by Travis Mateer
When I spoke with Cyril Wecht on the phone in 2023 I already knew the answer to the question I was about to ask him. You don’t have to be a famous medical examiner to know that a rear-naked chokehold isn’t the kind of physical maneuver that results in bruises all over a man’s body. To do that, additional physical contact would be necessary—like, say, a beat-down involving SEVERAL people.
Stories always contain truths but they’re not always obvious truths. To find where the truth is hiding in a story there’s an important factor to be aware of, and that’s money, which can be tricky. Money often acts like a kaleidoscope lens distorting the truth into complex patterns, morphing and changing colors as you rotate the glass. The Amityville ghost story is a great example of this.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time breaking down the hoax, but that’s what Amityville turned out to be, a hoax. What was the motivation? The narrative conspiracy to contrive a ghost story had two purposes. The first was to provide a paranormal rationale for a brutal set of murders in order to get the perpetrator out of prison, and the second was to write a book in order to make money.
Once you write a book to make money, like William Ramsey did with the Smiley Face Killers theory, truth doesn’t just become a potential inconvenience, it becomes a potential threat. Even worse, especially for those who REALLY WANT truth (like family members of victims), information that is the OPPOSITE of the truth can become valuable to those invested in the money-making ability of a story, and that transforms those people into narrative grifters. Like William Ramsey.
I recently caught Ramsey making an insinuation that Garth Brooks could be involved in the death of Riley Gaines, a young man found dead in the river a few weeks after a night out drinking with friends in Nashville. Since I wasn’t familiar with this case I watched a true crime Youtube video about it that studiously sticks to the known facts and, after watching this video, I’m much more interested in the role of homeless encampments along the river than I am in the data point that Garth Brooks owns the bar where Gaines was drinking before he went missing.
Comedians are storytellers who tell funny stories and, if you’re good enough at telling funny stories, people pay money to come and see you. When Sam Tripoli isn’t on stage, performing comedy, he’s creating content on a very popular podcast called Tin Foil Hat. On a recent episode Sam’s sidekick, Johnny, told the audience about the first movie he remembers seeing in the theater, a movie based on a short story by Norman Maclean, called A River Runs Through It.
While Norman managed to penetrate Johnny’s consciousness deeply with his Missoula story, brought to the big screen for big money, the Missoula story I’m trying to tell isn’t doing nearly as well, from a money perspective. Luckily I have people in my life who are much better at moving on from inconvenient dead black men than I’ve been, so I’m trying to learn from them the secrets of truth-suppression.
Without the studious indifference of narrative grifters I might be thrust into some kind of lucrative spotlight where I’m able to tell more than polite baristas about the possibility I’m involved in a Masonic plot involving dark occultists and a curse tied to Jesus’ blankie (Shroud of Turin), so, really, I should be more appreciative of the protective obscurity I’ve successfully maintained, not to mention the heap of legal consequences for thinking funny shit like THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE!
When I did my stint in jail last April the uselessness of truth really set in, and I took any story I could find, like a junky in withdrawal grateful for a fix. While truth still slinks around these restrictive spaces, no matter what we humans do to it, the need for narrative, I realized, is so essential, of course immense resources are deployed to control them. Duh.
Philip K. Dick died working on a story called THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT. In another Dick narrative, Radio Free Albemuth, it’s the kernel of song that carries the seed of truth beyond the walls of the prison camp. While controllers work to control, and grifters work to grift, truth moves with a force independent of human manipulation.
Here’s a song. I hope you enjoy it. And, if you can, I’m definitely still accepting donations. You know, for truth, which doesn’t pay.
Thanks for reading!
