The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (13 page)

“Tell me about your mother,” I asked the three Christs during one of their early meetings.

Joseph was the first to answer, and his answer was bland and uninformative. “My mother,” Joseph said about his long-dead mother, “is about sixty-three years old. She has rheumatism and can hardly walk.”

Clyde was next. He had a good mother, he said, but she wasn't living now. She had been quite religious, a good cook, and had helped people. “We had a wonderful home.”

Leon claimed he had no mother. “She's not my mother. I sincerely know from experience that she's an old witch, a devil, a duper. She is in with the arsenic and old lace gang. You know what they are, don't you? She likes to get people blue under the gills and put them underground for no other reason than to be mean because of prejudice and jealousy.

“A woman bore me; she consented to having me killed electronically while she was bearing me, which is in itself a disowning of a child. And I disowned her after I put the picture together. And she also stated when I was eight and a half years of age that I'm nothing to her, and that was like a brick between the eyes. And after I died the death I told her she's nothing to me,
and it's true what people say about her, when I was growing up, that she was a first-class fornicator, that she's no good, that she's worse than trash. That particular woman, I call her the Old Witch, because only an old witch would consent to doing a thing she has done. She's a disfigured midget, she's a sentimentalist, she's a hypocrite, she's a murderer. I had the occasion of almost being killed by her through arsenic that she put in the food and drink. And with the help of God, while I was in the state of half dead and half alive, I got to the toilet and vomited about a teaspoon or two. And that saved my life. Can such a thing really happen? It did happen, sir, and many other things such as sucking and blowing me off after putting knockout drops in my food. And when she does such things, as far as I'm concerned she's an old witch; she's not my mother.

“Through court, I disowned her through court. She is the reincarnation of Woman Eve. Adam was seduced by Eve and the proposition of what will happen if Woman Eve becomes the mother of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, because he was conceived without sin. The test has been put to me and I went through it. I did not consent to her warped theology or demonology.”

About his father, Joseph told us several times that the older man was still living, and that he sometimes wrote to his son. On many occasions, however, he denied having a father, since he himself was God. And on still other occasions he claimed that Dr. Yoder, the medical superintendent at Ypsilanti State Hospital, was his father.

Leon claimed to have no earthly father at all. “Sir, my father is a white dove who became my foster father after I died the death.[
1
] The Old Witch got that particular dove to ‘come' upon her head. However, the dove was guiltless. I also heard his voice in my head when I was fifteen or sixteen. I was meditating one
day and I said to myself: ‘How is it that I, a boy of fourteen or sixteen, doesn't have a visit from a person who claims to be my father?' As I was meditating, I heard some footsteps coming up and who was it but Mr. Leon Gabor, the particular man I was thinking about. He comes up and he says: ‘Young man, you're not through my seed; you're through that white dove in your head.' And if anybody got a brick between the eyes with a sharp point, it certainly impressed me. I'll never forget it. I also remember when I was five and three-quarters years of age. He was passing by in a Model B coupe Ford and there was another man sitting beside him, and I was anxiously waiting for him to take me in his automobile and give me a ride. He made a sarcastic laugh. He said: ‘Why should I support them? They're not from me,' and with a big laughing roar, he went away.”

Another day I suggested another topic—marriage.

Leon, still single, said he had been married to Doctor the Blessed Virgin Mary of Nazareth for thirty-eight years. When I asked him how this was possible for a thirty-seven-year-old man, he replied that he was born married to her. He then went on to describe her: “Blonde, four feet ten or eleven; she has a maiden figure, but not on the curvy side; she doesn't wear make-up; her hair is parted in the middle and she has a serene-looking face.” He also said that the first time he was conceived through the Blessed Virgin Mary, but that after resurrection she became his wife. Leon went on to say that a virgin who marries remains a virgin even though she has sexual intercourse.

—
Rex, there are people who say you have no wife
.—

“That's the impression they wanted to give me because in contrast to previous times this time our bodies are near the same age.
How would that look if Jesus Christ was the
wife
of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Nazareth? Oh, scandal! Why, it's written in the Book that at that time she was his mother.”

Asked about the slip of the tongue, Leon amended: “I meant the
husband
of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

Joseph spoke of his wife in a matter-of-fact tone. She was a French-Canadian girl from Ontario, he said, whom he had met through a mutual friend. He had married her and stayed with her for years until he became sick and had to be hospitalized.

On various occasions it was suggested that the three men discuss their earliest memories and childhood experiences.

“At the age of four,” said Joseph, “I loved to go to bed and think about geography and the New World.”

—
Do you remember your parents at age two?
—

“I remember the old man smoking a pipe. My father was six foot four, two hundred and thirty-four pounds. Has blue eyes, hair between blond and brunet, a pointed nose and two gold teeth. He was a farmer; could pick up a bale of hay to the top of his head. Died at three score and ten. I was nineteen. Mother followed him not long afterwards, and the farm was given to the town for a cemetery.”

—
At six months?
—

“I used to look at my fingernails and then up to the shoulder, to see how clean I was.”

—
Do you remember any pleasant incidents?
—

“My mother and dad used to sing together.”

—
Do you have any unpleasant memories?
—

“No. Everything was pleasant.”

Clyde, asked the same question, said peevishly: “What's the difference? It isn't any of your business. What's it to you? It was years ago. I was happy. Just a bunch of little child foolishness asking one another.”

“I wouldn't say it was foolish,” Leon interposed. “It's self-psychoanalysis insight.”

“When I was four years old,” Clyde went on, “my father and mother were going to get some lumber at the sawmill, driving a team, and I was up front. . . . My mother and father were all right. My father wasn't very tall—short and heavy-set, medium height. They lived quite a while, up around seventy years.”

Leon, describing his earliest memories, told of sitting in the womb, looking out, and dying the death. “We are hollowed-out ghost conceptions,” he said, “and when a person dies the death, the blood particles, white and red corpuscles, and every part of the body, are hollowed-out, get holes, cosmic holes. When you are hollowed-out, which means that you have no blood relatives, you go to a higher level of insight. Then the parents of that particular child become its foster parents. When the male parent passes away, the foster, hollowed-out child marries his foster mother, and the children they have are not abnormal.”

At another time Leon described an incident which, according to him, occurred when he was five years old: “It had to do with sex, due to the fact that the Old Witch did not have me circumcised as she should have. I had a tight foreskin and she used this to try to seduce me, and it finally came to the point that because of the pressure of the foreskin she sucked and blowed me off and I didn't consent to it. She was trying to enshroud a child in darkness. She did something even worse. She fornicated with me on the merits of trying to deprive me of the friendship of God at such an early age.

“In Europe, duping caused me to degenerate with some boys in a clubhouse. I became an eighteen-inch disfigured midget kneeling down and—boy! when I looked I saw that his feet were enormous compared to mine. I did it twice in a row and he did it twice to me. I was going on eight, and I got so frightened that I ran out and my hair started standing on end and I said: ‘Good God, what did I do? What happened?' It so happened that the Old Witch was fornicating with a man at the side of the house there. She tried to impose that on me, that I did it, and it so happens that a tornado occurred about twenty minutes later and
the tiles flew off the roof. Excuse me, it was a cycle, a twister. It went right over the place. And talk about being frightened! I said: ‘Good God, never again will I do that.' I had remorse of conscience for over ten years over that. I was eighteen or nineteen before I regenerated myself. I was at a seminary when I first tasted my ‘come.' I was learning to be a priest but I found out there. In that clubhouse the second time I nibbled on that boy's penis against my will, why, the earth started to move counter-clockwise under my feet and the opposite happened in the chapel. The instant I tasted of that seed of ‘come' I again heard that sound of the deep and the earth started to gyrate clockwise. I'm sorry I masturbated. I blame that screwball cook and also electronic duping. Since I was nineteen I never had that. I've had some temptations.”

Leon described the events leading to his final breakdown. “Previous to 1953 I was engaged to be married and because of electronic imposition that I didn't realize at that time, I told the particular girl that I couldn't marry her. I couldn't give her all of my heart. And, of course, the reaction was that I went into concentration. After six to eight months I went to the climax. At noon I was standing near the lathe and fifteen or twenty men were looking at me. A release of a great amount of energy from my brain so I could see through my cosmic eyes. You hear through the right side, so the lathe that was running very quietly was amplified so loud that it burst in my head, vibrated my brain. I yelled: ‘Don't stand there! Do something! Oh, you fools!' I apologized later for calling them fools. The topside was most interesting. I could see right straight up, and I started getting a penis erection, stretched my arms up and went into the fourth or fifth level of light. I felt myself and it seemed real peaceful. It was so peaceful that I would have liked to remain dead, but God didn't call me.”

—
Tell me about your dreams
.—

“A dream,” said Joseph, “is a realization of one's wishes.”

“Dreams,” Leon added, “are due to anxiety, hatred, or love, but can also be imposed—not really one's own at all.”

“I dreamed I was back in England,” Joseph went on. “Everybody is your friend. Everybody is secure and safe.”

Clyde said that he had dreams but couldn't remember them. Leon, at first reluctant to discuss his dreams, reported, after a little coaxing, that he dreamed someone was trying to force him to sign checks with his “dupe name.” He couldn't remember who, because the person went “into the squelch chamber to be ground up.” He then told the following dream: “I was a bird enjoying flying, sometimes not as a bird but flying as a human with my arms outstretched. In Detroit I took a letter to a Reverend—and I saw myself encircling the parish. I flew into his rectory and gave him the letter. My foster father, the white dove, is registered in Washington, D.C., as a mail carrier.”

“Simply distributing mail, why should he be a dove to do that?” asked Joseph.

Leon replied that he had flown on a condor and on an albatross. He had called the airport and told them when, for how long and how high he'd be flying, but in spite of these precautions he had been shot at. He then described a flight he had taken with his uncle, Sir Governor Joseph (the Archangel St. Michael), at 50,000 feet, at the end of which he had crashed right through a wall.

When Clyde and Joseph expressed disbelief, Leon exclaimed: “Man alive! You've got a lot to learn.”

“You're a machine,” rejoined Clyde. “You're not alive.”

The three men were discussing sex.

“It's been eighteen years ten months since I had a woman,” Clyde said. “I didn't get in with a lot of girls and get into trouble. I married the one they wanted me to, then I lost that one. The fifteen-year-olds are not experienced enough, the thirty-year-old ones are the best. There is spiritual food and sexual food and I can't have intercourse with a woman while I am on duty. Can't
have a woman, and this and that, and damned old guards got it so you don't have to have a woman now. What the heck is going to be next? Anyone know? I can support a hell of a lot of 'em. I haven't had any contact with women since 1940, but when this project is finished I can have all the women I want.”

Joseph said he didn't miss a woman because he was too busy with his work; he wasn't even tempted. “I wouldn't have sexual intercourse with a woman unless it was legitimate, only with my own wife. Anything else would be taking advantage of my power. I made the world and arranged it so that individuals had sexual intercourse when they are married.”

Later, when asked why he was so quiet, Joseph replied: “I am thinking about the old days outside. On Saturday nights you take your girl to the movie theater and feel her tits.”

“Sir,” exclaimed Leon, “your language, please! Since you are bringing up such pleasant memories, it reminds me of pleasant memories pertaining to my own wife. But that's in the future. In my case, I've never had sexual intercourse and I certainly look forward to getting together with my wife. My wife, Doctor Blessed Virgin Mary of Nazareth, is three years older than I. I have good news. Last night I thought about my wife and I got a hard-on, and I came without trimming the candle.”