Agent Needed to Negotiate Literary, Motion Picture,

and Music Contracts:

There is a story from the shadows of the Holocaust that has yet to be told. Its secrets are so Satanicly scientific and yet revealing of the infinite mercy of Yahweh.

The contents below represent only a glimpse of the final product.

Contact:

Kenneth J. Boyte

P.O. Box 1647

Castroville, CA 95012 USA

Cell Phone (831) 402-8480

Home Phone (831) 632-0389

Children of Mengele

in Search of the Psychedelic Sunrise

A Novel by Ken Boyte

Revision: 3-10-10

© Copyright 1996-2010

All Rights Reserved.

THE ONLY PHILOSOPHY which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be with its riffs and crevices, as indigentand distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.

—Theodore Adorno,

Dialectics of Enlightenment (1947

Chapter 1:

Bring On the Rebirth

Gulf War I, February 1991

THE DIONYSIAN ORGIES had been invading hallucinations ever since Professor Diligence started obsessing about the black-hooded priests. In the dreams that followed for Millbrook Tavistock, everybody was always dressed in red. And the battalions of jet fighters forever roared overhead, above Millbrook’s crossed, red eyes that could not see heaven, casting red laser tracers earthbound to mark the dead, and the dead, and the dead. Fire burning orange and red.

Everyone he knew from journalism school was talking about blood in those dark, Skull-and-Bones days of George Bush Sr. and Anton LaVey, the High Priest of Lucifer and the CIA, back when everybody was ritually consuming the consumption myths and sacrificing their kids to the economic world wars of capitalism, like they still are today, trying to forget their shame reading Sigmund Freud subconsciously between the frames of pornographic corporations. To make it through to the sunrise, everybody was wired on something and trying to escape.

Like Millbrook Tavistock, a tall and skinny, half-blind survivor of Phenix City, Alabama. For him, raised on Church-of-Christ religion and Sunday football, which he hadn’t been allowed to play because of the accident, it was like the Apocalypse had already begun, when his dreams turned vampire red, and the orgies filled his battered head full of bullets rocketing toward Malcolm X, impacting his face and exiting the back of his skull, splattering the fragments of his rebellion against the Hall of Fame.

The dreams always ended when Millbrook heard the Devil sing.

▲▲▲

Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.

– The Rolling Stones,

“Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

Chapter 2:

Blinded by Lies

Fall 1963

BACK THROUGH THE FABRIC of reality separating black holes from jazz notes, elves from human women, when the red lights of the ambulance stopped flashing, and the sirens blared no more above baby Millbrook’s bleeding head, he was crying and frightened by the geometric shapes of strangers in white holding shiny silver knives, staring down on him.

“Scalpel," said one of the neurosurgeons under the bright lights of the operating room to a nurse hiding behind dark-rimmed glasses and too much makeup. “Careful as we insert the metal plate,” the doctor grimaced, amidst blinking machinery, sterile gray gadgetry, and the static of a blue-and-white television.

Three seconds before the accident took his sight, white baby Millbrook fell from the edge of an old double bed and splattered the steel rod of the furniture frame below with blood from his head. Only for a moment, his unwed, 16-year-old mother had looked away on that gray November day, six months after his birth and death and first rebirth at the hands of military science and God, in 1963, along the Chattahoochee River across from the black smoke stacks of the cotton mills and the monotony of the metallic noise of the industrial looms that spun lies and fragmented time.

▲▲▲

Millbrook’s mother, unlike the tinsel advertisements, had been unknowingly named after the pagan goddess Isis, also known as Aphrodite and Venus. Cast in the dirt mold of a peasant, Diana Tavistock spilled the blood of her bastard son on a shattered altar of oppression, wishing for death and life in manic cycles of new and broken trinkets, forever in debt to the financiers and those who collected taxes.

Diana’s mother and father had survived the Great Depression and World War II, which, for her father, extended into a 20-year military career fighting and falling for bank deposit notes and foreign gold in Europe and Korea.

Like this, a brat of Manifest Destiny, Diana grew up traveling from one base town to another, among the nameless neighborhood flocks of new-refrigerator-buying Americans who believed that the Creator of Man would help their football teams win games of odds and chances in the parlors of Las Vegas. So blinded by the desperation of their sins, Mama and Daddy Tavistock cried out when the nightmares came past 3 a.m., and they blasphemed God begging for pain killers.

▲▲▲

Diana’s mother was Ashteroth, also unknowingly named after a pagan sinner, after Semiramis, Isis, and “the Queen of Heaven.” Millbrook’s grandmother, however, was only “Ash” to her friends, having been born into the shadows of 1914, into an earlier conflict that marked the return of Jesus Christ to the planet of Armageddon, or so the Jehovah Whistlers told them repeatedly on the front porch of their denial, leading up to the culling of the fields and the separation of the weeds of men.

As the only child to graduate from Red Devil High School, Ashteroth Tavistock was inbred, too, into deception, into the Roman lions’ den of market capitalism, to be the lone daughter in a family of five and blessed to survive two brothers who began working full-time in the factories of cotton before they were nine and on their ways to soldiers’ graves wrapped in red-white-and-blue flags. They never had a chance to fake death as children playing war because their childhoods were taken away by businessmen hoarding money.

Ash died with her brothers in front of cereal-box-sized dramas of corporate projections glamorizing perfect kitchens and beautiful people caught up in commercial predicaments and calculated solutions of psychology. She was as dead as anyone could be still breathing but doped up and believing in helplessness made escapable by little yellow pills – Valium Five: Take nine. Fall on your face. Sleep until suppertime.

Like this, Ash became an addict to pharmacists and big business tycoons patenting cures to problems that they also created. And on her knees, with a head full of green plastic curlers, she listened to the Hit Parade, being among the first generation of Americans taught by mass media advertising how to behave. But she never knew it. She never knew much about anything around her other than it all had been caused by a mysterious sliver behind the iron curtains of the shortcomings of men.

Nor did she know the immortal names of the corridors of power at Princeton University. She never even knew the significance of her own name, never cognizant of or asking questions about who or what or where or when or why she and her descendants had been born into a triple-six legacy of servitude, differentiated from the rich by bloodlines.

▲▲▲

Ash married Diana’s father, Norman, in 1933 when she was 19, in the countryside of Alabama. Meanwhile, across the sea in Germany, Adolph Hearst was casting black magic spells and hiding behind the changing names of the Devil.

Soon after their marriage, Norman was gunning for big businessmen on the front lines of Wall Street in Europe. After World War II ended, he returned to the red-clay farms of Alabama to sire a daughter and stockpile potpies in his new freezer, anticipating the Second Coming. Blinded by the yellow pestilence of hysterical newspaper fiction, like all the robots of the despots, when the enemies of the nation changed, he never questioned orders to kill communists and stomp out the youthful rebellion sparked by Elvis Presley--the King of pop culture madness and sadness and whores begging for their chances to suck off the cock of an idol.

▲▲▲

Maybe it was her rebellion against being raised without roots on the road to manifest slavery that made Diana Tavistock and her family crazy. But no matter the cause or the source of her temptation, no matter her shame, she turned away from another televised political assassination in mystical, magical 1963 – back and to the left, back and to the left – to see the blood on the head of her baby boy falling: blood red, and into darkness.

▲▲▲

For Freud, the unresolved conflicts that give rise to any neurosis are the stuff of literature. A work of literature, he believed, is the external expression of the author’s unconscious mind. Accordingly, the literary work must be treated like a dream.

– Charles E. Bressler,

Literary Criticism (1999)

Chapter 3:

The Mardi Gras Parade

February 1991

THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE had been Millbrook’s favorite way to block out the memories of childhood. Ranting against the government was another learned passion. “I’m telling you, man,” Millbrook would stammer in bouts of drunkenness. “They just create and use people like Saddam Hussein to give everybody inside the U.S. something to hate.”

Having arrived in New Orleans the Saturday before Fat Tuesday, he found himself sitting on the ground in a small park in the French Quarter. Far from the long winter of Illinois, where snow continued to blanket his college town, Millbrook was tripping on acid: “They point to people like Saddam and say, ‘Hate this, man.’ And we do. And they use our hate to control us, twisting our emotions so we’ll agree to pay more taxes to fuel more hate for those we are educated to kill.”

“Wow. That’s heavy,” commented a young woman sitting on the grass beside him. The smile of Adonis glistened in her eyes beneath the festive starlight of February’s spring.

Millbrook removed another beer from his blue backpack and passed it to Kali Iacocca, a prodigal daughter of the establishment who proudly grew psilocybin in the bottom of her bedroom closet. The night before, she and Millbrook had met and fucked aboard Amtrak on the way down from Illinois. Regardless of the truth, when Millbrook looked into her blue eyes, starbursts exploded love American style inside his head, with a twist of Larry Flynt.

Millbrook’s lust had begun years earlier in elementary school, staring at naked pygmies on the pages of National Geographic, excitedly doing what the preacher said was a sin. Soon afterwards, in junior high, he started collecting centerfolds from the adult magazines kept on the open racks of the local pharmacies.

And he found the best hiding places for his secrets, too, inside rock ‘n’ roll album covers. The inner sleeves of the triple-album Wings Over America, Elton John’s double-LP Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and the two-record set Alive! by KISS worked especially well for stashing porn.

▲▲▲

Back in the park in New Orleans, Millbrook began sticking a piece of black hash onto a straightened paper clip. He torched the drug with a lighter, which heated up the hash until it crumbled into a glass pipe and burned red. Millbrook inhaled the medicine before passing the pipe to Kali.

Spicy Creole sausages and blackened jambalaya shrimp sizzled in the kitchens of the bars nearby.

Millbrook breathed deeply, momentarily turning away from the conversation and squinting to see through the curly black hair dangling in front of his face. At first he thought he was hallucinating again when he saw the half-naked Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator holding a chain attached to the dog collar around the neck of a gay midget dressed exactly the same as his macho master. Both men wore silver-studded black leather jockstraps.

Lighting the hash, Millbrook once more raised his bushy black eyebrows when a white policeman on a Harley Davidson motorcycle stopped in the middle of the crowded street to tongue kiss a caped man dressed like Zorro. “Was that Rob Halford from Judas Priest, man?” Millbrook thought to himself. “I remember the night Elton John stuck his head in the oven and tried to die.”

But before Millbrook could think longer about songs inspired by tragedy, his mind drifted back to the middle-aged women of the Big Easy who were flashing their chests and dropping their pants for plastic beads.

“Show your cocks!” some of the women yelled back to the men wanting to see titties, who, likewise, obliged requests for voyeuristic sex on the balconies.

Millbrook was always looking up and gawking, stumbling through the crowded, curbed streets of schizophrenia and capitalism.

▲▲▲

The cramps within his stomach intensified an hour into that night’s psychedelic exploration of the darkness, the way the pain always came when the LSD digests through the intestines; however, the discomfort soon subsided and melted like Salvador Dali paintings into another red dream. But the Epiphany did not come, the way for Millbrook it never did. Instead, the rock music of his youth unraveled in the dirty streets, which opened up for him like a nasty yellow brick road full of midgets fucking Freddy Mercury, tempting all with the flute of Pan and Apollo to skip joyously without thinking into Wonderland, past the Mad Hatter and rabbits on a stick.

Millbrook continued to rush forward toward colorful broken mirrors reflecting the twisted, apocalyptic Christians carrying crosses and competing for attention among the paraded acts of Rex and Proteus, Elks, Zulu, Zeus, Bacchus, Argus, Alla, and Krewe Decadence. It was a pagan thing, dating back to the Roman full moon of Lupercalia.

Mississippi Queen.

And you know what I mean

I met a Cajun lady.

She taught me everything.

–Mountain

▲▲▲

It was a gnostic thing, the way Kali and Millbrook took the drugs and ate the words of the poets in a secret garden of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, into which they could escape like Alice, through a mirror of canvas and delight among the sweet thorns of taboo pleasure, which also brought back for them a boomerang of pain. It was a gnostic thing, something they read about in the library under a table.

Under the surface, under God in heaven, in middle school, when they first began to understand the tingling feelings between their legs that came when they touched themselves with their hands. This is how Millbrook and Kali's erotic experiences with art began in the brush strokes of a dead man’s vanishing lines, when they turned the pages and read about the Dutch Bosch and the Eleutherians, of which Bosch was a member in Holland at the end of the 15th century. This is how they came to know the carnal acts of portrayed beasts and feasts and jungle cannibal thieves of souls and flesh who did not wash away the blood from their faces.

And the more Millbrook and Kali gazed, the more they saw, the more it was repeated, the more they wanted to be like their habits, filling their minds with unclean cocks and twats opposed to organized God, who Kali hated, like Millbrook, who did not know his father's name.

▲▲▲

On the outset of their first Mardi Gras night of heretical hallucinations, the two had heard the Swedish hippies whispering, and they stopped to score: “LSD, Vitamin A. Acid.” No matter that Jimi Hendrix dosed more elaborately, laying tabs on his eyeballs or placing hits under headbands to be absorbed through osmosis, Millbrook and Kali preferred the basic, put-it-in-your-mouth method of ingesting psychedelics. It was not showmanship, just effective.

A newscast blared from the open doorway of a bar: "An increased presence of U.S. Marines will be on hand this week, out of sight, to swiftly arrest violence at the annual Mardi Gras celebration, which dates back to pagan pre-history."

Not paying attention to the static, Kali turned her head to stare at a tall, curvaceous woman wearing only a red G-string and disappearing behind a red doorway. But Millbrook did not see the sexy devil babe in red, the pitchfork tail dangling from the crack of her ass, or the red horns pinned to her brown hair.

“Mardi Gras is always held 46 days before Easter,” Kali said, breaking the silence.

“And Easter falls on the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox. My professor mentioned that, man,” Millbrook mumbled.

“A Roman circus called Lupercalia was held in mid-February,” Kali explained.

Removing the glass pipe from his pocket again, Millbrook held the flame of a lighter to another chunk of black hash. A song by the Clash played in the background:

The money feels good

Your life you like it well

But surely your time will come

As in heaven, as in hell

–The Clash

“In the end, man, we all have a choice to make,” Millbrook nodded. Stoned, however, he soon forgot what he was going to say next. Then his stomach roared. “Let’s find that place giving away free gator-on-a stick, man.”

Kali agreed, and on the way through the French Quarter looking for free food, they saw an old man wearing a capital-lettered sign around his neck, made of two pieces of poster board tied together with string and draped over his shoulders: “FALLEN, FALLEN, FALLEN IS BABYLON THE GREAT. SHE WHO HAS MADE ALL THE NATIONS DRINK OF THE WINE OF THE WRATH OF HER FORNICATION. COME OUT OF HER MY PEOPLE – SAYS THE LORD – THAT YOU MAY NOT PARTICIPATE IN HER SINS AND THAT YOU MAY NOT RECEIVE OF HER PLAGUES.”

“Repent!” the old man shouted.

But the young people did not listen and instead turned back to their hash pipe. The fire burned red, and Millbrook thought about his childhood, until his mind once more filled with confusion. “Such is the circular nature of the curse of free will, man,” he thought to himself, “to regretfully repeat mistakes forever, alone, either mad or surrounded by madmen.”

Chapter 5:

Little Egypt

Fall 1987

All the radical kids of Southern Illinois University gathered on The Strip to shake their fists inside an old white, tin-roofed building called the Hangar 9. Located along a road lined by other bars, restaurants, and shops, black-stained wood covered the walls carved with graffiti (like “Fuck You!” and “Anarchy!”) inside the Hangar 9.

A pool table at the entrance provided a focal point for competitive youth needing to be entertained. Across the bar, a pinball machine also gave kids wanting to cut class something else to do. Cigarette butts floated in ashtrays full of beer on the black cocktail tables between the bartenders and the stage. Torn red labels on empty bottles, tequila shot glasses, spilled white salt, and sucked-on limes also created atmosphere.

The Hangar 9 was especially popular with the depressed youth of Little Egypt who wore black T-shirts and checkered flannel. Slam dancing was part of the fashion statement, thrashing to fast beats and power chords inside the Hangar 9. Not a violent dance, but an expression of anger contained, not directed at anyone physically but harnessed and expressed with each step, with each movement, with hard, driving rage.

Most nights, student bands, and professional musicians passing through town, helped the kids escape thoughts of their mistakes for awhile before they aged, grew fat, and died – before the sweet smells of the punk rock girls went home with somebody else.

▲▲▲

One drunken night inside the Hangar 9, the lead singer of Goat Head was wearing a bloody mask like Pan and dancing wildly on stage under red and black theatrical lights. Molesting the room with his presence, the mad rocker humped the air eyeballing babes in a haze of dry ice. Then he thrust into the air a shrunken skull mounted on a gold-plated scepter, which was also his microphone and stand.

Out of danger from the slam dancers, who were running in a circle and diving off the stage, Millbrook bobbed his head to and fro, sitting at one of the black cocktail tables in front of the bar. He graciously accepted a joint from a classmate sitting beside him.

Meanwhile, a black-haired girl with a blue eyeball tattooed into the back of her neck walked past shaking her ass. The gold piercings in her nose and tongue reflected red stage lights. Oh, but for Millbrook, it was the black miniskirt and black fishnet stockings.

Losing focus for a moment, however, Millbrook thought back to the long bus ride from Alabama that he’d recently taken to Southern Illinois. He’d only been in town a few days, and his first semester of graduate school had just begun.

“I’m gonna’ fuck you up!” repeated the lead singer of the band. The lyrics echoed and swung like a pendulum in front of Millbrook's crossed red eyes, back and forth, back and to the left, blurring into darkness.

“Ever read Sigmund Freud, Holmes?” asked Millbrook’s classmate, a tall and slender black man who, to Millbrook, looked like Jimi Hendrix.

Millbrook toked the joint again, causing the fire cherry to glow red. Then he answered, exhaling marijuana. “Sigmund Fuck, that psychology guy who dreamed about his mother, man?”

“The secular religion of the state, Holmes."

“Hey, man, what’s your name again?” Millbrook extended his hand, which the black man firmly gripped for a strong greeting, skin-on-skin.

“They call me Cletus, Holmes.”

In the background, Goat Head was loudly jamming something off-key by Metallica:

Halls of Justice painted green

Money talking

Power Wolves beset your door

Hear them stalking

Soon you’ll please their appetite

They devour

Hammer of Justice crushes you

Overpower

The ultimate in vanity

Exploiting their supremacy

I can’t believe the things you say

I can’t believe

I can’t believe the price you pay

Nothing can save you

Justice is lost

Justice is raped

Justice is gone

Pulling your strings

Justice is done

Seeking no truth

Winning is all

Find it so grim

So true, so real!

Truth Assassin

–Metallica

Jumping up and down in his bloody goat’s head mask, the lead singer of Goat Head swung his skull-on-a-scepter microphone stand again, while Cletus attacked capitalism.

“If Sigmund Freud traced our sexual hang-ups back to the Greeks, and Nietzsche was an occult supermodel of philosophy, then some rich men chose to let these cats walk down the runway of public acceptance, Holmes, and now Nietzsche and Freud are fashionable. But nobody gets to be anybody without the OK from those in power who control access to distribution.” Cletus took another gulp of beer. “Like this guy I know who started selling donuts, Holmes. He’s going out of business now because the grocery stores won’t give him any good shelf space.”

“You can’t sell what the public can’t see, man,” Millbrook agreed.

“Exactly, Holmes. That’s the retail side of it. But before you can get your shit into a store to sell, you’ve gotta’ get it onto a truck to be shipped to all the stores. And before you can do that, somebody in power has to say that you can.”

“The business of power, man.”

Cletus kept ranting: “They’ve been using Nietzsche and everybody, and they allowed Nietzsche to be popular, so they could use his philosophy for their own political, financial, and spiritual gains.” Cletus took a gulp of beer. “We’re all just a bunch of conditioned slaves, Holmes.”

“They use us to sell war, man.”

“Dig it, Holmes.”

Their rap rambled on until 3 a.m., when the lead singer of Goat Head finished his act by spraying the girls at the front of the stage with a bottle of Jack Daniels, pretending to jack off on them just like in an X-rated film.

▲▲▲

It is apparent that today we are proceeding toward

an evolution which resembles the ancient kingdom

of Egypt in every detail, except that it is built on other

foundations, on technically more perfect, more

rationalized, and therefore much more mechanized

foundations. The problem which besets us now is not:

how can this evolution be changed? For that is

impossible, but what will come of it?

–Max Weber,

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Chapter 6:

Acid Bath

Summer 1986

THE LED ZEPPELIN ALBUMS kept spinning by the lounge chairs on what would soon be an artifact of technology called a turntable, bathing those outside and in the pool with Gothic poetry, as more journalism students showed up to the sunset party half naked.

Millbrook was smoking joints again with other writers from the university’s student newspaper. Having read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception before experiencing how the hippies felt, he confronted the temptation of dropping acid.

“Put this on your tongue, brother,” one of the sportswriters told him. “Just do half a hit. Relax, enjoy the ride.”

”Are you sure I won’t freak out, man?” Millbrook asked, cautiously.

“Just think positive, brother,” the sportswriter continued, holding the hit in front of Millbrook, who had been scared of LSD ever since his drug education class from Red Devil Middle School visited the rehab house across the river in Georgia.

Reluctantly taking the LSD and holding it awhile in his palm, Millbrook finally placed the drug into his mouth and swallowed. Then his thoughts flickered back to the diary of Alice and the melodrama that he had seen on television as a child in the living room of his grandparents’ house.

Millbrook’s paranoia, however, eventually went away and was replaced by a fascination with everything red, green, yellow, blue, and swirling, especially the Van-Gogh impressions of the music, which intensified inside his head. Refreshed by the touch of the wind and excited by the girls in pink and green bikinis so close to him, he climbed a silver ladder out of the water to grab another cold beer from an ice chest. Guzzling the brew, he sat the half-empty can down by a yellow lounge chair beside the pool and jumped back into the water. Swimming to the bottom of the deep end, he thrashed around for as long as he could hold his breath before coming up for air.

“Wow, man!” Millbrook exclaimed, splashing about above the surface again. He clumsily pushed his black hair away from his red eyes and floated to the shallow end of the pool to relax against a jet stream pulsating from the side into his back. He reached for his cold beer beside the pool. Savoring another drink, Millbrook smelled the burning weed from the party around him and felt lightheaded, as his mind began to fill with thoughts about mysticism: “Despite three-sided deltas and the true value of pi, what does it mean, man – sets of three – that seconds pass faster than minutes – 60 – that seasons turn to dust faster than years?”

Red blood and black disease rushing through his veins, Millbrook thought about 33 rpm records and 33rd degree Knights Templars, and he wondered if anyone else knew that they once had a chance to live forever before Gollum ran away with it, ran away with it, singing a Led Zeppelin song:

How years ago in days of old

When magic filled the air

Just in the darkest depths of Mordor

I met a girl so fair

But Gollum, the evil one

Crept up and slipped away with her,

her, her, yeah.

–Led Zeppelin

And just for a moment, Millbrook remembered the torn pages of his Bible, floating again within the sparkling reflections of the purple circular waves. Then he pondered the metaphors of Led Zeppelin:

I gotta’ keep searchin’ for my baby…

Sixty minutes into the trip, Millbrook’s heart raced at the height of his flight from reality. Every neuron inside his brain simultaneously fired across synaptic webs of DNA, or so it seemed, bringing back into focus the blood of a knife stained red. It was the first time he ever dropped acid.

▲▲▲

The next day Millbrook had a moment of clarity looking up at the electric lines strung between the black telephone poles on campus. He gazed curiously at the black wires crossing the blue sky beyond the cheerful orange-and-blue banners hanging from trees. And he began thinking that something didn’t make sense. Something seemed out of sync with nature. Taking a deep breath, Millbrook began to realize that the physical world that he knew did not exist by chance or evolution. And it dawned on him that the rows of poles and trees perfectly aligning the roads, the manicured shrubbery growing beside the walkways, and the yellow flowers decorating store fronts all had been arranged by men.

“And maybe, just maybe, man,” Millbrook thought to himself, “all of these things have been designed to shape perception. And if physical objects can be manipulated, ideas also can be manipulated to change meaning.”

Remembering the pictures of the tall cathedrals in Europe that he’d seen in art class, Millbrook thought about how small the people looked standing outside the churches of the Middle Ages.

“The Gothic architects,” he recalled, “wanted to make Christians feel small in relation to the houses of God and Satan.” Now Millbrook continued to wonder if the Gothic men of Alabama were in fact shaping him. Only for a moment before he forgot, Millbrook understood how sidewalks and parallel roads systematically numbered his thoughts about himself. And he began to wonder: “What if that bank building wasn’t there, man? Could I see naked babes in the shower of the girls’ dormitory behind it?” Then he fell into a trance. His red eyes bulged and his brainwaves changed to alpha as the physical world vanished.

▲▲▲

I was seized by a peculiar restlessness associated with

a sensation of wild dizziness. On arriving home, I lay down

and sank into a kind of drunkenness… characterized by

extreme activity of imagination. As I lay in a dazed condition

with my eyes closed, I experienced daylight as especially

bright. There surged up from me an uninterrupted stream

of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness accompanied by an intense, kaleidoscopic-like play of colors.

This condition gradually passed after three hours.

–Albert Hofmann,

the scientist who discovered LSD, describing his first acid trip

Chapter 7:

Professor Diligence

Fall 1987

Professor Diligence was a peculiar scholar of mass media propaganda who wore a bow tie and pink suits that fashionably matched an old pink Cadillac convertible parked for a quick getaway outside his office. Some of the feminists in the School of Journalism complained that he still fancied the days when it was OK to slap a woman’s ass and laugh about it.

Fiftyish with a head full of brown hair parted on the left, one day Professor Diligence caught on fire in the stride of a controversial lecture: “The goal of the establishment coven of the Devil throughout the ages has always been the complete infiltration, alteration, and eventual elimination of all opposing values.” He placed a black coffee cup on a podium beside a book titled, Alternating States of Journalism: Confronting Establishment Satanism.

Millbrook took notes beneath the flickering fluorescent lights of the room.

“How many of you did the reading?” Diligence shouted, clenching a large, brown pipe between his pearly white teeth. Then he struck a match against his silver pants’ zipper. Lighting the pipe, he puffed and blew smoke rings that began to look like Swastikas.

“They are behind the scenes of the counterculture organizing the oppressed classes on the pretext of fighting somebody else. Who are they? And where have they hid?”

“The Devil is a capitalist?” Millbrook thought to himself. “That makes sense, man.” He continued taking notes.

"Therefore, I say unto you most seriously, the profound battle for all things sacrificed to heaven or hell is overwhelmingly within!” The animated professor then farted, and an ash from his pipe fell to ignite a fire inside a silver trashcan beside the podium. Finally noticing the flame by his feet, Professor Diligence kicked into the can, stomping out the fire with black leather, until order was restored again. “I want you to think! Think! Think! Think about how our mistakes and even absolute evil fit into God’s plan.”

▲▲▲

Our indiscretion sometimes serve us well.

When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

–William Shakespeare,

Hamlet 5.2

Chapter 8:

Displacing Perception

February 1992

ALL THE FACTS TWISTED, wired on endless cups of fifty-cent coffee inside a corner booth of the Nostalgic ‘50s Diner. Across The Strip from the Hangar 9, in a room of black-and-white checkerboard tile, a waitress slammed two white mugs onto a table in front of Millbrook and the classmate who looked like Jimi Hendrix.

“Rockefeller is behind all of this bullshit, Holmes,” Cletus shouted, as the two continued to discuss the aftermath of the Gulf War.

Millbrook’s thoughts drifted away from the assignment for Professor Diligence to the snow blowing sideways outside in the Carbondale night. He tore open a paper container filled with fake milk and poured the white concoction into his coffee, clinging a silver spoon around against the inside of the coffee mug until the black sludge turned brown. He adjusted his tie-dyed toboggan and sank down into the imitation, black leather seat of the diner booth.

A helicopter hovered in a Metallica song playing on a silver jukebox across the chessboard room:

I can’t remember anything

Can’t tell if this is true or a dream

Deep down inside I feel to scream

This terrible silence stops me

–Metallica

“Rockefeller machine-gunned his way to the top of the corporate world, Holmes. Now they use video games and bubble-gum cards to sell wars.”

Millbrook nodded, noticing flashing red and blue police lights reflecting in the ice on the slippery sidewalks outside. He sank farther down in his seat.

Now that the War is through with me

I’m waking up, I cannot see

That there’s not much left of me

Nothing is real but pain now

Hold my breath as I wish for death

Oh please God, wake me

“They’ve fucking rewritten history, Holmes!” Cletus shouted. Then he silently sipped his coffee.

“Professor Diligence said the Nazis are now running things in America, man.”

Cletus noticed a strange, black headline on a tabloid newspaper among Millbrook’s books scattered on the table in front of them – “Aliens Linked to Occult.”

Space-ships from the constellation Sirius landed and

made contact with humans in Sumeria around

4500 BC. Secret societies of initiation ever since

that time have passed on the knowledge that was

gained from the contact.

–The Hollywood Pentagram

“What’s this all about, Homes?” Cletus looked at Millbrook.

“Professor Diligence said that Hitler was visited by aliens, man, the same evil green men who demonically possessed the snake.”

Cletus looked away, skeptical, and changed the subject: "I hear there’s a tank of hippie crack at the House of Voodoo tonight, Holmes. Got any more acid?”

A train whistled as it passed behind the Hangar 9.

▲▲▲

Commonly used by dentists to knock out patients with bad teeth, local partiers called nitrous oxide “hippie crack” because it was cheap and could make them feel like they were walking into heaven. No different from anywhere else in America, it all started with the military and the Grateful Dead, when capitalist fans learned to buy nitrous wholesale. Then they started bringing tanks back to the after-hours parties near The Strip and selling nitrous gas in colorful balloons – green, blue, yellow, and red. You could always tell from blocks away when someone had a tank of nitrous oxide because of the sonic blasts of the pressurized air that accompanied the discharge of hippie crack.

Basically, you would buy a balloon full of nitrous for two or three bucks, sit down on the ground, and inhale. Despite the headaches that followed, many kids thrived on the cheap high, although the door on the other side of inhalation never opened wide enough for them to meet Aldous Huxley. For the youth of Little Egypt, however, nitrous was a way to pass their lives, as one hit led to two led to three led to another, until student users were selling their compact discs to get high again.

Whatever the fleeting duration of the buzz, many in Little Egypt loved the almost mystical experience that hippie crack provided. And they believed that filling up their heads with nitrous oxide – or Drano, or Elmer’s Glue – could help them see God or get to the other side that Jim Morrison glamorized. But it never happened like that, not for Cletus, not for Millbrook, not for any of them.

▲▲▲

On their way to sniff hippie crack, Millbrook and Cletus stopped for a beer at another bar down The Strip. Standing in a haze of cigarette smoke, they tried not to stare at the hairy ass sagging from under the rawhide G-string of an old blues singer.

Dressed as usual in a black leather vest and a black cowboy G-string, Raucous Rod swigged beer from a brown wooden mug engraved with his name. Cowbells nearby behind the bar clanged every time somebody smacked silver coins against a glass tip jar.

Raucous Rod grabbed his cock. “So I answered the door naked, and them damn Apocalyptic Christians started yappin’ ‘bout goin’ up to heaven, ya’ll. Haw, haw, haw.”

On stage in the bar, the drummer struck a crash symbol, signaling the bartender to turn off the stereo so the band could jam. The bass player rumbled up and down the frets: “doom, doom, doom.”

On cue, Raucous Rod waddled back to the front of the room and yanked a silver microphone from a stand. His pale blue eyes rolled back white into his head, as he blurted out, “’Magic Carpet Ride,’ ya’ll! Haw, haw, haw!”

Last night I held Aladdin’s lamp

And so I wished that I could stay

But before the thing could answer me

someone took the lamp away

I looked around

a lousy candle’s all I found

–Steppenwolf

Distracted by a TV mounted on a wall in the bar, Millbrook had a drunken revelation, brought on by the sudden juxtaposition of sight, sound, mental state, and memory of something Professor Diligence said:

“The mechanistic philosophy of empiricism contributed to the 20^th-Century laissez-faire belief that God is no longer involved in the lives of men.”

Millbrook continued to watch the TV, where a heavy metal band dressed in black--and-yellow bumblebee suits began to sing: “To hell with the devil! ”

“The capitalist’s view of religion, man,” Millbrook thought to himself. “So many layers of cultural bullshit. Assumptions based upon other assumptions, lies based upon other lies as the foundation of Western Civilization. Where does the truth begin, man?”

Back on the TV, a church full of people fell hysterically into a mass epileptic fit, or so it seemed to Millbrook, while a preacher in a pinstriped suit held his palms skyward and danced figure eights. Suddenly, the man of God stopped and crossed his heart in front of a stained glass image of Jesus Christ rising from the dead.

There is a conspiracy of her prophets in the midst

thereof, like a roaring lion ravening the prey; they

have devoured souls; they have taken the treasure

and precious things; they have made her many

widows in the midst.

–Ezekiel 22:25