A Personal History of Moral Decay

This is a collection of autobiographical narratives that have been written over the last 40-odd years. There is more to come.

1950's

(SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES) "The Daring Young Man Meets William Saroyan"
That morning in the forest we fell out alongside the trail for a rest and some chow. There was the creek, the trail that followed alongside it, the trees, the bars of slanting sunlight with the specs drifting down, the underbrush and so on. It was a nice spring morning. Read More…

(SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES) "Something Wrong in Our House"
When I came back from Korea I didn’t see anything wrong, I thought that everything at our house was okay. The very next day my aunt rang me up and invited me for coffee. My uncle came too and we sat at the counter in a café that was all wrong while they told me about my mother and… Read More…

(MEXICO) "Laughing at the Dead. Not laughing"
We took the second-class bus from Mexico City to the plaza in Xochimilco, then started walking carrying the bundles with our suits and capes and the swords. The afternoon was sunny and hot. The street was paved with rocks for several blocks, then it was dirt. I hadn’t noticed before,… Read More…

(NEW YORK CITY) "The Morning The Sun Was a Knockout"
It wasn’t easy for Pamela because her family and friends were everywhere in New York and New Jersey, all of them well-situated, taking life seriously and pointing out to her, in the sensitive way they had, that she’d married beneath her station and that her life was moving in a… Read More…

1960's

(HOLLYWOOD) "The Last of the Romans"
Worthington has agreed to let me sleep in his room for awhile, along with he and Marlow. I walked over here a couple days ago with my typewriter and a paper bag with my clothes in it. The room is off Highland Avenue a couple blocks from Hollywood Boulevard with an alley entrance, in the… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Saved By The Animals"
I’ve decided to sell the typewriter. I’ve gotten rid of everything else but I’m hedging about the typewriter. It’s too heavy to lug around, I need the money, but I’m hedging. Selling the typewriter would make a clean sweep of everything I own except the change of clothes and… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Barney's Beanery"
This afternoon I sat on the steps to the back porch in the pale sunlight. The old garden is dead. On the dry grass a blue jay was tearing up a grasshopper. I watched the insect make desperate, crippled little jumps. Inside the house Mother began to sing in her clear pretty voice… Read More…

(SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES) "Secret Spindles"
SUNDAY 1 JANUARY. Last night I did my roadwork at a slow steady pace, jogging along in the dark past the old sheds and the brick warehouses. When the rain began to fall I took off my glasses and put them in my back pocket. I felt very intense about something but I didn’t know what… Read More…

(SOUTH CHINA SEA) "Americans at Sea"
It was night and we were steaming south through the Bashi Channel into the South China Sea. The black water was absolutely still. There was no moon, no stars. Out the porthole I could hear the quiet rush of the ship’s wake but I couldn’t see anything. I sat on the edge of my bunk… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Sue Ann, Ruby, Jenny and Me"
When Sue Ann telephoned this morning she sounded worried about our luncheon date. That was fine with me because I didn’t want to see her. It was too complicated.
Sue Anne said: “If Don finds out about us he’s going to be jealous.”
“So far there isn’t much for… Read More…

(VIETNAM) "Old Manuscripts, Old Lives"
Everybody wants to put a little something away for his old age. I’m no exception. I’m not nervous about getting old but when you’re fifty-one you think about it sometimes. You see yourself living alone in a room, you can’t walk too good because of… Read More…

(VIETNAM) "Lt Han's Brother's Throat"
I follow the stories of the kidnappings of unarmed civilians in Iraq by Muslim fanatics. I follow the stories of those who are beheaded, or shot, as if I know from personal experience something, a little, of what they have gone through. The kidnapping of the truck drivers… Read More…

(VIETNAM) "Che Guevara in Saigon"
When I saw the first light of day come in through the window I pushed the three paperback books I used for a pillow against the wall and rolled up the reed mat and stood it in the corner of the room. On the bed, Bryant turned onto his side snoring lightly. Bryant’s a Quaker, but… Read More…

(VIETNAM) "Waiting for Saigon to Fall"
[These are pages from a journal I kept while I was in Vietnam in 1968. Don't know where the rest of it is. Not certain which couple weeks it represents. I'm surprised to be reminded of how torn I was inwardly-not by what was happening around me in Vietnam, but by what I had left behind… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Love at the Nirvana Arms"
The alarm goes off at four thirty in the morning and when I get up to turn it off I see its raining so I mash a couple cockroaches and go back to bed to think things over. The next thing I know it’s eight o’clock and too late to kick up the typewriter. So I dress and… Read More…

1970's

(HOLLYWOOD) "Viel of Maya"
Up at six this morning I listen to the rain falling from the eaves. I dress quietly in the dark, careful not to wake Susan. In the kitchen by the light of the open refrigerator I mix half a glass of grapefruit juice with some mineral water. The rain is splashing on the concrete walk… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "The Journal"
There are a number of statements in the January, 1979 journal that I would now put differently, or would not put at all. That’s how it is with journals. For example, I would no longer take it as a given, as I do here in one place, that Germans used gassing chambers to murder millions… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Libertarians, Aliens, and Mal-contents"
I’m on the mezzanine of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. A Libertarian Party convention is taking place and there are a lot of people milling around. As I walk through the crowd I pause to accept a photocopy of a newspaper article that a man is passing out… Read More…

1980's

(HOLLYWOOD) "The Man Who Stopped Paying"
A.K. SWIFT: Last night I dreamed I was working on the production line in a factory that made sheet glass for storefront windows, something like that. While we worked the guys were talking about when the nuclear holocaust is going to happen. Some said it’s going to happen any day… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "The Auschwitz Huggers"
It’s a beautiful summer morning. The sun is shining, bees and flies are swarming in the Cecil Brunner rose, the smog still hovers over the horizon. Here in the old garage the air is cool, the newspaper clippings and manuscripts and books are stacked up on the table around the type… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "The Raincheck Room"
I was working for a small land developer in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, I hired illegal aliens for cheap labor, get drunk, staying out of trouble, evading entirely the Internal Revenue Service, chastising myself for not paying more attention to the kids, trying to think of interesting… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Auschwitz and the Mysterious Stranger"
Tom Marcellus was one of seventeen individuals who subscribed to  Smith's Journal after reading the first issue, a quarterly with twenty-four photocopied pages stapled together with a gray paper cover. I produced it with a typewriter on Mother's dining room table and… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Snakes, Elephants and Beer in the Malibu Mountains"
Got up by the alarm at 3:30 this morning to work at the typing and at 6:30 I dressed and walked the three blocks up the little canyon to where mother lives in a duplex. She had gotten up by herself, dressed, combed her hair and was sitting at the kitchen table in her wheelchair… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Holocaust Cultist Dreams"
For several days now a story has been running in the papers about the American Library Association convention being held here. The Association reports that since 1979 there has been a threefold increase in censorship efforts by "outside" groups and an atmosphere reminiscent… Read More…

(HOLLYWOOD) "Tools of Memory"
The New York Times publishes an interview with an old fellow in the Bronx who claims that every day at Buchenwald the Germans threw a Jew into a cage with a bear and an eagle. The bear would eat the Jew and the eagle would pick his bones. Give me a break. The old Jewish guy says that… Read More…

1990's

(VISALIA, CALIFORNIA) "An Interview"
Interview With A Holocaust Revisionist – The publisher of Loompanics Catalog, Michael Hoy, interviews me via USPS or email. Don’t recall which. The interview was subsequently published in the Catalog itself. I would use a different language if we were to do the interview… Read More…

2000's

(BAJA, MEXICO) "BREAK HIS BONES ; The Private Life of a Holocaust Revisionist"
AUSCHWITZ AND THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER.Tom Marcellus was one of seventeen individuals who subscribed to Smith’s Journal in 1978 after reading the first issue, a quarterly with twenty-four photocopied pages stapled together with a gray paper cover. I produced it with a typewriter… Read More…

(BAJA, MEXICO) "Fish tacos and a bad merlot"
After the disaster of 9/11 I went through a period where I asked myself if we would continue to talk about the Jewish Holocaust story, and talk and talk about it, the way we had before 9/11. After 9/11 and the declaration of war against "terrorism," the war in Afghanistan,… Read More…

(BAJA, MEXICO) "READING MEIN KAMPF; Adolf Hitler and Me (A Work in Progress)"
This afternoon I’m at a Starbucks in Chula Vista where I drink four or five or maybe six double shots of espresso to wake myself up and I get so high that in a fit of raging enthusiasm and self-confidence I decide I will write a book about Adolf Hitler. For the first time in my life… Read More…

(IRAN) "The Irrational Vocabulary of the American Professorial Class with Regard to the Holocaust Question"
Good afternoon (morning?). I’m very pleased to be here.
Today I will suggest that the American professorial class uses an irrational vocabulary to respond to revisionist arguments questioning the orthodox Holocaust story… Read More…