Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  They say that man has succeeded where the animals fail because of the clever use of his hands, yet when compared to the hands, the sphincter ani is far superior. If you place into your cupped hands a mixture of fluid, solid, and gas, and then through an opening at the bottom try to let only the gas escape, you will fail. Yet the sphincter ani can do it! The sphincter apparently can differentiate between solid, fluid, and gas. It apparently can tell whether its owner is alone or with someone; whether standing up or sitting down; whether its owner has his pants off or on. No other muscle in the body is such a protector of the dignity of man, yet so ready to come to his relief. A muscle like this is worth protecting!

  —Walter Bonemeir, M.D.

  The sixties were over. Negroes became blacks. Girls became women. Hippies became freaks. Richard Alpert became Baba Ram Dass. Hugh Romney became Wavy Gravy, and his wife, Bonnie Jean, became Jahanarah. Keith Lampe became Ponderosa Pine, and his girlfriend became Olive Tree. My sister, Marge, temporarily became Thaïs. Indians became Native Americans. Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali. LeRoi Jones became Amiri Baraka. And Oracle editor Allen Cohen became Siddhartha, but he moved to a commune where everybody called him Sid. They thought his name was Sid Arthur.

  In the summer of 1970 I attended a weekend workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, conducted by Dr. John Lilly. It was about exploring mysticism with the scientific method. We weren’t allowed to use words like “imagined” or “fantasized” or “projected.” Whatever we experienced had to be accepted as reality.

  Lilly read aloud from the manuscript of a book that he had decided not to have published, about his research with sensory deprivation tanks. During the workshop, I “experienced” communicating with Lenny Bruce in the grave. He told me to tell Lilly that he had a responsibility to have his book published.

  I passed the message on, but Lilly replied, with total consistency, “That’s Lenny’s problem.” Eventually the book was published, though.

  John Lilly had worked with dolphins so long that he had begun to resemble one. He could practically speak dolphin language. His license plate was dolfin. He had done research on interspecies communication, and I told him of my acid encounter with that dolphin in Florida when the Yippies were conceived—the dolphin who had said, “If God is evolution, then how do you know He’s finished?”

  “No,” Lilly corrected me. “How do you know you’re finished?”

  So it was up to me to evolve, not the God I didn’t believe existed.

  Jeanne was now living with somebody else, and had given birth to a son. Holly turned seven in January 1971. I promised her that we would stay in touch by phone and letters, and that I would be coming back to New York a few times every year to see her, and that she would spend summer vacations with me. But it was a painful parting. On our farewell afternoon, I took Holly ice-skating. She brought a little pillow along, which she stuffed inside her leggings in order to cushion her behind whenever she fell down.

  I was finally ready to leave New York. I sat in my vibrating chair, listening to music, eating ice cream, and looking forward to a second chance in San Francisco. I had really fucked up my life, but this time I was determined to get things right.

  Suddenly a gigantic fist burst through the clouds, and I heard a voice boom out: “Oh, yeah? Pow! Pow! Pow!”

  CHAPTER 9

  ONE FLEW INTO THE CUCKOO’S NEST

  I moved to San Francisco in February 1971. Stewart Brand picked me up at the airport. On the plane I had been thinking about my trip to Cuba. At an educational community, some young students removed the string that was set up by a landscaping crew to mark off a cement foundation, and next morning, the school director lectured them. “Even a little thing like that,” he explained, “does harm to the revolution.” The children of Cuba were being programmed for cooperation rather than competition.

  Now I asked Brand, “Do you think competition begins with the spermatozoa racing for the ovum?”

  “I think the sperm don’t race,” he replied, “they dance around the ovum.” He could be even more of a minimalist than Bob Dylan. I told Brand about the time I went to hear Ram Dass speak, and in the audience a heckler shouted out his capsule critique, “Words!” I told Brand I later learned that the heckler had once fucked a goat. Brand scoffed: “Deeds!”

  Ken Kesey had already been in Palo Alto for a week. When I arrived, he was sitting in the backyard at a table with an electric typewriter. His parrot, Rumiako, was perched on a tree limb right above, and whenever he squawked, Kesey would type a sentence as though the parrot were dictating to him. Kesey looked up at me. “Hey, Krassner, I’ve just been sitting here, thinking about the anal sphincter.”

  I reached into my pocket, withdrew that bit of printed wisdom about the anal sphincter which I had transported three thousand miles, and handed it to Kesey. “My card,” I announced. This was such an appropriate coincidence for a new beginning, it bordered on magic.

  Hassler—that was Ron Bevirt’s Merry Prankster name—served as our managing editor, chauffeur, photographer, and general buffer zone. A ritual developed. Each morning, Kesey and Hassler would come by the Psychodrama Commune where I was staying. We would have crunchy granola and ginseng tea for breakfast. Then, sharing a joint in an open-topped convertible, we would drive up winding roads sandwiched by forest, ending up at a large garage which was filled with production equipment.

  Kesey and I would discuss ideas, pacing back and forth like a pair of caged foxes. Gourmet meals were cooked on a pot-bellied stove. Sometimes a local rock band came by and rehearsed with real amplification, drowning out the noise of our typewriters. Kesey had been reading a book of African Yoruba stories. The moral of one parable was “he who shits in the road will meet flies on his return.” With that as a theme, we assigned R. Crumb to draw his version of the Last Supper for our cover of The Last Supplement.

  At one point, Hassler told me that Kesey needed a short review of an esoteric cartoon book. I checked it out and suggested, “It made me say ‘Far out’ for the first time.” Hassler’s reaction: “You Zen Bastard.” Until then, I had identified myself in The Realist as “Editor and Ringleader.” Now I decided to change it to “Editor and Zen Bastard.”

  One day, two black women from Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by the garage, and within ten minutes Kesey convinced them that in Revelations where there’s talk of locusts, it was really prophesizing helicopters. Actually, Kesey was a practicing Christian who also threw the I Ching every day as a religious ritual. When his daughter, Shannon, was invited out on her first car date, he insisted that she throw the I Ching in order to decide whether or not to accept.

  Once he forgot to bring his family I Ching to the garage, and he seemed kind of edgy, like a woman who has neglected to take her birth-control pill, so I suggested that he pick three numbers, then I turned to that page in the unabridged dictionary, circled my index finger in the air, and it came down pointing at the word bounce. So that was our reading, and we bounced back to work.

  One morning in the Psychodrama kitchen, I couldn’t help but notice that Kesey was pouring some white powder—from a box he found on a pantry shelf—into his crotch. “I’ve used cornstarch on my balls for years,” he explained. It seemed like an organic commercial in the making, so the next morning, Hassler brought his camera. Our public service ad would eventually appear on the inside back cover of the Supplement, with Kesey giving this pitch:Y’know how it is when you’re swarthy anyway and maybe nervous like on a long freeway drive or say you’re in court where you can’t unzip to air things out, and your clammy old nuts stick to your legs. Well, a little handful of plain old cornstarch in the morning will keep things dry and sliding the whole hot day long. Works better than talcum and you don’t smell like a nursery. Also good for underarms, pulling on neoprene wet suits and soothing babies’ bottoms. And it’s biodegradable.

  After a couple of months, we finished the Supplement and had a party. Somebody brought a tank of nitrous oxide to help c
elebrate. Kesey suggested that in cave-dwelling times, all the air they breathed was like this. “There are stick figures hovering above,” he said, “and they’re laughing at us.”

  “And,” I added, “the trick is to beat them to the punch.”

  Kesey lived on a farm in Oregon, and also had a house in La Honda, across the street from a hill where a pair of speakers were embedded and could be turned on from the stereo system in his living room. One evening, after smoking DMT, we were sitting on the large front lawn, watching the sunset, when a car stopped on the road.

  A couple inside were arguing fiercely. Kesey, with his wrestler stride, returned to the house and put on a record of Frank Sinatra singing “Strangers in the Night.” The couple was stunned by such loud—and appropriate—music emanating from the hill. We could see them smiling as they shared that mystery, then drove away.

  Kesey and I hung around La Honda for a while. We were smoking hashish in a tunnel inside a cliff which had been burrowed during World War II so that military spotters with binoculars could look toward the ocean’s horizon for oncoming enemy ships. All we spotted was a meek little mouse right there in the tunnel. We blew smoke at the mouse until it could no longer tolerate our behavior. The mouse stood on its hind paws and roared at us, “Squeeeeeek!” This display of mouse assertiveness startled us and we almost fell off the cliff. The headline would’ve read, Dope Crazed Pranksters in Suicide Pact.

  Before I interviewed Kesey at my new home in San Francisco—each of us using an electric typewriter on my dining-room table, passing paper with questions and answers back and forth—he used the remainder of my hash to boil a pot of tea for our creative fuel.

  “Do you see the legalization of grass,” I typed, “as any sort of panacea?”

  “The legalization of grass,” he typed, “would do absolutely nothing for our standard of living, or our military supremacy, or even our problem of high school dropouts. It could do nothing for this country except mellow it, and that’s not a panacea, that’s downright subversive.”

  “Since you’re against abortion,” I typed, “doesn’t that put you in the position of saying that a girl or a woman must bear an unwanted child as punishment for ignorance or carelessness?”

  “In as I feel abortions to be probably the worst worm in the revolutionary philosophy,” he typed, “a worm bound in time to suck the righteousness and the life from the work we are engaged in, I want to take this slowly and carefully.”

  He proceeded to type quite a long, poetic justification, concluding:

  “Punishment of unwed mothers? Bullshit! Care of neither the old nor the young can be considered to be punishment for the able, not even the care of the un-dead old or the un-born young. These beings—regardless not only of race, creed, and color, but as well of size, situation, or ability—must be treated as equals and their rights to life not only recognized but defended! Can they defend themselves?

  “You are you from conception, and that never changes no matter what physical changes your body takes. And the virile sport in the Mustang driving to work with his muscular forearm tanned and ready for a day’s labor has not one microgram more right to his inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than has the three month’s fetus riding in a sack of water or the vegetable rotting for twenty years in a gurney bed.

  “Who’s to know the value or extent of another’s trip? How can we assume that the world through the windshield of that Mustang is any more rich or holy or even sane than the world before those pale blue eyes? How can abortion be anything but fascism again—back as a fad in a new intellectual garb with a new and more helpless victim?

  “I swear to you, Paul, that abortions are a terrible karmic bummer, and to support them—except in cases where it is a bona fide toss-up between the child and the mother’s life—is to harbor a worm of discrepancy.”

  Krassner: “Well, that’s really eloquent and misty-poo, but suppose Faye [his wife] were raped and became pregnant in the process?”

  Kesey: “Nothing is changed. You don’t plow under the corn because the seed was planted with a neighbor’s shovel.”

  Krassner: “I assume that it would be her decision, though?”

  Kesey: “Almost certainly. But I don’t really feel right about speaking for her. Why don’t you phone and ask?”

  I then—uncomfortably—called Faye Kesey in Oregon and reviewed that dialogue.

  She asked, “Now what’s the question—if I were raped, would I get an abortion?”

  “That about sums it up.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  Before Kesey returned to Oregon, we went to a benefit for the United Farm Workers, and I saw Joan Baez there. When I gave her Dylan’s message, I suddenly realized that I really had left New York.

  A couple of years later, Kesey said to me, “If you’re going to write about my position on abortion, I’ve changed, you know. It has to do with the war on drugs. The war is not on drugs, the war is on consciousness. Nobody has any right to come in and mess with your inside. They don’t have any right to tell me what to do inside my head, any more than they have any right to tell women what to do inside their bodies. What’s inside of us is ours, and we’ve got to fight for it.”

  I moved into a house on a cliff above the beach in atsonville—between Santa Cruz and Monterey—with Hassler and his wife, Poopsie. She had a pair of pet porcupines that I hoped would stay off my waterbed. This was paradise for a city boy. I had to convince myself that the roar of the ocean was not the rumble of the subway. I could play music as loud as I wanted—there was a two-acre field between the house and a dirt road that led to the mailboxes, and there was a wooded area between the house and the edge of the cliff.

  I had read that Disraeli used to embrace an oak tree for an hour so he could absorb its energy and be able to stay up all night. I tried that with a willow tree, not for an hour but just for five minutes, because I only wanted to stay up for a few hours.

  I bought a used car, a Volkswagen convertible, for $500, although I still didn’t know how to drive. Every weekend I would take a bus to San Francisco, where I had a room in the basement of a yellow-painted mansion that housed Prankster attorney Brian Rohan’s law firm. Whenever anybody in the building flushed a toilet, I could hear it rushing through the pipes in my room. The caretaker lived in a little carriage house several yards from my room. He was a jazz drummer. I anticipated making love to the sound of his practicing. It would be fun to experience the buildup to an orgasm with the accompaniment of a drum roll.

  My radio job bracketed the weekend, with one show early Saturday morning and another late Sunday night. My first show was on Easter weekend, and I opened with Lord Buckley’s rendition of “The Nazz.” I tried to get the name Rumpleforeskin listed in the phone book, but they refused. However, they did offer to list me as Foreskin Rumple.

  I would eat meat only in the city on weekends. One evening, I was having dinner at a hamburger place before my show, and I sat at the counter watching a young ethnic chef with a white fluffy hat, as he placed one round piece of chopped dead meat after another onto the open fire to cook for rare, medium, and well-done strangers. I was intrigued by his serene expression, and talked about it on the air that night, inviting listeners to tell how they managed to survive boring, menial, repetitive jobs. The answers covered a spectrum of escapes that ranged from becoming a machine oneself to disengaging by astral projection.

  Another time, I asked listeners to call in and tell about their moment of awakening. My favorite was from a woman who had been shopping at the supermarket. She took ajar of mayonnaise off the shelf—something which she had done dozens of times—but this time she noticed that it said To open jar, remove lid, and as if she had been struck by lightning, she suddenly realized how she had been programmed by the culture to become a consumer robot. Life was never the same for her after that.

  Once, I suggested that listeners all get stoned or chant or do whatever got them high, and that they a
lso have ajar of honey but not eat any until I gave the signal. First I played some Ravi Shankar sitar music. Then, while countless tongues were simultaneously savoring the taste of honey, I played a tape of a seventy-six-year-old beekeeper reading his epic poem about the nature of honey before playing some soulful numbers on his fiddle.

  Another time, I orchestrated an electronic orgy. I requested that listeners wait to make love or masturbate until midnight. Then they could all get into it, knowing that they were sharing the pleasures of the flesh with a spirit of community that was like an invisible spider’s web spun across the city. I provided the background music, from Janis Joplin singing “Down on Me” to Gene Autry singing “Back in the Saddle Again.”

  Although I occasionally had a celebrity guest on my show—Kesey, Jack Nicholson, Lily Tomlin, Country Joe McDonald—it functioned mostly as a sort of radio switchboard. I was able to connect exploited hippie craftspeople with a union organizer. When a woman called whose house had been set on fire by a neighborhood kid whose father was a cop, at the suggestion of other listeners, she ended up taking the kid out to dinner. And when actor Garry Goodrow called to find out if I knew a pickpocket who could serve as a technical adviser for his role in Steelyard Blues, I asked for anybody who was a pickpocket to please call, and one did.

  Once I got a call from a man who was so hostile that I suggested he breathe deeply before we started talking. For ten solid minutes I allowed his heavy breathing to be broadcast, with music in the background, so that listeners who had never gotten an obscene phone call could finally get one over their radio.

  There was never any pressure on me from anybody at the station, but when the head of ABC’s FM division came out from the East Coast, he cornered me in the record library and advised me not to get too involved with talking about “the evils of capitalism.”