The Decadent Worker

In addition to rumors and theories, there is another factor that will help the reader see my conversations with Brother-in-law in perspective. Life among the artists and writers in the French Quarter, not chats with a strange hoodlum, comprised the central theme of my activities as I perceived them then.

My association with Clint Bolton was more or less typical in this respect.

One night when I was being a barroom poet in a cafe, reading some of my verses to friends, he rather drunkenly butted in. “Tear down the walls!” he roared, in response to a line about keeping my love behind the highest wall.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Isn’t your own business worth minding?”

“No.”

That answer caught me off guard.

“Trouble with you young people nowadays — you build too many walls. Rip ‘em down.”

As our discussion continued I realized he was a man who knew a great deal about literature. If I ever wrote about him, he was to tell me later, I should describe him as an aging middle weight.

Clint Bolton, an aging middle weight, had retired from a career of news reporting, of which a highlight had been interviewing Ernest Hemingway in Spain.

When what he called our “Tuesday afternoon poetry reading circle” broke up, he and I went together to a saloon on Rampart, where we talked about Pindar until morning.

“I could write circles around you,” he bragged. “I could tell you so much about writing — hell, I’ve already forgotten more than you’ve learned.” Then he paused, as was his way, for an intolerably long and drunken interval as I patiently awaited his next word. Clint was an emotional alcoholic whose own eloquence often drove him to tears. “I never wrote a novel. Every newspaper hack keeps an unfinished book manuscript in his desk drawer. Don’t mess around with that Tuesday afternoon stuff, kid. Every little old lady in America writes poems. Write a book.”

As I walked him home at dawn, I told him about The Idle Warriors. This was in the spring of 1963, probably April, and I’d long since given up trying to find a publisher. “It needs work. Not enough unity and plot. Just a collection of anecdotes,” I told him. But the basic idea was fantastic. I was trying to explain why foreigners hate Americans — like The Ugly American, only about enlisted men in the service, about how some of them acted on liberty in the Far East in peacetime. Man, it was horrible. A bunch of crew-cut young punks who thought they were conquering heroes. They beat up on cab drivers, tore apart bars, made fun of the customs. I felt ashamed of my uniform by the time I’d been there a month. One guy I knew got so disgusted with it that when he got out he defected to Russia. So my main character in the novel does the same thing.”

By this time we were standing in front of Clint’s shotgun apartment, a couple of blocks up the street from the Bourbon House. “Say the truth, kid. That’s all there is to great writing, you know. Just saying the truth without wasting words. And another thing,” he paused again and let me stand there as he fished for words in bleary-eyed silence. “I listen to you — as you tell me about this novel of yours — your tone of voice, your enthusiasm — and I think: Why in hell’s name is this kid sitting around in saloons reading poems to a bunch of Beatniks? Writing is lonely work. That’s something you have to accept if you are going to be an author. And that’s your book. I can tell by the ay you talk about it. Now listen to me, son — because I wish you were my son and that I was your father — listen carefully, because I’ve got only one thing to say to you: Go home and write, ya bum!”

I went home and slept. But when I awoke, I got out the old Idle Warriors manuscript and had a look at it. Maybe Clint was right. Ola had said practically the same thing in different words. I should write this book.

In retrospect, I cannot free myself of the suspicion, so nagging, that there was an intelligence community plot to get The Idle Warriors into print. If there was, it failed — not completely, though. A few chapters were published in a nonfiction book about Oswald I wrote after the assassination. When I testified for the Warren Commission, photocopies of two of my manuscript drafts were taken for the National Archives. Any such theory, of course, cannot omit the hypothesis that both Clint and Ola Holcomb were agents…

If any theory remotely like that one is true, then I must have been virtually surrounded by the intelligence community before the assassination — perhaps since 1959 when Oswald and I volunteered in the Marines for that project to help Fidel Castro rid his new government of Russian agents. That’s a pretty enormous conspiracy theory to have to swallow; it sounds paranoid beyond all reason.

Yet if Nixon and E. Howard Hunt were in charge of the preparations to invade Cuba, and they were, and if Hunt possessed the authority to create exile governments, and he did, then why is it not possible that I was the focal point of such a government? One thing Brother-in-law seemed especially concerned about was the human slavery that exists within even the U.S. intelligence community. With authorization to create a government unrestricted by the usual overseeing clauses he could have designed an organization with multiple purposes. And if CIA bureaucrats really were signing things without reading them, such a document would have been possible.

That the CIA sector involved with anti-Castro activities went out of control, “like a rogue elephant,” just prior to the President’s murder is known.

What if they got authorization to protect certain individuals, to legally murder anyone who posed a threat to their lives? Such persons could under those circumstances have been selected for no other reason than their capacity to draw fire. I was writing a novel based on a man I had known who was probably an undercover agent (for the CIA) in the Soviet Union, a man who then returned to the U.S. with remarkable ease married to the niece of an officer in Russian intelligence. According to a theory presented… in The Yankee and Cowboy War, Oswald may next have been assigned by the CIA to spy on FBI people involved with Guy Banister in anti-Castro preparations. Besides my curiosity about Oswald, I possessed other qualities. I was a militant atheist in a predominately Catholic town, and I appear to have been involved in one way or another with an intelligence community heavily infiltrated with Jesuits. I was an extreme rightwing laissez-faire capitalist. I wanted John Kennedy assassinated and made no secret of it. On top of everything else, I had a chip on my shoulder. I was an emotionally alienated, judgmental misfit. What better way for the likes of Richard Nixon and E. Howard Hunt and Tracy Barnes to get rid of their enemies?

–Kerry Wendell Thornley
The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984

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