Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  New York radio station WBAI recently featured programs under the tutelage of black revolutionary Julius Lester of the Guardian and Leslie R. Campbell, sometime teacher at JHS 271, from which it appeared that the only solution to Negro problems in America would be the elimination of the Jews. May we suggest the following order of elimination? (After all, we’ve been this way before.)

  * All Jews connected with the Establishment.

  * All Jews connected with Jews connected with the Establishment.

  * All Jews connected with those immediately above.

  * All Jews except those in the Movement.

  * All Jews in the Movement except those who dye their skins black.

  * All Jews (Look out, Jerry, Abbie, Mark, and Paul!)

  Once again, this flyer was approved by the FBI director’s top aides:Authority is granted to prepare and distribute on an anonymous basis to selected individuals and organizations in the New Left the leaflet submitted . . . Assure that all necessary precautions are taken to protect the Bureau as the source of these leaflets.

  NOTE: NY advised that Julius Lester, a revolutionary Negro writer for the Guardian, had recently featured one Leslie Campbell, a teacher at a Brooklyn high school, during one of his regular broadcasts over radio station WBAI. During the broadcast, Campbell read a poem which contained anti-Semitic statements. This and other broadcasts by Lester have resulted in organized picketing at WBAI and much comment in the press.

  NY suggested a leaflet be prepared, captioned: “Wanted: by Julius Lester” and containing pictures of several New Left leaders who are Jewish. This leaflet would refer to this broadcast and suggests facetiously the elimination of these leaders. Station WBAI is an ultra-liberal organization which has attacked the Bureau, as well as other Government agencies in the past. NY’s proposal would lend fire to this controversy surrounding WBAI and also create further ill feeling between the New Left and the black nationalist movement as Lester is a spokesman of this latter group.

  And, of course, if some overly militant black had obtained that flyer and “eliminated” one of those “New Left leaders who are Jewish,” the FBI’s bureaucratic ass would be covered: “We said it was a facetious suggestion, didn’t we?”

  Ironically, Julius Lester would later convert to Judaism. Oh, yes, and one other thing. It turned out that J. Edgar Hoover himself was a raving, unconfined nut.

  In February 1969, a group of Yippies were busy rolling innumerable joints—the contents paid for by Jimi Hendrix—and wrapping each one in a flyer wishing the recipient a Happy Valentine’s Day and containing facts about marijuana. More than 200,000 arrests for pot-smoking were made the previous year, and Mayor John Lindsay had just petitioned Governor Nelson Rockefeller to raise the penalty from one to four years for possession.

  The Valentine joints were sent to various mailing lists—teachers, journalists—and to a specific individual only because he was listed in the phone book as Peter Pot. One local newscaster who displayed one of these joints was visited by a pair of narcotics agents on camera while he was still delivering the news—a TV first.

  On Valentine’s Day, I was scheduled to be on The Tonight Show. I had been invited by Orson Bean, who was the guest host. He was an old friend I had gotten to know at meetings of the Summerhill Society, which he attended even while starring in a hit play on Broadway. Eventually, he started a Summerhill-type school in New York, which Holly attended. The essence of Summerhill was that learning should be fun. When Orson had substituted for Johnny Carson on a previous occasion, he arranged for Summerhill founder A.S. Neill to be flown in from England as a guest on the show.

  For my appearance, I wore a black Mexican cowboy hat that Abbie had given me and a bright orange shirt that Anita had embroidered with an Aztec design of an owl. I had developed a certain psychedelic macho. I especially enjoyed tripping while being interviewed on TV—from a marijuana brownie for Mike Douglas to magic mushrooms for Tom Snyder—and so, one hour before The Tonight Show began taping, I swallowed that week’s withdrawal of an LSD tab from my bank vault. By the time Orson introduced me, the acid was coming on strong.

  “Greetings,” said Ed McMahon, as though he were from Selective Service.

  While we were shaking hands, his face became a melting rainbow. I was tempted to just stand there and admire him, but instead I sat down and surrendered to spectator conversation with Orson. I was telling him about those marijuana joints that thousands of individuals had received in the mail that day from a mysterious source.

  “Now,” he interjected, “you’ve taken LSD, haven’t you?”

  I had an instant paranoid flash that my trip was showing, but I realized that he was referring to the past in general, not to that particular moment. I said yes, and the audience booed.

  Orson asked, “Why do you think they responded that way?”

  “Because they’re predisposed.”

  Later, he asked me about “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” There I was, privately peaking on acid, and Orson Bean was questioning me on network TV about my most notorious achievement. Of course, we couldn’t discuss the specifics of presidential necrophilia, but since it had been such an outrageous hoax, he asked if I hadn’t shown disrespect for the readers.

  “No, no,” I answered, “it was respect for them. I didn’t want to deprive them of the pleasure of discerning for themselves whether they were responding to truth or satire. In order to believe what I’d written, they would first have had to believe that the leader of their country was crazy.”

  The audience had no idea what we were talking about.

  A progressive nun was scheduled to follow me on the show. She had arrived at the studio with another progressive nun. During the commercial, Orson whispered to me, “I’ll bet she and her friend are eating each other out in the Green Room.” And we laughed. I had always wondered what the hosts on talk shows whispered to the guests. When the nun came out, she wasn’t dressed in clerical garb, just regular clothes.

  At one point I asked her, “Did your order achieve the right not to wear a habit through protest marches, you know, carrying placards and chanting slogans like, ‘Up against the wall, Mother Superior’?”

  Ed McMahon quickly answered, “No, Paul.”

  The next day I was visited by a pair of narcotics agents who had seen the show. I told them that the Mafia must have sent out all those marijuana joints in order to discredit the Yippies. And a viewer wrote to NBC complaining that I had worn a shirt with the internal diagram of a uterus.

  In the movie I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Peter Sellers’ marijuana brownies caused an immediate reaction, but in real life it takes a couple of hours. So, when my friend Bridget Potter booked me on The Mike Douglas Show in Philadelphia, I ate a pot brownie at Penn Station in New York, and it came on concomitantly with the end of a two-hour train ride. During the show, I didn’t remove my Mexican cowboy hat.

  “Do you always wear that hat?” Douglas asked.

  “Except when I take a shower.”

  “Don’t you think that’s impolite?”

  I opened my dungaree jacket and displayed a black sweatshirt with white lettering—Cosa Nostra—below which there was a montage of a revolver, a hypodermic needle, a whiskey bottle and glass, a limousine, a prostitute’s leg in a net-stocking, a hand grenade, a dagger, and a machine gun. Underneath was the slogan we aim to please.

  “Wearing my hat is only a symbol of impoliteness to you,” I explained. “If I were a professional criminal, I’d be here in my pin-striped suit, shiny black shoes, shirt, and tie. I’d be wearing an ostentatious pinky ring, and my hair would be neatly trimmed. But I could’ve arranged to have your mother killed, and I’d still have all the acceptable symbols of politeness.”

  “I see what you mean,” said Mike Douglas.

  In September 1968, I covered the protest of the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. There were a few hundred women there. On the boardwalk, demonstrators were holding a special ceremony. Icons of
male oppression were being thrown into a trash barrel—cosmetics, a girdle, a copy of Playboy, high-heeled shoes, a pink brassiere—with the intent of setting the whole mix on fire. But there was an ordinance forbidding you to burn anything on the boardwalk, and the police were standing right there to enforce it.

  So there was no fire, but that didn’t matter. The image of a burning bra became inextricably associated with women’s liberation. It was certainly a metaphorical truth.

  Robin Morgan helped organize that event. We had been close friends since our Yippie days. Robin, her husband, Ken Pitchford, and I had shared dinners and acid trips, conversations and conspiracies, but early in 1970 she told me that I would no longer be welcome “as a brother” in her home unless I quit as film critic for Cavalier, because it was by definition a sexist magazine. I couldn’t believe it. I was being purged from my own extended family. It was irrelevant that my column enabled me to support my daughter, or that Robin herself worked for Grove Press, which some feminists considered to be a sexist publisher.

  Then, while Jeff Shero—editor of Rat, the most volatile underground weekly in New York—was visiting his hometown, Austin, Robin became part of an all-female collective that took over the paper. Eventually, she became the editor of Ms. magazine. Jeff changed his name to Nightbyrd and launched a mail-order business selling drug-free powdered urine. Just add water, stir, and you’re ready to pass a drug test.

  Meanwhile, I got fired by Cavalier magazine. They declined to publish a particular column—my review of M*A*S*H as though it were a Busby Berkeley musical called Gook Killers of 1970—ostensibly on the grounds of bad taste, but I learned that three wholesalers had told the publisher they were pressured by the FBI and would refuse to distribute Cavalier if my name appeared in it.

  On top of that, my name was on a list of sixty-five “radical” campus speakers, released by the House Internal Security Committee. The blacklist was published in The New York Times, and picked up by newspapers across the country. It might have been a coincidence, but my campus speaking engagements stopped abruptly.

  In 1969, I met Jada Rowland, who was an actress in the soap opera Secret Storm. Although I fell in love with Jada, I hated soap operas. They were the ultimate creation of a value system that was the antithesis of my own. Their main function was to program viewers into becoming greater consumers by manipulating them to identify with the lives of other people who didn’t even exist. One viewer even sent a letter warning Jada that her “husband” was seeing another woman.

  Still, within that corrupt context, Jada maintained a sense of integrity. Once, the script called for her to put down her young daughter by referring sarcastically to her imagination, and Jada refused to say the line.

  We only had a two-night stand, but remained friends. I had presented her with a brass sculpture of a multi-armed Hindu demigod embracing his mate, whose legs were wrapped around him. As a symbolic gesture of my unrequited romance, Jada gave me a gift that she had made, a papier-mâché Donald Duck with eight arms and a tag attached, bearing the message, “Daisy Duck has been freed by Women’s Liberation.”

  When Richard Avedon invited me to be included in a collection of his photos of countercultural people, I accepted on the condition that Jada and I would pose together, and we could choose the pose. What we had in mind was a send-up of the Two Virgins album cover, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono stood nude, holding hands.

  We would be standing naked with our arms around each other. Jada would be holding a patriotic drinking mug with stars and stripes, and she would have arrows pointing to her breasts and crotch. I would be holding a small American flag, and I would have an erection. If Two Virgins was about anatomy, this would be about physiology. Jada was willing to risk losing her $1000-a-week job to participate in this photo shoot just for the fun of it.

  “I think it was my idea,” she recalls, “to do a take-off on Lennon and Ono. I was on one of my rants, objecting to the fact that the penis could never be seen erect and that there was a certain hypocrisy in their pretended ‘innocence’ as it seemed to me that they must have known that everyone just wanted to see the tits of the girl who stole the Beatle away.”

  I had ingested a capsule of THC powder before the photo session. Jada and I were now standing before the camera, and the only thing missing was my erection. I had heard that THC powder was actually an elephant tranquilizer. I would soon find out if that was true. Avedon asked what music to play during the session. I asked for the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” but he didn’t have it. He played my second choice, Bob Dylan singing “Lay, Lady, Lay,” and I began to kiss Jada.

  “This is obscene,” she whispered.

  “No,” I whispered back, “it’s very pure. But you’re right, it is kind of goal-oriented.”

  As she remembers, “What was ‘obscene’ in my view was that I wasn’t in love or in lust with you, so giving way to your request that I kiss you so you could get a hard-on seemed obscene. I felt both uneasily guilty, as I became aware that I was taking advantage of your fondness for me in order to be photographed by Avedon, and quite uncomfortable that you were taking advantage of the situation in order to kiss me. Those were the only ‘obscenities’ in my eyes.”

  We continued kissing. Dylan was now asking the musical question, “Why wait any longer for the world to begin?” My penis rose to the occasion, and the crew cheered us on.

  I signed a release, assuming that the photo would never be seen because the publishing of an erection was so taboo. However, in 1999—three decades later—my bluff was called. A $75 book of photos by Avedon and Doon Arbus, titled The Sixties, was published. A review in the Los Angeles Times mentioned that I looked “sheepish” and “sustained an erection.” Little did they know. On the back cover of the book, there’s a photo of Abbie Hoffman, holding a toy rifle in one hand and giving the finger with the other. He is smiling broadly, sticking his tongue out, and on his forehead the word fuck is written in lipstick.

  In August 1969, wearing my new yellow leather fringe jacket for the first time, I was on my way to Woodstock among a half-million others, walking past newsstands with headlines shouting about a mysterious mass murder in Beverly Hills, in sharp contrast to the Festival of Music and Love.

  The Hog Farm had been hired to provide security. At this event, security meant cream pies and seltzer bottles. Hugh Romney planned to wear a Smokey the Bear costume to warn people about putting out fires.

  Woodstock looked like the vision the Yippies originally had of Chicago. I wandered around this gathering of the tribes. Tom Law was leading a group in yoga exercises. I warned him, “If the government finds out you can get high just from breathing, they’re gonna ban oxygen.”

  The political contingent was encamped in a huge red-and-white-striped tent christened Movement City. In the afternoon, a mimeograph machine was churning out flyers proclaiming that the outdoor concerts should be free. At night, several festival-goers were busy unscrewing the metal-wire fencing that had been put up during the day. Yippie Roz Payne was among them. She helped take down the no trespassing sign and changed it into a sign that read people’s bulletin board.

  On an afternoon when Abbie, Roz, and I took a stroll down Merchants Way, which led to the stage that was still being constructed, they took down the merchants way sign and put up a sign that read ho chi minh trail. Lights had not yet been strung up along the path, and as it got darker, we kept walking and stumbling until we got lost in the woods. After a couple of hours, we saw a light through the trees, realized that we were right back where we started, and we laughed ourselves silly.

  Abbie would get serious later on, though, ebbed on by his sense of justice and fueled by the tab of White Lightning that we had each ingested. During a break in The Who’s performance of Tommy, he went up onstage with the intention of informing the audience that John Sinclair—manager of the MC5 and leader of the White Panther Party—was serving ten years behind bars for giving two joints to a narc; that this was really the politics
behind the music.

  “I think this is a pile of shit,” Abbie shouted, “while John Sinclair rots in prison.”

  “Fuck off,” Peter Townshend yelled. “Fuck off my fucking stage!”

  He immediately transformed his guitar into a tennis racket and smashed Abbie on the head with a swift backhand. He assumed that Abbie was just another crazed fan.

  When The Who played at Fillmore East the previous month, a plainclothes cop rushed onstage and tried to grab the mike. He intended to warn the audience that there was a fire next door and the theater had to be cleared, but he was able to do so only after Townshend kneed him in the balls. Now, as Abbie fled from his bad trip, Townshend warned the audience, “The next person that walks across the stage is going to get killed.” The audience laughed. “You can laugh, but I mean it!”

  Inadvertently, I ended up with a political mission of my own at Woodstock. For a while, I was hanging around the Press Tent, which later turned into the Hospital for Bad Trips.

  A reporter from the New York Daily News asked me, “How do you spell braless?”

  I replied, “Without a hyphen.”

  He pointed out two men with cameras who were from the Criminal Intelligence Division of the army. And a journalist who knew someone with a source in the White House told me how the Nixon administration had assigned the Rand Corporation think tank to develop a game plan for suspending the 1972 election in case of disruption. I decided to mention this at every meeting I attended, every interview I did, every campus I spoke at, and every radio show that I was a guest on.

  A year later, the story was officially denied by Attorney General John Mitchell. He warned that whoever started that rumor ought to be “punished.” I wrote to him and confessed, but he never answered my letter. Actually, investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum was able to trace the “rumor” back and discovered that I was the fifth level down from the original White House source.