GARY, A COCK-FIGHT, AND THE LIZARD KING
by DPR

Greetings, Gary-ites!

By now you should have gotten a general idea of the whackiness which lapped at Gary's heels like a ubiquitous orange weiner dog. Here are, in brief, a few of his more memorable exploits, the ones that have occurred to me lately.

Once, in Louisiana, he went to a cock-fight with a Mexican friend, although I don't think Gary knew what it was they were doing until they arrived. There, Gary discovered that the Champion Cock's name was 'Jerry Lee', had a nazi flag around it's neck, and was owned by some big redneck named Billy-Bob, or something. Gary thought the sport was "cruel, but not as cruel as those limber-dicked assholes who fight dogs... somebody should string those fuckers up by their balls." However, this didn't stop him from tracking down "the best fighting rooster on the east coast", buying him, re-naming him 'Chuck Berry', and meeting back up with Billy-Bob to have 'Chuck' "beat the living shit out of that struttin' sonofabitch Jerry Lee." After the fight, Gary gave his winnings to a farmer he knew in exchange for the promise that 'Chuck Berry' would live a long and prosperous life as "King of the Henhouse...lucky sonofabitch."

Although reluctant to tell the full story, the bits we got out of him were this: There was a molotov cocktail. Jim Morrison had hit on a lady friend of Gary's at a club in LA. Jim was given some bad LSD. (By whom?) A molotov cocktail was thrown at his back porch. His back porch was obliterated. Morrison ran out of the house, naked, his house being consumed by flames, and ran screaming down the street. "But that could've been any night of the week."

I'm just saying: Nobody saw anything, it probably didn't happen. I'm just saying: On the right day, in the middle of a wheat field outside of Athens, Ga., a really intuitive journalist with a long lens and helluva good directional microphone might-- just might-- have seen Gary and Governor Jimmy Carter sitting on a tractor, Gary with a huge spliff in his hand, talking about a way for "the good old boys" to infiltrate the Bilderberg group. I'm just sayin...

Here's a creepy and somewhat topical one, given the upcoming release of "War of the Worlds." Gary was a Charles Fort fan, and kind of obsessed with UFOs. He sought out and started hanging around with a group of ex-Navy guys from Virginia with "eagle-high security clearance." He claimed-- and he loved talking about this-- that all the stuff about aliens living among us, the deal with Truman, etc., is true, and that everything is building up to "The Big Showdown", much like what Spielberg is teasing us with in the trailer for WOTW. Gary bought me my copy of "Behold a Pale Horse" by William Cooper. (X-Files fans will know what I'm talking about.) I don't know if any of it's true... I prefer to just imagine. But Gary, like a lot of people, believed that "we are not alone... and if we think we are, we're egotistical assholes."