The Wilderness Page 12
When George did get him to charge, however, there was no telling how it might end. “They were both scary bright,” said Ditzler, and when they latched on to some new piece of devilry, they’d go back and forth—eyes lit up, voices rising—as they dared each other to keep pushing the scheme further. “George would start it, then Randy would add in his ideas,” Ditzler recalled. “He was the tagalong, George was the mastermind.”
Not all of George’s ideas were winners. One night, when they were freshmen, he came up with a flimsy, five-beers-in plot to dig up the time capsule buried at the center of campus. Instead, they drunkenly knocked over the monument on top of the capsule, and had to flee the scene. When the act of vandalism became front-page news in Baylor’s student paper, with various clubs pointing fingers at one another, Randy and George kept quiet and pledged never to speak of the night again.
At his best, though, George was a masterful performance artist. “He was very high-energy,” said Ditzler. “If he was going to do something, he was going to be flamboyant about it.” When she mentioned one day to George that the rat she had been training all semester in a class was going to be killed and dissected by the biology department, he proposed an emergency rescue mission. They dressed in all black, smeared dark paint on their faces, and broke into the lab in the middle of the night to retrieve the white rodent. “I don’t know how he figured out how to get past the lock,” Ditzler said. “That was just his thing: make a lot of drama where there is none.”
But there was also something strange—even mysterious—about her two new friends. Shortly after meeting them, Ditzler realized she had actually known George many years earlier, when they were kids in the same car pool in suburban Houston. Back then, though, his name was George Schauerte; now he was going by George Paul. Curious and confused, Ditzler began asking around about George’s name—but the answer she kept getting from friends and teammates only deepened the intrigue. “The only explanation anyone would give me was that Randy was so cool, and they were so close, that George had decided to change his [last] name to Paul,” she recalled. (That Paul used to be George’s middle name hardly solved the puzzle for her, especially once she learned that he had actually gone to the trouble of making the name change legal.)
There were other riddles, too. Ditzler started noticing, as she spent more time with them, that Randy and George would often disappear together without explanation. Whenever she confronted them about it, they’d offer vague pretexts and quickly change the subject. Then there was the question of their curiously celibate social lives. Despite their routine mockery of Baylor’s chastity police, neither of them ever seemed to be getting any action. Eventually, Ditzler came to the only logical conclusion she could think of: “I thought they were a gay couple.”
She eventually disposed of this notion when George started dating one of her roommates, but three decades later she would continue to wonder aloud why “Randy did not ever date anyone.”
Ditzler finally did discover the true reason for all their sneaking around—and though it didn’t involve a torrid love affair, it would still rank George and Randy among Baylor’s biggest sinners.
Unbeknownst to most of their classmates, Randy and George were members of a notorious secret society on campus called the NoZe Brotherhood. Founded in 1924 to make fun of Baylor’s fraternities, the organization had evolved over the years into a rowdy rotating cast of mischief-makers and blasphemers who delighted in stuffing their school’s sacred cows into meat grinders. “It was about making fun of Baylor and Baptists and… being iconoclastic,” said John Green, who was one of Randy’s fellow NoZemen. “It appealed to people who didn’t fit the traditional Baptist mold, or people who came in that way and were sort of warped while they were there.”
The mission of the NoZe Brotherhood was to tweak, troll, irk, rattle, and rile Baylor’s administration, and offend the school’s more humorless students. As Green would later put it, “We aspired to blasphemy.” And, in fact, they were so successful on that front that shortly before Randy was initiated, the university’s president booted the group from campus, calling it “lewd, crude, and grossly sacrilegious.” Word went out across the school: any student discovered to be a NoZe brother would be automatically expelled.
For Randy and George, the heightened stakes only made it more fun. Driven underground, the NoZe brothers would disguise themselves in Groucho Marx glasses and parade across campus performing elaborate, outlandish stunts. After beauty-queen-cum-culture-warrior Anita Bryant famously condemned oral sex as sinful, the NoZe brothers marched around carrying an enormous picture of Bryant with a cutout circle where her mouth was supposed to be. And when Baylor officials tried to get the liquor license pulled from a local sandwich shop on the grounds that it was too close to campus, the NoZemen showed up with a homemade surveyor’s scope and a rope created from rags, belts, and wadded-up American flags. They made a big show of measuring the distance between the restaurant and a campus building before declaring that a meltdown had occurred, “resulting in the expulsion of hot air and dangerous and even toxic levels of Christian atmosphere.”
Sometimes the cops would get called on them. Sometimes the cops would show up. And when that happened, the merry band of heretics would joyously scatter—laughing and panting and doubling over as they made their escape.
One favorite NoZe tradition was making up derisive renditions of cherished gospel tunes, like the song “Give Me That Old Time Religion,” which they rewrote, replacing “the Hebrew children” in the lyrics with evolutionary descendants of Neanderthals:
It was good enough for Cro-Magnon man,
It was good enough for Cro-Magnon man,
It was good enough for Cro-Magnon man,
It’s good enough for me!
During Randy’s time in the NoZe, he and his brothers channeled much of their creative energies into a satiric newspaper, The Rope, designed to parody and provoke their conservative Christian classmates. (A handful of excerpts from the paper later surfaced during Rand’s 2010 Senate race, but the entirety of the archives weren’t dredged up until a source provided them to me.) Among the paper’s more incendiary items: a story about an eighty-three-year-old man from California admitting he wrote the Bible on a lark (“I don’t know what all the fuss is about; I mean, I’m no Tolkien”), a first-person essay in which a teenage Jesus complains that Mary is stepping out on his dad with the Holy Spirit (complete with racist kicker: “Most guys named Jesus don’t even know who their father is!”), and a piece dryly lampooning a policy that required underage girls to get parental consent before acquiring birth control (“[This] will effectively end the practice of teenage sex in the United States”).
The articles were printed without bylines, leaving it unclear which pieces, if any, Randy was directly responsible for. But several of his Baylor buddies would later tell me that he wrote with some frequency for The Rope, and his mug even appeared on the cover of a 1983 issue—albeit masked by a giant fake nose.
Randy fit in comfortably with the troublemaking smart-asses that populated the NoZe Brotherhood, happily joining them as they looked for new lines to cross, new reverences to trample. When they talked about girls on campus, they referred to them as “hairy legs”; the ones who slept with them were upgraded to “Fortunates.” They tried to one-up one another with obscure, in-joke nicknames—Randy was SpoonNoze, named after Lysander Spooner, a nineteenth-century antislavery anarchist who was idolized by libertarians—and at the end of each year, they threw a big, boozy underground party with the cash they made selling advertisements in The Rope. (For a while, the paper’s back page was dominated by an ad offering a “Baylor special” at a local strip club: “Remember, at Two Minnies, every night is family night.”)
But while the NoZe Brotherhood was a natural habitat for a nonconformist like Randy, what he took away from his time there had little to do with its disrespect for power structures—he already got plenty of that at home. By the time he got to Baylor, Randy’s
combative, crusading congressman dad had already taught him the importance of picking principled fights with the powers that be; what he learned from George and the other NoZe brothers was what a win could often look like. Their game wasn’t circulating earnest petitions and participating in debates with square-jawed student body presidents. Instead, they aimed to ruffle and offend, to rile and inflame. And when they extracted the unflattering reactions they were looking for from their born-again Baylor targets—flustered and angry and comically indignant—they declared victory. The source of the NoZe brothers’ sense of superiority came from their ability to handle their opponents’ feelings like Play-Doh.
Randy was never on the same page, politically, as his fellow hellhound comrades at Baylor—most of them were left-wingers—but he related to them on a deeper level. “We knew he was kind of a right-wing nutjob,” recalled Green, who was present at Randy’s initiatory “unrush.” “He fit in with us because he was antiauthoritarian.”
Indeed, if there was one belief that united all NoZe brothers, it was the conviction that they were the enlightened few, the freethinkers, the ones who could look outside the cave and see the world as it was, and who now had a responsibility to drag their unseeing peers up the rough ascent, the steep way up, and never stop until they reached the light of the sun. (Randy was hardly the first NoZe know-it-all to commit a bit of Plato to memory.)
Looking through those Groucho glasses, it was plain as day that the established social order at Baylor was a farce—and that it fell to them to expose it.
At the start of the 1983 winter semester, Baylor pulled the plug on its swim program and filled its pool with cement. While Ditzler brooded over losing her campus sanctuary, George and Randy went searching for distraction, and began spending more time on pot-fueled NoZe adventures. “I was the one who was clearly bitter and suffering,” Ditzler said later. “They seemed happy and fun.” In particular, she noticed that Randy was getting much more into the spirit of the Baylor baiting. Lacking a more productive hobby, he no longer needed much prodding from George to join in on the antics.
Without daily swim practice, Ditzler drifted apart from Randy and George. She moved to an apartment off campus, where they would visit her sporadically. Then, one day, there was an unexpected knock at her door, and she found Randy and George standing on her front steps, holding a bandanna. They asked her to blindfold herself—which she did—and then proceeded to engage in a sort of mock kidnapping ritual. They stuffed her in their car and drove her to an apartment that reeked of weed, with army tents set up on the floor and clothes piled to the ceiling. “I had heard of guys from the NoZe Brotherhood who would do all their shopping at the Goodwill—wear the clothes a few times and then throw them in some apartment,” she told me later. “I thought maybe that’s where I was.” Randy and George tried to get her to take bong hits with them, and when she declined, they put her back in the car and drove her to a countryside creek outside of town. There, on the bank of the stream, they commanded her to bow down to their god, the “Aqua Buddha.”
They never hung out again after that, and soon afterward Randy disappeared from campus without a goodbye. (Ditzler would later learn that he scored high enough on the MCATs to get into Duke without graduating from Baylor.) She didn’t bother to keep track of Randy or George, and forgot all about the incident.
But the memory of that strange afternoon returned one day twenty-seven years later when, flipping through channels, Ditzler spotted her old pal Randy on CNN, running for Senate. He was wearing a blue blazer and a power tie—dressed up as if he was going as a Republican for Halloween—and he was delivering some laughably earnest spiel about God, country, and Constitution. Even weirder, the news anchor kept calling him “Rand.” It was all so ludicrously out of character that she wouldn’t have been surprised to find out the campaign was an elaborate NoZe brothers reunion prank.
Ditzler tried to remember the last time she’d seen Randy, and that’s when it came back to her: the image of her curly-haired friend, giddy and weird and probably stoned, shouting out nonsensical things about the Aqua Buddha. “It was like, whoa, you must have changed overnight,” she remembered thinking. “Or did we ever really know you?”
But after getting over the initial shock of Randy’s new act, Ditzler began paying closer attention to what he was up to. She caught the highlights of his big anti-drone filibuster, and occasionally came across news stories about him picking fights with other Republicans. She was a Democrat, and no aficionada of internal GOP politics, but every so often when she watched him on TV she could catch familiar glimpses of her friend.
“He always made fun of people for following,” she said, looking back on their college days. “He made fun of people for not thinking for themselves. He made fun of their beliefs… and he provoked people to cause them to question their beliefs.” Ditzler continued to believe that his whole flag-shrouded Republican routine was canned, but in at least one way the guy in the new suit was still the same old Randy.
“I guess that’s the only thing that’s consistent now with the person I knew,” she said. “He still provokes people.”
Rand would deploy his trademark provocation at many fellow Republicans as he elbowed and needled his way toward the 2016 presidential race—but few targets would prove more irresistible to him than the governor of New Jersey.
What a bunch of pansies.
It was July 25, 2013, and Chris Christie was sitting at the far end of a row of Republican governors on the Aspen Meadows campus, a playground in the Rocky Mountains for the socially conscious rich and the thought leaders flown in to entertain them every summer at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Tonight’s production was a panel, moderated by gregarious New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin, featuring four conservative state executives and prospective 2016 candidates. The open-collared governors had spent most of the evening complimenting one another and chatting affably about the policy innovations they were pursuing in their respective states. But for his final question, Martin noted a front-page story in his own paper that day reporting that a surprising number of congressional Republicans, led by Rand Paul, had voted with Democrats to crack down on the NSA’s recently exposed domestic surveillance program.
“Is your party becoming more libertarian?” Martin asked the governors.
Christie, his massive frame wrapped in a pink oxford shirt, watched in disgust as, one by one, each of his fellow governors punted on the question. Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal drawled that the libertarian surge in the party was “a good thing,” and then quickly pivoted away to some boilerplate Obama bashing. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker talked about how a “shift overall in the party” toward libertarianism might help the GOP reach younger voters like his college-age son. Indiana’s Mike Pence sunnily called the national security debate being driven by libertarians “healthy.”
Pansies.
It would fall to Christie, the truth-telling, no-nonsense New Jersey honcho, to put the libertarian rabble-rousers in their place, and stop this silly faux movement in its tracks before they actually managed to put American lives in danger.
“As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on September tenth, two thousand and one, I just want us to be really cautious,” Christie began, “because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought.”
Christie continued, his voice gathering intensity as he worked up a nice, frothy righteous indignation. “I think what we as a country have to decide is, do we have amnesia? ’Cause I don’t. And I remember what we felt like on September twelfth, two thousand and one.” He was really on a roll now. “And as the governor now of a state that lost the second most people on 9/11 besides the state of New York, and still seeing those families, Jon? I love all these esoteric debates that people are getting in…”
Martin, realizing that he was one quick follow-up away from a huge political headline, interrupted Ch
ristie’s monologue.
“Senator Rand Paul, for example?” Martin asked.
Christie briefly considered restraint. “Listen, you can name any number of people who’ve engaged in it,” he started, before deciding, Screw restraint. “And he’s one of ’em.”
“I mean, these esoteric, intellectual debates.” He paused for a moment, as though overwhelmed by the sheer repulsiveness of all the esotericism. “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have.”
The panel ended a few minutes later, and in between handshakes with attendees, Martin hurriedly tapped out an email on his Black-Berry and fired it off to Doug Stafford, Rand Paul’s top adviser.
In the Republican civil war, Chris Christie had just unleashed an unprovoked broadside aimed at libertarians. And Martin wanted to know: how was Rand going to retaliate?
By the time Rand’s advisers in Washington got Martin’s email and figured out exactly what Christie had said, it was after 10 p.m. and no one particularly felt like waking up the senator to bring news that the big man from the Garden State had called him a terrorist-loving sissy. Martin was pressing them for an on-the-record quote to run in his Times story, but they said they would have to hold their fire until they got Rand’s go-ahead.