BRAIN DAMAGE CONTROL
SWIMMING IN THE DEAD POOL
When Ken Kesey’s son, Jed, was killed in an accident—the van carrying his wrestling team had skidded off a cliff—I immediately flew to Oregon. “I feel like every cell in my body is exploding,” Kesey said as we embraced. A few days later, several friends were sitting around the dining-room table, and someone mentioned that the Dead Kennedys were on tour.
“I wonder if Ted Kennedy is gonna go see ’em,” I said.
Kesey, standing in the kitchen, said, “That’s not funny.”
“You’re right, I apologize. It’s not very abstract right now.”
“It’s never abstract.”
I recalled that little dialogue as I began to explore The Game, now in its 34th year, the longest-running dead pool in America, currently with 125 players. Before January 1st, everyone submits 68 names of people who might die that year. (Dr. Death, Game co-founder, liked to work on a legal pad—34 lines, two columns, 68 names.) Points are awarded according to the age of each dead person—anybody in their 50s is worth five points; 60s, four; 70s, three.
Each participant gets one wild card per year, worth five points no matter how old the deceased. Gamesters generally pick one-pointers for their wild card to get four extra points. Last year, most picked Bob Hope. When he died, one Gamester said, “My father was shot during World War II. While recuperating in England, Mr. Hope came up to his bedside and stuffed a half-dozen golf balls into his mouth. It cheered my old man up.”
Deaths become official when mentioned in the New York Times or any two major newspapers. One player “is extremely frustrated,” I was told. “He has Idi Amin, who is on life support in a Saudi hospital. Now there have been death threats, and armed guards have been posted.” Since the listees are all on various rungs on the ladder of celebrityhood, the Game is understandably rife with abstraction.
“After all, the dead pool has probably been around since the phenomenon of fame itself,” write Gelfand and Wilkinson in Dead Pool. “It has certainly been around as long as gallows humor has. In the heyday of hard-boiled journalism (the Front Page days of the 1930s), reporters who covered a country ravaged by organized crime and engaged in a world war found respite in the dark humor of the dead pool. . . . Even before the Internet, the dead pool was slowly emerging from the shadows of our culture.”
As with dead pools, ranging from business offices to Howard Stern’s radio show, that book is a guide to profiting from money bets. But members of The Game play solely for the fun of it. Whoever has the most points at the end of the year wins—“bragging rights only”—slightly ironic since Gamesters (lawyers, ad people, educators, psychology professsors, lobbyists, writers, everyday working folks) all play under aliases like Frozen Stiff, Fade to Black, Worm Feast, Decomposers, 2 Dead Crew, Johnny B. Dead, Wm. Randolph Hearse, Daisy Pusher, Silk Shroud, Necrophiliac Pimp, Legion of Doom, Gang Green, Habeas Corpse, Die-Uretic, Shovelin’ Off, Blunt Instrument, Rig R. Mortis, Flatliners, Unplugged, Toe Tag, Clean Underwear and Gratefully Dead.
One couple, the Moorebids, insist, “We play for honor, not bragging rights. It has to do with honoring who you get the hit on.”
Another player told me, “I compare playing The Game to my day job, science. We do a lot of data collection and data analysis, play our hunches. Our reward is not financial, but peer recognition. One selects some names to acknowledge the person. Other names are selected because earning you points is their last opportunity to do something productive and honorable in their otherwise useless life. My most missed hit was Spiggy [Nixon’s disgraced vice president, Spiro] Agnew; I was distressed at missing him.”
Each Gamester pays $10 to Pontius, official coordinator and editor, to keep score and report the hits. There are players in over thirty states (23 in New York), plus one each in Quito, Kuwait, England and Australia. You can become a Gamester only by being recommended by another Gamester. They’re mostly baby boomers, attracted by a whimsical, informative style of reporting.
Forty-nine Gamesters “hit” Buddy Ebsen. Obituaries mentioned that after ten days of filming The Wizard of Oz, Ebsen fell ill because of the aluminum make-up on his skin, and was replaced as the Tin Man by Jack Haley. (One player wondered, “Did Jack Haley add something to the aluminum make-up at the Wizard set?”) On the other hand, there have been “solo’s” on the unexpected demise of Princess Diana and JFK, Jr.
“A solo I am proud of,” one Gamester told me, “is the hit on Christian Nelson, who invented the Klondike Bar.”
“Yes, it’s sick,” admitted one player, “but c’mon, it’s just a game! The Game is a light-hearted way of spitting in death’s eye . . . your opportunity to pick a Generation-X rock star who OD’s on heroin, a geriatric blue-hair who finally kicks the bucket, a fascist totalitarian in the Mid-East who is assassinated. I’m not doing great this year because I invested too heavily in Hamas, but I’m still in the top ten. The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is doing its job, I just guessed wrong. Last year I scored on Khattab, a Chechnian rebel leader who was killed by a letter he opened that was poisoned. Our first poison-pen-letter death.”
Isn’t it somewhat ghoulish?
“Ghoulish?” a participant responded. “No more so than fantasy baseball. We can get up in the morning, and either pick up the newspaper or turn on the Internet to see if we scored, every day. It’s like baseball stats, you want to move up in the standings of the veterans. The reason we Gamesters play, I would say it’s about style. Style involves who you pick. Some concentrate on music, some on politics, some on sports.”
As for social significance, one player explained that “the pastime has been going on for more than 400 years, so I don’t think it’s reflective of any given time or society. Every Gamester comes with their own perspective. The Game is irreverent, even a bit shocking, and some take pleasure in that. It’s a poke to the ribs that lie beneath stuffed shirts, a tweak of bluenoses. The Game is a competition—challenging, engaging and energizing. The Game heightens awareness and helps us to recognize our kinship with those whose deaths we note. The Game is a way of sharing and staying in touch with friends, whether near or far. It gives people a reason to call and correspond.”
Pontius’ predecessor, Ghostwriter, thanked many folks in his farewell message, including “Persephone, who enabled me to say, ‘Yes,’ when a friend here in Central New York said, ‘Do you know a good adoption lawyer in Arkansas?’ It was my greatest cameo role, my finest hour as a networker, and I couldn’t have done it without The Game and this wise, wonderful woman.”
The Game’s listserv e-mails are titled “It’s a Hit!” They can be poignant, respectful, even sentimental: “July 4th—A score of swaying Gamesters were heard singing ‘I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe’ as each collected a five note from velvety-voiced singer Barry White. . . .”
Or they can sound like a warhorse race: “July 22nd—Mosul, Iraq. Qusay and Uday, the brutal and powerful sons of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, were ambushed by Special Forces and the 101st Airborne that resulted in a deadly four-hour firefight. Enjoying the best day of his career was Tomb Essence who had a 14-point Daily Double. . . .”
But The Game giveth and The Game taketh away: “August 21st—British and American armed forces in Iraq announced today that they had arrested Ali Hasan al-Majid, aka Chemical Ali. Back in April 2003, the British armed forces announced they had killed him. Tomb Essence celebrated then, but is crying like a baby now. . . .”
Animals have also been “scored,” from Morris the Cat to Dolly the cloned sheep to Keiko the killer whale. Choices can get personal, though. A player told me, “I purposely left off a good friend [former New York Post editor Jerry Nachman] who I knew was dying, and one of our game mates refused to list a friend’s [famous] mother who she knew was dying. Sometimes we just don’t want to ‘cash in’ on our friends’ pain. How un-American of us.”
Gamesters have scored on all the Kennedys as well as Lorraine Petersen, the
model on the Sunmaid Raisins box. But, under the title “It’s Not a Hit!” came this e-mail: “August 9th—The entire Game failed to list dancer and actor Gregory Hines, 57.” In The Game’s 2001 Hit List, under the subhead, “Other Notable Deaths That No One Picked,” included was “Ken Kesey, 11/12/01, author, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
I had a visceral reaction. This was not abstract.
“I never could decide if leaving Kesey off my list was the right thing to do,” a Gamester told me. “The Merry Pranksters obviously inspired my non de plume, the Bury Pranksters.”
BEHIND THE INFAMOUS TWINKIE DEFENSE
On November 27, 1978, former cop Dan White cold-bloodedly killed San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of that historical event, I was invited to be on a panel at the University of San Francisco with two other reporters who also covered the trial.
White had resigned from the Board of Supervisors because he couldn’t support his pregnant wife on a salary of $9,600 a year. But he’d been the swing vote on the Board, representing downtown real estate interests and the conservative Police Officers Association. With a promise of financial backing, White told Moscone he wanted his job back.
“Sure,” Moscone said, “a man has the right to change his mind.”
However, there was opposition to White’s return, led by Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the country. He had cut off his ponytail and put on a suit so he could work within the system, but he refused to hide his sexual preference. Now he warned pragmatic Moscone that giving homophobic White his seat back would be seen as an antigay move in the homosexual community. Even a mayor who wants to run for reelection had the right to change his mind.
On a Monday morning, after a brief conversation with Moscone, White shot him twice in the body, then two more times in the head, execution-style, as he lay on the floor. The Marlboro cigarette in his hand would still be burning when the paramedics arrived. White walked hurriedly across a long corridor to an area where the supervisor’s offices were. His name was already removed from the door of his office, but he still had a key. He went inside and reloaded his gun.
Milk was in his office. White walked in and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute, Harvey?” White followed Milk into his inner office, then fired three shots into his body, and while Milk was prone on the floor, White fired two more shots into his head. He later turned himself in to the police. Moscone’s body was buried. Milk’s was cremated. His ashes were placed in a box wrapped in Doonesbury strips, and scattered at sea. They had been mixed with the contents of two packets of grape Kool-Aid and formed a purple patch upon the Pacific.
A day before the trial began, Assistant D.A. Tom Norman was standing in an elevator at the Hall of Justice. He heard a voice behind him speak: “Tom Norman, you’re a motherfucker for prosecuting Dan White.” He turned around, saw several police inspectors, and faced the door again. These were his drinking buddies, and now they were mad at him. “I didn’t know who said it,” he confided to a courtroom artist, “and I didn’t want to know.”
In a surprise move, White’s defense team presented a biochemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on compulsive gobbling down of sugar-filled junk-food. This was a purely accidental tactic. Dale Metcalf, a former member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters who was now a lawyer, contacted me during the trial. He told me that he happened to be playing chess with Steven Scherr, one of Dan White’s defense attorneys. Health-conscious 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, even suggesting the author as an expert witness. In the book, Hoffer revealed a personal vendetta against doughnuts, and White had once eaten five in a row.
Flash ahead to November 23, 2003, when an article titled “Myth of the ‘Twinkie Defense’” in the San Francisco Chronicle stated: “During the trial, no one but well-known satirist Paul Krassner—who may have coined the phrase ‘Twinkie defense’—played up that angle. His trial stories appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. ‘I don’t think Twinkies were ever mentioned in testimony, ’ said chief defense attorney Douglas Schmidt, who recalls ‘HoHos and Ding Dongs,’ but no Twinkies.”
The fact is, psychiatrist Martin Blinder testified that, on the night before the murders, while White was “getting depressed about the fact he would not be reappointed, he just sat there in front of the TV set, bingeing on Twinkies.” Now Blinder complains, “If I found a cure for cancer, they’d still say I was the guy who invented the ‘The Twinkie defense.’”
The Chronicle article also quoted Steven Scherr about the Twinkie defense: “‘It drives me crazy,’ said co-counsel Scherr, who suspects the simplistic explanation provides cover for those who want to minimize and trivialize what happened. If he ever strangles one of the people who says ‘Twinkie defense’ to him, Scherr said, it won’t be because he’s just eaten a Twinkie.”
Scherr was sitting in the audience at the campus theater where the panel discussion was taking place. When he was introduced from the stage, I couldn’t resist saying to him on my microphone, “Care for a Twinkie?”
Schmidt and Scherr appear to have forgotten another psychiatrist, who testified, “If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.” Schmidt’s closing argument became almost an apologetic parody of his own defense. He told the jury that Dan White did not have to be “slobbering at the mouth” to be subject to diminished capacity. Nor, he said, was this simply a case of “Eat a Twinkie and go crazy.”
A representative of the ITT-owned Continental Baking Company asserted that the notion that overdosing on the cream-filled goodies could lead to murderous behavior was “poppycock” and “crap”—apparently two of the artificial ingredients in Twinkies, along with sodium pyrophosphate and yellow dye—while another spokesperson for ITT couldn’t believe “that a rational jury paid serious attention to that issue.” Nevertheless, some jurors did. Observed one: “It sounded like Dan White had hypoglycemia.”
What should have been a slam-dunk verdict—guilty of first degree murder— had morphed into the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter. Instead of capital punishment or a life term, White was sentenced to less than eight years, with time off for good behavior, ultimately on the basis of the Twinkie defense, in the guise of “diminished capacity.”
While White was serving time, the San Francisco Chronicle published this correction: “In an article about Dan White’s prison life, Chronicle writer Warren Hinckle reported that a friend of White expressed the former supervisor’s displeasure with an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian which made reference to the size of White’s sexual organ. The Chronicle has since learned that the Bay Guardian did not publish any such article and we apologize for the error.” Actually, it was 10 feet long, 3 feet 6 inches high, 3 feet 8 inches wide, and weighed more than a ton. No, not White’s penis; I’m referring to the world’s largest Twinkie, unveiled in Boston in 1981.
The “Twinkie defense” now appears in law dictionaries, in sociology textbooks, in college exams, and in over 2800 references on the Google search engine. Sirhan Sirhan told the Los Angeles Times: “If [White] had a valid diminished capacity defense because he was eating too many Twinkies, I sure had a better one [for assassinating Robert Kennedy] because of too many Tom Collinses, plus the deep feeling about my homeland that affected my conduct.”
In January 1984, White was released from prison. In October 1985, he committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He taped a note to the windshield of his car, reading: “I’m sorry for all the pain and trouble I’ve caused.” He had served a little more than five years for committing a double political assassination. The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie is seven years. That’s two years longer than he spent behind bars, and a Twinkie which had remained in his cupboard wou
ld still be edible.
THE RISE OF SIRHAN SIRHAN IN THE SCIENTOLOGY HIERARCHY
The FBI has labeled me “a raving, unconfined nut.” I prefer to think of myself as an investigative satirist. Irreverence is my only sacred cow. When I was writing the script for a fake Doonesbury strip, that slogan would grace the cover of The Realist, even though the masthead stated, “Fact Checker: None,” I verified with a source in Mafia circles that Frank Sinatra had once delivered a suitcase full of money to Lucky Luciano in Havana after he was deported.
Recently I met a 25-year-old woman who told me about “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” not knowing that I had written it. She believed that the act of “necrophilia” had actually occurred. What I had originally intended as a metaphorical truth has become, in her mind, a literal truth. Thanks to current realities, that piece of satire is now a credible urban myth. When I moved from New York to San Francisco in 1971, I wanted to publish something in the 13th anniversary issue that would top “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” I had observed a disturbing element being imposed upon the counterculture—various groups all trying to rip off the search for deeper consciousness—and I felt challenged to write a satirical piece about this phenomenon.
Scientology was one of the scariest of these organizations, if only because its recruiters were such aggressive zombies. Carrying their behavior to its logical conclusion, they could become programmed assassins. I chose Sirhan Sirhan—in prison for killing presidential candidate Robert Kennedy—as a credible allegory, since Sirhan was already known to have an interest in mysticism and self-improvement, from the secrets of the Rosicrucians to Madame Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy.
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