Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

To a more perceptive ear, Brother-in-law's words may have sounded like thinly veiled complaining. But since I bought the Nazi cover story without thinking, to me it sounded like right-wing delusions of grandeur, something like the hollow boast of a motorcycle gang member.

As I told Slim afterwards, I liked this brother-in-law of his more than I thought I would. "Why didn't you tell me he hates Kennedy as much as I do?"

"And spoil the surprise?" he said, laughing at the outrageousness of his humor. "Now I wouldn't do that. My name's Slim, not Scrooge!"

A bald head was Brother-in-law's most striking feature. In retrospect I wonder if he polished it. This is a serious possibility, for he must have been in disguise and may have shaved and shined his pate, wearing a toupee while on less clandestine missions.

The back of his head was rounded, protruding. I mention the shape of his head in hopes that his identification might be facilitated if he was in fact pretending to be someone else.

A somewhat nasal Midwestern twang could be discerned in his voice. Clipped words and abrupt sentences often dominated his speech patterns at the same time, however. Short giggles occasionally punctuated his sentences.

At such times he looked to me like a species of insect and his choice of words usually reinforced that impression. If what he said was not cruel it would disgust me in another way. "I like smoking a pipe," he told me once, "because it fumigates my mouth."

I gathered the perhaps erroneous notion that he avoided mingling with my Bohemian friends and acquaintances whenever it wasn't absolutely necessary.

His eyes were not a Germanic blue nor his eyelashes blond, I recall vividly, however, they were either hazel or green or blue-green, of a shade light enough that I was not moved to doubt his vaunted German ancestry. Sometimes I would look at Brother-in-law's eyes intently, and he would meet my gaze grinning mysteriously, defiantly, as if to say what Lee Oswald said later to his brother, Robert, when he visited Lee in jail after the assassination: "You won't find any answers there, brother."

Gary's pupils were neither dilated nor contracted. There was no glint either. They were like closed solid gates.

With faint amusement, he would just wait patiently, returning my stare as if he could guess the questions in my mind, but knew that never in a million years of looking would I be able to guess the answers in his. By and large I was tragically unimpressed by Brother-in-law.

I never thought much about him when I wasn't in his presence, except when Slim mentioned him. Once he told me that Brother-in-law had secured a job as a bouncer in a Bourbon Street night club owned by a colorful Mafioso thereabouts. Soon afterwards, he told me that Gary and Ola were now living together in an apartment in the vicinity of the Saint Louise Cathedral on Royal Street.

Ola Holcomb became Brother-in-law's lover shortly after his arrival. A month or so earlier I had myself tried to develop a romantic relationship with her, with disastrous results from the standpoint of my tender young male ego.

A mysterious woman to me, Ola professed to be an atheist but insisted on wearing a little gold cross around her neck. She rejected my advances for reasons she refused to fully explain. And now she was living with Slim's unusual Nazi brother-in-law, of all people.

In the middle Seventies when I first began talking about Gary Kirstein I began to sense something weird in the way people responded. There was a Gary Kirstein still living in New Orleans listed with information. A reporter told me he found Gary Kirstein's name in the resisters of some gun clubs. A magician in California investigating snuff films and other illegitimate practices among occultists said Gary Kirstein's name had turned up. I noticed that whoever I spoke to about him who seemed knowledgable usually mentioned the Trilateral Commission, as if to hint.

Anyway, it eventually became pretty obvious to me that whoever I had met in 1961 in New Orleans had probably been using Kirstein's name in order to set him up. Brother-in-law had in fact hinted at the time that he was "really more like a mad scientist" than the Nazi Kirstein was supposed to be and on one occasion he spoke emotionally of a scientist named Tom Miethe. So in 1977 and early 1978 I assumed I had been dealing with Miethe undercover as Kirstein. I found that Miethe was one of Hitler's rocket scientists who would up working for AVRO in Canada after the war. I met two individuals who claim they knew him as a teacher of nuclear physics at Georgia Tech in Atlanta in the middle Sixties. Still, people kept treating me like I was joking or crazy or trying to frame Miethe.

Then in 1978 somebody furnished me with what seemed like a hot tip that my man in New Orleans had actually been neither Kirstein nor Meithe but a Canadian businessman named Mortimer Blomfield, mentioned in Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal as one of John Kennedy's assassins. Since assassinating JFK had been one of our chief subjects of discussion, that seemed at least possible. Then, that same year, an assassination buff in California expressed the opinion that I had been talking to the Watergate burglar Edward Howard Hunt. So I read Hunt's autobiography Undercover . Not only did Hunt mention being involved in a number of CIA projects that the man I knew as Gary Kirstein discussed with me, a 1959 photo of E. Howard Hunt in the book exactly resembles the man I knew as Kirstein, except that Kirstein was bald and Hunt, at that time, wasn't. So for the past many years I've been more or less convinced was dealing with Hunt in disguise.

Meanwhile I was preoccupied with the tasks and adventures of day-to-day living in the French Quarter, where I shared my living space with a young man who had accompanied me from Southern California.

My roommate, Gregory Hill, was short in physical stature with curly black hair. Elfin blue eyes combine with his squat physique to give him a Pan-like appearance.

A lover of wines, cheeses, unusual tobaccos, exotic teas, strange blends of coffee, and anything else calling for subtle distinctions, including abstract optical effects in art and mind-bending intellectual paradoxes, a connoisseur of everything quaint, particularly when he discovered for himself what was quaint about it, Greg would spend hours looking into something that most people would never notice.

Expressions of gratitude to Saint Jude and Huey P. Long for prayers answered among the personal classifieds of the New Orleans Times Picayune , Cajun jokes, French Quarter architecture, Irish Channel slang and crackpot cults all amused him enormously.

Our first outings together in El Monte, California, had in fact been to meetings of a far-out religion of flying saucer buffs founded by a man named Daniel Fry. The cult was called "Understanding" (except that it was spelled with a Christian cross where the "t" would ordinarily go).

Greg found in Slim an amusing and intellectually stimulating companion.

I took Greg to visit Slim's pad, where, in keeping with his notions of hospitality, the landlocked seaman immediately served up a Mason jar full of room temperature coffee.

Greg took a sip and wrinkled his nose. "This coffee's cold!"

Slim laughed. "Man, you don't drink coffee, you drink temperature!"

Always a pushover for utilitarian logic, Greg was to remark to me many years later: "You know something? From that day to this I have never once complained about cold coffee."

Greg and Brother-in-law met only once or twice. First on the Sunday before Memorial Day when Slim, Gary and Ola dropped into our Saint Louis Street pad for a visit. I don't recall much of the conversation that afternoon, only that Brother-in-law kept looking at Greg's typewriter, with which I was currently writing my novel about Oswald.