Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  This public destruction of a symbol became the impetus for a prowar march. Ironically, the American flags carried by flower children in the prowar parade were torn to pieces by patriots, along with the punching, stomping, and tarring-and-feathering of a bypasser who happened to be guilty of needing a haircut.

  Armed Forces Day was a week later. It had been designated Flower Power Day by the Workshop in Non-Violence. The plan was to confront the official parade. The rallying cry: “Zap the military with love—blow their minds, not their bodies!” There had been meetings to decide on tactics. Someone offered to donate a thousand paper airplanes, but the idea was vetoed because it would mean littering.

  Another idea was to chain male and female protesters together. “According to a New York City regulation,” the plotter explained, “men and women can’t be put in the same paddy wagon, so the cops would have to march us down Fifth Avenue.” There was a call for volunteers who would spring ecstatically from the spectators and put flowers into the rifle barrels. But this planning had all been before the civilian brutality of the previous week. Now we were in Central Park, scared to leave its safety for unknown dangers lurking on Fifth Avenue.

  Abbie Hoffman was in the group. “What is this?” he said. “We’re huddled together like in a fuckin’ ghetto, afraid to watch a fuckin’ parade.”

  We decided to confront the parade, but a police captain approached one individual and said, “I’m gonna have to give you a summons for holding a meeting without a permit.”

  “We’re merely holding a conversation, officer. And why are you singling me out?”

  “You seem to be leading the meeting.”

  Although I was there as a reporter covering this event for The Realist, at that moment I took another step over the line separating my roles as an observer and a participant.

  “Excuse me, officer, but I was leading that meeting. You’d better give me a summons too.” I looked around. “Who else was leading the meeting?”

  Hands went up. “I was.” More hands went up. “I was.” “I was.” “I was.” It turned out that about fifty people were leading the meeting.

  “I’m not gonna give you a summons, but the next time you hold a meeting—”

  “You mean,” I interjected, “the next time we don’t hold a meeting.”

  “You’d better have a permit.”

  “I’m sorry, officer, we can’t continue this meeting any longer without a permit.”

  Then this horde of pacifists and hippies left the area, followed by a division of police. We passed the statue of Alice in Wonderland and her friends playing around a giant mushroom. We romped past, while some remained to present flowers to the Mad Hatter. The cops ordered them off, surrounding Alice as if they were guarding a fortress.

  The Armed Forces Day parade began its way down Fifth Avenue. The marines marched by, and we chanted, “Get a girl, not a gun.” The Navy marched by, and we sang “Yellow Submarine.” Green Berets marched by, and we shouted, “Thou shalt not kill!” The Red Cross marched by, and we applauded. A missile rolled by, and we called out, “Shame!” Military cadets rode by on horseback, and we advised, “Drop out now!” The Department of Sanitation swept past, and we cheered.

  When the parade was over, I left with Hoffman. Our paths had crossed at various meetings and events, but we’d never really hung around together. Now, over soup, he was telling me about the time he had brought a fuck communism! poster to a symposium on Communism, and how he had been influenced by The Realist.

  I asked, “Do you think it’s an ego trip for me to be concerned about whether the readers think I’m on an ego trip?”

  “That’s because you’re Jewish,” he laughed.

  “I don’t think of myself as Jewish. I’m an atheist. I mean Christ was Jewish.”

  “When I was at Brandeis,” Abbie said, “I asked this professor, ‘How come in one part of the Bible, Jesus says to God, Why hast thou forsaken me? But in another part of the Bible, Jesus says to God, Forgive them for they know not what they do?’ And the professor says, ‘You gotta remember, the Bible was written by a lot of different guys.’”

  Abbie Hoffman tempered his fearlessness with a gift for humor that was sharp and spontaneous. On a particularly tense night on the Lower East Side, we were standing on a street corner when a patrol car with four police cruised by. He called out, “Hey, fellas, you goin’ out on a double date?” These were the same cops from the Ninth Precinct that he liked to defeat at the pool table.

  I had become friends with Abbie and his wife, Anita. When CBS News wanted to film an acid trip at their apartment on St. Mark’s Place, being propagandists, we agreed to do it. As a joke, I suggested to CBS that they ought to pay for the LSD because I was curious to see whether they would charge the expense to entertainment or travel. Blaming my suggestion, they changed their corporate mind, expressing fear that the trip would now be “staged.” But we took the acid anyway—Abbie, Anita, a Digger named Phyllis, and me and we watched CBS on television. Every commercial seemed to be trying to sell us what we were already on. Abbie was having a rambunctiously good time.

  “Fuck the revolution!” he shouted.

  When Abbie and Anita walked into the living room naked, Phyllis and I figured it was time to leave. But just then a phone call came about some trouble at the Ninth Precinct. We decided to walk over there and check it out. However, I had raided the refrigerator, and I was feeling slightly nauseated. Abbie promised that if I did throw up outside, he and Anita and Phyllis would all circle around me to block the view of curious pedestrians.

  “That’s community,” he added with a mischievous tilt of his head.

  I told him, “You’re the first one who’s really made me laugh since Lenny Bruce died.”

  “Really? He was my god.”

  At the Ninth Precinct we learned that a few black kids had been arrested for smoking marijuana in Tompkins Square Park. Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the neighborhood couldn’t quite understand why white middle-class folks wanted to drop out of a society that they were still trying to drop into. The lack of understanding bordered on hostility, but Abbie wanted to indicate that there could be solidarity between hippies and blacks, so he insisted on getting arrested too. The cops refused to oblige his request, and Abbie just stood there in the lobby. Captain Joseph Fink beckoned to me.

  “Paul, do you think you can persuade Abbie to leave?”

  “Abbie’s his own man,” I replied.

  Abbie could see us talking from where he was standing, in front of a display case filled with trophies. He kicked backward with his boot, breaking the glass as though there were an emergency. It was a moment of transcendental meditation.

  “Now you’re under arrest!” Captain Fink yelled.

  So Abbie finished that particular acid trip behind bars, but he was there because of a purely existential act, and this would remain his favorite arrest. At six o’clock that morning, I called artist Richard Guindon, who was temporarily in London. I had an idea for the cover of the next Realist. It would be that bandaged fife-and-drum corps trio from The Spirit of ’76, only now they would be a Vietcong, a black man, and a female hippie. Guindon had to base his illustration on memory, since he couldn’t find a copy of that classic painting in any British library. After all, England had lost the first American Revolution.

  Phil Ochs had said, “A demonstration should turn you on, not turn you off.”

  Inspired by the sight of Allen Ginsberg wearing his Uncle Sam hat with Gandhi pajamas and declaring the end of the war with a Hindu chant, Ochs wrote a song, “The War Is Over,” and helped organize a War Is Over rally in Los Angeles. There was a teach-in at the Cheviot Hills Park. Muhammad Ali was signing autographs, but only on draft cards. Thousands of us marched to the Century Plaza Hotel where the Supremes were serenading LBJ. The demonstrators sat down in the street facing the hotel. The riot police lived up to their name, using tear gas and billy clubs to chase protesters into a grassy field, even beating people in
wheelchairs.

  At a follow-up rally in New York, we ran through the streets with noisemakers and flags, skittering between cars against the afternoon traffic to make it difficult for the cops trying to follow us. We spread the news about the end of the war, pouring into office buildings, restaurants, and bars, swarming down the aisles of movie houses and legitimate theaters.

  This was Wednesday and the matinee performers were building carefully toward their scheduled dramatic climaxes.

  “The war is over!” we shouted. “The war is over!”

  We had brought theater into politics and now we were bringing politics into the theater. Audiences resented this intrusion into their arena, but street theater was becoming the name of the protest game, and countercultural activists had become the players.

  Jim Fouratt, a gay activist who helped organize the Central Park Be-In, had an idea for a piece of seminal street theater, which Abbie Hoffman proceeded to put into action. A group of hippies went to the Stock Exchange, armed with $200 in singles, which were showered onto the floor from the visitor’s gallery. Stockbrokers weren’t used to seeing real money there, and they immediately switched from screaming “Pork Bellies!” to diving for dollars. It was a trick we had borrowed from the CIA—you don’t have to manipulate the media if you can manipulate the events which the media cover. Outside, reporters were given facts about Wall Street and the war.

  Ed Sanders was another expert practitioner of street theater. He was a poet, editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, proprietor of the Peace Eye Book Store, and leader of The Fugs, a name inspired by Norman Mailer’s euphemism for “fuck.” There was an apocryphal music store that kept The Fugs’ albums in their classical section, under the misimpression that they were The Fugues.

  When antiwar activist Dave Dellinger asked Jerry Rubin to be project director of the October 1967 demonstration at the Pentagon, Jerry moved from Berkeley to New York, Keith Lampe introduced Jerry to Abbie, and Ed Sanders teamed up with them to organize, not just a rally, but an exorcism of the Pentagon. The idea had originated with Allen Cohen, editor of the San Francisco Oracle, and painter Michael Bowen, after they read in The City in History by Lewis Mumford about the Pentagon being a baroque symbol of evil and oppression.

  When LSD became illegal, the psychedelic Oracle became politicized, and the radical Berkeley Barb began to treat the drug subculture as fellow outlaws. So now there was to be an event in the nation’s capitol that would publicly cross-fertilize political protesters with hippie mystics. The plan was simple—to defy the law of gravity. It was decided to hold a special ceremony which would levitate the Pentagon a hundred feet.

  We applied for a permit, then revealed to the media that Pentagon officials wanted to limit levitation to twenty-two feet, because that was the height of their ladders, so they’d still be able to pull the building down. But later they insisted on restricting it to no more than three feet above the ground, and the press accurately reported that.

  In order to build up further public interest in the event, we staged preliminary pranks that were bound to get media coverage. Abbie invented an imaginary new drug, a sexual equivalent to the police tear gas, mace. It was christened Lace—supposedly a combination of LSD and DMSO—which when applied to the skin would be absorbed into the bloodstream and act as an instantaneous aphrodisiac. Lace was actually Schwartz Disappear-O from Taiwan. When sprayed, it left a purple stain, then disappeared.

  A press conference was called at Abbie and Anita’s apartment where Lace could be observed in action. I was supposed to be there as a reporter who got accidentally sprayed with Lace from a squirt gun. To my surprise, I would put down my pad, take off my clothes, and start making love with a beautiful redhead who had also gotten accidentally sprayed, along with another deliberately sprayed couple, right there in the living room, while the journalists took notes. I was really looking forward to this combination media event and blind date. Even though the sexual revolution was at its height, there was something exciting about knowing in advance that I was guaranteed to get laid—although I felt somewhat guilty about attempting to deceive fellow reporters.

  But there was a scheduling conflict. I was already committed to speak at a literary conference at the University of Iowa on that same day. So, instead of being accidentally dosed with Lace, I was assigned by Abbie to purchase cornmeal in Iowa, which would be used to encircle the Pentagon as a pre-levitation rite. I was supposed to be a rationalist, but it was hard to say no to Abbie. In Iowa, novelist Robert Stone drove me to a farm.

  I told the farmer, “I’d like to buy some cornmeal to go.”

  “Coarse or fine?” he asked. I glanced at Stone for guidance.

  He shrugged and said, “Since it’s for a magic ritual, I would definitely recommend coarse.”

  “Coarse, please,” I said to the farmer.

  “How many pounds?”

  “Uh, thirteen, please.”

  The farmer smiled and said there was no charge. And so I flew back to New York with a thirteen-pound sack of coarse cornmeal properly stored in the overhead rack. Meanwhile, there were stories about Lace in the New York Post, the Daily News, and Time magazine, including the promise that three gallons of Lace would be brought to Washington, along with a large supply of plastic water pistols, so that Lace could be sprayed on police and the National Guard at the Pentagon demonstration.

  The guy who substituted for me in that accidental sexual encounter with the beautiful redhead at the Lace press conference ended up living with her. Even though I had never met her, I was jealous. Somehow I felt cheated.

  I was among some thirty people arrested at a demonstration protesting the appearance of Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the Diamond Ball, so named because of the presence of a South African diamond king. The cops had been pushing us along the sidewalk toward the corner, but there was a red light.

  I shouted, “There are cars coming! We have to wait!”

  I was charged with “loud and boisterous conduct, and refusing to move when told to by an officer.” I got busted for stopping at a red light. Among those arrested was a group dressed as Keystone Kops who were clubbing each other. All the arrestees were white, except for one black man who was in whiteface. The police took Polaroid pictures of each arrestee side by side with their arresting officer.

  I asked mine, “Where do you wanna go after the prom?”

  This was the same night that the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee was having its annual Tom Paine Dinner. All the radical attorneys in town were there, and it became a matter of decreasing seniority as to who was going to have to leave in the middle of the affair and spend the next several hours schlepping around night court.

  After a half-dozen lawyers declined, the buck stopped at Bill Schaap, who had no one else to pass it to. He insisted that he had never handled a criminal matter alone. They told him it was just an arraignment. Next morning, when the clerk called the first arrestee—me—several spectators jumped to their feet and cheered. I was embarrassed. The judge banged his gavel and shouted, “Clear the courtroom!” Schaap gulped, then apologized to the judge.

  The assistant district attorney had told Schaap, “Look, I don’t want to try Krassner. If he will say that he was at the Diamond Ball as a journalist, I will throw his case out on First Amendment grounds.” Schaap relayed the offer to me, but I declined. “I can’t do that,” I explained. “It wouldn’t be fair to the others. And besides, it’s a cop-out, because I was there as a demonstrator.” The case was ultimately thrown out for lack of evidence, but in court the judge warned us, “Next time, don’t tempt fate.”

  I mumbled, “Since when is freedom of assembly tempting fate?”

  “C’mon, Paul,” Schaap nudged me. “This is my first case. Don’t blow it for me.”

  In December 1967, Stop the Draft Week failed to stop the draft but succeeded in raising consciousness. A police bus took away those who had volunteered to be arrested, and they made V signs with their fingers through t
he windows. In return, I made the V sign for the first time.

  Abbie, Anita, and I decided to take our first real vacation, in the Florida Keys, where we rented a little house on stilts. I brought a stash of LSD to Florida, and we went on an acid double date—Abbie and Anita, me and a dolphin—at the Seaquarium in Miami.

  Anita observed, “It looks like hippies have been using dolphins for their role models as pioneers of a leisure economy.”

  I was having a delightful nonverbal encounter with one particular dolphin. I would run to my left, and the dolphin would swim in the same direction. Then I would run back to my right, stop short, run to my left again, then back to my right, and the dolphin would swim in perfect synchronization. We resembled that scene in the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup where Harpo mimics Groucho’s motions in a nonexistent mirror. Finally it was time to leave for a movie, and I had to say goodbye to my new dolphin friend.

  “By the way,” I asked, “what are you always smirking about?”

  The dolphin replied—and I’m willing to concede that this might have been my own acid projection—“If God is evolution, then how do you know He’s finished?” It was obviously a male chauvinist dolphin.

  We had planned to see The Professionals with Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin—Abbie said, “That’s my favorite movie”—but it was playing too far away, and a hurricane was brewing, so instead we saw the Dino De Laurentiis version of The Bible. Driving home in the wind and the rain, we debated the implications of Abraham being prepared to slay his son because God told him to do it. I dismissed this as blind obedience. Abbie praised it as revolutionary trust.

  This was the week before Christmas. We had bought a small tree and spray-painted it with canned snow. Now, we were still tripping as the hurricane reached full force, and the house was shaking.