CONJURELLA AVOCA: BLUE WATER LAST MEMORIES
To : MT
Subject: Re: john north wright
Date: 18 Feb 2004
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CONJURELLA AVOCA
by
T. Casey Brennan
Copyright © 2000
This is the story of the Blue Water last memories of
David Ferrie. No, this is the story of the two John
Wrights. The first John Wright I met through the
mails in my early days at Peck High School, circa
1961. He published a fanzine in Johannesburg, in what
was then the Union of South Africa. His zine was
called, I think, THE KOMIX. It contained no racial or
political propaganda whatsoever, only articles and
comics revolving around what came to be called the
Golden Age of Comics: World War II. A creation by
the first John Wright, a World War II British
superhero called Union Jack, was later to be
appropriated by Marvel Comics, by another one of the
first John Wright's early pen pals, Roy Thomas. The
second John Wright, proprietor of a combination
pornography and conspiracy mail order business called
Pacific Paradise, I met through a different kind of
mail, e-mail, after I had written CONJURELLA, the
story of how Dr. E of Port Hope, Michigan, and David
Ferrie of Ohio, where both my maternal uncles lived,
had kidnapped me on November 22, 1963, and forced me
to initiate the firing from the Texas School Book
Depository Building.
If the first John Wright had helped invent the comic book fanzine, the second John Wright had helped invent dadaist conspiracy journalism. Wright hailed from Port Huron, Michigan, where my late father, William J. Brennan, had once sat on the St. Clair County Board of Education, along with Thaddeus B. Vance, also of Port Huron, who had invited me, briefly, into the local chapter of the John Birch Society. Wright's Pacific Paradise website included, among other things, pornographic pictures retouched to look like Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton, blatant political bigotry, and dadaist conspiracy journalism born out of the Blue Water's hellish Vietnam era, when those who had been ensnared by the draft, returned to brag of hellish atrocities against the Vietnames to those who had not. Yet, of all the varied media outlets in the Blue Water area, only John Wright and Pacific Paradise would report on CONJURELLA, with a special section, wedged between the pornographic photos of pseudo-Clinton and pseudo-Lewinsky, and right-wing meanderings I could accept no more easily in the '90s than in the sixties.
But this was the story of the last Blue Water Memories. And this was the mixture of truth, fiction, and comic book promotion you THOUGHT I wrote.
I graduated from high school in 1965, at the age of 16. I should not have been that young, but when I started school, in September of 1953, I was five years old. My late mother, Alice Brennan, was the chief officer of the Swamp School Board, which would become one of the last K8, kindergarten through eighth grade, school districts in the state.
Anyway, Miss Nolan, the teacher, saw that I could already read, plus, I suppose she thought she could get some points with my parents, so she put me immediately into the first grade at age five. So I graduated at the age of sixteen, from Sanilac County, future home of itinerant drifter, Timothy McVeigh. The Sanilac County official who signed my high school diploma was Henry Hill, a John Birch Society member and organizer.
Rodding around with a case. In the country, in the sixties, that was what you did. Unfortunately, for me, there was a deadly footnote to this: I was no longer quite sure of who it was locally that I knew, and who I did not know. Dr. E's injections, combined with post-hypnotic suggestion, had produced a deadly selective amnesia; other witnesses, along with our alleged cousin, Howard Leslie Brennan, would manifest these symptoms at the Warren Commission hearings.
"Casey, get in the car! We've got some beer!"
Anyone could say it, and I'd get in. Except, if they were friends from over about a month before, I wasn't sure if I knew them or not. Had to fake it, with the names and everything. I actually didn't know.
Apparently, David Ferrie had been cruising 136, with a carload of bodyguards, the day I decided to walk to Avoca. Out ancestral home was about four and a half miles from Avoca, at the corner of Bricker and Brennan roads, almost. Now it's a park, named after my late mother, and my adoptive paternal grandfather, James Brennan, who adopted my late father, in 1906. But then it was a home, sort of, and that day, I had decided to walk to Avoca, and see what was going on.
David Ferrie must have been close, watching. He must have suspected that I would somehow catch a ride to Avoca, while I was walking, because he was there waiting, attracting attention, long before I got there.
They can fail. They can err.
There was a market, a mom-and-pop grocery at the eastermost end of town, on the left, as you head toward Beard's Hills. Bill Brown owned it; I guess he thought he was some kind of local do-gooder; you know, keeps track of the people, help them out and all. He was watching David Ferrie; he told me afterwards, he was watching David Ferrie cruise up and down the street.
I open the beer and start swigging. I am only a boy now, but I like to have people think of me as a man. There are two men in the front seat; four in the back, including me. It is crowded now, but not unusual for a carload of drunks in Avoca in the 1960s. There is only one problem. I don't really know who any of them are. I am only pretending.
I get in at the left rear passenger door. There are three men to my right. In the middle is David Ferrie.
I swig the beer and the man to my right issues the hypnotic command:
"Don't look at David Ferrie."
And again, for that one brief, hellish moment, I remember:
Again, the operating command, again the enigma, wrapped in a quilt, and sealed in a crate, is lifted up. Again the memory: I initiated the firing in Dallas.
Again the operating command, again the murdered President.
But I try to look away. The man to my right is adept. He can lean forward when I do, so I cannot see David Ferrie's face.
"You don't remember me, do you?" David Ferrie asks.
I smile and say, "A little..."
It is a forced smile and a forced answer, but it is somewhat true.
"Well," David Ferrie says, "I used to come around and bother you when you were a kid."
He pauses.
"But that's over now. I'm going to stop."
He is not lying either. Within a year, David Ferrie will be found dead of an overdose, as the New Orleans District Attorney's 0ffice investigation of the Kennedy assassination convenes.
I don't remember anything else that he says.
But when he lets me out of the car, after we've driven north a ways on Beard Road, toward Beard's Hills, I go over to Bill Brown's market to get a candy bar. Bill Brown is frantic. Bill Brown still thinks I'm a kid.
Damn.
"Do you just get in the car with anybody that comes by?" Bill Brown demands.
I pause sheepishly.
His friend behind the counter says:
"Those guys were cruisin' up 'n' down the street for near on half an hour. They were lookin' for somebody."
"Do you know who those guys were?" Bill Brown asks.
I shake my head, and Brown says: "Better watch who you get in the car with." His sidekick nods authoritatively.
More than three decades later, when I would remember who David Ferrie was, and transcribe those memories in the legend of CONJURELLA, I would be approached, through e-mail, by the second John Wright, John Wright of Port Huron (and, briefly, Lansing) and Pacific Paradise, who would read of CONJURELLA on a newslist. In May of 1999, I e-mail John Wright and tell him that a comic book from Evansville, Indiana, THE STORK #2, is now on sale at The Underworld comic shop on Ann Arbor's famous South University Street. He responds by telling me he is coming to Ann Arbor to see me, and to pick up a copy of The Stork #2, featuring my story, "Conjurella Fever".
Wright, unfortunately, has another claim to media fame. He e-mails me the details, and I find a 1981 article from the ANN ARBOR NEWS, abour Wright's adventures in Lansing, a UPI story entitled "Lansing Man arrested for threats to assassinate Vice President Bush". Excerpts from the article, taken from the April 18, 1981 ANN ARBOR NEWS, follows. As interesting as the fact that Wright's "threats" were clearly coerced, is the fact that an officer surnamed Ruby was sent for this supposed assassin.
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GRAND RAPIDS (UPI) -
...John Wright, 39, was arrested at his Lansing home by Secret Service agents Thursday after he alleged made the threatening comments to Lansing police officers investigating a harassment complaint.
The Secret Service transferred Wright to the Kent County Jail to await arraignment in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan in Grand Rapids.
Officers confiscated two loaded weapons - a scope-equipped rifle and a handgun - from Wright's home...
...When they arrived and knocked, he emerged from the house and closed and padlocked the front door, Sgt. Irv Ruby said.
Asked why he had locked the door, Wright - who lives alone and apparently is unemployed - stated the CIA was blackmailing him and trying to kill him, Ruby said.
...The man then said he was going to kill the director of the CIA and "everyone who's blackmailing me," adding, WHEN PRESSED, [emphasis added] that that included Bush, who served as CIA director under President Nixon.
When asked if he meant the vice president, Wright responded "that's right, he is the vice president isn't he, but I'm not going to say that," Ruby said.
Ruby said Wright went on to discuss a number of unusual matters, including UFOs, before the Secret Service was contacted and he was arrested.
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The following is fiction, for those of you who demanded it, for those of you who said CONJURELLA must be fiction. THIS is fiction, and comic book promotion:
Wright arrives at the Ann Arbor Greyhound station in the summer of 1999. My meeting with him is prearranged. He must wait at the bus station well after closing, till I arrive to meet him, after work at The Earle, the restaurant where I now work as a dishwasher. I punch out, pocket the Smith & Wesson 9MM, and walk. As it rattles dangerously in the pocket of my sport coat, I can hear the MK-ULTRA operating command:
DON'T KNOW THAT THE GUN IS THERE.
And I do not know. There is, in my heart, only anticipation, only anticipation of a friendship with a fellow Internet conspiracy writer, one who has embraced my work, and written of it at his website, however politically incorrect. Wright leans against the wall of the Greyhound station, in the darkened alcove where the buses arrive. I approach with little cat footsteps, like Sandburg's fog. When he looks up and recognizes me, I smile, and try to extend my hand.
But the MK-ULTRA command says:
IT ISN'T REAL. DRAW AND FIRE. JUST LIKE IN A DREAM. HE'LL LAUGH.
Dangerously, the safety is off on the Smith & Wesson 9MM, as it rolls about in my sport coat. Wright looks up and smiles for but a moment before my hand, involuntarily, comes up with the 9MM. I have only a nanosecond to see the smile fade, before I open fire: one in the heart, two in the head. The sound is ffft, ffft, ffft, as the silencer does its job. Wright, like myself, has claimed through his Pacific Paradise website, of memories of MK-ULTRA experimentation in his youth. They will be his last memories.
The second John Wright slumps upon his concrete deathbed like a rag doll. As he does, I pocket the gun and turn and walk away, and already the gunfire is a memory lost, like that day in Dallas. The MK-ULTRA command says:
JOHN WRIGHT DIDN'T SHOW UP AT THE BUS STATION. YOU NEVER SAW HIM.
And I walk down Huron St., humming an old song, sad that my e-mail friend never showed up in Ann Arbor to see me, as he promised.
THE END
Promotional Postscript: Optimists will be happy to learn that after the regrettable shooting incident, either comic character VAMPIRELLA showed up, as scripted by T. Casey Brennan in VAMPIRELLA OF DRAKULON #1-3 (Harris Comics, 1996) and VAMPIRELLA: TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE (by T. Casey Brennan & Steve Englehart), see...
http://www.davestevens.com/html/ds_harri2.html
...and bit him on the neck just as he was going out.
OR
roaring twenties Satanist Aleister Crowley showed up, back from the dead...see the T. Casey Brennan story in the Brazilian edition of Crowley's THE EQUINOX, Vol. V, No III, advertised at...
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~realoto/eqv3c.html
...and had him sell his soul to the devil. Either way, now the second John Wright is okay. Sort of. Just avoid him...after dark.
T. Casey Brennan___©2000
