The Decadent Worker

In February of 1968 when D.A. Jim Garrison questioned me before the grand jury in his JFK murder probe, there were names he asked me to identify that meant nothing to me, in addition to those I recognized. A few of the names that failed to ring a bell got repeated many times — insuring that I at least would remember them from then on. One of them was: Dave Chandler. Going down his suspect list, the D.A. would return every so often to Dave Chandler. At one point I said, regarding one of these recurring names, “I believe you mentioned him before.” Garrison nodded and stared accusingly. Obviously, he was sure I knew somebody named Dave Chandler.

Sometime later on, in a conversation with Lane Lake, a French Quarter friend, Dave Chandler’s name came up again. “Who was he?” I asked. “Oh, you remember — that friend of Jim and Bootsie.”

When I returned in the late summer of 1963 from California to New Orleans I became close to Jim Dyer and Bootsie Culp, ecause they were as much into Ayn Rand as I was — unlike most French Quarter bohemians. Dave Chandler, I now recalled, was also an admirer of Ayn Rand. One morning, probably in October or early November, he bought me breakfast in a small cafe near Pat O’Brien’s on St. Peter. What did we talk about? O Jesus, we were sitting there agreeing that the President should be assassinated!

When I asked Clint Bolton, who knew nearly everyone, if he knew Dave Chandler, he said, “Sure, he was a stringer for Life Magazine.”

Shortly after my grand jury appearance in 1968 I spoke to Richard Billings, who had originally contacted me for an interview for Life. When I asked him about Chandler, he answered, “I was his boss at the time, and I got the feeling then that he knew more about the assassination than he was telling me.” At around the same time, Billings quit his job at Life and went to work for the Congressional Record. “One of the reasons I quit,” he told me, “was that I got the feeling they were being less than honest about the Kennedy assassination.”

In the early eighties when I was living with Paula Petty in Tampa, Florida, I dreamt that a Time Magazine cover expanded in front of my eyes until filling my field of vision. A seductive female voice said: “Time for romance!” This cover faded and another appeared in the same way. “Time for adventure!” And so it went, just like a t.v. commercial, until I woke up, terrified. And there are people who want to trust landlords and other capitalists to investigate mind control.

A persistent intelligence community rumor says Pope John Paul II belongs to a Time Magazine secret society, in which he is solemnly sworn to murder me — in full public view with full public approval! When the deadline is and what happens if he failes is not made clear. But it sure makes a nifty contingency program for the assassinations in the meantime.

Time seems to have usurped the functions of both the State and the Mob.

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