Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  I warned Abbie that smoking tobacco could be harmful to his lungs, but he said, “Don’t worry. In the future, we’re all gonna grow gills.”

  For those who preferred a healthier version, the hash oil was mixed into jars of honey. This was strong stuff. The Fugs were completely fugged up. Ed Sanders described the grass he was walking on as “a giant frothing trough of mutant spinach egg noodles.” Tuli Kupferberg took a taste, and friends had to carry him by the armpits back to the apartment where he was staying.

  “They’re delivering me,” he explained.

  I swallowed two tablespoons of honey and stayed in the park. I was on my knees, holding on to the grass very tightly so that I wouldn’t fall up. We so-called Yippie leaders were zonked out of our minds. Sam and Walli Leff were driving us around Chicago when we realized that we were being followed by another car. It was like being in a slow-motion chase scene. But could this merely be paranoia as a side effect of the hash oil?

  I suggested that we go the wrong way down a one-way street. Then, if the other car was still following us, we could be sure that they were following us. We stopped in front of a guy sitting on a bench. I got out and told him that we thought we were being followed. We would drive around the block, and if he saw that this other car was in fact following us, he should give us a signal.

  So we circled the block, the other car followed us, the guy on the bench gave us a signal, and we continued on, figuring that the two men who were tailing us were cops and now they had to wonder what this guy had just accomplished that he was signaling us about, and should they maybe follow him instead?

  The previous day, we had been refused service at a restaurant. I told the manager, “You’re about to have your first Yippie sit-in,” and they finally served us. Now we stopped there again, shook hands with the manager, and told him there were no hard feelings, even as he was being put on the suspect list by the cops who were following us. We also stopped at an art-supply store where we had been treated rather rudely, and got them listed as accomplices too. Finally we parked. So did the cops. We got out and walked back to their car. They tried to appear nonchalant.

  “Hey,” Abbie asked, “are you guys following us?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you federal or local?”

  “We’re plainclothes officers with the Chicago Police Department. You’re under twenty-four hour surveillance.”

  “Wow,” I said, “three shifts, just for us!”

  “No, we’re short on manpower. We’re on two twelve-hour shifts.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s an honor just to be nominated.”

  We introduced ourselves and shook hands with the cops. Their names were Herbie and Mac. We offered them official Yippie buttons, but they said, “No, thanks, we’re on duty.” I explained that if we happened to lose them in a crowd, we’d be able to spot them more easily if they were wearing Yippie buttons, so they accepted the buttons and pinned them on their jackets.

  But this kind of communication is a two-way street, and now the cops asked us if we were planning to eat soon, because they had been following us for a while, and now they were getting sort of hungry. Although we had terminal dry mouth from the hash oil, maybe lunch would stimulate our salivary glands. We asked the cops to recommend a good restaurant since we were new in Chicago.

  “Well,” Herbie said, “the Pickle Barrel in Old Town has pretty good food.”

  “And,” Mac added, “their prices are quite reasonable.”

  “Okay, what’s the best way to get there?”

  “Follow us.”

  This was indeed a rare and precious moment. We obediently got back into our car and followed the cops. I thought they were going to try and shake us, but we managed to never lose sight of them. It was as if someone had pushed the rewind button and now our slow-motion chase scene seemed to be running backward. I expected to see the cops stop at the art-supply store, and the restaurant, and then a guy sitting on a bench would give them a signal—but instead we just followed them straight to the Pickle Barrel.

  We sat at separate tables.

  On the Saturday before convention week, officers were placed at every pumping and filtration plant to prevent the Yippies from putting LSD into the water supply, even though it was known that five tons of acid would be necessary for such action to be effective.

  In the evening we were reminded that sleeping in the park would not be allowed, even though Boy Scout troops had been permitted to do so. We were given an eleven o’clock curfew. Allen Ginsberg played the role of a pied piper and safely led the troops out with the power of chanting: “Ommmmmmm . . . Ommmmmmm . . . Ommmmmm . . .”

  On Sunday afternoon, Bob Fass was standing on a makeshift stage in Lincoln Park, preparing to introduce the MC-5, a band from Detroit. Fass’s free-form show on Pacifica station WBAI in New York, “Radio Unnameable,” helped orchestrate the nights there, serving as a central clearing house for community events, problems, and solutions.

  Now his mouth was so dry from hash-oil honey, he could hardly talk, so he just stood there and smiled, but the audience—also having tasted from the honey pot—just sat on the grass and smiled back at him. It was Fass who said, “A Yippie is a hippie who’s been hit on the head with a police billy club.” Now, suddenly, the cops were about to act out his definition by using force to prevent the concert from continuing. Stew Albert was the first casualty. He got his skull smashed.

  I screamed at the cops, “You’re not supposed to attack us until eleven o’clock!”

  After Stew’s head was stitched and bandaged, we went to a Western Union office and sent a telegram to the United Nations, requesting them to send in a human rights unit to investigate violations in Chicago. First Malcolm X, and then the Black Panthers, had planned to take their case to the UN. Stew had served as a liaison between the Yippies and the Panthers.

  A week before the Democratic convention, the Peace and Freedom party had held their convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver was nominated as their candidate for president, although Jerry Rubin was turned down as his running mate. Cleaver wanted to come to Chicago, but he was on parole and couldn’t get permission to leave California. Fellow Panther Bobby Seale flew to Chicago in his place.

  Robert Pierson, a local biker who had become Jerry Rubin’s bodyguard, tried to persuade Jerry to arrange for Bobby Seale to lead a march from Grant Park to Lincoln Park. Whose conspiracy was this anyway?

  Jerry told Stew, “Bob Pierson is really getting militant.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Stew replied. “Just try not to hurt his feelings.”

  In Lincoln Park, Seale gave his standard pro-gun rap. “If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club, and you check around and you got your piece, you got to down that pig in defense of yourself! We’re gonna barbecue us some pork!”

  Although the Yippie leadership had a male image in the media, in reality so much of the behind-the-scenes work was done by women—Nancy Kurshan, Anita Hoffman, Walli Leff, Judy Clavir, Ellen Maslow, Anne Ockene, Kathy Streem, and Judy Lampe.

  The leadership was all white, except for Jerome Washington, who was black. We had bonded at the October demonstration in Washington, where we were both pissing on the Pentagon building. As a Yippie organizer, he worked behind the scenes and was able to get permission from the Blackstone Rangers, the largest street gang in Chicago, for the antiwar movement to come to their city. He told me, “We could never have come if they hadn’t okayed it. They really owned those streets.”

  Another unheralded Yippie organizer was known as Super-Joel. His grandfather was Mafia boss Sam Giancana, but Super-Joel had dropped out of the family business. Instead, he let his hair grow long and distributed LSD. The intelligence division of the Chicago Police Department warned Giancana that Super-Joel shouldn’t hang around with me. The cops were telling the Mafia that I was a bad influence. Super-Joel was arrested at the convention. He yelled and gave the cops the finger throu
gh the caged door at the back of the paddy wagon. Super-Joel got arrested three times during the convention. He was just another anonymous Yippie now.

  “If it wasn’t for acid,” Super-Joel told me, “I with my Sicilian ancestry and you with your Jewish ancestry, we would never have become such close friends.”

  And he kissed me. But that was okay. It meant love now, not murder.

  Abbie, Anita, and I were staying at the apartment of a friend, whose landlord freaked out. I learned later that he was sitting on the front steps of his building, holding a .32 caliber revolver, waiting to shoot Abbie or me.

  I had taken a quick flight to speak at the University of Kansas, then returned to Chicago, going directly to the temporary office of the Ramparts Wall Poster to deliver my article. Writer Art Goldberg offered to drive me to the apartment from there. Because we both had long hair, a cop stopped us and searched the trunk. He asked for Art’s driver’s license, and when he saw the name Goldberg, he said, “We’ll get you all in the oven yet.”

  It was during this delay that other police arrested the landlord with the gun. My life had been inadvertently saved by an anti-Semitic cop.

  Abbie, Anita, and I moved into the apartment of my new girlfriend, Beverly Baysinger. On Monday of convention week, Beverly and I were walking in the park, holding hands and being followed by Herbie, the plainclothes cop who had been assigned to me. He now called himself Hawkeye and had taken to wearing a red cap so that I’d be able to spot him in a crowd in case we lost each other. Hawkeye even offered me half of his sandwich, which I accepted.

  “My wife put some LSD in it,” he said.

  On Tuesday evening we all attended an Unbirthday Party for President Johnson at the Coliseum, with Ed Sanders serving as emcee. The atmosphere was highly emotional. Dick Gregory recited the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence with incredible fervor. Fists were being upraised in the audience as he spoke, and I thrust my own fist into the air for the first time.

  Phil Ochs sang “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” and the place went absolutely wild. As individuals in the crowd started burning their draft cards, others joined in this spontaneous combustion. The audience of five thousand wouldn’t stop cheering. The standing ovation was an incredible emotional release. They were still cheering even after Phil left the stage.

  As we embraced, he said, “That was the most exciting moment of my career.”

  When it was my turn to speak, I told the true story of a journalist who had once interviewed LBJ, and after the formal question-and-answer session was over, the president told him, “You know, what the Communists are really saying is, ‘Fuck you, Lyndon Johnson,’ and nobody says, ‘Fuck you, Lyndon Johnson,’ and gets away with it!” I paused. “Well, when I count three, we’re all gonna say it—and we’re gonna get away with it! Are you ready? One . . . two . . . three . . .”

  And, from the Yippies and the Mobilization-Against-the-War and the Clean-for-Genes, it came at me like an audio tidal wave—thousands of voices shouting in unison, “FUCK YOU, LYNDON JOHNSON!!!”—a mass catharsis reverberating from the rafters.

  I told Ochs, “That was the most exciting moment of my career.”

  That night, across the street from the Hilton Hotel, where many delegates were staying, there was an outdoor teach-in on Michigan Avenue. A Peace Corps veteran related how that idealistic organization had turned into “an arm of the State Department.” Peter, Paul and Mary sang “If I Had a Hammer.” And the crowd continued chanting: “Fuck you, LBJ! Fuck you, LBJ!” It wasn’t exactly “Ommmmmmm,” but you could dance to it.

  The teach-in was replaced by a mob scene the next night, when Hubert Humphrey was nominated. Ironically, LBJ had dropped out of the race because Eugene McCarthy won the New Hampshire primary, but Humphrey hadn’t even entered a single primary. So now Michigan Avenue became a Roman arena for the delegates up in their balconies at the Hilton. By voting for Humphrey, they had turned their thumbs down on us.

  Protesters planned to march to the Amphitheater the next day, but since sadistic violence had been building up from the beginning, some decided to remain in the park for sanctuary. There were restrictions on where we could march, but Dick Gregory had told me he was going to get around that rule by inviting everybody to come to his house, which just happened to be on the other side of the Amphitheater.

  Several years previously, he told me that I had been the first white person who was a guest in his home. I had watched TV with his children, and we all laughed at the Clairol commercial which asked, “Is it true that blondes have more fun?” Now, the FBI planned to “neutralize” Gregory by alerting the Mafia to his verbal attacks on the crime syndicate.

  The violence reached a peak on Wednesday during speeches in Grant Park. The Chicago Tribune would later report that Bob Pierson—the police provocateur posing as a biker who had volunteered to act as Jerry Rubin’s bodyguard—was “in the group which lowered an American flag”—the incident which set off what the government’s Walker Report would describe as “a police riot.” In Official Detective magazine, Pierson wrote:One thing we were to do was defile the flag. The American flag in the park was taken down, then rehung upside down. After this had been photographed, a group of us, including me, were ordered to pull it down and destroy it, then to run up the black flag of the Viet Cong. I joined in the chants and taunts against the police and provoked them into hitting me with their clubs. They didn’t know who I was, but they did know that I had called them names and struck them with one or more weapons.

  Because of media omnipresence, our chant became, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” But Walter Cronkite left unchallenged Mayor Daley’s assertion that the beating of protesters on the street was necessary because there had been an assassination threat against the candidates.

  Marvin Garson had originally suggested that the Yippies nominate an actual pig as our candidate for president. When word of this reached the authorities, they put an armed guard on the pig in the zoo.

  Keith Lampe asked William Burroughs, “What do you think of this idea—we’re running a pig for president?”

  Burroughs replied, “Well, that’s a pretty good idea, but it would be more interesting if you ran a tape recorder.”

  Meanwhile, a certain competitiveness had developed between Abbie and Jerry. Abbie bought a pig, but Jerry thought Abbie’s pig wasn’t big enough, mean enough, or ugly enough, so Jerry went out and bought a bigger, meaner, uglier pig, which was released at City Hall.

  The Yippies had been infiltrated by ego involvement.

  Abbie wanted to spread a rumor that he had been killed by the Chicago police so there might be a riot in his name. Instead, he got arrested for having the word FUCK printed on his forehead with lipstick, an idea borrowed from Lenny Bruce, who had once printed FUCK on his forehead with strips of paper towel from a courthouse bathroom, in order to discourage photographers from taking his picture. Abbie might have gotten away with it if only he hadn’t tipped his hat to the police who were sitting in their car across the street from the house where we were staying, waiting for us to start the day. They followed us to a restaurant, where they asked Abbie to take off his hat, and when he did, they told him he was under arrest.

  “It’s the duty of a revolutionist to finish breakfast,” he replied, but the cops disagreed with his premise. They handcuffed him and proceeded to drag him out of the restaurant, forcing me to eat the rest of his breakfast.

  Jerry wanted to obtain press credentials, gain entry to the convention hall, and run down the aisle protesting when Hubert Humphrey got the nomination. “Jerry,” I warned him, “they’ll shoot you before you ever get to the podium.” He shrugged and asked rhetorically, “What’s my life?” Instead, he got arrested for inciting to riot while he was walking out of a restaurant.

  Nor was I immune to this infectious egomania. While I was walking away from the park, a young National Guardsman ordered me to halt, but I just kept on walking, not looking back, fantas
izing that he might stick his bayonet through my back, which would certainly have received much coverage in the media, although, ironically enough, he wouldn’t have even known who I was. But he didn’t stab me, and I wandered onto Michigan Avenue, where the battle was building up.

  Newsweek correspondent Don Johnson signaled me. “You better get off the street,” he warned. “The cops are looking for you.”

  “But I’m not doing anything.”

  He laughed. “Did you forget what you wrote?” Johnson, who is black, quoted a line from my piece in the Ramparts Wall Poster: “The Yippies are a community of voluntary niggers.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but it’s not really the same. We can just cut our hair anytime we want.”

  I asked if it was relevant to refer to him as black when I wrote about this. “Now more than ever,” he said.

  Six black youths had been killed outside the Republican convention in Miami. And just before the Democratic convention, a seventeen-year-old Indian was shot to death by the police, who insisted that he had drawn a gun first. The Yippies held a memorial for him. There was also a rally to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russian tanks. This confused those who were convinced that we were being financed by the Communist Party.

  I was disappointed that my idea for the Yippie Olympics never reached fruition. There was an area in the park with an athletic field, and we were going to have a race around the track with contestants running backwards. There would have been a marathon high jump—contestants getting high, then jumping up and down for as long as they could. There also would’ve been a sugar-cube hunt and a joint-rolling contest.

  At Abbie’s request, I stood in the park and declared the Yippies dead. I announced that “Yippie was merely a slogan to bring together the New Left and the psychedelic dropouts. The Yippies never really existed.”

  Nevertheless, there would soon be a soft drink on the market named “Yippie!” I got a call from a TV quiz-show researcher wanting to know the name of the pig that had been the Yippie candidate for president. I made a point of watching that particular show. The contestant, an air force pilot, didn’t know the correct answer—Pigasus. A question in one of the Trivial Pursuit games would ask what members of the Youth International Party were called; the correct answer was, of course, “the Yippies.”