Clandestine

November 5, 1943

This morning Doc and I drove out to Eagle Rock, ostensibly to move a supply of radios out of our garage there and up to our buyer at San Berdoo. Doc lectured on moral terror as I drove. He talked of the smallness of 99.9% of all lives, and how this smallness generates and regenerates until it creates an effect that is a "snowballing apocalypse of picayunity." He then said that the natural elite (i.e—us, and others like us) must send messages to the potential elite by "throwing a perpetual monkey wrench into the cogs of the picayunist's machinery." He explained that our buyer in San Berdoo was continually trying to bring us down in price by the intimidation tactic of threatening to look elsewhere for radios. Doc said that it could be tolerated no longer and that I should visit the man with a spiritual message that would teach him humility. Doc said no more until we had loaded our radios into the truck and were almost to San Berdoo, then he told me: "This picayune has a cat he dotes on. Picayunes love dumb animals because by comparison they are even more powerless than they themselves are. I want you to strangle that cat in front of its picayune owner. If you grab the cat lengthwise by its head, and wrap your little finger and thumb around its neck and squeeze abruptly with your first two fingers stationed firmly above its eyebrows, it will cause the cat's eyes to pop out of its head as you strangle it. Do this for me, Johnny, and I will teach you other ways to consolidate your power: the real mental power that I know you have." I did it. The buyer pleaded with us, pledging all his business to us exclusively and offering Doc three hundred dollars as a bonus. Doc declined the money and said, "My bonus is the lesson you have learned and the good that will come from it for you and many others."

I read on through 1943, as Doc Harris consolidated his hold over John DeVries, moving him into a widening arena of violence interspersed with counseling on the philosophy and psychology of terror. Johnny beat up and robbed homosexuals at Doc's command; he broke the arms and legs of bet welehers; he pistol-whipped burglars who Doc thought were holding out on their take. And he never, ever questioned his mentor. The philosophy with which Doc dominated him was Hitlerian-Utopian, tailored to fit Johnny's history of overdependence on supportive figures: