Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  At any rate, if I did say it, I would forgive myself now for having said it, because circumcision happens to be something that every Jewish male thinks about every day of his life. It makes us obsessive for a very simple reason. We don’t know if it’s an asset or a liability. And I’m not speaking of it lightly. I’m speaking of psychic castration that may make us smarter or it may not. We worry about things like that. So I will say categorically, that if I ever made that remark, I was out of my head, and to the best of my marijuana memory, I never made it. I want to thank you, Paul, for making that up and giving me a beginning tonight, and for warming up this audience . . .

  Ah, yes—dueling memories.

  When Hunter Thompson’s first book, Hell’s Angels, was published in January 1967, I assigned a behind-the-scenes article for The Realist about his promotional tour. He was broke, so I paid him $200 in advance, and I offered to send him some LSD if it would help.

  He replied, “You can send me some acid to help me level out. And I’ll send you a dozen just-born marijuana weeds. You can plant them in Central Park.”

  On a visit to New York in February, Hunter arranged for me to meet him and his copy editor, Margaret Harrell—an attractive redhead, smart and witty—for dinner.

  Apparently I forgot her name, so it’s possible that I called the publisher and asked for the name of the copy editor. In March, I sent her this letter:Dear Barbara,

  If you ever decide to try LSD, this is just to offer my services as guide. Incidentally—no, not incidentally—you are one of the most delicious females I’ve ever seen, and since there was already a mild establishment of intellectual rapport, I feel compelled to state my—to de-ulteriorize—my motivation. I would like to make funny, passionate, friendly, cosmic, absurd love with you. Ho hum. I think I’ll attach a questionnaire with this. It is not a form letter, by the way.

  Paul

  Barbara—check one:

  [ ] I like your honesty. Please call me at [phone number].

  [ ] I believe in equal rights. I’ll call you at [two numbers].

  [ ] Your honesty is appealing but I have a spontaneity hang-up.

  [ ] But didn’t you know I’m a virgin, and intend to remain one?

  [ ] I’m not a hymen-fetishist, but you’re just not my type.

  [ ] You’re my type, but I’m just not socially available.

  [ ] I’m a lesbian; do you have a cute sister?

  [ ] You men are all alike, you’re only after one thing, bla bla bla.

  [ ] I’m sorry, I can’t go out with a man who doesn’t drink.

  [ ] You’ll have to get a new trench coat first.

  [ ] Ha ha, I’m not even going to send this back to you.

  [ ] I’m an independent spirit and I’m afraid you’ll be possessive.

  [ ] I don’t have to give you any reason, see.

  [ ] Barbara Willson is somebody else; you and I never even met.

  [ ] You writers will do anything to get your book published.

  After a weekend rendezvous in Los Angeles with Hunter, Margaret arrived at work at noon on Monday. Now flash ahead to 2011. In her memoir, Keep This Quiet: My Relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, and Jan Mensaert, she wrote:In my absence that morning Swedish copy editor Barbara Willson had received a letter from Paul Krassner. He had written it to her, thinking that was me . . . Unknown to him, this one was half right: “Barbara Willson is somebody else; you and I never even met.” Barbara turned the letter over immediately—downstairs to the Random House obscenity files. I wasn’t told.

  Sometime later Paul phoned me at work. He said he’d asked Hunter’s permission to invite me out. Hunter said yes. I winced. So Paul wrote the letter. Then told Hunter he’d invited Barbara Willson on a date. Hunter said fine, but who’s Barbara Willson? Krassner was phoning to tell me to retrieve the letter, I’d get a kick out of it.

  I retrieved it. Obviously, I would not say yes and wondered why Hunter would, but it was part of his contradictory character. Would he really not mind? Would he say he didn’t mind as a test? Then I passed [that test]. So much blood shot to my head that I did not reason out the possibility that Hunter too had no idea what Paul was talking about.

  I know I don’t have any idea what I was talking about. It’s all a mystery to me. Did I actually call Hunter and ask for his permission to date his copy editor, not knowing yet that she was his paramour? All I know is, he never wrote that article, but he did return the $200.

  On the morning of April 1st, 1995, I flew to San Francisco. It remains my one of my favorite cities, and I jumped at any excuse to return there. My excuse for this visit: I was scheduled to emcee a benefit for Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, who had been on dialysis treatment for the last few years.

  On that sunny afternoon, I was standing around stoned in Washington Square Park, wearing my Mad magazine jacket that Holly had given me the previous Christmas. The smiling face of Alfred E. Neuman—stating his renowned philosophy, “What—me worry?”—graced the back of my jacket. That’s exactly how I felt that day, like a harmless innocent.

  I was waiting for the arrival of the annual Saint Stupid Day Parade, led this year by Grand Marshal Ken Kesey and his sidekick Ken Babbs in an open-topped convertible. The event was sponsored by the First Church of the Last Laugh. Their sound equipment was surrounded by yellow plastic tape warning, Police Line—Do Not Cross. Somebody in a clown costume handed me a three-foot section of that tape and, April fool that I am, I graciously accepted.

  The celebration featured music, comedy and a traditional free brunch, along with such favorite rituals as the Sock Exchange and the Leap of Faith. Kesey, also in town to speak at the benefit, was in fine form. He delivered an optimistic pep talk to the audience sitting contentedly on the grass.

  “It ain’t over,” he concluded, “until the fat lady gets high!”

  Then he led a “gong bong,” where everybody stands up, forms a circle, holds hands and, as a single unit, takes a dozen long, deep breaths, letting out the final exhalation with upraised arms and a group wail of exultation. During this moment of spiritual hyperventilation, a young woman fell to the ground and broke her nose. She was a casualty of peace.

  That night, at the benefit for Jan Kerouac—held only because she happened to be the daughter of a ground-breaking literary celebrity, even though he had abandoned her mother when she was pregnant with Jan—I said to my friend Julius, who drove me there, “It’s not enough any more just to be a sperm donor.”

  Jan had met her father only twice. The first time she was nine. The second time, six years later, he sat there, drinking a fifth of whiskey and watching The Beverly Hillbillies. Jan would eventually die of kidney failure at the age of forty-four, never having fulfilled her fantasy of becoming drinking buddies with her father, who died when she was a teenager.

  Now, backstage, someone I knew handed me a baggie of what I assumed to be marijuana. I thanked him and put it in my pocket. Ah, yes, one of the perks of the benefit biz.

  Later, as the final members of the audience were straggling out of the theater, I was sitting with Julius in his car in the parking area at Fort Mason Center. He was busy rolling a joint in a cigar box on the dashboard with the map light on. There was a police car circling around in the distance, but we foolishly ignored it. Suddenly, a moment later, there was a fist knocking heavily on the passenger-side window, and a flashlight shining in my eyes. Shit! Fuck! Caught!

  We were ordered outside and, with our arms outstretched against the side of the car, with the face of Alfred E. Neuman smiling at the cop and asking, “What—me worry?” And indeed, the cop was worried. He asked me if I had anything sharp in my pockets. “Because, he explained, “I’m gonna get very mad if I get stuck,” obviously referring to a hypodermic needle.

  “No,” I said, “there’s only a pen in this pocket”—gesturing toward the left with my head—“and keys in that one.”

  He found the coiled-up three feet of yellow plastic tape warning, Police
Line—Do Not Cross, and said, “Where’d you get this?”

  “At the Saint Stupid Day Parade.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “To keep people away.”

  But then he found the baggie. And, to my surprise, it contained psilocybin—magic mushrooms. He examined the contents. Then, with blatant sarcasm, he said, “So you like mushrooms, huh?” Under the circumstances, it was such a ridiculous question that I almost laughed, but I realized that, from his point of view, this was a serious offense.

  The cop’s question reeked with archetypal hostility, and it kept reverberating inside my head. So you like mushrooms, huh? It was not as though I had done anything which might harm another human being. This was simply an authority figure’s need to control. But control what? My pleasure? Or was it deeper than that?

  Julius was given a $50 citation for possession of marijuana, but I was arrested on the spot, handcuffed behind my back, and my Miranda rights were read to me. I stood there, heart pounding fast and mouth terminally dry, trying to keep my balance on the tightrope between reality and unreality. With the aid of a terrific attorney, Doron Weinberg, I got off with a $100 fine and nothing on my permanent record.

  And I finally understood what that cop when he snarled, “So you like mushrooms, huh?” What was his actual message? Back through eons of ancestors—all the way back to what Terence McKenna called “the unstoned apes”—this cop was continuing a never-ending attempt to maintain the status quo. He had unintentionally revealed the true nature of the threat he perceived. What he really said to me was, “So you like the evolution of human consciousness, huh?”

  “Well, yeah, now that you mention it, I do. I mean, when you put it like that—So you like the evolution of human consciousness, huh?—sure, I do. I like it a whole lot.”

  In 2005, I got a letter from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and then a call from Brett Morgen, director of The Kid Stays in the Picture. They were coproducing a documentary about the sixties antiwar movement. It would have no narrator and no talking heads, only archival footage and animated reenactments based on actual events and transcriptions of trial testimony. However, Allen Ginsberg floating a few feet above the floor in the lotus position while he chants can be construed as cartoonic license.

  Morgen invited me to write four specific animated scenes:1. Birth of the Yippies: The hurricane, the meeting, and the press conference.

  2. Got Permit?: Trying to get permits from Chicago deputy mayor.

  3. Acid Testimony: Ingesting a tab of LSD at lunch before testifying.

  4. Women’s Liberation: The feminist protest outside the Miss America Pageant.

  Although Brett Morgen “loved, loved, loved” the scenes I wrote, the backers objected to the use of LSD, fearful of diverting attention from the main focus of the film. It was Brett’s baby, but it was being diapered by the backers. I was disappointed, if only for the sake of countercultural history. Anyway, my suggestion—instead of referring to it as acid, Abbie could yell, “Hey, this is pretty powerful fuckin’ aspirin”—was rejected.

  Thus, the trippy hurricane segment of the “Birth of Yippies” scene, which was originally going to open the film, was omitted. My implied “threat” in the “Got Permit?” scene that the Yippies would pour LSD into the reservoir, plus the entire “Acid Testimony” scene, were also out. And, unfortunately, the “Women’s Liberation” scene wasn’t included because of time constraints.

  Brett named the film Chicago 10, encompassing the eight defendants plus attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass. I was concerned that people would think it was the ninth sequel to the musical Chicago.

  During an interview with Videofreex during the trial, Abbie had said, “We don’t wanna be martyrs. We wanna live to see the overthrow of the government. Be a great fuckin’ movie.” But Brett’s goal now wasn’t quite as ambitious as overthrowing the government. When he called to tell me that the documentary had been selected to open the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, he mused, “Wouldn’t it be great if Abbie’s legacy turns out to be that he helped to end the war in Iraq?”

  Brett got a standing ovation at Sundance. There was another screening a couple of days later, not intended so much for festival-goers as for folks who lived in Salt Lake City. I ate a chocolate candy loaded with psilocybin to enhance the experience, unaware that Brett planned to bring me onstage to speak to the audience and then join him in a Q & A session.

  Brett warned me, “This is the heartland.” Still, I began with a joke I’d heard in town: “A Mormon decided to go hiking in the beautiful mountains of Utah, but first he stopped to buy some equipment at a Mom and Mom and Mom and Pop store.”

  One of the questions was “What advice would you offer to young people today?”

  My mind was swirling like a multicolored whirlpool. I assigned my subconscious to come up with an appropriate answer, while I stalled for a moment, leaning on the lectern. “My advice to young people is,” I said, “if you go to a restaurant and order a club sandwich, be sure to remove the toothpick before you take the first bite.”

  When my subconscious came through, I said, “Always remember that the political system acts as a buffer between the status quo and the force of evolution. Example: In order to get Republican votes for the children’s healthcare bill, Democrats agreed to fund $28 million to their abstinence-only program.”

  Brett wanted Chicago 10 to open during the election year, and he was pleased that it opened in theaters around the country in February 2008 and was on PBS two weeks before the election. In October 2007, Chicago 10 opened the Austin Film Festival. Brett was unable to attend, so I went there as his proxy.

  I decided to smoke a joint before I left my hotel for the screening that evening. However, I was in a nonsmoking room, and there was a notice on the desk: “Should you choose to smoke in a nonsmoking room, a $250 cleaning/deodorizing surcharge will be added to your room bill.” So I toked it in the bathroom with the door closed, sitting on the tub and exhaling into the toilet. During the Q & A session, someone asked a question about the differences between the Vietnam War and Iraq. My response: Both wars were both based on lies and fear-mongering. One of the differences is that there was a draft during the Vietnam War. That personalized it, sadly. People wore buttons that said not with my body you don’t. The Bush administration deliberately doesn’t have a draft now because they know that whatever disconnect there is between the public and the horror that the government is conducting in their name, would dissolve. People have certainly protested (more than thirty million worldwide before the war began)—and been ignored—but with a draft in the U.S., citizens would take to the streets in multitudes to demonstrate against the war. When Latinos marched through Los Angeles over the immigration issue, there were a million of them. What we need to do now is hire Mexican workers as guest protesters, so they can do the job that Americans don’t want to do . . .

  During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, I was among 15,000 protesters who had gathered in Grant Park for a rally when the police, triggered by the actions of one of their own provocateurs, attacked the demonstrators and sadistically beat as many as they could reach. It seemed impossible that we could ever work within the system. But in 2008, forty years later, there were 200,000 celebrants who had gathered in that same park, giddy with the excitement of Barack Obama’s victory. They had worked within the system.

  During the past four decades, there had been a linear progression from Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock to Aretha Franklin singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at Obama’s inauguration. Was it possible that this event signified the early tremors of a nonviolent revolution? As the late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin once told me backstage at a benefit: “If you don’t act like there’s hope, there is no hope.” And remember, placebos work. My hope was that I wouldn’t become disappointed in President Obama. But I did.

  Now I find myself comparing and contrasting the Yippies and the Occupy Wall Str
eet protesters.

  We had to perform stunts to get media coverage of our cause, so a group of us went to the New York Stock Exchange and threw $200 worth of singles onto the floor below. Now, an Occupy placard, wall street is war street, gave me a sense of continuity. Other anonymous Occupiers carried posters proclaiming: god forbid we have sex & smoke pot. they want us to grab guns & go to war! i am an immigrant. i came here to take your job. but you don’t have one. $96,000 for a ba in hispanic transgender gay & lesbian studies and i can’t find work! And, a woman in a wheelchair: stand up for your rights!

  By the sheer power of numbers without the necessity of stunts, the Occupiers have broadened public awareness about the economic injustice perpetuated by corporations without compassion conspiring with government corruption that has resulted in immeasurable suffering. The Yippies were a myth that became a reality. The Occupiers are a reality that became a myth. The spirit of nonviolent revolution is what connects them.

  NPR waited until eleven days of Occupy Wall Street had passed before reporting its existence. The executive news editor explained that the Occupiers “did not involve large numbers of people” (actually, there were already several hundred), no “prominent people” showed up (thus ignoring Michael Moore and Susan Sarandon), the lack of “a great disruption” (the police pepper-spraying protesters trapped in a cage of orange netting finally met that need), “or an especially clear objective” (oh, right, just like all those flip-floppy pandering politicians whose clear objective is to get elected).