User talk:Beardo/Archive TCB
May 2008 addition
[edit]http://www.entrecomics.com/?p=14666
Terrance Casey Brennan ha trabajado como guionista para publicaciones de Warren en los años ‘70 como Creepy, Eerie y Vampirella, llegando a colaborar con autores como Pepe González, Esteban Maroto, Richard Corben, Reed Crandall, Jerry Grandenetti, Ernie Colon o Mike Royer entre otros.
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En los años ‘80, debido a que se sentía en la lista negra de los editores de cómic, decidió como venganza comenzar una campaña para prohibir que se mostrasen fumadores en los cómics, lo que animó a el entonces gobernador de Arkansas Bill Clinton a declarar Enero de 1990 como el “Mes de T. Casey Brennan”.
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Pero tal vez Brennan sea más famoso por su “confesión” en Conjurella de haber disparado a Kennedy en Dallas, según él, programado por la CIA mediante hipnotismo. No deja claro si se trara de una ficción o lo dice en serio, enmascarándolo en una especie de sueño-recuerdo post-hipnótico. Casi nada.
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En 2003 fue atropellado por un coche, perdiendo la capacidad del habla, que le ayudaron a recuperar un grupo de punks. Desde entonces, Brennan es un homeless y vocalista ocasional del grupo Frankenhead. Con casi 60 años, Brennan se defiende así sobre un escenario:
Más información sobre Brennan y numerosos enlaces, en wikipedia, incluyendo por ejemplo una historia completa junto a Dave Sim.
August 2007 message
[edit]Thank you for your interest in my work. These are the first two T. Casey Brennan JFK stories; I want to defect to Cuba.
Castle Mirage - The Prelude: Conjurella by T. Casey Brennan
(c) 2007 by T. Casey Brennan
This is the story of little mice. David Ferrie's mice. No, this is the story of Conjurella, and her daughter, Glinda; they were both there when I first met David Ferrie in Ohio, at the Old covered Bridge; so were Mama and Daddy and Uncle Johnny. Everyone is dead now, except me, and, I think, Glinda, so there is no one to ask. But I think it must have been the summer of 1953. I started school in September of 1953 at Swamp School on Bricker Road in Emmett, Michigan; a one-room school on a gravel road which boasted my late mother as the CEO of its Board; it was sometime around then that the meeting at the Old Covered Bridge took place.
It looked something like a covered wagon, over a small stream through a narrow road cutting through fields and brush that stretched on forever. This was 1953. The only war we might have lost had been over for less than a decade. Oh-ess-ess was a whisper that lingered in the air; a song that was over, yet the melody haunted us. War measures meant many things to those caught in the web of that whisper, oh-ess-ess, so softly spoken, a love song, a lullaby, a death threat. I don't remember, but I think that whisper was in the air when we first met David Ferrie. Uncle Johnny helped arrange it; Uncle Johnny said he was a finder. Daddy and Uncle Johnny park the car right on the bridge, and get out "to take a walk" -- there is something on the car radio, or maybe Daddy and Uncle Johnny tell us, about "two escaped convicts" believed loose in that area. Mama and Conjurella get in the front seat. Glinda and I are in the back seat. Has MK-ULTRA begun yet? They must have given me some of the amnesiac hypnotic drug that Dr. E, the hypnotist whose work formed the basis for Mama's obsession with hypnosis as noted in Castle Mirage, would later fore on me in a more conventional setting. Glinda is my age, she is five. she sees the Perfect soldier, David Ferrie, standing guard. Everyone has told me: "Don't see that soldier," but Glinda says, "He Sees that soldier."
David Ferrie uses his O.S.S. code name, Perfect Soldier. I don't remember how I know that. He assumes battle stances, brandishes his rifle, and threatens the children with rape. but it is Conjurella who is raped, by the "escaped convicts" who inevitably appear as David Ferrie looks on. Glinda and I are spared, and, I think, so is Mama. But I was too still in that back seat throughout the attack, too oblivious to what was happening - they had used something akin to Dr. E's "red lollipops", a favorite drug ploy of the MK-ULTRA hypnotist who would some day send the Perfect Soldier on a mission to kill John Kennedy.
I have the Brass Monkey, I think Uncle Johnny gave it to me. I don't know if it had anything to do with the OSS. It's not brass all the way through, and it says "Germany" on the bottom, not "Deutchlann" - Germany.
David Ferrie is hard to remember.
I said I went to Swamp School, that was for my first and second grades. In the third grade, I started parochial school, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish School, also in Emmett. That was in September of 1955. I attended Our Lady of Mt. Carmel for my third, fourth, fidth, and sixth grades. Daddy, who had always had intermittent violent fits, accusing my mother of an extra-marital affair (and me, of being the offspring of a local handyman from Texas, Frank Tilton) was on his best behavior through that period. He had been elected, or appointed, I forget which, to a position on the St. Clair County Board of Education, to match my mother's, on the Swamp Board. I am trying hard to be a Catholic religious sissy, worrying about mortal sin, telling me priest in confession about my Brigitte Bardot pin-ups, and studying prayerbooks. But in the summer of 1959, after my sixth-grade year, Daddy got in trouble. Getting out of it involved using his family "in hypnotic experiments".
That was how we met Dr. E. And how we all met David Ferrie again. Keep going north on M-19, and you will reach Yale, Michigan, a tiny town with its own tiny airport. David Ferrie, Who is calling himself David Ferris by then, flew into the Yale airport in he pre-dawn hours to meet with my Dad, and follow behind us in a car, as we drove farther north, to Hopeville, to meet the hypnotist, Dr. E. There was no doubt about it; we were in custody.
My Dad is introduced, and he extends his hand to David Ferrie/Ferris and says "I attended to Ferris Institute in Big Rapids..." He stresses the word Ferris; he knows he is in trouble and he is looking for something that will give him an edge conversationally. but there is to be no conversation. A committee of MK-ULTRA agents roughly hustle him back to his car. Back in the car, he tells Mama: "We're cooked. This is the same guy Johnny took us to meet".
My memories of Doctor E are very sketchy, and they are not always easily rendered sequential. I know that at some point, through the use of amnesiacs so we would have no recollection of the more threatening encounters, he gained our trust, although it is important to remember that it was as difficult remembering just what had taken place previously with Dr. E then, as it is now.
I know that at one point, Daddy was in Dr. E's office, and Mama and I were in the waiting room, and Dr. E came out and said, "I want to see how fast you can eat a red lollipop," and handed us two red candies, which caused us both to pass out immediately; I only vaguely remember us being carried limply into his private office, and that, only after over three decades.
We went up north in August of 1959 on a trip, and I started back to school in September, at the old Swamp School again, and it was around then that I met Lee through Dr. E. Lee flew into the Yale airport with David Ferrie; I was always afraid of David Ferrie, but I was never afraid of Lee. He did not know about the threatening circumstances of our initial meetings with Dr. E and David Ferrie. He said that Dr. E was going to give him "almost god-like powers", and that he was doing "something important for the government". He said he was going on a trip, but he would be back to see me every so often. He spoke of great authority that he would have on his return, and his explanations of that coming authority vacillated between the governmental and the mystical.
I saw Lee only a very few times, and one of the memories of that era is an implant, because Dr. E. shoved me up against his screen, as I'll describe later, and said, "You're going to meet Lee Oswald again at swamp School, but this time it won't be real." the meeting that was real is sketchy. I don't remember how he got there, but I remember he was standing at the very edge of the road, telling me he was concerned bout how I was being kicked around, but he was going to do something about it. A lady who drove by and saw us, Kathy Malarkey, was later put into a mental institution, though I don't know if there's a connection.
I only saw Lee the first few days of September of 1959 when I entered the seventh grade. By the time I finished that school year, the U-2 incident had taken place, and Dr. E told us: "Don't worry about that one. We control both sides." On another occasion, someone associated with David Ferrie told me that MK-ULTRA, which was directly overseen by then C.I.A. Director Allen "You're a Good Man, Mr. Dulles" Dulles, was in the process of artificiaally creating a disease that would Make the people who caught it hairless "just like David Ferrie".
I am trying to place all this timewise; I know that in the early days, I took home a comic book from Dr. E's waiting room; it was in issue of Robin Hood, under the brand Quality Comics, and several years old. By this time, Mama and I were so disoriented by Dr. E's sessions, that we had forgotten the early, threatening encounters, and Mama encouraged me to leave a comic book in the office in return, which I did, a copy of Brave & Bold #28, an issue which introduced the Justice League, a team of DC Comics superhereos, I was later to have some marginal connection with DC Comics, and my stories appear in some late 1970s issues of the former DC title, House of Mystery.
I am also thinking that my parents may have taken other children from the neighborhood to see Dr. E, and I am wondering if there are any witnesses.
We do not see David Ferrie again with Dr. E, but there are disjointed memories of meeting with David Ferrie in my home, and in a neighbor's home, under so much drugging that I was only dimly, barely aware that my surroundings were real. it must have been later in his life, not around the Old Covered Bridge meeting, because in 1953, he still looked like a man, but by the time these meetings took place, he was just a fat, bald old blob. He looked something like my Catholic godfather, Paul, who was also fat and bald, so I asigned him the name "Bad Paul", which he liked, thouh he always did his best to be as threatening as possible during these meetings, though he never Laid a hand on me.
I further remember them harassing me at a campground outside St. Ignace, around the time of the launching of Telstar, the first satellite to relay television signals, which you could then see orbiting like a shooting star. It was in August of 1962, before I started my tenth grade year, no longer at Swamp School, but now attending Peck High School in Peck, Michigan. Campers, including my parents and myself, liked to sit around a campfire, and watch Telstar. We loved Telstar; I even had the 45rpm it inspired. but on this particular occassion, we were discussing the U-2. A man at the campfire said, well, Powers was just a coward; he had a lethal injection to take if he was shot down, he should have taken it. But one by one, everyone, including my parents, leave the fire, and this one man remains, and he says, the C.I.A., that the U-2 was with, he works for them also. I say, hey, great. He looks guilty for a second, collects himself, and tells me the CIA has a use for me.
In October of 1962, we flew to New Orleans with David Ferrie and Air America, as I could help with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee very briefly. To understand the manner in which the Hopeville MK-ULTRA office - The Project, as I learned it was called- could be lethal with its participants one week, and a cooperative confidant and ally with them the next, it will be useful to understand, by way of a comparison, the effects of two drugs known to the general populace today; Rohypnel and Ritalin. Rohypnel produces unconsciousness and amnesia; Ritalin produces a very singular one-pointedness in users allowing them to concentrate on exactly what they are doing, and nothing else. It is possible for a person under the MK-ULTRA counter-parts of these drugs, combined with hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion, to, for instance, blithely pass out Fair Play For Cuba Committee literature in New Orleans, without ever even questioning how he got there, or believing that it should be questioned. also, there are processes of MK-ULTRA induced amnesia which make it virtually fool-proof. In the induced trance state, the victim is subjected to threats on his family members and himself. He is forced to witness real or contrived torture-killings of other human beings while in this state. Then, he is withdrawn from the scene of this abuse, given hypnotic commands in conjunction with drugs, told that the abusive treatment was all imaginary, and that he must not remember it; if he will not remember it, it will not be real.
I remember the Fair Play For Cuba Office in New Orleans, and I remember the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade office on the other side of the building. I remember asking someone, I don't remember who, but it wasn't Lee, "Are we for or against Communists?" And he said, "Both." and I laughed.
Anyway, Lee says the big Fair Play For Cuba campaign was in August, and I missed it, but we pass out a few pamphlets, and on the way back, we go into a store, it's just the two of us, on foot, and he buys me a candy bar, and he tells me to give them a pamphlet, tell them you're Lee Oswald, he says, and I do. And he laughs. Not far down the street, he stops by a tree. He wants to talk.
He says, "I'm doing dangerous work. If anything happens to me, I want you to take care of the family."
"Sure," I say.
But I really don't want any part of this. After we fly back, that night, Daddy pretends to have a fit. I say pretends, because now that I am an adult, and not under the influences of the substances forced upon me during the incidents, I see very well how his threatening, seemingly erratic behavior, contributed to the process of drug-and-hypnosis induced amnesia. My first example of it was, in the early days of visiting Dr. E, Daddy and I took separate pills, voluntarily this time, on the premise that they would help to "induce hypnosis", which, at that time, we thought we were studying. Driving back, Mama is crying, and I am lathargic and disoriented. I mention the pill I took, and Daddy flips out: "I took that pill, not you!" He stops the car and becomes more threatening. I say to Mama: "Daddy has gone crazy." Mama says: "This is a lot worse than Daddy going crazy."
The incident following the flight from New Orleans was a parallel; he began yelling "I want you to forget that trip! You're going to forget that trip!" And I did, again, for more than three decades.
I also forgot this:
At some point, Dr E asked if I would like to play the shooting gallery game that he had. I said that I would. He put me in front of a kind of television screen with a head brace on the seat in front of it. He says, "We don't have the gun that goes with it hooked up yet. But when you see the cowboy shoot the penny, you'll have good luck."
I look at the screen coming on, and he hits me with something, I think an injection in my neck, it hurts, and I slump. But the pictures form on the screen, and I can hear the words through head-sets.
First there is a picture of a penny.
"SEE THE CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD."
Then there is a picture of John Kennedy.
"THEN THINK OF THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD."
(Girl's chuckle.)
Girl's voice: "IT'S NOT REALLY LINCOLN. IT'S JUST A CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD."
Then there are moving pictures of a cowboy tossing a penny into the air.
"Pop!" he shoots it with a revolver, but instantly, the picture is of John Kennedy.
The voice says: "THINK OF THE CENT WITH LINCOLN'S HEAD, THEN SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD."
At another point, Dr. E shows me a whole film. It is sometime after I have seen something on real television, I think Disney, about the MacGregor family of Scotland, which I liked, about all the oppression they endured, and how, in the end, everybody stood up for them, and they are back on top. Dr. E. tells me he has something similar about the Fitzgerald family. I watch it, and I only remember the ending. It's set in the late middle ages or something, the Fitzgerald family is put through all sorts of problems, but in the end, there's a big crowd scene, and the speaker, a Fitzgerald himself, has just won some major victory, and he has everyone in the crowd with Fitzgerald blood yell "hooray for the Fitzgeralds!" The voices start up, and in seconds, you see that they are all over the place in the crowd. And that's the end.
Dr. E says to Daddy: "Well, I scared him with it. He'll be scared as hell of that story some day."
On the morning of November 22, 1963, I am awakened by Daddy unexpectedly in the pre-dawn hours. He says we are going to see Dr. E, then we are going on a trip. I think he means vacation, so I say fine.
We reach the tiny Yale airport, deserted in the pre-dawn hours, in no time. Daddy and I proceed to David Ferries plane, where Dr. E is waiting. Dr. E produces a hypodermic needle. His face is grim and he is wearing a parka in the pre-dawn cold.
Now I am scared, and try to get away. I yell "I don't want a shot!" and try to run. I know now that I m about to be kidnapped. I am fifteen years old now, but a pale, sickly fifteen, and I am in no shape to fight these men for my freedom. I struggle, but Dr. E injects me anyway, and I fall. The last thing I se before falling is the parka-clad face of Dr. E.
When I awaken, in the storage room of the sixth floor of the Texas Book depository building in Dallas, it is broad daylight. They have obviously brought me in crated up, or rolled up, in something. Anyway, I get dumped out, and David Ferrie kicks me in the ribs, and turns to my Dad.
"There's the assassin," David Ferrie says.
Daddy and David Ferrie make me stand agaisnt some cartons of books, and not look around. I am groggy. Sometimes when I would go up north to the Upper Peninsula with Mama and Daddy, they liked to explore abandoned buildings, places where I didn't always feel they had a right to be. I can't remember the injection now, and I amtrying to place just what is going on, whether it is one of these unauthorized romps Daddy liked to take through old buildings.
"Are we supposed to be here?" I asked, groggily.
David Ferrie laughs.
"Don't worry about that," he says, "If anybody bothers you for being here, you send them right to me!"
Daddy and David Ferrie are laughing now, and I'm beginning to think everything is all right. At some point, someone has told me that I am in Dallas, where Lee is now, and I ask to see him before we leave.
"Did you want to talk to him about comic books or something?" David Ferrie asks.
I say yes, that I wanted to tell him about the new Justice League comic just out, and that lee liked the Justice League, talked about how great it was that DC comics had brought back their old comic book series, the Justice society, from the 1940s.
"Well, he's downstairs pushing a broom. He's down on the second floor pushing a broom."
At some point, the lights went out. I don't know if I was injected or dosed somehow again, or whether post-hypnotic suggestion alone did the trick. Anyway, a hood was placed over my head, and then part of it pulled away and the gunsight pressed against my left eye.
Daddy gives the hypnotic command: "WHEN I YELL NOW, PULL THE TRIGGER."
Remembering this over three decades later, I can hear David Ferrie saying "I don't want him to see the gun!!" as he pulls the hood over my face.
David Ferrie says to Daddy: "Can he keep that right eye closed? If he can't, I'll kill him."
Now that funny screen of Dr. E's, at first it said "SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD". But just at the last, when they made me watch it, it said "SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD. THEN SHOOT THE COWBOY BESIDE HIM. YOU DON'T LIKE COWBOYS ANYMORE. YOU DON'T LIKE THIS COWBOY (Picture of Governor Connaly in a Cowboy hat). SHOOT THE SQUIRREL WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY'S HEAD. THEN SHOOT THE COWBOY BESIDE HIM."
Then they lift me up, in front of the open window.
I hear the voices: "Can he get up by himself?" "Lift him up!" "Don't let him open that eye!"
Slowly, I am lifted up, groggy and disoriented. I hear Daddy's crying voice say: "Please don't open that right eye, please don't open that eye, oh god, please don't open that eye."
David ferrie says "Can you see John Kennedy on the little screen?" My heart leaps as I see John Kennedy in the convertible six floors below, but only through the "little screen", i.e. the gunsight; I secretly like John Kennedy, though Daddy hates him, and I am glad to see him on "the little screen". But it all happens so quickly, seeing John Kennedy and then Daddy yells:
"NOW!"
My finger automatically contracts on what I now know was the trigger. I have never seen the Zapruder film, except in little glimpses. In my recollection of the incident, this is what took place: My shot hits the President in the chest. To my amazement, he writhes sideways as the bullet hits. David Ferrie takes the rifle instantly, and fires two more shots as I collapse.
As he does, Daddy shouts: "Don't shoot Jacky, Ferrie! Don't shoot Jackie, or I'll kill ya right now!"
David ferrie says: "Shut up, Bill!" - then, as three more shots ring out from elsewhere on the street - "Back-up! Good men! They could have left me hanging, but they didn't!"
I look out the window now, but David Ferrie gives the hypnotic command: "Don't look at the man we just shot!"
Either Daddy or David Ferrie says: "It's the end of the world. There's nothing but chaos out there now. Nothing."
I am groggy and disoriented, and am trying to take these words in a Catholic religious sense. I am looking around for signs of a Biblical Judgement Day, even though I cannot look toward the convertible at all, even if I wanted to, that was how great their power over me.
The next thing I remember is a man with glasses and a business suit, thirtysomething, short hair and professional-looking, entering. By now, we are all away from the window.
I call him Ultra Subaltern.
Ultra Subaltern says, matter-of-factly: "Everything go all right?"
David Ferrie says, "Well, Bill lost his head for a minute, but he's all right now." Daddy had no right to fly in David Ferrie's face like that over Jackie, they're thinking. Daddy nods nervously.
"You'll pay for that though, Bill," David Ferrie says.
Ultra Subaltern goes to the window.
Daddy says "You're going to the window?!" Ultra Subaltern says: "I was told to assess the situation. One of the ways to assess is by looking. Everyone is looking out windows now."
Ultra Subaltern leaves.
The next thing I remember is David Ferrie yelling "There's the signal!" Immediately, we were hustled into the hallway, with him carrying a suitcase. We walk rapidly down to the second floor. I do not yet know that the President has been shot, in spite of the fact that I've just witnessed it, and participated in it. My head is coming together a little now, and I say groggily that I'd like to see Lee now that we're in dallas."
"You'll see him," says David Ferrie, then: "Casey, you never believe me on these things, but they don't even remember you. We slipped them something. You'll see."
We see Lee in the halls of the second floor, sweeping. I say, "Hi, Lee!" but he doesn't even look toward me. Immedi_tely, David ferrie starts yelling at him: "I've got some friends here and I'm telling you we're through with you, you dumb sonofabitch, you goddamned fairy, yeah you goddamned fairy..."
I don't remember it all, but in the end, David Ferrie pushes Lee in the chest hard. I am embarrassed by this hostility toward a man I intended to meet as a friend. Lee is stoical, tight-lipped, and condescending, like he's just barely putting up with this abuse.
During this, people run by, and a woman yells, "Something's going on out there!"
Lee starts to walk away, and David Ferrie says, "Where are you going?"
Lee says: "I'm going downstairs for a Coke." The altercation with David Ferrie has prevented Lee from learning that the President has been shot.
As Lee walks away, I step forward apologetically, and say. "Er...uh...Lee, the new Justice League comic came out..."
He looks at me blankly, and keeps walking. I feel my face redden. What could I have done wrong?
I don't remember the trip back, but the next thing I know, I was in a chair in front of a desk with Dr. E in it. Dr. E says, "we're taking you to school. Walk as fast as you can, and the faster you walk, the faster you'll forget this. you'll be late, so walk up to a girl, and tell her you went squirrel hunting, this morning, and as soon as you do, you'll forget all this, and the whole trip never happened."
Next I was hurrying down the halls of Peck High School.
But this was the story of little mice, David Ferrie's mice, that he used in his experiments while he made the disease that would make everyone who got it bald like him. No, this was the story of Conjurella, who divorced Uncle Johnny, and though she wrote for a while, I never saw Glinda again. No, this was the story of Castle Mirage, and my mother's obsession with hypnosis as demonstrated in this book, and how that obsession might have come about, in an alternate world, in a paralell time. Not what truly happened, for that, no one knows, nor will, ever. Not truth, but Gothic Fiction; Alice: Life, what is it but a dream?
II.
Conjurella Messiah: Necronomicon Monks
by 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 Kenedy 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 scener 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 accouint of a condition which seemed to attack his central nervous sysytem, 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, it's 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, that will lead to the asassination 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 parallell 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-ventillating. 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, that 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 adbucted 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 travelling 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 appelation "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 placcid 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 archtypical 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 parallell 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 whisps 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, panelled 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, paradoxicly, obscenely, unfairly, in that alternate world of Toronto 1973, Dr. E had stalked me, and now Jim Warren was his target. Here ate 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 Civial 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. Someyears later, Rockwell would write, sympatheticly, "Casey thinks he's a Jew but he's not."
But Rockwell, like Edwin Walker, like Bruce Lee, like Lee himself, would perish. The sicties 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 warr, child assassins necessaruy 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 willinsulate 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 occassions. 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. Amwerican 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 cemetary at Bricker Road. There, Americvan 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 whilke 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 cemetary 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 mwe, 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-ULTA 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.
The End
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Fullmoonguy (talk • contribs) at 14:37 on 6 August 2007