The Vessel of God

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.

The Merchant of Venice Act 5, Scene 1

Boyd:

So you finally called me, I see. And just as I’ve predicted, you tried to pretend that the rift in our relationship was initiated by me, even though you know differently, I know differently, and you know that I know differently. It’s all part of a pattern of behavior that as of late has included a great deal of blatant lying. You think that as long as you stick to your lie, eventually the person will believe you, or you will at least get your way. Since you’ve done this at least a dozen times in the last few months, your latest move was quite predictable. What I did not predict was that you would try to drag the publisher into the conflict before you even spoke to me. I thought you were smarter than that. But apparently, alcohol abuse has eroded even your most basic common sense.

We both know that for months you have been planning on cutting off our friendship as soon as the book was done. You announced this openly to anyone who would listen, except for me, but of course, I quickly heard about it. Yet I had known this was coming for some time. I am quite “FRAMILIAR” with the way you treat friends who have loyally served you after they have outlived their usefulness to you; for instance, Michael Moynihan and Vadge Moore. I am quite “FRAMILIAR” with how you abandon people when your short attention span can no longer tolerate it, and the relationship becomes tedious; for instance, the way you abandoned your two sons, and the women who bore them. I know how you throw a tantrum when you can’t get your way, and how you attack people who don’t immediately gratify your desires: for instance, the way you treated Jamie, and the outrageous lies you’ve told about her.

Since the earliest stages of our friendship I have seen the writing on the wall. It started right around the time that I arranged a television interview and free trip to Rennes-le-Chateau for us both (originally offered to only me). AS a way of showing thanks, you schemed with the producer to upstage me and push me out of the show. It wasn’t enough that you got to be part of the show, but you had to be the star. You had to be perceived as the sole genius behind everything. You probably don’t remember it, but on the New Years Eve before last, when you were disgustingly drunk, you confessed this to me in front of four witnesses. I agreed at the time to forgive you, but I have known since that day that I couldn’t trust you in the slightest.

It was after the trip to Rennes-le-Chateau that the dynamic in our relationship was set. Prior to that, we were in the courtship phase. You wanted to be the author of a non-fiction book – to be thought of as scholarly and wise, and not just a Nazi Satanist drunk who dropped out of high school. You knew that you couldn’t achieve this on your own, but knew that I could do it for you. And so you showered me with gifts and praise, luring me into trusting you. But after I arranged the trip to France for you, you began to take me for granted. You began trying to control the content of my magazine, and to whatever extent you could, to control my life. You began demanding favors from me constantly. You always had these projects that you would essentially “assign” to me, sometimes requiring hours or days of my time. You demanded that I type things for you and look things up for you on the internet, then send them to you in the mail, so that you wouldn’t have to bother going down to the library that’s ten blocks from your house, or learn to use the computer that Kevin Slaughter so kindly gave you. You would even have me take dictation over the phone! Still, I was at first happy to do it, and then gradually less and less so, as your demands became greater, and your appreciation less. Then you convinced me to move here, one of your contentions being that if I was here, you could learn to use my computer, and the entire process of writing the book would be “easier” for both of us. As it turns out, the only person this made things easier for was you.

Once Brian and I moved in, you decided that we were both your personal secretaries. You would leave messages on our voicemail with instructions for what favors we were to do for you that day, and when we should drop the finished product off on your doorstep. Rarely was there a please or a thank you. You would have me print off lengthy documents for you, which you would then promptly lose, and demand a new copy. You even had us host a wedding for a friend of yours that you had originally agreed to host in your own home (one which required that my entire bedroom be painted black). You then tried to get us to entertain this friend for you throughout his entire stay, because you had grown tired of him but didn’t have the balls to tell him that yourself. Do you remember, Boyd, how we saved you from having Vadge Moore’s wedding turn into a total fiasco for you, and you never once said “thank you”? It didn’t occur to you, because your used to having someone else clean up your messes for you. You seem to think the world owes it to you.

After the first few weeks of us living here, you virtually ceased to grant us any favors in return. The slightest request from us was simply too inconvenient for you, and couldn’t be done. As for learning to use a computer, it was the furthest thing from your mind. You wouldn’t even touch the keyboard or mouse. But that didn’t stop you from writing. You began to demand more and more space in Dagobert’s Revenge to air your theories, while at the same time trying to control everything that I wrote in my own articles. You got lazier and lazier about your writing too. You would scribble out hundreds of illegible pages for me to type, and then complain rudely if I typed one of the words incorrectly because I couldn’t read it. You would include quotes that were incorrect, or for which the source was not cited, because you didn’t feel like crossing the room to pick up the book you vaguely remembered reading it in. In other instances, you would simply leave blanks where a name, date, or other fact was to be inserted by me. You simply assumed that I didn’t mind looking these things up for you; that I had nothing better to do than to facilitate your laziness. Knowing how megalomaniacal you are, you probably saw yourself as Hitler, and I your faithful Himmler, typing every pearl of wisdom as it dropped from your mouth.

But all of this was, to me, mere annoyance. It is not the real reason why I have grown to resent you so much. The real reason has to do with how you’ve appropriated the intellectual property of both Brian and I, not only making use of ideas, but completely remodeling your public image to incorporate ours. This would not be so much of a problem, for we didn’t at first mind sharing, except that you would then falsely accusing us of stealing from and copying you. After having heard you ramble on and on over the telephone about how every artistic or intellectual movement since the 1970s was the result of someone ripping you off, I already suspected that you had a compulsion to take credit for other people’s work. Therefore I was on my guard early on, as I knew that you would eventually begin doing it to me. This started, again, right after the trip to Rennes-le-Chateau. I remember mentioning to you while at our hotel in Toulouse a theory I had linking Dagon and the Quinotaur, and thus to the Merovingians and Dagobert. A couple of weeks later, you had written an article using this as a springboard, and when I told you I was already writing about the same subject, you became angry. You accused me of stepping on your toes, invading your territory, and stealing your ideas. I brushed it off, and agreed to publish both articles, even making efforts to change my own article so that it wasn’t quite as similar to your own. After all, I told myself, we’re in this together, and we really shouldn’t be competing with each other.

As time went on, this same dynamic occurred every time I mentioned a theory or idea of mine to you. At first I was happy that you liked my ideas enough to take them on as your own, but I sensed that a problem was developing. Then, when I came to stay with you for those three weeks while I searched for an apartment, I began to understand why this was occurring. Every night during my stay we both got uproariously drunk. And every night we would discuss ideas and debate things, but the next morning, your recollection of the conversation would be totally skewed. In addition to simply misremembering facts, you would, in your own memory, credit yourself with having come up with ideas that I had explained to you only the night before. When I would bring this to your attention, you would then accuse me of trying to steal from you. What was almost even more disturbing was that, after a few days of such binge drinking, you could no longer remember the basic tenets of the theory that you and I had come up with and agreed upon together. You couldn’t even remember things that you had written in your own articles, and there were many occasions in which you would deride me for touting a theory that you yourself had written about. Then you would deny ever having written about it.

Yes, as it turned out, the reason why you were so confused about the details of the theories we were developing, and whose ideas were whose, was because you are constantly drinking to excess, and you can hardly remember anything from one day to the next. This has been the case throughout the last three years of us working together. Several times I pointed out to you when you misremembered something, and several times I endured false accusations of the same coming from you, but I always chose not to start a fight about it, because I had the larger goal in mind: of us writing a book together and successfully promoting it. I knew it was important for us to appear as a united front, and so I compromised myself, over and over again, against all trusted advice from family and friends. I was always the bigger person, and always allowed you to be the asshole at my expense. I agreed to be selfless so that you could be selfish. I even dragged my husband into it, persuading him to be your personal graphic artist for any project you might be doing, and persuading him to bite his tongue when he received neither thanks nor credit for his work.

Your sense of entitlement towards those around you is one of your greatest personality flaws. You simply assume that people don’t mind doing your dirty work, and don’t expect any thanks in return. An excellent example is when we called you up to tell you about all of the cheap Cocteaus for sale on ebay. You immediately enlisted Brian to place your bids for you, and then complained to both him and I when he didn’t get back to you frequently enough about the progress of your bid. You were completely rude and out of line. It didn’t occur to you that Brian was doing you a favor, and that you wouldn’t have even known about the auction, much less been able to bid on it, without his help. And of course, at the end of it all, there hadn’t been a single thank you sent our way, but you got what you wanted.

Another example is your complete lack of appreciation for what I have done to help improve your writing, and therefore, your public image. In every single article of yours that I edited, I did everything I could to correct the many erroneous facts, to fix your at times abominable spelling, word choice, and sentence structure, and to make your argument consistent, rather than contradictory, throughout each piece. Instead of appreciating this, you were constantly complaining about how my corrections “ruined” your work. Yet you were obviously completely unaware of the extent to which I was saving your ass. Do you realize that in that entire 400-page manuscript, not a single one of your Bible quotations was correct? Not a one! You even had attributed entire scenarios as taking place in the biblical narrative that simply do not. Such errors were in no way confined to biblical subjects either. In fact, anything having to do with math or science was invariably incorrect also. When you talk about these subjects, your 9th grade education really shows through. If you didn’t have me correcting you, you would look like a verifiable idiot.

When I finally scored us a book contract and we started trying to put the book together, something snapped in you, and every remnant of courtesy or respectfulness towards Brian and I was abandoned. For the last six months, I have hauled ass trying to put our manuscript in shape for the publisher. As usual, you left all of the most tedious and difficult work for me, while still trying to maintain control of the project. You have spent most of your time in these months drinking and chasing girls, but when you did take time out for the book, you used it to harass me and nitpick at me, gratuitously challenging everything I wrote, even things that we had long agreed upon as true, or facts that could be easily verified by looking in the index of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. You made finishing this manuscript virtually impossible, and your approach to the work was so totally unprofessional, it would have been funny if it weren‘t for the fact that it was my career at stake, and it was me who had to work extra hard to make up for what you wouldn‘t do. A highlight was when you went around telling everyone that I had purposely tried to keep you ignorant of the deadline for your author questionnaire. Of course, I’m sure that when you finally got around to filling the thing out, you noticed that the due date was prominently displayed both on the first page of the questionnaire, and in the cover letter that came with it, even if you didn’t remember me specifically mentioning the due date to you when the questionnaire was first sent to us. Apparently, the “secretary” had not reminded you to do your job, and as usual, you blamed someone else for your own failure.

Over the last few years, I have really gotten to know the true character of Boyd Rice, and what I see is devoid of all decency: a rude, selfish and self-obsessed, ignorant, irresponsible, lazy, congenital liar, a disloyal friend, a deadbeat dad, and a drunk. The way you abuse the people most loyal to you is disgusting. Do these criticisms sounds “FRAMILIAR” to you? The reason why virtually everyone thinks of you this way is because this is truly what you are. You, Boyd Rice, are an ass. It is an embarrassment to be so closely associated with you. It is shameful to admit that I have spent the last 3-4 years of my life bending over backwards for you, trying to cover for you, trying to make you look smarter and more respectable than you are, making important business connections for you, scoring important media appearances for you, and receiving almost no thanks in return. I have endured untold amounts of abuse, insults, and humiliation. It is over now, and I intend to take no more.

You were wrong to assume that I have not called you because of anything Douglas has done. I felt that, after you so rudely snubbed both Brian and I at the Wax Trax in-store, publicly ignoring us in front of all of our mutual friends, the relationship was over, especially since you had already announced that the completion of the book meant the end of our friendship, and the book had been completed the day before. I didn’t even know that we weren’t on the list for the Death in June concert until you told me in your message, because I chose not to show up for it. I did not call you after sending the book off because I assumed you trusted me to handle this final step, as you have left me to handle most of the other tasks involved in creating this book. But for the record, you did not call me either. I have given you ample opportunity to sober up, and to realize how you have intentionally alienated one of your truest friends and greatest resources. That window of opportunity is now closed.

You said in your message that we had things to “discuss”, but I disagree. The book is done, and if your input is required for the editing or promotion of the book, either I or the publisher will contact you. I do not intend to be vindictive toward you, and I will at all times, when dealing with the public or the publisher, do nothing to indicate that there is any rift between us. I will at all times cooperate with whatever needs to be done to promote our work. I’m sure you would agree that this is the wisest approach for both of us. I wish you no ill will, and will happily allow you to go on your way with no bother from me, if you will afford me the same.

As for the return of the materials that you have left over at my house, I first require this: You must return to me the four books of mine that you have. Included are the two which you stole from my bookshelf while I was at work one day, and then made up some story about how you thought that Adam had given them to you and not me. These books are Language, Myth, and Man, and Babylon Mystery Religion. I have missed them since you took them, they are both out of print, and I want them back. The other two books you borrowed were The Labyrinth of the Grail, by William F. Mann, and Templar Gold: Discovering the Ark of the Covenant, by Patrick Byrne. You can drop all four of these books on my doorstep, and then we can make arrangements for the return of the rest of your stuff.

Sincerely,

Tracy Twyman

PS: It is funny that you are now finally getting a computer, after using Brian and I as your slaves for three years because you refused to even touch one. I’m sure the irony has not escaped you.