Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

Hands behind his head, Gary tipped his chair back and stared at the machine with a loutish grin and began talking about a pawn shop on Canal Street where it was possible to have stolen goods fenced.

For my part, I spent most of the time observing the serene, resolute Ola, whose liberal cultural and racial views rebuked her Mississippi background. I was trying to figure out what she saw in a self-proclaimed Nazi, since in spite of her professed agreement with Ayn Rand, some of my own much more rational right-wing views seemed to annoy her. Slim had told me Brother-in-law liked Ola because he deemed her red hair a Germanic trait.

In those days, we were inclined to leave our door unlocked, and the next day, Memorial Day of 1961, when Greg and I were out somewhere drinking coffee and arguing philosophy, somebody made off with the typewriter. Both of us suspected Brother-in-law, but we didn't see how we could prove anything, the idea of checking with the pawn shop he'd mentioned never dawned on either of us.

We did call the police, however. Two cops came to visit us. They said from now on to keep our door locked. "Believe me," one of them added, "after you've been in our business awhile, you know better than to trust your own brother."

As for any hope of recovering our stolen property, the chances were, they allowed, slim.

Since I was drawing unemployment, retroactive from the period before I got part-time work as a phone solicitor, I gladly paid the greater portion of the price for a new typewriter, something which Greg commented at the time, was "more than generous," compelling me to explain that my motive was self-interest: "I want to finish The Idle Warriors ."

Later when the Foster Awning phone room closed down, Slim gave up his apartment to live for a while in a skid-row mission, and at widely spaced intervals he would use our shower. Sometimes he would make such a visit when neither Greg or I were home, and we could always tell he'd been there because of the lingering stench. Slim would wear the same clothes, unwashed, for days at a time. This was not simply because of poverty, for he told me once that he actually preferred not to change clothes.

A few weeks later Slim and I went to visit Brother-in-law in the ground-floor Rue Royal apartment he shared with Ola. Only Gary was there. A painting of a stripper with pasties stood at one end of the room on an easel, prompting me to comment that Gary was a good painter.

"So was Hitler," he responded. "In fact once an art critic complained that you could count the number of cobblestones in one of his street scenes. I don't think that was a very fair criticism. Do you, Kerry?"

"I should say not," I chimed in. "We Objectivists like realistic art that requires genuine talent. That critic was probably an abstract expressionist or something equally decadent."

"Precisely." He seemed very pleased with me.

Ola came in at some point. I was telling Gary how much I looked forward to finding out more about Papa Joe, his boss at the night club, because soon I was going to attempt a novel about New Orleans that would include mobsters among the characters.

Leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, Brother-in-law began to tell me about Papa Joe, saying that he had many sons who helped him run the business. Unfortunately, either I changed the subject, or Slim said it was time to go, because the conversation went no further.

Somewhere around the same time, I became involved with an attractive nineteen-year-old Sophie Newcomb coed named Jessica Luck, and it must have been during July of that summer, 1961, that Slim invited both of us to ride with him and Brother-in-law to look at some property on Jefferson Highway that Gary had just purchased and where he was going to build a house for his own use.

A long stone's throw from the brewery, with its aluminum kegs lined up in a row on the shipping dock, across the road the vacant land in question was grown over with tangled vines and small trees. I stepped forward into the swampy thicket, but Brother-in-law cautioned me that there were poisonous snakes about of a species that would actually chase a human being, the cotton-mouth, I believe.

It was late in the day, the sun was setting, and I felt drained of energy, for to me it had been something of a pointless expedition. We piled back into the car and returned to the city.

Brother-in-law started talking about Nazis and Russians during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and asked me if I knew there had been a lot of "going back and forth from one side to the other" among them at that time.

Having read as much in Eric Hoffer's The True Believer , I could say that I did.

By the time we pulled up in front of Slim's place we were involved in discussing the literal meanings of the names various Russian leaders had adopted for revolutionary purposes, "Molotov" meant "Hammer," and "Stalin" meant "Steel," and so forth.

Gary was next to me in the back seat, his hands clasped together, his elbows on his knees, in a posture I was coming to recognize as characteristic of him when he urgently wanted to be heard. "If I were to assume a revolutionary name, it would be 'Smith,' because a smith is someone who forges things."

"You forge checks, money orders," guffawed Slim, beginning to list the small-time crimes to which Brother-in-law frequently boasted.

Of course, Gary had been referring to the forging of political alliances, but he laughed with the rest of us.

Then I must have walked Jessica up to the Freret bus stop on Canal Street, because my next recollection of that evening is that only the three of us, Slim, Brother-in-law and me, were sitting in Slim's room, when at one point or other in the chatter Brother-in-law asked, "Kerry, how would you like to be famous?"

"I'd love it," I replied without hesitation. "I've always wanted to be at least famous enough to make the cover of Time magazine."

Suddenly very serious, hunching forward with his elbows on his knees, he said, "I can make you famous."

After listening to me rant about how famous I wanted to be, he stammered, "Kerry, in order to make you famous I'll have to k-kill five people."

"Sure," I said with false bravado, not knowing what else to say. "Go ahead." Perhaps he was planning to rub out some of his underworld associates. I didn't ask. The remark was disconcerting.

That night, safely home in bed, I thought before going to sleep that Slim's brother-in-law was turning out to be weirder than I had at first supposed and that in the future it would be a good idea to steer clear of him.

As it happened I was not to encounter Brother-in-law again for many weeks. Slim would make mention of him from time to time. He'd gone out of town to Mussel Shoals, Alabama. He'd gotten in a fight and come out of it with a black eye. He was going to write a book about the officials of the Third Reich. It would be called Hitler Was A Good Guy , and he wanted to pay me to help him research it.

I wondered what kind of book it was going to be; I wasn't sure I wanted anything to do with it.

Besides the Sunday afternoon before Memorial Day, Greg does not remember any further meeting with Brother-in-law. But in July of that year we moved to a larger attic apartment in the same building, and sometime thereafter, possibly late August, Slim and Brother-in-law were very much present there one Saturday or Sunday morning. Slim and Gary and Jessica and I were going to the country for a picnic, and the place was noisy with our preparations.

Nothing significant happened that I recall, so perhaps Greg just didn't find it worth remembering. Or maybe he was bleary-eyed from a hangover and went back to bed afterwards and forgot about it. Since this time around I had the bedroom and it was he who slept in the living room, I'm sure he must have been awake, though possibly he had gone out early that morning.