Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (72 page)

“Just stay with me and you’ll understand soon enough. For now, it might interest you to know that the phone number for Scientology’s worldwide spiritual headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, was found written on the wall of David Berkowitz’s apartment.”

“The Son of Sam was a Scientologist?” D.H. asks, incredulous.

“I’ll tell you more later,” Lloyd promises. “By the way, here’s another little tidbit you might find interesting: Mark David Chapman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his youth growing up there.”

“So if either one of them had flown to the Moon before they got busted, they still could’ve voted.” Gordon has decided to just roll with Lloyd’s crazed connecting-of-the-dots–and even make some contributions of his own.

“You’re mocking me, but I can understand why. All this talk of conspiracies and coincidences sounds crazy, I know…” Lloyd concedes with a sigh. “
They
want it to sound crazy–so no one will take it seriously. By the way, you do know there’s a
They
, don’t you?”

“Sure.
They
want to fuck with our minds,” Skip says.

“Kind of like Lloyd,” says Twinker, whose mind–relative to Skip’s–isn’t quite so open.

“The simplest definition of a fascist is:
someone who wants dictatorial control over the will of others.
The
They
I’m speaking of are fascists, in the broadest sense of that term,” Lloyd says. “
They
may not always be human, but
They
are always fascists. Their neurotic need for control extends even to murdering those who refuse to go along with their crimes and unspeakable lies. We’re all meat machines on this planet, and anyone can be killed by anyone else, so long as the killer is willing to accept the consequences for his or her actions. But
They
don’t want to accept any consequences,
ever.
So
They
invented trance-assassins like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremer, and Mark David Chapman–mind-controlled pawns who take the consequences
for
them.”

“Okay, so the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, I guess I can understand…” says D.H., “especially if
They
are fascists–or right-wing Republicans. But why would
They
want to kill John Lennon?”

“Remember, Ronald Reagan had just been elected President one month before Lennon’s assassination,” Lloyd reminds them. “And Reagan’s running mate–former CIA Director, George Bush–would soon be Vice President. John Lennon was an icon of the counterculture movement they despised. He also had enormous political clout that he often wielded in unconventional ways. Remember the Bed-Ins for Peace?”

“Yeah! They recorded ‘Give Peace A Chance’ during one of those,” D.H. recalls. “Timothy Leary and a bunch of other people sang it around the bed that John and Yoko stayed in for a week at that hotel in Montreal.”

“Right. Now put yourselves in Reagan and Bush’s shoes. They’ve already cut an illegal back-channel deal with the Iranian government to hold the American hostages until the day of Reagan’s inauguration–and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Their contempt for the Constitution and the American people will soon be so obvious that a counterculture revolutionary like Lennon would almost certainly protest. Lennon had just taken a five-year hiatus from recording and public life to raise his son, Sean, but he was out with a new album and seemed refreshed and ready to go again. He was due to become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1981. By then, he would likely be challenging Reagan and Bush in public on issues like the environment, sexual morality, their arms-for-hostages deals, and the escalation of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The last thing they wanted was a politically active Beatle reawakening the old sentiments of the peace and love generation. And that doesn’t even begin to touch upon the occult significance of Lennon’s death.”

“The occult significance?” Gordon asks.

“There was an invocation of the powers of darkness,” Lloyd elaborates. “Or did you not know that Mark David Chapman claimed he’d prayed to Satan just hours before he called out Lennon’s name and dropped into a combat stance to fire four bullets into him in front of the Dakota?”

“I never heard that,” D.H. says grimly. “That born-again asshole!”

“Satan is for pussies,” Jimmy huffs.

“Satan is one of the most powerful egregores on this planet,” Lloyd corrects him, “second only to that egregore we call
God
–although, of course, the supposedly divine assistance from the
God
egregore has a distressing tendency to vary.”

“The born-again Christians would say you’re going to hell for telling us stuff like that,” Gordon jokes with Lloyd.

“Yes, those born-again Christians absolutely love sending people to hell, don’t they?” Lloyd observes. “Yet they seem to have no trouble breaking their own rules–‘Thou shalt not kill’ being chief among them. And how about the Sermon on the Mount? You don’t hear the Moral Majority invoking ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ when the budget-busting Pentagon goes about its business, or ‘Blessed are the merciful’ when their man Reagan is droning on and on about the Soviet’s Evil Empire…. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a public lecture in the near future. I’m going to call it, ‘Quantum Physics and Reaganomics: How Much Longer Until the Fabric of Reality is Ripped to Shreds?’”

“Wasn’t that freaky little possessed girl in
The Exorcist
named Reagan?” Jimmy asks half-facetiously. It’s been approximately ten years since he and Gordon sneaked in to see
The Exorcist
when they were boys, but Jimmy still rates it as one of his all-time favorite movies.

“Although the two names sound alike–and the connection has an undeniable
frisson
–I think you know their spelling differs,” Lloyd says. “But I’ll lay odds you didn’t know that the writer responsible for
The Exorcist
, William Peter Blatty, was an intelligence officer who’d been stationed in Lebanon.”

“You’re not gonna tell us he trained Mark David Chapman, are you?” Skip asks. There are limits to even Skip’s credulity.

“No, of course not. That was way before Chapman’s time,” Lloyd says. “William Peter Blatty worked for the United States Information Agency in Beirut sometime back in the fifties. The USIA devotes its energies to so-called ‘public diplomacy’–which might better be described as ‘propaganda.’ And if you think about it,
The Exorcist
could reasonably be considered propaganda as well–and not propaganda for Satan or the Roman Catholic Church, as one might at first think. Blatty was very specific about the identity of the entity that possessed little Regan. It was the ancient Sumerian demon,
Pazuzu
.”

“Oh, no. Here we go again…” Twinker says with a roll of her eyes.

“Propaganda for Pazuzu?” D.H. just wants to make sure he has it straight.

“Propaganda for the ancient gods of Mesopotamia, including the Lam and Those Who Shall Remain Nameless,” Lloyd says with a wink directed toward Gordon.

“Are we talking about aliens again?” Skip asks.

“What if there was a hidden purpose to all the assassinations we’ve been talking about, and to movie productions like
The Exorcist
, and other often-misconstrued events, like serial killings and Satanic Ritual Abuse?” Lloyd asks them. “What would you say if I told you that all those occurrences were highly concerted efforts at thinning the veil between this world and the evil on the other side of it?”

“I’d say it’s time to up the ol’ Thorazine dosage there, Bud,” Gordon jokes.

“Yeah, that’s just fucking nuts,” D.H. says, protesting perhaps a bit too much.

“Finally!”
Twinker shouts with an exaggerated show of relief.

“Why don’t you guys just shut up and listen?” Jimmy says. “It makes a whole lot of sense, if you ask me.”

“Oh
please
…” Twinker scoffs.

“It’s not so far-fetched,” Lloyd suggests. “Blood sacrifices to appease the gods have been going on since time immemorial.”

“Yeah, but times aren’t so immoral now,” Gordon counters.

“Don’t be so sure…. Disneyland hasn’t built a reproduction of Teotihuacán’s Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl and the Avenue of the Dead so they can stage live reenactments of Aztec sacrifices for the Mouseketeer crowd–
yet
–but every Easter you can find at least three Jesus snuff films playing on television. And what is the Christian Eucharist if not a human sacrifice ritual in symbolic form? It’s called
theophagy
–the eating of God. Taken together, what do the cross and the Eucharist signify? Rome was using them to set an example, a meme for slaves: ‘Go up against the Powers That Be,’ they’re telling us, ‘and not only will we crucify you–
we’ll eat you, too.’”

Lloyd has gone so far over the top that Gordon, Jimmy, and D.H. start to laugh.

“Go ahead, laugh all you want,” says Lloyd, “but every Sunday we’re treated to the spectacle of all those God-eaters chowing down the flesh and slurping up the blood of Christ. It’s obscene, really… Jesus is served up more often than Big Macs! Every year, more than a billion bodies of Christ are swallowed and turned into fecal matter.”

“I can’t believe you just said that!” says Skip. “Now whenever I take a crap, I’ll have to think about Jesus.”

Jimmy cuts loose with a horrendous fart. “What’s that smell?” he asks merrily. “The Father, Son, or the Holy Ghost?”

“Oh my
God
…” D.H. exhales, holding his nose, “I’m so glad I’m an atheist.”

They’ve reached the city limits of a town called Cambria. Tall gnarled spires of Monterey Pines rise up toward the sky on either side of the highway. Vacation homes on stilts dot the shaded green hillsides and more homes are nestled along unpaved roads cutting through lush banks of forest ferns and ivy.

Up ahead, the hills give way to an open stretch of reddish-brown beach strewn with tide pools and rock formations upended by long-ago earthquakes (
Moonstone Beach
, the sign along the highway reads). Overlooking that beach–high on the last cliff with a zigzagging, nine-story flight of stairs leading up to it–there’s an oddly round shingled cabin with a faded redwood deck out in front of it and a black tin chimney flue silently belching smoke. Imagining that he can smell the wood smoke
(with a hint of patchouli…)
coming from that very chimney, Gordon thinks to himself:
What a great place!

Lloyd has spied the cabin, too. “Look… it’s one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. Some hippie dropout has made quite a nice little paradise for himself up there.”

“Check out those stained glass windows!” D.H. exclaims.

On the nearest side of the cabin there’s an amber stained glass window in the shape of a smiling crescent moon, and another brilliant apricot one in front radiating flowery spikes like a happy child’s drawing of the sun.
I’m going to live there someday
, Gordon’s deep intuition is telling him–but he doesn’t know how that will ever happen.

“Buckminster Fuller came up with an excellent alternative name for the CIA,” Lloyd mentions. “Has anyone heard of it?”

Of course, no one has.

“He calls it the
Corporate Invisible Army
,” Lloyd says with a wry smile. “There’s a very-hard-to-find book called
The Secret Team
that explains exactly how the CIA and its corporate allies have become the shadow government of the United States–and of the whole world, for that matter. It was written by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the first Chief of Special Operations with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Colonel Prouty also served as a liaison officer for the Air Force and the CIA, so he truly knows the territory, so to speak. I can lend out my copy, if anyone’s interested in reading it.”

“If I tried reading that book right now, I think my head would explode,” says Gordon. “I’m just trying to get a handle on what you’ve already told us. I mean, tell me if I’m even close here: the egregore of the CIA got infected by the Nazi’s egregore during Operation PAPERCLIP, and now the CIA works as sort of an invisible army for the fascist egregores of multinational corporations.”

“Right,” says Lloyd.

“But at the same time, the CIA has been experimenting with these mind control programs in prisons, cults, and mental institutions–and I guess in places like Lebanon and on military bases, too–so they can send assassins out into the world to kill people like John Lennon and JFK.”

“Right again.”

“Now here’s where I get confused…. Are the assassinations politically motivated, or do they somehow benefit the corporations? Or is it really about human sacrifices and ‘thinning the veil’ like you said–or feeding the Moon, or whatever?”

“The answer is: All of the above.”

“Shit! Then I’m still confused.”

Lloyd reaches over and pats Gordon’s knee. “You’re closer to understanding than you might think,” he says. “The key lies in knowing that interdimensional aliens secretly control the people at the top levels of all the world’s secret societies–”

“– and from there they control everything else,” Gordon says, remembering.

“Ritualistic ceremonies, such as you’ll find in secret societies, serve to activate the reptilian traits in our own brains that allow us to be easily hypnotized and controlled,” Lloyd explains. “Now, don’t get me wrong. Spirituality, in general, is a fine thing. But ritualistic behavior–even within a spiritual context–is to be avoided at all costs.”

“Does that mean we’re not supposed to attend Mass?” Twinker asks cynically. She’s a lapsed Catholic, but she’s feeling a sudden need to defend her former faith.

“Well, you might ask yourself: ‘Do I really need to eat Jesus? Or isn’t it enough that I’ve asked him to guide me and strengthen my heart?’” After a thoughtful pause, Lloyd adds: “Besides, don’t you think the Catholic Church might have some unresolved control issues?”

“The fact that they won’t allow women to be priests kind of sucks,” Twinker admits. “I mean, are women supposed to be less spiritually evolved than men?
I don’t think so
….”

“You won’t get any argument there from me,” Lloyd says. “I share Wilhelm Reich’s belief that the suppression of paganism did a great disservice to the evolution of the human psyche. In many ways, I think we were all better off during the late, great matriarchal societies, when female deities and priestesses reigned.”