John Berndt
AKA Pego John Berndt. John Berndt was born from the pure colors in the wordless black light to reveal a shadowy slope toddling down Greenmount avenue... which is where he met The Ling Master at age 14 and was initiated into the cultish, Neoist movement which Al Ackerman had helped to found. After twenty years of concerted effort he was able to throw off that hypnotic mantle of evil through a cure in the Swiss alps, which then led to a series of under-funded traveling back-lot crusades across the country speaking against Ackerman, whom he only referred to in his many broadsides as "the Nemesis." At the close of the nineties, Berndt changed his tune and got back on the Ackerman bandwagon, helping to promote Ackerman's 12-step "Yardo Reduction" System book and forging key connections between the doctor and the then burgeoning national Toad and Rice movement. At the end of the day, Berndt is completely ambivalent about Ackerman's strange philosophy, his pork-pie hat, and handle-bar moustache -- connecting them as much with a hellish Zoroastrian pogrom as with F. Scott Fitzgerald and the lake poets.
Only time will tell.
Correspondence dates: Late 1970s, Early 1980s - present