Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

prepare breakfast and lunch. Dincalci cooked dinner when he got back in the evening. For the first
two months it was always fishsticks, breaded chicken, steaks or hamburgers, until Hubbard tired of
the diet and encouraged Dincalci to try other dishes.
After dinner Hubbard had a single tot of brandy and sometimes talked into the night. 'He'd jump
around from subject to subject,' said Dincalci. 'One minute he'd be talking about how an angel had
given him this sector of the universe to look after and next minute he'd be talking about the camera
he wanted me to buy for him next day. I used to watch him talking; sometimes his eyes would roll
up into his head for a couple of minutes and he'd be kinda gone. One of the things that upset him
was that he'd never gotten back the money that he had stashed away in previous lives. There was
some inside the statue of a horse in Italy which he had hidden in the sixteenth century. He was a
writer and had written The Prince. "That son-of-a-bitch Machiavelli stole it from me," he said. He
talked a lot about his childhood and all the horses he had ridden when he was little, how he would
get on them before he could walk. I didn't get the impression that it was a happy childhood, not at
all. There was a lot of bitterness there about his parents. He said, over and over, he had graduated
from George Washington University. "They say I didn't," he used to complain, "but I did." He said
that he was editor of the University paper for four years and that would prove it.
'He said that when Pearl Harbor was bombed he was on some island in the Pacific and he was the
senior person in charge because everyone else had been killed. He was controlling all the traffic
through the island until a bomb exploded right by him at the airport and he was sent home, the first
US casualty of World War Two. He had a big fatty tumour, a lymphoma, on the top of his head which
he said had slivers of shrapnel in it. We had it X-rayed once and had the film enlarged fifty times to
find the shrapnel, but there was nothing there. When he came back from the war his first wife didn't
go to see him, even though he was wounded. He had nothing good to say about her. His second
wife, whom he never really married, was a spy who had been sent by the Nazis to spy on him
during the war.
'Most nights I'd give him a massage before he went to bed and he always said he felt better for it. In
my mind I never questioned anything he said except once when he was talking about out-of-thebody
experiences and how beautiful it was to sit on a cloud. I was always running about New York
looking at things for him and I thought if he was such hot shit, why did I have to go and look? Why
couldn't he go out of his body and take a look himself?'
In February, Hubbard began to get jittery about the security in the Executive building and Dincalci
was asked to look for somewhere with a 'lower profile'. He found a large apartment in a scruffier
neighbourhood of Queens - a nondescript second-floor walk-up in the middle of a block on
Codwise Place - owned by a Cuban family who lived on the first floor of the house. Dincalci paid
three months' rent in advance, in cash, and said his brother and his uncle would be moving in
immediately.
Soon after the move, Hubbard decided to go out for a walk. Dincalci was concerned that the
preparations the Commodore was making to pass unnoticed in the street would almost certainly
mark him out for attention. 'His hair had grown very long, almost down to his shoulders and he
looked pretty unkempt. He insisted on wearing this big hat with the brim turned up. It made him
look like Bozo the clown. If he had walked into any org they would have kicked him out.' After being
cosseted by central heating for three months, Hubbard stepped out into a freezing February day,
immediately got a chill in his tooth and attracted a retinue of jeering street kids. It discouraged him
from venturing out again by himself.