Waco

by David Thibodeau

  My heart sank as the Silver Eagle approached Mount Carmel. The place was as stark and makeshift as I’d remembered it, a squatter’s camp stuck out in the middle of the flattest landscape I’d ever seen. In Maine and in Los Angeles, there were the ever-present hills and mountains, a rise and fall in the horizon to enliven the eye. Here there was nothing but straightness, like a flatline on a heart monitor signifying that the patient has died.

  During the five months or so since my first visit, most of the remaining clapboard cottages had been stripped of their timber for reuse in the Anthill. The new building’s skeleton had expanded, growing two-story wings out from the core chapel and cafeteria. When fully finished, these wings would be the dormitories where all of us would live.

  I was assigned a room in the part that was completed, just a bare cell with uninsulated, unplastered sheetrock walls, no door, and a rough plywood floor. Four wooden bunk beds crowded the space, and we had to keep our gear in suitcases tucked under the bunks. I shared the room with Peter Gent and Peter Hipsman, a guy my age from Upstate New York, and a Passover visitor from London whose name I never got. After Passover, I moved to another, similar room shared with Jaime and Paul Fatta.

  The living conditions were even more primitive than I recalled. Only the cafeteria kitchen had running water. For a bathroom, we had a shower rigged beneath a tree with a screen wrapped around it. For toilets, the men used an outhouse connected to the old septic tank, whereas the women and children were allowed chamber pots in their rooms. In late March it was still cold at night, and we shivered around a few electric space heaters plugged into outlets or overhead ceramic light fixtures. “Think of it as camping indoors,” Steve told me cheerfully when I complained. “That way it may seem like fun.”

  At times it was fun, especially during nights when we lit the camping lantern and chewed the fat about the good old days before Mount Carmel. Greg amused us with stories about his job at Westlake Video on the outskirts of Los Angeles. One of his clients was pop star Michael Jackson. “A sweet guy, very pretty,” Greg said. On occasion, Steve dropped by to talk about David, giving us the more intimate view of the man that he was privileged to know.

  If we were lucky, David himself would visit us; sometimes he invited us to join a select group for dinner in town. The trick, it seemed, was to try to be around David as much as possible, hoping he might launch into an impromptu study. I discovered that he often sat in the kitchen late at night eating a bowl of soup, and I started hanging around there when most people were asleep, hoping he’d come in.

  With few of us around, these late-night talks were intimate and intense. Our group energy was more focused, and that seemed to pull deep material out of David. I remember the night he told us that, in the midst of a vision, he’d levitated a few feet off the bed. “Like in The Exorcist,” he said. Sometimes he seemed almost speechless, dazed by his inner force, and his face had a haunted look that twisted my heart. “God gave me some light,” he’d murmur, and I imagined it had taken several days for him to integrate such an experience and pass it on to us.

  During Passover week, when Mount Carmel filled with visitors, I lost even the minimal comforts of my shared cubicle and had to camp out in the chapel with nothing but a thin sleeping bag between me and the hard floor. I shivered all night, dreaming of my happy Hollywood days, cursing the impulse that had led me here. It was even too cold and uncomfortable to think about sex—and maybe that was the point. The women in the community were too busy with mothering to be flirtatious, and several were carrying David’s babies, including Michele. Her twins, Chica and Little One, were born during the summer.

  A special excitement seized Mount Carmel during the festival period. After each study, people discussed the teaching David had given them with a kind of eagerness, especially those who were visiting. It was as if they had to top off their tank of spirituality before returning to their ordinary lives.

  However, not everyone was happy. Some visitors had family members who were there for the studies but who thought the whole thing was totally crazy. In some cases, like the Henry clan from England, dedication to David’s message ended up dividing families. Some people sincerely wanted to come and live at Mount Carmel but felt they wouldn’t be able to hack it, whereas others went away cursing us as a bunch of charlatans. But no one I talked to was untouched by the experience.

  After the visitors departed, the community reverted to its settled routine. While the others went to communion and then to work on construction, I was allowed to rise at nine or ten o’clock, have breakfast, then practice drumming all day until the ranch bell rang for supper. David wanted me to concentrate on the music, and he seemed to recognize that I was used to going to bed late and needed a good eight or nine hours’ rest or else I’d be yawning all day. My sleep rhythm was dictated by David; when he went to bed, so did I.

  My days were punctuated by the ringing of the food bell as well as by the jam sessions we had after supper, before the evening Bible study. After dinner we’d play for an hour or so on the chapel stage while men, women, and children assembled for the evening Scripture sessions, which sometimes lasted into the early hours of the following morning.

  Life at Mount Carmel revolved around meals and study periods. However, the meals were basic. Breakfast was oatmeal, bread, bananas, sometimes eggs, and millet. I hated millet! Lunch was usually a simple salad, maybe some soup and beans; but when Julie Martinez and her mother, Ofelia Santoyo, were preparing lunch, they treated us to delicious burritos, maybe roast chicken or grilled fish. Supper, served around six o’clock, was nothing but popcorn and a banana or two, with some leftovers from lunch. A lot of the food we ate was scavenged cheap from restaurants and supermarkets by Perry Jones: day-old pizzas and groceries that had passed their sell-by dates. The women did the cooking while the men worked on the building, a patriarchal division of labor that would have horrified my mom.

  On Friday nights, to welcome the Sabbath, the women dressed up a little, wore their best sweaters with maybe a bow in their hair and pretty earrings. No work was done on Saturday, and we were left to study on our own. That evening we got to watch a movie on a screen in the chapel, sometimes a war movie such as Apocalypse Now or a fascinating film like Lawnmower Man. During lighter moments, we had movies that appealed to the kids, like Ernest Goes to Jail, and we all gorged on usually desired treats such as ice cream and hamburgers.

  Everyone was responsible for doing his own laundry; we used buckets and hung the clothes on lines to dry. Accustomed to my convenient neighborhood laundromat, I found cleaning clothes a tedious, time-wasting task. Before Mount Carmel, I’d thought my wardrobe was basic: just a few pairs of jeans, some T-shirts, and sweaters along with underwear and socks; but when it came to having to hand wash every item, I found I had far too many clothes, and so I soon cut my wardrobe in half. I also did without my daily shower. I was a bit ashamed of this, since everyone around me always seemed clean and neat, the women’s long hair brushed and shiny, the men scrubbed after their day’s labor.

  No one chose to live at Mount Carmel for its luxurious lifestyle. People were there for a purpose, and the simplicity of the living conditions emphasized that, much as it did in the early Israeli kibbutzim I’d read about. Like on a kibbutz, the community not only endured discomforts but also took pride in doing so, gratified by the withering away of the endless excrescences of a materialistic lifestyle.

  At first, I found the deprivation and rigors hard to stomach. But Mount Carmel’s challenge was bracing, and gradually I began to enjoy it. Extreme by temperament, I tend to respond to anything that’s thrown at me with total revulsion or attraction. Since the hard life at Mount Carmel was part of the deal I’d accepted, my only choice was to embrace it wholeheartedly. After some early moments of revulsion, I began to actually enjoy scrubbing dirty laundry.

  Although I was at first allowed to dress as I wished, I finally had to conform to the dress code. For example, my shorts left my knees bare, and S
teve told me to make them longer, so as not to distract the women. I must admit I hadn’t realized my knees were so sexy. One thing I did resist was cutting my long hair. (At one point toward the end David and all the other men got trimmed, but I stubbornly refused, even though short hair was cooler in that heat, and David let me off.) It was my lone refusal to be withered.

  “God is like a rock,” David said. “Those that fall upon Him are going to be broken. Those who avoid the rock will have it fall on them.” David’s message rode a rough roller coaster. Having just hopped aboard and strapped in, I had to go along for the ride.

  When David felt I’d made my basic adjustment to life at Mount Carmel, he shifted me to the construction crew. His general message was, “Time to get down and dirty, Thibodeau. We may be living on an anthill, but that doesn’t mean we can’t spruce it up a little, tear all those ugly houses down, build a pool maybe, and a sandbox for the kids. Don’t you want to be part of that?” Frankly, I felt I could take it or leave it; but when David made a suggestion, people generally went along. His command style was casual, but few questioned it, and it helped that he got down and dirty with the rest of us.

  On a darker level, David said during several study sessions that he could sense the “waters rising around us.” The new, more compact, perhaps more defensible building was meant to house all those who might decide to join us at Mount Carmel for the coming confrontation with adverse forces. We had to create a solidarity against the dangers David felt were mounting in Babylon.

  At the time, our perception of these dangers was vague. Before the ATF and FBI focused their devastating attentions on Mount Carmel, there was no specific antagonism against the federal government as such in the community. Our wariness of this Babylon boiled down to a feeling that we were surrounded by a society that largely lacked a spiritual dimension and might easily turn on us because we held values different from the mainstream. In practice, however, David always tried to cooperate with state and local authorities, appreciating that Mount Carmel had enjoyed a mostly peaceful coexistence with its Waco neighbors for more than a half-century.

  Working outdoors was no fun. With spring came the monsoons—warm, moist air moving up from the Gulf of Mexico—bringing thunderstorms and steady rains, sometimes five or six inches in twenty-four hours, turning dust to mud. Whether it was raining or not, I felt I was toiling in a sauna, passing the days swimming in sweat with fire ants feasting on my calves.

  My job was to help demolish the few remaining cottages, stripping them to the foundations. I had the task of pulling rusty nails out of the framing and clapboard—a backbreaking, unglamorous, repetitious chore. I’d never in my life handled any tools, not even a hammer, and my palms broke out in blisters. The only construction job less skilled than mine, the gathering and piling of recovered lumber, was assigned to women and children.

  It was hot, hard labor, but after a while I perceived its deeper purpose. Working together molded and confirmed a group identity, a sense of communal achievement. We came from many different places, had many different pasts, belonged to a variety of races and nationalities; but under the boiling summer sun, when shade temperatures often reached the century mark, the heat beating our backs like hammers until I felt like a nail myself, we were brothers sharing sweat, building our own Jerusalem in a desolate place. And David was there alongside us, skilled in construction, sharing our hardships. “Everyone has to get stuck in,” he said, when people suggested he should save his often frail strength for teaching rather than toiling.

  David loved working with his hands. Besides being a fine carpenter, he was an expert auto mechanic. He also maintained our musical equipment, keeping the power amplifiers and mixing boards in prime condition. He had a very American feel for machinery and gadgets, and he loved to drive the hired tractor we used to haul materials around the site. At times, irritated by our incompetence, David would complete a task by himself, busily sawing and nailing until the work was done to his satisfaction. For a man with such a spiritual dimension, he was very much at home in the physical world.

  “We don’t need no extravagant church to worship God,” he said, urging us on. “All we need is a roof over our heads to keep the elements out, and walls to keep the world at bay.”

  The construction of the new building was supervised by Rick Bennett, an English architect who’d recently joined the community. He sketched out the overall shape of the place and directed the work, but I doubt if any of it was to code. The general attitude was that this is our property and that we could do whatever we wanted—a sentiment that likely sprang from a combination of Texas individuality and a presumption that our divine mandate superseded any temporal authority.

  Perhaps Rick was the only person with a clear concept of what the building would look like when completed. As he described it, the exterior had low-pitched, tar-paper roofs and a plywood exterior painted beige with white trim around the windows. The interiors, like the room I occupied, were finished in raw sheetrock. The double front door, facing southwest, had a core of plastic foam covered in sheet metal, painted white and stamped to look like wood.

  The front door was on an axis with the aisle of the chapel. Flanking the entry was a telephone room and Wayne Martin’s law office. To the left of the entry was a stairway linking the dormitory’s first- and second-floor quarters, the lower level for men, the upper for women and children. Above the original concrete vault, now used as a walk-in cooler adjacent to the kitchen and cafeteria, was a three-story residential tower for some of the older women who had no children, with a room for David under the roof. David had another room over the chapel, opposite a second-floor room that was later used for storing the firearms Paul Fatta took to sell at gun shows.

  A walkway running over the chapel connected the second-floor dormitory with the gymnasium at the rear, the last section of the building to be completed. Beside it was the pool we built with a rented backhoe. Between the tornado shelter, still under construction when the ATF attacked, and the water tower were pens for chickens and a well house. A cement block building two hundred yards east of the main structure housed our motorbikes.

  A trapdoor in the floor at the west end of the men’s living quarters led to a short underground passage intended to connect to an old school bus that we planned to bury as a temporary tornado shelter. I’d seen tornadoes only on TV or at the movies; David, however, had experienced several while growing up. He’d learned, too, that a tornado had ripped through the town of Waco in May 1953, killing 114 people, and that was more than enough reason for him to think about shelter.

  Water-supply and sewage connections remained problems that were never resolved before the siege. There were a couple of small ponds on the property, filled with fish, but their water wasn’t fit to drink. Our main water storage was three white vinyl tanks situated outside the backdoor of the cafeteria. As late as autumn 1992 we were still trying to get the well pump to function again. To replace the old septic system, we bought a big septic tank and installed the inside toilets, but we didn’t have a chance to dig the sewers and link them up before the ATF onslaught.

  As the months went by I slowly got to find out more about the erotic tensions within the community. At first, busy with my own struggles to get adjusted to Mount Carmel, I hadn’t probed much on this score. Trying to live a celibate life was hard enough for me without bothering about other people’s sexual scenarios.

  At the time, all I knew for sure was that David was the only male who was allowed a sex life and that he had a number of “wives,” some of whom were legally married to other men. I didn’t know the details of how the couples felt about this bizarre arrangement or how hard it had been for them to accept it. At times I suspected David might just have conned everyone into allowing him an exclusive harem, so to speak. Still, I knew there was more to it than that.

  By the summer of 1991, I hadn’t had sex for six or seven months, not since my last visit to Bangor. The first two months were really hard; a powerf
ul part of me definitely didn’t want to accept this prohibition. Sometimes I wondered if I was capable of staying celibate; but I was increasingly aware of a spirit within me, trapped in my flesh, yearning to be free. When I looked in the mirror I could see a fresh clarity in my eyes, a kind of glowing sixth sense. But the transition to chastity wasn’t smooth. Sometimes I felt as if I were pulling a knotted rope out of my gut, knot by knot, gagging all the way.

  Occasionally, I discussed sex with the other guys, especially Jaime and Greg Summers. They claimed that being celibate was “restful,” that they’d had a hard time getting on with women. Greg said he’d been popular in high school, had a lot of girls, but all the same he was glad to be “out of the game.” It seemed that reconciling myself to being a monk was harder for me than for them. They all claimed that they had come across something greater than sex, a kind of spiritual orgasm. They no longer even masturbated, they confessed. “It’s not good to spill your seed,” Jaime said solemnly.

  To avoid temptation, the men were generally discouraged from getting close to any of the women. I was attracted to Lisa Farris, a rocker from Hollywood, and Julie Martinez, who was still fighting a bad drug habit. These two women were hip and streetwise and had shared some of the same L.A. experiences as I, but we all took care not to get sexually entangled.

  My curiosity about the larger sexual picture was aroused by a surprising outburst from Steve Schneider. Late one night he and I were alone in the kitchen foraging for a snack. I was a night bird by nature and he was an insomniac, so we often ran into each other while the others slumbered. All I said to Steve was a casual, “How’s Judy?” asking after his wife, because I hadn’t seen her around in a while.