The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures (Paperback)

We drove up a rough driveway, through a pine forest, past a sign saying ‘Whites Only’, into a clearing with a church and a guard tower and scattered mobile homes. The walls of the pastor’s office were lined with racist leaflets in metal holders. Cold and cluttered, it was like the office of an underfunded charitable organization, albeit one dedicated to the eradication of world Jewry. A pair of German shepherds called Hans and Fritz prowled around. There was a stack of flyers with Adolf Hitler wearing a Santa Claus hat.
Butler wanted a moment to open the morning mail, so Jerry offered to take me on a tour of the rest of the compound. Icicles hung from the eaves. A sign said, ‘God has a plan for homosexuals. AIDS is the beginning.’ The church itself was a perfect combination of mildness and menace, like a village chapel, with pews and a piano and stained glass, but with swastikas on the altar and the wall. ‘There’s no armed guards or anything,’ Jerry said, as though I should be able to see for myself how normal this all was. ‘Anybody who’s white is welcome.’
We went up a ladder into the guard tower, our feet clomping on the wooden boards. And there, as we stood looking out on miles of white wilderness, me feeling as though I was at the far end of the earth, a strange moral antipodes where Hitler stood in for Father Christmas and the halls were decked with swastikas, Jerry announced his great fondness for the TV programme, Are You Being Served?. This struck me as surprising on many levels – that an American neo-Nazi should have heard of a relatively obscure British sitcom from the seventies, that he should have enjoyed its broad sexual innuendo-based comedy, that he should have thought it important enough to mention at just that moment, in the Aryan Nations’ guard tower, on the heels of a particularly nasty racist rant.
For a few minutes, we talked about some of the characters. Jerry mentioned liking Mrs Slocombe, the bawdy old saleswoman in the lingerie department who made frequent references to her pussy. I asked him what he thought of Mr. Humphries, an effeminate sales assistant whose catchphrase ‘I’m free’ relied for its humour on the implication that he might be available for gay sex. Perhaps sensing this didn’t sit well with the official Aryan Nations policy on homosexuality, Jerry looked confused for a moment, then said he thought he was ‘disgusting’. In a playful mood, I asked Jerry to say Mr. Humphries’ catchphrase, and the conversation ended where it started, with Jerry saying, ‘But I’m not free! Because this country’s in bondage to the Jews!’……

One morning in April, I packed my last few things into the loft as a taxi waited to take me to the airport. I had a bag with a few clothes and a list of names and not much else. My plan, such as it was, was to buy a second-hand car in Las Vegas, and work outwards from there; and it was several hours later, somewhere up above the American Mid-West, that two thoughts formed in my mind. The first had to do with the nature of weirdness. I realized that the main quality uniting my subjects, be they porn performers, neo-Nazis, or UFO believers, was their alienness to me specifically; and that my long years of interest in their beliefs was evidence that I – in however small a way – must share those beliefs. I wondered whether taken together the weird mores of the people I’d been covering all these years might represent a negative version of myself – a shadowmap of my own most secret nature.
The second thought was about the Weirdness Map I’d made in London. In my rush to get the last things into storage, I’d left it tacked up on the wall of my study; and I imagined it there, the sole item left in that empty house, a rendering in miniature of the landscape I was flying into… --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.