The illuminatus! trilogy (47 page)

“Who the hell is this?” Lepke’s voice cried as Drake gently cradled the phone. A few moments later, he completed checking out of the hotel and flew home on the noon flight, to spend five grueling twenty-hour days reorganizing and streamlining his father’s bank. On the fifth night he relaxed and took a young lady of the Lodge family to dance to Ted Weems’s orchestra and
listen to their new young vocalist, Perry Como. Afterwards, he fucked her thirteen to the dozen and seven ways to a Sunday. The next morning, he took out a small book, in which he had systematically listed all the richest families in America, and placed her first name and a check after
Lodge
, as he had done with
Morgan
the week before. A Rockefeller would be next.

He was on the noon flight to New York and spent the day negotiating with Morgan Trust officials. That night he saw a breadline on Fortieth Street and became profoundly agitated. Back in his hotel, he made one of his rare, almost furtive diary entries:

He tore the page out nervously, farted and crumbled it in the ashtray, where he burned it slowly. Then, still agitated, he dialed Mr. Charles Luciano on the phone and said softly, “I am a pretty good pretzler, Winifred. Department of Justice. I even got it from the department.”

“Don’t hang up,” Luciano said softly. “We’ve been waiting to hear from you. Are you still there?”

“Yes,” Drake said carefully, with tight lips and a tighter sphincter.

“Okay,” Mr. Lucky said. “You know about the Illuminati. You know what the Dutchman was trying to say to the police. You even seem to know about the
Liberteri
and Johnnie Dillinger. How much do you want?”

“Everything,” Drake replied. “And you are all going to offer it to me. But not yet. Not tonight.” And he hung up.

(The wheel of time, as the Mayans knew, spins three ways; and just as the earth revolves on its own axis, simultaneously orbits about the sun and at the “same” time trails after the sun as that star traverses the galaxy’s edge, the wheel of time, which is a wheel of
ifs
, is come round again, as Drake’s phone clicks off, to Gruad the Grayface calculating the path of a comet and telling his followers: “See? Even the heavenly bodies are subject to law, and even the lloigor, so must not men and women also be subject to law?” And in a smaller cycle, Semper Cuni Linctus, centurion stationed in a godforsaken outpost of the Empire, listens in boredom as a subaltern tells him excitedly: “That guy we crucified last Friday—people all over town are swearing they’ve seen him walking around. One guy even claims to have put a hand through his side!” Semper Cuni Linctus smiles cynically. “Tell that to the gladiators,” he says. And Albert Stern turns on the gas, takes one last fix, and full of morphine and euphoria, dies slowly, confident that he will always be remembered as the man who shot Dutch Schultz, not knowing that Abe Reles will reveal the truth five years later.)

Camp-town racetrack five miles long
…

During Joe’s second trip on the
Leif Erikson
, they went all the way to Africa, and Hagbard had an important conference with five gorillas. At least, he said afterwards that it was important; Joe couldn’t judge, since the conversation was in Swahili. “They speak some English,” Hagbard explained back on the sub, “but I prefer Swahili, since they’re more eloquent in it and can express more nuances.”

“Are you the first man to teach an ape to speak,” Joe asked, “in addition to your other accomplishments?”

“Oh, not at all,” Hagbard said modestly. “It’s an old Discordian secret. The first person to communicate with a gorilla was an Erisian missionary named Malaclypse the Elder, who was born in Athens and got exiled for opposing the imposition of male supremacy when the Athenians created patriarchy and locked up their women. He then wandered all over the ancient world, learning all sorts of secrets and leaving behind a priceless collection of mind-blowing legends—he’s the Phoenix Madman mentioned in the Confucian scriptures, and he passed himself off as Krishna to recite that gorgeous Bible of revolutionary ethics, the Bhagavad Gita, to Arjuna in India, among other feats. I believe you met him in Chicago while he was pretending to be the Christian Devil.”

“But how have you Discordians concealed the fact that gorillas talk?”

“We’re rather close-mouthed, you might say, and when we do speak it’s usually to put somebody on or blow their minds—”

“I’ve noticed that,” Joe said.

“And the gorillas themselves are too shrewd to talk to anybody but another anarchist. They’re all anarchists themselves, you know, and they have a very healthy wariness about people in general and government people in particular. As one of them told me once, ‘If it got out that we can talk, the conservatives would exterminate most of us and make the rest pay
rent
to live on our own land; and the liberals would try to train us to be engine-lathe operators. Who the fuck wants to operate an engine lathe?’ They prefer their own pastoral and Eristic ways, and I, for one, would never interfere with them. We do communicate, though, just as we communicate with the dolphins. Both species are intelligent enough to realize that it’s in their interest, as part of earth’s biosphere, to help the handful of human anarchists to try to stop, or at least
slow down, the bloodletting and slaughter of our Aneristic rulers and Aneristic mobs.”

“Sometimes I still get confused about your theological terms—or are they psychological? The Aneristic forces, especially the Illuminati, are structure freaks: they want to impose their concept of order on everybody else. But I still get confused about the differences between the Erisian, the Eristic and the Discordian. Not to mention the JAMs.”

“The Eristic is the opposite of the Aneristic,” Hagbard explained patiently, “and, therefore, identical with it. Remember the Hodge-Podge. Writers like De Sade, Max Stirner and Nietzsche are Eristic; so are the gorillas. They represent total supremacy of the individual, total negation of the group. It isn’t necessarily the war-of-all-against-all, as Aneristic philosophers imagine, but it can, under stress, degenerate into that. More often, it’s quite pacifistic, like our hairy friends in the trees back there. The Erisian position is modified; it recognizes that Aneristic forces are part of the world drama, too, and can never be totally abolished. We merely stress the Eristic as a balance, because human society has been tilted grotesquely toward the Aneristic side all through the Piscean age. We Discordians are the activists in the Erisian movement; we do things. The pure Erisians work in more mysterious ways, in accordance with the Taoist principle of
wu-wei
—doing nothing effectively. The JAMs are left-wingers, who might have become Aneristic except for special circumstances that led them in a libertarian direction. But they’ve fucked it all up with typical left-wing hatred trips. They haven’t mastered the
Gita:
the art of fighting with a loving heart.”

“Strange,” Joe said. “Dr. Iggy, in the San Francisco JAM cabal, explained it to me differently.”

“What would you expect?” Hagbard replied. “No two who
know
, know the same in their knowing. By the way, why haven’t you told me that you’re sure those gorillas back there were just men I dressed up in gorilla suits?”

“I’m becoming more gullible,” Joe said.

“Too bad,” Hagbard told him sadly. “They really
were
men in gorilla suits. I was testing how easily you could be bamboozled, and you flunked.”

“Now, wait a minute. They smelled like gorillas. That was no fake. You’re putting me on
now”

“That’s right,” Hagbard agreed. “I wanted to see if you’d trust your own senses or the word of a Natural-Born Leader and Guru like me. You trusted your own senses, and you pass. My put-ons are not just jokes, friend. The hardest thing for a man with dominance genes and piratical heredity like me is to avoid becoming a goddam authority figure. I need all the feedback and information I can get—from men, women, children, gorillas, dolphins, computers, any conscious entity—but nobody contradicts an Authority, you know.
Communication is possible only between equals:
that’s the first theorem of social cybernetics—and the whole basis of anarchism—and I have to keep knocking down people’s dependence on me or I’ll become a fucking Big Daddy and won’t get accurate communication anymore. If the pig-headed Illuminati and their Aneristic imitators in all the governments, corporations, universities and armies of the world understood that simple principle, they’d occasionally find out what’s actually going on and stop screwing up every project they start. I am Freeman Hagbard Celine and I am not anybody’s bloody leader. As soon as you fully understand that I’m your equal, and that my shit stinks just like yours, and that I need a lay every few days or I get grouchy and make dumb decisions, and that there is One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages but you have to find him for yourself, then you’ll begin to understand what the Legion of Dynamic Discord is all about.”

“One more trustworthy than all the Buddhas and sages …?” Joe repeated, finding himself most confused when he had been closest to total comprehension a second earlier.

“To receive light you must be receptive,” Hagbard
said curtly. “Work that one out for yourself. Meanwhile, take this back to New York and chew on it a bit.” And he presented Joe with a book entitled
Never Whistle While You’re Pissing: A Guide to Self-Liberation
, by Hagbard Celine, H.M., S.H.

Joe read the book carefully in the following weeks—while Pat Walsh, in
Confrontation’s
research department, checked out every assertion about the Illuminati that Joe had picked up from Hagbard, Simon, Dillinger and Dr. Ignotius—but, although some of the book was brilliant, much was obscure, and he found no clue to the One more trustworthy than all Buddhas. Then, one night high on Alamout Black hashish, he started working on it with expanded and intensified consciousness. Malaclypse the Elder? No, he was wise, and somewhat benevolent in a fey sort of style, but certainly not trustworthy. Simon? For all his youth and nuttiness, he had moments of incredible perception, but he was almost certainly less enlightened than Hagbard. Dillinger? Dr. Ignotius? The mysterious Malaclypse the Younger, who had disappeared, leaving behind only the inscrutable
Principia Discordia?

Christ, Joe thought, what a male chauvinist I am! Why didn’t I think of Stella? The old joke came back to him … “Did you see God?” “Yes, and she’s black.”
Of course
. Hadn’t Stella presided over his initiation, in Dr. Iggy’s chapel? Hadn’t Hagbard said she would preside over George Dorn’s initiation, when George was ready?
Of course
.

Joe always remembered that moment of ecstasy and certainty: it taught him a lot about the use and misuse of drugs and why the Muminati went wrong. For the unconscious, which always tries to turn every good lay into a mother figure, had contaminated the insight which his supraconscious had almost given him. It was many months later, just before the Fernando Poo crisis, that he finally discovered beyond all doubt the One who was more trustworthy than all Buddhas and all sages.

Do-da, do-da, do-da-do-da-DAY
….

(And Semper Cuni Linctus, the very night that he reamed his subaltern for taking native superstitions seriously, passed an olive garden and saw the Seventeen … and with them was the Eighteenth, the one they had crucified the Friday before.
Magna Mater
, he swore, creeping closer,
am I losing my mind?
The Eighteenth, whatshisname, the preacher, had set up a wheel and was distributing cards to them. Now, he turned the wheel and called out the number at which it stopped. The centurion watched, in growing amazement, as the process was repeated several times, and the cards were marked each time the wheel stopped. Finally, the big one, Simon, shouted “Bingo!” The scion of the noble Linctus family turned and fled … Behind him, the luminous figure said, “Do this in commemoration of me.”

“I thought we were supposed to do the bread and wine bit in commemoration of you?” Simon objected.

“Do both,” the ghostly one said. “The bread and wine is too symbolic and arcane for some folks. This one is what will bring in the mob. You see, fellows, if you want to bring the Movement to the people, you have to start from where the people are at. You, Luke, don’t write that down. This is part of the
secret
teachings.”)

Slurp, slurp …
Camp-town ladies sing this song
…

(But how do you account for a man like Drake?
one of Carl Jung’s guests asked at the Sunday afternoon
Kaffeeklatsch
where the strange young American had inspired so much speculation. Jung sucked on his pipe thoughtfully—wondering, actually, how he could ever cure his associates of treating him like a guru—and answered finally, “A fine mind strikes on an idea like the arrow hitting bull’s-eye. The Americans have not yet produced such a mind, because they are too assertive, too outgoing. They land on an idea, even an important idea, like one of their fullbacks making a tackle. Hence, they always crumple or cripple it. Drake has such a mind. He has learned everything about power—more than Adler knows, for all his obsession
on the subject—but he has not learned the important thing. That is, of course, how to
avoid
power. What he needs, and will probably never achieve, is religious humility. Impossible in his country, where even the introverts are extroverted most of the time.”)