" A little old man— he was five foot seven exactly, Joe remembered from the FBI files— opened the door.
"Here's our new recruit," Simon said simply.
"Come in," John Dillinger said, "and tell me how an asshole egghead like you can help us beat the shit out of those motherfucking Illuminati cocksuckers."
("They fill their books with obscene words, claiming that this is realism," Smiling Jim shouted to the KCUF assembly. "It's not my idea of realism. I don't know anybody who talks in that gutter language they call realism. And they describe every possible perversion, acts against nature that are so outrageous I wouldn't sully this audiences' ears by even mentioning their medical names. Some of them even glorify the criminal and the anarchist. I'd like to see one of these hacks come up to me and look me in the eye and say, 'I didn't do it for money. I was honestly trying to tell a good, honest story that would teach people something of value.' They couldn't say that. The lie would stick in their throats. Who can doubt where they get their orders from? What person in this audience needs to be
told what group is behind this overflowing sewer of smut and filth?")
"May storms and rains and typhoons beat them," Howard sang on. "May Great Cthulhu rise and eat them"
"I got into the JAMs in Michigan City Prison," Dillinger, much relaxed and less arrogant, was saying as he, Simon, and Joe sat in his living room drinking Black Russians.
"And Hoover knew, from the beginning?" Joe asked.
"Of course. I wanted the bastard to know— him and every other high-ranking Mason and Rosicrucian and Illuminati front-man in the country." The old man laughed harshly; except for his unmistakable eyes, which still held the strange blend of irony and intensity that Joe had noted in the 1930s photos, he was indistinguishable from any other elderly fellow who had come to California to enjoy his last years in the sun.
"The first bank job I pulled off, in Daleville, Indiana, I used the line that I always repeated: 'Lie down on the floor and keep calm.' Hoover couldn't miss it. That's been the motto of the JAMs ever since Diogenes the Cynic. He knew no ordinary bank robber would be quoting an obscure Greek philosopher. The reason I repeated it on every heist was just to rub it in and let him know I was taunting him."
"But going back to Michigan City Prison . . ." Joe prompted, sipping his drink.
"Pierpont was the one who initiated me. He'd been with the JAMs for years by then. I was just a kid, you know— in my early twenties — and I had only pulled one job, a real botch. I couldn't understand why I got such a stiff sentence, after the D.A. promised me clemency if I'd plead guilty, and I was kind of bitter. But old Harry Pierpont saw my potential.
"At first I thought he was just another big-house faggot, when he started tracking me around and asking me all sorts of personal questions. But he was what I wanted to become — a successful bankrobber — so I played along. To tell you the truth, I was so horny it wouldn't have mattered if he was a faggot. You have no idea how horny a man gets in prison. That's why Baby-Face Nelson and a lot of other guys preferred to die rather than go back to the big house again. Hell, if you haven't been there, you can't understand. You just don't know what being horny is.
"Well, anyway, after a lot of bull about Jesus and Jehovah and the Bible and all that, Harry just asked me point-blank one day in the prison yard: 'Do you think it's possible there might be a true religion?'
I was about to say, 'Bullshit — like there might be an honest cop,' but something stopped me.
I realized he was dead serious, and a lot might depend on my answer. So I was cautious.
I said, 'If there is, I haven't heard about it.'
And he just came back, real quiet,
'Most people haven't.'
"It was a couple of days afterward that he brought the subject up again. Then, he went right on with it, showed me the Sacred Chao and everything. It took my breath away." The old man's voice trailed off, as he sank into silent memories.
"And it really does go back to Babylon?" Joe prompted.
"I'm not much of an intellectual," Dillinger replied. "Action is my arena. Let Simon tell you that part."
Simon was eager to leap into the breach. "The basic book to confirm our tradition," he said, "is The Seven Tablets of Creation, which is dated at about 2500 B.C. the time of Sargon. It describes how Tiamat and Apsu, the first gods, were coexisting in Mummu, the primordial chaos. Von Junzt, in his Unausprechlichen Kulten, tells how the Justified Ancients of Mummu originated, just about the time the Seven Tablets were inscribed. You see, under Sargon, the chief deity was Marduk. I mean, that was what the high priests gave out to the public — in private, of course, they worshipped lok-Sotot, who became the Yog-Sothoth of the Necronomicon.
But maybe I'm going too fast.
Getting back to the official religion of Marduk, it was based on usury. The priests monopolized the medium of exchange and were able to extract interest for lending it. They also monopolized the land, and extracted tribute for renting it. It was the beginning of what we laughingly call civilization, which has always rested on rent and interest. The old Babylonian con.
"The official story was that Mummu was dead, killed in the war between the gods. When the first anarchist group arose, they called themselves Justified Ancients of Mummu.
Like Lao-Tse and the Taoists in China, they wanted to get rid of usury and monopoly and all the other pigshit of civilization and go back to a natural way of life.
So, grok, they took the supposedly dead god, Mummu, and claimed he was still alive and was actually stronger than all the other gods.
They had a good argument 'Look around,' they'd say, "what do you see most of? Chaos, right? Therefore, the god of Chaos is the strongest god, and is still alive.'
"Of course, we got our ass whipped good. We were just no match for the Illuminati in those days.
Didn't have a clue, about how they performed their 'miracles,' for instance. So we got our asses whipped again, in Greece, when the JAMs got started again, as part of the Cynic movement.
By the tune the whole thing was happening again in Rome — usury and monopoly and the whole bag of tricks — the truce took place.
The Justified Ancients became part of the Illuminati, a special group still keeping our own name, but taking orders from the Five.
We thought we'd humanize them, like the anarchists who stayed in SDS after last year.
And so it went until 1888. Then Cecil Rhodes started the Circle of Initiates and the big schism occurred. Every meeting would have a faction of Rhodes boys carrying signs that said 'Kick out the JAMs!' It was the parting of the ways. They just didn't trust us — or maybe they were afraid of being humanized.
"But we had learned a lot by our long participation in the Illuminati conspiracy, and now we know how to fight them with their own weapons."
"Fuck their weapons," Dillinger interrupted. "I like to fight them with my weapons."
"You are behind the big unsolved bank robberies of the last few years—"
"Sure. Just in the planning, though. I'm too old to vault over tellers' cages and carry on like I did back in the thirties."
"John is also fighting on another front," Simon interjected.
Dillinger laughed. "Yes," he said. "I'm the president of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. You've seen them— 'If it's not an LBJP it's NOT an L.P.'?
"Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus?" Joe exclaimed. "My God, you put out the best rock in the country! The only rock a man my age can listen to without wincing."
"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications — Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?"
"Yes," Joe said absently. "I thought it was nut literature. It's so hard," he added, "to grasp the whole picture."
"You'll get used to it," Simon smiled. "It just takes awhile to sink in."
"Who really did shoot John Kennedy?" Joe asked.
"I'm sorry," Dillinger said. "You're only a private in our army right now. Not cleared for that kind of information yet. I'll just tell you this much: his initials are H.C. — so don't trust anybody with those initials, no matter where or how you meet him."
"He's being fair," Simon told Joe. "You'll appreciate it later."
"And advancement is rapid," Dillinger added, "and the rewards are beyond your present understanding."
"Give him a hint, John," Simon suggested with an anticipatory grin. "Tell him how you got out of Crown Point Jail."
"I've read two versions of that," Joe said. "Most of the sources claim you carved a fake gun out of balsa wood and dyed it black with your shoe polish. Toland's book says that you made that story up and leaked it out to protect the man who really managed the break for you —a federal judge that you
bribed to smuggle in a real gun. Which was it?"
"Neither," Dillinger said. "Crown Point was known as the 'escape-proof jail' before I crashed out of it, and, believe me, it deserved the name. Do you want to know how I did it? I walked through the walls. Listen. . . ."
HARE KRISHNA HARE HARE
The sun beat down on the town of Daleville on July 17, 1933, like a rain of fire.
Motoring down the main street, John Dillinger felt the perspiration on his neck. Although he had been paroled three weeks earlier, he was still pale from his nine years in prison, and the sunlight was cruel on his almost albino-tinted skin.
I'm going to have to walk through that door all by myself, he thought. All alone.
And fighting every kind of fear and guilt that has been beaten into me from childhood on.
'The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology," Pierpont had said. "Remember that. We've got the Second Law of Thermodynamics on our side.
Chaos steadily increases, all over the universe.
All 'law and order' is a kind of temporary accident."
But I've got to walk through that door all alone. The Secret of the Five depends on it. This time it's my turn to be the goat.
Pierpont and Van Meter and the others were still back in Michigan City Prison. It was all in his hands—being the first one paroled, he had to raise the money to finance the jail-break that would get the others out. Then, having proved himself, he would be taught the JAM "miracles."
The bank suddenly loomed before him. Too suddenly. His heart skipped a beat.
Then, calmly, he drove his Chevrolet coupe over to the curb and parked.
I should have prepared better. This car should be souped-up like the ones Clyde Barrow uses. Well, I'll know that the next time.
He left his hands on the steering wheel and squeezed, hard. He took a deep breath and repeated the
Formula: "23 Skidoo."
It helped a little — but he still wanted to get the hell out of there. He wanted to drive straight back to his father's farm in Mooresville and find a job and learn all the straight things again, how to kiss a boss's ass and how to look the parole officer straight in the eye and be like everybody else.
But everybody else was an Illuminati puppet and didn't know it. He did know it and was going to liberate himself.
Hell, that's what a younger John Dillinger thought back in 1924—except that he hadn't known about the Illuminati or the JAMs, then— but he was trying to liberate himself, in his own way, when he held up that grocer. And what did it lead to? Nine years of misery and monotony and almost going mad with horniness in a stinking cell.
It'll be nine years more if I fuck up today.
"The spirit of Mummu is stronger than the Illuminati's technology."
He got out of the car and forced his feet and legs to move and he walked straight for the bank door.
"Fuck it," he said, "23 Skidoo."
He walked through the do or— and then he did the thing the bank tellers remembered after and told the police. He reached up and adjusted his straw hat to the most dapper and debonair angle — and he grinned.
"All right, this is a stick-up," he said clearly, taking out his pistol. "Everybody lie down on the floor and keep calm. None of you will get hurt."
"Oh, God," a female teller gasped, "don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
"Don't worry, honey," John Dillinger said easily, "I don't want to hurt anybody. Just open the vault."
LIKE A TREE THAT'S PLANTED BV THE WATER
"That afternoon," the old man said, "I met Calvin Coolidge in the woods near my father's farm at Mooresville. I gave him the haul — twenty thousand dollars — and it went into the JAM treasury. He gave me twenty tons of hempscript."
"Calvin Coolidge?" Joe Malik exclaimed.
"Well, of course, I knew it wasn't really Calvin Coolidge. But that was the form he chose to appear in. Who or what he really is, I haven't learned yet."
"You met him in Chicago," Simon added gleefully. "He appeared as Billy Graham that time."
"You mean the Dev—"
"Satan," Simon said simply "is just another of the innumerable masks he wears. Behind the mask is a man and behind the man is another mask. It's all a matter of merging multiverses, remember? Don't look for an Ultimate Reality. There isn't any."
"Then this person— this being—" Joe protested, "really is supernatural—"
"Supernatural, schmupernatural," Simon grimaced.
"You're still like the people in that mathematical parable about Flatland. You can only think in categories of right and left, and I'm talking about up and down, so you say 'supernatural.' There is no 'supernatural'; there are just more dimensions than you are accustomed to, that's all. If you were living in Flatland and I stepped out of your plane into a plane at a different angle, it would look to you as if I vanished 'into thin air.' Somebody looking down from our three-dimensional viewpoint would see me going off at a tangent from you, and would wonder why you were acting so distressed and surprised about it."
"But the flash of light—"
"It's an energy transformation," Simon explained patiently. "Look, the reason you can only think three-dimensionally is because there are only three directions in cubical space. That's why the Illuminati— and some of the kids they've allowed to become partially illuminized lately— refer to ordinary science as 'square.' The basic energy-vector coordinates of Universe are five-dimensional — of course — and can best be visualized in terms of the five sides of the Illuminati Pyramid of Egypt."
"Five sides?" Joe objected. "It only has four."
"You're ignoring the bottom."
"Oh. Go on."
"Energy is always triangular, not cubical. Bucky Fuller has a line on this, by the way: he's the first one outside the Illuminati to discover it independently. The basic energy transformation we're concerned with is the one Fuller hasn't discovered yet, although he's said he's looking for it— the one that ties Mind into the matter-energy continuum. The pyramid is the key. You take a man in the lotus position and draw lines from his pineal gland— the Third Eye, as the Buddhists call it— to his two knees, and from each knee to the other, and this is what you get. . . ." Simon sketched rapidly in his notepad and passed it over to Joe:
"When the Pineal Eye opens — after fear is conquered; that is, after your first Bad Trip — you can control the energy field entirely," Simon went on. "An Irish Illuminatus of the ninth century, Scotus Ergina, put it very simply— in five words, of course —when he said Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt:
'All things that are, are lights.' Einstein also put it into five symbols when he wrote e = mc2?. The actual transformation doesn't require atomic reactors and all that jazz, once you learn how to control the mind vectors, but it always lets off one hell of a flash of light, as John can tell you."
"Damn near blinded me and knocked me on my ass, that first time in the woods," Dillinger agreed.
"But I was sure glad to know the trick. I was never afraid of being arrested after that, 'cause I could always walk out of any jail they put me in. That's why the Feds decided to kill me, you know. It was embarrassing to always find me wandering around loose again a few days after they locked me up.
You know the background to the Biograph Theatre scam— they killed three guys in Chicago, without giving them a chance to surrender, because they thought I was one of them. Well, those three were all wanted in New York for armed robbery, so nobody criticized the cops much for that caper.
But then up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, they shot three very respectable businessmen, and one of them went and died, and Hoover's Heroes caught all sorts of crap from the newspapers. So I knew where it was at; I could never again surrender and walk away a few days later. We had to produce a body for them." The old man looked suddenly sad. "There was one possibility that we hated to think about. . . . But, luckily it didn't come to that. The gimmick we finally worked out was perfect."
"And everything really follows the Fives' law?" Joe asked.
"More than you guess," Dillinger remarked blandly.
"Even when you're dealing with social fields," Simon added.
"We've run studies of cultures where the Illuminati were not in control, and they still follow Weishaupt's five-stage pattern: Verwirrung, zweitracht, Unordnung, Beamtenherrschaft and Grummet. That is: chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy, and aftermath. America right now is between the fourth and fifth stages. Or you might say that the older generation is mostly in Beamtenherrschaft and the younger generation is moving into Grummet rapidly."
Joe took another stiff drink and shook his head. "But why do they leave so much of it out in the open? I mean, not merely the really shocking things you told me about the Bugs Bunny cartoons, but putting the pyramid on the dollar bill where everybody sees it almost every day—"
"Hell," Simon said, "look what Beethoven did when Weishaupt illuminated him. Went right home and wrote the Fifth Symphony. You know how it begins: da-da-da-DUM. Morse code for V—the Roman numeral for five. Right out in the open, as you say. It amuses the devil out of them to confirm their low opinion of the rest of humanity by putting things up front like that and watching how almost everybody misses it.
Of course, if somebody doesn't miss something, they recruit him right away. Look at Genesis: 'lux fiat' —right on the first page. They do it all the time. The Pentagon Building. '23 Skidoo.' The lyrics of rock songs like 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' — how obvious can you get?
Melville was one of the most outrageous of the bunch; the very first sentence of Moby Dick tells you he's a disciple of Hassan i Sabbah, but you cant find a single Melville scholar who has followed up that lead— in spite of Ahab being a truncated anagram of Sabbah. He even tells you, again and again, directly and indirectly, that Moby Dick and Leviathan are the same creature, and that Moby Dick is often seen at the same time in two different parts of The World, but not one reader in a million groks what he's hinting at.
There's a whole chapter on whiteness and why white is really more terrifying than black; all the critics miss the point"
" 'Osiris is a black god,' " Joe quoted.
"Right on! You're going to advance fast," Simon said enthusiastically. "In fact, J think it's time for you to get off the verbal level and really confront your own 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' — your own lady Isis."
"Yes," Dillinger said. "The Leif Erikson is laying offshore near California right now; Hagbard is running some hashish to the students at Berkeley. He's got a new black chick in his crew who plays the Lucy role extremely well. We'll have him send her ashore for the Rite. I suggest that you two drive up to the Norton Lodge in Frisco and I'll arrange for her to meet you there."
"I don't like dealing with Hagbard," Simon said. "He's a right-wing nut, and so is his whole gang."
"He's one of the best allies we have against the Illuminati," Dillinger said. "Besides, I want to exchange some hempscript for some of his flaxscript. Right now, the Mad Dog bunch won't accept anything but flaxscript —they think Nixon is really going to knock the bottom out of the hemp market. And you know what they do with Federal Reserve notes. Every time they get one, they burn it. Instant demurrage, they call it."
"Puerile," Simon pronounced. "It will take decades to undermine the Fed that way."
"Well," Dillinger said, "Those are the kinds of people we have to deal with. The JAMs can't do it all alone, you know."
"Sure," Simon shrugged. "But it bugs me." He stood up and put his drink on the table.
"Let's go," he said to Joe. "You're going to be illuminized."
Dillinger accompanied them to the door, then leaned close to Joe and said, "A word of advice about the Rite."
"Yes?"
Dillinger lowered his voice. "Lie down on the floor and keep calm," he said, and his old, impudent grin flashed wickedly.
