Chapter 19: Escape from the Moon(p)ies
Tobie’s arrest and brief incarceration had been a great embarrassment to Janie and Jeremy, although Tobie had become something of a folk hero to many of the good citizens of The Valley. The original charge behind Tobie’s arrest had been kidnapping, and the events surrounding the crime, bizarre.
For some time Tobie had sought a method to break away from the ranch, to add excitement to his life, to pull away from the humdrum profession of watching grapes grow. And he wanted to do something that required little mental or physical effort on his part. His brief attempts at careers as a boat racer, crop dusting pilot and whitewater rafting guide had all ended when he either refused to invest the required time to gain an expertise or he had destroyed the expensive toy that Jeremy purchase for him to become the expert.
Jeremy had actually ended Tobie’s latest planned venture – to provide hot air balloon rides at daybreak for tourists in The Valley. Much to the chagrin of Jeremy, Tobie had left for a hot-air balloon race in Las Vegas the week before the past year’s Crush had begun. Tobie’s sole job for the previous Crush had been to drive a flat-bed truck with bins of chardonnay grapes to The Winery. Nothing more had been required of him. A few days before Crush he had informed his father that he was off to Vegas for the week with his ground crew and servant, The Insect, in tow. Jeremy threw a mild fit and then wrote out a check for the entry fee to the race. But Jeremy had refused to pay the bill for salvaging and transporting the half-burnt balloon and gondola back to California after it was trapped in the electric lines coming from the Hoover Dam power station. Tobie had jumped from the gondola seconds before impact, setting some sort of State of Nevada high-dive record into Lake Mead.
The careers that had caused criminal charges to be filed – and ultimately dropped – against Tobie were skydiving and cult deprogramming. Tobie’s short-term vocations developed over a series of Guinness Stouts quaffed during a late-night drinking session at a Healdsburg tavern. His drinking companion was a bereaved Irishman drowning his sorrows over the loss of his only daughter. The Dubliner had come to The Valley to try to communicate with her, and he had failed. He feared his daughter was lost forever to an odd cult headquartered in an isolated corner of The Valley not far from the Barnes ranch.
The cult had an official five-word name that sufficiently hid their true identity. But ever since an article had appeared in Playboy that noted the similarities between the new cult and the established Moonies, and that the founder, a Danish-American entrepreneur named Martin Petersen, had once run a pastry shop specializing in a cream-filled doughnut that resembled a moonpie, the cult had been given a new moniker by the press: Moon(p)ies.
Martin Petersen had determined he was a prophet of God in the early ‘70’s, after God had visited him in the wee hours as he was kneading dough in his shop in Springfield, Illinois. God’s message: He, Martin Petersen, was the chosen one to provide spiritual guidance to the lonely and undirected of society. At one time a devout Catholict convert, Petersen came to be a harsh critic of what he found to be a top-heavy, lax, overly liberal church. Its greatest sin in his eyes was an alarming drift toward humanism, toward allowing the individual some room to think, to decide. It was in that mood of righteous indignation that Petersen began to hold meetings at his shop for all those he could attract to his teachings, teachings based on a highly disciplined form of siege-mentality Christianity not practiced in several centuries. He had made several shrewdly capitalistic updates to his reactionary religious rhetoric, and those revisions guaranteed the financial success of his budding church. The most noteworthy: He hired on as his behind-the-scenes business consultant – and as his future financial director of the burgeoning church – a man who was a franchising genius.
The two began a program of expansion, establishing doughnut shops near large state universities and in the urban centers of the Midwest. The chain of doughnut shops and his church grew hand-in-hand out of a simple formula: The closest devotees to the charismatic Petersen were given franchises in outpost cities. All profits were directed back to the main headquarters in Springfield although later the headquarters – Petersen’s “Little Vatican” as his critics called it – would be moved to prime ocean-front property near Laguna Beach, California. The managers of the franchise shops were given a small stipend on which to survive, and a quota for doughnut sales and new converts. And through Petersen’s proven plan, the quotas were easily met.
It was a brilliant ploy, for all-night doughnut shops were better than either bus stations or airports as the contact spots for recruiting new members, for 24-hour doughnut shops were surely the collection point for the most desperate, pathetic humans in American society. Marketing surveys commissioned by the church’s financial director had given Petersen the basic convert profiles – those who entered the stores between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. The average doughnut buyer during that time period was found by the surveys to be:
A) A slightly overweight young woman in college or in an entry-level position (usually secretarial) at a large corporation. She is single and in a new environment. She generally has been a good student, failing only her aerobic dance class. She consumes any and all information on diets and exercise found in the dozens of women’s magazines to which she subscribes, but those two programs – diet and exercise – are both treated by her as spectator sports. In moments of severe depression she enters a doughnut shop, and in her attempt to rationalize her psychosomatically induced hunger financially, she buys the “special” – a dozen doughnuts at a dollar off and consumes them in a feeding frenzy to destroy all evidence of her weakness.
B) An out-of-shape young man with a heavy bent toward computer games requiring less than two players. He is in a state college and, for the first time, away from his family and other members of his support group. He usually has acne or hair that cannot be coiffed into anything resembling a current style. He usually has spent the hours immediately prior to entering the shop being extremely uncomfortable – and unsuccessful – in a singles bar, or extremely comfortable – and guilt-ridden – alone with a pornographic magazine in the privacy of his tiny room called home. Doughnuts and milk, with their maternalistic connotations, provide him the sacrament of security he so desperately needs in order to atone for his sins.
Whenever either of the profiled members of the target group was spotted by one of Petersen’s employees/devotees, a simple, friendly, caring conversation was struck up and an extra-fancy doughnut was given free to the patron. If that customer was receptive to their overtures and returned within the month to the shop, he or she was earmarked as a potential convert, and a tailor-made recruiting and indoctrination plan, using the latest in computer software, was drawn up and put into action. The end result, if all proved successful, was the convert’s agreeing to travel – all expenses paid — to a joyous weekend of singing and dancing and group sports and the like at Bakers’ Camp in The Valley.
The author of the expose on the Moonpies in Playboy had amusingly tagged the three ranks of the Moon(p)ie hierarchy. Those who were potential converts were called “Doughnut Holes.” Those who had been sufficiently love-bombed at Bakers’s Camp to have forgotten life as they had once known it were called “Cream Puffs.” And franchise managers and the spiritual and corporate elite were called “Royal Danish.”
