Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

Very much as Brother-in-law mentioned Tracy Barnes and the Satanist sacrifices, he remarked also that the notorious bombing of the Sunday school in Birmingham had been the work of Griffin Bell, a name equally unknown to me at that time.

"Griffin Bell is a judge, Kerry. He is judge of the Fifth Circuit Court. That means he travels from one place to another, hearing cases. He's a circuit judge. Can you remember that, Kerry?"

"Yes, I can remember that because Marryin' Sam in Li'l Abner is a circuit judge and I knew a guy in elementary school named Clifford Bell."

"Kerry, remember that slogan, 'There's a Ford in your future?'"

"Yeah, in a crystal ball. It used to be in ads in my grandfather's National Geographics ."

"Well, keep it in mind. There may be a Ford in your future."

"I doubt it." I wasn't much into cars.

At that point Slim spoke up: "Listen to this man, Kerry. He's trying to tell you something."

Yeah, sure. I hated it when Slim became paternalistic like that.

Brother-in-law also spoke of the classes in anti-Communism that General Edwin Walker gave in Germany. "He was transferred for it, and a bunch of his fellow officers resigned when the Army reprimanded him."

"Good for them," I said of Walker and his friends. "Sometimes I wonder if this country even wants to win the Cold War."

"And you know about the case of the Air Force general, Billy Mitchell?"

"Yes, I read about that in Reader's Digest ."

"I don't think what they did to Billy Mitchell was fair. Do you?"

"Certainly not. He was like Rickover. He wouldn't tolerate red tape. That was his problem."

These were all things he brought up more than once and I became adroit at using them as excuses to change the subject. A Ford in my future? "They used to say you could have any color of Model T Ford you wanted, so long as it was black," I would say.

"Yes, that's called a Hobson's choice. You know, Kerry, the anti-Communist department in the FBI is called Division Five."

"Yeah, you've told me that before."

"Kerry, five is a very important number."

In 1964, living in Shirlington, Virginia, and corresponding with Greg Hill, I suggested that our satirical religion, the Discordian Society, which Greg and I had originated in California before going to New Orleans, needed a dogma, or, as we called it, a catma.

Brother-in-law's comment was in the back of my mind when I therefore determined that it should be the Law of Fives: Everything happens in fives, or can in some other way be connected with the number five. Slim Brooks was our fourth convert to the Discordian Society and, as might be anticipated, Brother-in-law was the fifth person to join that facetious cult devoted to the Greek goddess of confusion, Eris, known to the Romans as Discordia.

Although I was soon to forget Brother-in-law's reminder, I remained fascinated with the "law" it inspired, as with the Discordian Society in general, most particularly because of its rapid growth in membership. For in the late sixties and early seventies both Greg and I began encountering all manner of people calling themselves Discordians, including that other man whose weird ideas about Nazis seemed to so much resemble those of Brother-in-law, Stan Jamison, whose Discordian name was Coman-Ra.

How Coman-Ra entered the loosely knit Discordian network of friends and acquaintances I'm unaware, but I recall that I first began receiving mailings from him in about 1970. These ranged from instructions about how to grow bean sprouts to racist right-wing hate literature that both Greg and I thought was rather alarming. Not until 1975 did Coman-Ra intimate to me that he knew something about the John Kennedy assassination.

"There is Division Five of the FBI, Griffin Bell is with the Fifth Circuit Court," Brother-in-law continued, and he may or may not have mentioned, in addition to perhaps two other things related to the number five, that there was an intelligence community organization called the Defense Industrial Security Command with five front groups.

When I encountered that information in William Torbitt's unpublished manuscript, Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal , it seemed to stimulate my memory, but I have never been certain of that much.

"Have you ever noticed, Kerry, how by just pulling one thread you can unravel a whole sweater?"

"Yes?"

"Keep in mind that is also true in politics: you might find it very useful someday."

"All right, fine."

"How do you feel about this idea? What if things were to become worse in this country, for a time, and then to improve enormously? Do you think that would be okay?"

"Sure, I guess."

"Kerry, have you ever heard of a game called 'Freeze?'"

"No."

"Well first you turn the lights out in a room. Then everyone starts doing whatever they want. Then someone yells, 'Freeze!' — and everyone has to hold still as the lights are turned on."

I must have looked rather puzzled. I remember feeling very afraid.

Insanely, it seemed to me, Brother-in-law chuckled, and said: "That's a very good way to deal with people who are doing all kinds of bad things."

"Have you ever heard of 'Splooie?'" I asked in determination to keep up my end of the conversation.

"No. What is 'Splooie?'"

"A game they play with pledges in fraternities during Hell Week. They assemble them in a dark room and tell them all to start jacking off and for the first one who ejaculates to holler, 'Splooie!' And then they turn on the lights, and there is always one guy who was stupid enough to believe them and go along with it, and there he is, all alone among them with his pecker in his hand and cum on his trousers."

"There was a man who went to Heaven. And he found himself all alone on a cloud. Sailing past him were clouds with guys on them who were surrounded with wine bottles and women. So he sailed his cloud up to Saint Peter and said, 'Hey, what gives with those guys?' And Saint Peter said, 'They're in Hell.' And he said, 'Oh yeah? Then why the wine and women for them, and me sitting here all alone?' Saint Peter said, 'The Hell of it is, the wine bottles have holes in them and the women don't.'"

Then the discussion would drift off in another direction that seemed almost as inane. We spoke of the intelligence of dolphins and also of their extreme sociality, of how one dolphin would throw itself into a net so the rest of the school could escape.

More than once he mentioned that in Germany during World War II, armament factories owned by the Krupps were spared deliberately by Allied bombers, though whole civilian populations nearby were decimated.

To me that sounded like an awkward, top-heavy conspiracy theory. In those days most people seemed to believe that Roosevelt's New Deal had proved that governments were stronger than big business.

Only Crazy David, the paranoid, thought cartels existed that were above history in their chosen obscurity to the average person. But then he even suspected the politicians of rival nations conferred with each other about how to best destroy one another's people.

Crazy David said that only sixty families controlled most of America's wealth. That sounded like a hazy legend left over from the Gilded Age or one of the stories my dad used to tell about the Great Depression in order to rationalize voting against Eisenhower.

Certainly Brother-in-law was just a deluded psychopath caught up in the grandeur that was the Third Reich, boasting of the power of the Nazis. A dark, Wagnerian opera in a flop house.

But then there was always the inconvenient unpleasantry that such had been the predicament of Hitler in his early years.

Squalor and majestic themes had combined with national chauvinism to produce the dark Jungian shadow-roots of the next haunting fanaticism of our age.