Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  But if existence was not absurd, then it was planned, and that was even more absurd. By adopting John Lilly’s notion of the Earth Coincidence Control Office, I began to lose my own perspective. A couple of decades later, Lilly would dismiss his own concept. “Tooth problems,” he explained. “I was trying to get in touch with my teeth.”

  It turned out that those inexplicable things which had helped frighten me into a state of acute paranoia could be explained logically. The space creatures who were dividing up the ocean floor were actually people in wet suits, clam-digging with long rods in the mud. The Sheriff’s Department was never after me—they had been looking for a rapist in the area. The two men who intimidated me in my San Francisco basement room were from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—they were Treasury agents, and they thought I was Brian Rohan.

  In 1975, Squeaky Fromme tried to shoot President Gerald Ford. She was wearing a Red Riding Hood outfit, and I sent her a note in prison, teasing her about fading into the crowd. I wrote a piece for Rolling Stone titled “My Trip with Squeaky,” including a paragraph about Nathaniel Dight being in Naval Intelligence, posing as a hippie artist, and meeting with Tex Watson. Dight sued for libel, and my sources had to give depositions.

  Mae Brussell testified that I was “totally irresponsible” for publishing what she had told me.

  Mae was an extraordinary researcher. While her father, Edgar Magnin, senior rabbi at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, was entertaining Richard Nixon at his Beverly Hills home, Mae was busy revealing Nixon’s rise to power as an incredible conspiracy. In the summer of 1972, she told me that the ultimate purpose of all the assassinations was to get Ronald Reagan into the White House.

  But sometimes her heavy investment in conspiracy affected the objectivity of her perception. She was convinced that behind the death of John Belushi there was a conspiracy involving Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, who had both snorted cocaine with Belushi the night he died. I argued with Mae about this. After her death in 1988, I learned that, actually, the LAPD had been preparing a drug sting operation in which they planned to ensnare De Niro, Williams, and Belushi.

  In any case, Dight’s neighbor Louise was now in a state hospital. According to a psychiatric evaluation:Her feet are encased in the most unusual pair of slippers constructed of layers of garbage, including coffee grounds, bread crumbs, tea bags and lettuce and socks stiff with age and then plastic bags. The patient denies that this garb is out of the ordinary. In fact, she indicates that she was planning to use this foot gear as a pattern for a pair of slippers. She has related to the staff that she has been entered by the spirit of [Watergate burglar] James McCord and that she must die in order to free herself from this hex.

  I realized that she wouldn’t make a very good impression on the jury if she took the witness stand.

  Susan Atkins was deposed at the California Institute for Women:Q. Charles Manson, on occasion, he asked you or ordered you to sleep with men, whoever they might be, just men in general?

  A. Many times.

  Q. And Tex Watson did the same?

  A. No, he never ordered me to sleep with anybody.

  Q. So, on the occasion when you went to visit this friend of Tex Watson’s with Tex, it was not at Tex Watson’s request that you slept with this fellow?

  A. No. There was a mutual attraction.

  Q. So that was Charles Manson’s function, and no one else had that prerogative?

  A. Yes, I guess you could put it on that basis. I was kind of used, not kind of, I was used as a ploy to get guys to stay at the ranch. [She is shown a photo of Dight, whom she doesn’t recognize.] Can I say something? I don’t find him attractive at all to me, and I have this thing with men about overbites. I don’t like men with overbites.

  Dight was suing Rolling Stone for $450 million because he was never in Naval Intelligence. He claimed that my article caused him to lose interest in sex and his artwork. I considered pleading temporary insanity, but I realized that would be a cop-out. It was a moot point; the case was settled out of court for $100,000, and Rolling Stone published my letter of apology.

  Meanwhile, Charles Manson has become a cultural symbol. In surfer jargon, “a manson” means a crazy, reckless surfer. For comedians, Manson has become a generic joke reference. I asked him how he felt about that. He wrote back: “I don’t know what a generic is, Joke. I think I know what that means. That means you talk bad about Reagan or Bush. I’ve always ran poker games and whores and crime. I’m a crook. You make the reality in court and press. I just ride and play the cards that were pushed on me to play. Mass killer, it’s a job, what can I say.”

  During Manson’s lifelong career as a prison inmate, organized crime figures became his role models. He tossed horseshoes with Frank Costello, hung around with Frankie Carbo, and learned how to play the guitar from Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. On the night after the massacre of Sharon Tate and the others, Manson accompanied his family to kill supermarket mogul Leno LaBianca and his wife. Ostensibly, they were selected at random, but a police report showed that LaBianca was a heavy gambler. He owed $30,000 to Frankie Carbo’s organization. I asked Manson about a little black book he was supposed to get from LaBianca.

  He wrote back: “The black book was what CIA and a mob of market players had, Hollywood Park [race track] and numbers rackets to move in the Governor’s office legally.”

  I had always felt that there was some connection between Charlie’s executioners and their victims before the murders took place. I finally tracked down a reporter who told me that when she was hanging around with L.A. police, they showed her a porn video of Susan Atkins and Voytek Frykowski, even though, according to the myth, they had never met until the night of the massacre.

  But apparently the reporter mentioned the wrong victim, because when I asked Charlie directly—“Did Susan sleep with Frykowski?”—he replied: “You are ill advised and misled. Sebring done Susan’s hair and I think he sucked one or two of her dicks. I’m not sure who she was walking out from her stars and cages, that girl loves dick, you know what I mean, hon. Yul Brynner, Peter Sellers . . .”

  I checked the photos of Jay Sebring. He did not have an overbite.

  As I began to unwind from my psychotic episode, I could survey the damage I’d done. I had broken up with a girlfriend because I somehow convinced myself that the FBI had sent her to spy on me. She asked if we could at least have a dialogue, but that only made me more suspicious.

  When I found a new girlfriend, I actually asked if there was a microphone in her cat’s flea collar. Although I totally believed in the possibility at that instant, she of course thought I was just being my usual funny self. Twenty years later, I would read in an article by Harrison Salisbury in Penthouse that “the CIA wired a cat to eavesdrop on conversations. Micro sensing devices were installed in its body, and its tail was wired as an aerial. But it was hit by a car before it got into action.”

  The most serious transgression of rationality concerned my history with Lyle Stuart. He had broken off our friendship in 1964. When his wife, Mary Louise, died in 1969, I was devastated. I didn’t know what to do. So I just wrote a short note to Lyle: “I know the depth of your loss. I also know that you will smile again.” It had been well intentioned, but I was trivializing his grief. I was also circumventing my own pain. I had never quite recovered from the shock of their rejection. I kept trying in vain to recoup the relationship.

  Lyle gave me good advice. He said, “Friendship cannot be negotiated.”

  He had once published a collection of my interviews. When another publisher was readying an anthology of my pieces from The Realist, Lyle told them he had the rights to my next book and would sue. I had a letter from him somewhere, releasing me from that clause in our contract. I was desperate for money, but the new publisher was holding up my advance.

  Lyle thought he was being funny, but I thought he was being sadistic. I fantasized about having him killed. Then I figured that wouldn’t be ethica
l—I would have to do it myself. But the more I fantasized about it, the more I realized how self-centered I had become. To murder Lyle for being cruel to me would negate everything else in his life. I was shocked that I could have even considered taking anyone else’s life, especially somebody who had done so much for me.

  But now, years later, in the heat of my twisted psyche, I had lost the ability to trust, and somehow, as if to justify my severed relationship with Lyle, I managed to filter him into my occult conspiracy network. Because he had once published material on alternative ways of treating cancer in The Independent, yet Mary Louise had died of cancer, I reached the utterly insane conclusion that Lyle had made a deal with the Devil, sacrificing his own wife so that he could become a successful book publisher. I had to let him know that I knew, and yet some core of reality kept me from saying it outright, so instead I sent a message, a simple and shameful message: “The butler did it.”

  I had always considered myself to be a kind person. If I inadvertently gave somebody the wrong directions, it would bother me long after they had reached their correct destination.

  Once, at a KSFX party where the guests were about evenly divided between blacks and whites, we were all making the cliché racial-stereotype jokes—about tap dancing and eating watermelon and having giant penises—and everybody was laughing hysterically. Then, in the hallway, one black man said, “Hey, Paul.”

  “I don’t remember your name,” I pretended. “You all look alike.” I expected him to laugh, but he reacted as if I had punched him in the solar plexus with all my might. “Yeah,” he replied, bitterly, “we all do look alike.” Suddenly I realized that he had just arrived at the party and wasn’t in on the gag. I’ve never stopped feeling awful about that encounter.

  I wasn’t used to hurting people. And so, when I finally came to my senses about Lyle Stuart and the loss of Mary Louise, I was absolutely horrified that I had actually written, “The butler did it.” How could I have committed such a cruel act? Especially toward someone who had, in effect, saved my life? How could I have deliberately tried to hurt the man who had been my first intimate friend?

  I tried to trace back the roots of that intimacy. When I originally met Lyle in 1953, he had published an article in The Independent about how the Anti-Defamation League was secretly subsidizing anti-Semitic publications and then using them to scare contributions out of wealthy Jews. Lyle kept teasing me about being a spy for the ADL, but as our bonds deepened, we began to share our private thoughts.

  Now, after my sanity had returned, I was able to pinpoint a specific conversation that had marked for me the moment of true intimacy between us. We had been talking about Lyle’s relationship with Mary Louise. I admired the level of communication they maintained, but he said there were certain things that he couldn’t discuss with her. The example he gave was how horrendous it would be for him if she were to die. Now, as I recalled that conversation, I was totally shocked by the loss of empathy that had allowed me to sink to such an ironic depth of cruelty.

  Baba Ram Dass had dropped the Baba. He was now just plain Ram Dass. His father called him Rum Dum. His brother called him Rammed Ass. One afternoon Ram Dass was visiting me in Watsonville, and I taped our conversation.

  “In 1963,” I said, “I predicted as a joke that Tiny Tim would get married on the Johnny Carson show, and in 1969 it happened. You and I talked about that, and you called it ‘astral humor,’ but I never knew exactly what you meant by that phrase.”

  “Well, it’s like each plane of reality is in a sense a manifestation of a plane prior to it, and you can almost see it like layers, although to think of it in space is a fallacy because it’s all the same space, but you could think of it that way. And so there are beings on upper planes who are instruments of the law. I talk about miracles a lot, but I don’t live in the world of miracles, because they’re not miracles to me. I’m just dealing with the humor of the miracle concept from within the plane where it seems like a miracle, which is merely because of our very narrow concept of how the universe works.”

  Ram Dass knew of my involvement with conspiracy theory.

  “I’m just involved in a much greater conspiracy,” he continued. “You can’t grasp the size of the conspiracy I understand. But there’s no conspirator— it’s the wrong word. That’s why I say it’s just natural law. It is all perfect.”

  “Would you agree with the concept—what William Blake said, that humans were created ‘for joy and woe’—the implication of which is that there will always be suffering?”

  “I think that suffering is part of man’s condition, and that’s what the incarnation is about, and that’s what the human plane is.”

  And I asked Ram Dass, “If you and I were to exchange philosophies—if I believed in reincarnation and you didn’t—how do you think our behavior would change?”

  He paused for a moment. “Well,” he said, “if you believed in reincarnation, you would never ask a question like that.”

  And then his low chuckle of amusement and surprise blossomed into an uproarious belly laugh of delight and triumph as he savored the implications of his own Zen answer.

  I would find myself playing that segment of the tape with his bell-shaped spasm of laughter over and over again, like a favorite piece of music.

  I had wanted to explore the Charles Manson case, but ultimately I had to face the reality of my own peculiar darkness. Originally, I had wanted to expose the dangers of Scientology, but instead I joined a cult of conspiracy. I had been skulking around like the Ancient Mariner, waving my grungy albatross in front of people’s faces. I thought that what I had published was so important that I wanted to be persecuted, in order to validate the work. In the process, I had become attached to conspiracy.

  “My whole identity got tied up in plots,” I said to Ken Kesey.

  “Always stay in your own movie,” he advised.

  “Yeah, but I’ll tell you something—the FBI was right.”

  “About what?”

  “I am a raving, unconfined nut.”

  CHAPTER 10

  SHOWING PINK

  In May 1974, Flo Kennedy presented the Feminist Party Media Workshop Award: “To Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist. The longevity of which is a tribute to survival in a militaristic, genocidal, corrupt, police-state society. And with special recognition of his wit, humor, and irreverence.” It was an unintentional kiss of death—the May issue of The Realist turned out to be my final issue. I had never planned to stop publishing. I simply ran out of money and taboos. Circulation had dropped off. Readers wanted me to be funny, while I had become obsessed with conspiracy.

  “Sometimes you have to earn the right to be funny,” I wrote.

  In sixteen years of publishing, The Realist received two awards. One was from Playboy, for satire; the other was this one from the Feminist party, and I was particularly appreciative because I had always felt so strongly about equal rights. In 1959, I wrote, “From a completely idealistic viewpoint, the newspaper want ads should not have separate Male and Female classifications, with exceptions such as in the case of a wet-nurse.” In 1964, that double-standard practice became illegal. It was an early tremor of the women’s movement.

  In November 1977, I attended the first National Women’s Conference in Houston. There were more than four thousand delegates. Eldridge Cleaver was at the conference as an observer, but angry women surrounded him and chanted, “Out, rapist, out! Out, rapist, out!” Male TV reporters wearing makeup were busy interviewing female delegates who weren’t wearing makeup. Placards shouted slogans: adam was a rough draft! i own my body but i share! lesbians for wages for housework!”

  A counter-rally was held by anti-ERA leader Phyllis Schlafly, who had warned that the Women’s Conference would be “promoting witchcraft.” Her organization bought a half-page ad in two Houston papers, showing a little girl asking, “Mommy, when I grow up can I be a lesbian?” Ironically, Schlafly stayed at the same hotel as a lesbian motorcycle club, �
��Dykes on Bikes.”

  Over a thousand women stood in the rain to welcome a flaming torch that had been carried by a series of female runners for almost two months from Seneca Falls, New York, birthplace of the suffrage movement in 1848. Billie Jean King accepted the torch “as a symbol of what women can accomplish, not only in the world of sports, but in business, in government, and in the home.” Bella Abzug thundered, “All of us run here for equality, and we will never run for cover.” On the convention floor, there was a demand for the adoption of “Roberta’s Rules.”

  While the conference was in progress, the nemesis of feminism, Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, was flying in his private plane with Ruth Carter Stapleton, the evangelist sister of President Jimmy Carter. It was an alliance too outrageous for fiction. Hustler was, after all, the raunchiest men’s magazine on the market. In the evolution of popular pornography, magazines had started out showing breasts but not nipples, buttocks but not anuses—and never, never a vagina. Nor did pubic hair used to be all over the place. Even nudist magazines had once rendered men and women into department-store manikins without genitalia playing volleyball.

  The great pubic-hair breakthrough occurred first in Penthouse, and then Playboy. In a Playboy photo feature, “The Girls of Russia,” one of the models was gazing at her naked body in a dressing-room mirror, and although her crotch had been air-brushed out of existence, her reflection revealed a triangular patch of dark curly hair that would serve to open Pandora’s box wider and wider until Hustler eventually began “showing pink.” Flynt’s own wife, Althea, had shown pink in the pages of Hustler. Once issue even featured a Scratch ’n’ Sniff centerspread. When you scratched the spread-eagled model in her designated area, a scent of lilac bath oil emanated from her vulva.