by Mark Frost
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION Field Office Criminal Investigative and Administrative Files
You’ll recall that when the dossier last dealt with Dr. Jacoby—the town’s freestylin’ New Age psychiatrist—he had just been informed by the Washington State medical board that, for his full twenty-four-hour diner menu of ethical code violations, his license to practice medicine had been summarily revoked. Awaiting judgment, Jacoby then repaired to his childhood home on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Living off savings—and a tidy sum left to him by his recently departed brother Robert—he spent the next two years in Hanalei Bay, gone to ground, licking his wounds and searching for a way to reinvent himself.
While he could no longer legally hang up a shingle, the good doctor showed no inclination to abandon his well-trodden path dancing along the margins on the outer precincts of reality’s most radical possibilities. Jacoby threw himself into field studies with Hawaiian shamans and alternative medicines, which he chronicled in an early online blog, which we’d call it today. A substantial chunk of this content focused on the ways of the menehune, the folkloric “little people” of native South Sea Islander culture. Akin to similar mythologies in many other aboriginal traditions—leprechauns, pixies, elves, et al.—the menehune are usually depicted as mischievous nature spirits and master builders of various inexplicable engineering projects, usually involving stone and water. I’ll spare you most of the colorful details, Chief, but on more than one occasion Jacoby claims to have made contact with the little folk, who revealed to him that they’re not of earthly origin and that their mission here on earth is to help steer the “newer root race of human beings” away from our unfortunate genetic propensity for violence and self-destruction. Setting aside for a moment the efficacy of their “mission,” if we judge these wee folk solely on the degree to which they’ve succeeded in this regard, they’re running well below standards we apply to basic government work.
Jacoby also mentions a competing theory—more archaeology-based than mystical—that these little people may simply hail from an earlier race of smaller humanoid bipeds—as in “pygmies”—who settled the isolated island chain some eons before the migratory Polynesians showed up in their outriggers. He also offers that this doesn’t in any way rule out the possibility that the little people were alien in origin to begin with, putting us right back where we started.
(UFOs and “the grays” make a brief appearance here as well, which gave me the giggles one night, after two glasses of wine, when I found myself picturing them in grass skirts.)
Anyway, you get the drift. And at the least, I think this now gives us a reasonable working hypothesis for the basis of Jacoby’s enduring bond with his old friend Jerry Horne: killer weed. (To which I now feel compelled to reiterate that Jacoby lived in Hanalei Bay, first made famous as the home of Puff the Magic Dragon.)
As the Internet mushroomed, Jacoby’s blog gradually brought him back to some fraction of his previous 1960s notoriety, and to the attention of many prominent counterculture figures who had through the years kept, as they like to say, “on truckin’.” At the personal invitation of an unspecified band member, Jacoby spent most of 1994–95 on the road with the Grateful Dead, or, as I once heard Albert refer to them, “the world’s greatest bad garage band.” (Did you know Albert is a stereo and vinyl enthusiast with a jazz collection that numbers in the thousands? Yes, you probably did.) Whether Jacoby served the band as a “senior spiritual adviser”—the doctor’s version of his job description—or, according to one ex-roadie’s more blunt assessment, “the Banzai Pipeline to all manner of psychotropic traveling,” Jacoby’s time on the bus came to an abrupt end with the untimely death of singer and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. I believe that Jacoby’s enduring fondness for loud and colorful neckties is most likely a tribute to his old friend.
Jacoby’s peripatetic ways continued; he next turns up as a “resident fellow” with a sketchy progressive think tank in Amsterdam called the Zonderkop Institute—which translates as “Born Without a Head.” The organization itself, however, was born with a head: It was founded in 1981 by one Dr. Jost Poepjes—which translates, and I’m not making this up, as “Doctor Little Poops.” According to its website, the Institute’s mission statement claims it is dedicated to—this is my own slightly rougher translation—“finding alternative ways of raising human consciousness, and fast, before we blow all this shit up.” The Institute’s address places it directly upstairs from a popular hashish bar owned, I’m guessing not coincidentally, by Dr. Little Poops himself.
(I have come across a theory explaining this weird Dutch last-name business, although it may be of interest only to me: Holland was occupied by Napoleonic France for a short period at the turn of the eighteenth century, during which time the French instituted the country’s first comprehensive census. It seems many of their unhappy Dutch subjects may have offered ridiculous and, to the non-Dutch-speaking French bureaucrats tallying the count, untranslatable surnames as a mild form of protest—for example, the wildly popular surname Niemands, which means “Nobody.” In the end, the joke fell more heavily on the Dutch after Napoleon met his Waterloo and the French split the lowland scene but left the goofy names behind.)
Dr. Jacoby’s own two-year stay in Amsterdam came to an end in 1998, when Dr. Little Poops decided that the impending—and, it turned out, entirely media-driven—Y2K crisis signaled the “end of civilization as we know it.” Along with a few die-hard followers, Dr. LP repaired to a “secure and unspecified ecological biosphere in the far north of Sweden” to hunker down during the apocalypse. (And there Dr. Little Poops vanishes from the radar screen of history.) Jacoby did not attend.
Taking this millennial setback in stride, Dr. Jacoby returned stateside and headed straight for Florida, where he pitched in as a volunteer during the “hanging chad” portion of the 2000 presidential election recount. He spent whatever free time this gig allowed by offering “lay counsel” to distraught/defensive former Ralph Nader supporters. Although no longer able to work as a licensed physician, due to his loss of credentials, Jacoby released a noteworthy lay paper on his findings online, identifying what he called the “defiant liberal denial syndrome.” The article got some play in a few progressive media outlets and helped persuade Jacoby that it might be time to turn his still formidable power of mind toward political activism.
His decision was reinforced less than a year later: Jacoby happened to be in NYC on 9/11, participating in an anthropological conference on shamanism at the Museum of Natural History. In the days that followed, during countless hours of volunteer work that he spent comforting the wounded and traumatized, he came to view the terrorist attack through the eternal lens of cause and effect—or, to state it more simply, karma—and interpreted it as the first toll of the bell striking midnight for the American Experiment. He predicted, correctly and with no evident glee, that the government would overreact, lash out at the wrong targets, and kick off an even more destructive cycle of cause/effect that would only make the emerging global crises worse. When the search for weapons of mass destruction came up empty, kicking the legs out from under the administration’s rationale for invading Iraq, Jacoby took no pleasure in learning that his instincts had been confirmed. He interpreted this as confirmation of his theory that the United States, and perhaps the world, might be entering into what he saw as a “Kali Yuga”—an ancient Hindu term for a “dark age.” In 2003, on the wings of that vision, he decided it was time to head back home to Twin Peaks.
The purpose of this second return was not to reengage with the community he’d abandoned—and, in truth, felt abandoned by—more than ten years earlier. Instead Jacoby bought a used mobile home and hauled it up to a remote hardscrabble acre that he bought for peanuts near the peak of White Tail Mountain. Once he’d set up shop, he began making supply runs into town—at most, once a week, and usually after dark. The only person in the area I can verify he reached out to directly was his old “bud” Jerry Horne, who I b
elieve became the first and only outside financial contributor to Jacoby’s new enterprise. Lawrence Jacoby evidenced zero interest in reliving any part of his former life in Twin Peaks; he had embarked on a new mission now, a vision fueled by rededication to his youthful sixties-era radicalism.
He dedicated the next year to educating himself about all the advantages the Internet now offered as a means of distribution for his idiosyncratic messianic vision. During this period, he carefully crafted a new persona for himself to serve as the herald of that message, a character he called Dr. Amp.
In 2006, just after he turned seventy, Jacoby launched the first live episodes of what he predicted would become his “Internet media empire,” and The Dr. Amp Blast made its debut, streaming live, one hour a night, five nights a week. Although the early editions vary wildly in quality—he made them all available online after each live stream, as some of the first “podcasts”—his message and tone remained remarkably consistent: Dr. Amp offered a ferocious running critique against a world turning mad, a commonsense prophet offering a nightly jeremiad that railed against the ignorant, the privileged, and the false. He remained a true believer in medicine and the scientific method—tie-dyed, of course, with his sixties New Ageism—preaching truth against what he described as the rising forces of corporatism, the corruption of wealth inequality, and the corrosive effects of what he called “cannibal capitalism” on the human mind, body, and spirit. Dr. Amp not only tossed out political perspectives amid a regular diet of crackpot conspiracy theories, but he offered up practical home remedies to counteract their negative effects: alternative medicines, herbal supplements, ancient methods of meditation and spiritual renewal.
Jacoby had done his homework. Dr. Amp’s nightly crusades quickly struck a chord and garnered a small but intensely loyal Internet following. Most of his local listeners from eastern Washington—even including those who’d previously known him in and around Twin Peaks—had no idea where he was broadcasting from or who Dr. Amp actually was. (That changed at least in Twin Peaks, when he began video-streaming his program in 2012.) By 2009, when the economic bubble burst and the big banks nearly went under, plunging the national and global economy into an abyss, Dr. Amp’s message of defiant hope, activism, and individual responsibility struck an even more resonant chord. The mystery of Dr. Amp’s identity became an indelible part of his mystique, and by 2012 his reputation began to spread beyond the regional, into the national. He refused a few attempts by mainstream media outlets to co-opt his message or seduce him with the idea of reaching a broader audience by waving buckets of cash in his face. He had saved more than enough money over the years to support his modest lifestyle indefinitely and, as he made clear in his very first offering, “as far as people thinking I’m crazy, at my age, I just don’t have any fucks left to give.”
He did, however, eventually happen onto a unique ancillary revenue stream on his own. In 2015, Dr. Amp began a direct-mail operation after a number of his followers responded to one of his frequent admonitions to “dig yourself out of the shit”—a central theme of his call to self-empowerment, urging people to fight back and seize control of their own lives and destinies. Before long, he added the ideal tool you could use for the job: a (at first) metaphorical “golden shovel” that his followers could visualize to help them complete said task. The desired transformation through undertaking this assignment he described as a process of “intrapersonal alchemy,” turning the lead of dull, everyday consciousness into the gold of an evolved human soul, the goal of what he described as a hallowed tradition in esoteric philosophy harking all the way back to the Middle Ages. This led to Jacoby offering literal golden shovels for sale—simple garden spades that he personally spray-painted gold, two coats—in a series of home-crafted commercials, and before long he was selling dozens and eventually hundreds of them a week. Fittingly, he seems to take no interest in using this sideline for personal gain. An examination of his recent tax returns shows that his corporate income grew by 2.5 times, and 90 percent of it he anonymously donated to a variety of charitable progressive causes.
So do we conclude that, through this new identity and means of expression, Dr. Jacoby has “dug himself out of his own shit?” I have to add that, while I generally don’t find much common ground with either the doctor’s complaints or his prescriptions, listening to his show offers some peculiar pleasures; he comes across as a buoyant and likable personality, fueled by righteous indignation, unbound by convention or any shred of need for our approval. Jacoby remains nothing if not a dyed-in-the-wool gadfly, whose synapses appear to fire, more or less coherently, in more directions at once than a daisy cutter.
Lawrence Jacoby is over eighty years old now. There is an air of the tarot’s “Magus” about the man—the ancient archetype of a magician who’s outlived or conquered the base temptations of life to reach spiritual serenity while still maintaining the height of his powers. As I think of “Dr. Jacoby/Dr. Amp,” a character like Prospero comes to mind, a man in the last act of life who’s survived the “tempest” of human turmoil and by doing so gained the ability to see beyond its commonplace illusions. A man who lives at one with nature and its pagan “spirits,” whose developed senses can now “pierce the veil” of existence and leave him able and willing to share the wisdom one mines from such hard-earned territory. (King Lear would be the tragic version, a privileged man who arrives at the same place through loss and hubris that will eventually cost him his life.) That Jacoby’s personal “ground” sits atop a mountain in a remote range in eastern Washington, which, the dossier has established, is as steeped in mystery as any ancient Himalayan peak, seems altogether fitting.
As you may be able to tell, Chief, I’m experiencing a bit of a “What’s it all about?” moment with this inquiry. I’d like to believe there’s more to life than what we can see or lay our hands on, but the “job” keeps us so focused on the evil that men do that it’s a challenge to hold both thoughts at once. My research tells me that people drawn to law enforcement professions, if they’re thoughtful at all, perpetually struggle with this conundrum: How do we dig ourselves out of that particular shit? I suspect this is part of why you’ve asked me to take all this on: to instigate the process of confronting that riddle within myself. Is that the secret at the heart of the Blue Rose and the work we do? To identify root causes of human misery and evil, do we first have to find them in ourselves?
A JACOBY P.S.:
Chief, I’ve found a postscript to Dr. Jacoby’s arrival back in Twin Peaks, and it produced an indirect and positive bank-shot consequence to many of the people you know there.
As we learned in the dossier, the hard-luck romance between Ed Hurley and Norma Jennings had over the years run into more impediments than a congressional funding bill. Every time a crack of daylight appeared offering a possibility that they might finally get together, fate slammed the window shut with a steady stream of murders, imprisonments, nervous breakdowns—you name it. The return to incarceration of Hank Jennings seemed to signal the end of this cycle, only to be replaced not long after by the tragedy that befell Annie Blackburn, with Norma devoting herself to her full-time care. Then, no sooner had Annie’s worsening condition required permanent around-the-clock hospitalization—another window—than a serious setback in Nadine Hurley’s delicate state of mind pulled Ed back into his guilt-ridden caretaker role for her. A year after that, when Nadine finally appeared to be on the mend, and Ed had worked up his courage to break away from his troubled wife once and for all, his nephew James drove his troubled life into a ditch, requiring Ed’s help.
When Leland Palmer died in police custody after confessing to the murder of his daughter, Laura, the most innocent of her local boyfriends, a grieving and disillusioned James, took to the open road on his Harley, with no plans to return. Not long afterwards, after being taken in by a predatory older woman outside Portland, Oregon, James stumbled into the role of hapless patsy in a murder scheme straight out of noted noir novelist James
M. Cain. (I won’t bore you with the details.) Although James narrowly avoided being charged with any crime, he later appeared during trial as a witness for the prosecution. When the highly skilled defense attorney tore his testimony apart—casting serious doubt on James’s character, if not his version of events—James felt threatened enough by loose talk about how he could be charged with perjury that he impetuously and unwisely fled town before completing his testimony. A bench warrant was issued to ensure his return. It didn’t. We know now that James kept driving all the way to Mexico, where he hid out in Baja, working as a mechanic under an assumed name. The young man didn’t have a criminal bone in his body, but trouble sure had a knack for finding him—Major Briggs referred to this in the dossier as something the family has always sarcastically called “Hurley Luck.”
James managed to lay low down Mexico way for close to a year, until he got “lucky” again, after repairing the wounded engine block of a Lamborghini Diablo belonging to a Sinaloa Cartel capo. (In the parlance of the aforementioned Cain, the engine was suffering from a bad case of lead poisoning: Someone had opened fire on it with a Schmeisser AR-15 spitting hollow-tip, steel-piercing ordnance.) This cocaine cowboy took such a shine to James’s handiwork that he offered him a full-time job at his hillside Jalisco estate, maintaining the hotshot’s fleet of seventeen exotic luxury vehicles, another waving red flag the size of Texas that James seems to have missed. About six months later, a rival gang showed up one morning to execute the capo in a hostile takeover—this dog’s breakfast involved an undercover sting, crooked cops, and a rogue DEA agent who’d been turned by the cartel. James was one of the shootout’s few survivors, having hidden in the trunk of a Rolls, but in the aftermath he was swept up by the federales.