Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

"Kerry, you know how in old Westerns they run the bad guys into a box canyon before rounding them up?"

Also among the more well-known luminaries of Southern California's more eccentric attractions was a television personality named Criswell whose predictions about the future were made in sing-song tones that I found easy to imitate. A close friend of May West, he once prophesied she would become President of the United States.

Then there was a tale told by a woman who had lived across the street from us about a strange lady she met at a Tupperware party who had purchased tickets to Venus from the author of a then popular book called The Flying Saucers Have Landed .

Among the most notable lecturers Greg Hill and I had encountered at Understanding were Reinholt Schmidt and Jimmy Valaquez. Schmidt amused us because he said the interplanetary aliens spoke to him in High German and that the numerals on the dials in their saucer were "just regular numbers." When Greg asked, "Why do you suppose they use Arabic numerals just like us?" Schmidt said, "Why, I don't know what other kind of numbers they would use."

Valaquez was a more convincing speaker, but then his story of encountering UFO people was so far-fetched as to require the utmost rhetorical skill. All his aliens dressed like Jesus and wore sandals that were made of living protoplasm that glowed in the dark.

"Remember Eisenhower's farewell address, Kerry, about the danger of what he called the military-industrial complex?" was a question Brother-in-law only asked me once.

"Yeah, I figure Ike was senile by the time he made that speech."

"No, Kerry, there really is a military-industrial complex, and you had best keep that in mind."

"That's right," Slim added. "He ain't lyin'."

"Kerry, if the society you are living in begins to become totalitarian, you will be able to tell," he said more than once, "because, when you attempt to uncover the past, they will say: 'Don't bother with the past; only the future is important.'"

"Yes, William F. Buckley tells a story about Mussolini saying something like that to an American general once." My information was slightly confused.

Mentioned in Buckley's Up From Liberalism in connection with an attempt to officially "muzzle" General Smedley Butler, the incident is also reported in Jules Archer's The Plot to Seize the White House . General Butler invoked the wrath of Herbert Hoover some years previous to his effort to expose a ruling class conspiracy against Roosevelt by repeating a story told him by a reporter in which Mussolini's chauffeur-driven car ran over a small child without stopping afterwards.

Page 116 of Jules Archer's book says: "…The wire services carried journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt's revelation that he had been the one who had told Butler the true story about Mussolini. He corrected a few details. After running down the child, Vanderbilt said, Mussolini had observed the journalist looking back in horror and had patted his knee reassuringly, saying, 'Never look back, Mr. Vanderbilt, always look ahead in life.'"

"You will know it is happening, when your society is becoming totalitarian, as soon as they start saying: 'Yesterday's gone. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow.'"

"Just like Mussolini."

"And another thing, Kerry: Do you know where the expression, 'swan song,' comes from? A swan sings its most beautiful song as it is dying."

In the aftermath of Watergate, when Martha Mitchell died of cancer of the bone marrow, I recalled Brother-in-law's words here. Of everyone involved in that scandal, she was by far the most talkative. A book called World Without Cancer , circulated by the John Birch Society, claims there is a Rockefeller-Farben conspiracy that disposes of its enemies by means of artificially giving them cancer. Jack Ruby, Clay Shaw and Werner Von Braun were among persons allegedly connected to the John Kennedy murder plot who died of cancer. David Ferrie, one of Jim Garrison's suspects, was known to have at one time experimented extensively with inducing cancer in laboratory rats.

"You know the angel in the Book of Revelations that rules the world for a thousand years with a rod of iron? What do you figure that could symbolize?"

"Anything you want it to," I replied casually. "That's the advantage of predicting things in vague language: they are bound to come true, one way or another, sooner or later, if someone interprets them with sufficient ingenuity."

"Rods are used in nuclear energy reactors. They are also used in computers."

"Like I say." I was not very patient with scriptural interpretation, especially since I knew Gary professed to be a pagan, if not an outright atheist.

"I think the Bible would make a good code key for a revolutionary movement, though," he said.

"Yes, especially since there is one in every prison cell and hotel room in the country."

Whenever he persisted for long in discussing Revelations , I would turn the discussion to my favorite foreign movie, The Seventh Seal , since it drew its imagery from the Biblical Apocalypse.

"I think the mission of this century," I would say, "is to transform religion from the field of philosophy to the realm of the arts."

"You know, Kerry, you aren't going to be able to be too far ahead of your time."

"That's all right with me. My ambition is to be remembered as a man of his own times. Why be a sensitive genius who brags about being misunderstood? That's why I am not afraid to use cliches in my writing. Cliches are the idioms of the common people. Writers who scorn them are snobs."

Both Slim and Brother-in-law looked at me with hearty approval.

"Kerry, I think it would be better for the world if eventually just one ideology, no matter what it was, came to predominate everywhere."

"So do I," I said without attaching much importance to my words.

Similar to Brother-in-law's fascination with the Revelation of Saint John the Divine was his fondness for the Oracles of Nostradamus, toward which I displayed equal impatience.

Another of his favorite subjects were recent movies. "Remember in Night of the Hunter , how the preacher had the letters for the words 'LOVE' and 'HATE' tattooed on the fingers of opposite hands?"

"Now that was a movie that said something valid about religion. That preacher was a killer."

"Remember the woman Susan Hayward played in I Want to Live ? You know that was based on a true story. Remember how sensual and alive she was and how much people liked her for that reason?"

"Yes! That dance scene with the bongos was fantastic! I saw that when I was at Atsugi, Japan, in Marine Air Control Squadron One. We turned I Want to Live! into a slogan when we rioted in our barracks. I got office hours once for writing it on a post with a laundry marker. An asshole corporal named Curtis reported me. I hated that guy."

"Do you know what cant is?"

I wondered if he he was talking about the German philosopher that Jack, a Marxist-Leninist who hung out with the rest of the radicals at the Ryder Coffee House, liked.

But no. "Cant is a kind of slang used by criminal groups in order to make understanding what they say to each other more difficult for outsiders," Brother-in-law took pains to explain.

"I'm planning to write a novel that deals with, among other things, organized crime in New Orleans. There's so much of it here."

"Yeah. Most people think New Orleans is a French town. Actually, it's a Dago town. Italians are clowns. Hitler never should have accepted them into the Axis. That's one of the reasons he lost the war."

"What about the Japanese?"

"Now the Japanese are clever people," he said. "Among the Asians, they are the Master Race, together with the Chinese. You know, gunpowder and paper were both Chinese inventions."