“Did we get the part?” I asked.
On New Year’s Day, Margo St. James became The Realist Nun. She decided to wear her nun’s habit when she drove me to the airport. She looked authentic, from the Mammy Yokum button-up shoes to the rimless granny glasses. However, she was wearing nail polish, the button under her collar read Chastity is Its Own Punishment, and her pubic hair was trimmed in the shape of a heart.
At the airport we kissed goodbye—bodies grinding, tongues wiggling, hands groping—as the waiting passengers watched in utter disbelief. I was wearing my dungaree jacket and looked like a Hell’s Angel reject. They must have thought that Margo was from some particularly progressive order of nuns. She gave me a farewell pinch on the ass as we departed.
“Give my regards to Father Berrigan,” I called out.
Naturally, I wrote about that incident in The Realist. Paul von Blum, an instructor at Golden Gate College, reprinted that account as part of the final exam for his political science class, assigning the students to write an essay about it, “particularly in terms of some of the ideas we discussed in our class when we dealt with the role of symbols and images.”
On another occasion, Margo masturbated me in a porn movie theater while wearing her nun’s outfit. Patrons were shocked more by us than by what was on the screen. The incident wasn’t mentioned in any final exam, though.
Tim Leary had told me about the use of acid by Herman Kahn, director of the conservative Hudson Institute and author of On Thermonuclear War.
“Herman is not just a war planner,” Leary said, “he’s a civil-defense planner. Herman’s claim is that he is one of the few highly placed Americans who’s willing to gaze with naked eyes upon the possibilities of atomic warfare and come up with solutions to this horrible possibility. Perhaps his LSD sessions have given him this revelation and courage. And even his phrase, ‘spasm war,’ which to the intellectual liberals sounds gruesome, is a powerful, cellular metaphor describing an event which the very phrase itself, ‘spasm war,’ might prevent.”
Now Herman Kahn had a request. He wanted me to guide him on a tour of the Lower East Side. When we met, his assistant, Anthony Wiener, was there—he had been the conduit for CIA funding of the MK-ULTRA project, which used LSD in behavior-modification experiments with unaware subjects. Now Wiener was recommending a film, The War Game, to Herman Kahn.
“How does it scan?” asked Kahn.
“It scans beautiful,” Wiener said, about to leave us. “But you really ought to see it, Herman. You’re in it.”
“Why? I saw Dr. Strangelove. I was in that.”
I brought Kahn to Tompkins Square Park and told him about the police attack on hippies there. Kahn’s point of view was that of one who attempts to create an objective scenario as the basis for his predictions of the future, such as, “The hippie dropout syndrome is delaying the guaranteed annual wage.”
I told him that the CIA was running opium dens around Cambodia. He wasn’t surprised, he said, because they smoke dope and show affection with equal openness. In his capacity as a human think tank, Kahn had been present when a Laotian general was briefing John Kennedy in the White House.
“The trouble with your people,” complained the exasperated president, “is that they’d rather fuck than fight.”
“Wouldn’t you?” replied the general.
Kahn and I stopped in a bookstore.
“I’ll show you the books I bought,” I said, “if you’ll show me the books you bought.”
“You know,” he replied, “when I was three years old, I said to a little girl, ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’—and she wouldn’t do it—now you’ll print that because I was frustrated as a child I want to blow up the world.”
He had purchased a collection of poetry by Allen Ginsberg, a book on Russian economics, a John Hersey novel, short stories by Isaac Singer, and LSD and Problem Solving by Peter Stafford and B.H. Golightly. Then I took him to the Underground Head Shop, where he bought a poster that warned, chicken little was right!
The office of The East Village Other was across the street from The Realist. I dropped by one time when the editors—Walter Bowart, Alan Katzman, and Dean Latimer—were discussing a book, Morning of the Magicians. They were intrigued to learn that LSD released serotonin in brain receptors. They wondered if it was in nonchemical substances, and learned that serotinin could be found in bananas, inspiring them to launch the great banana hoax. The Berkeley Barb picked up the story, then the Underground Press Syndicate—and finally the mainstream wire services—spread it around the country.
It quickly became public knowledge that you could get legally high from smoking dried banana skins. In San Francisco, there was a banana smoke-in, and one entrepreneur started a successful banana-powder mail-order business, charging $5 an ounce. Agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs headed for their own laboratory, faithfully cooking, scraping, and grinding thirty pounds of bananas according to the recipe in the underground press. For three weeks, the Food and Drug Administration utilized an apparatus that “smoked” the dried banana peels.
The Los Angeles Free Press in turn promoted yet another hallucinogenic—pickled jalapeño peppers, anally inserted. All over Southern California, heads were sticking vegetables up their asses. And, at a benefit for the Diggers, I mentioned onstage that the next big drug would be FDA. Sure enough, Time magazine soon reported that there would be “a super-hallucinogen called FDA.” Silly me, I thought I had made that up.
When Time decided to do a cover story on the hippies, a cable to their San Francisco bureau instructed researchers to “go at the description and delineation of the subculture as if you were studying the Samoans or the Trobriand Islanders.” It was a proper anthropological approach.
For example, at the Summer Solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park, the same hippies who ridiculed Lyndon Johnson’s call for a national day of prayer were now imploring the sun to come out at 5 am. Although they had given up trying to influence the administration, they were still trying to influence the universe.
In May 1967, An Evening with God was held at the Village Theater in celebration of the Pentecost—a benefit for Reverend James McGraw’s Renewal, a Christian magazine—with Dick Gregory, Tim Leary, Malcolm Boyd, Harvey Cox, Len Chandler, and myself—“Speaking of the Devil,” according to the poster. I was to be their token nonbeliever.
The night before, I had been in bed with Sandy, Norman Mailer’s assistant. While we were making love, there was an evangelist on the radio providing a strangely appropriate background. He was talking about the importance of having “a firm God” and about “sliding your finger into any passage in the Bible.” It was funny until he claimed that six million slaughtered Jews in Nazi Germany were doomed to Hell because they had never accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, yet Adolf Eichmann went to Heaven because he had converted to Christianity a couple of days before he was executed. Sandy made the most religious statement that whole night.
“I’m so glad I have a cunt,” she said. It was a celebration of life.
At An Evening with God, I told that story and invited the women in the audience—including several nuns—to repeat Sandy’s chant after me as a congregational response. “All right, now everybody—I’m so glad I have a cunt.” There was only laughter and booing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you with such crudity. Okay, please repeat after me: I’m so glad I have a vagina.” But they still didn’t respond. “You mean you aren’t glad?”
I concluded my talk at An Evening with God: “I stand before you as an atheist, doing what men of the cloth should be doing. A couple of decades ago, Joe Louis said, ‘God is on our side.’ Now Muhammad Ali is saying, ‘We’re on God’s side.’”
Then I burned, not my draft card, but a Photostat of it. That way I would be able to continue burning my draft card over and over again. In fact, I burned Photostats of my draft card at campuses in a dozen states.
“What can the authoriti
es do,” I asked a courtroom filled with students at Harvard Law School—“send me a Photostat of a subpoena?”
True to its amorality, the Mafia had reportedly financed the printing of a poster showing the faces of Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey superimposed on the bodies of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper riding their motorcycles in Easy Rider. Now the Mafia was getting into the business of distributing LSD. A friend asked me to test a capsule, so I decided to take it at Expo in Montreal. I had been invited to speak at the Youth Pavilion and also to give my impressions, on Canadian TV, of the United States Pavilion—a huge geodesic dome engineered by Buckminster Fuller.
Before entering the United States Pavilion—which was guarded by marines who had gone to Protocol School—I ingested the acid. I began the CBC interview—saying, “It’s really beautiful, with all these flowing colors; you don’t see them, but I do”—and ended up burning a Photostat of my draft card. “Now, the reason I’m doing this,” I said, “is because we get hung up on symbols. People will be more upset about this than about the fact that children are being burned alive.”
The marine lieutenant called his captain. When the interview was finished, the captain told me it was against the law to burn my draft card. So I took out my draft card and showed it to them.
“But he burned it,” the marine insisted. “I saw him, sir. He burned it.”
“I burned a Photostat of my draft card,” I explained. “So I lied on television. That’s not a crime. People do it all the time.”
“It’s also against the law to make a copy of your draft card,” the captain said.
“Well, I destroyed the evidence.”
I knew that political demonstrations were barred at Expo, but I had managed to smuggle one in. The interview was labeled an “incident,” and there was a heated argument between the U.S. Information Agency and CBC, but the incident was already on tape, so now it had become a free-speech issue. It would be shown on TV that night and become front-page news in Montreal papers the next day.
Just as I was leaving the United States Pavilion, a band struck up a fanfare, and I made the mistake of projecting my own feelings, and suddenly I was convinced that LSD had been sprayed into the air, that everybody was tripping, that peace and love were breaking out all over the world at that very moment. As I was walking along, I started smiling at people and waving to them, and they were smiling and waving back. But then a core of reality came to the surface, the force of my own feedback made me turn around, and I saw that those same people were now pointing at me. What an asshole!
Still blushing, I found a phone booth and called up my friend in New York. “Well, you can tell the Mafia that I don’t approve of their methods or their goals, but their acid is pretty powerful.”
It was the Summer of Love.
While visiting Los Angeles in 1967, I was a guest on the Mort Sahl show. He had a blackboard on which he wrote “We Demand Faith in the Future.” He wanted to have a mock trial on his program as a preview of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, and he asked me to act as a defense attorney for Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara. I agreed to do it and said that I would have them plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
I was also a guest on the Joe Pyne show. Phil Ochs offered to drive me there. We had become friends when he asked for permission to write a song, “The Ballad of William Worthy,” based on an article in The Realist by Worthy, an award-winning journalist whose passport had been revoked.
Joe Pyne held up a copy of The Realist and called it “a filthy, avant-garde, left-wing rag.” He asked me, “Why do you feel compelled to print the most obscene words in the English language every month?”
“Well,” I replied, “why do you feel compelled to underline a few words in a magazine that contains twenty or thirty thousand words?”
“Does your magazine cater to homosexuals?”
“Why, Joe? Did you find something that appeals to you?”
“Well, this caught my eye here. You printed a cartoon about a homosexual act.”
The cartoon, by Bud Handelsman, depicted a man sitting at a huge desk, speaking on the telephone: “I’m very sorry, but we of the FBI are powerless to act in a case of oral-genital intimacy unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.”
“Joe, that’s also a heterosexual act.”
But he wouldn’t let me read the caption out loud to allow the audience to decide for itself.
“Why are you for the repeal of abortion laws?” he asked.
“Because I don’t think that a woman should have to bear an unwanted child as punishment for an accidental conception.”
“Do you edit your magazine because you were an unwanted child?”
“No, Daddy.”
Pyne tried to give me a hard time about a photo I had reprinted from the Reader’s Digest showing Jimmy Durante standing behind a little disabled boy as though he were dry-humping him.
Pyne: I won’t give this man’s name, but he’s probably one of the most beloved stars in all of the history of entertainment, and some time ago he posed for what obviously was an Easter Seal picture with a crippled child on crutches—a child that looks to be about maybe a year and a half—and the—whatever information there was about that picture has been cropped and Krassner has put on the top: “Soft-Core Pornography of the Month,” and below indicates that the man is a child molester. And this is what I mean about how [glancing at me] how this man can take everything that is decent and—and worthwhile—and twist it into something that is—Marquis de Sade looked like a Boy Scout compared to you.
Krassner: Well, let me just explain that. The beloved movie star you’re talking about is—
Pyne: Don’t mention his name, please?
Krassner:—obviously not a child molester, we all know that.
The point of this whole feature—continuing feature called “Soft-Core Pornography of the Month”—is simply to point out that obscenity exists only in the mind of the beholder, and that people can take a tender scene like that and find something dirty in it, if they wish.
Pyne: Where do you say all that, Mr. Krassner? All you say is
“Soft-Core Pornography of the Month” on the top, and then you say “Peterofilia in the Reader’s Digest” on the bottom.
Krassner: It’s pedophilia, Joe. Well, do you think for a moment that anybody’s going to take that seriously, and think we’re actually accusing that beloved movie star—
Pyne: Well, I have such respect for this man that I take it seriously . . .
Then he began making vicious references to the scar tissue on my face. “Well, Joe, if you’re gonna ask questions like that, then let me ask you: Do you take off your wooden leg before you make love with your wife?”
Pyne had lost his leg as a marine in World War II. Now his jaw literally dropped, the audience gasped, the producers averted their eyes and the atmosphere became surrealistic as Pyne went through the motions of continuing the interview. One feature of his show was the Beef Box, a podium with a microphone, where members of the audience could ask questions or make comments. One after another, his loyal fans understandably lambasted me. Then Phil Ochs was standing at the podium.
“Isn’t it true,” Pyne asked me, “that the man that is now in the dock is known to you as one of the leaders of the hippie revolution?”
“No, he’s known to me as a folksinger.”
“Uh-huh. Mr. Ochs, are you a hippie?”
“No.”
“Do you play for the hippies, mostly?”
“No, I play for everybody.”
Pyne had been put off balance by my question. He even called the next guest Mr. Krassner. When that interview was concluded and the guest made the mistake of trying to embrace him, Pyne shoved him away and made threatening karate gestures. The show was over, and Pyne walked off the set, hair mussed, loosening his tie. On his way out of the studio, he passed by me, sitting in an aisle seat in the audience.
“Son of a bitch put his hands on m
e,” he muttered. “That I don’t like.”
When Ochs and I left, I told him about a pro-choice rally where 150 people marched from Times Square to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The tail end of the parade started first, so that the single-letter cards they carried, which had been arranged to read legalize abortion, came out backward, noitroba ezilagel. As they rounded a corner, you could see only the baez portion.
“Must be folksingers,” a bystander observed.
There was a concert in Pittsburgh, with the Grateful Dead, the Velvet Underground, the Fugs, and me. There were two shows, both completely sold out, and this was the first time anybody had realized how many hippies actually lived in Pittsburgh.
Backstage between shows, a man sidled up to me.
“Call me Bear,” he said.
“Okay, you’re Bear.”
“Don’t you recognize me?”
“You look familiar, but—”
“I’m Owsley.”
Of course—Owsley acid! He presented me with a tab of Monterey Purple LSD. Not wishing to carry around an illegal drug in my pocket, I swallowed it instead. Soon I found myself in the lobby talking with Jerry Garcia. As people from the audience wandered past us, he whimsically stuck out his hand, palm up.
“Got any spare change?”
Somebody gave him a dime, and Garcia said, “Thanks.”
“He didn’t recognize you,” I said.
“See, we all look alike.”
In the course of our conversation, I used the word “evil” to describe somebody.
“There are no evil people,” Garcia said, just as the LSD was settling into my psyche. “There are only victims.”
“What does that mean? If a rapist is a victim, you should have compassion when you kick ’im in the balls?”
I did the second show while the Dead were setting up behind me. Then they began to play, softly, and as they built up their riff, I faded out and left the stage. Later, some local folks brought me to a restaurant which, they told me, catered to a Mafia clientele. With my long brown curly hair underneath my Mexican cowboy hat, I didn’t quite fit in. The manager came over and asked me to kindly remove my hat. I was still tripping. I hardly ate any of my spaghetti after I noticed how it was wiggling on my plate.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 17
