Kerry Thornley - The Dreadlock Recollections

Something had to be purchased to complete our provisions, so at one point Brother-in-law and I ran an errand together in his car. It was the only time the two of us were alone for more than two or three minutes that I can remember. Peter, Paul and Mary's then-popular Where Have All The Flowers Gone? was playing on his car radio.

"Heh, heh. I like that song," he said with what seemed like cynical relish. "It's so sad! Yeah, heh, heh, when will they ever learn?"

And so we picked up the wine or paper cups or sandwich bags or whatever we were supposed to get at Waterbury's Drugs and drove back from the corner of Camp and Canal to the apartment. I saw that Brother-in-law was in a wisecracking mood today and seemed, in his sardonic way, maybe not such a dangerous character as I had briefly feared. But I wasn't inclined to bring up the subject of the five people he said he would kill to make me famous, and I hoped he had forgotten about it.

Then the four of us drove out into the backwoods of Jefferson Parish somewhere and sat under the trees eating poor-boy sandwiches and drinking wine.

How unusual for someone like Brother-in-law, in his neatly pressed slacks with his Mafia slang and Nazi jokes, to suggest an outing like this! But he seemed to be enjoying it all immensely. Now and again he would look at Jessica with an expression I can only describe as fierce satisfaction. Certainly he wasn't flirting with her, because his scrutiny would come when she wasn't looking at him.

Vaguely disquieted, irritated with myself for feeling uneasy, unable to make any sense of his glances, I began to feel I was dealing with a man who was much too erratic or complex to evaluate.

Personally I preferred people like Greg, who belonged to a world I understood. Brother-in-law was from a world I didn't understand. I did not, in fact, know whether to fear or dismiss him as a cheap hoodlum's fabrication.

Slim belonged to both worlds. He would enjoy my labeling him a social amphibian. But he seemed predominately a creature of my world, and his fascination with this brother-in-law of his was hard to figure.

That autumn I heard from Slim that Brother-in-law's new house was now constructed on the property near the Anheuser brewery. Moreover, Brother-in-law was now respectably employed at the brewery. I don't recall whether he got the job there first and then purchased the land for his house or whether it was the other way around. What I do remember is that they were just beginning to produce a new brand of beer there, Busch Bavarian.

That he was no longer a bouncer in a Mafia strip joint I took as reassuring, for that would perhaps mean he was that much further removed from any present involvement with organized crime. Authentic New Orleans underworld figures were people I wanted to learn about, while staying as far away from them as possible.

And then there was the consideration that Brother-in-law was going to try his hand at becoming a writer. That was something I could identify with. Slim had assured me that Gary was going to keep his personal opinions out of Hitler Was A Good Guy .

"By God, he'd better," was my response, "if he expects to sell it to a decent publishing house."

It was to be an objectively written study of what the policies of various members of the Third Reich would have been, had they succeeded in their attempts to seize power from Hitler. The purpose was to argue that of all of them, Adolph Hitler was the least of many terrible evils.

So one morning, at Slim's prior suggestion, I met with him and Gary and we drove in Brother-in-law's car to the modest little flat-roofed house in Harahan, Louisiana, at the corner of Jefferson Highway and Plache. To the best of my recollection it was green stucco on the outside. Inside was a living room with an adjoining kitchen at the back separated by a structure resembling a breakfast bar. Upon a corner where a dirt or gravel road joined the highway, it stood far from any other residence. There was a bedroom off to the side opposite the main road. Or perhaps just a sofa in the living room that made into a bed, I don't recall exactly.

I remember thinking wistfully what I could do with a place of that size, a home base to which I could return after the numerous globe-trotting adventures I was planning on having as soon as I became a successful writer. Surveying the living room for the first time, I noticed an unusually large number of cheap girlie magazines stacked here and there.

This was to be the first of perhaps a couple of dozen such visits, filling a two-year span from late in 1961 until November of 1963. Each of these visits took place at Slim's suggestion, and each time Slim was to accompany me. Sometimes we would meet Brother-in-law in the French Quarter and all three of us would drive out to the house together; other times Slim would have already borrowed Gary's car and he and I would make the drive, with Brother-in-law awaiting us at the house.

At the time, these expeditions comprised a negligible portion of my life, so it seemed to me, for they were isolated from my adventures among the Bohemians and hipsters of the French Quarter, the Quarterites, as we called ourselves. So to phrase it mildly, I wasn't taking notes.

So the conversational dialog I use in telling this tale is written necessarily with a certain amount of poetic or literary license, to capture the mood of each situation, as there is no way I am able to present a word-for-word transcript of what was said.

Most of my memories of these talks were repressed for many years until 1975, when I could recall at first only that Slim Brooks had a weird brother-in-law who seemed obsessed with Nazism and who spoke once or twice with me of killing John Kennedy. As I recalled it vaguely, I had decided afterwards he was just playing with my mind.

However, since 1975 I have thought about almost nothing but Brother-in-law, literally, day in and day out. Times were many I thought my mind would snap from the emotional strain of having to dwell so constantly on anything so difficult to understand.

Gradually it occurred to me that possibly bizarre words and actions contain their own psychological camouflage. Police hasten to close cases like the John Kennedy assassination. Earl Warren said of the Dallas crimes, "This whole thing just makes me sick." Few Commission members bothered to attend the taking of depositions. When Jim Garrison reopened the case in the late sixties, reporters complained constantly about the bizarre nature of the probe's cast of characters.

In our society, distasteful matters are quickly disposed of with circumspection and minimal attentiveness.

For many years Warren Report critics, as well as anyone who attempted to take a closer look at the Manson family, were popularly dismissed as "ghouls" and "vultures."

"Manson made many friends during his last seven years in prison," before his release in the middle Sixties, according to Ed Sanders' The Family . "Some cell-mates say that Manson planned all along to collect an army of outcasts operating 'beneath the awareness' of the mother culture." (p. 32)

That Brother-in-law may have been involved in creating the Manson cult, as he must have been in on the John Kennedy assassination, was a notion that came to me slowly, very much intuitively feared before it was consciously acknowledged.

There is the nagging consideration that Robert Kennedy dined with Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski the night of his death and that Manson's people were very much involved with the "black-caped, black-garbed, death-worshiping Process Church of the Final Judgment" which, writes Sanders, "arrived on the Los Angeles scene in early 1968. They stayed in public view till a few days after Robert Kennedy's assassination in June of '68, after which they dropped from sight in Los Angeles." (p. 80)