Waco

by David Thibodeau

  “You don’t even know how hard it’s been!” he exclaimed, tears springing to his eyes. “I love her, and giving her up—” He broke off and looked away, overcome with shame and suppressed anger. “We were lovers for close on twenty years, married for ten, and never made a baby.… Now, suddenly, she’s having his child!”

  “David’s?”

  “That’s why Marc Breault split,” Steve ran on. “He chose to marry Elizabeth rather than stick around.” He grimaced awkwardly. “Maybe he was right.”

  “Do you really mean that?” I asked.

  Steve shrugged. He took a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a carton of milk out of the refrigerator, and we sat down at the table to make sandwiches.

  “Why do you accept it?” I asked, deliberately disingenuous. “I mean, going without sex is bad enough, but having to actually give up your wife.…” At the time, Judy was a very attractive woman in her late thirties, a trim strawberry blonde.

  “Well, Thibodeau, if your wife had a chance to marry the Lamb, would you want to hold her back?”

  From his tone I couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or serious, or maybe both together. Before I could query him further, he put on his solemn voice, the one he used when giving scriptural studies.

  “There’s an upper-room experience and a lower-room experience,” Steve said. “The students here fall into either category, and you’re still in the lower one, the experience that can’t yet comprehend the deeper message.”

  “Try me,” I challenged.

  “In 1989, when David received his New Light revelation, it divided those who were willing to go all the way with him from the others. We in the upper room understood that David’s truth was progressive, always evolving, revealing more and more of itself. We understood from the New Light that the rest of us should no longer have sex or procreate because the message, and our communal withering experience, was coming to fulfillment. As David said, if you believed your days were numbered, you had to commit yourself fully. Marc and Elizabeth couldn’t do that. They turned away from David, and became his enemies. Judy and I, on the other hand, finally knew we just couldn’t leave Mount Carmel. But hell,” he added fiercely, “for one moment back then I really wanted to kill him!”

  David, Steve said, had put the issue in his usual earthy fashion. “He told us, ‘You married guys have to stop fucking and put your mind one hundred percent on the message.’ Everyone went through a period of great frustration. ‘This is crazy.’ ‘Why are we doing this?’ We had to ask ourselves: Who on earth could have concocted this insane human drama? The answer clearly was, No one on earth.”

  A voice spoke up behind us, and we turned to see Wayne Martin in the doorway. He must have heard some of our conversation, because he said, quietly, “I had to ask myself: If I believe this message, and if David is the Lamb, it wouldn’t be fair of me to keep Sheila from having this part of the truth.”

  “That’s awesome,” I murmured.

  Wayne joined us at the table. His thoughtful eyes regarded me and Steve, judging our mood. “You have to understand that David himself didn’t welcome the New Light. All his common sense told him it would cause massive upheavals, desertions, outrage. In the category of ‘stumbling blocks,’ this was a monster. But it’s David’s calling to do what the message dictates, as each level is revealed by his inner vision.”

  “It was easier for you than for me,” Steve exclaimed, then bit his lip. “I mean, you had your children already, and your relationship to your wife was more, well, low-key. I mean, you’re not as horny as I am. Besides, Judy and I were together for twenty years and I never got her pregnant. Then along comes David with his magic sperm—and bingo!”

  Steve’s tone switched abruptly, to a calmer, more apologetic mode. “Of course, there was also a practical reason for the New Light. It eliminated the natural envy the single guys felt for the men who were married. After ’89, we all were put on ice.”

  Wayne nodded, watching Steve with great sympathy and affection. In that instant I realized that, compared to these two, my emotional and erotic sacrifices were puny. “We all have our own way in the withering,” Wayne said gently.

  Steve chuckled harshly. “Ain’t that the truth!”

  A while later, David talked about Steve and Judy in a study session. He told us that, when the New Light came, Steve and Judy had struggled hard to accept its implications for their marriage.

  “Steve was very attached to Judy, had reaped her virginity, he thought,” David said. “He could not imagine his life without an intimacy with her. He was real torn up about it.”

  I looked over to where Steve was sitting, to see his reaction at having his private pain publicly exposed. He leaned forward, chin in his hand, elbow on his knee, and his profile was etched sharp and stiff, like the face on a coin.

  “It’s hard for Steve not to put his darkness on people,” David continued. “He carried a cloud. He wanted to leave Mount Carmel, or kill me. He felt that Judy had been given to him by God, so who the hell was I to grab her?”

  A few of the younger women tittered, but most of the audience was, like me, rapt, drinking in every word.

  “In a study back then, I asked Judy if Steve actually was the first man she’d been with. Being no virgin himself when he married her, Steve was fixed on the notion that she was pure. ‘Steve was the first man I ever went with,’ Judy said, absolutely sure of herself. ‘Judy, you say that in front of God?’ I asked several times, and several times she answered ‘Yes.’”

  David paused for dramatic effect. “Then I came back at her, hard. I told her I’d been shown a vision of Judy and her girlfriends going out one night, way back before she knew Steve. These friends teased her about still being a virgin. They got her drunk, then sent her to come on to a guy sitting at the bar. In the vision I saw Judy and this man go out to his car and get it on in the backseat. ‘This guy was pumpin’ away on you, Judy. Am I crazy?’ I asked her.

  “Judy was shocked. Maybe she’d blocked the memory of that sordid incident from her memory. Or maybe she felt it was something she could never tell Steve. Steve was devastated. In fact, everyone was floored.”

  David looked at Steve for the first time that evening, and Steve nodded grimly. I looked around for Judy, but she was lost in the crowd.

  “I think the discovery that Judy wasn’t pure when he married her made it just a little easier for Steve to accept the New Light,” David said.

  After a pause, David continued. “Women are walking prophecies,” he declared. “You always try and speculate what each one who catches your eye might be like in bed.” He shook his head. “Women are just too much energy, my friends. Just too much energy.”

  He recounted an incident I’d heard some of the men talking about previously, in which David had had a young woman lift her skirt above her waist, revealing her underwear. “How many of you guys felt the old instinctive urge looking at her body?” he’d demanded. “Sexuality,” he told his audience, was a “huge stumbling block, a major source of pain and lies between men and women.”

  Now he went on to ruminate aloud about what he called the “enmity” between men and women. “When a man and a woman make love, they feel very close to each other. But as a man, I can’t say I know what’s going on in a woman’s mind at that intimate moment. When I put my dick in her, I know I’m feeling only myself, not her reality. There’s a sadness in that, don’t you think? The sadness of the limitation of the flesh as against the unlimited spirit.”

  In the orthodox Jewish marriage ceremony, sex was elevated into a ritual, David declared. Both the man and the women were virgins, and their wedding night had a sacred quality. “Maybe the wife suffered as her husband penetrated her for the first time,” David said. “Perhaps, however, her agony was his greatest joy, an acknowledgment of the pain of the body in the midst of a divine ecstasy.”

  I thought he’d gotten carried away at this point, elevating his own fantasies into holy mysteries. B
ut his remarks about the anguish and confusion involved in intimate relationships rang true to me. I loved women, but being with them was often a torment. It confirmed my feeling that it was better right now for me to be chaste.

  David treated me somewhat differently from the others, because, he said, I was a musician and very emotional. He liked having me around, and if he went to town he usually took me. There was some competition for David’s favor, and his choosing me to accompany him on these jaunts was a coveted intimacy. All the same, David was well aware of my weaknesses.

  One time he asked the assembled members what they thought of “our Baby Gorilla.” Grinning hugely, he said: “Isn’t Thibodeau someone you want to know because he’s a good guy, never hurts anyone?” When people murmured their assent to this, he added: “Isn’t that exactly the reason he often ends up hurting others, and himself?” This shrewd perception startled me, and I blushed to the roots of my hair.

  On another occasion he bore down hard on me in a study session. He used as a text the passage in Revelation concerning the Third Seal, which speaks of a black horse and a rider—one of the Four Horsemen—who carries a pair of balances in his hand. He told me that his spiritual role in regard to me was as an “oppressor,” the figure that forces you to refine your spirit, submit to the withering experience. “You have to toughen up, Thibodeau,” he said. “Cut yourself off from women and everything they mean to you.” I shivered at the severity in his tone, but I felt he was right.

  Later that same night, as I was lying in bed, just falling asleep, I suddenly felt some powerful presence nailing me to the bed. I heard a strange whirling around me, like leaves rustling, but the sound was more mechanical, closer to the thumping of a helicopter’s blade.

  I knew I was awake, but I had no will, no power, couldn’t move my arms or legs. “Oh my God, it’s happening!” I thought. There were eight other people in the dormitory with me, but none seemed to notice my predicament. I tried to talk, to cry out, “Guys, I’m being pinned down!” but no sound emerged.

  “Don’t flip out,” I told myself. “It’s like that time you were high at an outdoor concert, when everything turned white.…” But this was very different. It was clear that my state was induced by some inner energy, not a narcotic.

  For what seemed like forever I lay there, grappling with something immediate but invisible. Finally, the whirling sound started to fade and I managed to call out.

  Free to move again, I woke up Jaime and told him what had happened.

  “I’ve had that a couple of times,” he said calmly. He told me that Peter Hipsman, in a similar state, had heard demonic voices that scared him shitless. “It shows you’re getting in touch with your true self,” Jaime said sagely, but I wondered if I was just wigging out.

  As I lay in bed afterward, a kind of exhilaration washed over me. Had this really been a direct confirmation of the spiritual world? Maybe my struggles to discipline my desire had begun to open me up to another realm of being?

  “Hey, I heard you had a little experience,” David said, passing me in the hallway next day. “How was it?”

  “Great!” I replied. “But scary.”

  David regarded me intently. “It won’t always be wonderful,” he warned. “It all depends on your state of grace.”

  He was right. This kind of visitation occurred four or five more times, and once or twice I thought I’d never survive such terrifyingly abstract chastisement.

  Despite our special friendship, I could not bring myself to burden David with my terrors. Perhaps I was too aware that he had his own hard times, far worse than mine.

  Sometimes he would plead with us because, he said, God had “cut him off.” He could be in a state of darkness, deprived of the visionary light that was his psychological and spiritual energy for weeks at a stretch. During those times he was so knocked out he could hardly get out of bed. “You’re my saviors because God won’t listen to me,” he’d tell us. “Hell is not about being punished. It’s the agony of those who get to see what they might have had but never will, because they just didn’t give a damn.”

  When I thought I might approach him to get something heavy off my chest, I’d see that he himself was visibly suffering; with David, spiritual striving was always manifest in his manner and his flesh. As he endured his own personal moments of hell, the skin on his face peeled off in scales and his eyes skittered here and there, like a wild animal lost in a strange world.

  Besides, there was an unwritten code at Mount Carmel that you had to deal with your own darkness and not lay it on others. It was, Steve explained, inherent in the withering experience, which each person had to contend with in his own way. “Dave’s going through his pain; leave him alone with it,” Steve told my friends. He said the same thing to me when Jaime and Pete Hipsman struggled. This attitude was cold comfort during those moments when I longed to shout at the top of my voice, “Get me the fuck outta here!”

  In the end, though, I was—as Steve put it—“just too damn horny for the truth.” When it came right down to it, my desire to master and deepen my own nature always overcame my fears and my revulsions. In fact, I slowly came to understand that the fear and revulsion were vital forces propelling my attempt to evolve as a spiritual being. Like Jacob, I had to wrestle with the angel to prove I had power with God and with men.

  7

  TEMPTATIONS

  During the summer of 1991, my life at Mount Carmel took a surprising turn: I left my home in the community and went to live in the town of Waco.

  Music was the reason. After laboring at construction for a few months, I told David that my hands were coarsening and that I was losing focus on my drumming. “Without drumming, I’m nothing,” I said. “It’s like trying to live without oxygen, and our off-the-cuff jamming sessions here don’t cut it for me.”

  David agreed with me, for his own reasons. “We must refocus the music on the message,” he said. “That’s always been my aim. And it has to happen in public.”

  Characteristically, David immediately set about organizing a place for us to perform in Waco. He made the acquaintance of Randall, a truck driver who’d recently owned a nightclub named Cue Stick, “nightclub” being a fancy name for a beer joint with pool tables. When we went into Waco for relaxation we hung out there, and David finally suggested to Randall that we build a stage at the back of his bar, put in sound equipment and a speaker system, and play there on weekends.

  Randall liked the idea, and David constructed the stage himself in one day, working with the intense concentration and skill I admired, while Jaime and I and a few others hung around, watching. Cliff Sellors, our artist, decorated the stage with a canvas mural depicting a tongue-in-cheek rendering of two snakes, one with David’s head on it, the other with Randall’s. Above the mural was the title “Ranch Apocalypse,” a tag some Wacoans had given Mount Carmel.

  To launch the sessions, David came up with a concept he called “Boo Night.” He invited bands of all types to come play at Cue Stick on Friday nights, and the audience was free to cheer or jeer. Saturday night was for established bands like ours. David played guitar, Jaime or me beat drums, and Pablo Cohen thumped along on bass. David sang some of his own biblical songs; his voice was a pretty good rock voice, better than average, and the crowd responded to the rhythms without, I suspect, bothering too much about the message.

  We had put several thousand dollars into the sound system and drum set, and David was worried about security on the nights we didn’t play and when the club was closed. “Thibodeau, I’m putting you in charge here,” he said one evening. “You can hang around and bed down here, keep an eye on things, okay?” My heart leaped. To be free of the Anthill and spend night and day around my drums and the social scene—what a gift!

  For a while, I was in heaven. On the nights the band didn’t play, I tended bar. I found I was a natural as a bartender, loving to chat up people, listen to their troubles, josh with the guys, and flirt with the girls while dishing up dr
inks to a raucous crush of humanity. I’m a sucker for a sad story, and that crowd had plenty. Lord, it was fun! Sacrilegiously, I thought: If this is Babylon, bring on Nebuchadnezzar. During early-morning hours when the club shut its doors, I locked up and played the drums till four or five in the morning, before laying out my sleeping bag between the pool tables.

  That summer, Cue Stick was the hottest joint in town; I jammed with kids coming for the music and felt a new energy in my drumming; it seemed to spring back with fresh force after months of low-key neglect.

  Living at Cue Stick taught me a lot about human nature, particularly my own, and particularly with regard to women. Many girls were attracted to my new persona as drummer-barhop. Texas girls, I found, were amazingly forward, especially the co-eds at the famously conservative Baylor University, which was actually noted for its wild shindigs. In fact, these Baylor girls were offended that I flirted but wouldn’t go to bed with them.

  Amid this paradise of erotic temptation and music, I had to ask myself whether or not I was glad to be out of the old male-female game. My answer was ambiguous. In quiet moments I wondered why David had allowed me to live among the kind of temptations he knew were deadly for someone as weak-willed as me. Maybe it’s a test, I thought vaguely.

  Could David be that diabolical? Certainly. Could I survive his test? Maybe.

  In the club, I had another chance to see how David related to outsiders, especially those who were antagonistic, like Matt, a musician who played in a band called Whirling Dervish, which played on Boo Nights. That guy made it publicly plain that he didn’t like what he’d heard about Mount Carmel and David. From the stage—our stage—he referred to Mount Carmel as “Rancho Raunch” and to David as “Doctor Dickhead.”

  One evening after the band’s session, David went up to Matt and offered to buy him a beer. Matt was suspicious, but he accepted the beer—and several more. When he was quite drunk, he turned on David. “What if I stabbed you, would you resurrect?” he said, shoving his leering face into David’s. “Wait and see,” David replied, launching into an exposition about the Lamb opening the First Seal. “You mean, you’re the Lamb?” Matt exploded. “That’s blasphemy!” But after that evening he treated David with new respect and no longer slagged us on stage.