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The Last Statue

Chapter 3

‘If a man asks:
What is the
Process?
Say to him:
It is The End
the final ending
of the world of men
It is the agent of the End
The instrument of The End
The inexorable power of The End’
-Robert De Grimston

If you’re harder yet to please
We have most delightful dreams
Our recorders will preserve
The intensity and passion of your screams
For we only aim to please
It’s our customers who gain
As their appetites increase
They must come to us
for pleasure and for pain
And the price is right
The cost of one admission is your mind
-The United States of America

‘Strange days have found us
Strange days have tracked us down…
Bodies confused
Memories misused
As we run from the day
to a strange night of stone…’
-Jim Morrison

The Testament of Charles Kyd L’Maigne

I first met Tim Scully somewhere in the science department at Berkeley, briefly discussing, if memory serves, the theoretical possibilities of red mercury, the philosopher’s stone, the pursuit of the grail & the elixir of immortality, and how any or all of this, might or might not relate to the lysergic trend suddenly gaining momentum as the zeitgeist beckoned.
I had already met Melissa Cargill around the campus, and soon heard that she was living with the Big O up in Richmond, cooking up speed in their bathtub, taking in Scully as a roommate; then, eventually refining their act by producing a series of high quality LSD-25 prototypes; ‘Blue Cheer’, ‘Purple Haze’, and ultimately, yes…’Orange Sunshine’, breakfast of champions. Labs in Windsor, Orinda, and Petaluma were soon cranking out mass-produced enlightenment at the behest of Mr. William Mellon Hitchcock, who was bankrolling all of this neuro-chemical satori, I assumed, out of the goodness of his heart…

Eventually Nick Sand was on board; a pragmatic, profit-motivated counterfoil to Scully’s mystic idealism. Scully obsessed about purity, while Sand strove to find new ways to cut corners & add cheap thrills & bum kicks, cutting the acid with meth, strychnine, STP & DPT. Definitely quantity over quality with Sand, which is where I come into the picture. Relations between S&S were already strained when Sand accidentally (I think) tainted a major batch with kerosene. I’d done some minor work in a couple of their labs, produced a few batches, which Scully then meticulously analyzed, logged, and filed. Rather than argue with Sand at this point, Scully commissioned a certain quantity from me, and I assume, was fairly satisfied with the results, which is where all of that Holy Roman Emperor nickname stuff got started.

The main irony was that, at this point, I was moving away from lysergic solutions, becoming obsessed with a mythical psychedelic compound mentioned in ancient heretical Persian and Kurdish religious texts. The sacred libation, translated roughly as ‘Lace’, seems to have become intertwined with soma and haoma, from the religious traditions of India & Persia respectively. An aspiring young specialist in Kurdish liturgical texts by the name of Martin Schwartzman, claimed that superimposing certain passages from the Jandekite literature, namely, The Book of the Diamond, and The Book of the Pearl, would yield the encoded recipe for ‘lace’, which, according to the Diamond & Pearl literature, would trigger a series of synchronistic events, which would somehow provoke the immanent manifestation of the much anticipated Book of JNDK.

from JNDK: Hypothetical Heretic
Estimated Prophet
-by Walter Tyler

F& The Book of JNDK, according to Henry Corbin’s translation of Theodore Bar Konai, is depicted as a call being “sent” or “broadcast” from some origin-point located outside the sphere of linear temporal unfolding; rebounding from the flash-point at the end of History, casting a reflection of itself into the past, creating rippling, patterned modifications in seemingly random cultural artifacts, subverting and overriding preexistent interpretive meaning; connecting the dots on a whole other level, creating an infinite labyrinth of correspondences, spiraling outward in the form of a wheel, gathering the fallen sparks into the Ras, The Final Assembly, The Last Statue.

This last “statue”, would be composed of hashmal, a kind of divine, mercurial, liquid-fire type of energy, and would convey the gathered fallen sparks as a purified wheel of fire, to the “New Town”, a destination equivalent to the New Jerusalem, Astra Alta, or Christianopolis.

According to Professor Oskar Mier, in his masterful study of Guilo Camillo; ‘The Enigma of Bologna’ (a vast improvement over Mier’s previous effort; ‘The Diet of Worms’-strictly for the birds) the memory-wheels of Ramon Lull were a very specific reverberation of that same theme. Camillo evidently had a clandestine copy of Lull’s Book of the Seven Planets, wherein these connections are frequently, albeit cryptically, examined. Lull, who apparently had clandestine copies of the books of the Diamond & Pearl, seems to have extracted from these works, his color-coded system of decans; “the dye behind the wheel” as Lull would note.

The single credible surviving fragment alleged to be included in the Book of JNDK:

“I am a word, a son of words [....] beware the repetitions of mirrors and copulations lest ye fall into the labyrinth and be entangled therein [....] cast into the wastes of the kenoma, forgetful of origin and destination, prey to djinn, astral voyeurs [....] ghosts in the mirror (there follows a talismanic chant to ward off the aforementioned baleful influences)UUUAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAA UUUUUUUOOOEEEEEEEEEEEEEUUUUUUUUUUUUEEEEEE AAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOO” etc.

Each vowel in the sequence is said to represent a color, an element, a number, a musical tone, a planet, a day of the week and so on.

The remaining fragments of this hypothetical tome, relate the voyage of the JNDK and his followers, as they cross the Vourukasha sea in southern Uqbar, where they encounter the blue, but miraculously preserved body of Xormusta, in the frozen wastes of Mt. Elburz.
-end quote

“You are the result of a strategy that has been unfolding for over fifty years. You were prepared discreetly by several Englishmen who were themselves agents of the process…”
-Lama Govinda to Timothy Leary from ‘Confessions of a Hope Fiend’

The optimism and naivetŽ of the era tended to negate any inclination to feel skeptical or judgmental toward super-cool acid financiers who happen to be doing business with the same money launderers, as Nixon, Vesco, Bebe Rebozo, and a whole shitload of corrupt, venal, asshole Third-world dictators and other practitioners of cattle-prod-to-genital social engineering.
So…the flower blooms, dies, and rots, far quicker than you’d think it’s going to. By summer ‘67, the ‘Death of Hippie’ has been declared, the Haight spinning into a terminal amphetamine death-rattle, swarming with vicious pimps and hustlers, battening on the surplus of unsuspecting lemmings, who’ve made this long journey just to be victimized…

I’d set up a small basement lab on Cole street, which was an excellent vantage point to watch the New Darkness sweep down Cole and on into the Haight along with a myriad of other cults full of mindfuckers, soul-zappers, and blood slurpers.
Feeling kind of conspicuous, with a lab going so close to hippie ground-zero, concerns about the heat and all…a band rehearsing upstairs blows a fuse once or twice a week, leaving me scrambling for emergency power, while the word on the street is: Mr. ‘Billy’ Hitchcock is under some kind of pressure to relinquish his patronage to our worthy endeavor. But even more troubling is the phenomena brought to my attention by Milan Melvin…

“Kyd, word’s getting around that all the regular dealers, chemists, and distributors are disappearing, or turning up decapitated, mutilated or hacked to pieces if they turn up at all. Shit, some of them we sort of know, or at least have heard of, like Shob, Superspade, or Leo the Hebrew…supposedly done in by the King of Hearts, whoever the fuck that’s supposed to be…”

Concern ramps up to borderline paranoia with the very unexpected arrival at my door, of Nick Sand. I’d never been all that close to the Sandman, who operated according to his own agenda of semi-secret, privately commissioned batches of dubious compounds for unspecified entities, whose intentions I suspect, were far from benevolent. I could never really talk to Sand on the same level as I could with Scully or Cargill. Our main topic of conversation was the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, whom I knew a bit about through an uncle who had been part of the inner circle at G’s institute in Fountainbleu. According to my uncle; the real action where any kind of mystical progress was being made, was not in the lessons, classes, exercises, lectures, stupifyingly tedious readings of ‘Beelzebub’s Tales’, or menial slave labor, but in the marathon dinners which usually evolved or devolved, depending upon your point of view, into lengthy drinking sessions where the big G would push his student’s buttons, playing upon their weaknesses, until they were sufficiently destabilized to be receptive to the Big Enlightenment which was surely just around the corner…

Sand, needless to say, loved of all that manipulation of human weakness stuff, and was maybe using some of that as he pitched his plan to set up shop in the corner of my rented basement, to begin working some new short-cut LSD formula. The upside of his scheme, was that this recipe eliminated several steps in the process and obviated the need for ergotamine tartrate (ET) which was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. The downside of all this involved certain specialized solvents so volatile as to explode or ignite by mere contact with a sufficiently sharp surface (like broken glass for instance) which in close proximity to other compounds found in this context, could trigger a chain of explosions, possibly consuming the whole lab.
What a bummer man…

You connect the dots-you do the math-you fill in your own punch line-(KABLOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM!)
Sand picked his way through the debris; glass shards and splinters from Bunsen burners, beakers, and test tubes and various flasks & scales…bits of rubber tubing & detritus from vacuum evaporators & chromatography columns…Sand, or so the story goes, had arrangements like this all over town at this point, and so, staggered off into the morning mist, sandblasted (pun intended) from head to toe with pure crystaline LSD-25, plus related compounds, to cook another batch, maybe destroy another lab-all in a day’s work…

“Uh, sorry man…gotta go…later…”

I tried to clean up as much of the mess as I could, scooped & trashed most of the broken glass, though random splotches of various substances, some illegal, some still unknown to law or science, were distributed across major areas of the walls and ceiling.

A call from Roni; the willowy dark-haired girl who dealt a little weed & acid out of C-3, the apartment across from mine…
“Hey Kyd, just thought I’d tell ya: You know those guys down the hall? They’ve been coming around asking about you. I know they talked to Glickman, and to Naiomi & John in C-5. Shane says they were asking about the key to the basement, and when I came back from the market this afternoon, they both had their faces up in the windows of your camper. They seem to be taking an interest at the very least…Then I heard that boom, like it was down in the basement or something…is everything O.K.?”

“Yeah, just a visit from the Sandman, not nearly as apocalyptic as it probably sounded.”

“Good to hear, y’know everybody’s still raving about that Chained Lighting from last week, The People, such as they are, unanimously request more, when and if available, but we’ll talk about that when I see you…meanwhile those guys down the hall rate at least a 9 on my paranoia scale of 1 to 10. Narks, informants, rip-off artists-who knows? But they’re definitely up to something.”

I thanked Roni, then called Milan Melvin to discuss these current fluctuations in the exchange of commodities…

“Jeez Kyd,” sez a highly agitated MM, “You’d better get out of town right now, before you wind up as a warehouse doorstop, or several warehouse doorstops…you remember that little chat we had about Shob & Superspade…”

“Well, I talked to this guy a couple of weeks ago, a Digger, I think, named Erickson. He claimed to be part of some underground railway/safehouse kind of deal, where they shuttle draft-resisters up to Canada, and others with dope or political issues, down to L.A. or Mexico.”

“Who, Erickson?” says MM, “Nah, that guy’s not a Digger. I asked Grogan about Erickson, he’s part of some weirdo group that’s supposed to occupy one of the crashpads on Waller Street, as soon as the Diggers pull out-if they haven’t already… but definitely not a Digger. According to Grogan, Erickson works for that guy Stark, from the Himalaya Academy.”

“Stark?”

“Yeah, Ron Stark. Remember the ‘Alchemist’s Conference’ at the Himalaya Academy? Seems like everybody in the business was there; sort of heavy on the platitudes & happy-speak, a little light on substance…this guy Stark had big bushy hair-a little thin on top-and a Zapata mustache. I remember hearing one of the Academy poofters refer to him as ‘Uncle Sugar’. I heard Leary introduce him to somebody else, as ‘Carl’. The Big O implies that Stark might be stepping into Mr. Billy’s shoes before too long…none of which helps us at the moment-you need a deep-cover vacation…oh yeah, hold on a sec…yeah…I’ve been trying to find somebody to house-sit this cabin down near LA. Remember Marko? He needs someone to occupy his place for a few months while he gets some medical attention.”

“Oh yeah? What seems to be the problem?”

“Ah, it’s a long story…”

Hmmmm…

Maybe just about this long:
Patient in question now residing in the Charles Dexter ward of the James V. Forrestal wing at Atascadero State Mental Facility Patient complains of confusion and distortion in his spatial and temporal relationship to his body
Patient suffers from apocalyptic anxieties connected to ritual cult activities that he claims occur in the area near his residence Patient avers that his memories have been ‘tampered’ and ‘misused’

“I hope Marko was bullshitting or hallucinating about that cult stuff. Other than that, how bad could it be? Topanga by the sea…”

“You’re not going to drive that motor-home, are you? It looks like a Technicolor mother-of-pearl flying saucer on peyote. Beautiful, and in its own way, subtle, compared to all the day-glow paisley buses one sees these days, but still a long way from inconspicuous, if you know what I mean…”
He had me there. I’d trusted some very peppy freaks to repaint this camper from its original day-glow, green jello & magenta. So it comes back covered with this shimmering, prismatic, mother-of-pearl type coating, giving the effect of a mirage of an abalone shell turned inside out. Well it couldn’t be helped. I’d filled up the tank and loaded what I could salvage from the lab, and traded some of the remaining Chained Lighting to Roni, for a QP of Acapulco Gold (that’s right kids, such things did once actually exist) and a quantity of black Paki hash about the size of a cheese wheel. It would have to do.

“…the future’s uncertain & The End
is always near…”
-Jim Morrison

The Spiral Staircase

There it was; in all of its two-story Victorian glory, jutting against the picture-postcard Malibu sunset, which was in the process of being pre-empted by a looming thunderhead fronting a massive storm system gliding in off the ocean.
I’d followed the creek down toward the coast, avoiding the main canyon highway, figuring to chain-smoke a few joints, maybe cop some take-out food at The Raft or Positano’s, if it’s still open, then scoot back up to the cabin before the storm hit.
From what I’d seen of Topanga so far, Victorian-styled structures loomed highly incongruous amongst the cabins and bungalows scattered at the mouth of the canyon. And now, on the way back from the Raft, rounding past the house, notice the tilted angle, the skewed perspective, the infernal asymmetry…as I complete my pedestrian U-turn, heading back up the creek, now on the opposite side of the property, here’s two individuals, whom we deduce from the subtle stick-figure on the patch or ‘colors’ being worn, are Harley-riding members of something called ‘Satan’s Slaves’…bleary speed- blasted road-gristle, with beards like glazed doughnuts, on a break from the party at the end of the world…
An ancient Ford pickup screeches down the unpaved driveway back onto Topanga Canyon Lane, having clearly just departed. One biker chortling mirthlessly to himself, the other, sporting a puzzled expression and a question on his lips:
“What the fuck’s wrong with Big Stik? Just saw him tear by in the back of that pickup, he was holding his leg and howling like a motherfucker, looked like Roscoe driving, almost ran me off the road, fuckin’ prick…”

“That stupid asshole got all cranked-up and went messing around up at the Injun shack-just like I told him not to, fuckin’ dumbass…” says the first biker, “So he’s up there pissin’ in the garden, looking through the window; casing the place-he thinks the Injun’s got a bunch of silver & turquoise, maybe some gold…biggest bunch of happy horseshit I ever did hear…so, in the middle of all this, he says he’s attacked by some kind of dog or coyote or something, sounded like a cartoon to hear him tell it…now, it’s not enough that the dickhead hallucinates this bullshit, but he goes tearing off like a panty- wetting-schoolgirl, tripping over a raised tree-root…you know how he’s got that one fucked-up knee? Well, the cartilage is all gone now, fuckin’ knee got bent all the way back in the other direction…but no, that wasn’t painful enough, so the moron gets up on his bike makes 50-60 yards down the road, spills, just about totaled his hog, been lying around here since last night, pissing and moaning all day long, says if he gets enough ‘medicine’ he’ll be alright, but I got tired of hearing his weepy bullshit, told Roscoe: ‘Take him to the hospital in Santa Monica’, so yeah, he’s all pissed, fuckin’ chump…”

Suddenly, alert to the fact that I’m only a few feet away, the first biker whirls facing my direction, obviously caught off guard, squint-sneering suspicious, says, “What the fuck are you? Some kinda nark?”

I, in fact, happen to have a giant hit of Gold & hash occupying my lungs at this particular juncture, so I just let it out right into his face. The only way to follow a massive blue cloud of that magnitude is to reply: “That’s right pal, why don’t you go ahead and inhale that, and I’ll read you your rights…”
At first, the squint tightens at the perceived effrontery, then…as herbal smoke reaches snout, contacts olfactory receptors…a slackening of expression…reinforced by the sudden presentation of a crisp new joint for each of them, which they grab for eagerly, and you would too if you’d been up for a couple of days, speeding & boozing with nothing to smoke but harsh ten-dollar-a-bag “comersh” headache-weed that it is inevitably the biker’s lot to deal.

“Like I told Big Stik as we’re throwin’ him into the back of the truck,” says the first biker, mellowing, “you got to learn to walk softer, dumbshit, haw-haw-haw…”

I figure that a bit of cannabis diplomacy with the local hairy-thunderers would be a shrewd investment about now. I knew that the ‘Injun shack’ belonged to Elk, an anthropology consultant at UCLA, of Native American heritage that I’d been introduced to at Darla’s. Darla was my new neighbor from two cabins down the road, a hippie earth-mother who hosted open-invitation, semi communal breakfasts for the neighborhood. Melvin claims that Elk is a shaman, and though I tend to run a bit skeptical on such things (if I had a dime for every alleged ’shaman’ I’ve ever been introduced to, believe me, none of this would have been necessary) but I couldn’t rule it out in this case…

I have appropriately hazy memories of a very informal, intensely medicated discussion between Milan Melvin, Tobacco, Emmet Grogan, and a notoriously irresponsible Doctor of Journalism. One of the topics in that meandering discourse, was what to do about the Angels? Hell’s Angels that is, and though they differed slightly on the pros & cons of the Angel’s value in the New Society, they were unanimous in their assertion that the Angels, as disagreeable as they might be on occasion, were the Salvation Army compared to some of the other less well-known ‘bike clubs’. Satan’s Slaves, and the Gypsy Jokers being the most vile that they could think of, not to be confused with the slightly less vicious Straight Satans and Jokers Out of Hell.

“Yeah, ya gotta talk to Joe Dorgan up at the Plank, out in the Valley…nah, he doesn’t wear our colors, he’s Straight Satan-fuckin’ pussies-but he’s OK, we have an understanding, he can help you out…” says the first biker in response to a wooly derelict in a wizard’s cape & carnival mask’s discreet inquiry about things unwholesome… My new pals Mook and Shank seemed like routine biker foot-soldiers, although Grogan, Melvin, and the good Doctor, had all hinted at darker, meaner, sharper things up toward the top of that pyramid…

“Dog? No, don’t have one myself, and other than Shemp,” Elk says indicating Darla’s dog; an amiable, smiley-looking golden retriever now sitting at Darla’s feet, “You’d have to go 7or 8 cabins up the road to find one in residence…and they’re all pretty laid-back, not exactly guard dogs…now, there’s coyotes around here, but they’d have to be awfully sick and hungry to attack anyone…”

“This all sounds like drugs and dog karma to me,” says Darla, gazing off the porch into the rain. Darla had stopped by with a tureen of chicken-tortilla soup, served on the porch, inviting Elk as he passed by on the trail, to partake in a Soup Moment, which I see as a kind of random and spontaneous thing to be valued & shared. Guard your Soup Moments lest some nefarious corporation try to sell them back to you in a can, not that you can’t have a Soup Moment out of a can if you’re hungry enough, but it really helps to have some ambrosial home-made concoction, served with cilantro & lime, a ripping good thunderstorm is a prime ingredient of course, and a chunk of hashish as big as a cheese-wheel, can be considered a plus as well.

Neighbors Jessica & Sarah drop by with fresh-baked bread, strawberries, and grapefruit wine. As the new guests sample hash & soup, I inquire further about drugs, dogs & karma…

“The drugs, I thought were pretty self explanatory, but dog karma?”

“Some of the Satan’s Slaves supposedly worship the goddess Circe, who apparently is British, with red hair, shiny leather hip-boots, with lots of S&M posturing.”

“Kinky, provocative, even alluring, I must admit, but doesn’t Circe turn men into swine? Hardly seems Kosher…”

“A definite upgrade in this context. If you get a load of some of the tattoos these hombres are sporting, you’ll see just how un-Kosher it can get…Point being, that part of the Slave’s worship of Circe would seem to involve the drinking of dog blood…German Shepherds-freshly skinned & drained or so I’m told. Along with a lot of rape, necrophilia, pedophelia, and just generally freaking out, or all of the above simultaneously. It all has something to do with that house those guys were standing in front of.”

None of the locals actually called it the ‘Spiral Staircase’-that came later, after Manson’s ascension to media-darling status. When referred to at all, it was as ‘the Snake-Pit’ by the locals, or ‘Gina’s Roadhouse’ by the bikers. Before we examine any specific details, we must pause to consider the risk of offending any delicate sensibilities by portraying any 60’s icons in a possibly less than flattering light. Start deviating from the party line and things can get ugly; like the crowd of fans waiting outside a Michael Jackson court appearance, or like Homer Simpson stomping an obnoxious child-actor at the movie premier in ‘Day of the Locust’. Well-maintained and updated websites abound, practicing various increments of spin & damage control, to protect the pristine and unsullied reputations of certain personages 40-50 years after the fact.

So Remember: None of These People Ever Met Each Other Or Did Anything Illegal Or Immoral Or Even In Questionable Taste-And Even If It Sort Of Looks Like They Were In The Same Place At The Same Point In Our Chronology Doing The Same Thing-That’s Just Coincidence Or Something…

“There seems to be a mingling of various interests over at the Snake Pit, there’s Georgina and her group-she owns the place-then there’s the British people in the capes with the pentagrams and goat’s heads,” says Elk. Soup’s finished, leaving a cumin & Tabasco afterglow, now polished to a finely textured, iridescent sheen by a fresh bowl of hash, “Then there’s Bummer Bob and Charlie the Fer-de-Lance, some new breed of acid pimp-messiahs popping up like mushrooms…no offence to the mushrooms. The party’s always on. Catch it during the day or early evening, and it seems harmless enough: swingin’ stoner party, music, strobe-lights, dancing, groovy guys & chicks balling on pillows and couches…a little later on, the real weridos start to crawl out of the woodwork: witches & warlocks, cult leaders & would-be messiahs…evidently a very competitive field these days. From there, the hardcore believers branch off into different rooms devoted to S&M in one, hardcore deviant sex in another, some sort of blood rituals involving small animals in another. Lots of acid, lots of scopolamine, datura, Demerol, speed, pretty much whatever you want…and plenty of it.”

“Yep,” sez Elk, sparking hash in the bowl of a long clay pipe, then blowing a voluminous cloud off the porch out into the rain-drenched night, “You hear all kinds of stories up and down the canyon…dark things happening along the beach and up at the Moonfire Ranch…Georgina supposedly has a place in the desert where they really cut loose-the kids say they sacrificed a bear out there, and drank its blood…sounds like bullshit to me, but you never know-I hope it is bullshit though…You usually don’t see Georgina until the last part of the cycle when all these rooms full of strange goggle-eyed people have passed into a deep scopolamine & Demerol comatose stone-slumber, then she proudly wanders through the place, holding her black candle, grinning…taking great satisfaction in her accomplishment…what’s that song she always whistles?”

“Either ‘Danny Boy’ or’ Londonderry Air’-I think…she sings and whistles it,” says Darla nursing a cup of tea, “That house has come loose from its foundation, and I think most other residents in the area would agree; so has Gina. Doesn’t stop people from coming out and making the scene though. Sometimes famous and/or powerful people. Let’s say you’re a budding starlet driving down from Bel-Air in a red Ferrari…or a rock idol with your face plastered across billboards on the Strip, Gina’s is the ‘in’ place to wallow in all those kinky forbidden thrills that you thought you might be missing out on…Afterwards, there’s always the Canyon Ranch Motel, where they’ve got some bungalows out back. Nothing too fancy…but easier to maintain your privacy of celebrity than waking up on the tilted floor of the Snake-Pit-although many do…”

A bit more tea & hash…conversation addressing the concerns of mudslides, flooding, and sandbag availability, and I bid goodnight to some of my guests. Then, later…smoking on the porch, digging some late-night LA FM radio-Sandy Bull, Billy Holiday, Coltrane, Monk, Buffy Saint-Marie…some Ken Nordine, Desmond Dekker, Nina Simone, Lenny Bruce, Terry Riley, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis…Steady drizzling torrent, yet propitious atmospheric conditions for sharp crystalline reception; other than the occasional zap of faint lighting, smooth sailing…no static at all…I can see the inside of the cabin awash in the soft green glow from the FM, while back here on the porch… flashes of the Haight crashing hard off the “Summer of Love” into a lethal vortex of methamphetamine & sociopathic predators only six months ago…After the initial burst of light and color, could this be the Newtonian pendulum swinging back the other direction? Is any of this a random development at this point? Could it have been anticipated or planned? What, if any, is my part in all of this? What if the crowd hanging around at the Snake Pit is not an anomaly, but a prototype for The New Direction?

“Hey man, ain’t seen you around…watcha been up to?” sez Mook as I pass the hash-pipe. We’re on the second floor of the Snake Pit…looking toward the entrance to the next room; a topless chick dances furiously in the connecting doorway, framed by ominous pulsating strobe-lights from the other room…nude female day-glow body paint dancers line the far wall, while an impossibly effete dude, wearing what looks like a drum majorette outfit, topped by a Hussar’s shako & a monocle, is heard, during a brief gap in the shrill din, to lisp: “This is such a boffo soirŽe…Gina really is the hostess with the mostest”…as maniacal bug-eyed freaks with stringy hair & sharp pointed beards, wearing crude looking leathers & jewelry made from bones, teeth, and skulls from (mostly) small animals, chanting sinister sounding gibberish while beating on pots & pans and metal cans with various utensils including buck-knives & bayonets…taking hits from “community jugs” & odd-looking pipes incorporating more bones, claws, skulls & other animal parts. Some people looking lost, or hunched over…wild-eyed paranoiac, snarling at invisible enemies…oblivious to other bodies huddled sucking & fucking in various arrangements of number & gender…
There’s a lot going on at the moment so…I’m possibly not paying full attention as Mook passes the pipe back, muttering something inaudible against the sonic barrage… Maybe take an extra-deep hit to acclimate myself to the frantic & unsettling action, and…instantly-harsh, acrid, chemical burning in throat & nostrils, jarring waves of sinister energy flash up the spine like a cattle-prod in a Jacuzzi…Visible, tangible lines of crackling force spreading through the room revealing the citizens therein to be skull-faced, death’s head gristle-puppets dancing the jig of the doomed. What had seemed like chaotic free-form spontaneous activity, was in reality the oppressive manipulated convulsing of maggot-tainted meat marionettes with their strings now revealed in a shimmering, hi-res, 4-D, Bosch hologram of eldritch certainties…

Mook: “Hey man, did you get a hit? That’s the DPT I was telling you about…” Oh yeah, the pipe-right…I can feel the interior presence of long tentacled fingers probing deep into my brain, my memories, my soul; with icy loathing contempt…Opening my eyes to de-emphasize that vibe, the room seems to be distorting into non-Euclidian angles, crunching down into a claustrophobic trapezoidal chamber with no visible doors…it seems to take hours to make it to the wall, where I feel along looking for an opening…a doorknob…turn it, step through and…almost plunge from second-story sheer drop into the creek…grab fumbling onto the morning glory vine-trellis…scramble down side of house to gravel of creek bed…Through the side entrance to the ground level, I can see hooded persons surrounding a nude couple screwing with unholy convulsive vigor on the dirt floor, while one of the ‘hoods’ drizzles the blood of a dying slashed chicken on them…

I’m out of here.

“There…” says Elk, after closing the ceremony by facing the four sacred directions, “The rest is up to you…Shit boy, you was lookin’ most poorly when I stumbled upon you this morning. Thought it was another knucklehead come to pee in my garden…”

I’d only made it as far as Elk’s cabin, being able to go no further, having made what seemed a super-human effort just to get this far. It’d been a long haul on that trail in the dark; deranged, swizzled, twisted on some hellish drug…I could make out leering gnarled demonic faces in the tree-trunks, and in the dark spaces between the trees, I could see flashing glimpses of high-tech futuristic cities in slick, startlingly high-definition composition, purveying an unbearably oppressive feeling of ennui and twisted emotional distortion; a deep jaded emptiness from the point of view of a spiritual ingrown toenail. I could feel the distorted, grotesque asymmetry of the Snake Pit, pulling me back in the direction of that trapezoidal void. I was resolved with dead-grim certainty, that whatever happened, I was NEVER going back to that building again. The flesh seemed to rot away from my hands, exposing wires & stuffing, revealing sharp metal talons, as I started digging in the dirt-clawing frantically at the ground for traction to keep from getting sucked back toward the trapezoid of closed dimensions…

“Yep, the Pit’s a good place to pick up an astral-leech or two, ectoplasmic parasites, like quipoleth, as the cabbalists would say,” continues Elk, “I’ve just brushed those off for you, so you need to take this day to relax, have a good meal or two, make small talk and laughter with the guests that will soon be arriving at your cabin, and just take it easy for two more days after that. But at the end of the three days, if you want to make the healing complete, you have to go back to…yes, that’s right-the Snake Pit…”

A grim prospect, to be sure. But I had to admit that I was light-years closer to feeling normal after Elk did his thing with the rattles & chanting. Still feeling a little buzzy and spaced-out, but otherwise OK…I mean, before that…I was just slumped here with my checks all cashed, my soul all spent, and my options all nixed. Now I could at least envision a foreseeable future & a tolerable, even comfortable present moment.

Back at my cabin, Darla and her pals Sarah & Jessica, set about the making of coffee, tea, orange juice, blueberry pancakes, eggs, salsa, bacon, banana-bread, soup for later, and sliced mangos, strawberries, melons, kiwis, and pineapple. Elk sitting outside smoking, while Darla’s niece Emmy plays Frisbee with Shemp. The fizzy, evil-vibe hangover is soon eroded in a healing wash of cooking smells, and the warm laughter of lilting voices…

It’s show-time, three days later, no putting it off…While approaching on the path branching from the creek trail, you can already hear the chant emanating from the Snake Pit:

Chiiiinnnnnnggg…ON!
Chiiiinnnnnnggg…ON!
Chiiiinnnnnnggg…ON!
Chiiiinnnnnnggg…ON!
Chiiiinnnnnnggg…ON!

“Hey! You’re back…” bursts Shank, jovial, having latched onto a beautiful, but terminally morbid-looking Mendocino witch.

“Tonight’s the night buddy, Father P.’s here, just seen D.K. & Brother Ely…ain’t everybody been in one place like this since the Boulder creek run…”

“Father P.?”

“He’s a great leader, a man of fire, of judgment & inspiration” the Mendocino witch says thickly, taking a hit from the community jug, “He’s beyond the confines of human limitation, he’s God & Satan. I’ve been to his ceremonies up in Santa Cruz, and Alameda County man, they go all the way. He’s a prosperous man in the straight world, the world of business, a millionaire & a doctor, but here tonight with his disciples-his companions of life, you have the chance to see real genius.”

“Look at that fuckin’ Mercedes, huh?” notes Shank, pointing to a sleek black vehicle that I hadn’t noticed previously. “If I couldn’t ride Harley, that’s what I’d be driving…”
Random human flotsam & jetsam are gathered around a fire-ring over to the side of the house, where leathered troglodytes are hurling a magnesium VW engine into the blaze, then…balancing precariously on the rim of the fire-ring, deeply inhaling the fumes as they rise from the greenish flames…

Ascending the actual spiral staircase, I reflect on Elk’s basic do’s & don’ts:
1-don’t drink, eat, or smoke anything passed to me
even if I brought it originally
2-minimize all physical contact, beware the acid-kiss
and the wet touch
3-keep moving
4-have a reference mantra handy to nullify any
propaganda bullshit
5-maintain calmness, allow no expression of fear

This last point being the key motivation behind this whole General Mac Arthur trip in the first place. The basic idea being to confront the flash-point of The Fear, in a detached observational mode, transcending all emotional turbulence.

I’d watched Nick Sands cook up batches of DPT before. Always sounded kind of dubious once you got over the similarity to DMT, which is dimethyltriptamine as opposed to dipropyltriptamine. While DMT occurs in nature and is very similar in structure to compounds produced by the human brain, DPT occurs nowhere in nature as far as we know, and is possibly one of the most artificial substances that you can stuff into your cranium. Designated as EA-939 in the MK-ULTRA arsenal, DPT eventually found a place in the literature, as the “demon” molecule, an appellation that I personally find to be devastatingly accurate, bearing in mind of course, that some people like it, there being at least one cult in New York based on it, plus the fact that as of the first decade of the 21st century, it’s still legal just about everywhere, unlike say, DMT-the “spirit” molecule.

But the point now, was to avoid any contact with the ubiquitous mind-zapping party-favors, no matter how seductive or aggressive in their attempted delivery.
Darkened rooms seething with anticipation…stoned chatter occasionally breaks into handclaps & chanting:
Father P. !
Father P. !
Father P. !
Father P. !…then sinking back into the general hub-hub to bubble to the surface again in a couple of minutes. The wooly leather crowd is out in full force, cutlery poised over pots & pans, ready to smite…mingling with vicious-looking bikers, S&M buffs, a smattering of hard-core Hollywood coke-spoon swingers, black-cloaked hooded snuff-mongers, and a random assortment of splatter-geeks, blood-guzzlers, mind crunchers & freak-out connoisseurs…all in breathless expectation for the arrival of the Grand One:
Father P. !
Father P. !
Father P. !
Father P. !

Against the far wall, previously occupied by the nude body-paint dancers, are The Teacher & The Oracle: Winston Targarth-de Kalb, and Circe Targarth-De Kalb. Winston, speaking to a select audience…

“…Embrace the dark beauty of inevitable death, by living to the fullest, with no limits, no illusions, no doubts. Make love if need be. Spill blood if need be. Give in to your darkest impulse to refine the light within. Thou shall kill, rape, plunder and torture without mercy if need be, to arrive finally, at the ultimate Truth. Fear not the End. Come to the Now. As it were-shall it be.”

Then Circe addresses the multitude: “Some of the brethren will be passing out our pamphlets on vivisection…And now, as promised, our very good friend & colleague; the divine Father P.”

A bulky form strides purposefully through the murk, a momentary diversion as a teenage witch in the west corner, indulges in a freak-out, writhing convulsively on the floor, a string of saliva extending from her mouth. It’s unclear to me, whether this faux pas is due to the heavy presence of El Chingon Grande, or from taking hits off one of those fucking scopolamine jugs that they’re constantly passing around.
Father P. turns in the direction of the disturbance. Then, satisfied that nothing out of the ordinary has transpired, steps up to the skull-motif podium just yielded by the de Kalbs. Even still turned, while conferring with Brother Ely, there’s something kind of familiar about Father P. It’s a chilling thought; who in the world can I think of that would have any probability of winding up here? And why?

It takes a minute to register. Always the possibility of misfiring synapses…could I have not come down from the DPT? Is this one of those flashbacks that I had always assumed existed solely in the imaginations of desperate defense attorneys? Because… Holy shit! This guy looks just like Ronald Stark from the Himalaya Academy-No it IS Ronald Stark from the Himalaya Academy-just as I recognize the bushy handlebar mustache; there’s Erickson taking a hit off of a bony-looking ivory pipe, a curved Malaysian dagger in his belt. With any luck, it’ll be a hit of DPT…hopefully give me a buffer for a clean getaway…Check please! Musn’t give in to the Big Fear, although that seems to be the intended accumulative gestalt effect of everything in this house. Just keep moving slowly toward the exit…mindful of the call I’d received just two days ago…

“Uh…yeah, things are OK, as far as it goes,” Milan Melvin had said via long-distance, a hint of anxiety detectable even over the phone. “But I need to tell you, I talked to Roni. She hired a clean-up team with the cash you left for the basement de-tox, and I guess when the hired crew showed up to scour the basement, they got into a hassle with those two guys from down the hall that had been asking about you before you left. They were down there pulling the basement apart, looking for something, and wouldn’t let anybody else down there. She says that they were with some other guy who seemed to be in charge, a real high-powered go-getter…Roni found his vibe questionable enough that she clicked off a roll of film with a telephoto-lens, right through the open window, while they were arguing with the clean-up crew, right out on the sidewalk…”

Roni’s photos had been steadily winning awards for several years now, during which, she had amassed a formidable arsenal of cameras & accessory equipment.

“Real clear, crisp, sharply defined, possibly award-winning photos, which she made a definite point of showing to me…and it seems artfully clear from a number of angles, that the high-powered go-getter supervising the other two guys, is our old buddy Erickson.”

“Ah, one other thing that might just be relevant at this point is: I’ve been asking around about that underground railway for draft-resisters that Erickson was trying to set you up with, and between Grogan, Peter Berg, and John Bryan, I assembled a list of nine travelers who bought the ticket to take that ride, and in so far as anyone can tell, no one has seen any of them since. They may have made it to the end of the line, but they never reached their destination, if you know what I mean…”

Well…a replay of that loop is definitely not helping in the looming anxiety department, so let’s just focus on the fact that Erickson and a couple of buck-knife brethren are now reconfigured right in front of the singular doorway leading to the staircase…so, no real choice, but to retrace my wobbly escape route from my previous peccadillo. At least I can see the doors…ah yes, this is the one-careful-it’s still a sudden drop, even if you’re not frying on some demonic, soul-scorching pathogen of the spirit…

The descent by morning-glory trellis seems almost routine somehow, with the supreme advantage of having both eyes focus in the same direction for this one.

As I come to ground in the gravelly creek-bed, I can hear scuffling & gasping from the back of Roscoe’s old Ford pick-up, parked flush against the side of the house, where Shank is semi-reclining, while the Mendocino witch gratifies some deep-throated oral fixation with quite some intensity & gusto, scopolamine-glazed eyes rolled back into sockets…getting pretty close to the Big Moment too, when Shank notices my presence…

“Hey…” he manages weakly, nobody’s breaking stride, including myself, as I casually saunter past.

“For dessert…” I explain, setting a couple of monster-sized joints on a tree-stump. “Rotating tires upstairs bro…goin’ to my car for a case of beer-be right back,” I deftly elaborate, still moving in the general direction of away from the house. I didn’t really feel like I owed them a couple of joints or anything, but I was grateful that they at least could do this without being drizzled with chicken-blood.

“Hurry back, she’ll do you next,” offers Shank solicitously.

“Mmmmpppppffffff,” says the Mendocino witch.

So, adios Topanga…Recommendations & introductions lead to a home-base residency at “The Farm”; a very loosely-knit communal art-tribe gathering in the hills between Hollywood & Burbank off of Barham Blvd. The decentralized center of this community includes members of the Modern Folk Quartet, to wit: Henry Diltz, and the annoyingly charismatic Cyrus Faryar. I mean, it’s really grating to watch one’s self succumb to green, venal jealousy, as virtually all members of the female gender melt into mushy compliant puddles at the very sight of the guy. And generally, these were not emotionally scarred teen runaways, but sophisticated, smart, witty, talented, silky, finely featured, voluptuous, otherwise probably unobtainable women, who, if not zapped at the very sight of the dude, would fall over swooning sideways once he made with the guitar, and started dishing out the Faryar universe of seductive tropical sunsets, and languid, amiable atmospherics, shockingly free of the clichŽs that nearly always mar such efforts, and still quite listenable 40-50 years later.
The Farm was in many ways the polar opposite of the Spiral Staircase/Spahn Ranch scene, where probably the most sinister thing I can recall happening, was having every piece of clothing, blanket, sheet, towel, or other textile item in my possession, tie-died while I slept, by the eponymous but beautiful, Tie-Dye Annie. Tie-dye still seemed fresh & vibrant in the context of that trippy & na•ve era, as opposed to the mass-produced Wal-Mart baby-boomer bummer that it has become in later years.

With the motor-home safely ensconced & camouflaged at The Farm, I embark on extended tours of duty in Orinda ‘68, and Denver ‘69, until the June-bugs of the law arrive to shut ‘em down, or more favorably, till the run is completed. Now, a change of patron is in the wind, adios Mr. Billy…new money waiting in the shadows…

Feelers from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, lead to an invitation to Laguna, where plans are quietly discussed for setting up an independent lab, although up to now at least, the Brotherhood has avoided direct participation in the manufacturing side of business. After 3 or 4 days just digging the groovy Laguna vibe, I happen to come across Leary over at Mystic Arts…quick hello, howdy do-good to see ya…quick flashing patented smile, gleaming with the wholehearted sincerity commensurate to a politician in the middle of proclaiming “no new taxes”…

That night, while smoking in someone’s kitchen, we look out the window to see Feds in neo-military uniforms, brandishing automatic weapons & infra-red night-vision goggles with parabolic microphones & dishes, sweeping thru Laguna Canyon in the dark like they were in Nam, out to torch a gook village…Lots of knocking on, and in some cases, kicking down doors and waving of warrants, at least one of which seems to have my name on it, which is how I wound up living for a couple of weeks in a cave at the bottom of Bluebird Canyon, where my main human contact would be these kids, Tipper & Beaver and some of their pals, which is also where I started hearing major revisionist Leary stories…At first I thought the kids were just putting me on, maybe regurgitating some Charles Dickens jive, either from a movie or school assignment. But after a while, the consistency of a profile of Leary giving “You Gotta Learn The Value Of A Dollar” by hustling weed & acid for the Big Guys type-speeches to these kids maybe 12 to 16 years old, seems to give some credence to the Oliver Twist saga I hear when they make their deliveries of food, water, and dope.

“I just don’t know anymore…” says John Griggs when we finally meet up, at his teepee on the high ridge in Idyllwild. We’d originally met while closing a deal in some tiny village near La Bufadora in Baja, involving some rigamarole about crossing the square, then: comb hair, light cigarette, open paper, remove shades etc. But here on the mountain edge of Idyllwild, now, as an honorary member of the BOEL myself, things are more relaxed…”I mean, we started this whole thing because we were inspired by Timothy & the purity of his whole vision, y’know?”

Griggs is the leader of the Brotherhood, not by popular vote, nor by application of brute force, but by virtue of the fact that he is The Dude, the man with the plan, the Visionary…But now the vision is troubled, a house divided…

“Tim was briefing us on Mr. Billy’s withdrawal from the scene, and this new guy moving in, got unlimited supplies of ergotamine funded by big bucks, sent a rep with a kilo of pure liquid…OK, that’s some very impressive shit, but we’re fine just moving smoke, and the purest acid we can get, but this guy wants us to line up with his crew, and start with all this other shit that I’m not too sure about…STP, DPT, MDA…this new fucking ‘angel dust’ shit PCP, that’s total bad news…And speed for god’s sake…speed! Didn’t we all just see this crap play itself out, up in the Haight not too long ago? And now I’m ’sposed to line up & sign up to shovel more of that bullshit? I’ve seen more than enough already.”

“So we’ve got Tim, and Michael Hollingshead (who, some people are telling me, is a British Intelligence agent) staying here, and it’s hard at this point, not to believe that they’re acting as shills for this Stark guy, giving me the hard-sell on the whole line of goods, and when they finally realized it was no-sale as far as I was concerned, they started going behind my back and talking to Fat Bobby and some of the others that might go for that kind of action…I can’t fucking believe it! Tim! I mean, we thought of this dude as a god! A saint or bodhisattva at the very least…And this girl Charlene comes to visit, staying at Leary’s tent with his daughter, and she winds up drowning with a head full of acid. Shit, we’ve had kids up here playing & swimming in that pond all along, without anybody dying-we watch out for each other-it’s your brothers & sisters for god’s sake, it’s like a tribe, you don’t let people just go off and die through negligence…And I’m not putting myself in a position to judge the man, but I’ve frankly seen Tim more choked-up about cancelled dinner reservations, than he was about Charlene…Lotsa cops with questions nosing around, about five days ago, Leary takes his leave, and 24 hours later, the heat comes down: full scale raid, a big show of force, not nearly as damaging as it might be, but they still nabbed five of us. As you can see, there’s not many people on the property right now, at least till some of this bullshit settles down…”

Milan Melvin had called earlier in the week. No sign of Erickson or Stark, which is no surprise, since they seem to be here in the LA area. The two fellow-tenants from my former Cole street address, also on hiatus, which probably means I should be watching out for them down here too…MM apparently on the outs with Grogan however…

“He’s got Janis shooting dope again, goddammit…” I’d heard this before, from other people, including a disgruntled Country Joe Mc Donald…All I know is, once in a meeting at 1775 Haight, discussing whether or not there should be free acid, or whether there should even be acid at all, Grogan whips out his works, and oh, so nonchalantly, yet with a certain theatrical flourish that he also used when smoking a cigarette, and practically everything else, ties off, cooks up, and shoots…mainlines…not skin-pops, a full adult portion, fruit of the poppy, finest kind too, they tell me, without batting an eye, or breaking stride in whatever bullshit filibuster he was perpetrating at that moment.

And so, eventually it would come to pass that the Diggers were no more; bringing to an end, the era of free-food and jovial Robin Hood-styled anarchy. Different versions of the demise of the Diggers, usually center around a donation made by a former Viet Nam vet, who forked over a quantity of heroin ranging from a couple of ounces, to two gallon-bottles full, depending on who is telling the story, or how much rope you feel is necessary for a righteous self-lynching…

“I’ve been hearing about turf wars, and murders & reprisals, and all those dealers and distributors up north that got whacked,” Griggs continues, “I hear Stark has a major coke operation in place up there, with some very bad-ass enforcers on the payroll. Is that what we want to become? What happened to the community? A new way of living in the wisdom of the Tao..? Supposedly, the deal is that Stark is heavily funded by a certain Canadian crime family, with a Montreal mouthpiece that hooks them up to some Brit spies running Big Dope out of Montego Bay Jamaica, with all kinds of scams to bring big chunks of coke to the nostrils of America. These Canadians have been in business at least since prohibition, now they’re legit booze pimps with thumbs in a lot of pies.”

“Question I had to ask myself goes something like: Are we really changing anything by becoming part of some giant booze octopus? And that would be disturbing enough, but I’m hearing these weird stories about the house on Waller street, the Zodiac & the King of Hearts, the Alameda County Death Cult…What the fuck’s up with that? And why do I keep hearing Stark’s name come up in this shit? Through all this bullshit, the one thing I want to do, is try another hit of that Chained Lightning. That was beautiful…felt so good…But it’s been so hectic, I just haven’t had the slack for a whole trip. It sure seemed different. What’s the deal with that anyway?”

“It’s cut with Lace; an ancient Persian recipe. Much better I think, than the additives you find in some of the leading brands…” To put it mildly, I’m thinking. One liter-bottle of Lace was missing in the final inventory from the basement lab-blast, which would, if my memory serves me well, wind up temporarily in the possession of Abbie Hoffman, who threatened to dose the water of Chicago with it at the Democratic convention, to then be confiscated & stockpiled by some slick Feds, and later deployed as part of some ill-fated paranormal research project at Lawrence Livermore laboratories in the early ’70s. Still a few liters in stock; selectively available, if you know the right people… “The pure Lace trip is actually of much shorter duration, although it’s really quite negotiable.”

“Man, this recent Sunshine they’ve been tabbing up, isn’t even close-it’s some other shit that Stark & Sand cooked up in France or Belgium or wherever, and tabbed here, to look like Orange Sunshine; now it’s just a marketing gimmick-just another burger off the assembly-line…everybody’s richer & the emperor is very well dressed! What bullshit! Now I hear about a lot of pissed-off bike bros around LA saying they bought strychnine-laced mescaline and kerosene-flavored acid. So yeah…I could use a little taste of something fresh…”
An hour later, it’s a done deal. Upon being advised that a pure Lace trip can be modified with catalyst additives, to last anywhere from 2 to 14 hours, Griggs signs on for a 3-4 hour jaunt, “Shit, I got four hours to spare, I thought it was gonna be like a big long acid trip or something…”

“Yeah, it’s pretty malleable, and if you need to cut it short for whatever reason, we can have a cup of this Paraguayan paquirŽ tea all brewed up, snap ya out of it in a matter of minutes,” I show him the paquirŽ pouch, “Or on the other hand, this ‹pra mattŽ tea can take you further into it…kind of like ‘Alice in Wonderland’.”

The first signs of the onset of a full-scale Lace trip, is the sense of bejeweled gold filigree motifs superimposed upon your actual environment, morphing into mosques, temples, cathedrals, palaces…Phantastic geometric designs sprouting gleaming rubies, emeralds, sapphires…a sharply defined sense of cosmic abundance, before dissolving into bizarre & often beautiful, alien-looking landscapes, and finally merging into streams of concentrated symbolic information, or any modular combination of the above & then some.

I can see that Griggs is in that bejeweled-paradise phase, which I have to admit, is kind of startling even if you’ve been through it a few rounds…

“Look at this! My teepee’s turned to gold…” We can both see jeweled patterns on every visible surface, and the almost imperceptible sense of the tent gently breathing, obviously an organic sentient being…Griggs is now convulsing in laughter at the punch-line of the cosmic joke…”Centuries of conquistadors, pirates, plunderers, looters & sackers, all killing, torturing, dying for gold, diamonds, rubies, jade, emeralds…when it was in their heads all along, but they just couldn’t see it…the more you seek it in the exterior, the more you lose it within…the pearl of great price-no need to seek in the world of appearances…it’s your soul-the only value there ever was to any of it…THE ROCK IS IN MY HEAD!”

It was the last week of July ‘69, Gary Hinman is being hacked to death in Topanga, while the Solar Lodge is being raided in Blythe, the Tate-La Bianca killings another week away…but four days before that, one week after sharing the Lace with Griggs up on the ridge, on August 4th, very quietly, with no media fanfare at all, adios John Griggs…OD’d in his teepee on a fatal dose of psilocybin.

Yeah, right.

Well…yeah, I suppose it could happen. To determine feasibility, what we’d need to do, is juxtapose the particulars of this case against a patterned database of similar toxic psilocybin fatalities…What? Y-you say there’s not enough-oh, it must be this server glitching again…So anyway, something about pure psilocybin crystals brought back from Switzerland by Nick Sand…let’s see…powerful pharmaceutical connections in Europe… anybody else we know who might have a hand in this deal? Nah, probably just another coincidence…

When the barometric pressure is just right, in a suitably altered state of mind, standing on a ridge in Idyllwild, the high canyon walls of Benedict Canyon, in the blasted heath & waste of Blythe, the gold & purple interior of Stanford Chapel, or a Northern California speedway, where a major rock-star sporting an Omega sigil, will preside over festivities which will include an orgy of senseless violence, and at least one murder, advised & inspired by one very influential show-biz kid member of the Himalaya Academy, along with massive batches of bogus “Orange Sunshine” (more likely EA-939), and one of the very, very few major attorneys to have played an evil angel on the original Star Trek, summoned by a pack of strangely amoral, feral children, while a message left by Grogan at 710 Ashbury, two days before the free-concert, reads: ‘Charlie Manson Memorial Love-Death Cult Festival’…it’s still just possible to get a little whiff of an ill-wind that once blew from the long since demolished Spiral Staircase…

from-R.P. Stoval’s ‘Meetings with
Remarkable Death Dwarves’

All right Sherman, set the Way-Back Machine for 8-8-69. Earlier in the day, across the Atlantic, the photograph for the cover of Abby Road was snapped, while back in LA, Led Zeppelin treated local audiences to two nights of powerful Crowley-flavored blues-rock in Anaheim & San Berdoo…meanwhile, a little further up in the hills, at Celio Drive, it’s the night of the long knives…Mansonoids creepy-crawling through the tulips of Helter Skelter; the Flowers of Evil in full bloom…

Perhaps we can best understand the symphony of historical coincidence, as experienced through the point of view of William Garretson; young caretaker at the Tate-Polanski residence and sole surviving human on the premises.
Kicking back on a summer night, beautiful, quiet, rustic canyon…maybe do a hit or two of some mescaline or MDA-plenty of it around, what with Frykowski & Sebring dealing right out of the house…wouldn’t you?

A joint or two, maybe a beer, just to take the edge off of the mescaline…got the stereo going…Steve Parent just left…how’d he even find this place anyway? He’d never been up here before, in fact I’d only just met him that one time…odd that he’d just show up without calling, all the way out from El Monte, to sell a clock-radio that I’d never even heard of, let alone expressed any interest in…he was lucky to find this place showing up unannounced with no directions like that…
Lucky indeed.

With the stereo on, you can’t really hear much of what’s happening outside; barking dogs, shots, screams, stabbings, bludgeonings…first a Mama Cass album, I always liked the Mamas & Papas; dig ‘12:30′ for instance, (”young girls are coming to the canyon”) Would I have known about the interpersonal intrigues between Polanski and Michelle Phillips? Would I have known about the abduction, flogging, and video-rape of scumbag dope-dealer Billy Doyle, alleged to have occurred at Cass Elliot’s residence on Woodstock Road, directly across the street from the Folger-Frykowski domicile, with certain Celio Drive regulars in attendance?

Hopefully not.

The other album was by the Doors. Let’s see…maybe it was that first one…

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the Children are insane…
The Killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall…

Come on baby take a chance with us
And meet me in the back
of the blue bus
Fuck, fuck-
Kill, Kill, Kill…

Or how about “Waiting for the Sun’? Came out back in summer of ‘68, driving home the point, in case you missed it on the first two albums: summer of love’s over baby, flower-power’s all played out, the groovy vibes are gone…dig:

Your ballroom days are over, baby
Night is drawing near
Shadows of the evening
crawl across the years…
House upon the hill
Moon is lying still
Shadows of the trees
Witnessing the wild breeze
The mansion is warm
at the top of the hill
Rich are the rooms
and the comforts there
Red are the arms of luxuriant chairs
And you won’t know a thing
till you get inside

Now, in those days, young Doors fans were very likely to be grokking all of this on an obligatory, mind-crunching dose of LSD…RFK’s just been shot, while underage hippie-chicks, like Ruth Ann Morehouse & Snake Lake trip out on the new tunes…

Dead President’s corpse in the driver’s car
The engine runs on glue & tar
Some outlaws live by the side of a lake
The minister’s daughter’s in love with a snake
Who lives in a well by the side of the road
Wake up girl, we’re almost home

Alas, no ‘Celebration of the Lizard’ on the original vinyl…
WAIT!! There’s been a slaughter here!
What was that? Laughing? Shouting? Maybe another skinnydip pool party. All kinds of people show up here after the bars close. The pool-cleaning guy says that they go down to the Strip, cruising for “interesting” people to party with…maybe shoot some kind of X-rated films of these strange days…
Is that more shouting? Probably a mind-blowing party. Not supposed to fraternize with the residents or guests…oh well, just crank the music up a notch…the music is your special friend-maybe not your only friend…

Cancel my subscription to the resurrection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
I got some friends inside…

Was that the door knob turning? Nah, I must be tripping…thought I just saw two chicks chasing each other right past the window…
The face in the mirror won’t stop
The girl in the window won’t drop
“Stop stabbing me-I’m already dead…” Did I really hear that? It doesn’t even make sense…
A feast of friends; alive she cried
Waiting for me outside
Tripping kinda hard… best just to focus on the music…y’know, I never took the opportunity to just kick back, and savor the finely nuanced poetic imagery employed here to facilitate a spirited discussion of environmental issues…
We’re getting tired of hanging around.
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged & plundered
And ripped her
And bit her
Stuck her with knives
In the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences
And dragged her down…

On the cover of ‘L.A. Woman’, the seventh Doors release, the Jimster seems to have morphed into a sort of T.V. movie Manson icon, being, after all, a “changeling” like it says in the song. The record sleeve with the original vinyl depicting a nude female crucified on a telephone pole was a nice flourish, making me want to stop and say: Yo-Jimbo, what’s up with all this deadly hitchhiker shit? I mean obviously you’ve given this some thought-what with all the money and effort you put into your film ‘Hi-Way’…and the prank call to Michael McClure, where you pretended (I think) to have killed some guy out in the desert, not to mention the creepy classic-rock perennial: ‘Riders on the Storm’…makes my brain squirm like a toad just to think about it. What could you be trying to tell us? Well like Hapocrates says: there’s a season to shout out loud, and a season to dummy up. So not another word from this Mortimer Snurd…
‘Snuff said.

And then there’s Iggy…
Having briefly encountered the Ig a couple times subsequent to the anecdote I’m about to relate, we observe a complex dude when not in character: thoughtful, reflective, capable of well-informed, articulate conversation on a truly impressive range of topics.

But not this morning.

August 11-1974; I remember it well. My attorney had called first thing in the morning with some very good news…

“Case dismissed, charges dropped, game over…the State’s star witness has left the building, bugged out, skipped town, slunk off to Belgium and/or Italy, like the scumbag weasel we know him to be…” He was referring to my old pal Ron Stark, who’d been cooperating in cases against Scully, Sand, Mr. Billy, and the Brotherhood. The anxiety & dread had been building for months-lotta tough talk from federal attorneys about the Bad Shit that was going to happen for not jumping on the bandwagon and turning State’s evidence.

Unfortunately for the State, their star witness had spread himself too thin; founding a satanic pedophile ring in Belgium to service naughty NATO needs, more dark fun where the sun don’t shine with Faction Absurde & Le Cult de la Voie Verte in Paris…collaborating with colleagues Enrique Paghrea and Renate Curcio in yet more Red Brigade “terrorist” attacks; and in the near future, the removal with “extreme prejudice” of former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro. All this, when not posing as a Mossad agent, a physician, or alter-ego Khouri Ali, supposedly fronting the “radical Palestinian” Group-14, with notable synthetic-terror connections in Syria & Libya. A very busy man, a true agent of History, and…sorry, he’s not available.

So now, their case had fallen apart like last year’s Jack O’ Lantern.

I’d traveled light & clean, staying incognito at the Tropicana in Hollywood. But now, it seemed a celebration was in order, first: breakfast, nothing too pretentious or fancy, so I find myself sitting at the counter in Duke’s; where the elite meet to eat when they’re too hung-over or incapacitated to be tolerated anywhere else…

And there he was…kinda hard not to notice a guy in a silver lamŽ cod-piece with matching boots, offset by the delicately textured contrast of a desperately soiled leather jacket, topped with a magenta feathered boa.

At Duke’s, they’ve seen it all before and then some, so nobody was paying any attention. The Ig? He looks trashed, wasted, swizzled…staring in bleak incomprehension at random coins extracted from various pockets and spread on the counter…

“You got any change man?” blurts the Ig, “Listen I gotta make some calls…ya got some change? Look-here, check this out…see something in there you like, take it man, I just need some change…”

I was actually packing a roll of quarters as a hedge against getting caught short at a pay-phone at some crucial litigational juncture. The Ig was stoked and immediately started pumping quarters into the phone. Before jumping up, Iggy handed over a plastic zip-lock bag full of cheap & not so cheap thrills; Tuinals, Nembutals, and various multi- colored capsules & spansules, some qualudes and various bindles & blotters, and several pieces of what looked like decently manufactured windowpane acid. What the hell? I thought…hadn’t done any LSD in years, mostly exploring the Lace, plus feeling kind of ambivalent about being part of the whole sacred-hallucinogen-as mass-produced consumer-product movement. But now, the great weight lifted, a quality control spot-check seemed in order.

“Yeah, hey…Danny…uh, listen man…yeah, hey I know it’s early-fuck that shit, I’m trying to get hold of Ray, you know that show we been workin’ on…yeah we’re gonna do it tonight…at Rodney’s-yeah of course Rodney is up for this, I mean what the fuck’s he gonna do? Say no? So call Ray, I’m at Duke’s…well fuckin’ get up-I’m on my way over there…”

Ig returns to the counter to slurp coffee between calls.

“Been doing some uh, vigorous socializing?” I inquire with all due genteel politesse applicable to the situation.

“Fuckin’-A right man, been up all night…devil’s birthday party all day yesterday …virgin blood man…we gotta do this show-the Murder of a Virgin show-tonight…so you should come on down to Rodney’s…I’ll put you on the list…”

Sounding kind of dubious, like some Anton Le Vey night club act…just what are the kids up to these days? First the sexually ambivalent Heinlein/Ayn Rand styled aliens:
Rocky Horror… Ziggy Stardust…Jobriath…Zolar-X…and now this. Do what thou wilt shall be the hole of the doughnut…

“DO YOU WANT VIRGIN BLOOD?” Iggy screams from the stage…delirious, maybe a little disoriented; pushing the envelope even by Iggy standards. After a couple more opening bids, the crowd decides that yeah…maybe it does want virgin blood-after all, the Ig seems kind of pumped-up about it…
Upon arriving at Rodney’s, I had remonstrated with myself for copping-out and only doing half of the windowpane, but now…that choice…this far into it…seems like a decision of profound wisdom & prudence.

The guitarist, (Ron Asheton, I think…somebody told me afterward, that it was James Williamson-hey, things were so exaggerated it could have been Xavier Cugat for all I know) seems to be wearing a Nazi uniform and looking very ambivalent about it at best, while the Ig is on & off the stage, a veritable whirlwind of confusion and dubious vibes-still conducting a last minute cattle-call for a virgin (at Rodney’s yet, lots of luck) then, tries to pull a male ‘virgin’ up-no takers-finally attempts to goad an African-American gentleman (conspicuous by his presence, at Rodney’s) into stabbing him. The black guy looks suitably appalled-”no way”…so the Ig commences to carving on himself …slashing a sort of crude ‘X’ into his chest, (jeez…where have we seen something like this before?) then…after some more embarrassing thrashing around, Sugarman and a couple of goons hustle the Ig into a burlap sack and out of the club.

So the virgin bloodlust would go unsated, at least until the real Murder of a Virgin show (nothing to do with Iggy & co.), a little later in the year-October 12 to be exact, up at Stanford chapel…

Cut to: the apartment of Roland Barton Groatsworth, beloved counter-culture icon, author of ‘In the Cross-Hairs of Tlšn’. It’s Crowleymas ‘74, and the entire apartment building participates, while two guest “magicians” up from LA, bringing greetings from ‘Nightmare Alley’ & ‘Magic Island’, prepare to leave. It’s early, being only 9:45 or so…”Headed down to Palo Alto…got to meet up with some old friends out from Bismark,..” And so the “magicians” depart with the blessings of Groatsworth and Alpha-777.

“Wait a second…” says Learner in the present moment, “So this footage was in the archives, huh? I recognize one of those guys at Groatsworth’s place, Scharlach…Red Scharlach, he hung out at Celio Drive, and with that crowd on Woodstock Road, with Folger & Frykowski, Cass Elliot…Billy Doyle, Pic Dawson…some real model citizens…” Further footage depicts Scharlach lunching at the luxuriant residence of a high-profile Paramount producer, known as much for his elaborate casting-couch procedure, as for his legendary private screening-room. What could they be discussing? Perhaps the theological subtleties of Isaiah:22, or the secret of the bees & eternal repose found at the end of the road in Carswell Canyon…

Scharlach appears to be the unwitting star of many Omega productions. Known in the trade as Manson II: de facto King of Snuff. A montage from this guy’s resume connects some mighty interesting dots, from his early “astrological project” in collaboration with Bruce Davis and others up in the Bay Area, to his later interaction with a well-known Hollywood mogul, not to mention gainful employment with Larry Flynt, on a team that includes that ubiquitous man for all seasons; Gordon Novel…

Let’s boot up the Vitruvian, step into the virtual artifice of Stanford chapel…past the arch…the alcove over to the side…the 29th statue on the left-the one with the candle in front of it…OK, second arch…click here-Omega-dig:
-Dragon Alters Over Santa Cruz-Nov.’68 (Boulder Creek)
-Headless in Ventura (county-line/Pete’s Beef)
-Pantaloon Party at Moonfire Ranch (Topanga)
-The Main Event (Celio Drive)
-Total Eclipse at the Solar Lodge (Blythe)
-Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (Santa Barbara)
-Hollowberry Hills Bros. (Malibu)
-Weird Scenes Inside the Spiral Staircase (Topanga)
-Day of the Dead at Jack Ryan’s Place (Bel Air)
-Ode to Cheri Jo-Halloween ‘66-Bruce Davis (Riverside)
-Henry Cowell Park After Dark (Santa Cruz)
-Pig Night with Circe’s Slaves (Ventura)
-Goat’s Head Soup (O’Neil Park)
-Motel Burning Murder-Madness (Yucca Tree Motel-LA)
-Goona-Goona at Sebring’s (Easton Drive-Bel Air)
A drawer behind the alcove opens to reveal more footage filed by donor…
-Cafritz (Reno)
-Cafritz (Nicholas Canyon)
-Deasy
-Corush
-Wooten
-random 16mm Bolex

Some ’specialty’ items…
-looks like Manson at Esalen with the daughter of a
powerful congressional leader (is that the chortling
ghost of Barney O’Brian in the shrubbery?)
-Sellers-Brynner-Phillips-Elliot-Sebring-Atkins-Davis etc.

Lookout! Studio…

Some unprincipled hooligans, without a shred of evidence to their cause, have had the unbridled temerity to imply a connection between The Omega, and the low-profile government-military (assuming you still make such distinctions at this point) facility known as Lookout Studios, located on topically resonant Wonderland Drive in the Hollywood hills.

Not a State secret per se, but not exactly widely known, Lookout was set up by the AEC, the DOD, NSA and/or the Pentagon, or some such combination of alphabet soup run by shadowy off-screen puppet-masters. Starting in 1947, Lookout was intended, they said, to coordinate & produce “educational” films promoting confidence and optimism in our nation’s nuclear weapons program. Duck & cover indeed.
Interesting, that amongst the “gentle hill folk” in the area, back in 1967-69, dwells a preposterously high percentage of offspring from high-ranking military & intelligence family backgrounds, some celebrities, others less well-known…Frank & Gail Zappa, Jim Morrison, John Phillips, Jackson Browne, Steve Stills, David Crosby, Sharon Tate, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, Marina Habe…

Now…much later, scenic Wonderland Drive, one-time roost of Tex Waston, would be the locale of a sensational drug/porn massacre starring John Holmes. Back in the day however, you might find two neighbors just a couple doors down from each other…one, a “liberal” named Jerry Brown, who hung with the CSN-Linda Ronstadt-Jackson Bowne, coke-spoon swinger scene. The other; a “conservative” named Mike Curb, who ran MGM records, vowing at one point, to expunge the dreaded “drug rock” from the label. Few years go by, and these two guys are running the state.

Pugnaciously persistent nattering nabobs of negativism are still out there blogging about the alleged underground tunnels said to honeycomb the surrounding vicinity underneath the dwellings of the “gentle hill folk”, and the production & dissimination of bogus UFO footage, (The Eddington File-pages sighted: 10…45…136…325…etc.) and eventually, MK-ULTRA…Operation Chaos…COUNTERPLO, psych-ops terrorism and much, much more…

These same libelous louts are also prone to make much of the span of years during which the base was operational: 1947 to 1969, admittedly a couple of pivotal years for UFO mythology, and for sinister occult synchronicities.

Also pivotal years for Hans Habe, who although not exactly a household word, had apparently a distinguished enough career during WWII, to have had a movie, ‘The Cross of Lorraine’ based on his experiences as a POW. Habe, a German Jew, had started as a journalist who had outed Hitler by his real name; Schickelgruber, much to der Fueher’s displeasure. A post-war, US Intelligence psych-ops agent, Habe was also author of several books. One of the books was a detailed and highly critical study of “de-Nazification” policies, while another would seem to be a devastating attack on the Warren Commission’s “conclusions” about the JFK assassination. We note in passing that CFR kingpins Allen Dulles & John J. Mc Cloy, were largely responsible for Operations Overcast & Paperclip; the “de-Nazification” programs that, amongst many other dubious achievements, installed a very unrepentant SS General Reinhard Gehlen as de-facto czar of his own intelligence agency. Yes-yes…Dulles & Mc Cloy those same zany overachieving patriots, who also, by chance, happen to be key members of the Warren Commission. Anybody who finds that to be a bit much, should consult the work of Mae Brussel-if you haven’t already. Mae is unfortunately no longer with us. Seems she caught one of them sudden cancer strains goin’ around…sorta like Jack Ruby. If only David Ferrie had been allowed to find a cure with his white-rat experiments in his tiny home-lab…

Which brings us to 1969. Habe had long since retired to Switzerland, while his daughter Marina lived in LA with her mother; Habe’s former wife. The hideously slashed body of Marina was found New Year’s day 1969. She was known to have been socially acquainted with Manson & Co, as was Jane Doe #59, found in November of that year, a few yards down Mullholland. 157 stab wounds etc.-a very similar MO. Certain paranoid pundits will try to connect all this to alleged sightings of a black bus parked inside the nearby Lookout compound, and Red Scharlach fans will no doubt glean some twisted meaning from the interesting geometric pattern formed by tracing the sights of the two Mullholland murders down to Lookout studios slightly to the south…

So Habe, at many points in his long career, was in an optimum position to piss-off the Wrong People. The possibility exists that Habe’s daughter Marina was the recipient of some vengeful backlash. Otherwise we would hardly expect to find footage in the Omega archives, now would we?

If, as has been asserted on more than one occasion, seemingly “irrational” acts of savage mayhem (JFK-MLK-RFK-SLA, Manson, Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, 911 etc,) are psychological warfare strategies for control of the dreaming mind, while simultaneously serving a many-layered onion of multi-purposes; then R.P. Stoval’s ‘Et tu Cesar?’ “a surrealist interpretation of the era of the assassins”, might shed some light on pertinent matters…

F& One of the last stops on the outer fringes of Dire Possibilities, is a report compiled in 1974 by INS criminal investigator Richard Smith, concerning the activities & travels of an international occult society called ZAL, who some contend, had connections, influence, or perhaps a direct chain of command to Charles Manson & co. ZAL, it should be noted, vigorously denies any contact with Manson at all. A few of the main locations where they did not come in contact with Manson include: Cole Street, the Straight Theater, the Waller Street “Devil House”, the Himalaya Academy, the Esalen Institute, The Spiral Staircase, the Melcher, and later, Polanski residence on Celio Drive, the Barrymore mansion, the Solar Lodge etc.

ZAL would seem to be the product of certain British think-tanks, in conjunction with the Special Operations Executive, who like other intelligence agencies, had discovered “Satanism” as an effective binding mind-control tool, although some heavily paranoid bloggers imply that there might be more to it than that…

According to Smith’s report, which incorporated & corroborated previous reports filed by the FBI, and the State Attorney General’s office, in the wake of the RFK assassination, where it was asserted that Sirhan Sirhan was seen in the company of senior ZAL members at a series of parties, including one at the previous Tate-Polanski residence on Summit Ridge, on which occasions it is alleged, sex & drug rituals were conducted. The report also quotes an informant, who further alleges that they were in the room and witnessed the order for Sharon Tate’s “hit” from ZAL leaders to Manson, who, it is averred, took the contract.

Some commentators have rightly pointed out, that to be involved in such nefarious pursuits as ritual murder, dealing drugs, weapons, kiddy prostitutes, AND some sort of vicious, backlash cover-up of the killing of a popular presidential candidate, while going around dressed in pre-Goth black capes, with Mendes goats & inverted pentagrams, passing out clearly malevolent literature promoting, encouraging-in fact demanding: murder, ritual human sacrifice, necrophilia, rape as a “spiritual” practice, the specific “spiritual” command: “Thou Shalt Kill”, and so forth; and then, conspicuously disappear immediately after the Big Event…would be most imprudent, would in fact be downright…insane, on the level of posing in your backyard, tilted at an impossible angle, with subversive commie literature in one hand, and a cheaply manufactured rifle that allegedly killed a president in the other…seemingly absurd…

Except that: Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, Cass Elliot, and director John

Frankenheimer, dined in Malibu with RFK, the night his series got cancelled at the Ambassador Hotel; where some evidence exists, that a member of ZAL was employed in the kitchen, which, according to witnesses, Sirhan had visited just the previous day.

Frankenheimer was the noted director of the original Manchurian Candidate, which, as we all know, featured Angela Lansbury, as the Queen of Spades, and who, in real life, would write a To Whom It May Concern letter, temporarily conferring guardianship of Lansbury’s daughter, thirteen year-old Dee Dee, to one Charles Milles Manson, in the absence of Ms. Lansbury. Frankenheimer also directed the hair-raising identity thriller ‘Seconds’, and the American coup d’Žtat drama, ‘Seven Days in May’; with an advertising tag-line that went something like: “Impeach him? There’s easier ways of getting rid of the son-of-a-bitch than that!” set to air on 11/22/63.

Of course, ‘Manchurian Candidate’ executive producer Frank Sinatra is an interesting fellow to contemplate in regard to these matters. Frank always had a long standing interest in sharpshooters with scope-rifles, going back to ‘Suddenly’; the assassin played with mucho gusto, by the Frankster himself; or forward to ‘The Naked Runner’ much later, somewhat less exuberant than ‘Suddenly’; but still, nice of him to take an interest. Frank: pals with Sam Giancana & Frank Costello; bitterly disappointed would-be pal of JFK, former husband of young (very young) Mia Farrow, good buddies with Sammy Davis Jr., who, in turn is pals with Anton LeVey, and Jay Sebring. Frank is also sworn enemy of Roman Polanski, whose ‘Rosemary’s Baby’s opening shots linger on the entrance to the Dakota, where John Lennon would be killed, having once bonded with Mia in India while humoring the Maharishi, and working on songs for ‘The White Album’, a perennial favorite of apocalyptic acid messiahs everywhere…

Now, if it’s surrealism you want, (and I think you do) we could do no better than the analysis of the JFK “removal with extreme prejudice”, in chapter 23, of Stoval’s ‘Et tu Cesar?’
An interview with Max Nolan, an oil-rig drill-bit salesman of interest to the investigation being conducted by a chartered ad-hoc committee led by congressman Ryan…

Ryan: Were you acquainted with William Sullivan?

Nolan: I thought he was a deer…

Ryan: Did you know Carlos Marcello?

Nolan: A tomato salesman of my acquaintance…the weather is very warm in Tulsa, but heat is seldom…I could see better after the cloud that lifted; like Albert Thomas says: “A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse,” It was a massive theatrical production staged by Festpiele, funded through Credit Suisse & Permindex, a veritable cast of thousands, filling Dealy Plaza and the surrounding area: William Seymor up in the Texas Schoolbook Suppository, Manuel Gonzales, Michael Mertz, and David Morales nearby, everywhere from Dal-Tex, to the Triple Underpass. There were shooters from Oaxaca, a Corsican team that had attempted to smoke de Gaulle, wise-guys from Chicago, and Cuban-exiles still pissed about the Bay of Pigs. It was getting crowded out by the Grassy Knoll; there was only supposed to be three tramps, but we had: Charles Harrelson, Fred Chrisman, Frank Sturges, E. Howard Hunt, Thomas Beckham, Charles Rogers, John F. Gedney, Harold Doyle, James Files, Charles Nicoletti, Johnny Roselli, Thomas Vallee, Dan Carswell, Ambrose Bierce, Judge Carter, and Mel Lyman…Who, you might ask, would write a check for such an undertaking? Well…there’s J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, H. L. Hunt, E. Howard Hunt…just about any powerful old white dude with a name beginning with the letter “H”, and that’s just one letter. The question being, not: who killed President Kilpatrick, but who didn’t? So, you’ve got to double-check the Gordon novel, and dig the backward-masking on the CD, Jackson. Just like that dream I had, where I was in a post-war poker game with Fred Chrisman, Henry Kissinger, Clay Shaw, and J. D. Salinger; playing for paperclips on an overcast day…while in the theater, there’s a burlesque show featuring very annoying tap dancing & strip-tease pirouettes by various Oswald impersonators, including Gordon Novel, William Seymour, and Kerry Thornley; judged by a panel of Col. Sanders, Col. Parker, and Col. House. Becoming lucid in the dream, I feel compelled to confront the panel in grandiose declamatory oration, like Cicero on psilocybin…

“All right…first of all, not one of you assholes was ever a colonel in any capacity except assumed name. And while most reasonable people would, I think, concede that the marked decline of American health, and the spreading epidemic of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, is a very complex problem, stemming form many different sources in a Byzantine tapestry of complicity. But…if I really had to crunch it all down and come up with a single name; then you Sanders, would be near the top of my list…

“And Parker, despite all of your mint julep-bourbon daddy posturing, you’re really a Dutchman wanted for murder in your home country. Your grotesque and degrading mismanagement of your once talented star client, is trumped only by your crass & insensitive exploitation of African-American culture.

“But these chumps are small potatoes compared to you, House: grocery-clerk for Skull & Bones, and their Brit-Kraut puppet-masters. Your shit-head war-mongering, Hegel-inspired advice to Woodrow Wilson, was a major impetus to the sweeping international scope of WWI, and all the blood, pain & oppression to flow throughout the rest of the 20th century and beyond, at the behest of your monstrous progeny, CFR…”

Ryan: Do you know a Laurence Layton?

Nolan: I-(muffled voices-hand over microphone-shuffling papers)

Voice: I have a court-order injunction, prohibiting any further continuance of these proceedings. We will now adjourn this ad-hoc committee, for reasons of national security…
Ryan: This is-(power-cut-static-silence…)

Cut to String Therion-live at the Camillo:

For God’s sake-
let’s sit upon the ground
and tell sad tales
of the death of kings
Riding to their doom
in a long black limousine

No one saw
the contract sealed
A coup d’Žtat
A five shot deal…
When all the way
from Camelot
to Dallas-target zero
The Naked Runner
Suddenly
bought the Big Casino

Heads are gonna roll
Brains will disappear
Down in
The Ministry of Fear

Maybe it’s all for the better
Maybe it’s all for the best
says the man with the open umbrella
to the girl in the polka-dot dress
You better get your story straight together
A lapidary pyramid of lies
Burned into the memory forever
Stations of the Crossfire in disguise

History shaped to the national lie
Ritual staged for the camera eye
Now, Zapruder framed the passing
of a single mortal soul
Beware the magic bullet
from beyond the Grassy Knoll…

A new king now was swearing in
A vacancy was filled
A patsy found & photographed
was taken out and killed
Now, the lone-nut squad
is out to hit their quota
from Dealy Plaza
to New York’s Dakota

Heads are gonna roll
Brains will disappear
Down in
The Ministry of Fear
(c)2008

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5