by Neil Strauss
The next day, I began sending solicitous e-mails to various doomsayers and survivalists, asking if I could spend a few hours with them as the year changed over. I promised to bring my own food, water, and emergency supplies, hoping that somehow this would convince them I was a believer.
I soon discovered that one of the difficulties in writing about people who think the world is going to end is that they instantly know you don’t believe them. Because if you did, you’d know there wouldn’t be anyone left the next day to read your article.
The first person I contacted was Thomas Chase, a writer and theorist who predicted that the millennium bug would cause a massive electrical crash, triggering a worldwide depression and the coming of the Antichrist. I wondered what kind of sacred and meaningful ritual he’d be performing to prepare for the terror of the apocalypse.
“I plan on going to Boston’s First Night celebration with my wife, Peg,” he responded. “I’ve usually gone every year for the last few years.”
What about preparing for the End Times? “I did stock up on some extra water,” he offered.
The prospect of spending New Year’s Eve on the Charles River, then going back to Chase’s house to drink water with his wife wasn’t exactly Pulitzer Prize material. So I decided to call Jack Van Impe, a televangelist who’d been preaching the apocalypse since before it was trendy. He’d been warning viewers regularly to prepare for the coming devastation of Y2K.
But when I asked Rev. John R. Lang, the executive director of his ministry, what Van Impe was doing to prepare, he told me their leader planned to “ring in the New Year” with Mrs. Van Impe and family at home watching television.
After four more calls with similar results, the whole Y2K doomsday thing began to look like a big hoax. Perhaps it was just simple economics: with tabloid readers and journalists (including me) clamoring for people who thought the world was going to end on January 1, 2000—after all, something significant should happen to commemorate such a lovely round number—scores of attention-hungry people arose to fulfill the demand. This was before the reality TV boom. There were fewer routes to national humiliation back then.
So, in an act of desperation, I decided to ignore Jo Thomas’s advice and contact the most dangerous group on the list.
Despite having a rockabilly singer for a leader, the House of Yahweh was not a house to fuck with.
An apocalyptic cult run by Yisrayl Hawkins (known as Buffalo Bill in his rockabilly days), the House of Yahweh had received a lot of heat after Waco because of its similarities to the Branch Davidians. As a result, it was being watched closely by the FBI’s antiterrorist Y2K task force.
Because its members are secretive to the point of paranoia—even posting armed guards around their forty-four-acre Texas compound—I dialed their bunker with some trepidation.
“Hello, how may I help you?” a woman’s melodious voice answered.
I was taken aback. She seemed friendly. “Is this the House of Yahweh?” I asked.
“It is,” she said warmly, professionally. “What extension may I transfer you to?”
She sounded like a law firm secretary. The only difference was, at this law firm it would be impossible to look people up by their last names: they had all changed their family name to Hawkins in honor of their leader.
“Do you have, like, a publicist?” I stammered. “Or maybe someone who sort of deals with the press?”
“One moment,” she sang into my ear. “Please hold for Shaul Hawkins.”
The great thing about real life is that it will always surprise you. Nothing ever turns out the way you expect. I suppose that’s why I write nonfiction. If this were a movie, the organization would already have traced my number, bugged my phone, and kidnapped my brother. Instead I was being transferred to the publicist and media relations executive for a death cult.
“I’m doing a story for the New York Times,” I told Shaul when he answered. “They’re sending reporters to different places to, um, ring in the New Year. And I wanted to see what you were doing.”
I’m the worst reporter, because I get nervous every time I talk to someone. Instead of sounding like a sharp, tough-minded journalist fighting for truth, I sounded like I was asking him out on a date.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” he responded.
I wasn’t surprised anymore.
He went on to explain that the group doesn’t believe in the year 2000. They believe in the Torah and follow the Hebrew calendar, in which the year is 5760. The only thing happening in the compound on New Year’s Eve, he said, would be their normal Friday Sabbath celebration.
He sounded like a nice guy, normal, someone I could hang out with. But then he continued. They always seem to do that.
“We do encourage people to store food, but not for the year 2000. After the Y2K fears don’t pan out, everyone is going to think the world is okay. But in the book of Isaiah, it talks about the earth being burned and no one left. The only way this is going to happen is with nuclear weapons.”
All right, now I was getting somewhere. At least they thought the world was going to end—maybe not on December 31, but sometime.
“It’s going to happen soon, and it’s going to be over the seven-year agreement that took place on the White House lawn between [Yitzhak] Rabin and [Yasser] Arafat,” he went on. “In the news, Russia and China met and told the U.S. to stick its nose out of their business. It’s a very small incident, but it could also lead to major upheavals and terrorist actions. Even Clinton was warning that we’re facing biological and chemical warfare and mentioned giving out gas masks.”
He paused for effect, then concluded: “There isn’t going to be any warning.”
“That makes sense,” I replied. Those words actually came out of my mouth. I’m a very empathic person. I tend to see a person’s point of view easily, even if he’s criminally insane. But it does seem to be a good way to make new friends, because moments later Shaul was inviting me to join the group on a pilgrimage to Israel.
“I’ll see if the paper will let me,” I said.
Why do I say these things?
I hung up and returned to my research. I had my heart set on a sleepover with a doomsday group. After all, New Year’s Eve had always been anticlimactic. The year before I’d been at a party in a studio apartment where I only knew one person. When midnight came, I just stood there like an idiot, weakly mouthing “Happy New Year!” to anyone who accidentally made eye contact with me. So the year 2000 promised to be extra anticlimactic—unless I could find someone who wasn’t just paying lip service to the apocalypse.
The solution came in the form of a follower of Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist and the Typhoid Mary of Y2K paranoia. Since 1998, after what he claimed were four thousand hours of research, he’d been warning that when the clock struck midnight, power plants, which run on preprogrammed computer chips supposedly unable to handle the changeover from 99 to 00, would shut down. This, he predicted, would lead to a domino effect of disasters and riots that could result in two billion deaths.
Though North and one of his predecessors, the survivalist pioneer Kurt Saxon, weren’t speaking to the media, I learned that a group of their followers had built a self-sufficient community called Prayer Lake in the hills outside Huntsville, Arkansas.
They believed that with faith alone they would weather the coming devastation. They also stockpiled some food, water, and emergency supplies in case they ran out of faith. Unlike other survivalists, they didn’t have guns or artillery. Rather than training to fight looters, they built additional homes and saved extra food to give potential robbers as a peace offering.
Thanks to the miracle of directory assistance, I found a phone number for Bob Rutz, who had come up with the idea for Prayer Lake. I imagined sitting in Rutz’s new house with his family, praying and waiting to see what happened at midnight. But of course he had other plans.
“There’s a countywide event at the local skating rink,” he told me. �
��We’ll be there skating, praying, and eating.”
Though Rutz was reluctant to talk to the press about Y2K for fear of being labeled a “crazy,” he spent the next half hour speaking with me about it anyway. “I believe it’s going to be very bad, but I’m not going to be very worried about it,” he said. “All I can do is have faith in God.”
President Clinton, Rutz believed, was planning to take complete control of the country by using the Y2K panic as an excuse to enact martial law.
“So many simultaneous things are fixing to happen,” he continued. “The Chinese have an agenda, the Iraqis want to wipe us off the map, the Russians have a use-it-or-lose-it mentality, and the Muslim terrorists want to destroy us. The other line of evidence I’m looking at is the amount of oil getting to your gas tank. I used to be an engineer for Fluor in the Persian Gulf, and I know those legacy computer systems. If we had three more years and a couple million dollars more, we still couldn’t get ready. All you can do is get to know the Lord better.”
I thought Rutz might be the one. Sure, he was going to a skating rink in Huntsville, but at least I’d get some interesting conspiracy theory, a handful of Scripture quotations, and a good headline like “The Last Skate.”
“If God tells you that you should be with us, then you may,” he finally said. “Come on over to the rink at six or seven in the evening. We’ll be together—whatever happens.”
He recommended a place to stay in town called the Faubus Motel, so I called and asked if they had any rooms available on December 31. “When the rollover comes,” the owner warned in a slow Southern drawl, “we’re not responsible if the utilities go out. You can’t get your money back or nothing like that.”
I asked if I should bring anything in case that happened.
“Well,” he replied, taking his time with each syllable, “I served in the Gulf War. And there’s something my commanding officer told me that I will now tell you: ‘A good soldier is always prepared.’”
The next day, I set the afternoon aside to prepare. I didn’t know of any survival supply stores in the neighborhood, so I went to a corner deli and bought a bag of beef jerky, a flashlight, and a bottle of water. Realistically, I doubted anything was going to happen, and even if it did, I knew Rutz had stocked up on extra provisions for looters. So all I had to do was start looting, and the treasure would be mine.
However, there was one last item I knew I’d need to bolster my credibility with Rutz. So I went to a bookstore and bought a Bible.
I still had two weeks until the New Year. And, despite my skepticism, the closer it approached, the more my heart tightened.
In the late nineties, Western civilization appeared to have advanced beyond religious wars, beyond genocide, beyond imperialism, beyond borders. The Cold War had ended, the euro had been introduced, America was experiencing the longest economic boom in its history, and the Internet and the mobile phone were turning the world into a neighborhood with few secrets.
The political philosopher Francis Fukuyama captured the spirit of the time best in his 1989 essay “The End of History.” “What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such,” he wrote. “That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
We are a plot-oriented species, in perpetual need of satisfying conclusions to our stories. Even the Bible skips ahead to offer the Book of Revelations as closure to Genesis. And so, one couldn’t help but wonder, if we truly were at the end of history, then what was going to happen next in the story of our civilization, our species, our planet? How would we end?
As Y2K drew closer, I began to get obsessed with those questions. When I talked to friends, all I could discuss was the millennium and what was going to occur. In my heart I knew everything would be fine, but in my head I imagined the worst. All the extremists I’d talked to were getting to me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but these were the first tremors of an earthquake that would eventually awaken the survivalist lying dormant in me—as well as in some of the most successful businessmen in the country, who would become unlikely allies in my obsessive quest. Perhaps we make fun of those we’re most scared of becoming.
Soon, it became impossible for me to think beyond December 31, to make any sort of plan after then, or even to write anything due after that date. I wanted to wait it out, skate with the survivalists, and hold my breath until the calendar year changed. Then I could exhale.
But then something unexpected happened: I received an invitation to the White House.
I’d mainly known Bianca Gilchrist through her answering machine messages. They were short, shrill, and sharp. She was strictly business-class. Her world revolved around her position and responsibilities as a publicist in the country music industry. So she’d call offering me an interview with Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton, and usually I’d take her up on those offers, because I liked the people she worked with.
I never would have guessed that each yes was to her a sign not just of a successful work call and a faithful execution of her responsibility to a client, but of a deepening connection to me, until, without even meeting me, she began to grow attracted to this black-ink byline in the New York Times. Unfortunately, I had a rule never to sleep with anyone in the music business—not out of any personal morality, but because I’d failed in all my previous attempts and it was just embarrassing.
So three days before the millennium, Bianca called.
“D’ya wanna go to the White House with Trisha and me?”
By Trisha, she meant country singer Trisha Yearwood, whose record label, MCA, she’d recently been hired to work at. “When would that be, exactly?” I asked.
“For that Millennium Concert at the Lincoln Memorial. There’s a party at the White House after and all.” She always talked like she was chewing gum between words. “They’re flying us there in a private jet. Ya don’t need to write about it. Just come as Trisha’s guest. It’ll be fun.”
“Shit, I’m supposed to go ice-skating with some guys who think the world’s going to end. Give me a day to figure things out and I’ll get right back to you.”
“Okay, but ya better hurry. I can invite anyone I want, y’know.”
And so began twenty-four hours of mental agony, because each option appealed to a different part of my personality. My philosophy on life is that until I see it proven otherwise, I only have one to live. Even if there’s a heaven or there’s reincarnation or our energy exists forever, there’s no telling whether our memories or our conscious mind will survive the trip. So I want to pack as much into this lifetime as I can. As big as the world is, I want to see it, do it, learn it, experience it all—as long as it doesn’t hurt me too much or others at all. And since I would only get to experience one millennial New Year’s Eve in this lifetime, I needed to decide whether I wanted to spend it in the seat of American power in Washington, DC or the seat of American paranoia in Huntsville.
Either way, if anything did happen, I couldn’t imagine two safer places to be.
In the end, I chose power over paranoia. The only complication was that, in the meantime, I’d realized Bianca wasn’t inviting me because she wanted press coverage. She wanted me. Accepting her invitation meant making a prostitute of myself.
And I didn’t have a problem doing that.
I rented a tuxedo and filled my suitcase with the provisions I’d originally bought for Huntsville: flashlight, granola bars, beef jerky, and, of course, the Holy Bible. For some reason I also packed a pair of binoculars. A good soldier is always prepared.
On the morning of December 30, Bianca picked me up and drove me to a private airstrip. She was short, heavyset, and slightly freckled, with stringy blond hair. Like many in the industry, she had a brittleness to her, as if in order to succeed in a man’s world she had to sacrifice some of the softness and submission
that serve as honey to men on a date but as weakness in an office.
We parked on the tarmac alongside the plane and walked onboard with our bags to find Yearwood in a foul mood because her boyfriend, Garth Brooks, wasn’t coming. When we arrived in DC, a limousine picked us up at the airport, dropped our bags at the Madison Hotel, and then took us to rehearsal at the Lincoln Memorial, where an enormous stage had been erected.
The main event was still a day away, and black-suited Secret Service men were already posted everywhere. Backstage, agents mingled with Luther Vandross, Tom Jones, Will Smith, Quincy Jones, Slash, and other celebrities. Several hundred feet above, sharpshooters perched atop the memorial aimed their weapons at us.
Watching the elaborate security procedures, it seemed like there was little difference between the fringe lunatics and the men in power. Each was fueled by paranoia about the other. While the radicals bunkered up in fear of the government, the government bunkered up in fear of the radicals.
“We’re wondering right now if the Y2K bug has already hit,” a White House employee told Yearwood. “The security clearance cards we use weren’t working today. And I heard the computers at one of the newspapers here crashed, and they had to lay it out by hand.”
“I think that’s a separate issue,” a voice interrupted. I looked over to see John McCain, who was running at the time for the Republican nomination in the 2000 presidential election. He was trailed by an eager, just-out-of-college assistant. Easily ingratiating himself into the conversation, McCain seemed more cavalier about the millennium than any of us. However, he had played his own part in the panic, introducing a bill to restrict lawsuits against technology companies for Y2K problems.
The longer the celebrities and politicians talked, the more they admitted their fears: of losing phone reception, of being trapped in DC, of being cut off from food and heat. Because they’d made no preparations, these mainstream role models were actually more nervous about a millennial apocalypse than the sham prophets and cult members, who had at least accepted their potential fate.