Read Online A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill - Free Book Online

organization.”
    Then, according to Patrick, there are the “brainwashing” sessions, lasting up to thirty hours apiece. “Two people work on [the new subject] at all times without food and maybe a little water and maybe a little rest. Somebody is constantly in there working and telling you we are the Leader, we are God, and all this jazz. And when they get through with them, they are zombies. That’s all they are, complete zombies. They destroy their minds. They take their minds completely away. They have no will to think whatsoever. And all the things they are eager to do are what they are programmed by their leaders to do.”
    I asked Patrick if he felt he was engaged in a Holy War with the Jesus Freak groups. “I have nothing to do with religion,” he said. “These are not religious groups. These are more Satan groups than anything else. And I will stand behind this 100 percent. There is nothing religious about any of these groups. They … they’re more Satan and they know they are Satan. Because God does not lie and cheat and steal and even kill.…”
    “These are strong allegations,” I said.
    “You haven’t forgotten Manson,” Patrick countered sharply.
    “No, I haven’t forgotten Manson.”
    “These groups are the same. The Family looked on Manson. They thought he was God. All of these groups are
exactly
the same as Manson. Tony and Susan and all the rest of them are exactly like the Manson Family. Only thing is: they’re worse. They’re more dangerous than Manson. He had a small Family. But these groups—Tony and Susan—have five hundred or six hundred people, and they’re better organized. They’re more dangerous than Manson. These groups would do anything. Believe us.…”
    Patrick’s charges strained my credulity, and I wasn’t about to believe much of what he said without documentation. He said he could prove his allegations, but—and here he gave me a squinty-eyed suspicious look, as if I might be a devious Christian spy—he wasn’t going to release the information to me.
    I told him of my plans to infiltrate the Foundation and suggested that we talk at a later date. Patrick agreed but expressed grave concern for my safety. William Rambur, father of Kay “Comfort” Rambur, presently living in parts unknown with the Children of God, a militant Christian organization, told me that I was dealing with perhaps “the most vicious of the California sects.”
    “Watch out for your mind,” he cautioned, adding that the brainwashing techniques used by the Alamos could be as fearsomely effective as those used against American POWs by the Chinese Communists during the Korean War.
    “We’ve lost contact with many of the people who have gone up there,” he said softly.
    “Are you suggesting murder,” I asked.
    “We’ve lost contact with them. They haven’t called us. We can’t reach them. All I’m saying is that we’ve lost contact.”
    So, during the Holy Hours of Good Friday, when Christians commemorate the agony and death of Christ on the cross—when the sky darkened above Golgotha and the earth shook—a Volkswagen containing three journalists was moving east out of Saugus, toward the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation. The town itself is not more than a few stores and a classic
High Noon
railway station. The Foundation is another ten miles up into the rocky hills, past the beer and burger roadhouses, past the tough-looking country music bars, past the auto graveyards.
    It was
Grapes of Wrath
country, home of the thirties migration that didn’t make it to the Promised Land. It is a hot and tired land on the fringes of the Mojave, and it attracts failed cars: Corvairs and Edsels and Falcons haunt these holy roads. People in trailers own their own land, which they share with rattlesnakes and scorpions. Great steel pylonscarrying high-tension wires march two by two across the arid hills.
    I experienced a definite tightening of the sphincters as we neared the