Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Ginzburg went on trial for obscenity, and the jury found him guilty. I had become the moderator of a weekly Speak-Out at the Village Vanguard and, before Ginzburg went to prison, I invited him to be a panelist one night when the subject was “What’s Wrong with Prurience?” A few days later, Lyle called me.

  “Is it true that you invited Ralph Ginzburg on some panel?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know.” In the background, I could hear Mary Louise say, “Tell him he’s on my list.”

  I was very upset. On her list? I thought we were family. And yet I hadn’t exactly acted with any sense of family. I rationalized that I was being true to the principle of the First Amendment. After all, Ginzburg was going to be put behind bars for what he had published.

  “It’s like Al Capone,” Lyle said. “He murdered people, but he went to jail for tax evasion.”

  When I invited Ginzburg to be on the panel, I knew Lyle and Mary Louise might feel betrayed by me, although I didn’t expect our relationship to end so abruptly. There was no further discussion. For eleven years they were my closest friends, but now I had failed their loyalty test. I felt devastated. I had never been rejected like this before.

  In 1965, I met Joan Baez at a conference, Democracy on the Campus, at the University of Pennsylvania. She had come there only to speak, but was requested to sing. Nobody had a guitar, so she sang a capella. After her first song, a student stood up.

  “I would suggest that we continue the meeting,” he said. “We have serious problems and this music is irrelevant.”

  Baez responded, “I think you’re quite wrong. Without these songs the civil rights movement in the South would have been in desperate straits. But I’ll sing just one more, and then you can get on with your serious problems.”

  The audience joined her in “We Shall Overcome.”

  Back in New York, she came with me when I spoke at CCNY. Later she called and invited me to accompany her on a vacation in Canada. There had been nothing sexual between us, and I didn’t know if there would be, but that was a moot point. I was married and had a baby daughter, and Baez knew it. “I can’t,” I said. Jeanne was listening in on our conversation on the upstairs phone, unhappy that I had even been invited.

  “Why don’t you take me on a vacation?” Jeanne said.

  I wasn’t sure whether she was talking to me or to Joan Baez.

  It began to seem as if Jeanne and I were deliberately conspiring to kill the magic between us, to chop up our bond of total trust into cheap little power games. Ultimately we could each focus on one specific act that epitomized the path of our self-destruction.

  For me, there was the time that Jeanne came into my office, sat on my lap, and started kissing me. “C’mon,” I said, “I’m trying to write.” What a pretentious fool I was. I had probably become a writer just so a pretty lady like Jeanne would come sit on my lap and kiss me, but now I was so busy pricking pomposity that I had become a pompous prick in the process. Years later, I told Jeanne how bad I felt about that.

  She responded, “I thought I was being insensitive,” which only made me feel worse retroactively.

  For Jeanne, there was the time, in an attempt to get closer again, that I suggested that we get a babysitter for Holly that evening so we could go out, have dinner, and then attend the Broadway production of Marat/ Sade, which she had wanted to see.

  “No,” she said, “you’re supposed to clean your room tonight.”

  How could a pair of zany romantics like us have developed into this strange and petty parent-child relationship? We kept separating and getting back together again. I really wasn’t used to fighting. Jeanne attributed her anger to taking birth-control pills for the first time. I had even published an article by chiropractor Jack Soltanoff about the physical and emotional side effects of the pill.

  We fought over my being such a pack rat—saving piles of newspapers and magazines and documents, boxes filled with clippings and correspondence and manuscripts. We fought over the way I dressed—wearing a T-shirt to Times Square. We fought over the way I handled money—when I lent a nurse $400 for an abortion, Jeanne was convinced that I’d never get it back. The nurse not only returned the $400 but she also brought a floppy yellow lion for Holly, which became her favorite doll. She named him Lenny and took him everywhere.

  Once, while I was out, Jeanne got a call warning her that the cops were on their way to arrest me for abortion referrals. I didn’t smoke marijuana, but she smoked an occasional joint, and when I got home, she told me that she had hidden the stash in her vagina—which inspired my all-time worst play on words: “What’s a nice joint like that doing in a girl like you?” But the warning call had been a false alarm. Another time, an abortion referral call woke us up at three o’clock in the morning.

  While I was giving the caller the information she wanted, Jeanne said, “Tell her to call tomorrow. She’ll be just as pregnant in the morning.”

  When I got off the phone, I said, “I was just trying to have a little compassion for her. She’ll sleep better knowing there’s a doctor she can go to.”

  “How about having a little compassion for me?”

  In addition to all the abortion referral calls, there was a continuous invasion of Jeanne’s privacy while I was publishing The Realist from our home, so I finally rented a small apartment a few blocks away to use as an office. But the first time I came home, the door was locked from the inside, and Jeanne wouldn’t let me in. I had no idea what she was so angry about. Those fucking birth-control pills! I didn’t know what to do.

  I went to a phone booth and called Norman Mailer, but his assistant said he was working against a deadline and couldn’t be disturbed. I really needed to handle this myself. By now Jeanne had braced a bookcase against the door. I punched through a pane of glass in the door, stuck my hand in and unlocked the door, then pushed it open, wedging my way in, but knocking over the bookcase. It came crashing down near where Holly was standing, and Jeanne became hysterical.

  “You tried to kill the baby!” she yelled.

  She got a bread knife and threatened to stab me if I didn’t get out of the house. But this was not my crazy aunt. This was my soul mate. Holly was holding on to Lenny the Lion and screaming as she watched all this. I told Jeanne I would leave as soon as she put the knife down, because I didn’t want Holly to think that this was the way to get people to do things. Jeanne finally threw the knife on the floor. Then she started crying and punching me on the shoulder. Finally we talked.

  She had found a mushy letter to me from Sheila Campion, which I hadn’t thrown away because I never threw anything away. While Jeanne and I were temporarily separated, Sheila and I had a one-night stand. When Jeanne and I got back together, I had already hired Sheila as The Realist ’s new Scapegoat. I told her that there would be nothing sexual between us again, but Jeanne had no way of knowing that. Suddenly I understood this whole explosion from her point of view. She could only have concluded that Sheila and I were screwing around in our cozy little love nest in the guise of an office. Jeanne must’ve been incredibly hurt.

  “I’ve slept with other people too,” she said.

  I could only blame myself. I had even said in an interview that Jeanne and I were “not ready for honest adultery.” But when she told me who she had slept with—two of my closest friends, Lenny Bruce and Paul Jacobs—it really hurt. Jeanne shared the details, from Lenny asking her if it would offend her if he propositioned her, to “Lenny directed me. He’d say, ‘Okay, now put this leg up here against the bedpost.’ He was like a Fellini of the bedroom.”

  “When were you with him?”

  “The last time you were in Chicago.”

  “What? You mean you were fucking Lenny while I was interviewing Mort Sahl?”

  Eventually I confronted them. Paul Jacobs acknowledged what had happened, and we embraced, but Lenny refused to admit anything.

  “Look,” I told him, “I’m not mad. I just wanted you to k
now that I know.”

  “What is this Lone Ranger shit?” he insisted.

  “Okay, you don’t have to say anything to me. Just tell Mike Nichols.” Lenny ignored my sarcasm. “I guess you’d deny it even if I had walked in on you,” I said, reflecting a concept from his own act. “I know, I know—you were just giving her artificial respiration.”

  Jeanne and I continued to live under the same roof, but after three years of marriage, the pain finally began to outweigh the pleasure, and we broke up. She was such a responsible and creative parent that we agreed it was better for Holly to stay with her, but I could see Holly anytime.

  I moved into a loft on Avenue A. It was the size of a basketball court, and I installed a backboard-and-basket on the wall. I would get a large trampoline and a telephone with a thirteen-foot cord attached to the receiver so that I could jump up and down while talking on the phone. I bought a vibrating recliner chair for me and a rocking horse for Holly.

  Jeanne wanted to try for reconciliation, but I refused. Only in retrospect would I realize how stubborn I had become. And how I had treated our marriage vows like elephant shit. I would be particularly haunted by the memory of one night when Jeanne had awakened me.

  “I was dreaming that you were being mean to me,” she said.

  I could have comforted her. We could have delved into the dream. Obviously it had importance for her. Jeanne’s dreams were part of her reality. But all I said was, “You woke me up to tell me that?” Thereby being mean to her and making her dream come true. I had wanted to liberate communication around the world, but I didn’t even know how to talk with my own wife.

  CHAPTER 5

  MY ACID TRIP WITH GROUCHO MARX

  When it came to drugs, I was really puritanical. I didn’t even use any legal drugs. I never took aspirins or sleeping pills or tranquilizers. I never smoked cigarettes, and I never drank coffee or liquor. I had no socially acceptable vices. But I became influenced by the material I published in The Realist.

  In 1962, John Wilcock wrote a column titled “What People are Talking About that Vogue Won’t Admit to.” Under “Names to Drop,” he included: Tim Leary—a young Harvard professor who’s been experimenting with non-addicting, consciousness-changing drugs, because the sensible and unsecretive way he’s been handling his research might mean the first major breakthrough in the official wall of prejudice and therefore the possible availability in the future of such drugs for anyone who wants them.

  In 1964, I ran a front-cover story by Robert Anton Wilson titled “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb.” He wrote:The future may decide that the two greatest thinkers of the 20th Century were Albert Einstein, who showed how to create atomic fission in the physical world, and Timothy Leary, who showed how to create atomic fission in the psychological world. The latter discovery may be more important than the former; there are some reasons for thinking that it was made necessary by the former.

  Nuclear fission of the material universe has created an impasse which is not merely political but ideological, epistemological, metaphysical. As Einstein himself said, atomic energy has changed everything but habits of thought, and until our habits of thought also change we are going to drift continually closer to annihilation. Timothy Leary may have shown how our habits of thought can be changed.

  When that issue of The Realist was published, Leary invited me to visit him at the Castalia Foundation, his borrowed estate in Millbrook, New York. The name Castalia came from The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse, and indeed, the game metaphor permeated our conversation. Leary talked about the way people are always trying to get you onto their gameboards. He discussed the biochemical process “imprinting” with the same passion that he claimed he didn’t believe anything he was saying, but somehow I managed to believe him when he told me that I had an honest mind.

  “I have to admit,” I said, “that my ego can’t help but respond to your observation.”

  “Listen,” he reassured me, “anybody who tells you he’s transcended his ego . . .”

  Leary and his research partner, Richard Alpert, were about to do a lecture series on the West Coast. At the University of California in Berkeley, there was an official announcement that the distribution only of “informative” literature—as opposed to “persuasive” literature—would be permitted on campus, giving rise to the Free Speech Movement, with thousands of students protesting the ban in the face of police billy clubs.

  Leary argued that such demonstrations played right onto the game boards of the administration and the police alike, and that the students could shake up the establishment much more if they would just stay in their rooms and change their nervous systems. But it wasn’t really a case of either-or. You could protest and explore your thirteen-billion-cell mind simultaneously.

  In the original edition of this book, I included a story that, during the mass imprisonment of Free Speech Movement demonstrators, a Bible, which had been soaked in an acid solution, easily made its way into their cells. The students just ate those pages up, getting high on Deuteronomy, tripping out on Exodus.

  However, in 2004, at the fortieth anniversary of the FSM, I met one of its original founders—my old friend, Michael Rossman. He had asked several of the participants who were arrested whether my report was true, only to conclude that it was a false rumor. This was the last time I saw Michael before his death, but I promised that I’d retract the story, and now I’ve kept that promise. But, I admit, I really wanted to believe that an acid-soaked Bible had been smuggled into the jail.

  I confessed in the December 1964 issue of The Realist that “I’m still too chicken to try LSD should the occasion ever arise.” But I became intrigued by the playful and subtle patterns of awareness that Leary and Alpert manifested. If their brains had been so damaged, how come their perceptions were so sharp? I began to research the LSD phenomenon, and in April 1965 I returned to Millbrook for my first acid experience

  I was thirty-three years old, and I’d never been high. Leary was supposed to be my guide, but he had gone off to India. Alpert was supposed to take his place, but he was too involved in getting ready to open at the Village Vanguard as a sort of psychedelic comedian-philosopher. However, he did reassure me that my memory wouldn’t be affected.

  So my guide was Michael Hollingshead, the bald-headed British rascal who had first turned Leary on. Our start was delayed for a few hours, and I made the mistake of raiding the refrigerator while waiting. Finally we went to an upstairs room and ingested tasteless, colorless, odorless liquid, pure Sandoz LSD. Then my trip began with a solid hour of what Hollingshead described as “cosmic laughter.”

  The more I laughed, the more I tried to think of depressing things—like American atrocities in Vietnam—and the more uproarious my laughter became. The climactic message I got was: IT’S VERY FUNNY! I felt an obligation to share this tremendous insight in The Realist with one giant headline and nothing else on the front cover. But, no, I couldn’t do that. I debated the matter with myself, finally concluding that even though I tried to live by this universal truth, I wouldn’t jeopardize the magazine by flaunting it like that.

  “Well, the least you can do,” my lunar self said, “is inform your readers that no matter how serious anything in The Realist may appear, you will always be there between the lines saying IT’S VERY FUNNY!”

  I was laughing so hard that now I had to throw up. The nearest outlet was a window. I stuck my head out and had a paranoid flash that this was actually a guillotine and that Hollingshead was about to be my executioner. But I knew in my heart that I could trust him so I concentrated instead on the beautiful colors of my vomit as it started moving around on the outside ledge like an ancient religious mosaic coming to life. Napalm was burning someone to death in Vietnam that very moment, but I was alive, and that’s really what I was laughing at, the oneness of tragedy and absurdity.

  On the stereo, the Beatles were singing the soundtrack from A Hard Day’s Night, and I began weeping because Jeanne a
nd I had seen that film together. At this point we were temporarily separated, but I began to have reverse paranoia—that she was doing nice things for me behind my back—and I had an internal hallucination that she had not only helped plan for that particular record to be played but, moreover, in doing so, she must have collaborated with a guy she considered an asshole in order to please me. What a fantastic thing to do! She had always complained of my associations with assholes, yet now she had obviously worked with the one who had arranged for this acid trip. Filled with gratitude, I felt compelled to call her up, but I held back because I also convinced myself that she had planned for me to call her up against my will. So I figured I would call her up but I would also assure her that I was calling of my own free will. I argued with myself about this for a while, as the dial on the downstairs pay phone became the inanimate object of my megalomania and changed into Dali’s limp clock in The Persistence of Memory.

  I sat there, immobilized, unable to call until I could rationalize that as long as I knew that she had programmed this telephone call, and as long as I went through the process of deciding to call, it would be acceptable to my warped sense of independence. The coin slot was as squiggly and vibrating as my vomit, though. How was I ever going to get a dime into that? But then I took out a dime, and it was also squiggly and vibrating. My dime fit into the coin slot perfectly. I called collect, and the operator asked my name.

  “Ringo Starr,” I said.

  “Do you really want me to say that?”

  “Of course, operator. It’s a private joke between us, and it’s the only way she’ll accept a collect call.”

  That wasn’t true, but when the operator told Jeanne that there was a collect call from Ringo Starr, she did accept it immediately. I explained why I was calling.

  “Paul,” she said, “you’re thanking me for something I didn’t do.”

  And I was so sure that we had communed.