Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  We were all completely zonked out of our minds in the middle of the Nile. The Egyptians kept us dizzy on hash and we in turn gave them acid. The old man mumbled something—our translator explained, “He says he’s seeing strange things”—and gave me the handle of the rudder to steer, which I managed to do in my stoned stupor. The felucca was a vehicle of our cultural exchange.

  While I was still unwinding from my experience at Hustler, I had been simultaneously adapting to Egyptian consciousness, where a woman had to be clothed from head to foot with a chador so that only her eyes were showing. The mere sight of her flesh was officially barred because it could create anxiety and excitement in a man.

  A woman was not permitted to worship with men because her presence would serve as a distraction from Allah. Nikki Scully of our group decided to walk around the streets of Cairo wearing a chador. She said that the nonverbal message she kept getting from her eye contact with the Egyptian women was: We are one! We are one! We are one! Of course, she might well have been projecting her own feminist attitude.

  Coincidentally, Ruth Carter Stapleton was visiting Egypt. She had been conducting prayer meetings and inner healing sessions. When Washington Post reporter Rudy Maxa told her I was in Cairo, she asked him to invite me to meet with her. “After all,” she said, “mine is supposed to be a ministry of reconciliation, isn’t it?”

  But when Maxa wrote in the Post that “only the inability to determine Krassner’s whereabouts saved him from a dose of inner healing at the base of the Pyramids that afternoon,” he had no idea that I’d been tripping on LSD and chanting inside the Pyramid that same afternoon.

  On the return flight from Egypt, we ate whatever dope was left, and had an extremely pleasant trip. I joined the Mile High Club, making out with Mobilia Growlight in the airplane bathroom.

  “This,” said Mobilia, “is really flying United.” She didn’t know that it was an old Bob Hope joke.

  Back in the States, I wrote to Ruth Carter Stapleton, expressing my surprise that she wanted to meet me inasmuch as she had previously asked Larry Flynt to fire me. She phoned in response to my letter.

  “I want to apologize,” she said. “I had been advised that you were not the correct individual to change the image of Hustler, but I shouldn’t have judged you before I met you. I don’t usually judge people before I meet them.”

  “Well, if you were a true Christian,” I teased, “you wouldn’t judge me even after we met.”

  She laughed graciously. Then we talked about the blatant contrast between Hustler and Egypt.

  “I went from one extreme to the other,” I told her. “It was like getting out of a hot sauna and jumping into the freezing snow.”

  “How do you mean that?”

  “Well, I had gone from showing pink to wearing chador.”

  Larry Flynt had started out as the son of a simple sharecropper. A facsimile of the shack he lived in would be constructed in the basement of his mansion in Ohio. He lost his virginity to a chicken at the age of fourteen. When he married Althea, he arranged for a chicken to be a guest at their wedding.

  In 1984 a grand jury indicted Joseph Paul Franklin for shooting Flynt and his attorney. Investigators said the possible motive was his anger over sexually explicit photos of interracial couples in Hustler. There has never been a trial, because he is already serving two life terms at a maximum security prison, for racist killings.

  Flynt published a parody of a Dewar profile ad, claiming that Reverend Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, had lost his virginity with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued, and a court awarded him $200,000, not for libel but for malice. The case ended up before the Supreme Court, while Flynt was sitting in a wheelchair, wearing an American flag diaper, and calling members of the court “eight assholes and a cunt.”

  Nevertheless, the Court voted unanimously in favor of Flynt, overturning the lower court’s decision. Otherwise, it would have established an awful precedent that could apply to Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip. If Falwell’s feelings had been hurt, that was simply the risk of democracy.

  When Flynt became a born-again Christian and was praying to Jesus, he recalls, “I promised to give up my wife for Him. I promised to see myself castrated, to look down and see myself with no sexual organs and look up and say, ‘Yes, God, it’s okay, if that’s Your will, that’s fine.’ I spoke in tongues. There were animals eating at my neck, like baboons and monkeys, gnawing at me. He told me my calling—to bring peace to earth.”

  Larry Flynt’s prayers were answered. Althea became heavily addicted to narcotics, and in 1987 she drowned in a bathtub. Flynt had a penile implant and married a mail-order bride. He now attributes his conversion to “a chemical imbalance” in his brain.

  Postscript:

  I still like pubic hair, but Internet porn sites now present several choices—completely shaved, vertical landing strips that look like exclamation points, heart-shaped, the Charlie Chaplin with just a little patch above the clitoris, and a tiny triangle that serves as an arrow pointing to the clit—yet, for a full bush, one would have to search the Web for “hairy” sites that are considered as “specialty,” “kinky,” or “fetish.” The bald-pussy trend has gone mainstream, though Joy Behar observed that “no pubic hair creates a wind tunnel.”

  CHAPTER 11

  HOLLY TOMOLLY

  Holly’s first word was “more.” Her second word was “titty.” After my marriage with Jeanne broke up, I continued to be haunted by the memory of her nursing Holly with one breast while I suckled the other. It was one of the sweetest feelings of my life, and my heart would flash upon that memory every time I witnessed Holly’s childhood innocence fading away.

  The first time it happened, we were having lunch in Greenwich Village, at a sidewalk café across the street from the Women’s House of Detention. From behind the barred windows of an upper floor, inmates were shouting curses at their fate and tourists alike.

  Holly asked, “Daddy, were there supposed to be jails?”

  It happened again at a peace rally. “Isn’t war stupid?” she asked. I was carrying Holly and a placard with a large illustration of The Realist’s worried-looking birdlike icon, Sir Realist. She observed a group of young people with tambourines, singing “Hare Krishna” over and over. “It sounds like they’re saying my name,” she said, and then we started singing, “Holly Krassner, Holly Krassner . . .”

  Valerie Solanas served as an angry harbinger of the feminist revolution. She wore a man’s outfit and her hair was stuffed under a Bob Dylan cap. When she walked into Andy Warhol’s office to persuade him to make a film of a rather raunchy play she’d written, he accused her of being a cop. “And here’s my badge,” Valerie replied, unzipping her fly to expose her vulva. Previously she had telephoned him, and he invited her up to his famous loft because he thought her title, Up from the Slime, was so wonderful.

  Originally, she had sent her manuscript to The Realist. I rejected it, but we met at the Chelsea Hotel and had lunch. Valerie hated men. She told me of her “organization”—SCUM—the Society for Cutting Up Men, and her plan to herd all the men in the world and keep them caged up for the purpose of stud farming. Now she had written The SCUM Manifesto, a document of heavy-handed proselytization. Sympathizing with the anguish of a pamphleteer, I lent her $50, not expecting her to pay it back. That was on Friday, May 31, 1968.

  On Monday, June 3, I went to Jeanne’s apartment to pick up Holly for lunch. She was now four years old. First we stopped at Woolworth’s on 14th Street. Holly had seen a propeller beanie advertised on Romper Room, and I promised to buy her one. There was only one beanie left, but one of its two propellers was broken off.

  I told Holly, “We can wait and get one that’s not broken another time, or we can get the broken one now if you don’t mind.”

  “I mind,” she said, meaning she didn’t mind.

  We headed east—Holly wearing her new broken beanie and carrying the other propeller in her hand—turned lef
t on Union Square, and happened upon Valerie Solanas on 16th Street, just a block away from Andy Warhol’s place. She seemed less tomboyish than usual. Her Dylan cap was gone; her hair had been cut and styled in a feminine fashion. She seemed calm, friendly, in good spirits. We talked a little while about nothing special, then said goodbye, and I took Holly to Brownie’s, a vegetarian restaurant. Valerie headed west. Five minutes later, Holly and I were seated at a table, and Valerie walked in.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah, I do mind, actually, but only because I don’t get a chance to see my daughter that much.”

  “Okay, I understand,” she said, and left.

  Holly was confused by the use of the word mind.

  “That lady wanted to join us,” she observed.

  “I know, but I wanna be alone with you.”

  Holly smiled. “And I wanna be alone with you.”

  This was at 11:30 in the morning. Three hours later, Valerie went looking for Andy Warhol, but he wasn’t there. Two hours after that, she found him and shot him. For all I knew, she had bought the gun with the money I’d lent her. It turned out she borrowed it from Motherfucker Ben Morea.

  If I had known when she wanted to join us that Valerie’s intention was to shoot Warhol, who knows, I might have been able to talk her out of it. Was she actually asking me for help in the restaurant? Or did she simply want company? That would’ve been a switch; she usually charged lonely men on the street $6 for an hour of conversation.

  Could my quasi-rejection of Valerie have been the final straw? Maybe Andy Warhol was just a victim of her displaced hostility. Still, he had been the source of her persecution fantasies. She convinced herself that he was responsible for her literary difficulties.

  Then again, she could’ve shot me—and Holly—right there in the restaurant. “Whattaya mean, I can’t join you for lunch?” Bang! Bang! That easy. That absurd. That horrific.

  In a 1996 interview with actor Taylor Mead, Warhol cohort Paul Morrissey said, “In the spring of 1968, Solanas approached underground newspaper publisher Paul Krassner for money, saying, ‘I want to shoot [Olympia Press publisher] Maurice Girodias.’ He gave her $50, enough for a .32 automatic pistol.”

  One day Holly unintentionally inflicted a severe emotional wound on me. She simply said—referring to the guy Jeanne was living with—“I have two daddies now.” A terrible sense of loss went searing through my psyche. Moreover, if I was visiting at her apartment, Jeanne would ask me to leave before Holly’s other “father” got home.

  After I moved to California, whenever Holly and I talked on the phone we would always end with a big “wowee” hug. She would write to me about how she went to Central Park and climbed on the rocks like a monkey, and how she got dressed as a witch on Halloween. She signed all her letters, Holly Tomolly.

  The first summer that she came to stay with me, when she was seven, one afternoon she said, “Daddy, let’s kiss the way they do in the movies and on TV.”

  “Well, what do you mean?” I asked, trying to hide my discomfort.

  “Like this,” she answered, putting her arms around me, her little lips directly on mine, moving her head around just like they did in the movies and on TV. Then we both giggled, and that was all there was to it, but somehow I felt grateful that nobody had walked in on us. “Listen,” I fantasized, “this was her idea. She was the aggressive one . . .”

  When she was eight, a man exposed himself to Holly. The police asked her to describe him. She said that he was cross-eyed. The cops wanted to know if she remembered anything else about him.

  “It was big and hairy,” she said.

  By the time she was nine, Holly was a true anarchist. She wouldn’t even accept the rules of games. She challenged Stewart Brand to play a game of checkers with each of their checkers half red and half black. She also insisted on playing tic-tac-toe blindfolded. But her supreme moment came when she wanted to play hide-and-go-seek while riding in a taxicab.

  She would also ask me great questions, like, “Is laziness a form of hypochondria?”

  When Holly was ten, on one of my visits to New York I took her and Jeanne out for dinner.

  “Mommy told me all about sex,” Holly announced in the restaurant.

  “Oh, really? What did you learn?”

  “Oh, she told me about orgasms and blow jobs.”

  I blushed. They laughed.

  In 1975, when Holly was eleven, she decided to come stay with me in San Francisco for a whole year. This was a courageous move for her—new city, new school, new friends. Her best new friend was Pia Hinckle—whose father, Warren, was now editing City magazine, published by Francis Ford Coppola. It was the film director’s brief foray into print journalism. The girls used the City color photocopying machine to reproduce dollar bills.

  Holly and Pia enjoyed playing tricks. Once they rolled a marijuana joint for me, filled with herbal tea. Actually, I had a healthy stash of pot in my desk drawer, but mice kept getting inside and eating right through the baggie in order to get their cannabis fix. I would find mouse turds in the drawer each day. We had no mousetrap, but Holly had an idea.

  “Doesn’t the mouse get the munchies after eating the marijuana?”

  So we left on the floor a large paper bag containing a piece of cheese and a lollipop. Sure enough, in the evening we would hear the mouse rustling inside the paper bag, and I’d capture it by closing the top before it could get out. Then we would bring the bag with the stoned mouse out to an empty lot across the street and let it go free, only to be caught sooner or later by a stray cat who in turn would get zonked out from having eaten a stoned mouse. Although we had literally invented a better mousetrap—a nonviolent one—the world wasn’t exactly beating a path to our door.

  I had been performing occasionally, and naturally that experience turned into a bit onstage. I would weave an imaginary story about how I had found myself getting especially stoned on this stash but couldn’t figure out what made it so powerful, so I sent a sample to Pharm-Chem, a sort of People’s FDA, and they said that a preliminary test showed there was an additive in my marijuana.

  They could ascertain only that it was organic, but further testing indicated that it was mouse turds, so I began to entice the mice by leaving marijuana out and capturing them with the old lollipop-in-the-bag ploy. I would collect their turds till I had enough to roll a dynamite joint. I had discovered a new and cheap way of getting high—smoking mouse turds.

  I decided to present a comedic equivalent to Tony Orlando and Dawn. What stand-up comic had ever featured backup singers before? I held an informal rehearsal with Holly and Pia for the debut of Paul Krassner and Dusk. They choreographed their own dance steps to perform behind me, singing the appropriate doo-ah doo-ahs, while I proceeded to tell the tale of my discovery of a new way to get high at no expense except for a lollipop and rolling papers, culminating with a spectacular musical chant by Dusk—“Mouse turds! Mouse turds! Mouse turds!”—as they rhythmically flailed their arms in the air.

  At another show, a local Rolling Stone “No Talent Contest,” I decided to play my musical saw for the first time publicly. As I was putting resin on the bow, I confessed to the audience, “This is slightly humiliating for a child prodigy violinist, but . . .” And then I surrendered to an impulse, just as I had done at Carnegie Hall. Instead of playing “Indian Love Call” as I had practiced, I simply sawed my bow in half.

  Holly berated me for wasting money like that, and I promised never to do it again.

  Our apartment was halfway up a long, steep hill, and in the back was what Holly called “our magic garden.” States Street was just off the intersection of Castro and Market—the heart of the gay ghetto—and there was a Chinese laundry at the foot of the hill called the Gay Launderette which, even though it had changed owners several times, always kept that name for goodwill.

  There was a clothing store named Does Your Mother Know? And a bulletin board announcing an “Anal Awar
eness and Relaxation Workshop.” And jokes that gays told about themselves, like, “Why do the Castro clones all have mustaches?” The answer: “To hide the stretch marks.”

  Warren Hinckle introduced me to Harvey Milk at his camera shop, and I watched him develop into the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King. Had he lived, he might have been elected the first openly gay mayor.

  Holly took classes in computer math and trampoline, chemistry and gymnastics, played clarinet in the orchestra, took pantomime lessons, and on Saturdays she fed the animals at the Junior Museum across the street from our home. Once an iguana bit her on the hand, and I worried that Jeanne would think I wasn’t taking proper care of her.

  Holly and I enjoyed walking around and exploring the charms of San Francisco. She would read aloud the signs in store windows: “Yes, we’re open.” “Sorry, we’re closed.” But she would cover her eyes to avoid memorizing the phone number on the side of a delivery truck—something I had done as a kid myself, although she was imitating her mother.

  Another time we crossed a street, and she made the same philosophical observation that sages across the ages have made. “No matter where I go, I’m always there.” If I would spit in the gutter, she would not only imitate me, she would spit backward over her shoulder. We would walk along harmonizing the Grateful Dead song “Ripple”—not the lyrics, just “wa, wa, wa, wa . . .”

  Holly was thinking about getting a kitten, but she didn’t want to have it spayed. “If you had Mommy spayed,” she explained, “I wouldn’t even be here today.” When I was Holly’s age, I still didn’t even know where babies came from. But she had learned about the basic facts of human reproduction when she was three, and now here we were, discussing the implications of abortion.

  Holly was a very physical girl. She loved to have her back scratched, and we would always hold hands when we walked. Of course, men in the gay ghetto felt free to be equally affectionate.