was soft around the jaw and mouth and a little empty in the eye department, Orne Foy was steel hard in both places, and not like any other man I’d met until then, and the first thought that raced through my mind as he held that pistol was this man could kill Ray Bob Dideroff for me, if I could get him to want to. He looked at me for what seemed like a half hour but couldn’t’ve been more than a couple of seconds, and I felt a little like I had when I first got that look from Ray Bob, like he could see me not the mask I showed to the world, but there wasn’t any of that evil in it, no lust at all, only an interested regard from a being higher than me, one of those winged lions from mythology, or likea man sizing up a dog he was thinking about buying. He said you reading that book and I said yes and he asked me how did I like it, and I said I thought it was great. He said I guess you think you’re one of the people who hold up the world and I didn’t say anything and he said, what you got there is a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. Would you like to see the real thing, the source of the light? And I said, yes, sir, and he got up and took my arm and took me out to his truck. I guess there might be another major drug trafficker somewhere who travels with a copy of The Viking Portable Nietzsche never more than a reach away, but if so I never met him. He handed me it, and I looked at it and said Nitscha? And he said it right, and I said, I teach you the superman. Man is something to be surpassed. He looked at me funny like I might want to bite him and said you’ve read Nietzsche? And I admitted it was just Collier’s Book of Quotations, although it was on my lips to say oh, sure all the time, I wanted him to respect me so much, and that was the first time I had that particular and useful feeling. He told me to get out and he’d be back in a month and we might talk about it. Later I found out he bought them by the case and gave them out like Gideon does Bibles, a missionary in his way was Percival Orne Foy.
Well, started reading that night and I’ll admit that there was a lot that left me confused in it, mostly references to things I never read and philosophical terms. I had to look up Wagner and all the Greeks he mentions in the encyclopedia, which wasn’t a bad thing. But the core of it set me on fire, seemed pretty much designed to set on fire any bright heartbroken fourteen-year-old with a lust for revenge. The will to power! The tyranny of the weak! And fuck Christianity while you’re at it, all those hypocrites at Amity Street. Mediocrities! Slaves! I did the usual blasphemies, including dragging poor Hunter out and busting into Amity Street and making him fuck me on the table up front while I howled and laughed like a goblin.
When Orne Foy came back next month I was there and sat at his feet and drank in wisdom. Nietzsche had been right, Western society was hopelessly decadent, was moving inexorably toward chaos, Atlas shrugging away, fundamentalists and Jews running the country trying to turn us into a nation of repressed slaves. But it couldn’t go on. The environment would collapse, poisons would flood the air and the water, new diseases brought by filthy immigrants that we didn’t have the sense or guts to keep out would ravage us all. The economy would collapse because all the weak couldn’t stand for the strong to flourish and chained them with all their rules and regulations, so a real man couldn’t breathe…but after the collapse the faithful remnant would emerge, heavily armed, from their hidden fortresses and reclaim the world for glory and honor and savage beauty.
And a lot more in that vein. I had never really thought much about the world, except to despise it, so Orne’s teaching fell on rich virgin soil and flourished. He had a place in the wilds of Virginia where he grew dope in defiance of the slave government, and where, after the final collapse, he would establish the nucleus of the new
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