BACK
CONJURELLA MESSIAH: NECRONOMICON MONKS
t casey brennan
This is the story of Conjurella Con II. No, the blood has dried now; the Conjurella
memories are no more. Gone the voices: "Lift him up!" gone the memory, gone
the blood.
It is a decade beyond 1963 now: ten years are passing. No longer Dallas, but
Toronto. David Ferrie is dead. We are free.
No, this is the story of Cosmicon II, the last weekend of January, 1973, a comic
book convention held at Winters College, part of York University in Toronto, an
extravaganza that would include future Tonight Show guest host, P. J. O'Rourke,
Ted Nugent, the first computer game installed in North America (in the basement
of Winters), and, at the last moment, the blood-stained legend, T. Casey
Brennan.
No, this is the story of women named A, of abbreviated names, of Vampirella, of
the Absinthe Cafe, of secrets and legends and dried blood.
This is Cosmicon II. The sixties that spilled the blood of John Kennedy were over.
A memory. A blurred vision of high school years, followed by the early sales of
fiction stories by T. Casey Brennan...was the first a cover-featured story in the
Major Magazines/Candar Men's Group men's magazine Charger, Feb. 1968? (they
left out the "T" on my name on the cover), or was it "Family Curse" in Jim
Warren's Eerie magazine, 1969?
Who knows? This is 1973. David Ferrie is dead; Dallas is an aborted memory, a
dream that couldn't be.
But Cosmicon II will be the scene of another murder, the murder of the mind of
the greatest comic book publisher that ever lived, Jim Warren. A quarter century
later, a zine called Hungry Freaks would publish Jim's account of a condition which
seemed to attack his central nervous system, a condition which left him helpless
as his company was led to ruin, and a court-ordered Chapter VI bankruptcy.
Dr. E is close behind; I can feel his cold presence. Jim Warren has taken to
publishing a great many of my stories. Dr. E is displeased. I am so unsure of
myself; the sudden conversion from being a shy country boy with few friends and
a secret life, to an overnight celebrity for the award and award nominations I
received for "On the Wings of a Bird", drawn by the late Jerry Grandeneeti, in
Creepy #36, November 1970 issue, all at the New York Comic Art Convention at
the Statler Hilton in July of 1971. I stepped off the stage at the awards
presentations, with the Ray Bradbury Cup of Warren's own Frazetta Awards, and
nominations for both the Comic Art Fan and Shazam Academy of Comic Book Arts
awards.
Eerie #38 carried pictures of me receiving that trophy in 1972; I think there are
copies of that issue floating around Cosmicon II. Flash-bulbs popped, fan
journalists stormed me with tape recorders, mikes, and questions, and a new era
was born in my life. Somehow, I imagined that, in and amongst the sad,
melodramatic artistry I had perfected -- Warren's letter columns referred to "the
classic T. Casey Brennan allegory", and compared me to Dali and Rod Serling -- I
could drop little hints and clues of those secrets I carried so well.
One of my Warren stories began with a man who resembled me leaning out the
window with a rifle, thinking "Something's going to happen soon...", but I didn't
know then, not all the time, couldn't bear the Conjurella memory yet.
Some months earlier, I had written "shadow of Dracula" for Warren's Vampirella
comic book; it was recently reprinted by Harris Comics, who bought Jim's
properties at auction after a court-ordered bankruptcy, as Vampirella of Drakulon
#3, in May 1996. It was about the Van Helsings from the Bram Stoker classic,
Dracula, its back in 1897, and they're attempting to create a blood serum to cure
vampirism. Comic book writers often like to emphasize certain words in bold-face,
and when I showed Daddy, I had emphasized the words "The Project" on the
manuscript, in a reference to this anti vampirism nonsense.
Daddy points at the words "The Project", and says: "You can't do that."
I say: "Why not?" Then I stare in bewilderment, but inside, that bewilderment is
a lie.
Deep within, the Conjurella memory lurks; deep within, the truth that cannot be:
I am only a boy, shy, frail, sensitive, artistic, but it was my hand that pulled the
trigger. Kidnapped, drugged, tormented, injected: I am the true cold, dark legend,
Lee was innocent. I killed the President. I shot John Kennedy.
Daddy growls the name of Dr. E.
Closer comes the Conjurella memory; Daddy is right, I know, but I don't know
how, can't remember how Dr. E could loom forth from the 1950s to forbid me to
write something in a comic book in the 1970s.
In one world, The Project is the Port Hope office of MK-ULTRA, a hellish reality of
forced drug and hypnosis experiments on children, which will lead to the
assassination of the President.
In another world, The Project is a component in a vampire comic, a skillful plot
device involving a cure for Vampirella, from the socially inept but brilliant comic
book writer that many readers now feel is Jim Warren's best ace: T. Casey
Brennan.
The two worlds must not collide, but they do, only for a moment, and I say,
inexplicably: "I'm not a little boy any more. He can't tell me what to do any more."
And now it is 1973 Toronto. Time has washed away the blood; Dr. E's injections
have washed away the memory. Kennedy is a name in a history book, like Howard
Leslie Brennan. I carry no guilt, no shame, no recollection of the blood here: JFK
in this world was killed by a lone nut with a defective weapon and no motive.
I never knew him. I never wept. Not here, not now, not in the parallel world of
Toronto, 1973.
In the days preceding Cosmicon II, I had met, first Asian A, then American A, and
fallen in love with them both. They weren't spies, public figures, or comic book
publishers, so to put them among the Necronomicon Monks, they must be half
known and half concealed: Pretty girls named A____ who loved me, once.
Now they are gone, like their love for me. Now they are memories; now their
words of love are as distant as Dr E's words of torment, or Jim Warren's words of
praise for my comic book stories.
Once they were real. The taste of memories is bittersweet. In November of 1972,
Asian A and I took the train to Toronto. Asian A put her head on my shoulder;
there is a scent and a taste to Asian women easily as intoxicating and as
addictive as opium. It cannot be washed off; it cannot be concealed, and even
now, the scent of an Asian woman will set my heart pounding, and my lungs
hyper-ventilating. The story of the Necronomicon Monks is truth, but it is absurd
truth, so I will take this one step further, for this also is true: if an Asian girl,
particularly a pretty Asian girl (which would include about eight out of ten of
them), enters my space, I will know where she is, what hallways she has walked
down, what rooms she has entered, by scent alone.
But this was the story of the Necronomicon Monks. Daddy's stories for Street &
Smith's 1940s pulp magazine Love Story were one of the few things that he ever
did that I liked. It was also one of the few things he ever did that he didn't
somehow figure out a way of using against me. I'd seen letters to Daddy from
Love Story editor, Daisy Bacon; I think she published only two of his stories,
under the authorship, Bill Brennan. But he was there, in the pulps, like Cthulu,
Conan, and L. Ron Hubbard, like Lovecraft's hypothetical book of sorcery, the
Necronomicon. And in 1973, I was developing a strange, lethal obsession with
black magic, that went far beyond the fictional devices we all used for the
stories in the Warren magazines, Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella.
The Necronomicon has always been a subject for debate among the followers of
Lovecraft and the pulps. Some say Lovecraft created the Necronomicon, like L.
Ron Hubbard's former literary agent, Forry Ackerman, created Vampirella. Others
say it was an actual book of ancient sorcery, which Lovecraft had discovered and
decided to use in his stories in another 1940s pulp, Weird Tales. In this latter
category is found this legend: The Necronomicon was discovered by the Holy
Office of the Inquisition, and sealed behind stone in a monastery in Tibet...even
they, who could slaughter thousands of their own kind, still feared its dark power.
No: I bear the Dulles Stigmata: protracted delusions of a religious or occult
nature, which are the trademark symptom of those who were subjected to the
CIA's illegal mind-control experiments of the 1950s, directly overseen by CIA
Director, and later Warren Commission member, Allen Dulles.
But this is Toronto in 1973. This is Cosmicon II. Dallas is a decade in the past,
and the basement room where I would remember, and write Conjurella, is more
than two decades in the future. In that fateful world-to-be of the nineties, I
would make contact with others who plausibly and recognizably (to me, who had
lived it) claimed to have been abducted and abused by MK-ULTRA. Yet, the
stories would wane into occultism: terrifying tales of unmistakable CIA
abductions are peppered with the absurd. Abductees, after presenting what would
otherwise be valuable testimony, go on to relate accounts of neighbors with
mind-reading rays, NASA officials with time machines, and visions of Rose
Kennedy as an ally of the assassins. Nor was I less guilt in this also. Relating
now, in the nineties, my memories of Dr. E, and the real-life Project, I am
constantly reminded that in the seventies, I wrote essays for a variety of occult
publications, claiming to be the reincarnation of noted occult figure, Aleister
Crowley. This was as intended by the CIA. I also carry the Dulles Stigmata. If we
are all reincarnations of Aleister Crowleys, time traveling through hell with NASA
and Rose Kennedy, then our testimony is far less plausible, except to a very few.
But in Toronto in 1973, I am innocent: not still the assassin of Dallas that no one
saw, not yet the assassin of Conjurella that no one believed.
Sometime after I fell in love with Asian A, and before Cosmicon II, I met, and fell
in love, with American A. American A was pretty, but not really quite as pretty as
Asian A, who was indescribably gorgeous. Yet, American A was not without power
over me, and her power was words of love...promises and whispers, her fine,
slender strands of blonde hair brushing across my face, so different from the
thick, long, sleek black hair of Asian A.
In the days before Cosmicon II, American A spoke in promises and whispers,
swore she would love me forever, and begged me not to go to Ontario, where she
knew Asian A awaited me.
But within, there with the memory of Dallas, somehow concealed and
omnipresent, like Poe's Tell-Tale Heart, was he memory of Linda. Like John
Kennedy's blood, Linda's tears poured over me; like the mythical Necronomicon of
Tibet, Linda's memory was sealed up in stone, sealed within.
Uncle Johnny was the bad uncle. Quite unlike Uncle Charley, also of Columbus,
Ohio, who had one wife, and one set of kids, Uncle Johnny married and divorced
and remarried frequently, throughout his unlamented life. Some time in the early
1950s, he married Aunt Bonnie, whom I immortalized with the fictional
appellation "Conjurella", in my story of the same name. Her daughter was Linda,
who was the same age as me; for a while, she came to live with us in Avoca,
Michigan. She was a perfect, exquisite little girl, long blonde hair, a high I.Q.,
and an air of placid quality, even at the age of five. When she left us with Aunt
Bonnie, in 1953, shortly before I started school, she wore white muffs with sugar
cubes in them; that will always be my archetypical memory of her, Linda and Aunt
Bonnie leaving. It would not be, it could not be, that fleeting glimpse of Linda,
that day in Dallas, that hallway on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository Building, that fleeting glimpse, so cruel, as the MK-ULTRA operatives
hustled her past so quickly.
But this was Toronto in 1973: Linda was only a whisper here, from two decades
past. Here my heart was filled with Asian A and American A, as I drank heavily,
autographing copies of Creepy and Eerie, wandering through the maze of Winters
College, attempting to cope with my chaotic love affairs, my alcoholism, and my
new-found fame. Yet deep within, the memory of Linda lurked, deep within, I
knew: she, like me, had been of the chosen ones. She, like me, had been born to
kill, born to serve The Project, born to kill John Kennedy for MK-ULTRA, born to
serve the hellish renegades of the Office of Strategic Services who had chosen us
to end the power of the Kennedy dynasty forever.
Perhaps, sometimes when American A's blonde hair brushed against my face,
there was that whisper of a memory of Linda. This was Toronto in 1973, this was
an alternate world. I feared the intense cold of Toronto in the parallel world of
Cosmicon II, 1973, and Winters College was a vast, unchartable labyrinth.
Sometimes, in my wanders through it, I would come upon a door leading to the
cold, white world outside. For a moment, I would stare transfixed at the wind
blowing little wisps of snow through the bitter cold. Beyond those doors was the
cold world from which I had come, and the cold world to which I would return.
Beyond those doors was a cold past in which I had lost Linda and shot President
Kennedy, a cold future in which I would remember, and transcribe, those things in
the legend of Conjurella.
But within those doors was Cosmicon II, a world of Asian A and American A
playing tug-o-war with my heart, a world of adulation for the poetic, paneled
prose that had suddenly been evoked from me, a world of comic book stars and
comic book fans, a world with no John Kennedy writhing in blood from my single,
only shot, a world where The Project was only a brief, emotion-packed scene from
Vampirella. Within the doors of Cosmicon II, this was truth; the other world, the
alternate world, where The Project was a hell that MK-ULTRA had created for
children, was far behind and far before.
Yet, paradoxically, obscenely, unfairly, in that alternate world of Toronto 1973,
Dr. E had stalked me, and now Jim Warren was his target. Here at Cosmicon II, I
had found my Shangri-La, a world of comic book and trivialities, a world of
American A and Asian A battling inside my head for my heart, a world with no
blood of JFK that I had spilled, no sinister designs of Dr. E and The Project.
But somehow, beyond the lies, in the labyrinth of Winters College, Dr. E lurked,
stalking Jim Warren; somehow, beyond the comic books, beyond the scent of
Asian A and the whispers of American A, the memory of The Project lurked.
"You're part of the New Frontier, Casey," Dr. E had told me earnestly, in the
presence of two associates, after the Kennedy election victory of 1960.
To those who knew, but had been lied to, The Project was the CIA's ultimate
weapon against Castro's Cuba: a secret invasion force which would combine the
traditional warfare of the past with the super-science of the future.
Lee believed. Major General Edwin Walker did not. Walker had been a prominent
activist for the right-wing John Birch Society, which, in that era, had still been
enamored of America's Military, and America's espionage apparatus. MK-ULTRA
had sought a protective cover of rightists and paramilitarists, standing ready with
their own troops, to aid in the supposed "invasion of Cuba". Those who did
believe had included American Nazi Party leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, the
scholarly but sinister Dr. Fred G. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communism
Crusade (which shared offices with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New
Orleans), and martial arts expert Bruce Lee, hell-bent on liberating his people
from the murderous brand of communism which had overtaken China.
But Walker had refused altogether, and Lee, under orders from David Ferrie, his
commanding officer in the Civil Air Patrol, had fired on Walker and missed,
deliberately, as a warning. Lee believed, but Walker did not. George Lincoln
Rockwell, chess player, essayist, Nazi leader, friend: he believed also. ("Get
Lincoln out of that Nazi suit, and talk to him man-to-man, and he's all right,"
someone had told me then).
"Call George and tell him the invasion is off," David Ferrie said, light-heartedly,
after the assassination. Some years later, Rockwell would write, sympathetically,
"Casey thinks he's a Jew but he's not."
But Rockwell, like Edwin Walker, like Bruce Lee, like Lee himself, would perish.
The sixties would claim the lives of George Lincoln Rockwell and Bruce Lee;
Walker would die later, and horribly.
Rockwell would be shot outside a laundromat, by one of his own men, in a virtual
coup-de-tat by the CIA, which would place the American Nazi Party squarely in
the camp of the Kennedy assassins, directed no longer by their own
eccentricities, but by the very government which they had purported to oppose.
Major General Edwin Walker would be stalked and homosexually raped at a
freeway rest stop,, by men who would later identify him as a willing participant;
he died shortly thereafter, the pain and humiliation were too great.
And Bruce Lee: the cut-outs of memories, the fleeting glimpses of a past
somehow lost, like that fleeting glimpse of Linda...
That fleeting memory; no before, no after, just the memory. We are in a hotel
room, somewhere. It is before the JFK assassination, sometime.
Lee is there, like Bruce. They have both seen the children, Dr. E's children, sitting
limply in chairs with needles in their necks, headsets on their ears, screens
before their vacant faces. Dr. E says: it is necessary: child assassins formed with
the super-science of the future, child assassins, a proud tradition of both sides of
the now concluded great war, child assassins necessary for the invasion of Cuba.
It has already grated on Lee; later, he will seek a friend and confidant in Dallas
police officer, J.D. Tippitt, whom he will tell.
But for Bruce, it is intolerable now.
"Get rid of the kids," Bruce says, "We don't need them."
Lee sits, staring downward, his hand on his forehead, wearing that sly, secret
smile, only ever-so-slightly visible.
"I can't," Lee says softly, and matter-of-factly.
Bruce side-steps into position and gestures toward me.
"Get rid of the kid," Bruce says, "Get him out of here. Take him home. Lose him.
Anything."
"I can't," Lee repeats, like deja vu.
Bruce begins a series of blocks, cries, and kicks.
I look at Lee questioningly with drugged vision: Dr. E or David Ferrie must have
injected me again, recently.
Lee says, chuckling, "Well, Bruce goes a little crazy like that sometimes. There's
nothing we can do. It will pass."
Under the hypnotic drug, I take these words literally, not as a joke, a game. I
wait, horrified, for Bruce's supposed attack to pass. After, Lee says to Bruce, in
earnest: "That was great. That was magnificent."
But this is Toronto in 1973: this is Cosmicon II. I never knew them here. The
air-tight doors of Winters College seal out the cold, the wind, the drifting snow,
seal out the tormented past of Dallas, seal out the bleak future of Conjurella.
Within these doors, there are no memories of the aborted invasion, no memories
of the single shot which my hand fired, no memories of Christian
Anti-Communism or Fair Play for Cuba...only comic books, and fans of my Warren
stories, only the spectral phantasms of American A and Asian A, not present, but
there in spirit, battling for the heart of T. Casey Brennan, not the child assassin,
but the poet, not the pawn of Dr. E and MK-ULTRA, but the pawn of pretty girls,
touching, whispering, promising, their hair in my face, their scent in my nostrils.
Here, in this sealed off world of Winters College in 1973, T. Casey Brennan was
not the secret assassin; he was Archie, torn between Betty and Veronica; he was
not the drugged, helpless pawn of Dr. E, he was Dobie Gillis, lost in philosophy
and love affairs...
Yet, Dr. E lurked, even here. Inexplicably, Jim Warren had been strip searched by
customs officials, upon entering Canada, en route from New York. What did they
know, what did they suspect? What motives did they attribute, what foul plans
did they suspect?
Initially, it had seemed impossible to make it to Cosmicon II, where I had
received an invitation to appear, complete with complimentary room at Winters
College; Winters College, where the doors could block not only cold, but
memories...
And American A, who still loved me then, had begged me not to go. But go I did,
riding into Port Huron with a friend that morning. I call a Canadian taxi from Port
Huron, ride across the Blue Water Bridge, and soon, I am at the Canadian
National Railway station in Sarnia. Or maybe I went to Asian A's apartment
before the train station; I don't know anymore, I'm not a witness, I can't
remember.
The Sarnia-based taxi is called "A Stan-Lee Taxi." The driver gives me his card,
and later, I show it at the convention, as a take-off on the name of the Marvel
Comics publisher known as Stan Lee.
The driver lays a rap that could be entitled: "Great Tips I Have Been Given." He
tells me of a rider employed by a tire manufacturer, who ships him a full set of
tires, later, as a tip.
He wants comic books. But soon I will have no comic books. Soon, the bleak
future of Conjurella will propel me into a network of hippie communes, homeless
shelters and free meals. Soon, the insulating doors of Winters College will
insulate me no more. I sent him no comic books, though I may have promised.
I board the train for Toronto in Sarnia. I watch, sad and melancholy, as the
Canadian countryside and the memories flicker past me.
I am alone now. Not the sleek black torrents of hair of Asian A on my shoulder
now, not the promises and whispers of American A, only sadness, when there
should have been hope.
Within are the memories, forgotten, but not gone, like a word on the tip of one's
tongue, but somehow out of consciousness, somehow out of reach.
In the last days of David Ferrie's life, in mid-1966, and early 1967, David Ferrie
met with us on several occasions. I was always drugged and hypnotized during
those meetings, so the words would just barely filter through, in little bits and
fragments. I was no credible witness, then or now. But I knew Dr. E and David
Ferrie were creating a disease to attack Africa. It must have been 1966 when
David Ferrie told me they had successfully infected someone.
"It's going to fly!" David Ferrie said of the AIDS virus, grinning proudly. Daddy
smiled a sheepish smile, and nodded. He was afraid then. So am I. Even now.
But within the insulating doors of Winters College awaited the Absinthe Cafe. The
memories are non-sequential now, blurred visions of comic books, Jim Warren,
fellow celebrity guests, and probably the most outstanding performance ever
given by noted rock musician and hippie deerslayer, Ted Nugent.
Nugent did not socialize with us, but future Tonight Show guest host P.J.
O'Rourke drank that night at the same table with Jim Warren, me, and a
second-rate comic book writer named Denny O'Neil. The subject of a controversial
underground newspaper called Screw comes up, then managed by Jim Buckley and
Al Goldstein.
Someone, I think Denny O'Neil, says: "Jim Buckley, he's the real intellectual
behind that operation." At some point, Al Goldstein will be arrested in Cuba and
charged by Fidel Castro with being a fellow CIA agent.
And then someone says, "The Mafia does a pretty good job of distributing it."
P.J. O'Rourke frowns, sips his drink, and says, "Yeah, until they take it over."
But my mind is on American A, on the promises and whispers. She wants me to
leave Asian A, wants me to marry her, wants me to believe in witchcraft, as she
does...
And within, the Dulles Stigmata lurks, like the scars of Dr. E's needles in my neck.
In the Hebrew bible, the serpent who tempts Eve is NChSh, and the Messiah yet
to come, is MShYCh. In Hebrew, every letter is a number also, hence, the
Qabbaliastic science of Gematria, the study of the letters and the numbers.
Hebrew is called, by its proponents, a mathematically correct language: words
with the same numeration, are words with the same meaning, in spite of any
apparent differences, which must be resolved by meditation.
The Dulles Stigmata lurks. NChSh is Nun (50), Cheth (8), Shin (300), 358. MShYCh
is Mem (40), Shin (300), Yod (10), Cheth (8), 358. Brennan, transliterated into
Hebrew, is Beth (2), Resh (200), He (5), Nun (50), Nun (50), Aleph (1), Nun (50),
358.
The Dulles Stigmata lurks. American A wants me to believe in magic, and I do.
And in timeless time, beyond Dallas, beyond Toronto, beyond the 60s, or the 70s,
or the 90s, the words form: I am the Last Witness. I speak great things and
blasphemies. I am the first to shoot, and the last to testify. I wash clean the
blood. They must have given me clues as to how they made it; somehow,
somehow, I know, AIDS was begun in Dachau...the torture was only incidental, a
means to an end. Somehow, it was necessary to break down the resistance of
human flesh through torture, so that such a condition, flesh without natural
defenses, flesh without immunity, could be duplicated in a laboratory. And Dr. E
was an Osteopath; was Osteopathy only a cover, or was it a component in the
creation of the virus that the World Health Organization would later spread, in
vaccines, throughout Africa? Later, in the 1980s, the World Health Organization
would write about me in their Geneva-based journal, World Health, in their
October 1983 (page 30) and January February 1986 (page 9) issues.
The Dulles Stigmata lurks, and soon, I will be attempting to duplicate the exact
style of roaring twenties occultist, Aleister Crowley, in a variety of occult journals,
both great and small.
This The Dulles Stigmata lurks, but for now, in the Absinthe Cafe, there is no
memory of the blood of John Kennedy, only the memory of American A's kisses,
and I want to call her, to tell her again that I love her. Somehow, I find my way
through the labyrinth that is Winters College, to a wall with two (or is it three)
secluded pay phones. I call American A in Michigan, and breathe the most
oft-repeated phrase of my youth.
"I love you."
She is sad. She wanted to bolt from Michigan and follow me to Toronto.. "Don't
be surprised if I show up there, after you," she says before I leave for Cosmicon
II. She asks me to swear that I will love her always, and that I will always be
true to her. And I do swear. It is only half a lie. I can love her always, but I
cannot be true.
I return to the Absinthe, and this is mystery.
Jim Warren says he has called for a prostitute to be sent to his room.
"To a man like me, time is money," Warren says, "I don't have time for the kind
of courtship that you do."
All of the guests, including myself, were provided with complimentary rooms at
Winters College, and to anyone who remembers Cosmicon II from the guests of
honor's perspective, any prostitute who could find the damned rooms on her own,
would have to be considered a possible CIA agent from the gitgo.
Warren leaves, and returns shortly. He remarks to me are suddenly inexplicable,
out of rational context.
"Well," Jim Warren says, "I want to keep using your stories, but she says I can't.
She says I have to get rid of you."
This is the way home:
It would be a matter of split-second timing. I would take the train from Toronto
to Sarnia, where Asian A would meet me. I would stay overnight with her, then,
in the morning, she would take me across the Blue Water Bridge to Port Huron, to
the bus station, where I would take the bus down M-21 as far as Emmett, to the
cemetery at Bricker Road. There, American A would meet me, and drive me the
rest of the way home.
In the morning, at Asian A's, I hear Crocodile Rock on the radio, a song they
played so frequently on the radio while American A and I would be parked in front
of my parents' house, making out. I am sad, and full of longing: will I lose
American A? Will I let her love, her promises and whispers, slip away, for the
sake of holding Asian A?
I go down on Asian A in the morning; I hardly have time to pull my tongue out of
her vagina before she speeds me to the Port Huron bus station. We just make it,
and I get on the bus to Emmett just before it leaves. There is no time to wash
my face, rinse my mouth, no time for anything at all.
The bus lets me off at the cemetery at Bricker Road and M-21, where both my
parents will someday be buried. American A arrives, a few minutes late. She
leaps from the car, and embraces me, beaming. I resist her, only so slightly.
"Don't you want to kiss me?" she exclaims.
Then her tongue is raping my mouth, and her blonde hair is in my face, which I
have just pulled from Asian A's pussy.
There was so little time.
This is the way of conjecture:
To those who believe, anything proven by the Qabballah is true absolutely. There
is simply no question.
Hypothetical Jim Warren enters the room at the end of the labyrinth, the
prostitute on his arm. With mock impulsiveness, she embraces him, giggling, and
her ringed finger finds his neck. It is only a pin-prick at first that he feels there, a
jagged fingernail, perhaps, a harmless scar of love. But suddenly, there is the
weakness; he wants to pull away, wants to question, wants to wonder at this,
but he cannot.
There is so little time.
The girl counts the seconds as hypothetical Jim Warren, all but overcome now,
succumbs to the tiny hypo concealed in her ring. A decade later, he will be a
virtual invalid, as the deadly MK-ULTRA poison accomplishes the long-term job for
which it was intended.
At last, hypothetical Jim Warren slumps to the floor. It does not matter; he will
not remember.
Dr. E enters with two henchmen, nods to the prostitute matter-of-factly, and says:
"So this is the great Jim Warren."
But as hypothetical Jim Warren falls, I rise up, the Dulles Stigmata gnawing at
my soul, as the ring poison has on his. I am the cold, dark one. I am the Last
Witness. I wash clean the blood.
(c) 2008 by T. Casey Brennan