He phoned me a lot during these years regarding various side businesses of
his, little oddball companies he'd started, and I was always initially
interested; I'm glad I didn't invest, though, because none of these early
attempts ever came to anything besides bankruptcy. But Dobbs could work the
bankruptcy laws, and he was always the onlyone who came out ahead, even
when his investors lost everything. He once told me, "There are no
coincidences - not when there's money to be made."
In '57, he started something called The School of Nasocryptography,
teaching people to divine fortunes from nose hair patterns. In L.A., they
actually fell for it. He had all manner of health and therapy scams:
Noosecubating and Phlegm Reading and so on. Some people swore by them. He
was way ahead of his time... but he was always getting shut down by the
health departments.
The pitch of his that finally got me involved was insurance brokerage. We
did very well with that. I remember the night he set fire to the orphanage.
It worked out perfectly for everyone. Dobbs and I got a huge percentage;
the orphans got a new home, much nicer and safer than the old place; all of
them became eligible for assistance; and "Bob" made the news, rescuing the
orphans from the burning building. He was always making local news that
way. Never national news; you never heard about him on the networks. But
you did see him in magazines, in pipe and hat and tobacco ads and such; his
modeling career was at its peak then. Not an issue of Better Homes and
Gardens went by that didn't have some dopey ad in which Dobbs had modeled
as "the regular guy." He loved modeling. He told me, "I sit. I smoke my
pipe. They take a picture. I get a check. It's a living."
He invented the first hamburger franchise chain, almost identical to the
later McDonald's formula. But despite all advice from his hired ad-boys he
insisted on calling his chain, "BURGER GOD." He said he wanted Americans to
"loosen up." But church groups were outraged. Seven or eight BURGER GOD
outlets actually opened around Pittsburgh, Peoria, Cleveland, and
Minneapolis, and they might have done well if not for the riots.7
Dobbs couldn't quit experimenting with the "Sacred Sauce" formula. He said
he was working toward "the perfect population control method." Not that he
was trying to limit the numbers of people; he wanted to control the
population, no matter how big it got. He was sure that he could encode
behavioral traits into the beef fat; the doctored fat molecule would go
into storage in the body, and release over a long period of time,
instilling a zombie-like trance in his burger customers.
I said, "A zombie-like trance? I thought you were trying to wake people
up!" But he was being kind, the way he saw it. To him, chemically induced
Slack via hamburgers was a charitable gesture, considering how far gone
most of the Pinks already were. The pharmaceutical companies and the
psychiatry industry didn't see it his way, however, and the A.M.A. shut his
chain down for good, at least in the U.S.8
He thought marital aids might be a growing market, and in California he
briefly sold something called YETI-BRAND BODY OIL & COCOA BUTTER as a
'natural aphrodisiac.' On the label, underneath YETI BRAND, it said, "They
Make It In the Woods," and the picture showed a nice wooded glade - but if
you knew where to look, you could discern two Bigfoots copulating in the
bushes. The idea was, the subliminal "porno" would stir up word-of-mouth
among beatniks and misfits, and he'd make a fortune. It didn't happen; it
was the one time he lost money. But he kept his patents on things like
quantum foam rubber, packing foam ("ghost turds"), and all those novelty
gimmicks like X-Ray Spex, powdered unicorn horn, glass eyes, plastic poop,
latex prairie squids and pyroflatulation cushions... that was where a lot
of his fortune came from.
Around '57, "Bob" started doing evangelical Christian preaching on
weekends, strictly for the money. He had a big congregation of elderly
Po'buckers in Tulsa hanging on his every word. He told me, straight-faced,
that he'd successfully raised the dead, turned one Chicken Basket into
enough fried chicken for hundreds of people, and transformed a little boy's
guppy into a county fair fried fish cookout. He claimed he'd walked on
water, survived bites by venomous serpents, turned artificial legs back
into real legs, and other miraculous deeds. He also began "whiffreading"
wallets about this time.
I thought he was looking for more trouble from the Feds, with that kind of
talk. They had already interrogated me several times. J. Edgar Hoover was
obsessed with Dobbs. I can't blame him; "Bob" was good looking. Of course,
Hoover was just doing his job. Dobbs was subversive! But he was subversive
only in that he was so perfectly all-American. He was the Spirit of
America, unburdened by huge trusts, conglomerates, rational thought and so
forth... the epitome of small business gone hog-wild. They had to love him,
but they had to stop him; he was major competition for the Rockefellers and
Morgans and Rothschilds and all those Illuminati bastards. He might have
set up a domino effect. In fact he's still trying to do just that. But they
couldn't touch him, because he had friends in high places as a result of
his work for the Allies in WWII. Nobody, not even J. Edgar, was going to
mess with the man who iced Hitler and froze his head.
Furthermore, he had the Pipe. I am pretty sure now that all the powers he
attributes to the Pipe are real. It probably does do a lot of his thinking
for him; it's the Xist input terminal. Without the Pipe, he'd still be
lucky, but he might not be as active. He might just sit and drool.
But, as Dobbs got richer, working with the Conspiracy on an increasingly
intimate level, he was getting cynical and bitter. He became increasingly
paranoid about his enemies, the list of whom grew to include his business
rivals, his bosses, his customers, his mother-in-law, the IRS, the
Communists and the Venusians. He certainly had some enemies, but how could
they harm him? But then, Dobbs was never known for his logical thinking. He
became a survivalist, constructing an elaborate bomb shelter under his
backyard. One time when he was showing off his antipersonnel gear to me, he
said, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a GUN, and
OTHERS will feed him for a lifetime."
It was in this trough of negativity and despondency that "Bob" began his
wanderings - what we call his Lost Years. He quit his Conspiracy jobs and
dropped out of sight. Throughout the late '50s, he hitched boat-rides
around Indonesia, "trying to discover himself," but ended up in a prison
camp deep in Burma, run by some Japanese who had refused to quit fighting
WWII. He insists that Aleister Crowley was also imprisoned there, and that
he taught Crowley many card tricks while they squatted in a bamboo cage.
Crowley is generally thought to have been long dead by this time, and some
suspect that, perhaps due to poor diet and sensory deprivation, "Bob" was
hallucinating him.
His captors sold him into white slavery, and he was used by a wizened old
Sultan/Magician as an experimental sex toy. He has never gone into detail
about that, except to say that he learned a lot about himself. After a year
in captivity, he hustled enough money to buy his freedom. He then surfaced
in Tibet, at a place called the Forbidden Plateau of Chang-Eng, where he
fell in with the lamas of the Black Sect.
For awhile, "Bob" got his kicks from flaunting his amoral Western ways in
the lama's faces. But their patience was rewarded, because he ended up
swearing off his gamboling and sinning, and joined their monastery. He
threw himself heart and soul into the discipline, developing callouses on
his scalp from standing on his head for so long every day.
He went for two years without bathing, wiping or changing his clothing,
letting the rain, and the urine or spittle of his detractors, wash him. He
wore barbed-wire shirts, put nails in his shoes, and rolled in thorn-bushes
every time he had an 'impure thought' (which he defined as "the urge to
sell shoddy goods just for the hell of it"). He rode through the villages
backwards on an ass, wearing a 15-foot tall dunce cap on which all his sins
were listed. He lived in caves and fasted for months. He wanted to levitate
into the sky "to escape the stench of humans," but, because he was afraid
of heights, stayed inside and let his head bump the cave roof instead.
Eventually, for "Bob" there was no longer any difference between meditating
and not meditating; every single word, thought or act became a meditation,
and thenceforth he was able to practice "infinite action" or "Not-Think."
At this point he abandoned his severe asceticism, and more or less reverted
to his old goatish ways.
"One must be totally free from desire to achieve true Slack," he told me
upon his return, "and that means acquiring everything you desire. I have
become like unto a Handi-Wipe. A Handi-Wipe may clean everything it
touches, but itself becomes soiled. Yet it can be replaced by another
Handi-Wipe, exactly the same as the first one. The women that were too
beautiful for the Normals have let me sleep with them, the hunchbacked and
the cripples. And to me, each was the most beautiful woman on Earth. I have
made love to ten thousand beings, but not once was the act defiled by lust.
I loved all of them with all of my soul. Similarly, I loved all the
animals. Animals have the Buddha nature, more so than humans, and if one
feels affection for them, they will return it. Except for heat vent worms."
After besting his so-called "spiritual masters" in a series of riddle
games, Dobbs went home, the treasure of the High Lama jingling in his
pockets. Connie, in the meantime, had been manipulating his career just as
if he was still at home, so that when he returned, he found himself a
high-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral
Commission, and the Majestic 12. Guided by Connie, he exploited this status
until 1963, when he suddenly turned against the entire Conspiracy and began
telling everything he knew about Them to anyone who'd listen.
Many misunderstand "Bob's" motives. In fighting the Conspiracy, he isn't
being "noble." He doesn't really care about future generations; he's saving
the planet only because doing so benefits him.
By now Dobbs was a man of truly great appetites, and great expulsions. It
seemed that no matter where my work took me, Dobbs had a whole family there
and would invite me for dinner. What most surprised me was that he seemed
to be successfully concealing from each wife and family the fact that he
had other wives and children in every state. He was the ultimate
polygynist, making the Mormon Elders and the Grand Sultan of the Turks seem
like pikers. But it wasn't that he lied to his families; it was that they
never thought to ask. They're all a bit like "Bob" himself in that respect;
a lot goes right by them, and they're none the worse for it. Besides, most
of his wives are devoted polyandrists.
Connie was the ringleader of a gigantic swinger's network, and "Bob" would
wander through these beatnik orgies of hers in white robes, preaching free
love and spouting poetry while playing bongos. He had a bunch of
college-age "disciples," and I think he was toying with their minds,
refining the SubGenius formula.
"Bob" called himself the Gate, the Twelfth I'mam through whom one is
'opened' to the Fifth Way, the Way of the Most Sly Man. Most people, "Bob"
said, never do, they only have things done to them. This is because the
mind is actually a series of different, incomplete personalities that
endlessly bicker over which gets to run the body. The Most Sly isolates and
exploits these disconnected states, and achieves the ability not only to
truly "do," but to "do the HELL out of" whatever he or she is DOing. And,
if that is impossible, the Most Sly manages to make everyone else believe
that that is what is happening. For, in the false reality of the Pinks,
believing is all that is necessary - and the Most Sly does only what is
necessary, leaving the rest of the time for Slack.
For my part, I thought this was all a lot of high-sounding bullshit. But
one day, that changed.
My conversion happened in 1970. I was crossing a country bridge with "Bob."
There on that bridge, for no reason at all, I suddenly realized, as if in a
flash of insight, that not only was "Bob" THE ONE, the SlackMaster, but
also that this was my moment - my one chance to save the world from his
presence. I knew, then, that I had to either kill him, or follow him
blindly for the rest of my days. I could so easily have pushed him off of
that bridge to his death in the gorge below! I had the chance!... but I
chose instead to give over my life to him, and accept him as my Teacher, as
long as he is on my side.
Around 1972, "Bob" felt ready to go public with the Church of the
SubGenius, and recruited me as Assistant Overseer to organize and staff a
front office. I serendipitously encountered a young unemployed filmmaker
named Ivan Stang, who was desperate enough to accept the salary. Actually
there was no salary discussed, only promises, but Stang literally had no
choice; Dobbs made sure of that. Stang was willing to do almost anything to
scrape by and support his new family, except work at a real job. "Bob"
called Stang his 'lever,' meaning simple tool. It's too bad I was never
able to take him with me to Dobbs' parties, but at least he didn't have to
undergo the OverMan Transformation.
Many people ask me what it was like to become an OverMan. I can vouchsafe
that I did it reluctantly. In 1978, "Bob" insisted that, in order to help
launch the Church properly, I would have to go to Tibet for this
"operation." Grudgingly, and with great trepidation, I complied. It took us
almost three months to travel to the secret cave of the lamas, high in the
Himalayas. When I saw and smelled the ritual "operating room," I almost
backed down, but Dobbs promised to double my pay, and I agreed to go
through with it.
On a certain night when the great constellations were properly aligned, the
lamas started beating on drums and summoned down "Choronzon," a faceless,
disembodied Xist force that telempathechanically sodo-glandscaped me. While
this Sacred DeBuggering took place, the Secret Chiefs of Shambahala showed
up: three classic Men in Black, with angular features, strange eyes and
turbans, hauling a load of high-tech equipment. They smelled like they had
been drinking, and kept laughing uproariously and speaking in a strange
language. They used a cross between a C-clamp and a Möebius strip to
squeeze my testicles so hard that my head swelled up enormously. An instant
later, when the Xist "demon" suddenly yanked itself out of me, the suction
made my face cave in. I wasn't supposed to end up looking like this; I was
supposed to resemble a super-enhanced version of myself - kind of
"Bob"-like. But "Bob" was drunk during the ceremony. They were all drunk.
They thought it was funny! Oh, my intelligence was enhanced, and that made
the disfigurement worthwhile; like "Bob," I can enjoy overweening sexual
pleasure merely by watching a butterfly. But it was like "Bob's" own
resurrection in '84 after he was first killed - things didn't go perfectly.
All my nodes swelled up, my footglands became inflamed, I developed
uncontrollable behavioral twitches... I'm not exactly the perfect OverMan.
But "Bob" promises they'll have the process fixed by X-Day.
After I recovered from the surgery, we returned to Dallas and started
cranking up the Church's public outreach. By 1980, we had greased the right
palms and were distributing the basic Membership documents. As an OverMan,
I no longer saw any point in messing with the details; I made Stang take
over the world ministry aspects, and rechanneled my energies into a career
in entertainment with The Swinging Love Corpses and my new band, The
Uighurs. I had become more like "Bob," and that's what "Bob" would have
done. Let Stang be the nearsighted leader of the blind who are leading the
bland.
As far as the actual operation of the Church goes, "Bob" has very little to
do with it now. He's like Howard Hughes in that respect. I'm here running
the front office, Stang is maintaining the Church empire, going around
preaching, making up stories about "Harvest Mechanisms," and trying to keep
tabs on the other Apostles who, he'd like to think, might plot to usurp his
job as Scribe.
We usually don't know where "Bob" is. Some of his time is spent in secret,
probably setting up his big deal for X-Day, or possibly justavoiding all
the fans and "good SubGenii" eager to perform their token ritual "Bob"
assassination. Sometimes he's in Tibet, getting his Xist rebuild completed;
he was never re-erected quite right after the first assassination. He still
smells a little funny. Other times he's just fishing, or maybe gambling in
Bangkok, or learning sleight of hand tricks from some Master he met in a
bar - the greatest card shark in the world, or the greatest magician, or
pool hustler, or table football master, or video game master, or psychic
surgeon.
He might shock us. For all we know, he could be snickering nastily with the
fascists, plotting a new, even more specific retro virus release. But - as
horrible as this may sound - if that is "Bob's" will, then so be it. We
cannot question his ways. Not that we think that anything so repugnant to
our SubGenius sensibilities would ever be his will. But if it were, we
would still have to follow him blindly. Like St. Janor said, "You do what
you do because you want to. I do what I do 'cause "Bob" told me to." That's
what it comes down to. That, and your $30.
"The Lord tested the world and found it wanting." - Isaiah 5:10
"I tested the world and found it wanting New, Improved OZMO." - Dobbs 5:10
1 Certainly, Dobbs himself could tell us all we would want to know; but not
even for this book could anyone talk him into sitting still long enough to
tell his own story. Likewise, Connie Dobbs has had other things on her mind
than sitting and reminiscing like a senile old movie star.
2 Perhaps Connie, or MWOWM.
3 Onan posits that the reason Philo and Gordon remember none of this is
because they, too, were 'flowed back in time.'
4 If any of our readers have had encounters with Dobbs, we would like to
know of them. Send your depositions along with $5 for filing costs to The
SubGenius Foundation, P.O.Box 140306, Dallas, TX 75214.
5 "Bob" Dobbs never actually finished college, but he has a high school
diploma and hundreds of study-at-home and honorary degrees.
6 Onassis and Kissinger later became bitter enemies of Dobbs.
7 Only a few bikers of that era were inclined to order a burger called "The
Hunger Fucker."
8 Today, "BOB" hamburger franchises dot the face of Brazil like zits on a
young Bobbie.
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