The Adventures of Timberline
Issue #5, “The Director”
Busted Head Press, 1968
Price: 35 cents

The opening page of the underground comic book Timberline, Issue #5 (The Director) shows FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover seated at a massive executive’s desk in his oak-paneled office. His walls are decorated with the taxidermized heads of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Che Guevara.

Hoover’s desk groans under the weight of stacks of files, spools tape recordings, a machine gun, handcuffs, Billy clubs, John Dillinger’s penis in a jar of formaldehyde, bottles of gin and rye whiskey, reels of 8 mm surveillance film, spools of wiretapped audio tapes, and Clyde Barrow’s skull. A bare foot wearing a toe tag testifies to the presence of a corpse stuffed among the Director’s paperwork.

Hoover wears the grizzled, dyspeptic look of a mastiff that has just swallowed a live porcupine in one gulp. He sweats profusely around his balding pate and from the folds of his double chins while he composes his thoughts in an old-fashioned ledger. His internal monologue is spelled out in an array of thought bubbles.

“What groups present an existential threat to the United States?” he asks himself.

His first idea appears in a separate bubble: “Existentialists.” Other suspected enemies follow: “Anabaptists. Semiologists. Vegetarians. Abortionists. Astrologers.”

In the next panel, a door opens from the Director’s waiting room. A frail, aged man with a swarthy complexion and a full white mustache stands in the doorway, wearing a janitor’s uniform. “Clean your office, Mr. Hoover?”

Hoover glances up from his work, surprised, but then smiles at the old man as if in gratitude for the interruption. “Yes, come in. Are you new here?”

The janitor shuffles in. “No, Mr. Hoover. I’ve been cleaning your office for the past 12 years.”

“Oh. And your name is . . . ?”

“Dion, Mr. Hoover. You know me.”

“Dion, let me ask you a very important question. Who do you think poses the gravest threat to our American way of life? What group? I mean, besides the Communists, the anarchists, the Mafia, Jane Fonda, college professors, The New York Times, students, labor unions, Quakers, the NAACP, the Weathermen, the Panthers, the civil liberty nutcases, opponents of capital punishment, pacifists . . . .”

Dion ponders the question while dumping a tray of cigar ashes into his wheeled trash can. “In my neighborhood, I seem to run into more homosexuals every year.”

“HOMOSEXUALS!” Hoover thunders.

On the page, the word is set in a grotesque 50-point font, occupying almost the entire panel. The word crowds Dion and Hoover himself into the corners of the frame.

“Yes, Mr. Hoover.”

“PEDERASTS!”

“That’s right, Mr. Hoover.”

“SODOMITES!”

“Yes, Mr. Hoover.”

“QUEERS!”

“Yes. They have a bar on just down the street from my apartment house.”

“A bar? A bar just for queers?”

“Yes, sir. Oh, Mr. Hoover, you wouldn’t believe the goings-on in that place.”

“By God!” Hoover thunders. “This will not stand.”

“If you could find a way. . . .” Dion begins.

“To stamp them out? Yes. Certainly. I’ll launch a full-scale investigation. But tell me, now: How do you know the men at this bar are queers? How can you tell that they’re not just ordinary, normal men?”

An expression of mingled horror and shame crosses Dion’s care-ravaged old face. “Please don’t ask me to tell you that, Mr. Hoover. I don’t want to say it.”

Hoover is stunned. “Don’t want to say it? Don’t want to? It’s your duty to say.”

“Please, Mr. Hoover.”

“Listen to me: I am the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You cannot refuse my demand for information about these queers. So speak, man! Tell me what they do!”

Dion cringes before the Director in an agony of embarrassment. “I don’t want to say it out loud, sir. May I whisper it instead?”

The next panel shows Dion’s dark lips and full white mustache poised to the side of Hoover’s pasty, cauliflower-shaped ear. “They wear dresses.”

The next five panels feature close-ups of Hoover’s eyes, each one a distinct reaction to the news he’s just received.

Panel 1: Confusion, bewilderment.
Panel 2: Dawning realization.
Panel 3: Surprise.
Panel 4: Shock.
Panel 5: Rage.

And in that final panel, another speech bubble, Hoover’s voice. “Women’s dresses?”

“Yes, Mr. Hoover.” Dion now kneels beside Hoover’s chair, head bowed like a penitent. “Women’s dresses. They must not be allowed to do this anymore.”

“That’s the most depraved thing I’ve ever heard. It’s a crime against nature. It’s a crime against the law. It’s a crime against God himself! And by heaven, they shall be punished!”

In the next frame, Hoover gathers Dion into his massive, meaty arms, as in a lover’s embrace. “Thank you, Dion,” he says. “I realize you’re just a poor Mexican immigrant . . . .”

“I’m from Greece,” Dion corrects him, but is ignored.

“But in bringing these queers to my attention, you have performed a great service to your adopted country. Before I assign my agents to this case, though, I need to see these queers for myself, to prepare my men emotionally and morally for the kind of depraved behavior they will encounter. So I have a final request to make.”

Hoover’s voice drops to a whisper as he draws the old man into an even deeper embrace. “Will you . . . will you take me to this queer bar, so I can see?”

The perspective changes in the next frame, showing Dion’s tear-filling eyes as he gazes upward toward the Director and whispers, “Yes. I will take you.”

The next frame shows Hoover and Dion walking down the squalid sidewalk of a residential neighborhood of Washington. It’s a cold day. Hoover wears a double-breasted wool overcoat and a Fedora. Dion is still in his thin cotton janitor’s uniform. But somehow he looks younger. His mustache appears darker, his face less lined, his posture straighter.

The sidewalk is crowded with overflowing garbage pails, stray cats, urchins, hookers, and used syringes. A bum publicly urinates on a lamp post. The two give him a wide berth to avoid being splashed on.

“America is the land of opportunity,” Hoover brags. “I’m sure you live a much finer life here than you did in Mexico.”

“Greece,” Dion tries to correct him again.

“In America, a lowly immigrant like yourself can become anything he wishes. A dish washer. A parking lot attendant. Even a janitor, like yourself.”

“In Greece, I was an orthopedic surgeon. We're almost there," Dion says, as they pass under an advertisement painted on the side of a brick building:

BIG BUCK SALOON - 200 FEET

“Almost there?" Hoover stops in his tracks.  “Great Scott! A thought just struck me. I can’t go in there looking like this.” He gestures toward his fine coat, jaunty hat, and highly polished wingtip shoes. “I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. I need a disguise, to look like a poor man.”

“My apartment is nearby. Perhaps you could use some of my clothes.”

“You can’t have anything that will fit me,” Hoover says as they turn their steps back toward Dion’s place. The artwork emphasizes the difference in height and girth between the two. Yet Dion looks even younger and taller in this panel. As well as in the next. . . .

Dion opens the door to his apartment. His mustache is dark now, as well as his hair. Dark and curly, with a sheen to it. He seems to have recaptured at least a decade of his youth.

It is a sparsely furnished apartment with a kitchen and a bedroom. A bare light bulb hangs over the kitchen table, and dirty dishes fill the rust-stained sink. A rat watches them enter from a bare cupboard. In the bedroom, a straight back wooden chair with one broken leg sits beside an iron bed frame. The mattress is battered, threadbare, sunken. But across from the bed stands an expensive brass clothes rack laden with dozens of outfits. Hoover chooses a sports coat from a hanger but can scarcely get one arm into it.

“Just as I thought. Too small. You and I aren’t the same size at all.”

“My wife is larger than me. Perhaps something of hers would fit.”

“Your wife’s clothes?”

“Something like a winter coat, simply to cover your suit. Try this one,” he urges, passing Hoover a coat.

Hoover tries it on. “It fits. But it’s yellow. I can’t wear a yellow coat.”

“It’s very attractive on you,” Dion replies. “It goes well with your coloring.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Take a look in the mirror. See for yourself.”

“Not bad,” Hoover admits as he admires himself in an ornate full-length mirror that has suddenly appeared in the room. “But maybe a little too much yellow? The coat needs something to set it off.”

Dion considers their options on the clothes rack. “Try this scarf. Tuck it into the collar and under the lapels. Just like that,” he says, adjusting the garment. “The turquoise makes a lovely accent.”

“Not too feminine?” Hoover asks.

“Very manly.”

Hoover studies his reflection, frowns. “But now the shoes don’t match.” His fleshy mouth scowls with impatience. He surveys the rows of the wife’s shoes lined before the clothes rack. “Those,” he says pointing. But when Dion fetches the wrong pair, he explodes in a rage. “NOT the pumps! The heels!”

Dion obeys. His appearance has changed yet again. His hair has turned jet black. Curls cascade over his fair brow and down his neck. The mustache is gone. He wears the face of a man in the earliest flower of adulthood.

“If we’re adding height,” Dion says, “may I suggest a pair of pendant earrings to enhance the effect? My wife has some lovely pieces to choose from.” Dion leads Hoover to a vanity that wasn’t in the room a moment ago.

The next several panels shift to Hoover’s perspective, as he beholds himself in the vanity’s tri-fold mirror. The yellow winter coat is gone, replaced with a flame-red Madame Grès sleeveless evening gown of pleated silk. Hoover’s fat hairy shoulders bulge grotesquely against the delicate fabric. A tangle of gray chest hair sticks out above the buttoned collar. His neck wattles droop to his bosom.

Hoover regards himself with satisfaction as Dion adds a pair of pear-shaped ruby earrings to the ensemble, and then proceeds to apply lipstick, mascara, eye shadow, and just a hint of blush to the cheeks. The transformation is almost complete.

“But something’s missing,” Hoover says, studying himself carefully. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. Something . . . I know – the hair!”

“The hair. How silly of me not to have thought of the hair. Fortunately, I have quite a few wig styles to choose from. Brunette? Blonde? Redhead? What is your pleasure?”

“Blonde. I’ve always wanted to be a blonde. Do you have something that will make me look like Veronica Lake?”

“I have just the thing.” Dion places a flowing platinum blonde wig on the old man’s head. Its tresses cascade over Hoover’s pale, flaccid arms, and curl about his withered chest under the pleated red silk.

“Magnificent!” Dion proclaims.

“Magnificent!” Hoover echoes in an awed whisper. “By god, I’m beautiful!”

Dion’s face joins Hoover’s in the reflection as he kneels beside the Director before the vanity. But it is no longer Dion’s face. It’s not a human face at all, but that of a gray wolf.

“I believe,” Dion says, “that you’re ready for the ball.”

In the next panel, Hoover and Dion are back on the street. The urchins, stray cats, addicts, bums and dealers are still there, but in this scene they all sprout large questions marks (???) and exclamation points (!!!!) above their heads as they behold the Director strolling past them.

Hoover seems oblivious to the consternation he’s creating. “I feel so free!” he says to Dion – who is now drawn as a vague outline of a male figure. The only part of him that’s in focus is his wolf face.

“You’re doing very well in those heels,” Dion comments. “I was afraid you’d trip.”

“I used to wear my mother’s shoes when I was a boy. I loved playing dress-up when she was away. Her shoes. Her half-slips. Her stockings. Crinolines. Nylons. Garter belts. Stays. Corsets. Bras. Frilly nightgowns. Girdles. But her shoes especially. Yes, it’s all coming back to me. Walking in heels. Your body remembers, sort of like riding a bicycle.”

As Hoover says this, he passes by a row of Harley Davidsons lining the parking lot of The Big Buck. But being completely absorbed by the way the toes of his shoes flip out under the hem of his silk skirt, he fails to notice them.

“What you’re about to see will shock you.” Dion now seems to tower over Hoover, a full six feet tall. “You’ll never be the same after you pass through this door. Do you have courage?”

“I have courage!”

“Then step through to the other side, my brother.”

The next panel opens on an interior view of the bar. Hoover stands in the open doorway in his high heels, evening gown and platinum wig.

The room is filled with bikers. All of them big men. All of them hairy men – hairy faces, hairy chests, hairy nostrils, hairy armpits, hairy arms and hands and knuckles. Cigars. Tattoos. Bandanas. Switchblades. Brass knuckles. Confederate flags. Chains. Chewing tobacco. Beer mugs. Spittoons. Posters of nude women. Flies. Gnats. Plaster casts on broken arms and broken legs. Scars. Swastikas. Missing limbs. Missing eyes. Leather vests. Leather hats. Mirrored sunglasses. Missing teeth. Missing ears.

And in the next panel, a forest of ???? and !!!! bloom above each head as everyone in the room falls silent and turn to gape at the new arrival.

“Where are the queers?” Hoover says. “I’ve come to see the queers.”

The bikers merely stare back at him, open-mouthed.

“Come, come! I haven’t got all day. Bring me your queers!”

“We got no queers around here . . . and I don’t believe they like being called that,” one beer-bellied, bare-chested biker answers.

“Homosexual’s a more polite term,” a second comments.

“And better educated,” a third adds.

“This isn’t exactly their natural habitat,” the first remarks. “If you’re looking for homosexuals, you should probably go to a homosexual bar.”

“But this IS a queer bar,” Hoover protests.

“There goes that mouth again,” the second biker cautions.

“I have it on very good authority that this is a queer bar. My friend here told me so.”

“What friend?” the leather vested biker asks.

Dion is no more than a transparent shape against the wall now. A poster of a topless girl straddling an XR 750 shows right through him. The cartoonist makes it apparent that while the bikers cannot see him, Hoover still does.

“This man right here. He’s my employee and a loyal citizen. He may just be a filthy immigrant, but he’s a credit to his people, a credit to Mexicans everywhere.”

“I'm Greek,” Dion reminds him.

“There’s nobody there. You tripping, grandpa? Did somebody give you too much phenobarbital and set you loose from the old folks home?”

“This cat looks familiar to me,” the first biker says. He turns to an elaborately tattooed hulk beside him. “Snake, take that wig off him.”

Hoover tries to escape, but men seize him by both arms as Snake steps forward to remove the Veronica Lake wig.

His predicament suddenly dawning upon him, Hoover begins to sweat profusely. His earlier expression of a mastiff who’s swallowed a whole porcupine has changed to that of the same mastiff who now realizes he’s going to have to crap that porcupine out. Snake snatches the wig away.

“Well, bless my soul,” the vested biker says. “It’s J. Edgar Hoover!”

The bikers crowd around, curious.

“Now why would the FBI come snooping around our humble establishment?”

Hoover tries to smile. “Just looking for queers. My friend here said this was the place to come.”

“What friend?”

“He’s right there.”

“No. You’re alone, old man.”

Hoover’s panicked face jerks back and forth between Dion and the bikers. “Listen, men, this is obviously some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding? No, I understand perfectly. I know exactly what you’re here for.”

“You do?”

“Certainly. You want to infiltrate our group. You and your FBI infiltrated the Outlaws in Chicago. You infiltrated the Highwaymen in Detroit. And the Mongols out in California. And the Banditos in Texas. And now you show up at our doorstep, dressed like some prehistoric hooker and claim to be looking for homosexuals. But it’s really just another infiltration. In-fil-tra-tion,” he repeats, slowly and ominously.

“In-fil-tra-tion!” the bikers chant in unison, forming a tight circle around him.

“No! I’m not infiltrating! Honest!” Hoover cries in despair. “Tell them!” he pleads to Dion. “Tell them! Help me, you fool!”

“I’m only here for you, Mr. Hoover,” Dion replies. “They can’t see me. They can’t hear me.”

“And what do we do to infiltrators, boys?” the biker leader asks his men.

The next panel depicts a full-page panorama of the bikers – dozens of them, holding lead pipes, baseball bats, bullwhips, cudgels, hockey sticks, cattle prods, chainsaws, straight razors, table lamps, pool cues, power drills, hammers, flagstaffs, broken bottles, peppercorn grinders, feather dusters, mops, brooms, trowels, flyswatters, cinder blocks, hammers, gavels, golf clubs and drain plungers.

One enormous speech bubble rises above the heads of this crowd, an answer to their leader’s question about the proper disposal of infiltrators: “Whip the shit out of ‘em!”

Hoover cowers on the floor before them. His final words are directed to Dion, now nothing more than a translucent wolf's head hovering above the scene. Hoover has finally grasped that his guide has betrayed him.

“Who are you?” he demands “What is your name?”

“I am the dream that men like you wake from with a scream,” Dion replies. “I am the avenger of all human spirits crushed by the mighty, the wealthy and the proud. The people may lack power to destroy men like you, but I am the one who leads you to destroy yourselves.”

“A name! Give me a name!”

“I’ve been called Anansi. I’ve been called Bakcheus. I’ve been called Paradoxos, Loki, and Coyote. You, however, know me as Timberline.”

“Timberline? Bullshit! You don’t exist. My agents told me you don’t exist.”

“That’s what I told them to tell you,” the wolf's head – Timberline – replies. “And who knows? Maybe it’s the truth.”

“You mean you don’t exist?”

Timberline suddenly appears in the room, fully embodied. Tall, slender, hirsute, looking like an impossible amalgam of Che Guevera, Adonis, Jesus, and a youthful Rasputin. He is beautiful, strong, transcendent, something beyond human.

“Don’t exist?” he exclaims. “Of course I exist, you stupid piece of shit!” He turns to the bikers, now visible to them as well. “Sic him, boys,” he commands.

The next panel shows Hoover back in his office, back at his desk. Nothing much has changed in the scene except the Director himself, now wrapped in casts and plasters, head to toe, from the beating he suffered in The Big Buck. The only parts of his body exposed to view are the bare fingers of his right hand, clutching a fountain pen that he uses to write in his journal.

The last panel provides a close-up of the page he is at work on. In a surprisingly elegant cursive, Hoover has written the question: “Who poses the greatest existential threat to the United States of America?”

And below this question, in the same hand, the answer is written out, again and again and again:

“Timberline! Timberline!! TIMBERLINE!!!”