Jack grew up in a broken home (his father was a depressed adulterer) and spent most of his childhood reading alone and blowing shit up. Jack loved explosives. His extremely patient mother put up with his hobby, but was horrified when she caught him trying to do a supposed occult ritual to summon the devil. Jack was sent to military school to straighten him out, but it wasn’t long before he was expelled for blowing up toilets. Exasperated, his mother then sent him to a very liberal private school that didn't give grades and let its students do whatever the hell they wanted. What Jack wanted to do was blow shit up, work for explosives manufacturers, and write letters to famous rocket scientists, all of which he did. Though too poor to attend college, Jack started hanging out with several CalTech science students, bribing them with marijuana in order to gain access to the science labs. Together, Jack and his new friends formed a rocketry club, which also wrote pro-communist science fiction screenplays which they sent to Hollywood, because of course those two things go together.
As the country suffered through the Great Depression, Jack and his club built rockets out in the desert. It was around this time that he married Helen Northrup, a woman he met at a church dance, the place where all pot smoking socialists meet their wives. The marriage was a little rocky, with Jack spending all of their money on rockets (even once pawning her wedding ring) and making homemade nitroglycerin on the front porch. When World War II broke out Jack and his fellow club members, in a convoluted scheme to avoid the draft, founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and convinced the military to fund their research into rocket powered planes. Over the next several years Jack developed rocket fuels and engines which would later propel humans into space. Being such a genius he of course became inspired to join a cult. The cult of Thelema, founded by Alestair Crowley, who claimed Egyptian gods told him of the dawning of a new age, believed in spiritualism, cosmology, the finding of one’s true path, and of course sexual promiscuity. How sexually promiscuous do you ask? Well, when his wife Helen left for a trip, Jack started sleeping with her 17 year old sister Sara. When Helen got back, Sara declared that she was Jack's new wife because she was better at having sexing with him. When Jack agreed, Helen took a new lover and all four moved in together.
Things of course got weird. Jack poured all his money into the cult, buying a compound where they lived as a commune and slaughtered their own animals for food and blood rituals. He started walking around with a large snake draped across his shoulders and sleeping with every woman at the compound and at work, even the married ones. Though to be fair, he always politely paid for any needed abortions. Jack also started using large amounts of peyote, meth, and opiates, because what’s the point of running a cult compound if you can’t be high as shit the whole time? As the war began to wind down Jack left the JPL and rocketry to focus on the occult. It was around this time that L. Ron Hubbard (later the founder of Scientology) moved into the compound. Jack's main squeeze Sara was quite taken with Hubbard to the point that she started sleeping with him. Jack dealt with this by masturbating on sacred tablets in an attempt to call forth a goddess to have sex with him. Soon after a random vivacious woman named Marjorie Cameron showed up, and lo and behold, she did start having sex with Jack, so maybe don't be so quick to judge. Together, with Hubbard watching, Jack and Marjorie involved themselves in sex magic rituals. At least they did until Hubbard and Sara ran off with all of Jack's money.
Downtrodden, Jack quit the cult, claiming it wasn't culty enough for him, married Marjorie, and moved into a small house where he set aside an area for chemistry experiments and the homebrewing of absinthe. Jack tried to find a job, but had difficulties because he had been black balled by the government. No, not for being part of a drug fueled sex cult, but for writing communist themed screenplays when he was just out of high school. Such was the 1950's. To make ends meet Jack got work making fake fog and imitation bullet wounds for movies. Marjorie left him for a time to join a commune in Mexico, but came back after a few years. Jack made plans to go to Israel to get back into rocketry, but before he could, accidentally blew himself up in the lab he had set up in his home. Marjorie of course then went on to found her own cult called the Moon Children.
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