Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  As soon as the air raid siren sounded, the chief of police announced, “Officers, arrest those persons who do not seek shelter!” The cops seized those persons who were nearest to them, including Mailer. Then the all-clear siren sounded, and the rest of the protesters began to disperse.

  When I originally launched The Realist in 1958, I requested an interview with Mailer. He declined, but in 1962, after I published an interview with Joseph Heller when Catch 22 was published, Mailer called me. He was finally ready. We met at his home in Brooklyn Heights. Mailer sat in a chair, poised like a prizefighter. And I was his sparring partner.

  In 1963, when I performed stand-up at Town Hall and introduced Heller in the audience, somebody else, a friend of his, stood up, but since the audience didn’t know what Heller looked like, they applauded.

  “That’s not Joseph Heller,” I said from the stage. “This is right out of Catch 22.”

  Then I introduced Mailer, and again somebody else stood up. This time it was a young woman

  “I’m a friend of Norman’s,” she called out. “He couldn’t come tonight.”

  “That’s the story of his life,” I responded. It was a cheap shot, but I couldn’t resist. “He’s writing another book about it,” I added.

  In my interview with Mailer, we had been talking about the mating process of two individuals. “It’s mutually selective,” he said. “You fall in together or go in together.” Little did I dream that I would end up “falling in together” with that young woman in the audience, Jeanne Johnson. We got married at his home and had a daughter, Holly.

  The last time I saw Mailer was in 2005 at Wordstock, the first annual Portland (Oregon) Book Festival, where I was invited to open for Mailer and then introduce him.

  “The thing I most admire about Mailer,” I said, “is a combination of his courage as a writer and how much he respects the craft. He writes in longhand with a number two pencil, he told me once, because it puts him in more direct contact with the paper that he’s writing on, and I felt so guilty because I was still using a typewriter at the time. You remember typewriters. In fact, I have a niece who saw a manual typewriter, and she said, ‘What’s that for?’ I explained, and she said, “Well, where do you plug it in?’ ‘You don’t have to plug it in, you just push the keys.’ And she said, ‘That’s awesome!’

  “Anyway, one aspect of Norman Mailer’s craft is that he chooses his words very carefully. Or, as he would say, ‘One chooses one’s words very carefully.’ The thing that I recall, the words that he chose most carefully, of all the books he’s written, was something that he said [43 years ago] when I asked him how he felt about circumcision. He thought for a moment, then he chose his words carefully and, with a twinkle in his eye—one of his main characteristics—he said, ‘Well, I believe that if Jews didn’t have circumcision, they would punch their babies in the nose and break them. . . .’ ”

  When Mailer came on stage, walking with the aid of two canes because of a severe arthritic condition, he received a standing ovation. He eased himself onto a high chair behind the lectern.

  “Gee, Paul, I didn’t know how to start tonight,” he said, “but maybe you got me going. Now, if I ever made that remark, that the reason Jews get circumcised is to keep them from breaking their babies’ noses, all I can say is that I must have been down in the lower depths of a very bad marijuana trip. But I think, even at my worst, I couldn’t really have said that. Paul is a master of hyperbole. He loves hyperbole, as for example when Lyndon Johnson ‘attacked’ the wound in JFK’s head.

  “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. . . .”

  One night a couple of years later, I had a dream that Mailer died. Now that Holly would be getting married, when I woke up I decided to send a note to tell him. But then I heard on NPR that he had died, and it was too late.

  I also received this e-mail from an old friend, Sheila Campion:

  “I just read that Norman Mailer died. I know you knew him. When my son was about 10 years old, I took him to see Mailer at Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle for a reading. We went after to have him sign his new book. He was very nice. He talked with us both and asked my son how things were, and asked if he could do anything for him. My son said, ‘You could help me with my term paper.’ Mailer laughed and said, ‘Oh, no, my son already asked me, and I told him no too.’ I will light a candle for him.”

  MOUNTAIN GIRL REMEMBERS ALBERT HOFMANN

  On the day that the man who discovered LSD, Dr. Albert Hofmann, died at the age of 102, The Onion ostensibly asked people what they thought. “It’s just like I tell my kids,” replied one. “If you get involved with drugs, you’re going to end up dead.” The death of this renowned Swiss chemist also inspired David Letterman to share with his audience that same evening the fact that researchers have “combined LSD with birth control pills so you can take a trip without the kids.”

  The New York Times obituary stated that in April 1943 Hofmann “accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.” But the Los Angeles Times obituary stated that he had “accidentally gotten a trace amount of an experimental compound called lysergic acid diethylamide on his fingertips and taken the world’s first acid trip.”

  And the accurate answer, in Hofmann’s own words, from his book, LSD: My Problem Child: “How had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin.”

  At first, he didn’t know what caused his mysteriously scary and beautiful reactions. He tried breathing the solvents he had used, with no effect. But then, he said in an interview on his hundredth birthday, “LSD spoke to me. He came to me and said, ‘You must find me.’ He told me, ‘Don’t give me to the pharmacologist, he won’t find anything.’ ”

  Four weeks before his death, Carolyn Garcia had given a speech at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, where Hofmann lived, and she was invited to meet him.

  “He was so sweet to me,” she recalls. “Chatted and joked about musicians and black market LSD, chocolate and cherry trees, instructed me very seriously about the importance of hanging upside down every day, to improve the blood flow to the brain.” He discussed with an old friend, Juri Styk, “whether Sandoz Laboratories would approach other chemical companies to make some LSD for the new studies being conducted in Europe. Important studies, on LSD and dying, cancer relief and spiritual psychological benefits of its use for rebalancing people in crisis. ‘Long overdue,’ they said.”

  Carolyn asked Hofmann if the purification of LSD was a long process. He denied it and said, “LSD is very easy to make, you just do the recipe, and if it crystallizes, that is it, it’s done and very pure. No need to do anything else.” She told him a little about the Grateful Dead, “and he lit up and said he had ‘always been hearing about them, they played existential music, yes? And from small beginnings, it got large?’

  “With the help of LSD, the energy and telepathic melted together as they played. He understood that. He asked about Jerry. And Juri reminded him about the Acid Tests, and he lit up again and said, ‘Oh, yes, the Acid Tests, and the Grateful Dead played there long also? And you were there?’ And I smiled, yes, and pulled out the Acid Test diploma I had made for him. I presented it in the usual fashion,
saying that he had proven beyond doubt that he had fulfilled all the requirements and had certainly passed the Acid Test, and had earned this Acid Test diploma.”

  When she left, Hofmann “smiled and asked me to come back, and bring the sun, please. The wind was whipping the snow out of the trees as silent puffs of feathers. The walkway to the car was thick with ice. A few cat tracks showed the way. I didn’t get to meet the cat, who sleeps on the doctor’s bed since his wife passed away. Now where’s the cat sleeping tonight?”

  The United States government banned LSD in October 1966, and other countries followed. Hofmann insisted that this was not fair. He argued that the drug wasn’t addictive and campaigned for the ban to be lifted so that LSD could be used in medical research. In December 2007, Swiss authorities decided to allow the drug to be used in a psychotherapy research project.

  “For me,” Hofmann told Swiss TV, “this is a very big wish come true. I always wanted to see LSD get its proper place in medicine.”

  On the day of his death, the Albert Hofmann Foundation declared that “Dr. Hofmann’s discoveries have touched countless people and brought tremendous change to the world in more ways than can be counted. We are very glad that Dr. Hofmann could still witness the early stages of new studies with LSD that will start in Switzerland in the near future.”

  MICHAEL ROSSMAN: A TOUCH OF SATIVA

  You may never have heard of Michael Rossman, though he became a countercultural inspiration to young people during the 1960s when he was an organizer of the Free Speech Movement, which began at the Berkeley campus of the University of California—fighting a ban on political activism—and rapidly spread to colleges around the country. He served as a social and political activist for decades, but didn’t take himself as seriously as the causes he fought for.

  He spent nine weeks behind bars, where he was assigned to garbage detail. However, such punishment didn’t bother him the way his jailers had intended, since he happened not to have a sense of smell, a fact he disclosed in his first book, The Wedding Within the War. His other books include On Learning and Social Change and New Age Blues: On the Politics of Consciousness. He was conceived during the Spanish Civil War and translated some of the greatest poetry from that era.

  On May 3, 2008, nine days before his death from leukemia at the age of 68, Rossman showed up at the Bolshevik Cafe in Berkeley’s Red Finn Hall, wearing a robber’s-type mask. He had worked with Arnie Passman on the Golden Jubilee of the Peace Symbol celebration in February, and now asked him if he could read a poem he had written as a way of saying good-bye to family and friends. It was the two-hundredth anniversary of the event in Madrid during Napoleon’s Peninsular War that had inspired Goya to paint his classic The Shootings of May Third, perhaps Spain’s most famous painting, and the 1958 inspiration for the peace symbol. Michael took the stage, accompanied by his oxygen tank, and he proceeded to read his poem “Dear Body, Dear Body Mine”:

  Thank you for bearing me

  through the world so sensitively

  so vibrantly so long

  Thank you thighs for carrying me

  to the top of Shasta to see Heather

  doff her thermals and stand gloriously

  one-breasted in the snow

  as butterflies streamed above

  Thank you intricate apparatus

  of my inner ears for allowing me

  to hear Sibelius, to tell oak

  from bay in the night wind’s rustle

  and the slither of skink from alligator

  lizard in the day

  Thank you larynx for not cracking

  too much when I finally learned

  to sing among the chidren, for letting

  me roar and whisper in play personae

  Thank you stomach for taking apart

  everything I fed you, the maggots

  and stuffed jalapeños as well

  as the strawberries and leeks

  and never complaining

  Thank you teeth for cracking

  so many nuts before cracking,

  for not shifting when some

  fell away, for your lucid chatter

  when ice wind whipped off the lake

  Thank you lips for shaping

  the pure sounds in my flute’s throat

  anyway even if I never

  taught you right

  Thank you eyes for echoing

  my grandfather, for changing

  like deep waters, for reading

  the condensed OED [Oxford English Dictionary] unaided

  past fifty, for seeing so much

  so clearly after objective

  refractive tests said that

  was impossible, for showing me

  fifty thousand hues inside “green”

  and my granddaughter’s visage

  ecstatic and the untold fleeting

  faces of my lovers and the print

  in pulp magazines under the bedcovers

  in the flashlit transgressions

  that left my parents smiling

  Thank you hair for keeping me

  warm, for letting me play with

  appearance, for comforting

  my touch no matter how ratty

  your length looked for so long,

  for coming back in downy second

  life after the chemo

  Thank you lungs for providing

  such rich oxygenation all along

  beyond the norm, for allowing

  the touch of sativa to lift my

  spirit in play, for forgiving

  so many insults, for letting me

  lug down malachite breccias

  from high on Mt. Majuba

  before I went in hospital

  Thank you clever fingers

  for unknotting the backlash

  on so many reels, for guiding

  my cramped and lucid pen,

  dancing on strings and tone-

  holes, digging grubs within

  punky wood, for tracing the knots

  of energy under my dear friends’

  shoulderblades, unknitting them,

  standing by to let my energy

  fingers go deeper yet in release

  Thank you tongue for remembering

  my mother’s nipples so well,

  for savoring the flavors

  of a hundred lands, for surprising

  me with the profundity

  of still-touching with Anne’s

  Thank you skin for so loving

  the sun’s benediction, Karen’s gentle

  and shivery touch, the aftermath

  of stinging-nettle that tingles

  in you since yesterday’s

  creek-walk with Sage, the lash

  of brambles across my unguarded

  ankles, the cut of milkteeth that left

  such permanent lacy palimpsests

  across my forearms from sparring

  full-out with Bull and Flux, each sliver,

  each incautious slash, each rasp

  of my knee on the wrestling mat

  that left you joyous as a Border Collie

  herding lost sheep to do

  what you best could, my healing

  integument

  Thank you my soles

  who carried me unguarded to

  the top of Whitney with my son,

  who gave me gave me such pleasure

  naked on the pavement the sandy

  beach the sharps of crumbled shale

  feeling so directly the contours

  of my world, endorphins zinging

  my spirits in music from your random

  pianos of pressed points

  Thank you o my testicles

  for swelling so painfully

  in youthful tease and denial,

  for squirming and lifting and

  lowering your precious cargo,

  for your mechanisms of random

  recombination yielding the gametes

  joining w
ith Karen’s to produce

  such remarkable beings as our sons

  Thank you my penis

  my pretty dependable fool

  for giving me such pleasures

  and release without complications

  by myself for so long, for inviting

  her admiration and fondling and squirming pleasure,

  the deep bonding persistent

  whatever your mood

  And thank you my brain, you elegant

  transducer of my nimble mind,

  glorious, retentive, fast-calculating,

  ineffable-glimpsing, sharp-focusing,

  field-grasping, proliferative

  of metaphor and shades of feeling,

  luxuriously playful, shaded

  by awe, responding to almost

  everything I asked and more

  than I knew to want or

  recognize, oh how you will

  be missed and honored in wonder

  by whatever of me may persist

  Thank you all, thank you only

  as one for my integral being in this life.

  In 2007, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, Michael reminisced about the counterculture and pot smoking:

  “The thing about weed and political action, in that era, when you sucked on a joint, you inhaled not simply some smoke, but you inhaled this whole complex of cultural attitudes, not only opposition to the Vietnam War, but a liking for Madras bedspreads, an inclination to taste new and interesting foods, to feel less guilty about cutting class, to disrespect authority more because they were trying to make you a criminal for having these experiences and changes of perspective. When you made millions of young people criminals this way, on the narrow issue of whether they could put this plant’s smoke or that plant’s smoke in their bodies, you corrupted their attitudes about a whole lot in the culture.

  “This was a time when still in order to smoke the marijuana we locked the front door, we turned out all the lights, crowded in the bathroom and stood around the toilet ready to flush if the cops were going to knock on the door. We got high, went out and looked at M.C. Escher and listened to Bach with a new ear. So when the Haight emerged as a place where people smoked marijuana openly, it was a deeper kind of transgression and statement of liberation than can be understood in this day or by people who didn’t live through that time. God knows it drove the authorities nuts.”