Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  I visited with Dick Alpert for a while. He was soaking his body in a bathtub, preparing his psyche for the Village Vanguard gig. He had taken three hundred acid trips, but there I was, a first-timer, standing in the open doorway, reversing roles and comforting him in his anxiety about entering show business.

  “It’s only an audience,” I reassured him. “What can they do to you? If they don’t laugh, it doesn’t make any difference. What do you have to lose?”

  When I told my mother about taking LSD, she was quite concerned.

  She warned me, “It could lead to marijuana.”

  The CIA had originally envisioned using LSD as a means of control, but millions of young people became explorers of their own inner space. Acid was serving as a vehicle to help deprogram themselves from a civilization of sadomasochistic priorities. While the nuclear family was exploding, extended families were developing into an alternative society.

  What had happened to me as a child at Carnegie Hall was now occurring throughout the culture. A mass awakening was in process. There had always been a spirit of counterculture, taking different forms along the way, and just as the beatniks had evolved from the bohemians, the hippies were now evolving from the beatniks. There were subcommunities developing across the country. And the antiwar movement sprouted like weed.

  The CIA’s scenario had backfired.

  San Francisco became the focus of this pilgrimage. A whole new generation of pioneers was traveling westward, without killing a single Indian along the way. In January 1966, on one of my trips to the West Coast, folks all over the Bay Area were ingesting LSD in preparation for the Acid Test at the Longshoreman’s Hall, organized by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The ballroom was seething with celebration, thousands of bodies stoned out of their minds, undulating to rock bands amid balloons and streamers and beads, with a thunder machine and strobe lights flashing, so that even the Pinkerton guards were contact high. Kesey asked me to take the microphone and contribute a running commentary on the scene.

  “All I know,” I began, “is that if I were a cop and I came in here, I wouldn’t know where to begin . . .”

  My next stop was determined by a press release from the campaign headquarters of Robert Scheer, who was running for Congress in Oakland: Usually informed sources reported today that an outlawed left-wing psychedelic splinter within the Scheer campaign will caucus with Paul Krassner 2 a.m. Saturday night, at the Jabberwock. These authoritative sources reported that Krassner, who has just returned from Washington, will deliver a preview of the State of the Union Message for 1966.

  At this coffeehouse caucus, I displayed a headline from the San Francisco Examiner: “Pope Will Do ‘Anything’ for Peace.” It was a proper introduction to the state of Lyndon Johnson’s union, and I asked a rhetorical question: “Would the pope perform an abortion on Luci Baines Johnson if it would bring about world peace?”

  Scheer’s increasingly broad support was based mainly on his reputation as a spokesperson for opposition to the war in Vietnam, but the California Democratic Committee wanted him to drop his platform plank to legalize abortion. Conversely, a psychiatrist on the Board of Directors of the Society for Humane Abortion had also been active on the Vietnam Day Committee, but to avoid giving offense, the Society translated that to “anti-war groups” in their brochure.

  Ostensibly, there was a conflict between antiwar and pro-dope, so Scheer pleaded to the acid culture, “[Secretary of Defense] McNamara hasn’t dropped out yet.” Nevertheless, legalization of marijuana was one of Scheer’s platform planks, although he said he wouldn’t smoke it himself as long as it was illegal. I in turn announced that I wouldn’t stop smoking pot until it was legal. Stew Albert of the Vietnam Day Committee had introduced me to Thai stick in 1965, and I became a toker.

  “Now I know why there’s a war going on in Southeast Asia,” I said. “To protect the crops.” That quote was enough to land my picture on the front page of the Berkeley Barb.

  But my mother was right. LSD did lead to marijuana.

  When Tim Leary got arrested in Texas for possession of pot, the notoriety of his research in Millbrook spread. Law enforcement in nearby Poughkeepsie, led by Assistant District Attorney G. Gordon Liddy, raided the estate. In the summer of 1966, Leary and his associates ran a two-week seminar on consciousness expansion, culminating in a theatrical production of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf legend that weaved its way around the Millbrook grounds and buildings. Leary invited Liddy and members of the grand jury that indicted him, but none showed up.

  For this occasion I drank my LSD with orange juice. Walking along the porch leading to the front doors of the Millbrook mansion, I passed a series of psychedelic Burma-Shave signs: What . . . Is . . . Is . . . Within. On the floor inside, the Holy Bible and Scientific American lay side by side like the proverbial lion and lamb. The event was a costume party. Musician Charlie Mingus was dressed as a sultan; novelist Alan Harrington had on a football uniform; playwright Sidney Kingsley was wearing a nightgown and beads. I had turned a pair of white pants into a makeshift straitjacket. Acid researcher Ralph Metzner told me I resembled an embryo.

  Someone else said, “You’re making fun of the crazy game, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I replied, “I’m just a projective test.”

  In the kitchen, a man with a headache was about to take an aspirin.

  “Wait,” said Leary, “I’ll be your guide.” He returned to his conversation with a reporter from Look magazine. “Someday people won’t ask what book you’re reading,” Leary said. “They’ll ask which level of consciousness you’re in contact with.”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted, “but just like people lie about the books they read, they’ll fake levels of consciousness too.”

  The Look reporter asked me, “Is Leary putting me on? He told me that everyone here is on LSD.”

  “Of course he’s putting you on,” I said. “Only the children are on LSD. Can’t you tell by the way they’re acting?”

  Meanwhile, Shane Mage, a professor of Marxian economics, was walking around looking rather manic and carrying a fruit bowl that contained a couple of crushed cigarette packages which he was stirring rather joyfully. Somehow I was confident that he had a perfectly valid rationale for his behavior.

  When I later interviewed Tim Leary, I mentioned his eating steak when we had dinner in New York. He had this response:I feel that part of me is mammalian and does demand and need animal fiber. In my plan for the future, there will be some carnivorous activity. We will be food-conscious, and we’ll pay respect to the rights of the other species; as a matter of fact, starting next week, we’re going to have animals on this property here in Millbrook.

  Some of these animals we will raise to slaughter, but we will not kill these animals until we know them well and have had LSD sessions with them, until we have seen that they have produced offspring.

  We will then preserve their offspring.

  In Esquire, artist Ed Sorel lifted part of that quote from The Realist, and he caricatured Leary and a cow jumping over the moon together.

  Leary and I became friends. He told me about prominent people whose lives had been changed by taking LSD—actor Cary Grant, director Otto Preminger, think-tanker Herman Kahn, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, Time magazine publishers Henry Luce and Clare Boothe Luce. Of course, it wasn’t so difficult to drop out when you had such a stimulating scene to drop into. But on the day that he announced the formation of a new religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD), I signed up as their first heretic.

  Dick Alpert and I also became friends. We enjoyed what he called “upleveling” each other with honesty. On one occasion, we were at a party. I was particularly manic and he pointed it out, choosing an eggbeater as his analogy. I appreciated his reflection and calmed down.

  On another occasion, Alpert, onstage at the Village Theater, was sitting in the lotus position on a cushion, talking about his mother dying and how there seemed to be a conspiracy
on the part of relatives and hospital personnel alike to deny her the realization of that possibility. He also talked about some fellow in a mental institution who thought he was Jesus Christ. I teased him about having discussed his mother openly but concealing the fact that the man who thought he was Christ was his brother—death obviously carrying more respectability than craziness. At his next performance, Alpert identified the man as his brother.

  LSD became illegal on the afternoon of October 6, 1966, and in San Francisco the event was publicized with the Diggers’ “Prophecy of a Declaration of Independence”:When in the flow of human events it becomes necessary for the people to cease to recognize the obsolete social patterns which had isolated man from his consciousness and to create with the youthful energies of the world revolutionary communities to which the two-billion-year-old life process entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind should declare the causes which impel them to this creation.

  We hold these experiences to be self-evident, that all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: the freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness, and that to secure these rights, we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all conflicting hate-carrying men and women of the world.

  The blossoming counterculture—encompassing sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—was at its core a spiritual revolution, with religions of repression being replaced by disciplines of liberation, where psychotropic drugs became a sacrament, sensuality developed into exquisite forms of personal art, and the way you lived your daily life demonstrated the heartbeat of your politics. There was an epidemic of idealism. Altruism became the highest form of selfishness.

  The underground press was flourishing around the country, and the first psychedelic paper was the San Francisco Oracle. They interviewed me on one of my visits.

  Q. I was an atheist before I took LSD. Now I have an understanding of what is meant by God instead of just putting it down.

  A. Now wait, I never put God down any more than I put Santa Claus down.

  Q. Did your atheism change after LSD in any qualitative way?

  A. No, no, how could it change? There was a different God I didn’t believe in? People were very Christian before Christ ever existed, if he did. People were very humanistic before Humanism was ever organized. People were very loving before LSD was ever discovered. I dug defecating before I ever knew it was a Zen thing to do. So, what I’m saying is, awareness existed before LSD.

  But there was an ecological renaissance in progress. While hundreds of thousands of gallons of milk were being dumped daily by farmers in twenty-five states, the Diggers were feeding their community at no cost. Standing in their rented garage, the Free Frame of Reference, I asked how they felt about charitable gestures.

  Emmett Grogan responded, “Why don’t you give us $10 and find out?”

  I had heard of the Diggers’ reputation for burning money, so I gave Grogan a one-dollar bill. He held it up, singing, “Paulie gave us a dollar. Paulie gave us a dollar.” Then he touched it to a candle, and I watched my dollar bill burn. I had to put this into perspective. We were, after all, burning over a billion dollars every month to force Vietnam into seeking what we considered their proper destiny. Grogan placed the unburned corner of the dollar in the hand of an eight-year-old Negro boy who was hanging around the garage with his friends.

  “Here,” said Grogan, “bring this home to your mommy and ask her about poverty—and she’ll slap your face.”

  The kid asked, “How can you do a stupid thing like that, burning a dollar bill?”

  “You have another level to go,” Grogan said.

  I wasn’t impressed. There were those who felt that if minority groups would only take LSD they’d stop aspiring to white middle-class values. But the desire to avoid rat bites might well have transcended white middle-class values. Ironically, the Diggers were spawned by a curfew that grew out of racial unrest. People had to be indoors if they weren’t doing something specific. So the Diggers started making food for each other, cooking and eating in Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle.

  Not even the National Guard could make them go away. But it was still a compromise. To stand on a street corner—waiting for no one—that was the real goal, inspired by beat poet Gregory Corso’s play, Standing On a Street Corner. The Diggers had a strong theatrical bent, and they actually performed Corso’s play on a street corner for passing pedestrians.

  Hustling bruised food that would otherwise be thrown away at four o’clock in the morning and peeling a potato for the first time in your life at four o’clock in the afternoon were merely extensions of theater. Which helped explain the great tomato fight the Diggers had with a bushel of tomatoes given to them for the purpose of eating, not splattering.

  The Diggers ran the Free Store, also known as the Trip Without a Ticket. All the clothing and other merchandise were donated. Nobody paid anything except the changes they went through. One afternoon a patron got caught shoplifting, and consequently she was aided in her selections by the clerk. I devoted an entire issue of The Realist to “The Digger Papers,” and gave the Diggers forty thousand free copies.

  Emmett Grogan was one of the most skillful bullshit artists I’d ever met. He bragged that he had coined the aphorism, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Actually, it was Gregory Corso. Grogan told me that the Diggers had slaughtered a horse to protest an execution at San Quentin. That was absolute horseshit.

  When he came to New York, Grogan told me that Norman Mailer had complained to him that “LSD will make everybody pacifists,” and that he replied, “C’mere, I’ll bite your nose off.” I foolishly printed that without first checking with Mailer, who denied having the conversation. I compounded that error in a show at the Village Theater, when someone in the audience asked me if Mailer had ever taken acid.

  “No,” I replied. “He’s afraid that his cock would fall off.”

  Mailer was furious with me. He called Leary and Alpert “cunts on deodorant.”

  When a stage version of Mailer’s novel, The Deer Park, was produced, I was invited to the opening night party. Strange energy abounded, from the cameo appearance of Woody Allen to the fight between journalist Pete Hamill and boxer Jose Torres. Somebody (not me) had invited a few grizzled street people to come up. They wore seedy overcoats and were dipping their bare hands into the punch bowl. I wrote about all this for my monthly society column in Ramparts as if it were the third act of his play, titled “The Deer Party.”

  I intended it as an affectionate piece, but Mailer called it “smarmy” and stopped speaking to me for a year. I had crossed the line, treating a friend like a media object.

  When I was growing up, it was a sexual thrill just to get a quick glimpse of a girl’s bra strap through the sleeve of her blouse. Now girls danced topless in the park. Bouncing bare breasts were definitely on the front lines of the sexual revolution. On December 31, 1966, the Sexual Freedom League invited me to their New Year’s Eve Orgy in San Francisco. The party was for couples only, so I went with my friend, Margo St. James.

  She was a member of the Psychedelic Rangers, who went around late at night painting fire hydrants in Day-Glo colors. A former hooker, she later launched a prostitutes’ rights organization, COYOTE, an acronym for Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics. She turned the finest trick of her life when she spun prurient interest around on itself to spread the message of the first Hookers Convention. The official poster featured an illustration of a woman fingering her clitoris, with the slogan, “Our convention is different—we want everybody to come!”

  Flo Kennedy, a radical black attorney, gave the keynote speech at the convention, titled “What is this Shit?” She asked why the FBI was orchestrating a “national campaign of busting prostitutes while everyone else is sucking their way to success anyway?” Then she answered her own question. “It’s a control mechanism—of hookers, of veterans—of all victims.
The government must maintain guilt as a tool of oppression over those whom they niggerize. Migrant farmers are brought in illegally, then they’re on the defensive and can’t fight for their rights.”

  Now, Margo was wearing one of her Christmas gifts, a brand-new nun’s habit, and the cab driver gave her a rose. After we were admitted to the orgy site, because she had guests that evening, she gave me the rose and returned home. The party was in a large theatrical studio, with 150 people dancing in the nude. Behind the closed curtains on the stage there were fifteen small mattresses for those who wished to screw.

  A few loners stood around backstage, playing with themselves as they ogled couples playing with each other. I sat on a chair, in the studio, conspicuous because I was fully dressed, sniffing my rose like a harmless voyeur. Then a naked girl sat down next to me. She had been dancing.

  “Those guys out there,” she complained, “they shouldn’t just automatically assume they’re gonna have intercourse with their dance partner of the moment.”

  “But,” I asked, “in effect, aren’t you cockteasing?”

  “No. It’s okay to hug when you’re dancing close, but if a guy starts to kiss me or put his tongue in my ear, I tell him not to. Or if he begins to get an erection, then I tell him we’d better stop dancing. It’s only fair. You have to draw the line somewhere.”

  At 11 pm, a league official announced that somebody had been smoking an illegal substance, and since the orgy, albeit legal, was especially vulnerable to a police visit, the smoker was endangering the other guests and should kindly leave. Three-quarters of the party left. By then I had taken off all my clothes so that I could fade into the crowd. A girl sitting next to me started stroking my knee. “You’re very neighborly,” I said. At 2 am we went onstage and started making love on one of the mattresses. Suddenly the curtain opened. They were closing the theater. I looked up and saw a man who was sweeping the auditorium.