In 1968, when Jim Garrison accused me of frequent contacts with Lee Oswald in New Orleans just previous to the assassination, I again journeyed to the Crescent City — this time to endeavor to clear myself before the grand jury.
Slim was the very first person I encountered. Striding along, looking more like Don Quixote than ever, he crossed an intersection half a block ahead of me. Calling out, I got his attention and he escorted me to his pad.
Now he was living in a run-down tenement on Decatur Street. On the way there, he informed me, “The Bourbon House is no more. Somebody bought them out and now it’s a steak house called The Embers. Much too fancy for us common folk.”
Typically, he room was furnished in contemporary Salvation Army with a nautical touch. “Nowadays about the only social clearing house is a coffee house run by a group of end-of-the-world Christians called The Process. If you want, we’ll go poke nose in there. See what goes. They’re okay, which is to say they don’t evangelize or nothin’. We can make a detour and visit John Kamus at his pad. Take him with us.”
Probably it was on the way to get Kamus that Slim cautioned me not to mention “name of Brother-in-law to Jim Garrison.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. Jim Garrison already had enough weird characters to cope with, myself included. I was not there to lead him further astray in the direction of the bizarre.
We did not go in at John’s, but invited him along to The Process, located in an old warehouse on Rue Royal near Saint Anne.
A severe woman in a black dress sat behind a counter. In a corner behind her, near a narrow staircase, was a literature table.
I glanced at an array of pamphlets with the titles, “Jehovah on War” and “Satan on War” and “Lucifer on War,” as we passed on our way to the coffee house on the second floor. A cheerless, dimly-lit room with bare walls, no carpets and only a few tables and chairs, it depressed me immediately. As the three of us sat down at the only available table I glanced around at the rest of the clientele. Obviously, they were at home here. No laughter animated conversation or distracted from the gloom. Everyone seemed pale and thin and subdued. In fact, they reminded me of a bunch of zombies. “So this is where the action is?” I commented.
“Kerry,” John said, there is something I want you to know about. Barbara Reid is one of the witnesses against you.”
“I’ve already guessed as much,” I told him. “She’s probably the only one.”
“Now the other night, she threw a party at her house and invited all your friends — as well as Jim Garrison, Mort Sahl and Mark Lane.”
“But only Jack Frazier and John here showed up,” Slim put in.
“That’s reassuring. But what’s with Jack Frazier? We hardly know each other!”
“He’s very suspicious of you,” Kamus warned. “He gave the guest book from the old Ryder Coffee House to the D.A. and they’re going through it looking for samples of your handwriting.”
“That should prove most informative,” I remarked dryly. “I used to sign it: ‘Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, 1369 Blanderblunk Drive.’”
“Yeah, they found those.”
“I gather Garrison and Mort Sahl and Mark Lane were not among the guests that failed to show,” I said.
“They were there.”
“Sounds like a plot to turn my friends against me.”
“That may have been the general idea,” John answered.
We drank our expresso and then Slim and I departed, leaving John Kamus behind, presumably to converse with the Processenes…
…I went alone to visit Lane Caplinger Lake, another old French Quarter friend. A former secretary in Jim Garrison’s office, she engaged me in an all-night discussion of the workings of the district attorney’s mind on this eve of my February 8th grand jury appearance. “If you can only get through to him…” she kept saying. “Garrison is a man who is capable of contemplating only one possible reality at a time… When I worked for him, a creep named Pershing Gervais monopolized his consciousness. Nowadays, it is Mark Lane and people Mark Lane believes, like Barbara Reid. You will have to get through to Garrison with your reality, Kerry, or he sure as hell will charge you with perjury.”
“What about Barbara? I don’t get it. Why are they listening to her? Everybody in the French Quarter knows she’s a screwball.”
“I’m not certain why. I’ve beenthinking about that. These days, Barbara is up to her ass in a very strange cult called The Process.”
“I know about them. Slim says they’re harmless. He calls them end-of-the-world Christians.”
“‘End of the world’ is right,” she said, “but most of them are Satanists, not Christians. And they aren’t just waiting for the end of the world; they are trying to hurry it along! One of them explained it to a friend of mine. They say they are trying to stir up social conflict — like race riots — because they think that will make the end happen sooner. They’re terrible people, Kerry, and they are just up the street from Barbara’s and she is up to her ass in that outfit.”
My grand jury appearance the next day was a disaster. I was exhausted from the previous night’s discussion and Jim Garrison, who asked me most of the questions, seemed indeed caught up in another version of reality. A ridiculous number of coincidences I couldn’t explain linked my activities with his assassination theory…
Upon returning home, I wrote a letter to Assistant District Attorney “Mu Mu” Sciambra, expressing my suspicion that The Process may have been instrumental in framing me. That didn’t help. Instead of an answer to the letter, I received a bill of information charging me with perjury.
Moreover, I was to learn when I returned to New Orleans in April for a pre-trial hearing, The Process had suddently packed up and left town… within a week of when I sent the letter about them to Sciambra.
Writes Ed Sanders in The Family, “…In New Orleans, the Process rented a large house in the French Quarter. The eight Luciferians from the London home church, with Alsatian dogs, began to run a coffee house and serve homemade brownies, attempting to relate to the hip community… There is some indication that while in Nor Orleans they became interested in voodoo.
“In early 1968 Processans left New Orleans for California. Reports from two people, one a former Processan, say that they encountered trouble with the local authorities…” (p. 88)
And on page 80 he writes, “…Process Church of the Final Judgement arrived on the Los Angeles scene in early 1968. They stayed in public view till a few days after Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June of ‘68, after which they dropped from sight in Los Angeles.” — Kerry Wendell Thornley, The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984 (pp. 219-220-221 & 40)
LANGUAGE IS THEFT/ Uniformity: Inequality in drag.
“Goats Forever!” — Robert Anton Wilson, Werewolf Bridge (MS)
