Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  The Wise Old Owl: I don’t want to withdraw the question, but I don’t want to let an answer which the witness is obviously confused about get before the jury who has heard exactly when the Coliseum was.

  Elmer Fudd: You have said that twice now. He hasn’t said he is confused. You have said he is confused.

  The Wise Old Owl: All right. I will withdraw the question, Your Honor, to save time.

  The Big Bad Wolf: One of the ways you test the credibility of a witness under the law, Your Honor, is with his memory.

  The Wise Old Owl: Now, I will call your attention to Sunday, August 25, at approximately 4 pm on that day. Do you know where you were?

  Alice in Wonderland: Sunday, August 25. May I respond to his comment about credibility and memory?

  Elmer Fudd: No. Just answer this question if you can. If you can’t answer the question, you may say, “I can’t answer it.”

  A. Well, I was upset by what he said, and that affects my answer, see.

  You are pretending that this is not an emotional situation . . .

  Cross-examination by the Big Bad Wolf was brief:

  Q. Where were you on Friday the 23rd?

  A. Friday the 23rd. I think I was speaking—

  The Wise Old Owl: I don’t think I asked him anything about that date, Your Honor. That is outside the scope of the direct examination.

  The Big Bad Wolf: We can test his memory.

  Elmer Fudd: He said he came to Chicago on August 23. I have a note of it.

  Alice in Wonderland: No, I said the 21st. On the 23rd, I went to the University of—I went to Kansas. I spoke there before the National Students Association.

  Q. Then you came back to Chicago the next day?

  A. I flew back on the plane with Allard Lowenstein, yes.

  Q. How old are you?

  A. I am thirty-seven.

  Q. Thirty-seven. You will be thirty-eight in April?

  A. That is the way it goes chronologically.

  Q. No more questions.

  When my testimony was completed, in order to get centered, I asked myself, “All right, now why did you take LSD before you testified?”

  “Because,” I answered myself, “I’m the reincarnation of Gurdjieff.”

  This was slightly confusing, in as much as I didn’t believe in reincarnation—I thought it was the ultimate ego trip—and besides, I had never even read anything by Gurdjieff. Then I flashed back to a conversation with Dick Alpert during my first visit to Millbrook. I had been curious about Tim Leary.

  I asked, “Do you think Tim ever gets so involved he forgets he’s playing a game?”

  “Well, you know, he’s an old Irish Catholic boozehound, and he tends to get caught up in his own game sometimes, but Tim’s a very skillful game player, and he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Well, who would you say—among all the seekers you’ve ever known of—who would you say was always aware of playing a game, even the game of playing a game?”

  Alpert thought for a moment and then said, “Gurdjieff.” So that’s why I had taken the LSD, because the Chicago trial was just another game. But not to Abbie. He was furious. He felt, understandably, that I had been totally irresponsible.

  “You were creamed on the stand!” he shouted. “You were mean to the judge!” I couldn’t explain to him that somehow my original courtroom scenario had been short-circuited. Try as I might, I just hadn’t been able to vomit. “You’re not a leader,” Abbie yelled. “You’re a fuckin’ social gadfly. You’re not an organizer. You don’t urge people to do things. You never make demands. That’s what organizing is.”

  From Abbie’s point of view, I was guilty of self-indulgent betrayal. As penance, he wanted me to turn The Realist into a Yippie organ. I refused, and Abbie broke off our friendship.

  Ten months later, I would notice a little ad in the movie section of the paper—The Professionals was playing at the Charles Theater on Avenue D—so I ripped it out and mailed it to Abbie.

  Apparently, that gesture broke the ice. Bob Fass called me and said that Abbie and Anita would like to have dinner with me, and so we celebrated a much-needed reconciliation.

  The Conspiracy Trial defendants had been found guilty, but that verdict was overturned by a judge who had been appointed by Lyndon Johnson.

  The original American Revolution was fought over taxation without representation, and that’s what was happening all over again. In 1970, the War Resisters League in New York planned a demonstration at City Hall Park, and asked me to serve as emcee and to burn a blowup of a tax form, because so much tax money was financing the Vietnam War.

  When I set fire to the huge tax form, reporters shouted at me: “Do you pay your income taxes?”

  “That’s irrelevant,” I shouted back. “I’m not doing this as an individual. I’m doing it as a symbolic act.”

  The truth was, I hadn’t paid my taxes for the first five years of The Realist. Then an accountant, Don Wilen, volunteered to prepare my back taxes, and he even got me a refund. I managed to pay my taxes every year since then. When the protest rally ended and I was walking away, Ben Silver of CBS News caught up with me.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “They were all yelling at you there, but I wonder if I can get you for just a minute, and you might answer that question.”

  “Okay,” I said, and the camera was turned on.

  “You’ve just burned that replica of a tax form,” he said. “Have you paid your taxes?”

  “Yes, and I would like to confess right here on network television that I’m a mass murderer, because so much of the tax money I pay to the government goes to the Pentagon for just that purpose. I pay taxes and that money has gone for dropping napalm on children in Vietnam.”

  My statement never got on the air.

  While on a hiking trip in the Sierras with Margo St. James and a couple of friends, I considered moving to San Francisco to give my life a new beginning. There was a waterfall near our campsite, and I wanted to luxuriate in it, but the pond leading to the waterfall was painfully cold. I knew that only if I could take this plunge, would it serve as my commitment to moving. It had to be done immediately. I practically tore off all my clothes, counted to three, and ran screaming into the waterfall.

  We spent that evening in the Sierra Nevada, on futurist-philosopher-poet Gary Snyder’s land. The last time I’d seen him, we were on WBAI discussing countercultural trends. Now he was building his non-electric dream-house with the aid of his meditation students and electric tools. I ingested a tab of LSD to enhance the change my consciousness was already undergoing. Just as the acid was coming on strong, Snyder asked each guest to pump the water one hundred times. I could do that all right. Keeping count would be the hard part.

  Later, we all sat around a campfire, making our own music and telling Native American legends. Snyder recited a poem by Robert Duncan. I imprinted on one particular concept: “If the possibilities are infinite, that means in both directions . . .”

  That night, I had a dream about my brother, George. It took place in summer when we were kids. An aunt who was a health fanatic used to take us to Brighton Beach very early every morning. Then she would force us into the freezing cold ocean, completely naked. She brought along old newspapers for us to roll back into as we hit the shore, before we got dressed again. Although my brother was three years older, I was the one who decided to rebel against this bizarre practice, just as I was the one who decided to give up the violin.

  George went to the High School of Music and Art, but he really liked math and science—he even brought his slide rule along on dates—and he shocked the family by turning down a scholarship at the Julliard School of Music. He wanted to be an electronics engineer, not a concert violinist, and he went to the University of Michigan as a graduate student. Our mother insisted that he mail his laundry back and forth to New York in a light metal case she had purchased for that specific purpose.

  After he left, we drifted apart, and I began to develop a friend
ship with my sister Marge. She became a legendary music teacher at Boys & Girls High School. At the onset of the space program, George became a government engineer. His proposal to launch and lead a space electronics group was accepted, and they designed the first communications satellite built in the United States.

  He coauthored a textbook, Introduction to Space Communication Systems—five thousand copies were printed, but more were sold overseas, especially to Russia, than in this country. He worked with the seven original astronauts, and on Project Horizon, a thirteen-person secret task force headed by Wernher von Braun.

  It was such a secret project that George had to fly there, pretending to be a paratrooper who would jump last, but never did. Nor did he tell his wife, Judith. Each day on the phone, she would ask him about the weather in Washington, and each time he’d make up a weather report. Eventually he became an executive at a company that was selling helicopter components to the Pentagon.

  “How do you feel about what’s going on in Vietnam?” I asked.

  “I think we should continue what we’re doing there,” he replied.

  My heart sank with disappointment. George was certainly not an evil person, yet he was making money off the very war against whose inhumanity I was still protesting. He had a top secret security classification, while I was on an FBI list of radicals to be rounded up in an emergency. His security clearance was in continuous jeopardy because of my activities, with the FBI interviewing his neighbors. I found myself wondering why we had gone off in such opposite directions. What had turned him cynical, and me self-righteous?

  Then I remembered a childhood incident which made me realize the part that I had played in his development. I had borrowed a dime and then pretended it never happened, making him cry. I was experimenting with the misuse of power. Now, a few decades later, I could no longer escape my responsibility.

  As soon as I returned home from my California trip, I sent George a long letter with an apology and a dime attached. He appreciated the gesture and wrote a very honest letter in return. He had once told me, “My job is to make myself replaceable,” but now he realized that he had become “part of the rat race.” He accepted my apology and the dime, and he didn’t even ask for any interest on the loan.

  I also remembered that while I was peaking on acid, Gary Snyder mentioned that he knew someone from the Rand Corporation who had “an important story to tell.” I contacted Snyder to follow up on that vague lead. The individual turned out to be Daniel Ellsberg, who, with Tony Russo, would leak the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post. Ellsberg told me that if they hadn’t published the material, he would have offered it to the Los Angeles Free Press.

  He called himself One-Legged Terry, having had his right leg gobbled up by a machine at a kibbutz in Israel. Previously, he had taken LSD on a postwar visit to Dachau; fought with the Israeli Army; and was sympathetic to the Arab cause. He managed to smuggle into the United States a chunk of hashish inside a piece of cloth wrapped around what was left of his thigh. He was confident that nobody at customs would have the audacity to say, “I beg your pardon, sir, but I’m afraid we’ll have to search your stump.”

  Terry told me that when he was in the hospital, it was the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s songs that helped him to recuperate. And now he was teaching Hebrew to Dylan. One afternoon in 1970, Terry called me and said, “Bob Dylan wants to meet you.” I walked over to Dylan’s studio on Houston Street, trying not to plan our conversation, yet thinking I might start off by referring to a folksinger who was a mutual friend—“You know Happy Traum, don’t you?”—but then I tried to block even that out of my mind.

  When I got to the studio, Dylan and I shook hands, and he said, “You know Happy Traum, don’t you?”

  I had just come from seeing Holly, and I told Dylan how she insisted on calling her fingers “toes,” and her toes “fingers.” He in turn told me how his son wanted to be called “daddy” and insisted on calling Dylan “son.” In the middle of this conversation, Dylan suddenly stopped.

  “This isn’t an interview, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Because, Bob Dylan—that’s somebody who’s waiting for me out in the car.”

  When Terry and I began talking about Cuba, Dylan picked up his guitar and started strumming a Latin-American riff for our soundtrack.

  One evening, Terry moderated a radio panel, and Dylan came along to the studio. The panelists were Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane, Arab-American spokesperson Mohammed Medhi, Abbie Hoffman, and me. I suggested that the Gypsies were also entitled to a homeland, perhaps an empty supermarket. At the end of the two-hour discussion, everybody summed up their position.

  I summed up mine in three words: “Nyah, nyah, nyah.”

  Later, Dylan said to me, “Hey, you didn’t say very much.”

  “No, but it’s all that’ll be remembered.” To my surprise, I was wrong. Twenty-two years later, an editorial in Direct Marketing News would state:

  “How odd it is that the very people who are helping to keep Haitian refugees out of our country are offended over Japanese slurs against African-Americans. Satirist Paul Krassner once concluded a radio debate with a remark that could serve in any number of ethnic contexts. ‘It’s important to realize that we’re talking about value judgments,’ Krassner said. ‘Not only may Jews not be the chosen people, but people may not be the chosen species.’ A good thing to keep in mind.”

  Of course, Dylan didn’t say very much himself. When I had asked why he was taking Hebrew lessons, he answered, “I can’t speak it.” He was a true minimalist.

  Now, at the radio station, I pointed an imaginary microphone at him and asked, “So how did you feel about the six million Jews who were killed in Nazi Germany?”

  “I resented it,” he replied.

  “I’ll miss these little dialogues. I’m gonna move to San Francisco.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, if you see Joan Baez, would you tell her that I’d like to do a benefit with her again some time?”

  Eric Christiansen was also at the radio station, just observing. The son of a union organizer, he had read The Realist when he was ten years old. Now he was the program director at KSFX, ABC’s FM station in San Francisco. We discussed the possibility of my doing a regular show when I moved there. I was skeptical about how much freedom I would have, but Station Manager John Turpin promised me, “You’ll be surprised.” There was a rumor that he was a Black Panther. On his office wall in San Francisco, there was a poster of Angela Davis, certainly not official ABC interior decorating policy.

  Meanwhile, Stewart Brand had asked Ken Kesey to edit The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, and Kesey said he would do it if I would coedit it with him. Brand called and asked me.

  Without hesitation, I said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

  In a letter of confirmation, he wrote: “For two prime origins of the Catalog to help finish it is nice. Even tidy.”

  I figured that I’d be able to start my radio show in San Francisco immediately after The Last Supplement, since we would be working on that project in nearby Palo Alto. But first I had to do an audition broadcast in New York on WPLJ. I chose as my guests Vietnam Veterans Against the War and a radical rock group, Elephant’s Memory. I even read a commercial for a film.

  “I haven’t seen it myself,” I added, “but if it’s really good, your friends will tell you.”

  Anyway, I got the job.

  Eldridge Cleaver was still on the lam. He had gone from Cuba to Algeria. Tim Leary had been in prison for seven months, then escaped with the aid of the Weather Underground. Now Leary and his wife Rosemary were Cleaver’s guests. I was scheduled to be a host on Free Time, Channel 13’s answer to network talk shows. Among the guests on my first program was Marilyn Sokol, pretending to be Leary’s mother.

  “Welcome to the show, Mrs. Leary. That’s a lovely coat you’re wearing. What kind of fur is it?”

  “Oh,” she replied, “it’
s made of Algerian camel hump.”

  I had a little button in my ear, through which the producer kept telling me to inform the viewers that I was actually interviewing an actress. I felt like a contrary Joan of Arc, ignoring this voice that was buzzing around in my head. I just didn’t want to condescend to viewers who might not be aware that this was a put-on.

  Finally, the producer’s exasperated voice said, “Paul, are you gonna say anything or not?”

  I shook my head no as unobtrusively as possible, realizing that my first show would be my last. But that was okay, because I was leaving New York anyway. A group of ministers were now providing abortion referrals, so I could leave that service behind.

  The last issue of The Realist that I would prepare before moving featured a “Report from Algiers” by journalist Jonah Raskin. I assigned artist Robert Grossman to do the cover illustration—a parody of the ad campaign for Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice—a caricature of Leary, Cleaver, and their wives, all in one bed, with the caption, “Tim and Rosemary and Eldridge and Kathleen,” followed by the movie’s slogan, “Consider the possibilities.”

  But that sense of togetherness disappeared just as The Realist hit the newsstands. Cleaver had put Leary and Rosemary under house arrest at gunpoint. Leary said, “Chromosome damage meets Black Panther. That means trouble.” Cleaver, in his diatribe against Leary, called hippies “silly psychedelic freaks.” And so, as a commitment to my culture, I decided that my radio name would be Rumpleforeskin.

  There were about 160 cartons in my loft. For several weeks I went through each box, throwing stuff away, saving an occasional item, making literally thousands of decisions every day. I came upon one strange little card which I just couldn’t decide whether to keep, so rather than break my rhythm, I simply stuck it in my pocket.

  THE ANAL SPHINCTER

  A Most Important Human Muscle