He wanted me to appreciate the funny part of it?the triumph of the trash paid for by dope that the Bastards needed because their miserable money-grubbing lives and their dead god couldn’t give them anything to live for, no decent food, no decent air or water, their heads full of TV crap concocted by Jews, no decent sex, their manhood dried up by the gray lives they had to lead to make the money they thought they need to buy the garbage the Jews and the faggots told them they had to have to be men…and on and on like this it must have been hours, and it made perfect sense to me as an explanation of the shittiness of the world although to be frank I had kind of lost focus when he mentioned decent sex. Although you might have thought that given my experiences in that line I would’ve been off the whole thing but you would’ve been dead wrong there because you know while all of that was going on from age nine I had only one thought in my head that I was holding on for someone who would make it all turn out right who would redeem my fouled body with blazing passion and wipe the stains away, redemption through sex a common American trope and I did not need any Jews or faggots to put it there either it is in the air of my native land.
I finished eating and he was still talking away, few are made for independence it is the privilege of the strong, Nietzsche, oh, my, could he wail on Nietzsche, pages of it in his head, his gospel, him and the two Toms, Jefferson and Paine, and he was still talking as I took my bowl and cup to the sink and washed and still talking when I turned around and he only ran down a little when I ripped my T-shirt off and yanked down my pants so I was jaybird naked and jumped up on him wrapping my legs around him and grabbing his still talking mouth with my mouth, but he shut up for a while after that and I made him fuck me on the cold enamel of the kitchen table.
As I reflect now I have to say that in all the time I was with him he never said he loved me nor did we exchange many words of tenderness. We lived with each other like fierce beasts an occasional snarl a cuff of the paw and then all submerged and forgotten in blazing sex. I believe many people live in this way and some of them write songs about how great it is and I thought it was great too I thought that was what lovewas. I love him still. If he walked through the door right now I might give it all up and follow him, I can’t be sure, my faith is so weak really it needs a bodyguard of saints. God will judge not me.
The next morning I got the tour. Bailey’s Knob was not a commune or even much of a community. It was a company town, Orne being a CEO straight out of Ayn Rand and the business was the growing of high-grade marijuana. I guess that the people who lived there more or less believed what Orne believed about the government, they were all some kind of survivalist type of person, but I never saw much organization aside from the guard roster, which everyone accepted as a business necessity. It wasn’t a Christian Identity center or any other kind of center and I doubt whether any of the people I met knew who Nietzsche was or cared. They were all lanky, pale people with light hair and tin-pail eyes, the children and grandchildren of miners tossed off their land by the strip mines or unemployed by the deep mines closing down. They had a grudge sure enough and guns and they weren’t going to send their kids to the town schools where they’d learn to despise who they were, like I had. They had no use for the kind of America they saw on TV, they didn’t understand it and didn’t want to. Not big fans of diversity but not exactly fascists either because while they respected Orne there was no cult of personality going on that I could see. They mainly wanted to be let alone, and if Orne gave them the opportunity to support themselves and their families they’d give him a wary loyalty and most of them believed that the world was really going to crash just like Orne said, or maybe they were just hoping it would and didn’t want to be left behind. The Foys, it turned out, were originally mountain people from around here. Most of them had lit out for north Florida and become the depraved tribe I had grown up with but some of them stuck, and Orne had come back and with money that came from no one knew where, had bought a whole mountain’s worth of busted coal mines and ruined streams and piles of spoil and started his business.
The heart of the operation was Caledonia Number Three, which was the name of his coal mine, in a gallery two hundred feet down inside the mountain. We took a cage elevator down, and it was not dark as a dungeon at all but full of blazing light from Gro-Lux lamps in long rows shining down on tables covered with long rubber tubs in which grew dense green marijuana plants over eight thousand of them at various stages from seedlings to harvest-ready. A team of women was moving up and down the line, tending plants, fertilizing from shoulder tanks, pinching buds into plastic pails, snipping and trimming. Orne said they regularly tested different plants for yield, part of the breeding program. Then we went to the processing center in a side adit where some other people men and women and young girls were stripping the buds from harvested plants and tossing the leaves and stems into a hopper, for later chopping and processing into low-grade weed and some were compressing buds into bricks with a hydraulic rammer. They wore masks so they could remember what they were there for and not work the whole day stoned from the fine intoxicating dust that hung yellow-green in the air and coated every surface. I got a buzz from five minutes in the place.
They had a shipping area too where they packed the bricks in shrink-wrap and loaded them into cartons. Orne moved bulk around the country in regular trucks and private planes just like UPS. He had a computerized billing system and inventory control. As a cover operation he bought crafts?dolls and quilts and rag rugs?from local women and shipped those out to mail-order. It explained the boxes going out air freight and washed the dope money.
He was moving tons of the stuff right out in the open like that and never a sniff from the cops, because according to him the cops and the DEA were set up to catch dummies really, not smart people like Orne or Kaczynski the Unabomber, a local hero, unless they’re betrayed by someone close to them. In another gallery of the mine he had the armory and we took a look at that too. He had every kind of weapon, pistols, rifles, machine guns, mines, rocket launchers, boxes of shells and ammunition, plus other military hardware like radios and generators and in another room stores of food and water for when the nuclear destruction came and they had to all sit it out down in the deeper tunnels where the radiation couldn’t follow. The electricity to run the place they generated from methane that came from a digester fed on hog manure from North Carolina and he also had a little steam generator that ran off of coal, but that wasn’t hooked up yet. We cooked with the methane too.