Waco

by David Thibodeau

  David went out of his way to maintain a good relationship with townspeople. When a deal went sour, he always preferred to take a loss rather than engage in a dispute. “No amount of gain is worth the ill will,” he said wisely. David was frequently generous with people he liked. For example, he loaned the bass player from the Zeroes a new instrument and never bugged the musician to give it back. He was friendly with McLennan County Sheriff Jack Harwell (who would later act as an intermediary during the siege, arranging a milk delivery for the children). All that most Wacoans really knew about David was that he led a community that owned this farm property on the outskirts of town. I don’t think they knew that a lot of the kids were his or were particularly concerned about our setup. While working at Cue Stick I seldom heard snotty remarks about Mount Carmel, apart from a few uglies like Matt. In general, Texans prefer to mind their own business, to live and let live, and Mount Carmel enjoyed a vague existence way out on the edge of Waco’s consciousness.

  That summer, David often visited Los Angeles to make connections with club owners and executives in record companies, hoping for an album. Nothing ever came of these visits, so far as I could see, but that didn’t trouble me. I was having too much fun, drumming and slinging booze.

  But as the months went by David became increasingly discontented. “The music can’t go forward because we aren’t one body,” he declared one Sunday morning, after a long night on the stage. “Our songs lack coherence and power.” He threw up his hands. “You know, in the end I have to say, who needs the world? My true purpose is to work with a small group of people, give them a chance to fulfill the Seals. This is all I want; I don’t want any more.”

  Immediately, he contradicted himself. “We’ve got a great band, but we have to be even better,” he said. “But to go forward we all have to have the same mind-set, you know? And that isn’t happening.”

  Privately, I agreed with him—but for different reasons. Though David said he was trying to develop the band’s spiritual qualities, he never got down to structuring our performance, to building it, from low to high. We were just jamming and jamming, not really getting anywhere. I knew Jaime was frustrated by this, and so was I. “If the music’s meant to go forward, it will,” David said, but none of us felt that was a really satisfactory explanation for our increasing sense of being stuck. At times David implied that the music was secondary to the message, a remark that seemed to contradict his stated intention to make the music and the message one and the same thing.

  And I had another problem with David’s musicianship.

  His style was getting more controlled, more technically correct, and that development was totally out of sync with my wild ways. To me, raw passion was being squeezed to death by David’s head trips, his prissy precisions that seemed to snag all the spontaneity out of rock. I tried hard to get in tune with him for a while, keep a straight beat, but it was hopeless. Increasingly, we were at odds, which made for some hairy onstage moments. Fortunately, for us, the Waco crowd wasn’t musically sophisticated enough to notice our cross-purposes, but I did, and so did David. “Get with the message, Thibodeau,” he hissed at me on several occasions. “Get with the groove,” I wanted to retort.

  Day by day, night by night, my excitement drained away. I felt I was doing everything I could, yet it just wasn’t happening for me or the band. In reaction, I developed a resentment toward David and his message. What kind of friggin’ sick God am I worshipping? I asked myself. Struggling for self-control, I tried to be more grounded, to let things bounce off me and not get so riled. Man, you’re cooler than this, I chided myself, but it didn’t help.

  I was aware that I was spinning my wheels, that I wasn’t growing and learning as I’d hoped. Maybe being away from Mount Carmel so long had loosened the bonds of my self-discipline. Maybe, as David often said, failure was built into the plan. On a larger scale, if the message contained in the Seals was true, either we were going to almost die and God would come down and save us, or we were simply going to be wiped out.

  On a personal level, the slow degeneration of my artistic sensibilities might have been a reflection of this necessary failure. It was as if I had a dream foretelling the Titanic wreck yet bought a ticket anyway, hoping against hope the dream was false. But if I jumped ship, where would I be?

  The Cue Stick period slowly faded out. Randall, the club owner, felt our music had lost its pizzazz—and he was right. He wanted to bring in new musicians, but he was loath to pay for the equipment we’d installed.

  There was also the issue of David’s increasingly ill health. As the summer passed, he got sicker and sicker, plagued with ulcers. To get going in the mornings, he needed a bowl of soup laced with cayenne, which couldn’t have done his stomach much good. He told us that he was being punished because we were out of sync and nothing seemed to be moving forward. More and more, he talked of the days when Marc Breault was still around. “Back then, everyone was in harmony,” he claimed. “Nothing’s gone well since then.” “Get over it, move on,” I said, impatient with his sad stories about Marc. But he seemed unable to set his mind to anything.

  At times, everything in me just wanted to say, Fuck this! I couldn’t walk away, but I was very frustrated.

  “Take it day by day,” Jaime urged wisely. “That’s all anyone can do.”

  Finally, David pulled the band out of the club, and I had to move back to Mount Carmel. It was a real downer, being back at the Anthill, away from the music and the temptations. Yet I was encouraged that I hadn’t actually succumbed to any of the easy seductions. I’d discovered that I was stronger than I thought, that maybe after all I’d gained something vital from David’s discipline. Maybe, finally, I was becoming a man, not just a kid indulging every impulse.

  My suspicion that David was testing my ability to resist temptation was confirmed soon after the Cue Stick scene folded. In October, David asked me to go to Los Angeles to help Julie Martinez find her eldest son, Stephen.

  Julie, it seemed, had lost contact; she believed Stephen lived with her former husband somewhere in the Sacramento area. She had five other children living with her at Mount Carmel, but the loss of Stephen troubled her greatly. David suggested that I accompany Julie to Pomona, where we could rent a car and drive together to Sacramento to visit the state records office in an attempt to trace the boy’s location.

  “Please don’t make me do this,” I pleaded.

  “Julie is vulnerable; she needs a chaperone,” David replied.

  “Why me?” I asked. “Why are you deliberately putting temptation in my way?” But David ignored my objections.

  Julie had come to the community about six months after me to join her mother, Ofelia Santoyo, her grandmother, Concepcion, and the two children she’d sent to live with them because her life was a mess. She’d divorced her first husband, Stephen’s father, and had then taken up with a guy she referred to as “an El Paso junkie.” By the time she was thirty she’d had six children and was a druggie herself.

  Julie frankly admitted that she’d sought out Mount Carmel because she was desperate. “I didn’t come for the religious stuff,” she told me as we flew to Los Angeles.

  “I was at the end of my string. The community gave me a chance to get my act together, have all my kids together, except Stephen. Mount Carmel saved my life.”

  I’ve always had a weakness for tragic stories, and Julie, then barely thirty, was small, dark, sad, and hot. She was intriguing, and I knew she was attracted to me. Clearly, this assignment was going to push me to the limits of my shaky self-control. Thinking about it as we winged our way across New Mexico and Arizona, I came to the conclusion that David felt I had to master my sexuality before I could become a full member of the community. If I failed this test, I was probably out, and I realized that I couldn’t bear that.

  Whereas Julie’s tension seemed to ease as we rolled up the I-5 toward Sacramento, mine increased. I was eager to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible; aft
er all, how long can a man hold his breath? But Julie had other ideas. “Let’s have some fun, detour up to Jordan, where I used to live,” she suggested. When I seemed doubtful, she told me not to be a bear.

  We spent a night in San Francisco in the home of a family friend I’d known back in Maine. We had to sleep in bunk beds in the small apartment’s spare room, and I was all too conscious of Julie’s female warmth in the dark, the scent of her faintly jasmine perfume lingering in the air.

  “You sleeping?” she asked suddenly, and I picked up a hint of tears in her voice. “I can’t sleep. Please come down here and lie with me; I need cuddling.”

  I wanted to say no, but how could I refuse her some comforting? I climbed down from the top bunk and slid under the covers with her. She was crying softly as I embraced her, and she clung to me with a kind of erotic despair. It took all my willpower to hold her yet not get sucked into a sexual vortex.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t I turn you on?” Julie murmured.

  “Too much; that’s the trouble,” I said through clenched teeth, feeling the bare skin of her belly burning against mine. “Please don’t—”

  “What?”

  “You know. ‘Seduce’ me.…”

  Julie chuckled low in her throat. “Poor old Thibodeau,” she said. But she drew back a little, putting a small space between our bodies, and I was grateful.

  However, as we drove toward Eureka on a hot fall day, Julie invited me to join her in a naked swim in the Pacific. The water looked delicious, but I refused. Her frank desire made me nervous. I felt like a chocolate addict in a candy store who’s been told that all the goodies are poisonous.

  When we finally got to Sacramento and searched the records, we could not discover the whereabouts of her son. Julie was really downcast, and for a while she retreated into her shell, curling up into a small space to contain her hurt. However, during the ride back to Los Angeles she suggested we share a motel room and get it on.

  “I can’t do this, Julie,” I insisted. “I’m real sorry.”

  “Don’t be a drag,” she countered. “What harm’s a little comfort-sex going to do to your immortal soul?”

  “If I take one step down that slippery slope…,” I replied. She was annoyed with me, I saw, but I knew I had to hang on. I had too much to lose.

  At nightfall, halfway down the Central Valley, we stopped for burgers, which we ate in the car. Before I knew it, we were kissing, and Julie was trying to undo my belt.

  “I just can’t do this,” I panted, trying to pull away. The mixture of her neediness and my horniness was almost too much to resist. I could see David’s face watching me, shaking his head in despair. With a surge of determination that astonished me, I managed to disengage and push Julie gently away.

  For me, that decisive act was a huge victory. I was exhilarated. I found I had a new power to resist my impulses, to fight against my carnal nature. It may sound a bit pompous, but the gut thing was, I discovered that I was no longer a totally helpless victim of every sexual urge that stirred my blood. Whether for spiritual reasons or not, it mattered to me to be able to discriminate between one kind of appetite and another, between knee-jerk self-indulgence and the power to refuse.

  When I got back to Pomona—chastity preserved—I found my mother there, as we had arranged. She was making her annual visit home from Greece, and I’d asked her to meet me in Pomona. I preferred to see Balenda in Los Angeles rather than Waco, because I really did not want her nosing around Mount Carmel. I suspected she’d be appalled by the place, by its primitive conditions and its patriarchal structure. To be frank, I didn’t want to subject my life to her scrutiny right then.

  During the months I’d been living at Mount Carmel we’d chatted on the phone many times. Often, I had David talk to her, using him as a screen between us. David tried to explain the Seals to Balenda, but she usually cut him off. “I get uncomfortable with that stuff,” she told me. “Does this man really claim to be this ‘Lamb’ character?”

  I left such questions hanging, and when my mother pressed for a visit, I suggested she join Julie and me in Pomona. I think that, former hippie that she is, Balenda enjoyed the easygoing, music-heavy scene in the Rock House. She got on well with Julie and comforted her for the failure to find her son. If you let her, my mom can be wonderfully soothing.

  In a letter I’d recently written her, while she was still on her Greek island, I’d tried to explain what was happening to me in Mount Carmel, to correct her impression that I had been captured by some weird “faith.”

  “There’s a difference between living by ‘faith’ and living by ‘knowledge,’” I wrote. “I much prefer the latter. The Seals are deep and much to the contrary of organized religion as we know it. It’s a lot clearer than some jive-ass preacher telling me about heaven and hell.

  “I’ve always wondered and made a pact with my heart that if I’d ever know the will of God, not a bullshit God but a real truth, I’d go with it. You are probably the only person in my entire family that ever really, I mean really, believed in me, and I want you to know that I’m now more in touch with the real David Thibodeau, the child, than ever before. I will stand up for what I believe in, at any cost!”

  My mother hadn’t been convinced. In a letter I later found, written to her father, my grandfather, during the siege, she said: “The mind control practice of Koresh is very skilled and he has succeeded in instilling extreme paranoia in his devotees.”

  “Take care, Davey, don’t get in over your head,” she said, hugging me hard as we said goodbye at Los Angeles Airport. “One of these days I’ll definitely come to Waco and corner your Koresh in his lair!”

  God, I hope not, I said silently, with a secret shudder.

  Back in Waco, David asked me, with transparent casualness: “I hope everything went well?”

  “Did my best,” I muttered, avoiding his eye.

  “You don’t have to say anything about it,” David said, but I sensed he already grasped how close I’d come to lapsing from virtue.

  I guess David knew I was bound to finally fall to temptation, and he was right.

  A few weeks after I got back from Los Angeles, I went to a bar in Waco one night with David and a few other guys. A gorgeous blonde walked in; our eyes met and locked. She came right up close to me, and I knew I was lost. Cheryl was wrapped in that fatal air of sadness tinged with madness I’ve alway found irresistible.

  Anyway, Cheryl accompanied a group of visitors David invited back to Mount Carmel to jam. He was always very hospitable; besides, he felt it was good policy to let some of the locals see where we lived and find out for themselves that we weren’t just a bunch of crazies. I thought I’d be safe from temptation on my home ground, but it turned out otherwise. Within a short time I found myself sitting in a parked car in the dark with Cheryl’s tongue down my throat. I tried to stop her, but she went down on me, and my resistance melted.

  It was the first orgasm I’d had in months, the first woman I’d had in more than a year, and the experience was shattering, in more ways than one; extreme pleasure and guilt in one heady cocktail. Cheryl went back inside while I sat in the dark, trying to make sense of what had happened.

  I’d not only betrayed myself; I’d sold out womanhood itself, the spiritual Shekinah, the mother image of all females. It was this betrayal that shook me most, the sense I’d trashed one of the deepest principles of David’s teaching—the feminine aspect of the message he brought us.

  In the following days I tried to talk to David about my fall from grace, but I just could not bring myself to confess. He probably knew, anyway, seeing right through me with those shrewd eyes.

  A few weeks later, David asked me to take Michele as my “wife.” He presented it as a “sham marriage,” to deflect the official investigators who were beginning to nose about Mount Carmel. Other men “married” David’s women, for more or less the same reason: Greg Summers and Aisha Gyarfas; Jeff Little and Nicole Gent; Cliff Sellors and Ro
byn Bunds. Some of these phony liaisons were arranged to keep the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at bay, as foreign men and women were overstaying their visas. Though there were no official documents, the visitors could pretend they were married if they were ever questioned.

  However, I suspected that in my case David had an extra agenda. By providing me with a wife, even in name only, he was binding me into a familial structure he hoped would bolster my weak nature. But marrying Michele meant I’d have to lie to my mother and my family, pretending that the marriage was real. I hated that, and I refused at first.

  David started pressuring me. “I need you to do this for me,” he insisted, and I finally consented.

  Our marriage was conducted without ceremony. One day, in a study session, David announced it, and that was that. In the event, I acquired an instant family. Serenity was around three years old; the twins, Chica and Little One, were barely six months old. Serenity, with her shy, quiet smile, was my favorite little girl in the community. “Tib-o-doe, what are you doing?” she’d say. I guess that, even at her age, she pegged me for a kid needing a firm maternal hand.

  “Serenity, call Thibodeau ‘Daddy,’” David teased her, but she refused. She knew who her father was.

  I liked Michele a lot, but she didn’t turn me on, and that was good. She was pleasant-faced and fair-haired like her sister, Rachel, David’s legal wife. She was a great mom, which was all she ever really wanted to be, and I respected her for that. Though she was only sixteen, she had a matron’s gravity. Having Serenity when she was fourteen hadn’t harmed her any, so far as I could see; but we never spoke about that.