Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

"Yes, I remember. She once told me what she liked best about the way her apartment was furnished was that anywhere you sat, even on the toilet, you saw books." I chipped in a few bucks.

Next I learned that Slim Brooks was now living in a small room right next door to the Quorum. I went to visit him.

Slim had found a way to tap an extension line into the pay phone located on the sidewalk out front. After showing me how it permitted him to make use of free phone service, he suggested we "go stick nose in the Bourbon House."

Later that night, as we were preparing to go our separate ways from the Bourbon House, he said, "Incidentally, there is a man who wants to see you before you leave town again."

"Oh, yeah? Who?"

"He lives out on the Jefferson Highway and his name begins with K."

"Oh, him. Your brother-in-law."

"Uh-huh. He made a point of it. Says he definitely wants to see you."

I mentioned my appointment to lecture about Goldwater at the Quorum and we decided Slim should tell Brother-in-law to meet me there.

"You know," Slim added, "he's still cultivating powerful men, in keeping with his theory about the secret of Hitler's power. And you know what else? Heh-heh. He went and joined himself up in the Anti-Defamation League. Kirstein sounds like a Jewish name, so he decided he might as well get on their mailing list."

"Yeah, that's your brother-in-law. It figures," I said, anxious to be on my way.

"And one other thing. You know, Barbara Reid is still going around telling everyone she saw you sitting with Oswald in the Bourbon House a couple of months before the assassination."

"Over a bottle of Old Crow, probably," I scoffed. "She told me about that herself once. I even believed it. I couldn't remember who the hell I was sitting with that day. Then Clint Bolton and everybody else who knows her said Barbara ties herself into everything that happens. I ain't worried about what Barbara Reid says."

"But, but, but, but, but, there are people who believe her."

"Slim, there are people who believe in God. Barbara herself believes in witchcraft. Anybody who believes in Barbara Reid I am certainly not worried about."

"Yeah, well. I'll see you next trip, as we say in the merchant marines."

Clint Bolton, a retired newsman who enjoyed giving me pep talks about my writing, was a close friend of Barbara Reid, whom he called Mother Witch.

During the days immediately after the assassination, when I was still working at Arno's, I used to find him at Barbara's watching television, late at night when I got off work.

With him usually was a Sicilian-American gentleman named Sam, for whose wholesale cigar business Clint was working during the day. Sam shared my admiration for Garibaldi.

Clint, aside from a passing complaint about my poor taste, was one of the few who had not come down hard on me for my post-assassination antics, so I'd gotten into seeking them out, instead of sitting in the Bourbon House looking for action.

Barbara was something else. I didn't know what to make of her. In her living room was an imposing voodoo altar, cluttered with statuettes and herbs. She wore a beret and smoked her cigarettes in a holder, like a 1930's Greenwich Village artist.

One night Sam and Clint left early and Barbara Reid invited me to remain there, offering another beer. We talked late into the morning hours, calmly, about our differences concerning John Kennedy and the assassination. She claimed to be a personal friend of Robert Kennedy, something I didn't find extraordinary, since I knew Barbara was involved in Civil Rights work.

That was when she told me, dramatically, that she had seen Oswald and me together, one afternoon in September, in the Bourbon House.

"That isn't possible," I replied, convinced I was in California and Mexico when Lee was in New Orleans.

She produced newspaper clippings to prove we had in fact been in town at the same time, for a week or two, earlier that year, previous to Oswald's departure for Mexico City.

"Remember that day you were sitting at the corner table with someone and I called to you from the bar, asking if you had ever worked in radio?"

As a matter of fact I did. She went on to tell me I had a beautiful voice and that I should think about going into radio. Slightly embarrassed, I waved off the compliment and returned to my conversation with the man at my table. "But if that had been Lee Oswald, I would have recognized him."

"Not if someone had hypnotized you to forget."

I laughed. "That's too paranoid."

"Could it be that you just didn't recognize him out of uniform, that the face was familiar, but… "

I thought about that.

"Kerry, I'm certain it was him. When Oswald's picture came up on the television screen after the assassination I screamed, 'That's him. That's the man who was sitting with Kerry in the Bourbon House that day.'"

"I guess I might have seen him and just thought he was some French Quarter person whose name escaped me. It's possible, except I was sitting there working on notes for my book based on Oswald at the time."

"Kerry, he was talking about how he planned to go back to Texas soon. I remember."

It did seem that whoever I was sitting with had mentioned Texas.

"I used to work as a casting director and, believe me, I never forget a face. That man was Lee Harvey Oswald. I'm certain of it."

I went home that night somewhat intrigued with the notion that maybe Oswald had walked into the Bourbon House that afternoon and nodded in my direction, and that I had gestured for him to join me at my table, just as Barbara remembered it. More than once I have vaguely recognized someone whose name I didn't recall and spoken to them, ashamed to admit I didn't remember where we had met previously.

Over oyster stew in the Bourbon House the next morning I mentioned to Clint and Sam that Barbara was certain she had seen me with Oswald last September, and that I was inclined to believe it myself.

"Barbara is certain, my young friend, that she has seen every famous or notorious person who ever lived somewhere in the French Quarter at one time or another," Clint droned.

Sam concurred heartily, going into a number of examples.

As the day wore on, I mentioned Barbara's claim to others with the same response. Yet there was the nagging fact that I could not recall who I was sitting with that day.

More recently I have decided that the individual in question was a country and western singer named Glen, who happened to be a friend of Millie Fletcher, another of my friends. Glen was from Texas and at that time was making preparations to return.

A year after the incident, I was still trying to figure out who the mystery man was, although I was sure by this time it wasn't Oswald. What disturbed me more, though, was the way Slim had taken such pains to try to alarm me about Barbara Reid's gossiping. Slim Brooks made no pretense of believing Barbara's story. Why, then, did he seem to enjoy needling me about it?

When the night of my lecture at the Quorum arrived, I noted with slight feelings of relief that Brother-in-law was not in the audience. Since he and Ola Holcomb used to be lovers, he would probably be depressed and, in any case, he was an individual I found depressing in the brightest of circumstances. I delivered my speech, fielded a few very intelligent questions afterwards in what I felt was a satisfactory manner and then noticed Slim standing off to one side.

Upon joining him I learned that Brother-in-law had not forgotten our appointment. "He didn't want to listen to your speech. He thinks your politics are bullshit, too light-weight for him. He's in the patio, out back."

Sure enough, there the sonofabitch was, sitting in a chair, his bald head gleaming in the dim light, looking as cheerfully nefarious as ever. I didn't mention Ola and he didn't bring the subject up either. In fact, it seemed as if there was nothing to talk about. That didn't seem to make him the least bit ill at ease. Grinning smugly, he just kept chewing on the stem of his pipe and looking at me.