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All Roads Lead to David

David Koren is many things — a politics junkie, a businessman, a homeopath. And a member of a supper club for far-right conspiracy theorists.

(article penned in October 2016)

If you drive north far along the 405 and should you stomach its curse of lurching brakelight inertia, you’re spat out onto the flatlands of Fountain Valley, where expressway avenues carve tracts of suburbia and shopping plazas into the grid-like designs of microchips — no real city center, just a fuzz of diffuse nodes implicating a single unit. Nodal parking lots to fluorescent big box stores across big bite eats between brutalist municipal offices.

Off the concrete west bank of the Santa Ana River, Orange County’s water treatment facility looms over the murky sluice, pumping fortified tap water into the underground, to the middle class cul-de-sacs where some young, bored kid with a fast enough broadband connection might have been watching the same film as we did that night, a mile away at Mimi’s Café.

The two servers at Mimi’s gape incredulous, clutching their menus and sharing a side-eyed look, taken aback when I announce that I’m there for the monthly Freedom Forum meeting. Braces and clumsy teenage tact betray their stations at the front of the house., “You mean those old right wing dudes?” cautions one of them, eyeing me suspiciously. I nod and he briskly leads a path to the back room. The restaurant clangs with the silverware-to-china scraping of the modest dinner rush crowd, whose conversations blur into diner Muzak which streams into the enclave in the back.

Arranged like a small mess hall, the back room is the rustic corporate dream of liberated post-war Provence — sepia, brick, chandeliers. Mimi’s was founded by a World War II bombardier named Arthur Simms, though the company mythos exoticizes him as a spy. The story goes that Simms fell in puppy love with a French girl named Mimi, falling so hard and so fast that he wrote an ode to her in the sweet language of American entrepreneurialism and named the casual-dining chain after her. But the late Simms later admitted to having a ‘Mimi’ in every port, every city his bomber alighted. And her name was probably Gigi, or something. His stated goal was to combine French taste with the energy and the easy, hedonistic joie de vivre of New Orleans; I think he hit the mark. And tonight, joining the vaguely francophiliac décor — think stout old-world cottage, hearth smoldering, cozy, in some Provencal field — is a humming digital projector and its painted fabric canvas on a cobblestone wall.

These few men of the Forum numbered only 14 that Wednesday night. Sometimes gatherings swell into the few dozens, for a guest speaker or some other person from the Forum’s inner circles. But on this night the lull of late October creeps into the private room at the back of Mimi’s. The men of the Forum are nondescript aging Boomers — no one younger than 45 — white men in cushioned tennis shoes, washed out polos paired with Wrangler jeans or Dickie’s. Hairlines retreating or none at all, wedding rings or the tanline impression of them. Walking sticks for some, high-caliber eyewear for most. Probably could have convincingly given you HVAC or drywall or tiling advice at Home Depot. One of the members is an actual HVAC contractor, but the others work a variety of middle-class service jobs: middle management, insurance sales, hospital billing. One or two small business owners.

That kid by the front entrance called them “old right-wing dudes” and in a way, he’s correct. But to see them as mere right-wingers is to smooth and temper the group’s bumps and troughs, the texture of the far-flung fringes of the right. A sense of disenfranchisement unites them, the shared frustration of an electorate of untouchables (“basket of deplorables,” if you prefer) abandoned by an elite political caste. This sort of language has always floated around the fringes of mainstream politics, but in the dawn of Donald Trump’s America, talk of an alienated electorate is practically common knowledge among cable TV’s pundits and their patrons. This recent election cycle has uncovered a faction of blood-red conservative nationalists, and if you asked the men of the Forum to sort themselves onto a flat, lateral blue-to-red political gradient, some would stand proudly on the most scarlet end, with a few planted firmly in the reactionary hinterlands, touting an economic libertarianism that seems bravely anachronistic in post-NAFTA America, and a social conservatism that makes one wonder at their decision to lay roots on the solid blue west coast. Their reasoning rests on their status as Orange County natives, born and bred, so why should they have to move? Why should they have to accommodate the transplants?

This resistance might stem largely from California’s rapidly shifting demographics. Latinos have officially outnumbered whites — 14.99 million to 14.92 million according to the LA Times. For the first time ever, whites no longer hold a plurality in the most populous state in the union. Not that this was a momentous, tectonic ethnic shift: California’s been primed for a Latino majority since the 1970s. Latinos are the most visibly growing minority group, but their growth has slowed in recent years, offset by an influx of Asian nationals who pose a shift in brain power rather than raw numerality, by attaining higher educational and professional milestones than the shrinking white population. So while immigrants and their children increasingly own businesses, ascend corporate and academic ladders, and stake their claim in powerful political positions, the men of the Forum, white working-to-middle class guys with just a few college degrees among them, feel as if they are slipping into obsolescence, being replaced and outnumbered at a stunning pace. By all accounts, this anxiety over identity and belonging is universal, ever since the first communities condensed into cities that are always in flux, shedding old skin for new growth.

But outside of this platonic vacuum are growing pains. According to a Forum veteran, membership within the Forum spiked after the 2008 financial crisis. Nothing better than economic precarity to stoke an already contentious population and inspire the tribal instinct that time and again is our first move: find our own and keep it that way. In response, Forum leadership provided a space for members to lick their wounds, air their grievances, and to, purposefully or not, twist their underdog story into an adversarial one — their natural target: the “newcomers,” most of whom weren’t newcomers at all. Second and third generation immigrants comprise a considerable portion of the non-white population’s growth and the number of unauthorized immigrants has actually decreased since 2007 by more than half, according to Pew Research. Moreover, though immigrants tend to be more readily employable than their counterparts at the Forum, they are vastly underpaid — working more to earn less. But, in this room at the back of a café, it stands to reason that if a small amount of them happened to have built lives here illegally, then why not hold all of them accountable? Bad apples and all that.

And in the same vein, why not hold everyone else accountable? Along with social solace and ideological coalition, the Forum promises something else, something seductively elemental: the blueprints to the hidden knowledge of globalists, all of those suits on the Hill, plotting world domination in cabals in the inner cloisters of the Pentagon and the White House. These agents of a “shadow government” act in the mangled core of all their economic and social strife. The Forum promises enlightenment to the grand design, a linked network of events and players, a network where nothing is coincidental, where everything around them is suspect, one of many thin spokes originating from “the source.” Zionist pets of Israel, neoliberal lapdogs of obscure billionaires: President Barack Obama the sycophant poster boy. Bought and sold. America as a debt-state for European banking dynasties — the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Romanovs — who rendered the Constitution a parchment receipt and the Founders as headhunters. It is a network that spans centuries, logically uniting the breadth of American history in a neat, cause-effect narrative, collapsing in on everything. And you’re either in on it, or you’re blind; you’re in, or you’re out. You’re us, or you’re them. Abortion is population control. Katrina is a test-run for FEMA camps, where “they,” whoever “they” are, will intern citizens while globalists raze cities with refugees from some wartorn somewhere — Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Mexico. Poison in the water, poison in the air.

“What brings you to the States?” one of them, Chuck, laughs at me. He’s an older forum member, cashing in on the sweet senior discount for his meal — a generously portioned hamburger, which he feeds through his friendly, graying muttonchops. He crinkles his blue eyes at me expectantly. It’s a joke, but in this context, it doesn’t roll off my back so much as it slithers like a leech.

The air in the room sharpens, and I consider the current situation as a tableau. Me: ambiguously brown, hair washed out blue-black, my septum pierced, my demeanor betraying my bookish politics, painfully young in a room of wizened men. A neophyte in the temple elders’ chambers.

Him: a man whose Oldsmobile’s bumper is an ideological mosaic of Oathkeeper stickers and scratched-up Gadsden flag snakes — testifying his allegiance to the reactionary, militant, fiercely nativist schools of America’s proprietary white nationalism. I can appreciate how my presence tenses something up in the room. And in late October, with Donald Trump injecting the news cycles’ doomsayer marquees with his knockoff brand of paranoia-lite, I can see how conspicuous can elevate to outsider.

I stammer something about being born in Santa Monica, “At St. John’s. Mom opted for a cesarian, since I was in an awkward position.” But Chuck is hard of hearing and I have to repeat my non-rebuttal. I chew on my words like they are tarred taffy.

A man in a bright red sweater must have heard me answering with my bit-down tongue and interjects, “It’s all in good fun, all love.” I laugh, mostly at myself. I know that I’m prone to taking things personally, prone to clinging to the residue of any social situation. What I didn’t know was that I would come to befriend the man in the bright red sweater. That he would lead me beyond the far-right to the far-out, past the reactionary and to the visionary. To where rationality’s empirical impositions branch out endlessly like a metastasis of reason, the tendrils of deep conspiracy, or the structures collapse into themselves — reason in remission. He would chaperone me into the terra incognita of magical thinking.

I spend a few minutes explaining myself to Chuck when the organizer called for order.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

To unscramble the dominant cultural programming, which is of course the media-machine of Liberal propagandists (see: Operation MKUltra, The Illuminati, The Gay Agenda, among others) the Forum has decided to screen an exposé about the New World Order, one of those amateur-professional conspiratorial films connecting disparate nodes to contrive a grand design: this is all as it should be, planned air tight.

“Americans are being dumbed down. It’s in the tap water, lead and fluoride. It’s the shit they play on T.V. that makes us consumers,” says one who asked not to be named, behind a skull-sized burger patty. He takes a sip from a canteen of thrice-purified water. I thought this guy was a fringe case, in the fringes of fringe. The whole tap water fluoridation conspiracy seemed to achieve parodic heights since General Jack D. Ripper’s iconic paranoia about the country’s water purification system contaminating our ‘precious bodily fluids’ in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ but here the members speak on it as a matter of fact. I ask around if anyone has a water filtration system installed, and the handful of men I asked said yes so plainly that I felt foolish for asking.

The Forum’s organizer, or I guess acting chair, is a man named Bob Green. He is 63, standing at the front with an arm planted on his hip, completely bald in an olive polo and drab slacks, skin tinged pink like raw meat. His glasses, aviators, contort his eyes into searching blue orbs, as if refracted by a round reflection pool. The group anointed him successor of Rosemary Carter, the forum’s originator, after she passed in 2011. He reluctantly took the reins of the operation. “I’d only been a member for 3 years. But I guess I made some sort of an impression,” he said. And according to his comrades, it was a strong one. He possessed the self-assured ethos admired in these circles, with the word-associative logos that propels the group’s theories. His voice would not be amiss on some conspiratorial AM late night radio show, something like Coast to Coast. Before screening the film, he takes the chance to pontificate on the elite’s agendas, but shies just short of explicitly saying he has it all figured out. He teases revelation. It’s all based on independent research, he says. He’s woken up, and by virtue of attendance we have too. We are praised for our bravery. Facing Morpheus, we chose the red pill. In these circles, it seems like the Wachowskis’ landmark film, ‘The Matrix’ is only ever two or three degrees of separation away. Everyone is Neo. Or chooses to be.

I sip my tap water on ice.

The show begins and ends as expected. A man rich with conviction voices over a sort of slideshow of charts and graphs to start: celebrities and media execs, all loosely tangled in a web of intrigue, sensationalized demographic shifts. Then, it’s simply a mash-up reel of news anchors from RT, Fox, and CNN reading headlines and blurbs over tensely cinematic strings, a score you would hear underpinning a panning shot of the Pentagon in some B-movie thriller. His thesis is self-explanatory: the Obama administration is priming Americans for subsumption into one, “communist,” global government. It warns us to prepare for martial law — for a scorched earth America, felled to ruin by Obama’s consolidation of the Executive Branch and Department of Defense.

As my ice water rattles against my front teeth, I overhear an involved exchange from two men beside me. John Ericsson and David Koren share a conspiratorial look chatting over dinner, that sort of inside-joke intimacy in their eyes as they lean into each other over the table. David, I recognize in a flash of red; he’s the man who in good cheer eased the tension between me and Chuck earlier. He is 62, 11 years John’s junior, comparatively filled out in that red sweater. Blood flushes his cheeks and his hair is casually combed back; he looks like an aging surfer, skin salt-kissed and copper. John is 73, but spry and wiry as he works on a generous slice of New York cheesecake, big forkfuls at a time. Though gray all over, save for sunspots and the pale blue wreath of veins snaking up his hands, his eyes retain a youthful spark. I catch snippets of something called the Kol Nidrei over the clatter of cutlery and murmured conversation. I ask, genuinely curious, and introduce myself. After shaking my hand, John obliges. The Kol Nidrei is a Talmudic prayer that Jews recite to kick off Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and absolution.

“It’s a total scam. The Kol Nidrei is just sold to us as a prayer, when it really is a get-out-of-jail card for the Jews.” He goes on to explain, mindful of his tone, that the prayer in question is a renunciation of any oaths, promises, and bonds that a Jew has made over the past year; in rabbinical terms, the refrain absolves a Jew of perjury, clearing out any heavenly bad credit for lying under oath. Obviously, though unspoken, their logical conclusion maintains that Jews, Zionists can’t be trusted, even under sacred oath. They’ve schemed up an ancient karmic carte blanche, and their word is null, void. Lies. John and David disclaimer — “I’m just saying…” and “It’s worthwhile to look into…” — to shroud the point, encouraging autonomous research but expecting a similar outcome.

On the projector, fifteen feet away, photoshopped caricatures of bobble-headed heads of state — President Obama, Secretary Clinton, John McCain — resemble marionettes holding Old Glory in their right hands, and Israel’s flag in their left. Their audience is a literal flock of sheep, wool decorated with Obama pins. Fade to black. Enter, the next photo. Same crude, Dadaist photoshop job. This time a line-up of small Palestinian children and brutalized corpses superimposed on the ruins of a bombed out village frame a military siege, with tanks, fighter jets, and Apaches radiating from a large Israeli flag. A bold ‘Z’ occupies the center of the star of David. Old Glory looms in the background, in a walled off vista of Jerusalem. A kindly waitress, slim and tanned with a thick mop of Indian hair, taps on my shoulder, prompting me to place an order.

She keeps her eyes on her pad of order sheets while Palestinian babies beseech her.

I go for a pint of beer, a cup of coffee on the side. Do I blur the edges or sharpen them?

“So what brings you here? Always nice to see fresh faces,” David asks. He arranges his folded hands in a triangle on the table, fingers peaked over a half-eaten burger.

His ears perk up when I explain that I’m doing research for a class.

“On the folks at the sidelines of politics, or I guess democracy as we know it,” I say.

“We’re not a democracy. America is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic,” he’s quick to parry.

Of course. Civics 101. I could barely clarify myself before he asks me to define a ‘constitutional republic.’ I’d come to learn that David leaned on this particular rhetorical interaction — to get me to define or explain things in my words. Follow with affirmative compliment: “Right on,” or “No, you got it.” These can range from tepid to ebullient. Pivot to refining my words, as if editing me with a linguistic red pen, until my words become his. And his become mine. And then something like the satisfaction of being on the same page washes over the conversation, until he inevitably leaps pages and chapters ahead of me, and it becomes clear that we weren’t reading the same book after all.

I say something sophomoric about the Constitution being some sort of operating system, and David drills me to elaborate more and more. I do, and he emphatically agrees; He does his Socratic dance, he leads and I follow. Yes, absolutely the Constitution was written for and by a small faction of elites, men of consequence. Land-owners. White. Yes, of course it centralized economic, social, total power to a federal machine. Yes, those federalists and framers remained loyal to the British Crown. So it stands to reason that ‘citizen’ is code for ‘subject,’ and that the British Crown is a vast, historic tangle of banking families, to whom the government owes its allegiance. And legality, citizenship itself, is servitude in the debt-state of America. Did you know your birth certificate is actually a receipt of sale? Did you know your name is just a string of numbers, tied to a shadow bank’s checking account? A checking account owned by an international cabal of bankers, who are Jews? And on, and on.

“This is all very deep stuff. Lots of complex factors to consider,” David says to me, my face twisted into concentration, mind-bent focus. His eyes are shut, peering into the neural lace in the back of his head, and his fingers form a lattice to cradle his temple. “Look into it later.”

I let the words sink to the hardwood floors, coating the small space between us with a thin film of silt. Four or five beats, arrhythmic and awkward time to process. How did we take historical fact, albeit reductive, and hop-skip-jump to global domination? I wasn’t at a loss for words; rather, I felt rendered unfluent. Stranger in a strange land. “That’s wild,” I manage through a lame smile. John takes one last bite of his cheesecake then runs a bony index finger along the plate to lick off the sweet residue.

The conversation shifts to them — David and John — how they met at the Forum two years ago when David first decided to attend. David had approached him and they hit it off pretty readily. “We both grew up in the Midwest and both ended up settling in California while running a small business,” says David. “It was just meant to be. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.” Shop talk led to John, an independent water filtration installator, offering to modify the plumbing at Dave’s home in Laguna Hills. This seems to be a right of passage for any serious newbie at the Forum: to be cleansed in charcoal-sifted tap water by John, the baptist. David co-owns a health supplement distribution operation with a longtime business partner, which John found interesting enough, but once David admitted to working a side gig as a physical therapist, John leapt at the opportunity; a slow leap, though, given his swollen, arthritic joints. They began their sessions three months ago, and when I ask what sort of regimen he’s got John on, David says “I pulse him.”

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

I met David and John at an innocuous strip mall, eight small storefronts long, in front of the chiropractor’s office where David works sometimes as a physical therapist — or rather, a practitioner of physical therapy. Not exactly a certified physical therapist in the traditional sense. David boasts about his $1,000 certification to administer Pulse Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) therapy. Naturally, he got his certs online.

Riding the crest of that uniquely crunchy Californian brand of New Age metaphysics, modern PEMF therapy claims that radiating low to mid frequency electromagnetic waves in pulses — like the heartbeat of the Earth’s magnetic field, some PEMF websites describe — into patients encourages healing and optimized functioning at the cellular level. Everything starts at the cellular level, then expands outward and outward. “Think of yourself like a tuning fork,” David says, captivated by his analogy. “Pulse therapy is like retuning your body. We walk around in an electric smog from cellphones, cell towers, everything. And our cells, the ones in our body not the ones in our pocket, suffer from it. The therapy retunes you to the energy frequency of the planet.” He smiles at me like a sonic Buddha.

David happily meets my initial skepticism with the historical data. The science checks out, to a degree — the FDA approved PEMF therapy in 2011 for its long-standing record of expediting bone repair (bone repair in horses, to be clear, since PEMF was initially only approved for equine veterinary care) and more recently, the practice has been used to treat medication-resistant depression. And there is a kernel of truth tucked into the lofty image of “the energy frequency of the planet”; NASA had a hand in the development of EM pulse devices to use on astronauts manning long sub-orbital missions. The aim was to reproduce the Earth’s magnetic field mechanically, as previous astronauts who made it back bore fatigue, depression, inflammation, a kind of zero-G syndrome acquired when severed from the planet’s magnetic reach.

Superficially, the literature suggests some limited success, but my approval, albeit tepid, gets cut short by a cold splash of incomprehension. David and John, perhaps as with their politics, expand this realm of possibility to a universe of hyperbole. Like most holistic movements PEMF has generated a cult of panacea, with impassioned, impossible personal testimonials fueling its fidelity. Lazarean tales of people suffering chronic pain and permanently inflamed soft tissue walking again. Enlarged prostates shrinking. Nerve pain diffusing. It’s not exactly clear what the PEMF exactly does, or what it exactly treats. Practitioners like David, all privately funded — no surprise health insurance won’t cover this boutique practice — claim to treat the same symptomatic nebula as other proponents of alternative medicine cite: chronic pain, fatigue, cardiovascular issues, depression and anxiety, the familiar list of general malignancies addressed by acupuncturists, chiropractors, bud tenders, those at the liminal space between medical science and faith healing. John, who has been pulsed by David for the past three months now, is fully sold on the practice, and tells me so while spinning his arms in large circles, lifting his knees to his gut, as if to prove his vitality. “See this? If I did this two months ago, I’d be curled up on the ground.” I look at the cement in front of the office, fossilized chewing gum and cigarette char streaks, and laugh with him.

The letters above the chiropractor’s office matched its neighbors neon signage, in that blocky font that glows LED-red in the dark: ‘CHIROPRACTIC.’ ‘LIQUOR.’ ‘TACOS EL RANCHO.’ The essence of southern California strip mall. The office is managed by two brothers — sibling Doctors of Chiropractic, educated at Palmer College in Iowa, known as “the Fountainhead” because it was the first collegiate institution to rigorously train neck and spine-crackers, or rather, realigners. A sign reading ‘Gluten Free Doctors’ splashes in white font across the office’s tinted windows, subtitled by the litany of holistic healthcare’s public enemies, that cluster of systemic symptoms that point to everything and nothing at all, a recursive pattern.

Past the white walls of the reception desk, where we’re greeted by a perky attendant, is a small, amber-lit hallway to the PEMF room. A plant, some kind of ficus, broods in a dark corner, barely lit by warm lamp light. No overhead halogen lighting or fluorescent buzz typical of most clinics. But I guess this clinic by nature resists typical. It smells lightly of disinfectant.

David and John have allowed me to shadow them for one treatment session. David grabs a part of the machine at the center of the room.

“This is the Magna Wave EZY.”

Magna Wave is the industry standard in PEMF therapy, or at least it leads the pack, with a suite of pulse-generating machines. Magna Wave deals in accreditations too; David’s certificate bears the company’s modified nautilus crest. The EZY, designed lightweight for expedience, retails for $2,475. It’s a white ring-like apparatus, roughly the size of a backpack, or a plastic wedding band for a colossus. Its simply smooth, plasticine surface suggests that it could be one of Steve Wozniack’s proof-of-concepts, some near-future neckbrace, if not for the inelegantly thick cord connecting the hoop — David calls it the Coil — to its control pad, which is a weighty, gray brick with a small display that presents red analog numbers. The console reminds me of an old Game Boy, first generation. Two laminated buttons, up and down arrows, allow you to adjust the pulse frequency.

David instructs John to have a seat, but John is already settling into the velveteen padded beachwood recliner, propping his feet on the matching ottoman. David positions the ring over John’s head, through the hoop, and slickly, John grabs its edge to keep the device around his shoulders and pits. Then, it begins.

The tapping.

When David turns the machine on, the ring emits a metronome staccato. “That’s the ‘pulse’ part,” David offers when he sees me tilting my head curiously. John describes the sensation feels how it sounds — like someone’s tapping his back and chest. “The tapping goes through your entire body. I can feel it resonating in my lungs and ribs. It doesn’t hurt,” he insists. His eyelids rest, slack, but I see his eyeballs swirling underneath, rippling his lax, paper-thin lids. Tap, tap, tap. John lets the Coil orbit his solar plexus for around 10 minutes before snaking it down to his pelvis. “Prostate,” he offers curtly. This time, he belted himself with the Coil for 15 minutes. Right now, the waveforms should be unclogging whatever cellular debris has accumulated in his pelvic blood vessels. In David’s mind, he sees the microscopic river-rush of blood, viscous and clogged, recalibrated to a swift stream. A platelet traffic jam rendered smooth-sailing. A cellular system reset. David envisions white blood cells, amoebic and plump, crawling along vessel-walls, the roar of red platelets skimming their resilient membranes as they enter John’s now-pliant soft tissue to seek inflammatory infidels. Seek and destroy. John is cleansed in the heartbeat of the planet. John is re-sync’d to the grand design. To the medical science community at large, electromagnetism’s biological mechanism of action remains unknown, except to David and to John and to the chiropractors, and to the thousands of people retuning their frequencies every week. Retuning to match the frequency of the Earth. Finally, John sheathes the ring down to his patellas, folding his spindly digits into his lap, pleased, at peace. Tap, tap, tap. David adjusts the frequency accordingly.

And 15 minutes later, the tapping stops.

“That’s all she wrote,” David said as he fished the ring past John’s rubber sneakers. “How do you feel?” he asks with a knowing grin on his face.

“Like brand new,” John replies, harmonious.

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

When I meet with David again, it’s one on one. We’re at Mother’s Market, an Orange County supermarket chain, a staple in any nucleic shopping plaza that services the health-body-spirit-conscious, affluent clientele that don quartz crystal pendants for purification, and more often than not hail Jenny McCarthy and Gwyneth Paltrow as personal role models. A natural specialty foods store, Mother’s maintains an apothecary of supplements — from marine phytoplankton gel caps to African baobab oil. Organic produce, probiotics, and designer protein shakes abound. The faint scent of patchouli or masala spices our lunch — his a green salad with tuna on rye, mine roasted chicken on wheat with a side of lemon quinoa.

He opens with an anecdote. “Y’know, the other day I was sitting on the grass in Laguna Hills, grounding myself, enjoying my day. It was probably Saturday afternoon after I got your call to meet up,” now, he closes his eyes and keeps them shut, his hands are in prayer at his temple — ”accessing,” he calls it. He goes on, “So out on the grass, I was thinking about your smile. It’s genuine and warm, a really great smile. It reminded me of an old friend, Rob. You two share the same smile, and that’s immediately what I thought when we met at Mimi’s. Anyway, I’m sitting out there, and suddenly, I hear someone calling my name. It was Rob’s mom!”

He goes on to describe the serendipitous moment with such sincerity that it seemed he was still making sense of it, four days later. To him, our meeting at Mimi’s must have set off some chain of events fractaling out into that chance moment last weekend. I try to backtrack to Mimi’s, where we first met. On the drive there, I’d plugged in the wrong address into my GPS; that one-number discrepancy prompted Google’s satellites to lead me to a rundown printing place, its windows fogged with foreclosure, 20 minutes away from Mimi’s. What if I’d arrived earlier? Or never made it at all? And when I rushed into the back room, with the cobblestone wall and the projector and the dozen empty seats to choose from, what if I’d sat farthest from the door, farthest from old Chuck, from John, from David? My hindsight dissects all the possibilities and they unfurl into granular, tangentially linked nodes, like a bead curtain. Our meeting, my smile, inspired his memory of Rob which inspired, or perhaps conspired, to result in catching up with an old friend. I look at him as he works on his meal, the slow, precise movements of a shadowboxer. He is a man fully convinced of connectivity, infinite, sticky connectivity. He’s made peace with infinite possibility by wholeheartedly believing in one inevitable result: whatever comes his way, he subsumes into the grand design. He’s in on it. And I stand on the outside, knee deep in my subjective swamp.

David grew up in Brookfield, Wisconsin in the early 1960s, the first born son among the four children of a Standard Electric salesman and a homemaker. This is essential, middle-class Americana during the zenith of white flight from rapidly urbanizing Milwaukee, its population teeming with eager migrant workers — black folks from the South drawn northward for factory jobs in the blossoming auto industry dominating the Midwest Rust Belt. Urban growth and integration inspired discriminatory housing practices and, as always, that tribal paranoia at the cusp of change which hyperventilated white life into the fields due west and south of Milwaukee. Within the span of 10 years, bedroom communities sprang up around city proper, a geometric occupation that manicured the lush, lake-fed greenery of Greenfield, Wauwatosa, and Brookfield into country clubs, well-funded high schools, mecca malls, and these satellite suburbias were incorporated into Milwaukee’s municipality. Incorporation meant political clout, and as a result, Milwaukee’s proposed freeway and intra-city rail systems — avenues for unifying integration between the suburbs and downtown — withered on the vine. From the sky, Brookfield evidences this past — a pixelated swath of lawns and shopping plazas between two threadbare interstate freeways. And it was here David says he fostered his magical thinking.

He fancies himself as always having been on the cutting edge of whatever field he’s in, a born autodidact. Entrepreneurial. Special. One night as soon as his father returned from the office, a 15-year old David surprised him — a post-work Lucky Strike lazily expiring on his father’s lip — with a Cartrivision he’d purchased with money earned delivering papers and shoveling snow (a part-time job he insisted he’d spearheaded in his neighborhood). Cartrivision was a proto-VCR of sorts, an analog video cassette player, the first to hit mass markets through big-box department stores like Sears and Macy’s. By the early 1970’s, it was ready for consumers. “Look dad! I’ll show you how it works,” a goofy grin plastered on his face. A puff of smoke disguised his father’s small chuckle in reply. He grabbed a cassette of ‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’ the John Wayne classic, and popped it into the machine. A few seconds passed until the triumphant Marine’s Hymn blared from the television set, “From the halls of Montezuma, to the sands of Tripoli….” And light bathed David’s eager, expectant face.

Through a haze, his father said, “Now why would anybody ever want that?”

It’s the 1980s now, and David has struck out on his own. He’s young and hungry. He’s dropped out of UW Milwaukee — the pedagogy didn’t suit him, or rather, he couldn’t contort himself to fit the demands of a rigorous university schedule. He began his independent study, devouring New Age media and entrepreneurial primers. He pursued a job hawking tupperware sets door-to-door, and claims he “revolutionized” the way his agency did sales: by founding its mobile sales fleet. With a little help from his father, he purchased a dinged-up white van, the inaugural vehicle that would carry as many as six salesmen across Brookfield’s sleepy neighborhoods. A chance encounter with a Wall Street businessman jetted him to Manhattan to train as a stockbroker’s apprentice in the city’s electric, downtown waterfront that crackled with corporate optimism. But under the sunlight glinting off the Financial District’s glass and steel obelisks, a scourge crept in New York’s alleyways and nightclubs. Like most Americans, David was swept up in the paranoid wave, the wake of the AIDS epidemic. He bought into it quickly: that AIDS was airborne, skinborne. He marks the mass hysteria of the AIDS plague as a sort of prologue to his politics now. This hypochondriacal instinct evolved into one of moral righteousness: gays suffered a spiritual “dis-ease,” as in, the lifestyles of men who have sex with men fundamentally disturb some elemental equilibrium. I ask him to elaborate as I scrape at my bowl of quinoa. He won’t. Not yet anyway.
He finally moved to Orange County in 1989, and set up shop with a business partner in Santa Ana. He claims they were the first distributors of methyl sulfone, a dietary supplement with limited use as an anti-inflammatory agent, to local health food stores like Mother’s Market. Strangely, like PEMF, methyl sulfone’s first medical applications were also for horses. I tell him about this and he nods, as if the congruences were inevitable.

Beyond dealing in joint supplements, David reached personal political enlightenment in California through his fanatical support of both Ralph Nader and Ross Perot. He vividly remembers Ralph Nader, high priest of the anti-corporate state preaching the gospel of Green to a full house of rowdy college leftists and rubberneckers at Chapman College 16 years ago. “Oh man, now that was a pivotal moment. He talked about stuff no one else would tackle. Called it like he saw and especially called Gore and Bush out on their shady corporate friends,” he says. “They wouldn’t even let him debate them! For Christ’s sake, now what does that tell you about how things are run?” He then shifts into an uncanny George Carlin impression, sinking his head into his neck, cocking his eyebrow. He does the bit about “paper or plastic, cash or charge,” the spitfire jester speaking truth to power. I’m inclined to agree about the corruption, Carlin’s illusion of choice bit, the thinly veiled collusions between Washington’s upper crust, foreign money, arms dealers, and while nodding in sync with him, I feel the dance coming at my peripherals.

“Was that when you started really taking seriously these like, out-there globalist conspiracy theories, the New Wor — ”

He cuts me short, “Now ‘conspiracy theory’…That’s an interesting phrase. I’m so glad you used that. What is a conspiracy?” He shoots me a serious look.

Flustered, I say nothing he can latch on to. I miss my cue, but he whips his phone out and consults the OED; He will make his point, no matter my input. He silently reads the standardized text and resurfaces with, “So it’s the act of at least two people coming together to do something harmful or illegal. That’s it. But, it’s been used to shut people down, to shut them up. If you’re a ‘conspiracy theorist,’” here he caricatures air quotes, “you’re not worth listening to. You’re a nut.”

I agree with him — yes, absolutely you can lump any and all speculation, no matter the clarity and paper trail as suspect. But as always, it’s a transient satisfaction.

Emboldened now, thinking I can reach some sort of solid answer where I can plant my feet firmly, I ask, “So what’s the end-game? I mean, what is it all leading to? What is the driving force of all this, if it’s not just a random mess?”

In the beat between my question and his response, I realize the scope of my ask, what it might imply, cornering him like this, pleading for blueprints to the grand design.

He assumes his ‘accessing’ stance — eyes turned inward, hands locked, peaked, pleading at his temple. This time he pulls at his hair, tugs at the roots.

“The end-game…Is to orchestrate as much evil as possible to happen in the world, to spread ‘dis-ease’ to every corner of the planet. I believe there is an evil cult at the center of all this, harnessing the evil deeds done — ”

“Like a Satanic cult or…?”

“Absolutely,” he shrouds his face and his voice retreats into his larynx. “Yeah, yeah. They use evil energy, mostly from sex and violence, to summon their god…AIDS, for one. That’s not caused by a damn virus, that’s caused by vice. Promiscuity. Drugs and alcohol.” His eyes remain rotated inward, accessing. Eyes wide shut.

“That’s just one example. Obama, I think is a machination of the CIA. Blasting drone bombs on ‘collateral’ lives, he’s harvesting those souls for the cult.”

“And what are you doing to stop this?” I am stone-still, my chin boring into my palm as I appraise him.

He resurfaces from his deep dive.

“I just try to love. To teach as many people as I can…to wake them up.” His mouth carves a straight line across. He seems to have aged hyperbolically in the past few minutes, and I notice lines and lines that hatch fine cuts on his face. All of them seem to connect, or seek to.

“That’s a heavy cross to bear, to unplug everyone from the matrix.” I let out a small laugh. Is it relief or shock? Disbelief? My feet seem to disappear from under my neck, plunging into the tiled floor, concrete, steel beams, layers of compacted earth, saturated aquifers, the bedrock of continents, to the molten plastic earth — to the center.

“Yeah. I do get tired, but I do what I can do. I’m just one guy, but I reach out to people like you, and you hear me.”

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