligent, a true searcher who’d rejected the Christianity of his upbringing. “I’ve got a lot of questions for God,” he told me. “Hard questions.”

  Back in the summer of 1990, when Steve came around to my Hollywood apartment to give his first studies to my friends, I’d invited John to join us, thinking maybe he might find something of value in the teaching. After visiting Pomona a couple of times, I told John about Messiah Productions. “Forget it,” he told me. “Religious bands never go anywhere.” I tried to say that David’s band was different, but John wasn’t convinced.

  While I was in Mount Carmel that autumn I phoned John, excited by a study David had given about the Temple and its priests. David had described the breastplate the high priest once wore, studded with green and red jewels. When he was asked a question, the jewels lit up, red for no, green for yes.

  When I finally ran out of steam, I heard an echoing silence in the receiver pressed to my ear.

  “Dave, are you okay?” John said finally.

  I laughed. “You think I’m being brainwashed, eh? My mind turning to mush?”

  “Is it?” he asked pointedly.

  When I returned to Los Angeles, John grilled me about David. “Does he believe he’s the Messiah? What’s this ‘truth’ he claims to reveal? If we’re living in the ‘Final Days’ or ‘End Time,’ why mess about with music?” He asked to meet David in person, for what he mockingly called an “audience.”

  For reasons he wouldn’t reveal, David resisted meeting John, despite my urging. “John really wants to meet you,” I said several times. Even Steve and Paul were puzzled by David’s reluctance; usually, he wanted to talk to anyone who might like to join the community, and I’d told him John was a very serious guy.

  “I suspect that John is crippled in his spirit as well as in his body,” he said finally. “But I’ll talk to him.”

  We arranged a meeting at the Denny’s on Sunset. David, Steve, and I tooled up to the restaurant, riding a pair of David’s beloved Harley-Davidson motorbikes. All three of us proudly sported Messiah Productions T-shirts, inscribed “David Koresh/God Rocks.” On the bike I clung to David’s back, the wind whipping my hair, my arms locked around his middle. As David skillfully bent the bike into a curve, I had the sensation that we were about to fly off the surface of Earth.

  John was late, and I went to his nearby apartment to fetch him. While I was waiting for him to get his jacket I sneaked a chocolate bar I found on his table. “Don’t tell David,” I begged John when he caught me. “Chocolate is banned; it’s an aphrodisiac, David says.” John gave me a funny look.

  “I’m glad to see you’re still a sinner,” he laughed, watching me wipe brown smudges from my chin.

  David began by deliberately challenging John. He liked to open people up with outrageous questions. “Would you die for the truth, if you encountered it?”

  John hesitated a moment, suspecting a trick question.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he murmured finally.

  David came back at him fast. “Would you kill for it?”

  “What?”

  “Would you kill for the truth?”

  “No way. Life is sacred.”

  David turned to me, smiling. “Looks like you brought me another weak Christian,” he said sardonically. “If you can’t kill for the truth you can’t die for it.”

  “But what about ‘Thou shalt not kill’?” John protested.

  “And what about the passage in Matthew that has Christ saying, Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I come not to send peace but a sword?”

  They tossed biblical quotations back and forth, until David called it quits and settled down to explain the Seals. John listened intently, and when we said goodbye I wondered if John had changed his mind about David. I talked with John a couple of days later when we met at Denny’s on Sunset Blvd. and I got my answer.

  “I think David might be the real deal, that he has the truth, but I’m not
going to go with it. I just want to do my thing. I have a lot of questions for God. If God can’t answer my questions in the judgement then I’ll just flip him off and jump in the lake of fire.” I was stunned.

  “This whole experience was for you,” David said, when I told him about John’s response. “To help you understand that not everyone is ready to listen to something you consider vital, even those you love. I had that experience with Marc Breault, and it still hurts. God showed me something about John’s character. I didn’t want to show John this truth because I was shown that he wouldn’t accept it, that his spirit was at odds with what John considers to be God. This experience was for you, not for John.”

  John’s rejection of David hurt me a lot, but it didn’t shake my feelings. John chose his way, and I felt I’d chosen mine.

  6

  THE WITHERING EXPERIENCE

  In the spring of 1991 we all returned to Mount Carmel for Passover. Along with the Day of Atonement, Passover was one of two major festivals celebrated by the community, a time when all of those attracted to David Koresh’s teachings gathered in Waco to hold a series of intense scriptural studies. There was no traditional Passover service, however. David was against all such rituals. “If we have the truth, why do we need a performance?” he said.

  I went back to Texas with mixed feelings. Although I was eager to learn more from David and knew I must fully commit myself to the “withering experience”—the hard routine of Mount Carmel and its discipline—I was reluctant to leave Los Angeles and sever my last connection to my old life. In Hollywood, I’d been able to maintain the illusion that my options were still open, that I could, if I chose, just walk away from David and all he offered and demanded. It was an illusion, I knew, because in my heart I’d accepted his message; but I preferred to leave the full consequences of that acceptance up in the air.