The 49th Anniversary of having to ask
WHO KILLED JFK, MLK & RFK
WHO KILLED JFK, MLK & RFK
| Should it be a surprise that nobody really cares who killed JFK-MLK-RFK anymore, much less even believes they were killed? For all we know the astronauts we supposedly watched walk on the moon all those years ago could just as easily have been gliding across a lot in Studio City. And even if we thought we saw it with our own eyes on live TV, for all we know, Jack Ruby never killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Department on November 23, 1963 . . .Not to dwell on who among us actually saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden before it was stuffed into a body bag and went for a swim wit’ de’ fishes? |
Wild Billy Hicks always believed that right before the National Archives officially opens up the files on the assassinations, some multinational conglomerate will come up with the bright idea of selling us a gigantic Holiday Healing Special as a desperate effort to unite our fragmented country. They’ll lump the three, maybe four or more dates together (by the time you read this), subtly hyping the new Martyrs Day holiday (with corresponding sales), before the Speilberg-or-Cameron-of-the-day signs on to bring it commercially to life, and gives the world this stupendous full length special government sanctioned animated 3D musical, which will not so subtly be called The Three Assassinations.
The Three Assassinations. or “3A in 3D”, as the hipper pundits will call it, will be more like an opera than a Broadway musical, though it will open on Broadway at the same time it opens on the Big Screen, Pay For View and Streaming Internet TV (for the lifestyle shut-ins). This Special will depict the three major popular inspirational political leaders of the 1960s — JFK, MLK & RFK — as traitors to America who had to be eliminated in order to save the country. The alleged assassins, of course, will be portrayed as the good guys; brave faceless FBI and CIA agents aided by wily mob warriors looking to redeem their heinous lifestyles in order to protect truth, beauty and the American way of life from something. . . Whatever that turns out to be, whoever gets the job will have to sell the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan-Sirhan were heroes, right? Or maybe they’ll create a generic composite of the quintessential lone gunman that the Lone Gunman Queens of corporate publishing and broadcasting have worked so hard to pass off on us ever since November 22, 1963. In tabloid lingo, he would have to be the perfect prototype American loser, someone a whole lot less complex than Lee Harvey Oswald. Someone like Shooter, as we’re told he’s been called since he grew up in Waycross, Georgia, Muskegon, Michigan, Scottsdale, Arizona, or Dirt Scrabble, Missouri, would fit the bill as a perfect drifter straight out of Central Casting, though a lot closer to 31 than the 21-year-old delivery boy Stein told police had poisoned him during the first hectic days following the so-called “summer of love.”
| The alleged assassins will be portrayed as the good guys; brave faceless FBI and CIA agents aided by wily mob warriors looking to redeem their heinous lifestyles in order to protect truth, beauty and the American way of life from something. . . Whatever that turns out to be, whoever gets the job will have to sell the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan-Sirhan were heroes, right? Or maybe they’ll create a generic composite of the quintessential lone gunman that the Lone Gunman Queens of corporate publishing and broadcasting have worked so hard to pass off on us ever since November 22, 1963. |
Looking back on it, Stein’s contradictory description of the scumbag who delivered poisoned bar-b-que to him from Loeb’s was text-book discombobulation, alternately recalling Shooter as a short, young, tall, old white delivery guy, with stringy long blond hair he could tell had been peroxided because of the roots coming out…of his virtually nondescript, almost invisible – even if you talked to him – persona. Whatever he really looked like or what his true age was, Shooter himself would have agreed with the mythology he was almost invisible and had never really imprinted any changes with age, but had just kept starting over before anything of any consequence could settle into his essence. If, in fact, he even had an essence.
In short, from the very first to the very last pimply-faced time he got silly-wall-banging-drunk in the privacy of his own lonesome dungeon he would wear Clarence Frogman Henry’s 1956 monster hit on his forlorn face, croaking to the empty mirror, ”Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo, I ain’t got a mudder, I ain’t got a fadder, I ain’t got a sister, not even a brot’er. . . I’m lonely frog, I aint got a home, . .” Yet despite this fucked-with inner woo-woo, he still managed to resolutely face his emptiness head on, because he assumed that the normal state of his being was always on the verge of becoming something somewhere he would never reach, as someone he would never become.
| Oswald was so connected on the front & back ends of so many U.S. intelligence scenes, from being the patsy fronting the built-in lie of FAIR PLAY FOR CUBA while actually being in the middle of the joint mob-CIA (Marcello-RFK) plots to assassinate Castro, to so many other different positions in both Intel & Counter-Intel that he was both sarcastically & reverentially put in the same category as his childhood hero Herbert (I Led Three Lives) Philbrick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Led_Three_Lives) and referred to in some quarters as The Great Oz when they looked at the scope of his spread - from being named in Francis Gary Powers’ published 1962 memoir as the unknown American intelligence soldier who had defected to Russia and was responsible for the U-2 Pilot’s plane being shot down. . .over a full year before anyone outside intelligence supposedly ever heard of him. |
The good thing was if you were in the shadows like Shooter, you’d never have to worry about being embarrassed by coming out. Much less would ever have had the gall to even think of himself anywhere else, and certainly not as a public persona, like Oswald, for instance, who the world obviously assigned the job of being THE BIG WHACK’s poster boy. In fact, way before JFK happened, Oswald was so connected on the front & back ends of so many scenes, from being the patsy fronting the built-in lie of FAIR PLAY FOR CUBA while actually being in the middle of the joint mob-CIA (Marcello-RFK) plots to assassinate Castro, to so many other different positions in both Intel & Counter-Intel that he was both sarcastically & reverentially put in the same category as his childhood hero Herbert (I Led Three Lives) Philbrick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Led_Three_Lives) and referred to in some quarters as The Great Oz when they looked at the scope of his spread, from being named in Francis Gary Powers’ 1962 memoir as the unknown American intelligence soldier who had defected to Russia and was responsible for the U-2 Pilot’s plane being shot down, before coming back to America with his Russian wife and publically going back and forth between New Orleans and Dallas so many times it was hard to tell whether he was establishing an alibi or setting himself or someone like him up to take the rap for whatever would go down. Either way, in the end, he or his double was always being seen and photographed in Mexico (trying to get a visa to get into Cuba) and always seemed to be in at least two other different places at the same time, until he, or somebody masquerading as him or his fabled double got it wrong, like one of them supposedly did that day in the Book Depository – even if it was really the real Double-Oz who fucked-up where the so-called rifle of record and someone else’s separate fingerprints were left to be found in the sniper’s nest — in certain behind closed door circles, his Russian connection was heavily mocked when he was dubbed the much less flattering moniker Schmucknik.
http://humansarefree.com/2011/07/john-f-kennedy-assassinated-by-lyndon-b.html
Shooter, on the other hand, thought of himself as a pure behind-the-scenes type of guy, though he wasn’t an educated Mac Wallace behind-the-scenes type of guy. There was just no way he could have run for, much less been elected, President of Student Union at the University of Texas, like Mac, or could picture himself hobnobbing with LBJ, like Mac – even (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79lOKs0Kr_Y) sleeping with LBJ’s wild-child younger sister Josefa before whacking her so-called fiancé (blackmailing LBJ) golf pro John Kinser, who Mac claimed, not-coincidentally, was sleeping with his own wife, as his alibi for murdering him. According to Billie Sol Estes’ lawyer, then Mac even arranged for Josefa to get whacked from a so-called stroke (without an autopsy) to shut up her big mouth, coincidentally within a week of the real stroke that permanently silenced the Hardy boy mob prince Kennedy brothers’ father (former Prohibition bootlegging partner of New York mob boss Frank Costello) Big Joe Kennedy from telling them what to do (finally freeing them to be on their own for the first time), and then followed that hit up with bullseyes on Henry Marshall, George Krutilek, Harold Orr, Ike Rogers, Coleman Wade and finally, if you believe the buzz (and the fingerprints that were identified as Mac’s 27-years later), the tip of the schvantz, John F. Kennedy himself, on November 22nd, 1963, just two hours before a New Orleans jury threw out Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s three year attempt to deport Louisiana-Texas mob boss Carlos Marcello, who just happened to be partnered with his father’s former business partner in crime, New York mob boss Frank Costello, to run his Louisiana-Texas gambling businesses for him.
| Shooter wasn’t an educated Mac Wallace behind-the-scenes type of guy. There was just no way he could have run for, much less been elected, President of Student Union at the University of Texas, like Mac, or could picture himself hobnobbing with LBJ, like Mac – even (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79lOKs0Kr_Y) sleeping with LBJ’s wild-child younger sister Josefa before whacking her so-called fiancé (blackmailing LBJ) golf pro John Kinser, who Mac claimed, not-coincidentally, was sleeping with his own wife, as his alibi for murdering him. According to Billie Sol Estes’ lawyer, then Mac even arranged for Josefa to get whacked from a so-called stroke (without an autopsy) to shut up her big mouth, coincidentally within a week of the real stroke that permanently silenced the Hardy boy mob prince Kennedy brothers’ father (former Prohibition bootlegging partner of New York mob boss Frank Costello) Big Joe Kennedy from telling them what to do (finally freeing them to be on their own for the first time)… |
Incestuous irony aside, if all those unlikely connections are not enough for you, I know what you’re thinking out there: Why is it that while those charges against LBJ’s own personal button boy are on a public record and can’t be disputed that they actually happened, they’ve never been mentioned even once in all the numerous volumes of either Robert Cairo or Doris Kearns Goodwin’s highly-praised bestselling LBJ bios? Or is never acknowledged as historical fact in polite ostrich circle jerks, and probably never will be unless someone high up on the old rotten ruling totem poll particularly wants to utilize this available (but buried from public view) evidence (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=890IJ-L4c8c) to get somebody else who’s fallen out of favor with one segment or another of the ruling elite of the day. Like it or not, that kind of justice is just part of the trickle down price you have to pay for a stable fixed society, whether it’s under corporate-government or La Cosa Nostra control. Look at it as one of those situations where rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper covers an awful lot, but always leaves a trail behind unless it’s covered with enough green and threats to keep a lid on all the loose lips out there who’ve got more than just all that stone cold Billy Sol Estes evidence waiting to sink Lab’s ship if anything happens to him. But even with that cat’s cradle cloak of protection in place, the great mystery about Mac, with the undeniable kind of accreditation given to him behind the scenes, was not how he got away with all the whacks he allegedly did for his boss, but in a country that thrives more on tooting the legend than owning up to reality, why he didn’t become at least as famous as Billy the Kid, instead of becoming the almost anonymous invisible whisper whose unidentified fingerprint turned up to be the only one they ever found in “the sniper’s nest” of the Texas Book Depository, but wasn’t identified as his until 25-years later, in 1998, 27-years after the exhaust in his car was rigged, causing him to fall asleep at the wheel, and conveniently die in “a car accident” while driving through Pittsburg, Texas, on the way to his daughter’s house for Thanksgiving Day dinner.
Though he would have given almost anything to work for Carlos Marcello himself, that kind of limited bio was not only much more detailed than Shooter would have ever felt comfortable leaving behind, even if it was less detailed than the bloody tracks moonlighting rent-a-cop Eugene Thane Cesar left when he was standing directly behind RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and became the most likely candidate to fire two shots at an upward angle into the back of the Senator from New York’s head, with the kind of cold detachment that might’ve come from one of Marilyn’s old boyfriends looking for revenge – if Hollywood wrote the script for that kind of low-rent passion. As if that that kind of in-the- gutter gossip was ever whispered as the reason the part-time ACE security guard with the uncanny knack for beating lie-detector tests, was hired to protect RFK. Cesar’s normal 9-to-5 had a high security clearance at Lockheed Aircraft, which stood to make enormous hay as long as the war in Vietnam kept going on. He was a rabid right-winger, with out-front racist views, a died-in-the-wool anti-Kennedy boy who openly supported George Wallace; just the perfect weekend bodyguard some incompetent or never-found double-agent inside the RFK campaign conspired to hire to protect their next President of the United States of Camelot. Cesar was by his own admission standing right there in the rush of victory with Bobby, grabbing the Senator by the arm and leading him through the victorious election night crowd in the Hotel, into and right through the pantry. Once, when Bobby tried to turn in a different direction, Cesar, by his own admission, pulled him back in line, and in plain view of Bobby’s celebrating staffers, held on to the Senator’s arm and guided him – though nobody in the room who wasn’t part of invisible-team-Cesar could remember seeing him at all, even after the shooting started, when he squatted down behind Bobby almost like a catcher hunching down behind home plate. Later, Cesar admitted publicly that his body was so close to Bobby that nobody could have stood between them. And of course, when Sirhan Sirhan, blindly staggering 6-to-8 feet in front of the victorious Senator, started wildly shooting up the joint, scattering the crowd like a drunk Saturday night Manchurian cowboy waiting for one of the Earp bros to bop him on the head with a Buntline Special and take him out of his Tombstone limelight, Cesar pulled a .22 caliber handgun out of his pocket - he left an unfired .38 caliber in his holster, and some people now claim, in a beautiful example of the-dog-ate-my-homeworkism, Cesar was so close to Bobby, he couldn’t help shooting him in the back of the head (with his hidden Catch 22) and killed him, of course, by accident while trying to defend him from Sirhan’s attack. And since the LAPD never asked for the gun, chalk the whole unsolved assassination up to good old American incompetence if you’re too incompetent to read between the lines, yourself. From there, just say Bobby went back to meet his big brother Jack up in some little bardo shack — way due north of Hyannisport, and just at the bottom of the Hollywood sign. Since the ubiquitous They already had their prearranged patsy, the LAPD never checked out his .22 to see if it had been fired that night, though admittedly Cesar told Them and the FBI too that he had once owned and sold the same caliber .22 that had killed Bobby long before the murder had taken place. Though he actually sold it several months after the assassination, after he’d walked away, after the hypnotized jockey-junky Sirhan thought he confessed (maybe?), and took the fall for the deed he didn’t know if he did or not. And according to the grapevine, to this day Cesar (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.conspiracy.jfk/zYVDBAWK-iU) remains as free as the not dead Ruby, the real Oz, and the proverbial bird on a wire right behind the Hollywood sign, waiting for its number to be called to sing its guts out in the court of last resort.
| Eugene Thane Cesar, the bloody tracks moonlighting rent-a-cop stood directly behind RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel and became the most likely candidate to fire two shots at an upward angle into the back of the Senator from New York’s head. Cesar’s normal 9-to-5 had a high security clearance at Lockheed Aircraft, which stood to make enormous hay as long as the war in Vietnam kept going on. He was a rabid right-winger, with out-front racist views, a died-in-the-wool anti-Kennedy boy who openly supported George Wallace; just the perfect weekend bodyguard some incompetent or never-found double-agent inside the RFK campaign conspired to hire to protect their next President of the United States of Camelot. Cesar was by his own admission standing right there in the rush of victory with Bobby, and when the shooting started, he squatted down behind Bobby almost like a catcher hunching down behind home plate. And when Sirhan Sirhan, blindly staggering 6-to-8 feet in front of the victorious Senator, started wildly shooting up the joint, scattering the crowd like a drunk Saturday night Manchurian cowboy waiting for one of the Earp bros to bop him on the head with a Buntline Special and take him out of his Tombstone limelight, Cesar pulled a .22 caliber handgun out of his pocket - he left an unfired .38 caliber in his holster, and some people now claim, in a beautiful example of the-dog-ate-my-homeworkism, Cesar was so close to Bobby, he couldn’t help shooting him in the back of the head (with his hidden Catch 22) and killed him, of course, by accident while trying to defend him from Sirhan’s attack. |
The truth in broad strokes was that Bobby and big bro Jack were both dead men walking from the day Papa Joe had that stroke and couldn’t tell them what to do anymore. Between magnetizing the most amazing pussy on the globe into their world, and running their swords through the whole shish-ka-bob, they had more interest in wiping away the stain of their father’s former get-rich-with-partner’s partner, the very same Mafs who had stolen the election from Nixon in Illinois and West Virginia and gotten Jack elected President, than they actually were in evolving Civil Rights or ending the Vietnam war. Not that they were against doing either, but they didn’t want to get trapped in those issues just then. If they had just stopped before they started detouring around the real problems they were suppose to be dealing with they might have escaped through the rabbit hole without having to have prove any of the good intentions they got credit for attached to their motives to, say cover up all their failed plots to kill Fidel, or if Bobby hadn’t become fixated along the way on deporting the tough little Guinea New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, who was so all powerful he defiantly never became a U.S. Citizen – because he didn’t have to if he didn’t fucking want to – so Bobby literally had the Crime Boss of Bosses snatched from the Immigration and Naturalization offices he reported to once a month in New Orleans, on the morning of April 4. 1961, and immediately forcibly put the dazed don on a plane to Guatemala that same day, without allowing him to call either his family or his lawyers first. Or allowing him to have more than the few dollars he had in his pockets to buy his way out of whatever trouble his surprise exodus got him into. It was the ultimate insult to the self-made Sicilian born & earned-on-his-own don, and took him two months of life & death, physical and psychic hardships he never forgot, or forgave the little bastard for, after he was sneaked back into the country. An act that so infuriated the rapid crime busting AG, that Marcello being deported for good became the major thrust of the RFK Justice Department, even as his dark-cloud-of-justice, on-the-mob-take FBI director kept insisting there was no organized crime, no Mafia, no La Cosa Nostra in the United States. Capish?
| If Bobby hadn’t become fixated on deporting the tough little Guinea New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello, literally having the Crime Boss of Bosses snatched from the Immigration and Naturalization offices he reported to once a month in New Orleans, on the morning of April 4. 1961, and immediately forcibly had the dazed don put on a plane to Guatemala that same day, without allowing him to call either his family or his lawyers first history might have been different. . .But in order to get the dirty little rat prick and get away with it, Marcello had to have the head of the snake – Jack himself – killed first. That way, Bobby’s arch enemy, LBJ, would suddenly be in charge. And with Hoover vacuuming all the evidence away as usual, that would be the end of Bobby’s power. Which of course it was. |
Bobby did. Over the next seven years Marcello made dozens of boasting threats that he was going to get him, but in reality was street smart enough to know that if he had the Attorney General whacked, the President would have called out the fucking Calvary! And immediately had the entire Marcello family, all the way back to Palamero, permanently put up against the fucking wall, and disposed, annihilated and evaporated into the ether. So in order to get the dirty little rat prick and get away with it he had to have the head of the snake – Jack himself – killed first. That way, Bobby’s arch enemy, LBJ, would suddenly be in charge. And with Hoover vacuuming all the evidence away as usual, that would be the end of Bobby’s power. Which of course it was. Being shot down again in New Orleans two hours after the President was assassinated in Dallas (odds-on by Mac, not patsy Oz, according to The Secret Big Board in Vegas), when at 3:15 p.m. the Marcello bros watched a jury reenter Judge Christenberry’s courtroom, and listened closely as the foreman read the NOT GUILTY VERDICT on all charges of conspiracy and perjury against them that would have permanently removed them from the country. It was such a total annihilation of the Kennedys in, and on, a-one-fell-swoop-day, that for all anybody knows, the date has become a hidden Maf holiday they still celebrate once a year. But whatever it was, it absolutely took away all the fight Bobby had joyously lived for ever since referring to the rushes he got battling Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa as like, “Playing Notre Dame everyday.”
Even knowing in advance that that kind of fix would cover his ass too, Shooter would’ve rather put one right between his own ears or slit his throat down the middle than to have been cross-examined if he got caught in an embarrassing situation that public. It goes without saying, he was no silver tongued Devil to start with. More the strong silent type. Though you wouldn’t have normally thought it, being a dumbass in this situation helped too. . . Looking back through the prism of his youth out into his future, he had no real political agenda like Cesar, and had no ability to give orders from the top of a chain-of-command like the ex-FBI honcho Frank Holloman, Memphis’ new Teflon Fire and Police Chief of record, who nobody in the mainstream media ever wanted to acknowledge was running the show in 1968. Holloman was an organizational pro of the highest order, who, for all Shooter knew, was even orchestrating his own movements in order to ensure he would never even become a footnote in this saga of gaga; unless of course he fucked up and blew the gig like the double-Oz, and had to be taken out in front of the whole world by some new manifestation of the Ruby slippers before they found out he wasn’t the real him, and could no longer remain the anonymous-and-proud-of-it beer-chugging-patriot next door who dreamed of growing up to win a Heisman Trophy and Congressional Medal of Honor, long past the age either honors were bestowed on nitwits who had never been on a-field-of-battle at all
| Looking back through the prism of his youth out into his future, Shooter had no real political agenda like Cesar, and had no ability to give orders from the top of a chain-of-command like the ex-FBI honcho Frank Holloman, Memphis’ new Teflon Fire and Police Chief of record, who nobody in the mainstream media ever wanted to acknowledge was running the show in 1968. Holloman was an organizational pro of the highest order, who, for all Shooter knew, was even orchestrating his own movements in order to ensure he would never even become a footnote in this saga of gaga; unless of course he fucked up and blew the gig like the double-Oz, and had to be taken out in front of the whole world by some new manifestation of the Ruby slippers before they found out he wasn’t the real him. . . . |
He had given up on those dreams when he joined the Army and almost immediately got busted for stealing another man’s what? He couldn’t remember what they had charged him with stealing, since anything was fair game if you were always innocent like him anyway. Innocent and hopeful and hopeless all at the same time, was what he was, even if he was technically still doing time and playing butt-plug on the yard football team in Yuma for stealing something even more irrelevant than the first time, in case they needed to discredit his testimony over something somewhere sometime down the line in either the near or distant future.
Not knowing his hand-picked fate was waiting to be plugged-in to whatever situation they needed him for, he didn’t think about the possibility of being in two places at the same time then, he just wanted a better life tomorrow than the one he had today, wanted to picture leaving something of value behind for posterity – though he didn’t necessarily want credit out in the world. He just wanted to know he had made a contribution to something other than the emptiness he felt in the pit of his stomach 24 hours a day, every day of his life, though he didn’t even know what that was until a hippie chick put a flower behind his ear, before going down on him until the first rush of any kind he ever had exploded out of the top of his head like a comic book WOW! It was the breathtaking breakthrough blowjob he had been waiting for, but two hours after he came down from the rush he couldn’t remember why it was a breakthrough. He still didn’t know who he was, but had to admit that had to be a little breakthrough because at least for the first time he knew for sure he didn’t know who he was. It was liberating to know he was lost and had always been lost, and would probably always find his comfort lost in the heart of an American Dream he couldn’t be part of. Although he was much too uneducated to call himself a postmodern nowhere man like the one time University of Texas, Long Island University, University of North Carolina esteemed Professor Mac Wallace would be labeled even before he ever came under the umbrella of LBJ, Shooter knew he was born and bred in the bosom of pure nothingness. Unlike the true believing “Be here now” hippies he didn’t have to learn there was nothing else but the moment for him to look forward to. Though he couldn’t explain it, he knew it, and he knew enough to keep his mouth shut instead of arguing with them, because he liked the sex.
Hippies could see God in a turd floating in a toilet bowl. Shooter saw the same thing in the-score-of-the-moment, and nothing more than whatever it brought. If anything was there, he acknowledged there was a God who gave it to him ‘cause he knew from high school football the God fearin’ fans all loved to see a humble boy praising the power and the glory who was responsible for the winning field goal as opposed to hearing what the asshole had to say if he didn’t make the kick, and couldn’t praise God for missing, but instead of saying fuck Him for chocking in the clutch, had to praise the fuck out of the void instead, then speak glowingly about the unknown game plan He has for us all, before asking them to pass the ketchup, while quietly hoping there was something on the plate to put it on. That was as close as he ever got to philosophy, or religion either, for that matter. As for the sex, the one thing he knew about the sex, other than it felt good, was that it wasn’t about love. Even though he had to admit he missed that loving feeling of getting off as much as the next horndog, but he loved it without having to feel he was in-love with it and had to own it; whatever-it-was. All the old hipsters he met knew the stupid fucking hippies always devalued the word every time they went off on the lame All You Need Is love Beatles ya-ya-ya tangent. And then had devalued it even further by calling it “free love.” He was no hipster, not even lose, but too street to be a mundane mortician of mediocrity either, so without vanity or modesty either, knew he didn’t know a thing about love because he’d never gotten any — not from his mean-mouthed mama or busted to Private-No-Class daddy, or even from the dog he’d had before it ran away and got hit by a diesel truck chasing after the ball he had thrown him to fetch – so whatever it was, he knew it wasn’t “free.” Despite this realization, and how much it sent him into a rage every time he heard the expression, he knew he’d cash-in on it whenever it to come his way.
In a reality he copped from some pilgrim he had met out on the road between Las Vegas and Reno, he talked about becoming a master carpenter one day, and then began introducing himself that way to strangers, though he’d never worked at the trade, and had no skills other than being a survivor-of-the-fittest right down to his fucking name. If indeed that was his fucking name. In short, Shooter was going nowhere fast, but not even getting there slow, when he got the orders to relieve his constipation. Sitting in the Starlight Lounge in Birmingham, Alabama, one rainy evening in 1967, he was introduced to a Portuguese honcho named Royal by a con he’d been hired to help escape from the joint nine months earlier in a bakery truck up in Jefferson City, Missouri. Royal was looking for someone like Shooter to drive a ’66 white Mustang to Memphis, and check out the city. Shooter was perfect. In fact, one could even say he had been ordered up for the job in advance. Not that Shooter knew, or even cared, for that matter, what the real deal behind the deal was at the time. Having nothing better to do with what passed for his life than the next offer he got to do anything else than what he was doing, he took $300 to do the job. Once he got there he was supposed to settle in at a predetermined boarding house, get a real job, and wait for either Royal or his con buddy to bring further instructions. Though he wasn’t qualified for much in the way of gainful employment, he could at least hear opportunity knocking when it was knocking on his frontal lobe.
| Hippies could see God in a turd floating in a toilet bowl. Shooter saw the same thing in the-score-of-the-moment, and nothing more than whatever it brought. If anything was there, he acknowledged there was a God who gave it to him ‘cause he knew from high school football the God fearin’ fans all loved to see a humble boy praising the power and the glory who was responsible for the winning field goal as opposed to hearing what the asshole had to say if he didn’t make the kick, and couldn’t praise God for missing, but instead of saying fuck Him for chocking in the clutch, had to praise the fuck out of the void instead, then speak glowingly about the unknown game plan He has for us all, before asking them to pass the ketchup, while quietly hoping there was something on the plate to put it on. That was as close as he ever got to philosophy, or religion either, for that matter. |
Most white men would’ve looked down their nose at the job of delivery boy, but when the old lady at the totally empty Loeb’s Laundry & Bar-b-que on the corner of Belvedere and Madison said she had to close the store in order to make a delivery, he told her he’d make the delivery for her for a couple of bar-b-ques and a Coke — “Bar-b-que is my life,” he told her — and before he even checked in at the boarding house she gave him a fulltime job delivering “Q” for one of the many joints making up Mayor Henry Loeb’s family business. From that promising foundation, it took him less than an hour to find and rent the $29-a-month furnished two-bedroom apartment in the rundown boarding house on Harbert Avenue, a block off Lamar, on the touchhog lowlife ledge of southwest Midtown Memphis. It was the kind of place gravity abhorred, but could do nothing about; for a certain subterranean segment of the population, the place was an underground Mecca. The residents, though hardly ever staying longer than three weeks at a time, sometimes came from as far south as British Dutch Guyana on one hand, and as far north as Nova Scotia on the other. They came fresh off the oil rigs of Morgan City, they made it their first stop out of Parchment Farm, they brought their goods and talents, and did their trading, but most of all they blended in and disappeared from the rest of the world. When it got right down to it, it was the best place Shooter had ever lived, though the first three weeks he was there he didn’t see another resident, even in the halls, or out back parking their cars in the driveway. He only saw the stupid fucking dirty smelly hippies who lived in the big house next door. They waved and flashed him the peace sign every time they saw him while they were out walking their dog. At first he ignored them, but after noting the two hot chicks walking the beast, he started flashing the peace sign back to them.
| Then opportunity knocked again when Royal finally got hold of him – make that Raoul. No, Raul. The patsy couldn’t pronounce his name. Raul laughed when he told Shooter that, and said, “that’s why he’s the patsy.” He told him his job down the line would be to take care of the patsy before the patsy could sing O Sole Mio, but the big job wasn’t quite set up yet. In the meantime, until it was, he had some little warm-up jobs that Associates had asked him to take care of which would begin to prepare Shooter for the real thing |
Eventually, they offered him dope. They always offered dope first. These hippies didn’t even try to sell it; they just wanted to turn him on. If they were high, they wanted everybody else to be high too. If they were getting off listening to music they wanted everybody else to get off listening too. If they were having sex they wanted everybody else to have sex too. Commerce, he was sure, would come later. After he was hooked. But to his surprise, they never tried to sell him anything. Instead, he was invited to dinner every night he came over to get high with them, until at one point — the point they dubbed him “Stoner” — he realized they thought he was one of them, not one of him.
He was almost starting to believe their peace, love, may-the-circle-be-unbroken bullshit himself, but then opportunity knocked again when Royal finally got hold of him – make that Raoul. No, Raul. The patsy couldn’t pronounce his name. Raul laughed when he told him that, and said, “that’s why he’s the patsy.” He told Shooter his job down the line would be to take care of the patsy before the patsy could sing O Sole Mio, but the big job wasn’t quite set up yet. In the meantime, until it was, he had some little warm-up jobs that Associates had asked him to take care of which would begin to prepare Shooter for the real thing. ”Woo-woo-woo woo-woo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97IBY8cQ5fs&feature=artist).
Boris Yaro’s photograph of Robert F. Kennedy lying wounded on the floor immediately after the shooting.
© 1975-2017 Mike Golden
excerpted from the novel
BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP, WENT OVER THE EDGE:
WHO KILLED JFK, MLK & RFK
