This is brother’s pajama bottoms. He had a nocturnal emission last night. What a shame. It woke him up. But see the semen stain. It has millions of dead sperms. They were killed the natural way.
This is sister’s sanitary napkin. It doesn’t look very sanitary anymore, does it? There is an ovum somewhere in that bloody mess. But it will never be fertilized. It will be flushed down the toilet bowl. That’s the natural way too.
This is a baby. It was born dead. Every year in the USA, 136,000 infants are stillborn or die within a month. Now suppose their Mommies and Daddies had interfered artificially with the process of procreation. God’s purpose would never have been achieved. Just think what a tragedy that would’ve been. But at lease some of the dead babies were baptized. That’s the natural way.
This is a special calendar. It marks off menstrual periods. That’s for the rhythm system of not having babies. A husband and his wife are in bed. They start to make love. Then they get out of bed. Because they have to look at the calendar. That’s the natural way.
This is a husband and wife who want to have a baby. But the calendar says that the time is sterile. Lucky for them they have a calendar. It saves them from having unnecessary intercourse. So they stop making love. Unless they’d like to gamble on having an unwanted baby. That’s the natural way.
This is a confessional booth. There is a screen in the middle. The person on one side is a priest. The person on the other side is a confessor. He is confessing that he has had evil thoughts. The priest tells him that to have an evil thought is evil. It is just as evil as committing the evil act that the evil thought is about. Priests never have evil thoughts themselves. They don’t have to. They have an ample supply of other people’s evil thoughts to draw upon.
This is the husband and his wife again. The ones who don’t want to have a baby yet. Now the calendar says that the time is sterile. How convenient. Now they can make love without stopping. And without worrying. But they’re good, consistent Catholics. And so they are worrying. Because they know that evil thoughts are evil. Their evil thought is to have intercourse but to avoid having a baby. They can’t be sure they won’t have a baby—that’s why the rhythm system is moral—but the intention is there. Tomorrow they will go to confession.
When The Realist began, there were eighteen states with laws forbidding the sale of contraceptives. The pill had not yet been developed, but freelance journalist Harry Kursh gave The Realist an exclusive article about xperimentation with a birth control pill. The human guinea pigs were women in Puerto Rico.
“When the birth control pill is finally reported on by scientists and made commercially available,” he wrote, “it may prove to be the political and sociological atomic bomb of this age.”
Meanwhile, when my mother read “Sex Education for the Modern Catholic Child,” she said, “I’ve had three children, and you know more about birth control than I do.” Twenty-six years later, the Pope would warn that the rhythm method of birth control could be “an abuse if the couple is seeking in this way to avoid children for unworthy reasons.”
I was publishing what was considered to be the hippest magazine in America, yet I was still living with my parents. I was twenty-six years old, yet I was still a virgin. But I had become an expert at heavy petting. I even wrote a sex manual for adolescents titled Guilt without Sex. It was turned down by Mad but accepted by Playboy.
The night finally arrived when I would get laid for the first time. Because I had no place to take a girl, Bill Gaines gave me a key to his office and permission to use his convertible sofa. My date Joanie and I went to a rehearsal of the Steve Allen show to catch Lenny Bruce. At the time, Elizabeth Taylor was converting to Judaism so she could marry Eddie Fisher, and Lenny’s opening line was a rhetorical question:
“Will Elizabeth Taylor be bat mitzvahed?”
Then Joanie and I went to the Mad building. Bill Gaines’s office had original paintings of his famous horror characters hung around the walls—the Old Witch, the Crypt Keeper, the Vault Keeper—and there was also a framed portrait of Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, watching over us while I lost my sexual innocence, just as he had been watching over a whole generation as they lost their cultural innocence. Joanie and I were rolling around on the carpet, kissing and groping and undressing each other. To open the convertible sofa now would interfere with our compulsive spontaneity.
I had read so much about Bartholin’s glands, how they lubricate the vaginal cavity and take the friction out of intercourse, but now that I was actually putting my thing into her thing, now that I was sliding around inside another person’s body after fantasizing about it for so many years, it occurred to me to flap my arms like wings to make sure I wasn’t dreaming—but, since my weight was on my elbows, I couldn’t carry out that particular reality check without losing my balance.
Joanie and I were beginning to reach that certain point in lovemaking where the voluntary is on the verge of becoming the involuntary. I needed to get the condom which had been residing in my wallet beyond any possible estimated shelf life, so I stopped moving while I still could, and broke the silence with a strained yet noble whisper:
“I better put something on.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Joanie said. “You can fuck me without worrying.”
I had never heard a girl say the word fuck before, and I was just a little shocked to hear it now, even though we were in the middle of fucking. As our spasms of pleasure mounted and began to overwhelm us, her reply remained in my awareness—You can fuck me without worrying—then suddenly my verbal ejaculation became as inevitable as my physical ejaculation, and I simultaneously surrendered to both, blurting out, in a voice that was not quite my own, “What—me worry?”
Even though I had been in the very throes of orgasm, I still could not resist responding to such a perfect straight-line.
I never knew where I would find new contributors to The Realist.
One night I woke up at three o’clock in the morning. My radio was still on, and a man was talking about how you would try to explain the function of an amusement park to visitors from Venus. It was Jean Shepherd. He was on WOR from midnight to 5:30 am every night, mixing childhood reminiscence with contemporary critiques, peppered with characters such as the man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the brand name of the refrigerator it came from and the year of manufacture.
Shepherd would orchestrate his colorful tales with music ranging from “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues.” He shared philosophical insights like “Life is a series of resolutions and relapses.” He edited several of his stream-of-consciousness ramblings into articles for The Realist under the title “Radio Free America.”
One of Shepherd’s regular features was the hurling of invectives. He would instruct listeners to put the radio on a windowsill. He’d whisper, “Now turn the volume all the way up,” and then he would yell something that sounded ominous—“Shut up, you filthy pragmatist”—for the rest of the neighborhood to wonder whose family was quarreling with such unusual profanity.
Someone in my building was following those orders. It turned out to be a teenaged Nazi who liked Shepherd best when he talked about Nietzsche—all those unseen listeners heard his program through their own particular filters—and I published his article, “I Am a Nazi,” to the dismay of many readers. It was the second time a teenager had appeared in The Realist. The first was an account of a petition to halt nuclear tests. Now, the teenaged Nazi called that “pacifist rot.” He was also indignant about John Francis Putnam’s “Modest Proposal” satirizing Nazi war memoirs.
Another writer, Robert Wilson, editor of the Institute for General Semantics Newsletter, gave himself a middle name, Anton, for his first published article in The Realist, “The Semantics of God,” in which he posed this suggestion: “The Believer had better face himself and ask squarely: Do I literally believe ‘God’ has a penis? If the answer is no, then it seems only logical to drop the
ridiculous practice of referring to ‘God’ as he.” Wilson began writing a regular column, “Negative Thinking.”
I was the entire office staff, and took no salary, but I did have to figure out how to continue ublishing—paying the printer, the mailer, the writers, and artists—without accepting ads. So naturally I got involved with a couple of guys who had a system for betting on the horses. Although I lost all my savings, there was one blessing in disguise. At the racetrack, I bought a handicap newsletter, The Armstrong Daily, which included a clever column by Marvin Kitman.
I invited him to write for The Realist and he became our consumer advocate with an Independent Research Laboratory. His first report, “I Tried the Rapid-Shave Sandpaper Test,” called the bluff of a particular advertising campaign when he described his personal attempt to shave sandpaper with shaving cream. He also wrote sardonic pieces such as “How I Fortified My Family Fallout Shelter,” on the morality of arming yourself against neighbors who didn’t have a fallout shelter.
Ultimately, I was able to subsidize The Realist with freelance magazine assignments and by performing stand-up at colleges in the guise of giving guest lectures. The Realist was now two years old and had a circulation of three thousand. Novelist Herb Gold mentioned in one of his books that I kept the subscriptions in a shoe-box, not realizing that his fictional tidbit was literally correct.
In my capacity as editor of The Realist, I could follow the impulse to satisfy certain curiosities that might otherwise have remained in limbo. When I heard a rumor that IBM employees were required to have their teeth capped by a company dentist, I checked into it. Their medical director replied, “We do not maintain dental services nor do we provide remedial dental care.”
When it was reported that Bertrand Russell had just predicted he would die in June 1962 because he would then be ninety years old and that age “seems like a good time to die,” I queried my favorite philosopher-activist about the accuracy of what seemed to be a very un-Russell-like bit of mysticism. He replied: “Your letter has astonished me. The prediction of my death was made in 1937 purely as a joke which I thought was obvious. I find, however, that astrologers and such have taken it seriously.”
And when I heard that a TV drama by Rod Serling with a New York locale used a film clip of the Manhattan skyline with the Chrysler Building erased from the scene because the program was sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, I wrote to Serling, and he verified it, adding: “In a Playhouse 90 script, I was not permitted to use a line of dialogue which read as follows: ‘Have you got a match?’ The reason for this, advanced by the agency, was that the sponsor was the Ronson Lighter Company, and that matches were ‘competitive.’”
It was the banality of such fear that inspired a piece I wrote, “Monologue by a Miss Rheingold Loser.” The winner of this beauty contest—sponsored in seven states by Liebmann Breweries, the maker of Rheingold Beer—garnered more votes than did both presidential candidates in those same states. My Miss Rheingold Loser confessed, “We all had to wear the same blue dresses and shoes, with white pocketbooks and gloves, so that none of us could take unfair advantage of individuality.”
She praised permanent registration in certain bars, revealing ballot-stuffing in others, and concluded, “Far be it from me to get catty about the winner, but I heard that Boss Liebmann had decided on her at the original caucus.” In that same issue, I published a critique of the FBI. Subsequently an agent was assigned to find out all he could about The Realist and its personnel. But he wasn’t from the FBI. Rather, this “investigator” was from an advertising agency whose client, Liebmann Breweries, wanted to know who was really behind “Monologue by a Miss Rheingold Loser.”
And there was the southerner who saw a Negro man kissing a Caucasian woman on his TV set. He wrote a nasty letter, threatening never to buy the sponsor’s product again. Actually, the kinescope that had run on his local station was defective—the leading man was really white. So the sponsor flew an account executive there and held a private screening for that lone irate viewer. It was this climate of paranoia that spawned The Realist’s infamous TV Hoax.
I selected the most innocuous program on the air—Masquerade Party, where a panel had to guess which celebrity was wearing a mask. I picked an upcoming air date and suggested that readers “write a letter complaining about the offensive thing that was said on the program. Use your own wording. But don’t mention anything specific.” I gave the addresses of the network and the sponsors. More than a hundred readers wrote. The theory was that each letter represented fifty thousand that were not sent. There was a panic at NBC, but in their official response they fought vagueness with vagueness:This is to acknowledge your critical appraisal of a recent Masquerade Party program. It is a matter of genuine concern to us that you found this program objectionable. We will most certainly note your sensitive expression of criticism and relay it to the Manager of our Continuity Acceptance Department.
Producers called people across the country, telling each one that he or she was the only person who had complained. When the hoax was finally revealed, an advertising executive predicted that I would be charged with malicious mischief. I could hardly wait.
The State Department was financing counterrevolutionary broadcasts to Cuba from a radio station on Swan Island in Honduras. Program content ranged from telling Cubans that their children would be taken away to warning them that a Russian drug was being added to their food and milk that would automatically turn them into Communists. Lyle Stuart was national treasurer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which sponsored a trip to Cuba in December 1960, and he persuaded me to come along, all expenses paid.
Since I had never been to a prostitute, Lyle brought me to the Mambo Club, a combination bar and whorehouse in Havana, and left me there. I sat at the bar and asked for an orange juice. The bartender said he didn’t have any. I asked for a soda. They didn’t have that either. I settled for a frozen daiquiri which I didn’t drink. A woman sat next to me and asked for a cigarette. I told her I didn’t smoke. She asked if I would buy her a drink, so I did. Then we went out the back door to one of several small cottages. While we were sitting on the bed getting undressed, I kept asking political questions.
She finally said, “Are you a Communist?”
“No, I’m just curious.”
She was the first Cuban I’d met who didn’t have a strong sense of optimism. The revolution had ruined the prostitution business. She used to be thin and blonde for tourists. Now she was plump and brunette. “I bleached my poosy,” she explained while washing my genitals in the tiny bathroom. Later, in the middle of performing fellatio, she stopped and looked up. “You sure you’re not a Communist?”
“Even if I was, I wouldn’t tell you now. You’d bite it off.”
That night, there was a reception at the Presidential Palace for several hundred visitors from around the world. When Castro arrived in the main ballroom, he was surrounded by an eager, protoplasmic circle of admirers and well-wishers. He stood tall and handsome in their midst, uniformed but hatless. Mary Louise compared him to Marlon Brando’s Zapata.
“If I were a homosexual,” I remarked to her, “I could go for him.”
“If I were a homosexual,” she replied, “I could go for him.”
The throng of people with Castro at the hub surged forward a few feet at a time toward the end of the ballroom and finally gave way to a line that formed to meet him, one by one. Some asked him to pose with them, which he did. A man with a camera stood on a plush chair for a better angle, but his wife, who was posing with Castro, yelled at him, “Max! Don’t stand on that chair! This is a palace!”
I gave Castro a copy of The Realist and requested an interview. He told me to set it up with his secretary. Then a palace guard handed him a cablegram from Dwight Eisenhower—in the final weeks of his lame-duck presidency—calling off diplomatic relations with Cuba. I asked Castro for a statement.
“I do not think it is up to me to comment,” he said, “si
nce it is the United States that has broken relations. I will say only that Cuba is alert.”
There was no official announcement at the Presidential Palace, but the news spread rapidly among the guests as Castro strode across the ballroom and departed.
I had brought Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind to Cuba. Now I was in my hotel room, sitting on the bidet and reading his long poem, “I Am Waiting,” while waiting in vain for a call from that secretary. But Fidel Castro obviously had more important things to do than answer my questions. In retrospect, I would like to have asked him, “Do you believe in term limits?”
I was becoming bad company. Campus bookstores were banning The Realist. Students whose parents had burned their issues often wrote in for replacement copies, but I was publishing material that was bound to offend. For example, Madalyn Murray was a militant atheist who was challenging the constitutionality of compulsory Bible reading in public schools, and she concluded her article:
“I feel that Jesus Christ is at most a myth, and if he wasn’t, the least he was, was a bastard, and that the Virgin Mary obviously played around as much as I did, and certainly I feel she would be capable of orgasm.”
The Realist had become a central clearinghouse for bizarre news items sent in by readers. I reprinted unusual material from medical journals: on fracture of the penis; on the caloric content of semen; on objects found in the rectum, from a tennis ball to a frozen pig’s tail. And I published this letter from a reader: “I found the article entitled ‘Great Moments in Medicine,’ concerning foreign bodies stuck in the rectum, thoroughly repellent. I trust that you know what you can do with your magazine.”
The Realist had also developed a reputation as a haven for cartoons which could be published nowhere else. Our first cartoon, by Drury Marsh, was a reaction to the National Association of Broadcasters amending its TV code to ban the use of actors in “white-coat commercials.” The revised ruling read:Dramatized advertising involving statements or purported statements by physicians, dentists, or nurses must be presented by accredited members of such professions.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 7