Boys in Gilded Cages Read online

  In his ManChild article, Faust said, “To ignore Hawthorn the way some people say you should ignore Westboro, is to ignore the dilapidation of an entire town. Redmond wants you to go away, to let him work in the dark. The sad thing is, America forgets easily. As Pat Robertson was a viable candidate for President, so could Harold Redmond. The only difference is, Redmond’s cunning enough to shun the spotlight when he needs to, and to manipulate it according to plans.” A ManChild commenter doubted his theory: “I’m not doubting the egotism of this fuckwad. All cult leaders are egotistical. But to say that a military funeral protestor holding up inflammatory signs…ripping a page straight out of the famewhore manual, is shunning the spotlight? It doesn’t add up.” Bobby responded, “His plan is more complicated than you can imagine. There are things I don’t understand. What you have to remember is that you are not dealing with someone who has a firm grip on reality. You have someone who thinks he can, and has the right, to create a reality all his own. Sometimes he makes sense, and seems at himself. During one of his episodes, though, he thinks he is God, though he’d never say that out loud. And the Bible says the Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “What people don’t get,” Bobby says, “is that this is not a cult, in the religious sense. They use that word but they don’t know what it means.”

  After all, the beliefs spouted by both churches can be found in black-and-white, right there in the Bible. One has to wonder if they aren’t turning more people away from Christianity, than they are attracting them. “Doesn’t matter,” Bobby Faust says. “It’s not about converting people. Redmond wants to get a good grip on the town of Hawthorn. That’s all he needs right now.” He seems to suggest that Redmond has a nefarious plan that reaches beyond Hawthorn. “I’m not saying that. I’m not giving credence to any conspiracy theories. I won’t give him that much credit,” Faust says. “I will go so far as this though: Westboro Baptist Church are universally hated. The Phelps family may be brainwashed, I don’t know, but that’s as far as it goes. Hawthorn Baptist Church is the centerpiece for an entire town. Redmond essentially controls an entire town’s economy, and has the affection of most people in town. In his mind, he owns them, and he’s well on his way. Westboro, as well-known as they are, can’t claim that. That’s not their goal.”

  “This could be a Kool-Aid-Nike situation, it could turn into that,” Faust says. “The thing is, Redmond’s erratic and no one knows exactly what comes next. And I can guarantee that hardly anyone in Hawthorn is even aware that anything’s going on…even now, if you were to ask them.”

  The disconnect between Bobby Faust’s vigilance and his hesitation to admit to a conspiracy, suggests that he’s still sorting this out for himself. He seems vacant; not in the sense that he’s a superficial man, but in the sense that everything inside of him has been drained. He’s 19, but unshaven, tired and with weary eyes, he could pass for years older.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” he says, “This whole thing has really sucked me dry. I’m exhausted.”

  The moment Bobby rejected Redmond’s “offer”, he regretted it. “I mean, fuck, at least I’d have a roof over my head,” Bobby says. “Sometimes I would gladly take anal probes or electroshock or whatever, over this,” he says, half-jokingly. “At least I’d get free food, even if they put lithium in the meat loaf.”

  It’s understandable that Bobby would second-guess himself. Since the incident, he says, he’s been mostly homeless. “Whenever I talk to T.V. media, I usually try to travel to them and ask for accomodations.”

  ManChild New York disclosed their compensation to Bobby when the article was posted, though they didn’t say what they offered Bobby. “First class tickets to New York, and a free week in an extended stay in Brooklyn for writing the article, then first class tickets to Lambert Airport and another week in an extended stay, in exchange for a photo op of me ‘confronting’ Redmond with a megaphone outside a Lady GaGa concert in St. Louis,” Faust claims. “I could have done the whole thing from where I was, but I decided to make demands.” Why did they send him to Saint Louis, I ask. “I think they thought it was close to where I lived. Really, I had never been to St. Louis before.” As for his confrontation with Redmond, “Westboro was there too. No one cared about Hawthorn Baptist Church, and I doubt Redmond even heard me, there was so much commotion.” And then, “that video they made as part of the article was kind of bullshit.”

  Bobby’s defection wasn’t without commotion within the community, however. Since he has left, he says, he has received a variety of correspondence. “Ironically, mostly via e-mail,” he says, letting himself grin. “Everything from e-mails saying ‘you have hurt this community more than you will ever know’, to a voice mail from Eric’s aunt Tina saying ‘I’m glad you got out when you did, that town would eat a nice boy like you alive,’ to death threats,” Faust says, frighteningly matter-of-fact. “In all, I’ve gotten about ten reach-outs from people in the community.” Which was surprising, he says, considering how much of the community has chosen to isolate themselves from the media. “Of course, I never reply, so they may just be referring to my leaving, I’m not sure.” When I asked if Darrin was one of those people who reached out to him, Faust said simply, “I don’t know.”

  To Bobby’s friends and family, his resignation, if you prefer to label it that, from the Church clearly felt like abandonment. The elderly citizens and relatives were particularly taken aback. “My Great Aunt is someone I miss very much,” Bobby says. “She died while I was away, and we loved each other very much. I don’t feel that way about a lot of family members, but she was very pure. I hope that if there’s an afterlife, she forgives me.”

  “I would crash on couches here and there, and I’d still get calls from Redmond for the first few weeks, begging me to come back,” Bobby says. “That’s what he does. He’s nice at first, then he’ll make himself out to be the victim. The longer you ignore him, the crazier he gets. By the end of it, he was telling me about my Great Aunt asking where I was, telling me that I hurt her, and calling me a traitor to my community.” He again holds back tears. “It’s bullshit. Complete nonsense. I have to believe he’s lying.”

  This past February, I met Faust in New York. He was in the midst of a self-imposed media blitz. “I barely remember meeting you, I met so many assholes in suits,” Bobby says at a later meeting, laughing. “I do remember you, though, because you were dressed kinda like me—like a bum.” We met in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. He sat at a table in a lonely corner, his sunglasses on, as if he were either hung over or in hiding. He is a good-looking kid, with a chin-strap beard, unkempt hair tamed by a Farm-Tek baseball cap, incandescent grey eyes, and a prominent scar over his right eye, interrupting his wild brow. At the time, he seemed jittery but tired, almost strung-out on energy, but his droopy mouth suggested he was severely dopamine-starved.

  He was approaching 19, and was preparing for what seemed like a significant appointment at the time, an interview with Sean Hannity. It seemed like an odd, out-of-the-blue interview for a major network, but Hannity had spent almost a whole week battling with Shirley Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, and Hannity had seen Bobby’s Op-Ed in ManChild New York. “It was pretty much a last minute call,” Bobby said. Gabe Law, the editor for ManChild, was contacted by Fox and had asked for Faust’s room phone number. “It was weird. I don’t have a cell phone, and they just called the room as if they were calling my home, which I guess it was my home, for the week.”

  Law says it was probably uncouth to just give them his number, but figured this was a special case. “Having the pleasure of talking with him for a few hours, I could tell that this kid had nowhere to go. As much as I despise Fox, I figured that Bobby would probably finagle some sort of arrangement for himself, which he did,” Gabe said, chuckling.

  For a kid from the backwoods of Missouri, Bobby has proven to be incredibly resilient. “That’s part of a Missourian’s identity,” he says with faint pride. “We’re stubborn as mul
es. We don’t give up, especially when we’re trying to get even.”

  While we were chatting about Bobby’s new life in New York, an attractive young female barista approached him. “Did I hear you say you were from Missouri?” She chirped, eyes batting. “Yes, Ma’am, I am,” Bobby said, obviously catching the signal. “What part?” She asked. “Hawthorn. Near Springfield.”

  “Oh, I’m from Blue Springs. We know all about Hawthorn,” She said, dubiously.

  Bobby immediately went guarded.

  “Can I get a job application?” He asked, polite but no longer smiling. The barista folded her arms. “Sure,” She said, walking away.

  “More famous than you thought,” I offered.

  “Doesn’t count. She’s from Missouri, too.”

  I immediately noticed something about Bobby. He liked to believe that this will blow over, and that it’s no big deal—part modesty regarding his newfound oddball media celebrity status, and part dampening of the panic he feels, that this will get out of hand. He’s blunt and could probably be outspoken if he was comfortable, but he remains quiet; I can barely hear him sometimes when he talks.

  The actor Brandon Bennett, who grew up with Bobby, describes him as cynical and funny, but simultaneously deathly serious. He remembers him in middle school, always at the back of the class. “He said nothing, hardly ever [spoke in class],” Brandon recalls, “But when he opened his mouth, the most perceptive shit came out, and hit me and the teacher like a truck. We called him ‘Prof’. Even our gym instructor started calling him that once he heard.” He was very smart, but distant from even his circle of friends, of which Brandon considered himself among. “We’d all go out drinking or whatever,” he says. “And he’d never want to come along, saying 12-year-olds shouldn’t drink because our brains were still growing,” Brandon said, bursting into laughter. “He always—always—did what was expected of him. He may not have taken church seriously, and if you got him alone he’d tell you that, but he sure as shit was there every Sunday and Wednesday. He respected authority. So I was proud of him when I read his article. He did what was right.”

  Brandon also told me in our phone conversation, that Bobby was welcome to crash at his place anytime, and asked me to relay that message to him. “That’s nice of him, but I haven’t really talked to Brandon in a long time. Plus, from what I hear, L.A.’s just a bigger version of Hawthorn.”

  Bobby told me that he was out of cigarettes, a habit he’d picked up very recently, and asked me to walk him to the nearest liquor store. On the way, I asked him if Hawthorn was as bad as the media had let on.

  “It’s not a compound. There are no gates. You’re not monitored,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he walked. “Generally, people don’t give a shit who’s there and who’s not. If I were to go back today, I probably wouldn’t be found for, like, a week. It’s not a dangerous place to live, but it takes its toll. In a lot of ways, it’s no different from any other small town. It’s just suffocating, and Hawthorn Baptist Church is, if you were to ask most of its members, harmless.”

  Back at his room, he lit up, despite the fact that it was a nonsmoking room. “They don’t care. I smelled it in the hallway when I checked in.” I asked him what a typical church service is like.

  “Well, when I was there, it was actually pretty boring,” he said. “We stood for the songs, we sat for the sermon. Redmond was pretty calm for the first year or so,” he said. “Slowly, he crept up…he got more riled, and started talking in a ‘us versus them’ type of way. There were enemies: Politicians, homosexuals, Hollywood actors.” What started as general rants about liberal immorality, became almost a hyper-vigilance and paranoia. “He started using phrases a lot, like ‘taking action’, and ‘They want us’,” Bobby said. “He turned a conspiracy against God’s people into a conspiracy against Hawthorn.” Bobby doesn’t believe any of it, and sees it as performance. “I just don’t think he means it. It seemed phony and calculated to me,” he said. “My gut told me that something else was up with him. I was right.” This was a week after the ManChild exclusive was posted. As we sat in that dark, bland room, he seemed unnerved about something—possibly the repercussions of discussing Redmond so candidly, not that he had anything else to lose. But as Brandon Bennett mentioned, Bobby had the gift of insight, and he couldn’t keep quiet about it.

  Bobby remembers himself differently than his classmate. “That was nice of Brandon to say,” he said. “But honestly, I’m not that smart.” He was born in 1992, and hardly left town for almost two decades. His father, Charles, worked at a factory that made trailers. His mother, Esmeralda, a Pentecostal woman, became a Baptist after Bobby was born. “Pentecostal people usually don’t believe in television,” Bobby said. “I think dad got tired of hearing the news on the radio. He wanted to see the anchors.” He didn’t know if his mother had a problem with changing religions. “She never seemed that interested in her own identity,” he said. “She was very old-fashioned. They both were. What my dad said, went.”

  Bobby was a creative child, and he spent many nights sketching comic book characters. “I wasn’t allowed to read any comic book with profanity or super powers, because super powers were seen as magic,” Bobby said. “So that pretty much left Archie, Batman, and the Sunday Comics.”

  Though he had no disciplinary problems, he had extreme trouble concentrating. “I probably have ADD,” he says. “Or a learning disability. I can’t read for longer than five minutes without needing a beer.” His much older half-brother, Jonathon, was a model student. “Jon was always cool to me. He was in high school when I was in first grade, and he would help me with my homework. But he was gone most of my life.” He came back to Hawthorn to teach high school, but it wasn’t much of a reunion. “I left almost as soon as he came back. I just heard he died, like three weeks ago. Meth,” Bobby said, unemotional. “Thing is, I left sophomore year, and he ended up teaching sophomores, in my worst subject—math.”

  Bobby might have had attention problems, but he had a hyper-focus when it came to art. “Time would go by, man,” he said, “hours. I’d start drawing at 3:30, and I’d look at the clock and it’d be 3:30 again, and dark outside, and I wouldn’t remember the Sun going down.” He’d sleep all day in class, sleeping through every day for weeks at a time. Somehow, he managed to pass every class, but barely.

  His eighth grade final report card reflected a 1.0 average. His parents decided to home-school him for a short period. “Probably the dumbest thing my parents could have done,” Bobby says. “I learned nothing. My dad worked weird, long shifts, and my mom was passive. I just took advantage of her soft nature like you wouldn’t believe.” The next quarter, he was back in public school.

  This was about the time Harold Redmond came to town, and church became a bigger focus of the Faust household. “Not just us, the whole town,” Bobby said. “I found it annoying, because all of the sudden I was expected to show up twice a week, no exceptions.”

  Harold Redmond was new, young blood. He had a politician’s charisma, a swirly Tennessee drawl, and the allure of a big-city outsider. “He was kind of a…big topic of conversation among the women, you could say,” Bobby said. “He took advantage of that, I’m sure.”

  Bobby was unimpressed. “I thought he was full of shit from the beginning,” he said. “Hate to say I told ya’ so, Hawthorn. I called it.” He saw his town quickly following Redmond’s lead. When Redmond preached about the evils of rock music, all CD’s were closely monitored by parents. When Redmond told horror stories about drugs, several parents removed the doors off the hinges of their children’s rooms. “My parents didn’t care enough to do that,” Bobby said. “I was the most boring kid ever…kind of a screw up, but no delinquent.”

  Bobby wasn’t keen on the Redmond family. Harold Redmond struck Bobby as a charlatan. But the other two members of the Redmond household had some strange idiosyncrasies. Mary, Harold’s wife, was seen by some of Bobby’s classmates talking to herself in her car when pi
cking Eric up. “I never saw it, but I believe it,” Bobby said. “She was a strange woman.” Mary wore strange clothes, which were strangely patterned in day-glo colors, and appeared to be hand-knitted. Then there was the son, Eric. “He was a tweaker, plain and simple,” Bobby said. “I don’t know how his parents didn’t know. Maybe they did and just ignored it.” What was really strange about Eric’s drug use, is that he didn’t hang out with the burn-outs at first, yet seemed to always be high. “I don’t know where he got the shit. Eventually, he took up with Darrin, as drug people always find other drug people. But as for where he got the shit when they first came into town, I have no clue. He was a complete hermit. I am sure he never left the house for the first two months. But at school, he was always a mess.”

  Being a couple years older than Eric, Bobby had limited experience with him—that is, until the Redmond and Faust family started mingling.

  “Our parents became friends, so we were expected to hang out,” Bobby said. “And I don’t want to bash Eric too much, because I feel bad for the kid and I don’t want to embarrass him.”

  “One thing I can say about him, is that he seemed to really hate his father. So his compass wasn’t completely fucked.” Bobby says that almost every time Eric and Bobby hung out, Eric dropped subtle hints about drug use. “I eventually just told him, ‘Hey, dude, I’m not into that. What you do is none of my business, but I don’t touch that shit.’ He wasn’t as keen to be friends after that.”