## CRYSTAL MEMORIES

### by T. Casey Brennan
Copyright 2002 T. Casey Brennan
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This is the story of what happened after I left the protection of the Webfairy. This is the story of what truly happened in Dallas, and the story of Am and how I held her once, for but a moment. This is the story of the night I learned I would never see Crystal again.

This is the story of the Crystal Memories, of Conjurella in May.

In my memory now, Crystal lies on the couch, watching television, her hair reddish-bown, her eyes intent. There is about her a quality unnamed, undefined; she watches intently, her delicate lips always about to speak or sneer, she is like a kitten about to pounce, like a rare, plumaged bird about to spread its wings. She is young, she is Crystal, and she called forth the Crystal Memories. Basicly, there are only three ages that girls are worth anything, 19, 20, and 21. At any other age, their value is equal only to the extent that they can SEEM like one of those three.

Crystal seems like one of those three. So does Am. That is not her name, only a part, but I took it somehow from the Little Orphan Annie character known as "I AM", a prophet, infinitely wise. When I first get to know Am, I think of her that way - infinitely wise. Perhaps it is those dark eyes, or some combination of her youthful innocence and her flawless form, that somehow seems to convey wisdom instead.

Am emails me when I am far away, in Chicago, under the protection of the Internet conspiracy journalist known as the Webfairy. She says I can come and stay at her communal student house on Ann Arbor's campus.

Am is like the Phantom Lady. The Phantom Lady had been a 1940s-1950s comic book character I had written briefly in Paragon Publications' brief revival of her, in the late 70s, in FEM FANTASTIQUE #'s 1 and 3. Like the Phantom Lady, Am's hair is black, her form is sleek but muscular. She is also a world traveler, and sometimes tells tales of her recent trip to Ghana. Her manner is composed, diplomatic, gracious, but with dark eyes and a look that can be ignored only briefly. After that moment when I can ignore her, I know I am drawn in, I know I will see those dark eyes, and the way her black hair falls down on either side of her face, or is piled up, on top of her head; after that moment, I know I will look too long, pretending I am listening to some nonsense she is saying. Am is mystery. Those are precious moments when Am, educated and articulate, expounds on some movie we are watching at her communal house, or comments on some topic at hand, in those moments, I can look too long, I can watch that dark, exquisite loveliness for but a moment.

At a party at her house, before I left for Chicago, as I left, I held her once, knowing it would be only once, and never before and never again. She put her arms around me, and I could only whisper, "Oh, so precious to hold you, for just this moment, just this one moment..." And then she was gone from my arms, and would be forever, except for that one moment, that would somehow have to live on in eternity as the one time I ever held Am.

Because when I finally moved in to Am's basement, Am was acting more like a curt landlady, and her boyfriend was always present.

But this was the story of the Crystal Memories, and the brutal aftermath of Dallas. This was the story of a distant past when, kidnapped, drugged, tormented, cowled, I fired one shot in Dallas, of a near future when I would be an honored guest at the May 2002 Motor City Comic Con.

Before Am, before the memory of Crystal, I had written CONJURELLA, in 1996. In the 70s, I had been an award winning comic book writer for such titles as CREEPY, EERIE, VAMPIRELLA, and Archie's RED CIRCLE SORCERY, which helped introduce Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch. In 1996, Harris Comics had reprinted my stories in VAMPIRELLA OF DRAKULON numbers one, two, and three. At the same time, I located, in a Books in Print Index, at the public library, my late mother's book, CASTLE MIRAGE by Alice Brennan, reprinted in a large print editor by a publisher known alternately as Ulverscroft or F.A. Thorpe, in Leicester, England. I contacted them and asked "Why didn't you pay me?" They referred me to my late mother's agent, Kurt Singer, who had worked for the CIA's predecessor, the OSS, or, Office of Strategic Services, during World War II. He had published several histories of espionage, he had done a speaking tour against the OSS in universities in the 1950s, and he had purchased "All Foreign Rights" to Castle Mirage for one thousand dollars from my late mother, as he told me by return mail, giving a list of other foreign editions of CASTLE MIRAGE, which he had sold throughout Europe, all to his sole profit.

But, being a good CIA agent, as opposed to a bad CIA agent, he made me an offer whereby I WOULD receive some money, he said. He suggested that I write something autobiographical about my late mother and myself, and, he said, he would use it as a preface to future editions of CASTLE MIRAGE, and pay me for the new material. I wrote "Castle Mirage - The Prelude: Conjurella", alleging that I had been programmed by the CIA's illegal MK-ULTRA division, investigated by the U.S. Senate in 1977, from the ages of five to fifteen, and forced to initiate the firing in Dallas. I sent it to Singer, labeling it sardonicly, "Gothic Fiction" (it was neither), and he immediately developed an infection on his leg, and his leg was amputated, and his company destroyed.

Undaunted, I took the story elsewhere, and, in six years, it had spawned a host of Internet fan pages, but up by fans and followers around the world (sometimes in other languages), and numerous sequels, of which the story of the Crystal Memories is one.

In six years, the many sequels and the many fan pages had spawned me a following of tens of thousands world wide. Occassionally, the stories would jump off the Net into print: a rock and rock magazine in Austin, Texas called SALT FOR SLUGS, distributed internationally by Tower Records, published one, so did an Indiana-based underground comic called THE STORK. But, for the most part, the publishing industry ignored me, though comic book fandom, at last intrigued by what I had done, turned its attention upon me. COMIC BOOK ARTIST magazine of Rhode Island, a respected fan journal, includes an interview with me in their history of Warren Publishing Company and CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA, called THE WARREN COMPANION. And the Motor City Comic Con in Novi, Michigan, includes me on its guest list, as of May 2001.

The statements which should have reinstated the House Assassinations Committee Investigation and placed me on the witness stand, have made me a comic book star again instead. The journey back had been a long one. The seventies had made me a comic book star, as the eighties had taken it away. Privately alleging a blacklist against me, I launch an internationally acclaimed campaign against smoking in comic books on a shoestring budget, garnering such attention as write ups in the U.N. World Health Organization journal, WORLD HEALTH, available now on Microfilm in the University of Michigan graduate library, October 1983 (page 30) and January-February 1986 (page 9) issues, and inclusion of my work in CONGRESSIONAL RECORD - SENATE, Vol. 128, No. 131, Sept. 28, 1982, page S12435. Legislatures, Governors, and Mayors all issue Proclamations, Declarations, and Resolutions honoring my work. Later, in the WARREN COMPANION interview, I will admit that it was all a publicity.

But the one-two effect of the initial pointless conspiracy against me by the vendetta-prone comic book industry, followed by the enemy-of-the-industry role I took on with the ban-smoking-in-comics campaign, had removed me completely from the comic book industry in the 80s. The write-ups for my campaign against the comic books, which extended as far as Prague, Communist Czechoslovakia, in Prague's DEMOCRATIC JOURNALIST magazine, July-August 1987 issue (pages 30-31 - basicly a rewrite of the earlier WORLD HEALTH articles from a Soviet Communist perspective), provided prestige, but neither income nor fans. Such publications were read, but only by a select few, and they paid nothing.

So prior to the mixed effect of CONJURELLA, VAMPIRELLA OF DRAKULON, and the British reprint of my late mother's book, CASTLE MIRAGE, all in 1996, T. Casey Brennan fandom was something locked in the 70s, as when Warren's EERIE #38 published an article about the 1971 comic book awards ceremony at the Statler Hilton in New, and my resultant forced autograph signing spree in the mezzanine. I had anticipated that CONJURELLA would result in investigations, polygraphs, and testimony, but it had instead reinstated my role as a comic book celebrity.

But, unlike dishwashing for local restaurants, it was work which did not pay. In spite of my growing fame, my meager resources had dwindled to the point of homelessness by the spring of 2002. As winter was just passing, the Internet conspiracy journalist known as the Webfairy had financed a brief stay with her in Chicago; there, Am had written and offered support when I returned on the train to Ann Arbor.

Am could offer two weeks, she said, and nothing more. They prepared a basement room for me, and, within three nights, Er appeared.

Am's communal house seemed to constantly conceal a virtually limitless number of pretty girls. With sparkling eyes and hair flowing wild or tied back, they would pour from rooms or down stairwells in endless torrents, sometimes the next one hardly different from the last, hardly discernible one from another, but all with those qualities of near-perfection that marked Am's friends. Am knew only pretty girls. Of these, Er was the least, a pretty girl caught, through some cruel fate, in a house packed with other pretty girls who were superior to her. She had reddish-brown hair somewhat similar to Crystal's and she was only slightly too chubby for a cute girl.

On that night, on perhaps the second or third night of my stay, in darkness, in secret, Er called upon me in my basement.

She tiptoes down to the basement common area where I sleep, on little cat feet, like Sandburg's fog. She brings two cans of beer, though I know longer drink and dislike the taste of it. But she makes me drink a beer and smoke of her cigarettes. She sits on the couch by my bed, drinks her beer, and tells me she wants to write an article about me, about my career. She wants to manage my coming appearance, she says, a few weeks hence, on the guest list of the Motor City Comic Con in Novi, but she also wants to touch me, and her hands repeatedly tussle my hair, or she pauses in her speech to swat me playfully with a comic book. Somehow it is warm. And somehow I, alone now in the last days of winter, have needed that warmth, warmth from Er, Er, who says she cares, and is the pretty girl who is the least of the pretty girls at Am's house.

Er says she is the president or somethingorother of Am's house, and that she really likes me, and I can stay as long as I want. She tells me not to worry; we drink our beers and then she is gone.

Though Am and Crystal have been distant, separated from me by chasms and stairwells and boyfriends, Er has been near. And, for that moment, and the one that would come, I needed her.

Er's plan for an article on my work is scattered and ill-conceived, but her attention and affection is sweet. I could only look upon Cystal and Am, but now Er, the least of the pretty girls, could swat me with a comic book and pet my hair, and tell me that it would be all right and that she cared, even if she were, as she must have known, the least of the pretty girls. So later in the week, she makes a verbal list of stuff she loves, and, she says, my name is on it. I barely breathe, "You can touch me, baby," and in moments, she is traveling across the room, a perilous journey which a man can rarely make without invitation, and her arms are around me, and her soft moist lips are on my neck as her hands carress my back and hair.

My three memories of the girls would be, Am in sillhouette, Crystal in recline, and Er, upon me.

Am, in sillhouette, her black hair not really long enough to be the Phantom Lady, her near-perfect form blending always with her air of mystery, in her stance, and in the lines and curves of her body.

Crystal in recline, lying on the couch, luscious, exquisite, the kitten always on the verge of poucing, the rare bird always on the verge of spreading its wings.

But Er, the least of the pretty girls, upon me; that will be the precious memory of Er. Er, somehow propelled across the room from her seat to mine, now hugging me and kissing my neck. I hold her and stroke her back and run my fingertips along her bare skin, that strip of skin on a girls back, above her panties and below her top. Er, the least of the pretty girls, who brings me a warmth, a comfort, a reassurance that Am and Crystal never can.

But then she is gone from my arms, she is going to bed, she says. Later, she tells Am she wants me to leave, and I do, homeless again, without the dark vision of Am, without the equisite kittenish vision of Crystal, and without the comforting carress of Er, the least of the pretty girls, in the middle of May, just before the 2002 Motor City Comic Con, where I will be guest. Someone tells me, she thinks I'm cute, but the three decades plus of age difference has made her feel guilty about.

So I have taken the warm, comforting arms of Er, the least of the pretty girls, for but a moment, and now I have lost forever the visions of Am and Crystal. But within the play, within the romances and the guest appearances and the games, lies the horrible truth that this facade must somehow conceal: alone, of those three men who waited in the storage room of the Texas School Book Depository Building on that day in Dallas, only I yet live, only I remain to testify.

"You have a wonderful life," Er told me, once. But within the romances and appearances that renewed fame had brought me, was the terrible lurking future where I would testify as to what had been done to me, a boy of fifteen, by those who had arranged the murder of John Kennedy.

But for now, I told myself as I left Am's for the last time: why bother? Why know of that bleak future, a witness stand so cold, so unlike the a comic convention guest spot? Why know that at all, in a day in the middle of May, 2002, with the equisite memories of Am, Crystal, and Er so near?

CRYSTAL MEMORIES illustrated & posted!