“I didn’t ask to be the leader—it just sort of happened that way, like gravity or centrifugal force, something that couldn’t be helped and was just understood. They believed in me, and their belief made me believe. The group became everything to me. When I wasn’t in the group, I was thinking about the group. They weren’t exactly my friends—and one of my regrets in life is that I’ve never had any close friends—but it’s hard to be a leader and a friend. It almost never works. I took the responsibility seriously, and I embraced modesty. I made myself obedient to the Lord. I was only going to follow God’s instructions. Of course, there’ve been killers who have said the same thing—we all know that now. But I trusted myself. I trusted I would hear God accurately. I knew about Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. The dangers of an arrogant leader who believes himself divinely inspired. But I knew I wasn’t going to be any kind of Jim Jones. Not even close. God would guide me.”
“Have any of you done the Jim Jones scenario?” Falstaff was standing again. Several of the men looked annoyed. The conversation must have hit a nerve in Falstaff—Daniel had never seen him look this agitated. No one responded. “Suicide as a social event—it’s almost unheard of. That was the charismatic power he had over these people. He abused them psychologically, blackmailed them, and still they revered him. Sometimes we underestimate how vulnerable people are.”
“But like I said,” Lenin continued, “I was no Jim Jones. There were vulnerable people in that group, troubled people. and every new member seemed to have a different kind of trouble. We had our alcoholics, our addicts, our thieves, wife beaters, gamblers, and adulterers. There were folks into pornography and all manner of sins of the flesh, and we had individuals who were just sad, almost too sad to live.
“I kept painting them this picture of the Heaven I wanted them to see. I wanted to convince them how wonderful it was going to be. The ultimate location! If they strayed, if they started veering into beliefs and speech that didn’t contribute to my vision of Heaven, then I’d tell them, ‘my Bible doesn’t say that. You must have gotten hold of the wrong Bible.’
“I didn’t try to cover up any of the hard truths. I talked about Noah, and all the people that had to die. I talked about Lot’s wife. They had to know that the stakes were high. Their immortal souls! The stakes don’t get much higher than that! This was serious business, and I had no tolerance when they weren’t serious about it.
“I’d give them verse after verse to say with me. I wanted to get the words embedded so far into their heads they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Bible verse and their own thoughts. ‘Repeat after me,’ I’d say, again and again, ‘repeat after me.’
“I convinced them all to tithe. Sometimes I shamed them into giving more than they planned to, and doing more. Maybe you don’t approve of that, and maybe you’re right. But I saw it as just winning more souls to Christ. Sometimes the ends do justify the means.”
“But it always comes down to the money, doesn’t it?” Some of the men were trying to get Falstaff to sit down but he appeared oblivious to them. “The church needs it to get their message out, to convert people to their way of thinking. The rich man needs it to shield himself from death, or so he thinks. My grandfather was a rich man; he could have prevented everything that happened to me. I don’t know, maybe he wanted me to learn my lesson. Rich people are all for poor people learning their lessons, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and all that. My grandfather was one of those people who make money even in the hard times. Like they say, ‘the rich get richer while the poor only get poorer,’ something like that. He was always on top. Perhaps he sent people to look for me, perhaps not. I would have been difficult to find.
“But so much could have been prevented if we’d all just agreed to get along with just a little less. If all of us had made that sacrifice—accepted a lower standard of living, fewer things, less expensive foods, a smaller footprint on the planet. Maybe we could have sustained things better. In the part of the city where I lived things had gotten pretty hopeless. There were just too many people and not enough good housing, not enough food. The New England summers had gotten hotter every year. Augusts were unbearable—it drove people crazy.
“The neighborhoods were full of strangers-immigrants from Mexico, South America, and down from New York. Of course they came because they thought they had to. People have to eat somehow. But if you don’t want people to be racists, don’t let them get into situations where they have to compete with people from another culture for food.”
“The money was for good works!” Lenin shouted. “Sometimes you have to feed the spirit while you feed the body, otherwise people forget what life is for. I was going to tell you about Malcolm before you interrupted me. One day the Reverend Philips brought Malcolm down to the basement and introduced me to him. He certainly looked troubled—his eyes buried in his face and never once did that young man look at me directly. The Reverend said, ‘I’m delivering our young Malcolm here into your care and to the ministrations of the group.’ What can I say? I took on Malcolm as part of my holy mission.
“I admit I didn’t like him. Oh, I tried to like him, but you’re never going to like everybody, now are you? Most of the time you don’t need to take care of that—God will take care of them, God will adjudicate, but sometimes it’s God’s will that you take action.”
Even the residents not part of their intimate little group had turned their heads to listen. Some had moved to closer bunks. Only Falstaff appeared nervous and restless. In the windows a red sky had fallen over the crumbling city. The distant shadows appeared smoky, on fire.
“… abandoned by his parents to wander the streets begging, the addiction, the aggressive theft and other crimes. Obviously this young man was in considerable pain. But some of the things he would say about God, Jesus, and religion! I started to think he actually might be some kind of demon sent to test me. So defiant. So unreasonable. Maybe God let him in the door just to test me. God has all kinds of tests—you never know when you’re going to be tested.
“‘A belief in God’s worse than heroin!’ He’d blurt out something like that right in the middle of a serious discussion. ‘More people have prostituted themselves in the name of Christianity than have ever whored for drugs!’ That kind of thing. It made some of the group furious. A couple even jumped out of their chairs and went after him. I had to break up more than a few fights, something I never expected to do in Bible study. Still, I kept telling the rest of them to have patience with ‘Brother Malcom,’ that his soul was wounded, but eventually we would win that soul for Christ and wouldn’t that be a triumph!”
“People would riot over the smallest thing.” Daniel turned his head. The voice—he recognized Falstaff’s voice—had come from the corner. He could see Bogart and a few others sitting there, listening. Perhaps they’d been turned off by Lenin’s religious rhetoric. Or perhaps they simply found Falstaff’s pre- or post- apocalyptic narrative more intriguing, or in fact, more relevant. Daniel moved closer so that he was between the two groups.
“The police rarely interfered. They generally stayed away from our part of the city—I suppose they found it too dangerous, and the local residents had too little power to influence them. The fire fighters still came—there were a large number of fires in those days, but I guess there are always fires—it’s one of the ways people vent their anger while still remaining largely anonymous. But in our neighborhood people didn’t shoot at the firefighters. It was a point of pride, I think.