Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  The most popular ride was the Steeplechase Horses, which were like merry-go-round horses, except that they didn’t travel rooted in a circle; they weren’t impaled on a carousel. Rather, they moved individually on elevated tracks, up and down hills, all around the perimeter of the park, so that you could see the ocean, the beach, the boardwalk, the rides—the Tilt-a-Whirl, the Whip, the Parachute Jump. The Steeplechase Horses operated mechanically, but it seemed as if you could make them go faster by pelvic thrusts alone. When the ride ended, you had to walk down a passageway to an exit door, which turned out to be the entrance to that stage. This was the only way out, so you instantly became a captive performer.

  After I rode the Steeplechase Horses, I came through the door and saw that the dwarf in the clown costume was standing at the edge of the stage with his back toward me, talking to someone in the front row. His electric cattle prod was leaning against the railing. I knew that I had to make a decision immediately. Time froze.

  The left, more rational, lobe of my brain warned, “You must realize that if you turn his own electric cattle prod on him, it will definitely change the dynamics of this particular encounter and inevitably result in hostile vibrations.” The right, more impulsive, lobe of my brain queried, “How can you resist such a temptation? You’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t seize this opportunity right now. You’ll never get a chance like this again.” And, in that split second while time froze, the left and right lobes of my brain fused. Impulse and choice became the same process.

  Having my retrospect in advance, I realized in a flash what I had to do in order to avoid regret. I picked up the electric cattle prod and buzzed the dwarf clown in his buttocks. He jumped away, just as he had made countless others jump away. The audience cheered and applauded wildly. Suddenly I was a hero—but not to the dwarf clown. He was fuming. He chased me off the stage, shaking his fist and cursing me out. He continued to run after me, around the cotton-candy stand and in between the Dodge’m Scooter Cars.

  There was a certain dreamlike quality to all this—being chased around an amusement park by a dwarf in a clown costume because I had just buzzed him in the ass with his own electric cattle prod—so I began to flap my arms like wings while I was running, and since I didn’t fly, I knew it wasn’t a dream. This was reality.

  It was, in fact, the most exciting ride in Steeplechase.

  When my maternal grandparents came to live with us, my parents sacrificed their bedroom and slept in the living room on a convertible couch next to the piano. My brother, my sister, and I slept in the other bedroom. There was a lot of tension in the house. Marge almost lost her scholarship because it was so hard to concentrate. Whenever things got too tense, I would take our dog, Skippy, out for a walk. Once, he was squatting in the street, straining unsuccessfully at his stool because it was hanging from his anus by the cellophane from around a slice of salami he had eaten. I tore off a piece of newspaper in a trash can and extracted it for him.

  Frank Sinatra replaced Ronald Reagan as my role model when he made a short film, The House I Live In, that was against prejudice. The lyrics of the title song summed it up: “All races, all religions, that’s America to me. The right to speak my mind out, that’s America to me.” I had a new hero. I would sing his love songs to myself—“Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week” and “It was just a ride on a train, that’s all that it was, but, oh, what it seemed to be.” I even went to a masquerade party as Sinatra, wearing a large bowtie, padded shoulders, and pegged pants, crooning into my broom-microphone. I won first prize. From then on I continued to comb my hair like him.

  My hair wasn’t platinum blond anymore. Now it was light brown, though my mother called it “dirty blond.” I began a search for the perfect hair tonic. I compiled a list of attributes from various ads—non-greasy, keeps hair in place, nonalcoholic, keeps hair well-groomed—and finally selected Wildroot Cream Oil. My father bought me a giant, barber-shop-size bottle, but the smell was so embarrassing that I used it only once.

  That seemed to be my pattern. As a result of my search for the perfect candy, I bought twenty boxes of Holloway’s Milk Duds, then lost interest after eating the first box. I hoarded the rest in my desk, but my mother was afraid they would attract ants, so I threw them away. Instead, I bought a can of chocolate-covered ants in a gourmet food store, but my mother wouldn’t let me keep it in the refrigerator, not even while the can was still unopened.

  My grandmother had very long gray hair, and she started using my Wildroot Cream Oil every day. It couldn’t overpower the bitter smell of boiling senna leaves—an herbal laxative—that she prepared every day. My grandfather was always kicking the dog away from his legs. One time, as if for revenge, Skippy climbed onto the toilet, then the hamper, managing to extract my grandfather’s false teeth from a herring jar on the bathroom widow sill. Then he hid under the couch with the false teeth in his mouth. You could see this human-type smile on the dog’s face, like some silly creature in an animated cartoon.

  I always had some kind of part-time job. One was at a grocery store where, among other tasks such as delivering orders, I had to separate the good cherries from the moldy ones. I marveled at the blindness of Nature’s force. The green mold didn’t know what it was doing any more than the red cherries knew what they were doing. Another job was at a candy store in the front of our building. The family who owned it lived in the apartment right above the store. They made whiskey in their bathtub, and it was connected by a pipe to one of the soda faucets in the candy store.

  My job there was to insert various sections of The New York Times into the main section. That’s exactly what I was doing when I learned about the atomic bomb being dropped on Japan. I kept reading the headline over and over as I inserted the newspaper sections. I couldn’t understand why an all-knowing, all-powerful God would allow such total devastation to happen to so many innocent civilians. And so I became an atheist at the age of thirteen. I was aware of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but I knew nothing about Nazi concentration camps and genocidal ovens, or I would’ve become an atheist then.

  My behavior didn’t change, though. In fact, I was even more determined to be a moral person. That would show God—except I no longer believed that there was a God to know that I didn’t believe in Him, a God that could think, This is Me!

  In school, I had to write a report on a political candidate. I chose Vito Marcantonio, who was running for mayor of New York. I didn’t know anything about him except that Frank Sinatra was supporting his campaign and sang at a fundraiser. Marcantonio was running on the American Federation of Labor ticket, but my teacher called him a Communist. He got very agitated and phoned my parents.

  What I learned was that the Constitution didn’t guarantee the separation of politics and culture. One of my favorite songs, “But Not for Me,” included the phrase “more clouds of gray than any Russian play could guarantee,” but now, on the radio, I heard an altered version: “more clouds of gray than any Broadway play could guarantee.” Early tremors of the Cold War. My mother insisted that her family had come from White Russia, not Red Russia. My father threatened that if I ever became a Communist, he would kick me out of the house. I didn’t even know what a Communist was.When my grandmother died, my father got drunk and poured the rest of her Wildroot Cream Oil hair tonic out the kitchen window. That was his style of catharsis.

  There was a time when playing stickball seemed to be the most important thing in the world. The only equipment we needed was a tennis ball and a broomstick. The street served as our playing field, the sewer manhole covers were our bases, and the game stopped for traffic.

  Later I graduated to sandlot baseball. I played right field for the Astoria Red Sox in the YMCA league. The guys on one team were all from Elmhurst or Jackson Heights; they were called the Elmjacks. The guys on another team were all Irish or Italian; they were called the Mickwops, until the Y made them change their name. There were a few Puerto Ricans on my
team who did their infield chatter in Spanish, and the umpire complained that they were cursing him.

  Long Island City High School didn’t have a baseball team, but the local American Legion post wanted to sponsor a team with an automobile dealer. I tried out and played second base. Every Sunday morning, I became a living parody of a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. I would be wearing my American Legion baseball uniform (on the back it said “Universal Cars—Sales & Service”), riding my bicycle on my newspaper route, with my dog Skippy in the basket.

  I wanted to be an FBI agent when I grew up. But for now I was the only member of my baseball team who brought a shoehorn to the games to help put on my spiked shoes.

  My infield chatter was considered improper. Instead of chanting, “C’mon, baby, strike ’im out,” I’d shout, “He couldn’t get it up last night, so how’s he gonna swing the bat now?” Although I always played my best, I didn’t really care whether my team won or lost. I had to fake enthusiasm or disappointment. But I loved the adrenaline rush at that instant when you had to decide whether or not to swing at a pitched ball.

  Once, during an especially tense moment in the bottom of the ninth inning, the score was tied, and I was at bat with a runner on second base. I couldn’t resist breaking into a tapdance on home plate. Then I got a hit, which sent in the winning run.

  It was the same with basketball. I had been fouled, and was about to take my free throw at a critical point near the end of the game. I bounced the ball a few times, took a deep breath, and started singing “Indian Love Call” in a falsetto voice. It drove the coach nuts, but then I sank the shot.

  I played on a Police Athletic League team, and also a Catholic Youth Organization team where we would all stand in a tight circle before each game. Everybody would clasp hands, then separate and genuflect and pray before we trotted out to our positions on the court. Instead of making the sign of the cross, I would just scratch my chest and mumble gibberish.

  Not only didn’t I care if my team won, but I didn’t have any school spirit in general. Nevertheless, I was elected president of the Student Court. My first official act was to subpoena the new principal for coming from a rival school. I also wrote, produced, directed, and starred in the senior play, about a teacher called Mr. Schnook. I had to defend my choice of that name when I was interviewed by a committee for membership in Arista, the high school honor society.

  I explained that I called him Mr. Schnook “because I didn’t want it to apply to any one particular teacher.” They accepted me into Arista because I had a good record of extracurricular activity as well as excellent grades, even though I did an absolute minimum of homework and hadn’t read a single book.

  Whereas my high school was in the factory district at Queens Plaza, my college was in the business district in Manhattan. This branch of CCNY was on East 23rd Street, and the campus was on the ninth floor. In college, I continued to con my way through courses without reading any books, but it kept getting more difficult, and I had to compromise by reading everything in the textbooks that was in italics and taking notes on everything that the instructors said in italics.

  I got all through high school and college doing book reports based on Classic Comics. You could read an entire novel in less than half an hour. Once, in a literature course, I gave an oral report on Hamlet based solely on the previous night’s reading of the Classic Comics version, and I acted out the final scene of Hamlet stabbing himself.

  “Farewell, Horatio,” I said, “the rest is silence—aarrggghh!”

  At home, we didn’t have a TV set yet, and I felt culturally deprived when I heard other students talking about what Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had done on their show the previous night. Stores actually closed on Tuesday evenings because customers were staying home to watch the Milton Berle show. Every Saturday, my whole family would take the car and visit another family to watch Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, until we finally got our own TV set.

  I met my first girlfriend, Deedee, at the summer camp where we both worked as counselors. This was 1950, I was eighteen and extremely horny, but the sexual revolution had not yet occurred for either of us, so all we did every night was kiss and rub against each other’s bodies with all our clothes on, then go to our separate bunks. In the morning our lips felt completely swollen.

  Every week there was a campfire with a different theme, announced by a flyer on the bulletin board. One time, somebody changed “Hobo Campfire” to “Homo Campfire” and a few of the older boys came in drag. At the Gypsy Campfire, I got dressed up as a fortune teller, using a blown-up prophylactic as my crystal ball—well, at least it wasn’t going to waste—and I was chastised by the camp director. My mistake had been to use a condom with a reservoir tip.

  At the end of that summer, I went to the camp masquerade party dressed all in red with a white string tied to my head. For the campers, I was an unused firecracker. For the counselors, I was a used Tampax.

  When Deedee told me that her previous boyfriend was a Negro, I was stunned to hear myself actually verbalize what I was feeling subconsciously.

  “Did you kiss him on the lips?” I asked.

  I had always thought that I was super-conscious, but despite my delusion of being really awake, I had somehow absorbed this combination of racism and sexism by cultural osmosis. It was so incongruous with what I believed that by simply uttering those words out loud, I was able to start demystifying the implications of my prejudice.

  Maybe it wasn’t really true that Negroes practice “bump Thursday.” On that day each week, according to the folklore, Negroes would deliberately jostle white folks in the subway, on a bus, walking along the sidewalk, wherever, so that if it were to happen on a Wednesday, then you’d know it was only an accident.

  My father originally had his own print shop. When the local Mafia representative came around for protection money, my father—who was a short man—grabbed the unwelcome visitor by his collar with one hand and held a wooden printer’s mallet threateningly in his face with the other.

  “I don’t know who you work for,” he said, “ but I know you, and if anything happens to this place . . .”

  Meanwhile, the International Typographical Union ran a campaign to unionize all print shops. My father was strongly pro-union, but he had a Negro assistant and the union wouldn’t allow Negroes to become members. My father told the union he was willing to join, but insisted on keeping his assistant. That wasn’t acceptable to them. So, although the Mafia didn’t succeed in busting my father’s print shop, the union did.

  Now he worked in the composing room at the Long Island Star-Journal, setting up ads. However, national advertisers had developed a system whereby they supplied local newspapers with embossed mats, into which hot lead could be poured, and that would save—or lose—the job of setting it by hand. But the union was strong. They got a “reproduction” clause—nicknamed “bogus”—in their newspaper contract which fought off this automation by providing that even if a mat were used, the same ad also had to be set by hand.

  With fine craftsmanship, my father would set up an ad, getting proofs and making corrections. Then, when it was finally perfect, it would be destroyed. The lead would be thrown into the Hell Box, and be melted down for use again. My father compared this to building a sand castle on the beach, only to see it washed away by the ocean, but to me it seemed like the ultimate alienation from work.

  I became so obsessed with trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life that I took a leave of absence from CCNY to figure it out. In the morning I worked for a messenger service. The best thing about this job was that my boss’s wife was an Armenian gourmet cook. Every day I would go to their house to pick up his lunch. Then I would stop in the park and sample each delicious temptation in the package, without leaving any evidence, before delivering it to him. This became my daily ritual. But one time I ate the whole dessert, and I hoped that my boss’s wife wouldn’t ask him how he like
d it.

  Every afternoon, I would go to a special branch of the library and read one vocational guidance brochure after another, but there was no category for Cultural Mutation. Even though humor was my religion, I had never seriously thought of stand-up comedy as a possible profession. Comedy clubs didn’t exist yet, and there were virtually no role models for me.

  My brother and I would go to the bandstand in Central Park every Labor Day weekend for a big show emceed by Milton Berle, but he told the same jokes every year. Even the same ad-libs. He would say to a voluptuous singer, “You look tired—go to my dressing room and rest.” Other Borscht Belt comedians also did the same material year after year, condescending and boring. I kept hoping they would make me laugh, but instead I just felt insulted.

  I returned to college, having decided to major in journalism and psychology, with a minor in draft dodging. I had an automatic deferment. Although I recognized this as a blatant form of elitism, I was not about to join the army and get sent to Korea just to demonstrate my spirit of equality. School was dull, filled with memorizing and regurgitating. One professor even announced precisely what the final exam would consist of.

  He said, “Write down everything you can remember me saying this semester.”

  Between classes, I would either play basketball or read sex manuals in the library. I had the theory down quite well, but I never went out on a date to test it out. My greatest learning experience was in a social psychology course where I sat next to a female student. Our thighs kept rubbing together for the entire hour three times a week, and my pippy was in a constant state of arousal. We never verbally acknowledged that we were doing this. Once she was absent but I got an erection anyway. It was a stimulating object lesson in conditioned reflex.