Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  I assumed she would check with her source. Instead, she wrote in her column that she had been fooled by me, implying that her source had based the revelation on my article in Chic. Somehow my hoax on Liz Smith had backfired. I became a victim of my own satirical prophecy.

  Then one day I sensed that there was something vaguely different in Stewart Brand’s San Francisco apartment where I had a little room. I finally realized what it was—my Richard Nixon poster. His eyes, which were usually looking toward the right, were now looking toward the left.

  It had that eerie effect of a platter with the face of Jesus, whose eyes follow you as you pass a novelty-shop window, except that Nixon’s eyes were frozen in this new position. I examined the poster more closely and was able to discern that the original eyeballs had been whited out from the right side, and new eyeballs had been drawn in at the left-hand corners.

  Then I checked to see whether the eyes in Holly’s photo had also been changed, but no, she was still looking directly at me. Only Nixon’s eyes had been altered. But it would’ve been out of character for Stewart to do that.

  Ken Kesey had been around again.

  G. Gordon Liddy and I had something in common. A few years after I answered “no” when the bailiff at the Chicago conspiracy trial asked, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” Liddy answered “no” to that same question at the Watergate conspiracy trial. And he wasn’t even on acid at the time. On the other hand, Liddy once ate a rat and I’ve never even tasted one, so things do balance out.

  Back in 1966, when Liddy led a midnight raid on Millbrook, it was a shrewd career move. Arresting Tim Leary was a giant step up Liddy’s ladder, to the FBI, to the CIA, to the White House Plumbers—and, after serving time in prison, he started his own counterterrorist company, played a role on Miami Vice, held hands with Betty White on Password, starred in Nowhere Man—as a man who fakes his own death to throw cops off the trail so he can make a huge drug score—and finally Liddy got his own TV talk show. Another typical American success story.

  The essential difference between Tim Leary and G. Gordon Liddy was that Leary wanted people to use LSD as a vehicle for turning themselves on to a higher consciousness, whereas Liddy wanted to put LSD on the steering wheel of columnist Jack Anderson’s car, thereby making a political assassination look like an automobile accident. But who could have predicted that—sixteen years after the original arrest—Leary would end up traveling around with Liddy in a series of debates?

  I decided to attend the debate in Berkeley in April 1982. Julius Karpen wouldn’t go with me.

  “Liddy is Hitler,” he said. “Would you pay to see Hitler?”

  Lee Quarnstrom answered, “I’d pay to see Hitler.” Then he turned to me. “Wouldn’t you pay to see Hitler?”

  “Well, first I’d try to get a free backstage pass.”

  “Sure,” said Lee, “and you could tell the security guard, ‘It’s okay, I’m with the bund.’”

  Leary warned the audience that Liddy was a lawyer—“trained in the adversary process, not to seek truth. I was trained as a scientist—looking for truth, delighted to be proved wrong.” He confessed that “Liddy is the Moriarty to my Sherlock Holmes—the adversary I always wanted—he is the Darth Vader to my Mr. Spock.”

  “As long as it’s not Doctor Spock,” said Liddy.

  He argued that “the rights of the state transcend those of the individual.” Not that he was without compassion. “I feel sorry,” he admitted, “for anybody who uses drugs for aphrodisiacal purposes.”

  “Gordon doesn’t know anything about drugs,” countered Leary. “It’s probably his only weakness.” He looked directly at Liddy. “It’s my duty to turn you on,” he said, “and I’m gonna do it before these debates are over.” Then he made a unique offer: “I’ll eat a rat if you’ll eat a hashish cookie.”

  Liddy turned down the offer—one can carry machismo only so far, and he had to draw the line somewhere—but he did provide appropriate grist for my stand-up comedy mill:According to Liddy’s book, he actually ate a rat. He did it to overcome his fear of eating rats. Certainly a direct approach to the problem. None of that gestalt shit. Now, I’m not sure how he ate the rat, whether he just stuck it between a couple of slices of bread, or barbecued it first, or chopped the rat up and mixed it with vegetables in a stew.

  But there were rumors that when Leary and Liddy were on tour, the Psychedelic Liberation Front found out their itinerary and began feeding hash brownies to rats and releasing them, one by one, in Liddy’s room at the various motels he stayed at, while he was debating, in the hope that nature would sooner or later take its course, and one night Liddy would feel in the mood for a midnight snack, catch the rat that was left in the room, eat it and, by extension, the hash brownie the rat had eaten, and then Liddy would think he got stoned from eating the rat. This would, of course, be right on the borderline in the ethics of dosing.

  In 1974, at a party in San Francisco, Abbie Hoffman was talking with Sheriff Richard Hongisto. “Are you really the sheriff?” Abbie asked. Hongisto took out his gold badge—the design included a peace symbol—and Abbie feigned snatching it from him. “I’m the sheriff now!”

  It was a poignantly ironic gesture to those of us who knew that this was really a farewell party for Abbie. He was about to go underground. He had made the mistake of introducing one individual who wanted to buy cocaine to another who wanted to sell it, and they were both cops. Now he was facing a sentence of fifteen years to life.

  “I got caught behind enemy lines,” he whispered to me, “without proper identification.”

  So Abbie went on the lam, changed his name to Barry Freed, and started another life. He felt “like a hunted animal” but, with the aid of plastic surgery, managed to become an environmental activist.

  In January 1977, Jimmy Carter was scheduled to be inaugurated, and I was scheduled to perform at the Counter-Inaugural Ball. I went to Washington and met up with my old friends, Walli and Sam Leff. They were grinning as we strolled through the streets toward the swearing-in of Carter that afternoon, because they knew there was a surprise in store for me.

  We encountered some guy leaning against a building. He had a beard, he was wearing shades, and there was a hood covering his head. I didn’t know who it was, but then I recognized Abbie’s laugh, and we embraced. Walli and Sam served as Abbie’s main aboveground support system, and they had cunningly orchestrated this reunion.

  “Somebody’s staring at us,” Abbie whispered to me. “I hope it’s you they recognize.”

  He introduced me to his “running mate,” Johanna Lawrenson, and we all continued walking.

  “Do you think,” I asked Abbie, “that Gerald Ford could’ve been reelected if he hadn’t pardoned Nixon?”

  “Plea bargaining always has its risks,” he replied.

  Now we were standing in the midst of a huge crowd on the sidewalk, just a few yards away from Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Instead of riding in a limo, the new president and First Lady were walking hand in hand down the street just like ordinary folks.

  “Hey, Jimmy!” Abbie yelled, aware that his voice was being safely drowned out by the cheering of the crowd. “Hey, Jimmy! Why don’tcha gimme a pardon as your first act in office!”

  Who could have dreamed that, several years later, Abbie would be joining Carter’s daughter, Amy, and two hundred other students protesting CIA recruitment at the University of Massachusetts? When Abbie finally met Jimmy Carter, he told him about that scene at the inauguration.

  The former chief executive responded, “I would’ve pardoned you.”

  In San Francisco, shortly before Christmas 1979, my phone rang. A voice said, “You wanna buy me coffee?” It was Abbie, still on the lam.

  “I’ll meet you at City Lights Bookstore in half an hour,” I said.

  Johanna was with him. He called her Angel. They had become each other’s psychic anchor.

  “Our relationship is comple
tely nonsexist,” he explained. “She’s my bodyguard, and I do the cooking.”

  They spent more time together than any couple I knew. But, Abbie confided, there was one problem: “She wants to have a kid.”

  “Oh, yeah? You gonna have one?”

  “Don’t you remember? I had a vasectomy.”

  “Oh, I forgot about that.” In fact, a film—Vas!—had been made of his operation. “Well,” I offered, “if you need a donor—after all, what are friends for?”

  We wandered around North Beach. Abbie was not exactly keeping a low profile. He stood next to a Salvation Army Santa Claus on Broadway, borrowed his bell, and rang it vigorously, urging unsuspecting passersby to drop some cash into Santa’s cauldron. We moved on. He did a Harpo Marx parody of a tourist responding to a barker in front of a strip joint. Then he proceeded to take the place of the barker.

  “Come on in,” he shouted. “Whatever you want, we got. You want ladies with stretch marks? We got ’em here!”

  Abbie was frustrated about a film, The Big Fix, in which a character obviously based on him sells out and works for an advertising agency. In real life, as Barry Freed, Abbie was an organizer in the anti-nuclear-power movement. In fact, one day, in separate stories in the same issue of his local newspaper in upstate New York, there were photos of both Abbie and Barry. While Abbie was being written about as a fugitive, Barry was being honored as an environmentalist. Abbie confessed that he had come to prefer his new identity.

  “Angel is in love with Clark Kent, not Superman,” he said. “Abbie Hoffman becomes like a third person in bed with us.”

  “Then why are you thinking about emerging?”

  “I don’t like being chased.”

  In 1980, Abbie emerged from underground by way of an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters. She was taken to meet him by Bob Fass and Cathie Revland, whose code names were Mork and Mindy.

  It wasn’t too long before Abbie found himself onstage at the University of New Mexico, debating G. Gordon Liddy. The moment had come for Abbie to ask Liddy a question he had been pondering for months. Abbie braced himself.

  “Liddy,” he shouted, “I got just one question for you. Do you eat pussy?” The audience cheered. This was really off the wall. “Come on, Liddy, answer me! Do you eat pussy?” Liddy couldn’t respond over the roar of the crowd, and Abbie bleated over and over, “Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy?”—like some kind of sexual street fighter chanting his mantra—“Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy?”

  The audience went wild. Abbie was triumphant. Finally, Liddy was able to reply, “You have just demonstrated, more than I ever could possibly hope to, the enormous gap which separates me from you.”

  In the summer of 1982, there was a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, at Naropa, a Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado, where presumably they referred to his book as On the Path. I was invited to moderate a discussion titled “Political Fallout of the Beat Generation.”

  The panel would consist of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Tim Leary. At a pre-panel brunch, Burroughs mentioned communicating with Jack Kerouac from beyond the grave.

  “But how can you tell,” I asked Burroughs, “whether the experience is a subjective projection or an objective reality?”

  Burroughs replied, in his jaded nasal voice, “Subjective, objective—what’s the difference?”

  We were all asked to sign posters for the event. Abbie was writing his signature extra large and with great care. “The guy who shot John Lennon,” he said, “complained that Lennon gave him a sloppy autograph, so I ain’t takin’ any chances.”

  Since Abbie and Leary had both debated Liddy, they were now comparing notes. Abbie told Tim about his fundamental question, did G. Gordon Liddy eat pussy?

  “I can attest to the fact that he does,” said Leary. “At least he made it a point at some of our debates to announce that he is definitely not monogamous.”

  I asked, “Does that mean there are Liddy groupies?”

  “Oh, definitely,” said Leary.

  “I guess my father was right. There really is a law of supply and demand.”

  On the panel that evening, Allen Ginsberg was speaking:I think there was one slight shade of error in describing the Beat movement as primarily a protest movement, particularly Abbie. That was the thing that Kerouac was always complaining about; he felt the literary aspect or the spiritual aspect or the emotional aspect was not so much protest at all but a declaration of unconditioned mind beyond protest, beyond resentment, beyond loser, beyond winner—way beyond winner—beyond winner or loser, a declaration of unconditioned mind, a visionary declaration, a declaration of unworldly love that has no hope of the world and cannot change the world to its desire—that’s William Carlos Williams—unworldly love, which means the basic nature of human minds, which is totally open, totally one with the space around, one with life and death.

  So naturally, having that much insight, there’ll be obvious smart remarks that might change society, as a side issue, but the basic theme was beyond the rights and wrongs of political protest. I was always interested in political protest in a way Timothy disapproved of, and that Kerouac thought was new reasons for spitefulness—actually, new reasons for malice—out of my old socialist, communist, gay, funny intellectual eyeglass background, maybe, but the basic thing that I understood and dug Jack for was unconditioned mind, negative capability, totally open mind—beyond victory or defeat. Just awareness, and that was the humor, and that’s what the saving grace is. That’s why there will be political after-effects, but it doesn’t have to win because having to win a revolution is like having to make a million dollars.

  In my role as moderator, I asked, “Abbie, since you used to quote Che Guevara saying, ‘In a revolution, one wins or dies,’ do you have a response to that?”

  Hoffman: All, right Ginzo. Poems have a lot of different meanings for different people. For me, your poem Howl was a call to arms.

  Ginsberg: A whole boatload of sentimental bullshit.

  Hoffman: We saw in the sixties a great imbalance of power, and the only way that you could correct that imbalance was to organize people and to fight for power. Power is not a dirty word. The concept of trying to win against social injustice is not a dirty kind of concept. It all depends on how you define the game, how you define winning and how you define losing—that’s the Zen trip that was learned by defining that you were the prophets and we were the warriors.

  I’m saying that you didn’t fight, but you were the fighters. And I’ll tell you, if you don’t think you were a political movement and you don’t like winning, the fuckin’ lawyer that defended Howl in some goddamn obscenity suit—you wanted him to be a fuckin’ winner, I guarantee you that. That was a political debate.

  When the applause subsided, I added: “And by the same token, Tim Leary didn’t want his lawyer to ‘drop out.’ But I must add in fairness that I once said the same thing about Leary’s doctor. I said, ‘Well, you don’t want your doctor to drop out of medical school, do you?’ And he answered, ‘Well, you’re talking about doctors, and I’m talking about healers.’ So I do remember my lessons. Tim, while Abbie was talking, you muttered, ‘That sounds like G. Gordon Liddy.’ Would you care to expand on that?”

  Leary: Is this [microphone] on? At this moment, Liddy would say, “I always have trouble with bugs,” right? Yeah, I was debating Liddy the other night, and he put on the blackboard the word Power. When it was my turn I put The Evolution of Intelligence . And in a very interesting way, Abbie, you and Gordon have much more faith in the political system’s ability to change things, and I believe with William Burroughs that it’s the culture that changes—you change the way men and women relate to each other, you change the way people’s consciousness can be moved by themselves, you change their music and their dress, you change the way they relate to the land and to other forms of plants and animals, and you’ve got yourself a revolution�
��to use your word, a fuckin’ revolution—that’ll make the politicians and the power-mad people . . . it’s gonna happen so fast they won’t know it’s gonna happen.

  Hoffman: Well, I don’t wanna argue, because there’s so many good vibes, and standing in front of the Albanian flags up here, and everybody’s so happy and high—shit, it’s like The Love Boat—but I will say this about my debate with G. Gordon Liddy. For me it was a Voltairean experience, namely—once, a philosopher; twice, a pervert—and I’m never gonna do it again. And I whipped his ass. Easy. And I wanna say, Tim, if you don’t regard the four years you spent in prison as a political act, you took one trip too many.

  Because a lot of people during those times—just growing your hair long—I mean I look out and I see people with long hair, short hair, no hair, green hair, blue hair—you know, earrings in their ears—and that happened because other people had to stand up, whether it was against their families, their church, their school—cops would drag ’em into alleyways and shave their heads—it was a political act. So, to separate what is cultural from political when we are talking about American society in the fifties and sixties is an absolutely hopeless and ridiculous task.

  But Leary had become politicized, as indicated by his revised slogan for the eighties.

  “Turn on,” he advised the audience, “tune in and, please, take over!”

  A couple of months after the Chicago convention in 1968, antiwar organizers became a target of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. At the hearing, there was a plan for witnesses and their lawyers to protest the focus and manner of the proceedings by standing up at a predetermined signal. I stood up too, and a pair of marshals carried me out by the armpits while I continued to take notes: carrying me out ...