Koresh, page 5
His bandmates kept at him. He’d be rehearsing with the band or just hanging out at the local roller rink and they’d be like, “Hey, man, you want to try this?” Holding out a joint.
“No thanks.”
“So what, man, aren’t you cool?”
“You know I’m cool. I mean, whose jams are you listening to?”
“Well, man, if you, if you smoked some of this, you’d really play good guitar.”
Now he needed to smoke to play guitar? Vernon thought that was some BS. “Man, there’s gotta be something else,” he thought. “I’m just not like these dudes.”
He just couldn’t fit in all the way. He wasn’t rough and tough enough to be a jock. He had small hands with short little fingers, not a football player’s mitts. They made him fast on a guitar, but, even in that world, he wasn’t druggy enough to become a real rocker. And he sure wasn’t smart enough to pull good grades.
It was a lonely feeling, but sometimes it was a good feeling, too. He wasn’t going to be just another North Texas redneck.
Two years after arriving at Erline’s, his grandmother told him he had to leave. His grandfather, Vernon Clark, didn’t want him around anymore.
It could hardly have been a surprise. Grandpa Clark had never relented on his distaste for his grandson. But the fact that his own kin didn’t want him around hurt Vernon terribly.
He took down the rock posters and unplugged the black light. His little group of friends dispersed.
Vernon was seventeen now, almost ready to set out on his own. Before he did, he decided it was time to meet his real dad, Bobby Howell. He didn’t know anything about the man. He couldn’t recall a single memory from his childhood. Vernon couldn’t even tell you what the guy looked like.
He drove to Houston and found a phone book of the city. He turned to the H’s and started calling every Howell in the directory. After a few “No’s,” someone got on the line that knew his dad. They told Vernon where to find him.
Vernon called ahead, then drove to the house. The family had been told he was coming and had arranged for all Bobby’s children to be there to meet their long-lost half brother.
Vernon pulled up in his pickup truck. He got out of the car and there was this dark-haired man standing a few yards away. It was Bobby Howell. Vernon walked toward him and Bobby held his arms open and Vernon walked into a hug. Bobby’s mother, Jean Holub, who’d sang to Vernon when he was a baby, hugged him, too.
He and Bobby went inside the house. People were buzzing around them, cousins angling to get a look at his face. But Vernon just wanted to talk to Bobby.
He asked his father what he did for a living and Bobby said he did carpentry and was a mechanic. Vernon was struck by that. “I know how to do carpenter work. It was just natural. And I am a mechanic, and that came natural, too. Now I know that I got it from you.”
Bobby said sure, that sounds right.
The only off moment came when Vernon started talking about God. Bobby nixed that. “I don’t want to talk religion,” he said. Vernon might have gotten his woodworking skills from his father, but the Jesus thing was his and his alone.
By the time he pulled away in his truck, he was filled with feelings of kinship and belonging. It had been a wonderful day.
The bond didn’t take, however. Vernon rarely saw his father again after that.
6
Vernon and Linda
IN 1976, SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Vernon landed a construction job. He’d moved back in with his parents after Erline kicked him out and relations between Vernon and his parents had improved enough for Bonnie to buy him a brand-new pickup, a black Silverado with red velour interior. Vernon stocked it with cassettes—Van Halen, Aerosmith, Nugent.
The good vibes didn’t last. One afternoon, Vernon was off work. He decided to take a nap in the house. While he was asleep, the mailman came with a letter. It was from the school district. Vernon’s little brother Roger was failing his classes, not for the first time.
Roy, who’d been drinking heavily, read the letter and flew into a rage. He found Roger in the garage, whipped off his leather belt, and began beating his son with it. Vernon woke up to his brother’s screams. He dashed out to the garage and saw Roy tearing into Roger.
Vernon had seen abuse almost since he was born, a long line of “country type” men beating on him and his loved ones. He’d never fought back, until now. He hauled off and punched Roy. It was an archetypal moment: the son finally confronting the violent father. Vernon rarely talked about what happened that day, but he would often preach against what he’d witnessed. “Don’t ever let me ever catch any parent disciplining their kids in anger,” he told his followers more than once.
It was a rule he would break again and again.
Roy was furious that Vernon had hit him, but he and Bonnie stopped short of kicking their son out. Regardless, Vernon was slowly becoming more independent of his parents. He had money of his own coming in. Texas was in another one of its oil booms, and Vernon was riding the wave.
His job involved putting up Sheetrock, painting, doing panel mold, pouring cement. He didn’t dig it. Pouring slabs or manning a jackhammer was grunt work. But he did like putting up the frame, and especially the trim work, really putting your touch on a house. It was a good feeling when you locked out the thing and knew some family would be moving in. He felt like a craftsman.
During his off-hours, he’d bring his guitar and his amp to a mobile home park where he knew a girl, Debbie Owens. She was really into him, he could tell. He started shredding some riffs from his favorite songs, even some Clapton. Kids at the pool nodded their heads to the music and others came up and just watched. It was like a little concert.
The music hypnotized Vernon with its possibilities. It had sex in it, and freedom, unlimited freedom, exaltation. Vernon closed his eyes and the world would collapse itself into the guitar lines. He only had to hear a song once or twice on the radio or on a stereo before it was locked in his head. The breaks, the solos, everything. It wasn’t something a lot of teenaged musicians could do.
If he blew a note, he’d get down on himself. Maybe it went back to that show-and-tell music show in sixth grade, but he wanted the chord changes to be perfect. Vernon wanted to be perfect.
But in striving to become the next Clapton, Vernon ran into some problems. Sometimes, he’d be playing, going all the way down into a riff, and suddenly he’d stop. A good rock song made you feel like you could have everything it promised. Vernon wanted to be famous, he wanted to be adored, he craved sex with groupies (even as he struggled to suppress those desires). But at the same time, he felt that even dreaming about them was like waving at the devil.
Vernon would stop playing and jerk the guitar strap right off his shoulder. He’d take the guitar off and throw it to the ground. It freaked people out. They thought he’d gotten electrocuted or something. But the real reason was that Vernon had felt Satan worming his way into his mind.
When the music felt the best to him, Vernon told his friends, that’s when evil was close.
One night Vernon went to the arcade with some friends. He spent the evening playing foosball, minding his own business.
After a few hours, a girl he knew a little, Linda, came up and said hello. Vernon made small talk and then Linda asked him to drive her home. Linda was fifteen and didn’t have her license yet. She lived in Richardson. She’d been hanging out with a couple of nerds and it seemed she’d gotten tired of them.
They talked on the way. Vernon asked how her friends were. She said, “I haven’t seen anyone in months.”
“Well, goodness, don’t anybody come and see you?” Vernon asked.
“Not since I moved in with my dad.”
“Well, if you ever need a ride up to Mars or some other place, just give me a call and I’ll pick you up.”
After they arrived at Linda’s house, she invited him inside to talk. Vernon said he’d like to say hello to her dad—he knew him a little bit—and so he went in.
Her dad wasn’t up. “Look, I better get out of here,” Vernon said. Linda told him, stay awhile, we can talk, so he did. But the talking led to kissing and soon they were going at it. There should be a law against it, Vernon thought afterward. But it’s just one of those times when a good man falls.
Driving home that night, Vernon’s mind was going a mile a minute. “My God, here I am, this big religious guy who’s got all his stuff together,” he thought to himself. “I don’t do things like this, I’m not some Mr. Cool looking to score. How could I fall into something like this?”
He told himself it would never happen again. He went out to Linda’s the next day to apologize. But it was like a bad comedy. He got out there, they got to talking, pretty soon they were in bed going at it again.
Vernon had always hated when his music buddies talked about women, how they divvied them up into boobs and butts and lips, then fantasized about sleeping with them. It turned him off, a reaction he always chalked up to his own piety.
With Linda, his defenses faltered. Clearly, Vernon wanted to have sex with young women; he did it with Linda every chance he got. But afterward, he let himself off the hook. His animal desires had taken over, he told himself, but his heart was still pure.
His earlier disgust at his friends now looked more like jealousy than anything else. Vernon didn’t just hate when a specific girl he liked slept with one of his friends; he hated when any girl slept with anyone who wasn’t him.
The narcissism that had flashed out here and there through his childhood—his insistence that God was speaking to him, the refusal to back down to teachers, his perfectionism on the guitar—now came fully out into the open. When he saw others hooking up, his first question was: Why isn’t she interested in me?
Vernon had to get away from the temptation. He left town.
After a few months, he returned. One day, the phone rang. It was Linda.
“How’d you get my number?” he said.
“Oh, I have ways.”
He asked her why she was calling.
“I’m in trouble. I’m pregnant.”
It knocked him backward. A terrible fear came over him. He felt like the walls of the kitchen were closing in.
“I’m sterile,” he blurted out. It was a line he’d heard in a movie once.
There was silence on the other line.
“Oh. I see,” Linda said finally, her voice so sweet, childlike. “Okay, I’m sorry, then.”
Vernon heard a click on the other end. He put down the phone.
Vernon was upset. He prayed. “God, what’s going on?” he said. “Help me.” Me a father, he thought. It didn’t seem possible.
It was his childhood all over again. He was Bobby Howell and Linda was Bonnie. They were both about the same age as when his parents got together. And now he was thinking of abandoning his child, just like Bobby had with him.
As the weeks went by, though, his mood began to shift. The pregnancy wasn’t necessarily a disaster, he thought. To have a baby to raise and love and be loved by? It could be special. He could raise the child and make sure not to make the mistakes that were made with him.
He went back to the Bible and read the Scriptures that spoke of sex and marriage. He realized that sleeping with Linda wasn’t a sin after all. They’d lain with each other, which, as Vernon interpreted the scripture, made them a married couple in God’s eyes. If he could get Linda to be with him and to honor the marriage contract, everything would be fine.
Vernon couldn’t bear to be the bad guy. God had to sanctify his desires, no matter how deranged they were. In fact, the Bible records no verses that grant marital status to men and women who sleep together. Vernon was finding in the Bible what he wanted to find.
Soon, the Lord came to him in a dream. He told Vernon that he and Linda had to live together as husband and wife. Excited, Vernon hopped in his pickup and drove the hour and a half back to Richardson.
Before he got to her house, he pulled over, found a pay phone, and called Linda’s number. He couldn’t wait to give her the good news. They weren’t sinners; in fact, they were newlyweds!
Linda picked up. Vernon barely had a chance to ask her how she was before she blurted out that she’d had an abortion. “I had to,” she said.
Vernon felt his skin get hot.
“I’m really sorry about everything,” he told her. “I . . . I wish I could die.”
Guilt washed through him. I’m a murderer, he said to himself. He thought Linda was going to yell, tell him how much she hated him. But instead, she said, “I’d like to see you.”
Vernon drove over to her place and they talked. The two made up. Vernon started spending more and more time at the house, returning every chance he could get. He found Linda had a deep mind, a fact he’d almost missed by thinking of her as an object of his lust.
Within days, he realized that he was in love for the first time.
Linda’s dad let him stay at the house, up in Linda’s bedroom. The three of them got along famously. It was like he had his own family there in Richardson, Texas. He was doing construction all day, and then at night he’d come home to his little love nest with Linda. It was a bizarre arrangement, one that would have never passed muster in the Clark house where Vernon grew up. All Linda’s father asked was that Vernon respect his house and not have relations with his daughter.
Vernon agreed. But the temptation persisted. He found, despite praying on it, that he couldn’t control himself. He and Linda were getting it on right every time they looked at each other.
Linda got pregnant again. Her father found out and lost it. He ordered Vernon out of the house.
Vernon was ready to defy him. He went to see Linda, even after her father had forbidden it. But from the moment he saw her, he felt the electricity between them strangely altered.
Linda told him he was scaring her. He was too obsessive, ranting and raving about what God wanted. She said he should see someone, like a psychiatrist.
That really irked Vernon. There was mental illness in his family, something Vernon knew but was reluctant to talk about, taboo as it was in 1970s North Texas. When she was sixteen or seventeen, Bonnie’s sister Beverly had started showing signs of instability. She was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Then Bonnie’s niece started going strange and she got the same diagnosis. There were others who had succumbed to mental illness, one way or another. But, in his family, people didn’t see psychiatrists.
Vernon didn’t give up. He kept going by Linda’s house, telling her that God had told him she was to be his. The way he saw it, if God ordained it, it wasn’t Linda’s to decide.
Linda started avoiding him. She was afraid for herself and for the baby she was expecting. “Your love is the best love in the world,” she said in one of their last conversations, “but it’s like candy. Too much of it rots.”
Linda gave birth to a girl. She wouldn’t let Vernon see the baby, no matter how much he begged. Every time he tried, Linda’s father would tell him to go away. Linda would let Bonnie come by and hold the baby, but not Vernon.
It was like a hot piece of steel being put through his chest. A hard lesson in pain.
As the weeks went by, Vernon became more and more depressed. As a child, he’d been robbed of a father. Now he was going to be robbed of his daughter. The injustices were piling up.
He cried and cried whenever he thought about the little girl.
Vernon often understood theology through biography. He’d come to believe that the wrenching, bewildering things that happened to him were actually divine tests. His life was a prophetic storybook, and he was tasked with reading it correctly. When he started to feel extreme things, and to behave in extreme ways, he didn’t see it as a sign of psychological problems. It was, instead, the correct response to God’s challenges.
There was a grandiosity to his pain. It was special.
After Linda, children began to loom large in Vernon’s cosmology. He saw her rejection of him as another obstacle he had to overcome.
“The way you become one with God,” he told his followers later, “is by becoming one with God’s image, becoming one with your own glory. The way you love God is by loving yourself. The way you love yourself is by becoming one with one that is given to you of God, the woman . . . She anoints you. Your horn [your penis] is a symbol of your power, your power to be as God, to procreate . . . Then you have one, two, three, four, five, six, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred, a thousand, maybe two thousand, twenty thousand, maybe a million kids.”
“Now who is king?” he said. “You are.”
His first child had been hidden away from him. Soon he would vow to raise an army of them.
After Linda left him, Vernon was adrift, physically and spiritually. He’d lost his new family and had nowhere to go. He started living in his pickup. He was feeling increasingly distraught. He couldn’t eat and his bowels became so bound up that he wouldn’t go number two for days.
He started attending different churches near Tyler and asking the preachers for answers: “What should I do? Why am I so alone?” In his estimation, he got nothing back he could hold on to.
Sometimes he’d find a graveyard and pray there. He knelt among the tombstones and spoke to his Father. Maybe he’d given up on the living, maybe he thought about being dead himself.
There’s little doubt he was depressed. God seemed to have abandoned him and he had no idea why.
He landed a job with a lumber company in nearby Wylie, Texas. The owner’s son had just bought a brand-new El Camino. The kid had removed the motor out of the car and was looking to put something faster in there. Vernon told him he worked on hot rods and would help him install the new engine.
The two of them got friendly and the guy said, hey, why don’t you stay here at the lumberyard? There was a place he could use. Vernon moved out of his car and into the little room.
He continued his round of church visits, looking in on the Southern Baptists next. If you swung a dead cat in North Texas, you were bound to hit a Baptist, and Vernon thought they might have some good advice. He was having mood swings; one minute he thought he was God’s favorite, the next he was a no-account son of a bitch, scum who was so corrupt and wicked that he was constantly surprised God didn’t kill him on the spot.
