I booked myself to perform at a theater in Hollywood for a series of Monday nights. One Sunday morning, I was scheduled to be a guest on Michael Benner’s KLOS show. I still didn’t know how to drive a car, and there were no buses or cabs in sight, so I was hitchhiking to the radio station. A police-car megaphone advised me to pull over to the side, and two cops got out. “Don’t you know it’s against the law to hitchhike?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
One cop frisked me and the other wrote a citation for “hitch hiking w/ thumb out.” Where it said, Make of Car, he wrote down “Ped” for pedestrian. Where it said Approximate Speed, he indicated that I was going three miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone. Then he asked for my ID.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, “I never carry any ID.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I know who I am.”
He wasn’t amused—I could tell by his expression—and I realized that I had lost my empathy for a moment. Seeing it from the cop’s point of view, I had come across as a wise guy. So now I wanted to do something to reconcile the tension between us. I took out of my pocket an ad from the L.A. Weekly. The headline said, “An Evening with Paul Krassner,” and the photo was one of me mooning an audience. I had a slight doubt about handing the ad to him, but I did anyway.
“Here,” I explained, “this isn’t exactly my ID, but it’s all I have.”
Out of habit, the cop looked at the photo of my ass, then at my face, and he said, “Is this you?”
It was another one of those rare and precious moments.
The next night Scott Kelman came to my show. We had met twenty years previously, when I performed at Town Hall in New York. Now he was planning to start a new theater in downtown Los Angeles and wanted to produce me there—but my show would need a name. Thanks to Harry Reasoner, I decided to call it Attacking Decency in General. My show opened at the Wallenboyd Theater in 1984, and it ran for six months. I received awards from Drama-Logue and the L.A. Weekly.
Scott and I became friends in the process. He slept at his office and let me stay at his apartment in Venice Beach. I fell in love with the neighborhood and that’s when I decided to move there, but for a while I also kept my place in San Francisco, shuttling back and forth.
“It’s really decadent,” I confessed to the audience. “I mean, there are people living in cardboard boxes just a block away from this theater, and I still have two apartments. I was feeling very guilty until the other day, when I was walking down the street and I saw a guy who had two cardboard boxes.”
David Letterman was winding up his interview with sex therapist Ruth Westheimer.
“Do you have a favorite question?” he asked.
“Funniest question lately was . . . a caller called and said, ‘Dr. Ruth, I do use contraception. But one of the things we like to do, my lover and myself, she likes to toss onion rings on the erect penis.’ And I thought”—But Letterman reached over to hit the sound-effects buzzer and said, “I’m sorry, time’s up, Ruth, uh—” He was interrupted by applause from the audience. “Good heavens,” Letterman said, “this is not a jack-in-the-box. We, uh, on that note we have to pause. Believe it or not. Good luck with your television show. Come back and see us. Dr. Ruth Westheimer, ladies and gentlemen.”
And that was the end of it. Letterman never did find out what Dr. Ruth thought, but that bizarre onion-rings image would remain embedded in my consciousness. In 1984, in the introduction to an anthology, Best of The Realist, I included in a long paragraph about changing taboos:Did Nancy Reagan actually sit on Mr. T’s lap while he was wearing a Santa Claus suit and kiss him on the cheek, or was this one of those doctored photos on the cover of the National Enquirer? Was I only dreaming when I saw Phil Donahue ask the long-awaited question, “What does the Old Testament have to say about vibrators?” Did I merely hallucinate Dr. Ruth Westheimer advising David Letterman that his girlfriend could vary their foreplay by tossing onion rings onto his waiting erection? Did I just imagine I heard a young boy call the Alex Bennett show and discuss the taste of chocolate pubic hair?
I didn’t realize until too late that the sentence about Dr. Ruth and David Letterman was missing. I called up my editor to find out why.
“Paul,” he said, “that’s actionable.”
“But it’s true—how can it be libelous?”
“Well, I thought you made it up. I’m not familiar with Dr. Westheimer, and I don’t stay up late enough to watch the Letterman show.”
“Look, I don’t blame you—if I hadn’t seen it myself, I would’ve thought I made it up—but I wish you would’ve checked with me.”
The depressing aspect of this incident was that fear of litigation had permeated the mindset of publishers and producers so deeply—as though David Letterman might actually sue me if I had made it up—or, more likely, Dr. Ruth might sue. I sure would have enjoyed covering that trial.
I could envision her on the witness stand, telling a jury, “The defendant caused me great mental anguish and also severely harmed my professional reputation, because I would never recommend such a practice—playing ringtoss on an erect penis with onion rings—I mean everybody knows, fried foods are not good for you.”
But it was this touch of censorship in the guise of editing that provided the specific impetus for me to start publishing The Realist again in 1985, after an eleven-year hiatus. “The taboos may have changed,” I wrote, “but irreverence is still our only sacred cow.” I felt like the old alcoholic doctor in those classic Western movies where the school-marm, having been impregnated by the sheriff, is about to give birth in a barn, and the doctor’s hands are shaking, but he says, “I can still do it—get me hot water and blankets—and hurry!”
I had no staff, but an old friend, Lynn Kushel, would handle circulation. I thought that the subscription price of The Realist would be $24, but Robert Anton Wilson told me of William Burroughs’s observation about how often the number twenty-three occurred in his life, and then Wilson began to notice that same coincidence in his life. Two of his children had been born on the twenty-third. My own daughter was born on the twenty-third. My Venice post office box number included twenty-three. So I took Wilson’s suggestion as an omen—it was a leap of faith in the irrational—and the rate became $23. One subscriber referred to it as “the official Illuminati rate.”
There seemed to be a renewed need for The Realist since the Reagan administration had begun conducting government by public relations. Although the taboos were different—bad taste, in fact, had become an industry—social commentary itself was now the biggest taboo of all.
I published the return/premiere issue of The Realist—this incarnation was in newsletter format—in the summer of 1985. It featured an interview with Jerry Garcia:Q. Does the world seem to be getting weirder and weirder to you?
A. Yeah. The weirdest thing lately for me was that thing of the Ayatollah and the mine-sweeping children. In the war between Iran and Iraq, he used kids and had them line up like a human chain, holding hands, and walk across the minefields because it was cheaper than mine detectors.
Q. That’s just unfathomable.
A. It’s amazingly inhuman. And people complained about the Shah—a few fingernails and stuff—but this is kids walking across minefields. It’s absolutely surreal. How could people go for that?
Q. But how do you remain optimistic? There’s 48 wars going on now simultaneously—and yet the music is joyful—even “Please don’t murder me” is a joyful song.
A. Well, when things are at that level, there’s kind of a beauty to the simplicity of it. I wrote that song when the Zodiac Killer was out murdering in San Francisco. Every night I was coming home from the studio, and I’d stop at an intersection and look around, and if a car pulled up, it was like, this is it, I’m gonna die now. It became a game. Every night I was conscious of that thing, and the refrain got to be so real to me. “Please don’t murder me, please don’t murder me.”
For a fe
ature story in the second issue of the born-again Realist, I contacted Robert Anton Wilson. There was a one-inch news item about a convention in Italy of the Married Roman Catholic Priests Association, representing seventy thousand priests who had married in defiance of the Vatican. I gave the clipping to him.
“Bob, should you choose to accept this assignment, I’d like you to cover this event as though you had actually been there.”
Wilson wrote his report, and even I almost believed that he had actually gone to the married priests convention. Next, there was a tiny news item about the first International Orgasm Conference, and I assigned him to cover that event, too, as though he had actually been there. The Realist was back in apocryphal business.
(The final issue was published in Spring 2001. Several years later, Austin artist Ethan Persoff began to post all the issues online, four at a time, on a website, The Realist Archive Project.)
Venice was paradise, especially for a nondriver like me. It was my desert island. I could walk to the post office, the grocery store, the laundromat, the bank, the pharmacy, or take a bus to the mainland (Santa Monica) if I wanted to see a movie. I had a sense of community in Venice—a little Philippine restaurant prepared a special drink for me, Ginger Treat, and the mail carrier talked about “the spirit of the sidewalk.”
At a “Freedom to Read” event at Small World Books on the Venice boardwalk, I met Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. He told me, “I’ve been reading The Realist since 1966, when I was eleven years old, and I must say that it warped me for life.” Now that was gratifying.
I lived in a tiny two-room apartment on a walk street, Clubhouse Avenue, one block from the boardwalk. I could take long barefoot walks on the beach, and I could see the ocean from my kitchen window. The waves had different moods—calm, frisky, angry—but their momentum always gave me a sense of perspective. They were rolling onto the beach long before I was here, and they would continue rolling in long after I was gone.
Nancy Cain was one of my neighbors. She lived right across the sidewalk from me. When she was sixteen, Nancy listened over and over to Mort Sahl’s first album until she memorized it, just as she did with the score of My Fair Lady. As an actress she worked in summer stock in Detroit, and as a singer she performed on a bill with Lily Tomlin and Madeline Kahn in New York. She left her show-business career to become active in Videofreex, pioneers in guerrilla TV, documenting the counterculture and antiwar movement. Then she programmed a pirate television station, Lanesville TV, in upstate New York.
She was a producer on the PBS series The ’90s, and would eventually launch CamNet, the first camcorder network, with her partner, Judith Binder. Rolling Stone designated CamNet second only to HBO in their list of “the ten things in 1993 that didn’t suck,” heralding it as “a peoples CNN” and “the inevitable next step in the liberation of television from network owners and broadcasters.” In 2011, Nancy’s memoir, Video Days: And What We Saw Through the Viewfinder, was published.
Nancy and I shared a certain shyness, but she was the only one I ever saw who stopped and talked with a guy who shouted gibberish poetry on the boardwalk. After a while, they had a conversation in English. And, as Nancy and I became friends, we developed our own peculiar frames of reference. Once, just as she said, “I have no personal problems,” my smoke alarm went off for no discernible reason, and that became a running gag between us. Whenever either one would utter a sentence that sounded like it was tempting fate, the other might say, “Oops, did I just hear the smoke alarm just go off?”
Nancy had been saving two capsules of the designer drug Ecstasy, not wanting to try it alone, and we took it together on the beach one afternoon, savoring the sensuality of the sand. Later, we were walking along the shore, and I had a severe case of dry-mouth. She dipped her finger in the ocean so that I could lick the salt water off. That moment of intimacy smoothed the transition for us to evolve from friends into lovers.
So, I was publishing The Realist again, I was performing regularly, and Nancy and I were growing closer and closer. I finally felt happy again about the way things were going in my life.
And then my smoke alarm went off.
A dozen police cars had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the angry shouts from five thousand understandably angry gays. This was in 1979. I had been covering the trial of Dan White for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The ex-cop had confessed to killing Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Dale Metcalf, a former Merry Prankster who had become a lawyer, told me how he happened to be playing chess with a friend, Steven Scherr, one of White’s attorneys. Metcalf had just read Orthomolecular Nutrition by Abram Hoffer. He questioned Scherr about White’s diet and learned that, while under stress, White would consume candy bars and soft drinks. Metcalf recommended the book to Scherr, suggesting the author as an expert witness. After all, in his book, Hoffer revealed a personal vendetta against doughnuts, and White had once eaten five doughnuts in a row.
Hoffer didn’t testify, but his influence permeated the courtroom. White’s defense team presented that biochemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on compulsive gobbling down of sugar-filled junk-food snacks. Psychiatrist Martin Blinder testified that, on the night before the murders, White “just sat there in front of the TV set, binging on Twinkies.” Another psychiatrist stated, “If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.”
In my notebook, I scribbled “Twinkie defense,” and wrote about it in my next report. On the 25th anniversary of that double execution, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that, “During the trial, no one but well-known satirist Paul Krassner—who may have coined the phrase ‘Twinkie defense’—played up that angle.” And so it came to pass that a pair of political assassinations was transmuted into voluntary manslaughter.
And I got caught in the post-verdict riot. The police were running amuck in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming, “Get the fuck outta here, you fuckin’ faggots, you motherfuckin’ cocksuckers!” I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee and I fell to the ground. Another cop came charging at me and made a threatening gesture with his billy club. When I tried to protect my head, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my ribs. Oh, God, the pain! The dwarf in the clown costume had finally caught up with me, and his electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs.
At the hospital, X-rays indicated that I had a fractured rib and pneumothorax, a punctured lung. The injuries affected my posture and my gait, and I gradually began to develop an increasingly unbalanced walk, so that my right foot would come down hard on the ground with each step. My whole body felt twisted, and my right heel was in constant pain.
I limped the gamut of therapists—from an orthodox orthopedic surgeon who gave me a shot of cortisone in my heel to ease the pain, to a specialist in neuromuscular massage who wondered if the cop had gone to medical school because he knew exactly where to hit me with his billy club, to a New Age healer who put one hand on my stomach, held the receptionist’s hand with the other, and she asked her whether I should wear a brace. The answer was yes. I decided to get a second opinion—perhaps from another receptionist.
Meanwhile, my twisted limp became increasingly worse. In 1987 I went to a chiropractor, who referred me to a podiatrist, who referred me to a physiatrist, who wanted me to get an MRI—a CAT scan—in order to rule out the possibility of cervical stenosis. But the MRI ruled it in. The X-rays indicated that my spinal cord was being squeezed by spurring on the inside of several discs in my neck. The physiatrist told me that I needed surgery.
I panicked. I had always taken my good health for granted. I went into heavy denial, confident that I could completely cure my problem by walking barefoot on the beach every day for three weeks. “You’re a walking time bomb,” the podiatrist warned me. He said that if I were in a rear-end collision, or just out strolling and I tripped, my
spinal cord could be severed, and I would be paralyzed from the chin down. I began to be conscious of every move I made. I was living, not one day at a time, not one hour at a time, not one minute at a time—I was living one second at a time.
The head of orthopedics at UCLA assured me that I really had no choice but to have the operation. I asked if I could have avoided this whole situation with a different diet or by exercising more. He shook his head no. “Wrong parents,” he said, referring to hereditary arthritis. My condition had been severely exacerbated by the police beating, or vice-versa.
I was one of 37 million Americans who didn’t have insurance—by November 2011, the number would reach 53 million—nor did I have any savings. Fortunately, I had an extended family and friends all over the country who came to my financial rescue. The operation was scheduled to take place at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York, where my brother and I had once played our violins on Christmas Day.
A walking time bomb! I was still in a state of shock, but since I perceived the world through a filter of absurdity, now I would have to apply that perception to my own situation. The breakthrough for me came when I learned that my neurosurgeon moonlighted as a clown at the circus.
“All right,” I told myself, “I surrender, I surrender.”
Paralyzed from the chin down! I tried to dial—I mean push—Nancy’s phone number with my nose. I fantasized about using a voice-activated word processor to write a novel called The Head, in which the protagonist finally dies of suffocation while performing cunnilingus because he can’t use his hands to separate the thighs of the woman who is sitting on his face.
I met my doctor the night before the operation. He sat on my bed wearing a trench coat, and he called me Mr. Krassner. I thought that if he was going to cut me open and file through five discs in my upper spinal column, he could certainly be informal enough to call me Paul. He was busy filling out a chart.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 44