The Call of the Weird Read online

  He said he’d spoken to Thor over the phone a couple of times but he stopped answering Thor’s calls because he kept getting into his head and causing his nose to bleed. Thor, he said, was a “reptilian shapeshifter” and had been sent to Hell. Or possibly he’d time-traveled and accidentally set up a “paradox,” erasing his own timestream. Either way, it wasn’t proving a fruitful line of inquiry.

  I had better luck with the organization Pat mentioned. The mysterious guild of technoshamans turned out to have a website, with pages of magical products for sale: “Aladdin’s lamps,” “spell books,” “ritual kits,” “all-purpose voodoo-doll kits.” It was like an Argos for budding Harry Potters. Thor’s fingerprints were all over it, phrases I’d heard him use: “warrior monks,” “mystery schools,” “grimoires.” There were several books previously credited to Thor that now appeared with his name taken off. There was also a whiff of Thor’s opportunism: Gas prices had recently gone up, and one of the websites was selling a disk that you could stick on to your car to improve its mileage.

  “We are an ancient yet futuristic mystery school. We were the builders of Atlantis and played an important part in the leadership of that society . . . I am sure you have hundreds of questions about the above facts. Of course you do. That is your slave mind talking, questioning the real. After all, you are programmed to buy into the created history of the ‘well’-educated professors, the men of letters and science . . . There is only one answer: FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT! . . . HACK AND CUT!! THIS IS THE ONLY WAY. Let the cowards fall away! LET THE FIGHTERS SHOW THE WAY!”

  I sent an email asking about Thor, and received a terse reply. It said: “Hello, Sorry, we have no info on this person. We are a new company that bought rights to some old products and publications. Thanks.”

  It was official: Thor did not want to speak to me.

  My original question had been answered. What do you do after you’ve been Lord Commander of the Earth Protectorate? Why, you found an ancient yet futuristic mystery school that helped build Atlantis and now sells voodoo dolls.

  Now what? Should I phone up? Should I pretend to be an interested customer? Should I stake out his building? Until now, I’d excused myself by imagining that Thor might actually want to get together and hang out. Not that I’d given it a great deal of thought, but I suppose I imagined meeting his family and loved ones and trying to put him in some kind of social context. I had a hunch that at some level he didn’t really believe that he’d killed ten aliens, but I wanted to find out for sure, or hear how he rationalized it. I wanted to meet his mother and say, “Do you really believe Thor killed ten aliens?” I wanted to find out his real name.

  But if he didn’t want to meet, where did that leave me?

  One morning in Las Vegas I drove to the address listed for Thor’s outfit. It was a soulless stretch of shopping plazas and franchise outlets on the west of the strip: I counted a Wendy’s, a McDonald’s, a 7-11, and a KFC, all within a block. The address in question turned out to be a “postal center” where he rented a mailbox.

  So I called a number on the website, putting on an American accent, and asked about the mileage disk.

  “Ah, yes,” said a voice. “You glue it on your gas tank. It works using energy rays. It changes the structure of the gas. It improves your gas mileage 20 to 40 percent. Costs one hundred and fortynine dollars.”

  It was definitely him. The same self-serious intonation, the tendency to overexplain. But speaking to him under false pretenses— deceiving someone for whom I basically felt affection—didn’t feel right, and I wasn’t sure how to get off the phone.

  “That sounds rather a lot,” I said, in my assured voice.

  “You can send money orders. You can also send cash registered.” Thor sounded ready to close the deal.

  “I don’t have a credit card at the moment,” I said, and rang off. A few weeks later, I called up as myself.

  The first few moments were a little awkward. I explained who I was, reminded him of the TV show we made. He sounded shaky, as though he knew he’d been found out.

  “Oh yes,” he said, recovering himself. “I remember. I’m sorry, I spaced out a little there . . . I’m not really active in that alien area any more. It just didn’t pan out for us as any kind of reality. So we’ve kind of stepped away from that . . . The major problem of our time is superillnesses. That’s where our emphasis is. There’s an amazing number of healing tools we’re trying to get to people.

  AIDS, chronic fatigue, cancer. Who really cares if we’re invaded by aliens, we’ll all be dead from diseases . . . ”

  I told him I’d seen websites for the Alien Resistance Movement still going on the Internet.

  “They’re all a bunch of goofball jerks with either Christian fanatical leanings or kids that want to play army. I contacted them and told them, look, we own that name and logo, that’s our organization. But it was going nowhere anyway. They’re comic-book characters shooting machine guns at the sky, which doesn’t even work. I think our threats are much greater from our politicians than from extraterrestrials.”

  This turned out to be Thor’s new theme: the disaster of the Bush presidency.

  “Quite frankly, I’ve come to sympathize with the aliens. If they need the human crud we have on this planet to propagate, they’re welcome to it. I just wish they’d start by abducting Adolf Bush and his cronies. The guy did not win the election. If he was a president in Central America we would have invaded by now . . . We’ve got body bags coming back from a no-win war where all the people hate us. He’s a stumblebum moron. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a clone because his chip ain’t working right.”

  He said he lived an hour or two outside Vegas, in Nevada, in “an isolated location,” still with Liz. He didn’t seem averse to meeting up. We made a plan to go for coffee in September. We spoke for an hour or so, mainly about politics, finding much to agree on. That I should find so much political common ground with a one-time alien hunter struck me as curious.

  At the end of the conversation, his tone changed a little. “You know,” he said, “I’m surprised at the number of sites you’re on with your show. I wish we could get on as many sites, heh heh heh.

  ” “Yes,” I said.

  “Interviews with you, talking about meeting the different characters. There were several different postings on our interview.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sometimes I spoke about the show—well, I think in some interviews I crossed the line.”

  “I liked your show. I watched it all the time when it was on Bravo.” He mentioned the wrestling episode. “You looked pretty scared when you were with those wrestlers and that psycho drill instructor. He really lost it with you.”

  “I may be wrong, but you changing your name, that wasn’t anything to do with me and the exposure you got on the show, was it?”

  “I don’t really want to be connected with that area. I’m trying to step away from that stuff. It loses me credibility. I can’t go in and talk to a biochemist if he says, ‘Oh, you’re the great alien hunter, ha ha ha!’”

  “Right.”

  “And I wasn’t in it to make money. We were a small operation. We were nobodies. If I’d wanted to get rich, I would have gone into the corporate world. But we had to make money to survive, and they were all products I believed in . . . ”

  “Sure.”

  “So I go by a different name now.”

  Then he asked if I would keep his new name to myself.

  In September I called back several times to see if Thor still wanted to get together for coffee. The calls all went to a machine. The message said: “Welcome! We’re unavailable at this time. Leave a name and number and we’ll get back to you when we can.” The startling thing was that the message, while recognizably Thor’s voice, was delivered in a fake English accent.

  On the last night of the UFO Congress at Laughlin, still suffering with food poisoning or whatever it was, I made my way down to the closing banquet. The seating was at
round tables, ten to a table. I spied Bob Short, in blue lamé shirt and matching shiny blue cummerbund, with a large pendant round his neck, obviously pleased because all the seats at his table were taken.

  Seated across from me was Richard Boylan, a New Age educator from Sacramento, who looked a little like a jolly Irish priest, red-faced and white-haired. I recognized his name from the Congress’s program of speakers. Being ill, I’d missed his lecture that day on “star kids”—“hybrid children” with “advanced abilities.” But after we’d eaten, he began testing the auras of some of those at our table to see if they might be star kids.

  “Normal people’s auras reach about a foot away from their bodies,” he said. “Starseed are about twelve feet.”

  He offered to test me. I was a little nervous, fairly certain that my own skepticism meant I wasn’t starseed and fearful that my lack of belief would show through. I stood twenty or so feet from Richard. He walked toward me with a pair of L-shaped dowsing rods in his hands. Suddenly, they splayed out, as though butting up against an invisible force field. “Hombre! What’s that? Fifteen feet?” he said. “Yours is the biggest yet!”

  When we sat down, he sketched out a vision of the society we star kids would one day create. Peaceful, just, egalitarian, environmentally sensitive. “Think of a society where everybody’s telepathic,” he said. “Imagine being a used-car salesman when everyone knows what you’re thinking.” I felt flattered to be a star kid. Though I had no doubt it was folderol (shortly afterwards Richard handed out business cards, explaining we could attend his seminars to develop our starseed potential: learn telekinesis and so on), my being included in the club inclined me to be charitable toward his unlikely vision. Later I thought how ironic it was that Richard should use the example of a used-car dealer, there amidst the mountebanks and latter-day snake-oil salesmen of the UFO world. But at the time, I didn’t think that. I was just happy to feel part of the team.

  How odd, I thought, that even though I don’t believe, it still feels nice to be included. What does that prove? I wondered. That even something untrue can produce an effect; that sometimes a con is also an act of kindness.

  2

  JJ MICHAELS

  The corridors outside Jim South’s World Modeling were clogged with porn performers. A closed casting call was in progress. For Jim’s stable of talent, it was a chance to schmooze with directors, producers, photographers.

  The director Henri Pachard was there, supposedly the real-life model for the Burt Reynolds character in Boogie Nights. Oyster-eyed behind thick glasses, a tasteful diamond in his ear, his hair was still bouffant. Looking good for sixty-five, I thought. I’d interviewed him eight years before. “Sure, you did the bondage thing,” he said. “No,” I said, “that wasn’t me.” Max Hardcore was there, the legendarily vile maven of degradation and rough sex, recognizable by his trademark cowboy hat. I’d interviewed him briefly, too. Real name Paul Little, he was sitting in his office with his cowboy boots on the desk, looking like the sheriff of Cock County. His door was open. No women were going in there, though. His reputation preceded him.

  Twelve directors in all. All men, all looking creepy to various degrees. I spotted myself reflected in a dark window. Lank-haired, unshaven, I looked creepy too.

  It was one of the pitfalls of being back in this world, I reflected, that you felt creepy. I’d had the same sensation—of being compromised and distracted by the images, of cutting a faintly ludicrous figure as a semi-serious journalist covering the porn industry—on my last visit seven years earlier.

  On that occasion, I’d been making a documentary about JJ Michaels, a young performer who was then new to the game. JJ was out now, working a straight job in Missouri. While I was here in the San Fernando Valley, California (the capital of the U.S. porn industry), I was keen to find out what I could about the business and how it had changed.

  Outside I’d been speaking to a farmboy from Georgia. His working name was Mac Turner. He was fresh-faced, twenty-one years old, brand new to porn. He looked like he’d walked off a production of Oklahoma!. “Sometimes I’ll work five days, sometimes I’ll work a couple. Which is why I’m here today, to meet some more people so I can try to work every day.” He used to manage a gym, but said it was “stressful and boring.” His grandparents raised him. They still didn’t know about his change of career.

  Jim Jr. was standing by, guarding the entrance to World Modeling with a clipboard, making sure no unaccredited producers wandered in—no scavengers or pimps. Jim Jr. was in his early twenties, the son of the boss and founder, Jim Sr. I’d met him before, too. The faces of the performers change, I thought, but the behind-thescenes people, they stayed the same.

  I asked what he knew about JJ.

  “Oh yeah, he was a nice guy,” Jim Jr. said. “He got married to an Australian girl named Astrid. Then they got divorced. Then he got married again. A girl from Russia, I think.”

  “Was he working a lot?”

  “Yeah, he was doing pretty good. He was working consistently.”

  The women were all shapes and sizes. Tall, short, busty, flat-chested. Raven-haired pale goth girls, bottle-blonde girls. Generally the older the woman, the bigger the bust, almost as though they were compensating for their age by shooting for more volume. The male performers were fewer—buffed and groomed in tight sleeveless T-shirts.

  The atmosphere was charged, a little giddy, like market day. I began chatting to the performers as they waited to be called into the offices of the producers. A Hispanic woman, mid-twenties, wearing bright red lipstick and a beige business suit, gave her name as Catalina. She’d been in the business four years, she said, and had done more than a hundred films with Max Hardcore. “I like his stuff because it’s very different and it stands out like a sore thumb in the industry. It’s my career. It’s not just fun and games.”

  A twenty-three-year-old Asian woman, Paris Waters, from Southern California, whose T-shirt bore the legend “I make my own money,” said she’d seen an ad in a newspaper. That was how Jim got many of his walk-ins. Using the time-honored bait-and-switch, his sign and his ads decorously said: “Figure Models Wanted.” Then, when you arrived for your appointment, he told you how much you could make if you had sex in a movie. “I went ahead anyway,’cause I’ll try anything once.”

  Holly Wellin, from Manchester, England. Eighteen years old. She was wearing white stiletto boots, a denim miniskirt, giggling. “I don’t know how many scenes, I’ve done loads,” she said. “I love it over’ere. The weather, the people, everything. It’s so different. It’s like a different culture.”

  I asked her to be a little more specific.

  “It’s like there’s loads of different fast-food places,” she said. “I actually had my butt torn a few weeks ago. But it’s like any job. You have good days and bad days.”

  Still thinking about this piece of wisdom, I wandered into a dark little office where a curly-haired, walrus-mustached man in his late fifties was sitting with two female performers—one a veteran named Anita Cannibal, who was on his sofa, the other an aspirant named Donielle Dare. Donielle Dare was stark naked in a desk chair. “Because it’s easier than putting my clothes on and taking them off again,” she explained—meaning for photographers and directors, I assume. Thirty-two, she’d grown up in the Central African Republic, the daughter of missionaries.

  The man was Bill Margold. An ex-performer and now the head of a support group for people who work in the industry, he describes himself as the “most knowledgeable person in the world about this business.” I’d interviewed him on my first visit, too, an encounter that stayed with me because, out of prankishness, and also to test his assertion that there was nothing intimate about the human genitals, I’d asked to see his and without much cajoling he’d taken out his penis and begun rubbing it. I’d thought the oddness of my request might have made an impression on him and that he might remember the incident and me, but no such luck.

  “Has the business changed muc
h?” I asked.

  “I think there’s less creativity,” Margold said. “There’s more attempt to shock than to arouse. They can’t really put the time into creating eroticism because, hell, most of them don’t know how to spell eroticism.”

  “We’re getting into circus tricks now,” Anita Cannibal said. “Who can stick what up their ass. It didn’t used to be like that.”

  “There’s no suspense left in sex any more,” Margold said. “It’s all just right in the face. This industry has choked on its own freedom. We found ourselves so free that we thought we could get away with anything. It reminds me of Rome at the end of the Empire, the worst excesses at the Coliseum . . . If Bush gets re-elected, the next four years in this business will give us a chance to grow up.”

  I told Bill about my book, that I was curious about JJ and what kind of dimple he had left on the waters of adult entertainment.

  “Little short kid?” Margold said. “Don’t know . . . ”

  “What happens to the performers? They just disappear and no one knows where they go to?”

  “They eventually grow weary of doing this. They sometimes get some external pressure on them not to do it. And they disappear into the real world. There are some people who stay, because they’re accepted into it, and they don’t want to leave. There’s no reason to go looking for these people. You don’t really want to find them. there’s no reason to dig them out of the anonymity they’ve escaped into.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t remember more about JJ. He made hundreds of films.”

  “A minor note in the history of this business,” Margold said, in a lordly way. “I don’t even remember what his last name was. Didn’t it start with an M? Or an L?”

  “Michaels.”

  “There wasn’t much there. He wasn’t a great stud. He just did his job. Plus he was short. Short guys don’t get a whole lot of attention.” Out in the corridor, the ranks of the performers were thinning. I bumped into a director named Robert Herrera. A soft-spoken Hispanic man, he said that according to the trade magazine Adult Video News, the porn business now produces four hundred films a week. “There’s too much product,” he said.