Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Actually, that melding of Coincidence and Mysticism had begun in 1971 when I wrote a comic strip, drawn by Richard Guindon. It was about political witchcraft, a takeoff on Rosemary’s Baby, directed by Polanski. A key scene in that film showed Rosemary moving around the letters from a Scrabble game so that instead of spelling out the name of her neighbor the letters spelled out the name of a warlock in a book she had been reading about witchcraft. And now, scrambling the letters of the vice president’s name—SPIRO AGNEW—it became GROW A PENIS. Coincidence had been my religion, but this was so appropriate that it challenged my theology.

  After all, when Senator Charles Goodell came out against the war in Vietnam, it was Agnew who called him “the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party”—thereby equating military might with the mere presence of a penis. Around that time, Mike Wallace interviewed me for 60 Minutes. He asked me what the difference was between the underground press and the mainstream media, and I told him about the GROW A PENIS anagram.

  “The difference,” I said “is that I could print that in The Realist, but it’ll be edited out of this program.” My prediction was accurate.

  Yoko Ono and John Lennon spent a weekend at my house in Watsonville. They loved being so close to the ocean. In the afternoon I asked them to smoke their cigarettes outside, but in the evening we smoked a combination of marijuana and opium, sitting on pillows in front of the fireplace, sipping tea, and munching cookies. We talked about Mae Brussell’s theory that the deaths of musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and Jim Morrison had actually been political assassinations because they were role models on the crest of the youth rebellion.

  “No, no,” Lennon argued, “they were already headed in a self-destructive direction.”

  A few months later, he would remind me of that conversation and add, “Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.” For now, though, we were simply stoned in Watsonville, discussing conspiracy, safe at my oasis in a desert of paranoia. At one point, I referred to Mae Brussell as a saint.

  “She’s not a saint,” Lennon said. “You’re not a saint. I’m not a saint. Yoko’s not a saint. Nobody’s a saint.”

  We discussed the Charles Manson case. Lennon was bemused by the way Manson had associated himself with Beatles music.

  “Look,” he said, “would you kindly inform him that it was Paul McCartney who wrote ‘Helter Skelter,’ not me.”

  Yoko said, “No, please don’t tell him. We don’t want to have any communication with Manson.”

  “It’s all right,” Lennon said, “he doesn’t have to know the message came from us.”

  “It’s getting chilly,” Yoko said to me. “Would you put another cookie in the fireplace?”

  Lennon was absentmindedly holding on to the joint. I asked him, “Do the British use that expression, ‘to bogart a joint,’ or is that only an American term—you know, derived from the image of a cigarette dangling from Humphrey Bogart’s lip?”

  “In England,” he replied, “if you remind somebody else to pass a joint, you lose your own turn.”

  Mae Brussell believed that her article could literally prevent the reelection of President Nixon. We held a press conference—I had never done that for any issue before—but there was a lot of skepticism. It had been five years since I published “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” and I began to feel like the little boy who cried “wolf!” Only now there really was a wolf at the door, and I started running around like a graduate fresh out of Zealot School, getting copies of The Realist to the media and individual journalists.

  Then, one sunny afternoon in Watsonville, I decided to take an acid trip to celebrate the publication. Hassler and Poopsie had moved, so I lived alone now. I ingested three tablets—a total of nine hundred micrograms of LSD—and went for a leisurely walk along the dirt road. On the way back, Jackie Christeve invited me to meet a man she described as her spiritual teacher.

  He had a ruddy complexion and Satanic eyebrows. He was talking about having communicated with beings from outer space. Jackie gave him the new issue of The Realist. He began turning the pages with one hand and gliding his other hand a couple of inches above, back and forth, page by page, as though he were sensing the contents.

  He said, “I feel a very strong sense of mission from everyone who has contributed to this.”

  “That’s true,” I said, flashing back to a conversation Norman Mailer and I once had about the tools of our craft. He used a pencil, and I used a typewriter. His rationale was that what you wrote with affects your style. A pencil is soft, he insisted, whereas a typewriter is clickety-clack. But, I argued, I wrote inside my head first, where it was not merely soft but mushy. So now, could Jackie’s spiritual teacher be putting me on? Was he really just some kind of speed-reading con artist?

  Although I could understand the concept of one’s vibrational level being transmitted to paper through a pencil, I had presented the printer with typed manuscripts which were reset on another machine, photographed onto paper, run through presses, trimmed, and stapled. Yet here was this strange guy responding to the magazine in such an unusual way that I had to sit back and watch where my suspension of disbelief would lead.

  “One of these writers,” he continued, “has a higher consciousness than all the others. Not this material on fascism”—he must have seen the word standing out—“but, where was it, this is the highest consciousness of all.” His hand glided over a column titled “Unintentional Satire.” It was reprinted from Horoscope magazine—a poignant letter from a fifty-year-old reader who wanted to know what his chances were, astrology-wise, of getting a sex-change operation—he said, “I think I could face everything if I could do it as a little old lady instead of a broken old man”—together with the complicated text of a speculative chart the editors had set for him.

  “Who’s this author?” said the con artist. “I’m not familiar with the name. Is it an Oriental?”

  He pointed to the byline at the top of the column: “by Wotsiur Syne.”

  “That’s just a pun I made up. There’s no such person.”

  Jackie left the room, and her spiritual teacher took on an air of confidentiality. “We’ve selected Jackie astrologically, you know.”

  Suddenly I felt extremely vulnerable.

  “Who’s we?” I said. “I don’t understand what your purpose is.”

  “It’s time for God to regain control of these bodies that have been entrusted to us.”

  His answer scared me. Once, when I had my radio show, I found a bubblegum football card, and I began to read it on the air, without mentioning the player’s name, so that listeners could guess. It stated that he’d never had an injury in his entire professional career. “Well, we can fix that,” I said, writing a note, “Season of the Witch,” and I held it up for my producer to see and find the Donovan record.

  “Let’s all concentrate,” I continued. “No, never mind, because then if anything happens to him, they’ll blame us. You know, the word would finally reach him, and it might affect his performance on the field.” As the song was being cued on the turntable by the engineer, I added, “The trouble with magic is, it works if you believe in it.” So now, even though Jackie’s spiritual teacher may not have been trying to psych me out, I was doing a pretty good job of it myself.

  I fled from Jackie’s house and ran along the dirt road back to my house. I had left the radio on and now Mae Brussell was talking about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. But I had overdosed on conspiracy. I ran in one door and out the other, then down into the woods behind the beach. I found a cove at the bottom of a hilly area, sat under a tree, and then I let out a long, loud, uncontrollable wail—it must have been a ten on the Primal Scream scale—releasing all the fear that had been building up in my psyche, from Scientology to Richard Nixon, from Naval Intelligence to Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Then I just sat there and watched the ground moving around in beautiful mosaic patterns.

 
; At dusk, I moved to a dilapidated easy chair on the edge of the cliff. Through the fog I could see the silhouettes of some kind of space creatures. They were marking latitudinal and longitudinal lines on the ocean floor, as though it were a classroom globe. That evening I called Kesey. He said, “It has to do with a struggle for the will.” And I called Mae. She said, “These people have their own reality. The occult is their safety valve for not having to deal with the problems on earth.”

  In fact, I was perceiving what had happened in mythical terms—the attempt to divert human compassion into otherworldliness. With that as my premise, I began to apply the logic of paranoia, and so now Jackie became part of the plot. Her last name was Christeve. Of course! Wasn’t Christianity utilized for the prevention of rebels? Didn’t Eastern religion rationalize the suffering of others as rotten karma? How long had that spiritual teacher been re-channeling Jackie’s energy?

  I recalled how I first met her when I was running on the beach and she was riding a bike slowly along the shore. Aha! She must’ve found out from the federal data bank that I had once been the winner of the Slow Bicycle Race. What a shrewd way to entrap me. I was seeing everything through a conspiratorial filter.

  The next morning, when I went outside, there was a man on the road observing me with binoculars. Then there was another man, in a red sweater, running behind a tree. I counted seven men altogether. There was a helicopter circling overhead. I hurried to the cliff and down the rickety wooden steps onto the beach. There was a sheriff’s car parked on top of the cliff, and a couple of deputies were watching me. They had my whole house staked out.

  I walked along the beach, trying to appear nonchalant, back around into that cove in the woods. I sat under the same tree where I had howled like a helpless infant the day before. Now there was another Mission Impossible type standing in the woods, about fifty feet behind and above me, watching through binoculars.

  Finally, choosing my words carefully, I turned around and called up, “What are you waiting for?”

  He hesitated, then called back, “You seen any girls around here?”

  “No.”

  “I heard they take nude sunbaths.”

  “Well, I haven’t noticed any.”

  After a brief silence, he called to me, “What are you waiting for?”

  “I just like to watch the way people act.”

  He grabbed his crotch and said, “You want this?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I stayed there a few more minutes, just so he wouldn’t think he scared me away. Then I got up and called out, “Well, good luck.” I headed toward the beach, and he signaled to another plainclothes officer. All this was really happening. It was not my imagination. The LSD I took the previous day was very powerful, but it had worn off. These men were not any kind of hallucination. I was having a bad trip, but it was reality. I went back to my house, put all my dope in ajar, and buried it. I packed a few things and walked along the beach for about a mile.

  It seemed like people were staring at me—every hippie surfer was an undercover cop—but somehow I managed to get away. I hitched a ride, making sure we weren’t being followed. The driver gladly let me off at a phone booth. I called Frank Bardacke, an old friend from the Free Speech Movement who lived in the area. I knew I could trust him completely. He drove me to a bus station, and I went to San Francisco to hide out in my little room. The jazz drummer in the carriage house told me that a helicopter had been circling overhead there too.

  Since I was a regular guest on Edward Bear’s weekly TV show, I just went on that night and freaked out in public, spreading paranoia like apple butter. Although I was suffering from a severe case of information overload, I could still pass for sane in public. I even managed to keep a dental appointment without revealing the utter turmoil in my mind. I was desperately trying to maintain my balance between coincidence and conspiracy. But then two men showed up at my basement room.

  They knocked on the door, and I asked for their ID. “Open up or we’ll break the fucking door down.” I decided to let them in. They were huge. They insisted on seeing my identification, but I didn’t have any. They hassled, threatened, intimidated—scared the living shit out of me—but they wouldn’t tell me who they were or what they were looking for. They didn’t seem to want anything except my ID. The best I could do was show them mail addressed to me.

  When they left, I was shaking. I decided to go back to Watsonville. On the bus, my thumb began to feel numb. It was obviously a direct result of the cavity in one of my molars having been filled. When the bus stopped in San Jose, I got off and called William Robbins. He was my dentist.

  “Bill,” I said, “I know who you work for, and I have two demands. I want everybody out of solitary confinement. And I want a cease-fire all over the world.”

  He hesitated a second. “Hold on, Paul, let me get your chart.” He was stalling for time. When he came back to the phone, he asked, “Now, do you want my reaction?”

  “No, that won’t be necessary. I’ve gotta go. Goodbye.”

  I hung up the phone and got back on the bus. The man sitting in front of me, obviously an operative for the CIA, adjusted the ring on his finger in order to let his partner outside know that I was on the bus again. I had to let the man in front of me know that I was onto his game. So I took out my ballpoint pen. Clicking the top over and over like a telegraph key, I kept repeating, “Paul Krassner calling Abbie Hoffman”—just loud enough for the man sitting in front of me to hear—“Paul Krassner calling Abbie Hoffman.” The CIA operative fidgeted nervously. He knew I was onto him now.

  My mind had finally snapped. Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl began, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” and I had always identified with the “best minds” part but never with the “madness” part. Eventually I told Abbie how I had tried to convince a CIA operative sitting in front of me on the bus that I was calling Abbie Hoffman by using my ballpoint pen as a telegraph key.

  “Oh, yeah,” Abbie said. “I got your call, only it was collect, so I couldn’t accept it.”

  Lee Quarnstrom invited me to stay at his home and cool down. He was an original Merry Prankster who was now a reporter for the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian, bringing his acid consciousness to Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors meetings. On the afternoon that he came to pick me up, there was a man on the dirt road using a surveyor’s scope. As we drove toward him, it appeared that he was surveying us. Was Lee delivering me to him?

  “Lee, I’ve trusted you up till now.”

  “I was afraid of that,” he replied. To himself he thought, Well, it was bound to come to this. Either Paul has trusted me up till now and still trusts me, or, more likely, he’s trusted me up till now and suddenly thinks I’m part of the plot. Either way, he’s really wacko. Late that night, while Lee and his wife, Guadalupe, were asleep, I stayed up talking with another former Prankster, Julius Karpen, who had once been Lee’s editor in Chicago. As we spoke, we were rolling billiard balls back and forth across the pool table in the living room, pushing and catching them with our hands rather than hitting them with a cue stick and waking anybody up.

  Finally, I asked, “How long is it gonna go on?”

  “How long is what gonna go on?”

  “You know, this battle between good and evil, when is it gonna end?”

  “Maybe never,” Julius said.

  Suddenly I felt a wave of relief. So it wasn’t all my responsibility. Such a heavy burden had been lifted from my soul.

  The turning point in my insanity came inadvertently one day at a gas station. While Lee was out of the car, I noticed two guys standing there, staring at me. Just as I was convincing myself that now they were out to get me, I flashed back to the West Side Highway in New York. Sheila Campion was driving her motor scooter, with me sitting behind her, my arms circling her waist. She was wearing a miniskirt. Truck drivers were making animal sounds and whistling.

  “They recognize
me,” I joked to Sheila.

  And now, the moment I realized that these two guys in the gas station were staring, not at me in the back seat, but at Guadalupe in the front seat, my perspective began to return.

  I was fine by the time Holly, then eight years old, came to stay with me that summer. A group of us went to the Santa Cruz County Fair. As we were walking down the midway, a startlingly obese woman beckoned to us. She was an evangelist, and asked if Holly wanted to hear a story. Holly said okay, and they went into her tent. Several minutes later, Holly came out, carrying a balloon. “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Oh, she was telling a story about God. I don’t even know if I believe in God.”

  “Neither do I. Well, at least you got a balloon out of it.”

  “And she gave me this too.” Holly showed me a miniature police whistle. Then she started blowing the whistle and calling out, “Jesus! Here, Jesus!”

  And I laughed . . . for the first time in a year. It had been one whole year since I started that experiment. I had gone an entire year without laughing. But now it began, just a chortle at first, but the dam had been broken, and that chortle turned into a side-splitting, knee-slapping, rolling-on-the-ground attack of laughter that alternated with spasmodic sobbing. Later I could analyze how Holly’s spontaneous irreverence toward authority had finally broken through my thick shell, but for now I just surrendered to having one of those darned spiritual orgasms right there in public.

  Losing my sense of humor had been the direction of my insanity. By taking myself as seriously as my cause, I had violated the Eleventh Commandment. I had an investment in my craziness, and I needed to perpetuate it. Only in retrospect would I find that, in response to my megalomaniacal demands, what my dentist had said—“Hold on, Paul, let me get your chart”—was unintentionally, screamingly funny.

  By publishing Mae Brussell’s work, I had been on a mission from the God I didn’t believe in. I had bought into a celestial conspiracy. I had gone over the edge, from a universe that didn’t know I existed, to one that did. From false humility to false pride.