JACKIE OF THE OLD PLACES AND THE DEATH OF BARON GEORGE
DEMOHRENSCHILDT
by T. Casey Brennan

Copyright 2000 by T. Casey Brennan

                    This is the story of Jackie of the Old Places.  No,  this is the story of how I sold my soul to the devil in 1958; my mother wrote gothic novels and was a little crazy, so she made me read the Lord's Prayer backward in front of a black candle on Ember Day.  I was nine years old, I think, but she gave me up to the Old Ones.  She called them up from the Old Places. And it was so easy.
                    I grew up in an old farmhouse in Michigan; born in 1948, my earliest memories were of books so old, that  now they would be considered quite archaic: children's books of cloth pages, illustrated with grim, unsmiling visages of Mother Goose or Aesop.  Books of old stories and legends with pages so brittle, that corners flaked off at the turning, books made for the children of my father's era, when students were routinely beaten, sometimes to death, by their teachers.  Legend has it that the Brennan family came to Michigan from Canada, when a teacher had inflicted fatal punishment on one of their children.  The child was forced repeatedly, in the course of a day, to stand in front of a hot furnace, then to stand outside in the brutal Canadian cold of winter, again and again.  The child died of pneumonia.  The Brennans, seeing this as part of a death plot against Irish Catholics, left Canada.
                    Old Books.  Collections of stories and essays by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Voltaire, and Cotton Mather.  And sometimes, not here, but in the OLD Places, where THEY wait (coiled serpents who once ruled, for Aeons before man, they ruled, now they long to take back their world), beneath the Earth, sometimes only a heartbeat away, there, and only there, I beheld the Necronomicon.
                   So, I guess it was a book like that where my mother, soon-to-be Gothic novelist, Alice Brennan, found the story about how to sell your soul to the devil by  reading the Lord's Prayer backward on, I remember the book called it, "Amber Day".  So my mother decided it  must be EMBER Day, which has something to do with Lent, I think, I forget what.  So, on Ember Day, she took a copy of the Our Father, and started typing it out backward.  Then she stopped, and half-smiled and  half-cried, and said:
                    "Casey, I don't want to do this!"
                    But she kept typing anyway, and I read, "Nema, live morf su reviled..."  On Ember Day.  And here it is, almost half a century later, and I have a GOOD job emptying garbage at the Taco Bell, plus they're going to give me some more hours now.

                    But this was the story of Jackie of the Old Places. She summoned me up from Hell.  A decade ago, I had been in a homeless shelter.  Now, T. Casey Brennan Internet fan pages spring up constantly.  One of them is by a brilliant 13 year old computer student named Jackie.  Of all the T. Casey Brennan fan page posters, she is the most attentive, and the most skilled.  Shesends news that enemy nations have accessed her T. Casey Brennan fan page repeatedly: Iran, Iraq, Cuba. I immediately gather emails for government officials in all three countries, and try to defect, not so much because I support their form of government, but because...
                    Because when I was thirteen, I was being prepared for the blood.  I had started school in 1953 in the first grade at five, so, in 1961, I entered Peck High School, in Sanilac County, later to become infamous as the alleged origin of the Oklahoma City bombing plot.
                    At 13, I had already become enamored by the pamphlets provided me, sometimes in huge stacks, by my school board official parents' right-wing political friends. These ranged from the rabble rousing populism of Myron Fagan and the Cinema Educational Guild to the scholarly essays of Dr. Fred G. Schwartz of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, which shared offices with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans.
                    Later, in my senior year, Peck teacher Robert Losie would teach a class called "Communism", based on the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade textbook, YOU CAN TRUST THE COMMUNISTS - TO BE COMMUNISTS by Fred G. Schwartz.

At 13, it was eight years since, drugged and  terrified, I had first met David Ferrie; two years since I had been taken before the hypnotist J.H. Earnshaw, D.O.; and another two years before those men would kidnap me from the Yale, Michigan airport on November 22, 1963, and force me to fire from the sixth floor storage room of the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas.

In 1996, I wrote of that Hell in a story called  "Conjurella", fictional because only some of the names  had been changed.  It had spurred, not government  investigations, as SHOULD have been, but numerous T. Casey Brennan Internet fan pages, from the world over,  reminiscent of my former fame as an award winning writer for the Warren comics, CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA, in the 1970s.

Among these pages, is one by Jackie, the teen-age genius.  She writes on her page and in her emails of mad rock stars and vampires.  In dreams, I wonder: Is she, like me, of the Old Places?  Did she, like me, call them up from Hell?  Did she, like me, feel their yearning, those dark cold serpents who ruled before man, reveling in the endless darkness, breathing methane gas, now yearning to take back their ancient home, always waiting, always hoping, to take back the Earth in serpent glory?  Did she, like me, smell their sulphurous breath, and chant, ABOMINATIONS, WALK, COME FORTH FROM THE OLD PLACES, TAKE BACK THE WORLD, TAKE BACK THE NIGHT?

In the last month of the last year of the twentieth century, I write JACKIE OF THE OLD PLACES, four years after the world had accepted "Conjurella" as art, but dismissed it as testimony.

So this is the story of Jackie of the Old Places, the REAL Jackie, who put up the great T. Casey Brennan fan page, who promoted me and said I had a fan club at her school, the REAL Jackie, who, at 13, posted my old comics from the 1970s, and tried to help me to defect  to Iran, Iraq, or Cuba, the REAL Jackie, who, only in dreams, had given herself up on Amber Day to the serpents of the Old Places.

T he REAL Jackie, not the one in "Conjurella", not the one in David Ferrie's gunsight, as I collapsed to the floor after firing my single, only shot, trying desperately to push the braced rifle out the window as I fell, as my tormented father shouted through Ferrie's gunfire:

"Don't shoot Jackie, Ferrie!  Don't shoot Jackie, or I'll kill ya right now!"

Somewhere on the Internet, I read that Baron George deMohrenschildt had something to do with a charity  that had something to do with Jackie Kennedy.  He had known Lee, and testified before the Warren Commission. Of my memory of him, demolished by Dr. Earnshaw's amnesiac injections, only this remains: he was a basicly good man, caught up by circumstance, not  because of the Kennedy assassination, because none of us had anything to do with it (well, except for me,  and I was so drugged and hypnotized and terrorized  that I didn't even know what I was doing), but because of something else.

                    DeMohrenschildt was of Russian birth.  The war years  had concealed the murderous purges of Stalin, as well as the true extent of the Nazi death camps.  While Dresden burned under saturation bombing, railroad lines leading millions into camps like Auschwitz and Dachau went untouched by Allied attacks.  And while Stalin carried out a similar persecution and murder of millions - some in Russia, and in the rebellious Soviet occupied Baltic states, chose to favor the temporary rescue from Stalin's troops that a Nazi victory might bring.  Like my late mother's agent, Kurt Singer, served the O.S.S., deMohrenschildt served the Nazi intelligence apparatus.  Those Russians who made this choice must be judged in the context of history; Stalin massacred whole villages - to a Russian whose parents had been killed by Stalin, those two deaths carried greater meaning than the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

                    DeMohrenschildt: I forgive you, now, too late, in the year 2000, more than twenty years after I have, unwittingly, brought about your death.  Serpents of the Old Places, hear them: grant them peace, grant them rest.

                    From the mid-'70s to the late '70s, I lived at Xanadu Cooperative House, at 1811 Washtenaw Avenue, in Ann Arbor.  So it must have been around then that it happened.  One day, Daddy said: "George deMohrenschildt says you're an awfully smart boy."

                    Daddy shouldn't have said that.  He knows he shouldn't have said that.  Has he forgotten what David Ferrie
                    and Dr. Earnshaw told us about talking about the people in Dallas?

                    The CIA's MK-ULTRA trauma conditioning sets in.  I must scare Daddy now, the way he scared me when I was a little boy.  I must not remember about my single shot, must not know, not yet.  I say:

                    "Don't ever say that to me again!"

                    Daddy smirks, and is silent.

                    But it doesn't work.

                    This is the second memory of JFK witness, Baron George deMohrenschildt.

                    I first moved into Xanadu in 1974, but the memory of helping Dr. Earnshaw kill Baron deMohrenschildt must
                    have come in the later years, sometime before I left for the last time, in, I think, 1980.

                    1973 had killed my mother and taken away the two girlfriends that I wrote about in the "Conjurella"
                    sequel, "Conjurella Messiah: Necronomicon Monks".  The automobile accident that had claimed my mother's life,  had left my father a temporary cripple.  I was 25 then, and alcoholism and irresponsibility and artistic idealism had left me the mental age of 13, the age  that Jackie is now.

                    So it was then that I met The Russian Girl, who wasn't a girl at all, but was almost three decades older than
                    me.  She and her husband offered to help.  They brought food, did laundry, and offered consolation.
                    The Russian Girl taught me how to make pancakes for my dad; when I lost her love, I lost that talent, and I
                    never can again.

                    One day, she was helping me wash dishes, and chattering about nonsense, and I couldn't take it any
                    more, so I pushed her into a corner and kissed her. She was old, and wrinkled, and gorgeous.  She said for
                    two cents, she'd leave her husband and marry me, but I didn't have two cents, and she left me.

                    It still hurts, even though now, she's probably in a nursing home, and hobbles along on a walker, trying to
                    find her false teeth.  But I'd still hold her again, the way I did...

                    The way I did the last time.

                    At first, we were so bold as to hug and kiss in the next room, as, nearby, her unsuspecting husband
                    discussed sports and hunting with my bed-ridden dad, as I played the radio, loud.  Then, in October of
                    1973, she took me to the Detroit Triple Fan Fair comic convention, where, as a celebrity guest, I was
                    provided with a free table to sell all of my comic  book collection, and move to Ann Arbor, or perish.

                    Though my support at Warren Publishing Company had weakened, in October of 1973, I was still a comic book star, and fellow comic book stars like Barry Smith and Steve Skeates rallied about me.  My dealer's table did well, but in a few weeks, I was broke in Ann Arbor, and I called again for the support of The Russian Girl.

                    She met me in the bus station in Detroit, with a  handful of tens and twenties, and a clipped out ad for
                    a place advertising cheap nightly rooms, called,  ironicly, the Camelot Hotel.  Broken, penniless except
                    for her money, homeless, half-orphaned, I held her again, told her that I would love her forever, and
                    then, the tears came, as she broke away, slowly, gently.

                    That was the last kiss of The Russian Girl.  Nearby, a middle-age woman looked sidelong at me i amusement as I wept.  Lost and bewildered, I followed her exact  directions on city buses to the rundown cockroach-ridden Camelot Hotel, somewhere in Detroit's sprawling ghetto.  In the morning, I returned to Ann

                    Arbor, with The Russian Girl's money.  By the summer of 1974, I had entered Xanadu Co-op in Ann Arbor, a
                    combination of student housing and hippie commune, still intent on joining with the leftist campus
                    activists, still intent on concealing my rightist past.  There, I attempted to fraternize with campus

                    Maoists and Trotskyites, learned the Hebrew Qabalah, and adopted a mode of thinking which termed my former friends, the conservatives, "neo-Nazis".  All in all, students or not, the co-opers were a seedy, drunken, drug-infested lot, except for an ever changing contingent of upper class New York Jewish girls, whom I admired greatly, and were, through some strange quirk of fate, the only Xanaduvians who were ever nice to me.

                    DeMohrenschildt, meanwhile, had beaten up his wife,  been in and out of a mental institution, and
                    reportedly had, in his last days, given himself over to the care of a mysterious doctor much like Dr. J.H.
                    Earnshaw.  In those days, I traveled back and forth  repeatedly to stay at my father's house in Avoca,
                    Michigan, alone with him now, no longer with the comforting arms of The Russian Girl.  It must have
                    been during one of those trips that it happened.

                    Earnshaw, still intent on imposing CIA MK-ULTRA mind-control conditioning on me, though we had long
                    since killed John Kennedy, took me into his office again.

                    "You don't like Nazis now?" he said.

                    Drunken by his poisonous injections again, I launch into a slurring rant.

                    "Come on," he says, "There's something I want you to do."

                    In the car, on the way, they program me with the words that will trigger the post-hypnotic commands that will
                    end the life of the now chronicly suicidal Baron George deMohrenschildt.

                    They take me to a phone booth and dial deMohrenschildt's number.  DeMohrenschildt answers, to hear from me: he always was.  But there is no time to think now, no more time than there was in Dallas  when David Ferrie ordered me to fire, no hope of defying them, no hope of being free of MK-ULTRA.

                    "DIRTY NAZI BASTARD!" I say, "I HATE YOUR GUTS!  KILL YOURSELF NOW!  764321 DIE!  DIE, NAZI BASTARD, DIE!"

                    I learn later that deMohrenschildt has killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head, while taping a
                    television soap opera, so there would be no doubt that it was suicide and not murder, just before he was to
                    testify before the House Assassinations Committee on the Kennedy assassination.

                    But this was not the story of deMohrenschildt who had been forced into the service of the Nazis, not the
                    story of the upper class Jewish girls I loved so much at Xanadu, not the story of The Russian Girl and her
                    last kiss.  This was the story of Jackie of the Old Places, not the Jackie that deMohrenschildt knew, but
                    the little girl who put up the T. Casey Brennan fan page, and said I had a fan club at her school.  Not
                    because I ever really knew her, not because I ever met her or heard her voice, but because, somehow, I
                    believed she was my last hope to solve the Kennedy assassination for the world.  And in dreams, in
                    dreams, in dreams, she is with me.

                                         The End

 CONJURELLA FRANKENHEAD & THE 827 MYSTERY  

          or HOW THE WONDER WOMAN GIRL LOOKED
                       
                         by

                 T. Casey Brennan

This is the story of the music of the abominations.

This is the story of 827, which was a magical place where you simply could not fall off your skateboard,
no matter how bad you were, or how hard you tried, where the men were all punk rockers, where the girls
were all wonders of the defiant culture of the 21st century, as radiant, bold, and inexplicable as the
newschoolers code of art which they followed. 

This is a skateboarding story about how I joined a band and got hit by a car, and another story about how
I sold my soul to the devil.  In the 1970s, I had written Vampirella stories now immortalized in the 1992 Harris Publications trade paperback, VAMPIRELLA: TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE.  I did not create Vampirella, but rather, inherited her from the late Archie Goodwin, who had infused an initially satirical comic with overtones of Lovecraft, a "Cult of Chaos"
which mimicked the black magic cult of pulp fiction, a cult some swore, was real.

Long ago, great serpents we now call dinosaurs ruled the earth.  As we all know from reading comic books
and various hippie religious scriptures, these did not all die out before man appeared.  So, in those days,
when both man and serpent walked the earth, the legend of Solomon appeared, claimed by both believers in god,
and black magicians.  And Solomon banished them in a day and a night, telling them, "After these signs, you
may return.  First the crucifixion of the Christ, then the stoning of the prophet, then the revelation of the
golden tablets, then plague shall sweep the Earth, then shall man's reign upon the world be ended, then
shall the old ones return.  Then shall they come forth from the old places, then shall they swoop down from
the skies, then shall they spew forth in slime from the earth, then shall they come up from the sea.  Then
shall their serpent yearning be ended; then shall they rule eternal."

Some of the great serpents fled to the stars, some went into the great caverns of the earth, some went
into Einsteinian paralell worlds, always to yearn for the day that they would return and take back their
ancestral home.  They are gone, but not gone, and when they return, their absence shall be but a moment.  It
shall seem that they were always here, that they never left, like an errant lover that returns to our
welcoming arms.  As we all know, sometimes they are far beneath the surface, but sometimes in the Earth
only inches beneath our feet, yearning, always yearning, to claw up, to return, to reclaim their
serpent glory.  As we all know, they lurk in dark, secret places, waiting.

So the Vampirella series had tied my name irrevocably to the Lovecraftian pulp mythos, and, knowing that, I
had played that card in the late 1990s, as I began writing a series of autobiographical stories that
would allege my own, and my family's, unwilling association with the JFK assassination, under the
direction of the CIA's now outlawed and exposed MK-ULTRA program.  The first of the stories, called
CONJURELLA, can be found at:

http://www.geocities.com/avalard/brennan/conjurella.html

Though devoid of occult references, it had been followed by a host of sequels, all recalling the
pseudo-Lovecraftian philosophy which my past association with Vampirella had validated.  And
suddenly, my comic book work of the 1970s had taken on a new importance, as I booked such varied appearances
as the Motor City Comic Con in Novi, Michigan and the X-Zone nationally syndicated radio program.

So on February 1st, 2003, in one world, I was heading for an 8:00 pm appointment, at 5:00 pm, with the 1990s
Ann Arbor underground band, Frankenhead, where the extra time could be utilized for further planning on
the Frankenhead CD we had planned, with me, the comic book writer in a state of lateral expansion, doing
cover vocals for rock classics.  In another world, I was painfully early to see Frankenhead guitarist Jim
McGee, he would not be home, or consider it an imposition to come just after 5:00 for an appointment
at 8:00 pm.

But in still another world, which was the real one, I was struck by a car at 5:00 pm on Washtenaw, as I
entered Ypsi on foot.  I was hurled through the air and knocked to the pavement, regaining consciousness
only as I was being taken into an ambulance.  Had I been on a skateboard, and had mastered the ability to
push off, I would have cleared her left front bumper in time.  But, in the real world, I had time only to
make one leap before her hood caught me in the abdomen in mid-air.

A long time ago, on another trip, before everything happened in Dallas, before I was ever a comic book
writer, when Mama and Daddy were still alive, we went to Detroit.  We didn't go to Detroit very often, since
we lived in the country in Avoca, Michigan, so it was a big trip.  My late parents were paragons of The
Peter Principle in action.  The Peter Principle, from a how-to-succeed-in-business paperback, said that
people are always promoted to a position they can't quite handle, then stay there.  So, while living a
life of rural poverty, my late parents both became nationally known authors and local school board
officials.

So it must have been before the Kennedy assassination that we made the trip to Detroit to see the doughnut
place, since Mama and Daddy were still nice, which they weren't, for long, after Dr. E got a hold of
them.  Dr. E had used both my parents, known to the world as paperback author Alice Brennan, and St. Clair
County, Michigan, Board of Education member, William James Brennan, for his experiments.  Dr. E had pills
for us all to take, they were bad pills that made us either pass out or think we could do whatever we
wanted.  Eventually, they made Mama and Daddy as bad as Dr. E himself, but that hadn't happened yet.

So we all went to Detroit to see the doughnut place.  We lived in the country then, and sometimes, at night,
we could look into the distance and see a dim glow, almost like a sunset.  Daddy looked at that glow once,
and said "That's Detroit!".  And it was.

The doughnut place covered, I think, three floors.  A big sign on the wall said: "The optimist sees only the
doughnut; the pessimist sees only the hole."

We kept going back - I don't know why, and my dad got to like the guy who owned it.  Or maybe he knew him to
begin with, I don't remember which. 

So in the other trip, the new trip, I had been hit by the car after months of preparations for a kind of
merger with Frankenhead.  Initially, I had intended only a horror comic book based on the band's name.
Jim McGee and I had produced ashcan editions of a FRANKENHEAD comic, reminiscent of my old Warren
stories,posted in part, at:

http://www.geocities.com/frankenheadlives

Warren was the publisher of CREEPY, EERIE, and VAMPIRELLA -- the latter, best known for a 1996
made-for-television movie starring Talisa Soto and Roger Daltrey of The Who.

But at the May 2003 party, at the Novi Doubletree Hotel, Jim and I performed a karaoke rendition of WILD
THING on stage.  Everyone loved it, and everyone knew of the tie-in to the collectors item comics I had
autographed all week-end.  Ironically, though now penniless and unemployed, fans flocked to dealers
tables at that convention, bringing me a variety of items to autograph, paying as much as twenty dollars for items ranging from vintage Warren comics containing my work, to the more recent trade paperback, VAMPIRELLA: TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE, by T. Casey Brennan and Steve Englehart.

But May had brought an end to my stay with FRANKENHEAD, and I found myself taken in by the
magical commune known as 827.  Those early weeks had found me barely able to walk after being hit by the
car, and sometimes I had to be helped to my feet.  But at other times, I was able to stand on a skateboard in
827's deep carpet and do knee-bends, or do drift warily down 827's inclined sidewalk, still unable to
turn or push off  -- capable only in my stance and my ability to stay on.  In better days, I had spread my
legs instantly in a karate stance, once, at a party, while bailing.  But at 827, I had taken my only fall
not on my feet, from a skateboard -- I fell into an upholstered chair, in a sitting position.   

That was the magic of 827.  827 was an aura, a bold reflection of a culture somehow both sociopathic and
ethical, a culture where skateboarding was a revolutionary act, where "goth" had become a
subculture, not the vague cross-section of shoppers who had purchased my Vampirella comics, and my late
mother's gothic novels in decades past.  It was one such novel, CASTLE MIRAGE by Alice Brennan, that had
been reprinted in Leicester by a company known both as Ulverscroft and F.A. Thorpe, that launched the
CONJURELLA autobiographical series in which I alleged my own, and my late parents' unwilling involvement in
the Kennedy assassination.  Propelling me back into the public eye, I launched into a variety of
convention appearances, radio interviews, and write-ups in fan publications and websites, including
the Austin, Texas rock magazine SALT FOR SLUGS, which included me in their Winter 1998 issue.

So this was how it all ended.  The day before the black-out, 827 closed and I was never to see it again.
 Instead, on August 14, 2003, I sat on a porch with Jim McGee of FRANKENHEAD in a darkened Ypsilanti, not
far from where I had been hit by a car.  A kind of glowing fog hung low on the darkened streets, and
roaming bands of dazed zombies walked about aimlessly with flashlights.  Always the band's composition was
the same -- white youths, a pretty girl in the lead, and seven to eight able-bodied male companions.  All
this, of course, had followed a day of unbearable heat, and a sky glowing unnaturally reddish-purple,
almost ultraviolet in its hue, but somehow beyond that in its odd blasphemy of sunlight.

As the night wore on, the bands become more hostile, and, as I sat on the porch and watched, flashlight
wars would develop with repetitive shouts of "Take that flashlight off of me!" and "Not until you do!".
All of that, and 827 was no more.

And, in the old times, the nice doughnut man closed up forever.  Then Mama and Daddy made a deal with Dr. E,
like I said in CONJURELLA, and they got me involved like a stooge passing out right-wing pamphlets in Peck
High School, in Sanilac County, Michigan, then they drugged me and kidnapped me and made me fire first
from the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas.  Later, I wrote about it, and started
autographing my old comic books like I hadn't done since the '70s, then, at last, entered the magical
commune of 827.

And then, long afterward, I went to visit the man who had begun it all, who had begun 827.  The Wonder Woman
girl was there, and this was how she looked:

The Wonder Woman girl wears a veneer of intellectuality like Wonder Woman's secret identity,
Diana Prince.  It is not that it is not genuine, it is only that it conceals, but for a moment, an exquisite
delicacy of features, a lithe form, a face adorned with a wavy curl of dark hair that falls down upon her
face on the right, though her hair is pulled back and tied.  Somehow, that one strand of hair has burst
loose, and now adorns her.  As the evening progresses, more and more strands of dark wavy hair join their
lustrous companion, and it is a slow motion cascade, as, one by one, the strands fall along the side of her
face.

                 The End

 CONJURELLA KRISHNA: SRILA KASIPADA
                 
           Or:  How I Became A REAL Hippie Guru!
                                                    
                                                      
                          by

                                        
                   T. Casey Brennan


Copyright 2003 by T. Casey Brennan

This, of course, is a sequel to the earlier CONJURELLA
stories  posted at:

http://www.geocities.com/avalard/brennan/contents.html
http://tcasey.inri.net
http://pw1.netcom.com/~mthorn/0brennan.htm
http://www.konformist.com/mkkafe/tcasey/tcasey.htm

This is the story of two dreams, two Hare Krishna gurus, and the Kennedy assassination.  In the period
from late 1983 till mid 1985, I had left my adoptedhome of Ann Arbor, Michigan and journeyed to
California.  In the 1970s, I had been known as apopular comic book writer, my work appearing in such
titles as Warren comics' CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA, DC's HOUSE OF MYSTERY, Archie's RED CIRCLE SORCERY and a few scattered small press publishers such as POWER COMICS, FANTASY QUARTERLY, and the Canadian ORB.  But 1983 had found me destitute, and, with the help of my friends, I traveled to California, hoping for more professional validation.  Favors from a power structure which now just barely accepted me had been
slim; California had brought me a few scattered radio and television interviews, a comic con guest appearance at a building in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, and a write-up in the U.N. World Health Organization magazine WORLD HEALTH, published in every major language in the world, October 1983 issue, page 30...look for it at your local UN office, your public library, or your university's public health library -- a follow-up report on me appeared in WORLD HEALTH,
January-February 1986, page 9.  Then WORLD HEALTH magazine editor Peter Ozorio had been supportive of my
purported work, as an award winning comic book writer, to ban smoking in comic books.  Later, in an interview
in COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine's excellent history of Warren Publishing Company, THE WARREN COMPANION, I
would admit that it had all been a desperate publicity stunt.  But then, in the mid 80s, it had been a
vehicle for keeping my name and work alive, in a decade before the internet took hold, when the fans of
my comic books had all but forgotten me.  

Though this is a story, not only of dreams, but of drugs, cults, and murder, it must be prefaced with
background information on my work.  The 90s had produced not only my trade paperback, VAMPIRELLA:
TRANSCENDING TIME & SPACE, a compilation of Vampirella stories by myself and Steve Englehart, but also my
story of my adventures at the Berkeley Krishna Temple, whose title was a take-off on the title of my book:
CONJURELLA FEVER: TRANSCENDING TIME & MK-ULTRA.    The story had been published twice, in a comic book called THE STORK, back when editor Ray Earles had been intent on making THE STORK look like an underground comic, and in the Winter 1998 issue of an Austin, Texas based rock and roll magazine called SALT FOR SLUGS, carried
internationally by Tower Records.  March 1984 had found me penniless in Berkeley; I appeared at the
Krishna Temple there, on 2334 Stuart St., suitcases in hand, and nowhere to go.  I had run the gamut seeking
money from friends and political contacts; Peter Ozorio had arranged for a check to be sent to me c/o
General Delivery, Berkeley, from a United Nations account in Zurich, based on the first WORLD HEALTH
article.  The check had only a serial number for the issuer, and an illegible signature, but had been sent
via airmail with a signed United Nations voucher; I had had no difficulty in cashing the check at the Best
of Two Worlds comic book store in Berkeley, who knew me by name and professional reputation, but by now, it
was long gone.  In that bygone era, the Krishna people, besieged by scandals, had begun the long
process of excommunicating their ill-behaved gurus, and, strangely, had initiated the process by ousting
the least offensive of them, saving the worst for last.  The first two excommunicated gurus, Srila
Hansadutta and Srila Jayatirtha, were denizens of the San Francisco Bay, as I was now, quite unwillingly.  I
would have traded an arm to get back to Michigan then, but no one was buying human arms, so I stayed, quite
miserable and mistreated, in the temple of poor Hansadutta, whom I later maligned for his escapades,
in the aforementioned FEVER story.  In that story, I had omitted my brief adventure with the Krishna
people's only LSD guru, Srila Jayatirtha, much like my mentors, saving the worst for last.  Jayatirtha had,
it was said, originally been a protege of Timothy Leary.  According to legend, he had renounced LSD
before accepting the Krishna guruship, then later, resumed the practice, resulting in his eventual
excommunication.

But this was the tale of two dreams.  In 1996, I had written a story called "Castle Mirage: the Prelude -
Conjurella", alleging my own, and my late parents' unwilling involvement with the JFK assassination.  It
was posted immediately by several conspiracy sites, inspiring dozens of Internet fan pages about me, and a
host of sequels, of which the Hansadutta story, CONJURELLA FEVER, was only one of many.  Ironically,
the original CONJURELLA story did not see print off the Net, till it appeared with title and contents
shortened, in the St. Louis-based political conspiracy magazine, STEAM SHOVEL PRESS, issue #19, summer 2002
issue, as "JFK Redux - Castle Mirage" on page 21.  So that was the first dream.  The second must come
later in this story, after I tell what I left out in CONJURELLA FEVER, after I tell of my meeting with
Jayatirtha, and his eventual murder.  Unlike the first dream, the second may not have happened at all.
Unlike the first dream, the second may be only a joke among my many fans and followers, and, like my
ill-fated ban-smoking-in-comics campaign, only an excuse for further professional exposure.  Unlike the
first dream, the second may be blasphemy; unlike the first dream, the second may be the lowest form of
self-promotion; unlike the first dream, the second may be truly, truly evil.  So, for now, I will wait in the
telling of the second dream.  And for now, I will tell only the facts of my meeting with Jayatirtha.

It was on Thursdays, as I recall, that Jayatirtha's disciples came to the Berkeley Temple of Srila
Hansadutta, where, by early 1985, I was firmly entrenched as dishwasher, semi-unwelcome guest, and
impoverished semi-follower of Srila Hansadutta.  Except for ingrained rowdiness, the Hansadutta
devotees, as the Krishna people call their followers, were not significantly distinguishable in their
philosophy from their former parent group, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness or
ISKCON.  Hansadutta's followers were aware of their guru's inconsistencies, apologized for him, and
followed him anyway, still attempting to promote among their supporters the ISKCON position condemning
intoxication of any kind.  Hansadutta had regretted his inability to follow that position; Jayatirtha had
not.  Jayatirtha had been defiant, and, following his removal from his formal position as ISKCON guru, had
taken to selling marijuana and LSD at HIS temple, across the Golden Gate Bridge, in mountainous Marin
County.

So it was on Thursdays that they came, I think.  Like the Hansadutta devotees, they danced and chanted
before the deities, the magical statues of Krishna on the temple's altar.  The deities had not been invented
by the Hare Krishna people, the system had been created thousands of years before, in India, when
Hindu priests began the tradition of calling the presence of Krishna into statues of his likeness.  To
Christian missionaries in India, it had been idolatry, but to T. Casey Brennan, abandoned and impoverished in
Berkeley, the beaming statues had been his only source of inspiration in a cult which, it seemed, had set
themselves at variance not only with him, but with the rest of the world as well.  The Berkeley devotees
frequently hated each other, hated the stifling rules and regulations of ISKCON, and, at times, hated their
own guru, but loved the deities.  Consequently, the presence of the Jayatirtha devotees before our temple
altar was not always considered proper, but I did not give a damn.  I needed a secondary refuge besides the
Berkeley Temple -- I advanced on the Jayatirtha cult, hoping to shift my loyalties, as I had done so many
times before.

A Berkeley Hansadutta devotee named Dave had taken to the Jayatirtha followers before I had, and they to
him.  So much so, that they had offered him Initiation.  Initiation, in the Krishna people, works
like this:  the trainee is initially a Bhakta, and is known by this tile, followed by his name, in this
case, Bhakta Dave.  But when he receives Initiation, he is given a Sanskrit name, and renounces his former
life -- in this case, Bhakta Dave was henceforth to be known as Deva Das.  

So on that day in 1985, a carload of Berkeley devotees embarked, with only minimal support from their
comrades in Hansadutta's temple, to accompany Bhakta Dave on his initiation, and to smoke marijuana and
take LSD in the process.  Along the way, someone said, Srila Hansadutta was thrown out of ISKCON because he
was into guns, Srila Jayatirtha because he was into LSD.  I could not let that conversational opportunity
slip away; T. Casey Brennan, former writer of comic book stories known for  their quality and idealism in
the '70s, was now a bitter cynic.  

"I like both guns and LSD," I said, "So I like them both.  Maybe they should get together on it -- start
the 'LSD-GUN NEWSLETTER'."  I think, only Bhakta Dave laughed.  But then, that was the way of most of my
jokes in Berkeley.  We stopped along the way, to check tires or something.  Bhakta Dave and I walked to the
back of the car.  He took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one up quite professionally, and offered it to
me.  I took it, and we both lit up, as the other devotees in the car looked around scowling.  

We crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and reached Jayatirtha's Temple in the mountains.  Somewhere, we
had crossed an expanse of smoke-belching factories.  One of the girls had commented that she disliked the
smell of the factories.  But this was 1985, and I was intent on portraying myself as a conservative.
"Myself, I don't like the smell of the unemployed, homeless people that are left when the factories close
down," I said.  That didn't get much of a laugh either.  That same year, I appeared on KFCB's
CALIFORNIA TONIGHT show, a religious talk show from Concord, clad in suit and tie, with shoulder-length
California bleach-blond hair, made that way from constantly walking around in the sun (usually to avoid
the Berkeley Krishna people) -- host Ron Haus had given me the biggest build-up I'd ever received on a
TV talk show, noting letters of support from Art Linkletter and the aforementioned UN WHO articles --
and called for a return to the comic book burnings of the 1950s, as inspired by religious groups and a
crusading psychologist of that bygone era.  It had been my last TV appearance, as of this writing, in
2003, and was last broadcast, I believe, on Valentine's day of 1985.

But here I was no star, no celebrity; here I was the least of the Berkeley Krishna people, accompanying
Bhakta Dave for his initiation by a rival guru, the now legendary and murdered Jayatirtha.

We parked and entered the huge mansion.  My first impression was that it was bitterly cold, as the
mountains in Marin usually are in winter.  Jayatirtha had not yet arrived, but we approached the altar.
Krishna's statutes were upon that altar, as was a photograph of Jayatirtha, but so also were statues of
Jesus and Mary, in defiance of ISKCON regulations forbidding such things.  I turned to one of the other
devotees and said jokingly, "These are dangerous men," though, in fact, I was impressed by their soft-spoken
gentleness.  It was that T. Casey Brennan cynicism again, and again, no one understood, and no one
laughed.

At some point, we were each provided with The Sacrament:  LSD on rice paper, embossed with the word
YES.  Some weed was smoked, and periodically, I asked for more of the pleasant rice paper LSD.  The devotees
complied, tearing the YES squares in half with some difficulty, supplying me with half a hit at a time,
each time I asked.

Gradually, due to the LSD, my mountainous surroundings, and the diverse nature of Jayatirtha's
followers, I began to get the impression that I had entered some strange fairy tale kingdom.  A hunchback
arrived, some children, some Indian-born Hindus, and assorted Berkeley hippies, all in the bitter,
shivering cold.  It was night now, and Dave and I walked onto a wooden porch overlooking the majestic
Marin landscape.  At last, Jayatirtha arrived, apologized for the cold, and said it would be better
when the fire sacrifice began.  Though young in appearance, he had long gray hair, also in defiance of
standard Hare Krishna custom, which preferred the shaven-headed-with-ponytail look.  Jayatirtha was, it
was said, Jewish by birth, and a British citizen.  Though expelled by ISKCON, his tremendous charisma had
caused Temples to spring up in England and India and elsewhere in Asia, following him still, whatever his
course.  

Bhakta Dave, of course, had the seat of honor, but was not handling his LSD as well as I, or the others.
Later, though I was not present, he told me that, as he sat down, he suddenly shouted "They're going to
kill me!" and bolted for the door.  "I was scared," he told me later, back at the Berkeley Temple.  Still
with that 1985-style T. Casey Brennan cynicism, I'd replied, "If I'd known that, I would have pulled a gun
and shot you in the back."   But the gentle Jayatirtha had said, "You have to come back and sit down now,
Dave.  We're going to begin."  And it had worked.

Now, not to be self-deprecating, but most of my life, I've been just a tad out of synch with what I'm
actually supposed to do.  The Jayatirtha initiation was no exception, and the LSD had nothing to do with
it.  My last television appearance had been in 1985 in Concord, California, but my first had been in the
1950s in Columbus, Ohio, on a children's show called THE FIVE AND TEN SHOW, so named because you had to be
between ages five and ten to be on it.  A row of children, including me, were supposed to do a dance
with motions to "jump down, turn around, pick a bale of hay".   I did all that, but completely out of synch
with my child colleagues, and the last scene found me still spinning awkwardly, as the rest of the line of
children bowed and left the stage.  The Jayatirtha fire sacrifice experience was similar.  On an altar
fire of burning aromatic wood, we were instructed, on signal, to throw a handful of rice on the fire and
chant "SVA-HA!"; it's Sanskit, I didn't know what it meant, I still don't.    So each time the devotees
shouted and threw the rice, I waited five seconds and did the same after them, and each time, they all
turned to look at me contemptuously, as had the other children on THE FIVE AND TEN SHOW.

As we had been given the LSD, we had been told proudly that the building had once been the old Owsley LSD
factory, since reopened.  Owsley, like Leary, had been one of the early LSD pioneers.   So I was tripping
heavily by the time of Jayatirtha's sermon, as he finalized the initiation of Bhakta Dave, who, at some
point, had become Deva Das.  Jayatirtha told Dave that now that he was receiving initiation, the most
important thing was that he be a good person.  Jayatirtha paused eloquently, and added "Now that
isn't always possible.  But, always to try..."

I shall never forget those words or that sermon.  After the initiation, we went to Jayatirtha's other
mansion, and Jayatirtha led us in a song of his own making, "Temple of Peace".  I was deeply moved.  In
the morning, we returned, and our driver was still feeling the effects of the LSD, speeding down the
treacherous mountain highway at a breakneck pace.  Dave, now, Deva Das, and I tried to calm him by
nervously invoking the philosophy.  "Well," I said, my cynicism replaced by mortal fear as the high-on-LSD
driver negotiated the mountain curves at 90 or 95, "The devotees don't care about speed; no, the devotees
have a more relaxed kind of lifestyle..."  Deva Das chimed in, "No, the devotees don't care about speed,
hare krishna, hare krishna, krishna krishna, hare hare, hare rama, hare rama, rama rama, hare hare..."

But the driver was chanting, "I love speed, I love SPEED!"  I never thought I'd make it through alive.
But I did.  But Jayatirtha didn't.

Later that year, in the fall, I believe, the Jayatirtha temples made national news when they were
raided, and LSD, marijuana, and cocaine, plus a half million dollars in British and American currency were
seized.  The story was carried in USA TODAY, and the San Francisco papers, and safely back in Ann Arbor, I
saw footage of a hooded Jayatirtha in custody on television.  Amazingly, there was no trial to follow,
and no mention of the raid in the later books and articles chronicling criminality in the Krishna
movement, though numerous pages are devoted to his LSD usage and sales.  The raid and its consequences have
simply ceased to be.  History has been rewritten, even by ISKCON's self-professed staunchest critics.
Several years later, Jayatirtha was found murdered in England, his head cut off, and a knife driven into his
chest.
    
A berserk former devotee was arrested and committed to a mental institution.  No credibility was assigned to
the theory that Jayatirtha had been murdered by the CIA for becoming too indiscreet with the LSD they had
helped prepare for him at CIA LSD laboratories...the raid was not the reason, after all, it had never
happened.  Those who persisted in this account were told what was, they said, the REAL story.  In hushed
tones, they told what they said was the SECRET truth; the berserk devotee who had killed Jayatirtha had been
inspired, not by the CIA, but by Jayatirtha's WIFE, whom he was in the process of leaving.  And after the
CIA blew Kurt Cobain's head off for the exact same reason, they told the exact same story about HIS wife.
 The names were changed, but the story the same, but then, I said there was a second dream, didn't I?

So this was the second dream.   Jayatirtha's followers told a bit different story about his excommunication
than did ISKCON.   The Hare Krishna movement had been begun in America by an aged guru, a Hindu by training,
though he despised that word, preferring the more specific term, Vaisnava.  He was known as His Divine
Grace, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, usually called, simply, Prabhupada.  They Jayatirtha devotees
told me that Prabhupada had appointed Jayatirtha as his sole successor, a position not easily refuted,
since his papers allegedly denoting succession upon his death, now appear, even in the eyes of the most
impartial observers, to be, at best, unclear, or, at worst, forged or altered.  

In the second dream, there are two initiations taking place, one on this plane, one on a higher plane of
existence.  Here, Bhakta Dave was being initiated as Deva Das.  But in the higher plane, the gentle,
eloquent Jayatirtha tells the cynical, self-promoting T. Casey Brennan, "When I am murdered, you must take
up my place, and tell what you know on the Kennedy assassination.  When I am murdered, you must become
Srila Kasipada, in direct succession to those who came before us."

"You are Srila Kasipada," Jayatirtha said, in the dream, "Meat-eater, fornicator, blasphemer, the last
and the worst of Krishna's gurus."

And, you know?  I guess I am.  And that was the story of the two dreams, how Bhakta Dave became Deva Das,
and Srila Jayatirtha became a murder victim, and the cynical, blasphemous T. Casey Brennan became Srila
Kasipada, the last and the worst of the Krishna gurus.

                                              The End

LINKS

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Conspiracy_theories/Brennan--Conjurella/Brennan.html
http://www.geocities.com/avalard/brennan/contents.html
http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.com/conspire.html#brennan
http://www.davestevens.com/html/ds_harri2.html
http://www.konformist.com/mkkafe/tcasey/tcasey.htm
http://www.geocities.com/satanicreds/ltr-clinton.html