Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Another question was, “Who first suggested putting LSD into the Chicago water supply?” And the answer was—me. An episode of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show revolved around the publication of an old photo of his mother sitting nude on Abbie Hoffman’s shoulders. Jerry Rubin appeared in a cameo spot on Saturday Night Live, selling “revolutionary wallpaper.” And an episode of Barney Miller would show a police inspector looking at an arrestee’s record and muttering, “A Yippie, huh?” He then read from the rap sheet: “Making bombs, inciting to riot . . .” That’s disinfotainment.

  Richard Nixon defeated both Hubert Humphrey and Pigasus in the 1968 election, and David Frye became a born-again impressionist. Although the nation had a new Republican president, a certain horrifying ritual continued as a bipartisan policy. My daughter, Holly, then four, was sitting on my lap one evening as I watched the CBS News, and there was Walter Cronkite, matter-of-factly reciting that week’s body count.

  “Daddy,” Holly asked, “is that happening in our universe?”

  It was Thursday again.

  Me in my Little Lord Fauntleroy suit.

  My parents. The original caption by my mother read “The awakening of love—ahem!”

  Here I am snuggled between my brother, George, and my sister, Marge.

  My brother and me, ready for a violin duel.

  Two views of Paul Maul, with functional prop.

  Here I am performing as myself at a benefit for the Los Angeles Free Press (Van Pelt)

  Discussing The Realist’s patriotic poster at the Radical Humor Conference.

  Lyle Stuart and me. Lyle was the most important influence on me as a journalist.

  Lenny Bruce and his daughter, Kitty. Lenny was the most important influence on me as a satirist.

  Jeanne Johnson and me, on our wedding day. (John Francis Putnam)

  With our daughter, Holly.

  Hanging around with comedian Bobcat Goldthwait before performing at a “Stop Contra Aid” concert. (Deirdre Walpare)

  Getting busted for stopping at a red light. (Maury Englander)

  Celebrating the Summer of Love at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. (Lisa Law)

  Burning a Photostat of my draft card during “An Evening with God” at the Village Theater in New York.

  (James Mc Graw)

  Abbie Hoffman and me conspiring. (Roz Payne)

  With Orli Peter, after living alone for eighteen years. (Perry Garfinkel)

  Mae Brussell, the queen of conspiracy research. (Barbara Brussell)

  Antiwar activist Rennie Davis (LEFT) had become a devotee of “the Perfect Master,” who was then fifteen years old. I challenged him to a debate at Millennium ’73 in the Houston Astrodome, “Resolved: that Guru Maharaj Ji and the Divine Light Mission serve to divert young people from social responsibility to personal escape.” The moderator was Berkeley Barb editor Ken Kelley. Rennie ignored me when I referred to his guru as “the Perfect Masturbator.”

  Wavy Gravy introduced me on graduation day at Pacific High where I delivered the commencement address. David Crosby had rented this alternative school in the Santa Cruz mountains for Wavy to be able to recover from his third spinal fusion. In 1973, students were taken to the UN conference on the environment in Stockholm.

  On top of the world with my daughter, Holly, at our secret mountain hideout in Oregon. (Annie Leibovitz)

  Ken Kesey had thrown the I Ching to determine the fate of the entire universe, but Holly, through sheer mental power, caused one of his coins to remain on edge. Kesey was forced to accept an uncertain future. (Annie Leibovitz)

  Old friends reunited to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road. (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) Allen Ginsberg, Tim Leary, myself, Abbie Hoffman, and William Burroughs. (Jerry Aronson)

  Picnicking in Grant Park, for the twentieth anniversary of the Democratic convention in Chicago. (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT) Abbie Hoffman, myself, Dave Dellinger, and Bobby Seale (Associated Press/Wide World)

  Chatting with musician Richie Havens, at the rally preceding a march to shut down the Nevada nuclear bomb test site in April 1992.

  (Lisa Law)

  Lindsay Wagner and me, at an American Heroes conference. She was the star of “The Bionic Woman.”

  Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” and me at a “Freedom to Read” event at Small World Books on the Venice Beach boardwalk.

  With my producer, Scott Kelman, and John Densmore, former drummer for The Doors. (Jay Green)

  With Peter Bergman and Harry Shearer for the “Peter, Paul, and Harry” show. (Jay Green)

  Dick Gregory and me. (Nancy Cain)

  Jules Feiffer and me. (Nancy Cain)

  My mother and me. (Bart Friedman)

  With Nancy Cain, my favorite biological quirk. (Jody Sibert)

  Holly, Dan, and Talia.

  Watching my granddaughter conducting invisible music.

  CHAPTER 8

  BURNING BRAS AND BRIDGES

  What was life like after Yippie? The trend was toward affinity groups. My affinity group was not very together. We didn’t know what actions to take. The London Bridge was being dismantled and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, and there was some joking about blowing it up after it was rebuilt in Arizona. We also considered breaking the windows of glazier shops around New York. But first we would have to steal a quantity of wristwatches with second hands so that we could practice synchronizing them.

  Actually, I was asked by antiwar activist Walter Teague to go on a more serious mission to Canada, to help arrange for an unofficial prisoner-of-war exchange. I was stopped and searched at the airport in Montreal. They found a card in my pocket bearing data about Ventnor Avenue. It was from a Monopoly game. I had found it on a subway train.

  “What’s this for?” asked a customs official.

  “It’s a deed. I’m a property owner.”

  They let me go. I was just too silly to fit their profile of a terrorist.

  At the meeting, everyone was being obsequiously respectful of the representative from North Vietnam. Someone asked how the negotiator, Madame Ti Binh, would get to Canada from Paris.

  “She’s gonna walk across the water,” I said.

  There was an awkward silence until the Vietnamese man walked over, smiling, and embraced me.

  “I like you,” he said. “You’re crazy.”

  The tension was relieved, and the others felt it was okay to laugh.

  Back in New York, Ben Morea and Tom Neumann of Black Mask, an anarchist group in New York whose members were all dressed in black, became the nucleus of an SDS street chapter named “Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers,” borrowing it from a line in a LeRoi Jones poem, “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stickup!”

  Whereas Black Mask had once issued a leaflet criticizing Tim Leary for being counterrevolutionary by advocating LSD, the Motherfuckers’ urban commune started taking acid and changed their position. They began to wear beads—all black beads at first, and later a variety of colors. They appointed themselves watchdogs of the Lower East Side, following police around to make sure they didn’t hassle citizens. Their red headbands were a precursor to the Guardian Angels’ red berets a decade later.

  When Bill Graham converted the Village Theater to the Fillmore East, the Motherfuckers demanded one free night a week. I accompanied Motherfucker Tom Neumann to a meeting with Graham, who asked, “What exactly do you want to do?”

  “Bomb! Shoot! Kill!” Neumann explained.

  I was embarrassed by this and added, “We thought you might like to contribute to the United Jewish Fund.”

  One night at the Fillmore East, the Living Theater participated in a benefit for the Columbia student radicals. But this was not the usual audience for their production of Paradise Now. Some folks in the audience were burning dollar bills before the actors chanted, “I cannot live without money.” They were undressing before the actors chanted, “I am not allowed to take my clothes off.” Joints were being passed
around openly before the actors chanted, “I am not allowed to smoke marijuana.” Suddenly, the Motherfuckers seized the stage to act out the leaflet they had distributed:Tonight the people return the theater to themselves. Originally our demands were modest, one night a week for the people of the FREE community. Bill Graham (who, within the archaic legal frames, was technically in control of the theater) refused our demands. Now we take what is ours anyway. The theater now belongs to the people, including Bill Graham. We must preserve this liberated territory. Now!

  Graham came onstage and shouted, “You’ll never take this building by force! You’ll have to kill me!”

  Naturally, folks in the audience called out, “Kill him! Kill him!” This was more than the Living Theater had bargained for. “Burn it down!” they screamed. “Burn it down!”

  A riot could break out any minute. Journalist Michael Thomas wrote:And Paul Krassner, laughing, because that’s what he does best, was standing backstage in this denim outfit he wears, like a love-soiled prison guard, saying how he was scheduled to speak after the Living Theater, but he’d rather take his chances at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King while wearing a George Wallace button.

  I did go onstage, though, and found myself arguing with the Motherfuckers about the Hare Krishnas.

  Motherfucker Ben Morea shouted, “There’s no place for religion in the revolution!”

  “Bullshit,” I shouted back. “Tell it to the Buddhist monks and nuns who set fire to themselves!”

  Speaking of which, when I interviewed Woody Allen in 1965, our session concluded this way:Q. Are you concerned about the population explosion?

  A. No, I’m not. I mean, I recognize it as a problem which those who like that area can fool around with. I doubt if there’s anything I can do about the population explosion, or about the atom bomb, besides vote when the time comes, and I contribute money to those organizations who spend their days in active pursuit of ends that I’m in agreement with. But that’s all. And I’m not going to set fire to myself.

  Q. But do you agree with the motivation of the Buddhist monks who set fire to themselves in Vietnam?

  A. I don’t think so. No, I think that they don’t know what they’re doing. I think they’re nuts. That’s not the answer. When all is said and done, it’s not the answer. When you’re home at night and you say to yourself, “Tomorrow morning I’ll get up at eight o’clock and set fire to myself,” there’s something wrong. I wouldn’t do it that way.

  I can see dying for a principle, but not that way. At the very minimum, if you are going to die for something, you should at least take one of them with you. Go back to the Jews in Germany. If you have a loaded gun in your home, and the state comes to get you, you can at least get two or three of them.

  I’m not opposed to violence as a course of action in many instances. Sometimes passive resistance is fine, but violence in its place is a good and necessary thing. But setting fire to yourself is not the answer. With my luck, I would be un-inflammable.

  Anyway, Bill Graham, having a keen sense of community, ultimately gave the Motherfuckers their free night at Fillmore East. Each week a band would play, and then the Motherfuckers would do a commercial for the revolution.

  Howard Rasmussen was not his real name. Actually, he was an FBI agent working in their New York office. One day in October 1968, he was reading Life magazine. He saw those photos of me—playing basketball in my loft, lying on the floor of an airport—accompanying a complimentary article. Then he sat down at his typewriter, creatively trying to choose every word so carefully that it would reek of credibility, as he composed the following letter to the editor of Life on plain stationery:Sirs:

  Your recent issue (October 4th), which devoted three pages to the aggrandizement of underground editor (?) Paul Krassner, was too, too much. You must be hard up for material. Am I asking the impossible by requesting that Krassner and his ilk be left in the sewers where they belong? That a national magazine of your fine reputation (till now that is) would waste time and effort on the cuckoo editor of an unimportant, smutty little rag is incomprehensible to me.

  Gentlemen, you must be aware that The Realist is nothing more than blatant obscenity. Your feature editor would do well to read a few back issues of The Realist. Try the article in 1963 [sic] following the assassination of President Kennedy, which describes disgusting necrophilism on the part of LBJ. To classify Krassner as some sort of “social rebel” is far too cute. He’s a nut, a raving, unconfined nut.

  As for any possible intellectual rewards to be gleaned from The Realist—much better prose may be found on lavatory walls. If this article is a portent of things to come in Life, count me out, gentlemen, count me out.

  Howard Rasmussen

  Brooklyn College

  School of General Studies

  Before he could be permitted to mail the letter to Life, he was required to send a copy of it to FBI headquarters in Washington, along with this memorandum: The 10/4/68 issue of Life magazine contained a three page feature on Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist and self-styled “hippie.” Krassner is carried on the RI [Round-up Index] of the NYO [New York Office].

  Bureau authority is requested to send the following letter to the editors of Life on an anonymous basis. It is noted that the Life article was favorable to Krassner.

  Howard Rasmussen was merely doing his job, writing that poison pen letter, but is that how taxpayers’ money was supposed to be spent? I had broken no law. The return memo—approved by J. Edgar Hoover’s top two assistants, Kartha DeLoach and William Sullivan—was addressed to Mr. Floyd and Mr. Shackelford at the New York office. It stated:Authority is granted to send a letter, signed with a fictitious name, to the editors of Life magazine. Furnish the Bureau the results of your action.

  NOTE: Krassner is the Editor of The Realist and is one of the moving forces behind the Youth International Party, commonly known as the Yippies. Krassner is a spokesman for the New Left. Life magazine recently ran an article favorable to him.

  New York’s proposed letter takes issue with the publishing of this article and points out that the The Realist is obscene and that Krassner is a nut. This letter could, if printed by Life, call attention to the unsavory character of Krassner.

  Life magazine never published Howard Rasmussen’s letter to the editor. However, they did publish this letter:Regarding your article on that filthy-mouthed, dope-taking, pinko-anarchist, pope-baiting, Yippie-lover: cancel my subscription immediately!

  Paul Krassner

  The Realist

  There were Howard Rasmussens all over the place. One memo tried to smear Tom Hayden with the worst possible label they could invoke—“FBI informer.” The FBI distributed a caricature depicting Black Panther leader Huey Newton “as a homosexual,” and ran a fake “Pick the Fag” contest, referring to Dave McReynolds as “Chief White Fag of the lily-white War Resisters League” and “the usual Queer Cats—like Sweet Dave Dellinger and Fruity Rennie Davis.”

  The FBI always took pains to instruct agents to “insure mailing material utilized and paper on which leaflet is prepared cannot be traced to the Bureau.” In that context, “Bureau authority was received for New York to prepare and mail anonymously a letter regarding [an individual’s] sexual liaison with his step-daughter (Age 13) to educational authorities in New Jersey” where he was a teacher.

  In 1969, the FBI’s previous attempt at mere character assassination of me escalated to a slightly more literal approach. This was not included in my own Co-Intel-Pro (Counter-Intelligence Program) files but, rather, discovered elsewhere by Sam Leff. At the Chicago convention, Leff had erased the line between anthropologist and activist. Later, as a Yippie archivist, he investigated a separate FBI project calculated to cause rifts between the black and Jewish communities.

  He found this: Julius Lester had allowed a black teacher to read an anti-Semitic poem on his program over WBAI in order to showcase an artistic expression of
the outrage behind that point of view. As a result, the station was picketed. The FBI reprinted the poem on a flyer with the photo of a picketer holding a placard reading do not use jews for scapegoats.

  This leaflet was “aimed at individuals of Jewish background active in the New Left and who, until recently, gave open sympathy to Lester’s revolutionary ideas.” Then the FBI produced a wanted poster featuring a large swastika. In the four square spaces of the swastika were photos of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd of SDS, and myself. Underneath the swastika was this message:LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES!