call me willie. i ain't got nuthin' but time, mr. garrison. minutes, hours, days, years of'em. time just stands still here like a snake sunnin' itself in the road.
yeah. clay. i met him sometime in june of '62 at the masquerade bar. dave ferrie took me there, for the express reason to meet him.
well.  yeah.
twenty dollars each time. hell, it's no secret. that's what i'm here for.
i remember he had some kinda thing wrong with his left leg. he limped. don't get me wrong, he's not one of those, you know, limp wrists. he's a butch john. you'd meet him on the street, you'd never snap. you could go fishing with him, play poker with him, you'd never snap in a million years. so one night we were over at ferrie's place. having a party. sometime in the late summer of '63.
there were about nine or ten people, cubans, friends of dave doing some stuff in the bush with him. place was a mess. dave's mind was a mess, y'know he had all those mice cages around cause he's working on this cure for cancer.  dave's smart - real smart - speaks five languages, knows philosophy, medicine, military history, politics. he wanted to be a priest but they defrocked him 'cause he was queer.
yeah, strange guy. dave introduced him as.
how ya doing?
fuck you, man.
fuck, yes. hell, i'm already in jail. i got no reason to lie to you. i ain't no nigger.
well the party got crazier and crazier, one of those, y'know "beatnik" type things.
finally they got out of there and i found myself alone with dave and this leon, two of the cubans, and this guy bertrand. dave pulled out his clippings which he was always carrying around. he'd been obsessed with castro and kennedy for months and he started in again.
then the cubans left and the bullshitting was going on, dave was drunk, really drunk and he starts in with kennedy again.
oh, c'mon, dave, you're never gonna get that sonofabitch.
what about the secret service, the cops?
i didn't think much about it at the time. just bullshit, y'know, everybody likes to make themselves out to be something more than they are. specially in the homosexual underworld. but then when they got him i got real scared, y'know. real scared. and that's when i got popped.
fuck, yeah! i told you so. and you can tell'em all i told you so.
bring on all the motherfuckers! bring their college degrees in here! i got nuthin' to hide. they can't buy me. you can't buy me. i don't even need the parole. this is about the truth coming out. you're a goddamn liberal, mr. garrison, you don't know shit, cause you never been fucked in the ass. fascism is here now, facism is.
you wanna know why? 'cause that mother fucker kennedy stole that fuckin' election, that's why! nixon was gonna be one of the great presidents 'til kennedy wrecked this fuckin' country. got niggers all over the fuckin' place asking for their rights, where do you think we got all this fuckin' crime now, 'cause kennedy promised 'em too damned much. revolution comin'. fascism's coming back. i tell ya this - the day that communist sumbitch died was a great day for this country. i jes' hate to think they're blaming it on some silly fuckin' oswald who didn't know shit anyway. people should know why that sumbitch was killed. 'cause he was a communist. put me on the stand, go ahead, i'll tell the same goddamn story, i'm proud of it, don't matter fuck all to me, things don't change.
that's clay bertrand. that's the man i saw at david ferrie's.