Hella Nation - Evan Wright [155]
I have scarcely digested one of these letters when Dollard leads me into the editing room to reveal his next inspiration. The editing system is set up against the back wall of the bedroom. Along the opposite wall is a child’s bed, with an ornate iron frame and a ruffled cover, which was his daughter’s in his old home and is set up for a visit from her that never happens. I sit on the bed as Dollard plays jihadi videos: YouTube-quality clips made by insurgents to showcase attacks on Americans, beheadings and other violent doings. Designed to recruit young men into the insurgency, many are set to jihadi hip-hop. Watching them, Dollard becomes outraged (even as I am struck by how similar they are to his own film). “This is the Islamofascist death machine at work,” he says. “This is the breath of Darth Vader.”
Dollard has long conceived of his film as a work of guerrilla cinema, a sort of American version of a jihad video to galvanize the domestic audience. But recently the videos have inspired him further. Dollard wants to launch an anti-jihadi action cell in the West. He explains, “This will be an educational, activism and political organization dedicated to waging final war on modern jihadism. There will be a manifesto, guides for maintaining political pressure in favor of the overthrow of the Syrian and Iranian governments. Aggressive militarism in support of these goals will generally be encouraged, dependent on current conditions within the target nations and regimes.”
He tells me that he has already registered the domain name, jihadikiller .com, then shows me a note to his business manager, Evan Bell (whose other clients include Steven Soderbergh and Bill O’Reilly), telling him to incorporate a business named Jihadi Killer, Inc.
(Dollard forwards me the e-mail from Bell responding to his request: “Pat you sure you want this name? I fear extra, extra scrutiny towards the LLC & everybody & everything associated with it. Pat, we are in uncertain times. Really don’t think a name like that would have any kind of positive (except shock value) impact. I do think it is a mistake.”)
I leave at about ten as a delivery guy shows up from a corner store with cigarettes and more root beer and vanilla ice cream. “You sure you don’t want a root-beer float?” Dollard asks, grabbing his bowl from the sink.
THE BUDDY SYSTEM
A FEW DAYS LATER, Dollard calls, sounding rattled, to tell me that the night before “the Devil was back.” Driving alone in Hollywood, he was seized by a powerful urge to get loaded. Though he resisted, he says that since then he’s “just felt literally sick.”
Dollard assures me he’s taken steps to maintain his sobriety. He’s having a young man he met in rehab move in with him. “I’m doing it just like the Marines,” he says. “I’m going on the buddy system.”
Dollard describes his new roommate as a “metrosexual gangbanger.” Josiah Hernandez is twenty-two and slight of stature, about five-two, but with eyes so large his face looks like that of an anime character. His dark hair is fragrantly pomaded. He dresses like any kid in a low-rent Hollywood club—black Skechers, a dark striped shirt and pressed jeans worn so low his plaid boxers fluff out like feathers. When I meet him at Dollard’s place, Josiah shakes my hand, grinning. His smile is so big it makes his eyes squint.
Before he and Dollard met at Impact House, in May, Josiah had recently finished serving three and a half years in prison for armed robbery. “Josiah has a long history of occasionally going crazy and stabbing people,” Dollard explains, eyeing the young man with a look of paternal pride.
Josiah had been folding Dollard’s laundry on the coffee table when he let me in. In addition to serving as Dollard’s sobriety helpmate, he works around the house as a sort of manservant (while also working as a busboy at Hamburger Hamlet). Josiah fetches me a drink, then resumes sorting Dollard’s socks. He tells me about his past.
“I used to be a stickup kid, eh?” He finishes his sentences with an “eh?” the way Canadians do,