Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  How proud could a father get?

  And, whenever I found myself looking lustfully at a teenager, I would automatically hear Holly’s voice saying, “Daddy, she’s my age!”

  I continued to perform occasionally. When I was booked in Minneapolis, I spent the afternoon hanging around the indoor mall, soaking up atmosphere, and gathering last-minute material. The men’s room in the mall had a long one-way mirror in front of the urinals, so that while I stood there peeing, I could watch people walking casually by. It was surrealistic to be shaking out those last few drops of urine while a woman who couldn’t see me appeared to be looking right at me as she applied her lipstick.

  When I returned to my motel, there was a message that Holly had phoned. I called her back. She was about to be taken to the hospital by a neighbor. She had been bitten by a spider and her arm was painfully swollen. I called again later, right before my show, and she was crying because a doctor had told her that if the infection reached the bone her arm could be paralyzed. Somehow I went onstage and did a surprisingly good show, perhaps because I had to concentrate so hard in order to keep my emotions on hold.

  The next morning, in my motel room, I got a call from Jeanne. “I’ve raised that girl for seventeen years, and now you’re killing her.” I could see my jaw drop in the mirror. I was absolutely speechless. “Paul”—I heard Jeanne’s voice say—“you’re not laughing.” She had zeroed in on the core of my vulnerability, but the relief that she was only joking was worth the tension of that brief moment when I thought she was serious.

  There was a line I sometimes used onstage: “Pope John Paul has issued a pronunciamento that, under extreme circumstances, a one-night stand may be considered a form of monogamy.” And that’s exactly what happened when I performed in another city—instant intimacy. Now, a few months after one such encounter with a young woman named Bernadette, I got a call from her. She was planning to visit San Francisco and wanted to stay with me. She confessed to having fantasies of being spanked by me.

  When I was a kid, my father bought a cat-o’-nine-tails—a stick with nine little leather whips—which he used to punish my brother, my sister, and me. I was lucky enough to understand on some gut level that he was a victim of his own conditioning. When he finally realized that he couldn’t break us, he broke the cat-o’-nine-tails and threw it away.

  After Holly was born, I began researching child abuse for The Realist, and learned that those parents who abused their offspring had consistently been abused by their parents, so that the practice was passed on from one generation to another, as if it were in the genes rather than imitative behavior. But I never had the slightest doubt that I would break that pattern.

  When I was a guest on The Mike Douglas Show, I mentioned that I didn’t spank my daughter, and the matronly audience started booing me. During a commercial break, another guest, Minnie Pearl of Grand Ole Opry fame, said to me, “I’m a’scared of nonconformity.” I was surprised.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “You’re wearing a bonnet with the price tag still hanging from it.”

  So now here was Bernadette on the phone saying, “I’ve been having fantasies of being spanked by you. Would you do it?”

  “But,” I protested, “I’m nonviolent.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  I asked, “Were you spanked as a child? I have this theory that when kids get spanked, but then the parent feels guilty and hugs them, the kids begin to associate pain with warmth.”

  “I wasn’t spanked as a child,” she said.

  “Well, there goes that theory.” Women were now asserting themselves and saying out loud what pleased them sexually. And men were expected to do those things which women were now free to tell them they wanted. “All right,” I said, “when you visit, I promise I’ll spank you. But when you say stop, I promise I’ll stop.”

  “No, no—don’t say that. It’s the vulnerability that turns me on.”

  “Yeah, but it’s fake vulnerability, because you trust me. I mean, you didn’t call Melvin the Mauler.”

  She never did visit, but I fantasized about it. I imagined that in my room I would be spanking a twenty-seven-year-old woman, while in another room slept my seventeen-year-old daughter, who I had gotten booed by the audience on The Mike Douglas Show for not spanking.

  Economic security had always been very important in my family. My father moonlighted as a short-order cook, and he used to put three piles of change from his tips on the floor, for my brother, my sister, and me. When my parents came back from a vacation in Las Vegas, my father gave each of us a silver dollar, with the admonition, “You are never to spend this. It’s a reminder that you can always come to your mother and me if you ever need money.” So now I passed on my silver dollar to Holly, with that same admonition, thereby carrying on my father’s tradition.

  The year 1982 became a turning point for both Holly and me. She was celebrating her eighteenth birthday, and I was mourning my fiftieth. On January 23, I presented her with one of those novelty newspaper front pages bearing the headline “Holly Krassner Becomes Legal!”

  On April 9, she presented me with a foot massager, a gift certificate for ice cream, and several pads so I could write down all her telephone messages. I had been somewhat melancholy as I approached the half-century mark, brooding over projects that had remained long undone and regretting relationships that had never been properly nurtured. I was rationalizing my current spate of celibacy when Holly gave me some advice.

  “Dad, have fun while you’re young. Not having fun is what makes you older.”

  So I started going out again. One afternoon Holly came home with her new boyfriend, only to find me in bed with my new girlfriend, who felt slightly awkward.

  “It’s all right,” Holly reassured her. “I’m a liberal daughter.”

  “I’m glad you guys are here,” I said. “My cock is about to fall off.”

  “I’m glad we’re here,” Holly’s boyfriend replied. “My cock is about to fall off.”

  We all laughed heartily, but I felt some kind of archetypal discomfort at this reference to his sexual prowess with my daughter, as though some unspoken primordial taboo had just been shattered. But I was the one who had triggered it.

  Holly began to remind me more and more of her mother. The way she walked, the way she said certain words—like “wonderful”—the way she prepared food, biting the ends off string beans, then spitting them into the sink. She could even fit twenty-four checkers into her mouth.

  One day I noticed that the wedding photo of Jeanne and me was missing from the wall behind Holly’s bed. At first I thought it might be a symbolic gesture of adolescent independence, but she explained that a friend had brought over some cocaine, and they used the glass on the frame to chop it up with a razor blade. “But you can’t write about that,” she quickly added.

  We had an agreement that Holly could approve anything I wrote about her, because, after all, you can’t tell your own daughter, “Nyah, nyah, you forgot to say that was off the record.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “It would show how you don’t have any false sentimentality, and that we communicate with such honesty.”

  “I just don’t want people to think I’m a dope-head.”

  “What difference does it make what other people think? You know, there was a time when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were getting a lot of bad publicity, and they were really upset about it, so I gave them this little strip of paper from a Chinese fortune cookie that I’d been carrying around. It said, If you are standing straight, it doesn’t matter if your shadow is crooked. But look, of course I’ll respect our agreement.”

  However, Holly had a heavy date that evening, and she couldn’t find her car keys. She was starting to panic.

  “Dad,” she said, “if you can find my car keys, you can tell the coke story, okay?”

  I found her car keys, but I told her she didn’t have to keep her part of the bargain. She insisted on keeping it, though.


  Holly was nineteen when she decided to leave San Francisco and go to school in London. I finally removed the spaghetti from my kitchen ceiling. It had been sticking up there for two years. And Ken Kesey came over and removed from the wall my photo of the napalmed child and his mother. It had remained there for twelve years.

  Before Holly left, I did another show at the Roxie Theater. She checked the sound system, made sure there was a stool and that I had a glass of orange juice. “Dad,” she said, just as I was about to go onstage, “I have to tell you something. I’m not yours.”

  I was going through some sort of midlife crisis. I missed Holly, I missed publishing The Realist, I missed having a girlfriend. Then I met Rachel Hickerson. She was a writer who used the pseudonym Pheno Barbidol. We were both scheduled to be in New York at the same time, and arranged to spend a few days together.

  When I returned to San Francisco, I called and asked her to marry me, and she said yes. Radio personality Alex Bennett agreed to perform the wedding ceremony on his morning radio show, and Herb Caen announced it in his column. This all sounded like great fun in the media, but in reality it was a terrible romantic illusion. We hardly knew each other. I kept asking myself, What have I done? I had apparently lost my sense of cause and effect. Rachel stayed at my apartment for six schizophrenic weeks, with me serving as both the cause of her pain and the source of her comfort.

  I might just as well have abducted Rachel. She was a culmination of the way my relationships with women had become an extension of my relationship with pornography. Each new magazine—and each new woman—was like an investment, and of course I wanted a return on that investment. Then I would discard a woman as easily as a porn magazine.

  I had lived alone for the eighteen years since my marriage ended, always holding back commitment from every new girlfriend as though intimacy would still be a betrayal of Jeanne. Now I was determined to break that pattern.

  Right after Christmas 1983, I was booked as the opening act for Professor Irwin Corey, the elderly “world’s foremost authority,” in a four-day run at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley. Backstage, Corey and I smoked a joint, and he told me how he used to read Nazi hate literature to get him in the mood to perform. Rachel came to the theater with me a couple of times, but not on closing night, when I met Orli Peter, a graduate student in psychology.

  Although we only talked briefly, there was an electric spark between us. We were supposed to get together, but Rachel was still living at my apartment, and I kept postponing my first date with Orli. Finally, on the day before Rachel was gong to leave, Orli called (actually, it was her sister, pretending to be Orli), insisting we meet either that evening or the next. Naturally I chose the next evening. Rachel left at 4 pm the next day, and Orli arrived at eight o’clock. I was amazed at my own resilience.

  Orli and I ended up living together. Our relationship was confrontational but fun. There was an age difference—I was fifty-two and she was twenty-eight—which was not really a problem, but she wanted to have children someday, and I was extremely ambivalent about starting a new family at this stage in my life. Jeanne gave me her blessing.

  “Good luck,” she said, “you’ll just be an old fart with a young kid.”

  In 1985 I sent a letter to Holly in London, and this was her response:Dear Dad,

  I received your “father-to-daughter-turning-21” birthday letter. Thank you, it made me laugh & cry. Only moments before the mailman slipped the letter through the door I was telling my friend what wonderful parents I had & how much I missed them—what timing. I think it’s wonderful that you & Orli have been together a whole year now, she must be an incredible lady. I love you very very much, not only because you are my father but because you are also a wonderful friend. What a surprise to find out you are actually considering raising a family.

  I know that I’ve always wanted to be your only child—but that’s pure daughter selfishness. I’ve always been my daddy’s little girl, in all the years I didn’t live with you, in the few years I did, & even now, turning 21, living so far away, I am & will always be your little girl. I guess I’m now at an age that I can take care of myself & I guess you are too. As you said—your kids could play with mine—what a funny idea. Just make sure that’s what you really want before you do it. I suppose this is my daughter-to-father lecture. Regardless of the fact that I grew up with my parents separated & slightly crazy, I can’t imagine anyone loving their father & mother more than I love mine, nor can I imagine having grown up differently.

  So—if I’m about to have any more brothers or sisters I want them to have the same happiness & the same strength (without needing it so much) that I have had. They couldn’t ask for a better father although I can hardly conceive the idea of you changing diapers & playing baseball in the park. I’m sure Orli would be a wonderful mother, although I haven’t met her yet. I know what you’re like so I can only guess what a woman living with you would be like. I also know that out of all the girlfriends you have had you couldn’t have picked anyone better to be my mother.

  I just don’t want you to do anything rash. I do remember a wedding announcement a little over a year ago which has long since been forgotten. You must realize by now that us kids—well—we’re a lifelong commitment. You’re right, it is a hard but enjoyable process to know what you really want (sometimes). I have complete faith in you & I’m sure you’ll make the right choice. Don’t worry about my daughter selfishness, my support is with you whatever you do.

  I think I had to write all this down because your letter was such a shock to me, not a bad shock, more of a surprise. No matter what happens I love you lots & it will be a real trip for both of us to see what I do with my life.

  Holly’s letter forced me to admit that I really didn’t want to be a new daddy. Us kids—well—we’re a lifelong commitment. I realized that I simply didn’t want to make that commitment. Orli and I loved each other, but we had different goals in life. Despite the bond between us, we would have to go our separate ways.

  That summer I worked at Winnarainbow, a camp for the performing arts run by Jahanarah and Wavy Gravy. I was the comedy counselor. At the end of the season, I made out with another counselor on the outdoor trampoline one night. The next morning, I noticed a stain on the trampoline from my semen. I found a piece of chalk and drew an outline around the stain. It was, after all, the corpse of Holly’s sibling.

  Holly had gone to visit a Greek Island and stayed there, working as a dishwasher and cleaning squid for a dollar an hour, eight hours a day, seven days a week. To take a bath she had to climb into her kitchen sink. But now she was back in London, and she was planning to return to America. She sent a photo taken in one of those booths with a curtain where you get four poses on a filmstrip. She had written a different word on four rectangular cards and, switching quickly, she held up one card with each pose, so that you could read this vertical message in front of her smiling faces:DEAR

  DAD

  SEND

  MONEY!

  Her friends borrowed those cards, went into the photo booth, and sent that same message to their fathers.

  I moved to Venice Beach, and Holly stayed in San Francisco. By 1991, she had become the manager of community and government relations at KQED, the PBS and NPR affiliates there. I was performing in town and staying at her apartment. Because it was raining hard and she traveled by motor scooter, I was tempted to call her at work and tell her that if the ground was too slippery to drive on, I’d be glad to pay for a cab.

  But Holly was now twenty-seven (old enough to spank), and I realized that if I were in Venice and it was raining in San Francisco, I wouldn’t phone her about the rain, so now, even if she were to die because her motor scooter slid in the rain, and I would have to live with that horror for the rest of my life, I still had to let go of my paternalism and trust her judgment. I decided not to call. When Holly came home, I told her how I had resolved my dilemma.

  “Oh,” she said, casually, “if it was raining t
oo hard, I would’ve taken a bus home.”

  Over dinner, we were talking about the way you realize how dependent you are on appliances when the electricity goes off.

  “Speaking of appliances,” she said, “do you ever use that microwave oven Mom and I gave you last Christmas?”

  “Yeah, once in a while, to heat up soup and things. You know what, though, I left the microwave door open and I found a few mouse turds on the tray inside.”

  “Oh, remember that time on States Street, when we invented that mousetrap—the paper bag with a lollipop and cheese in it?”

  “Of course I do—and if I ever actually caught a mouse inside the microwave, I’d try to shut the door before it could escape.”

  “Dad, I can’t believe you’d nuke a mouse!”

  “No, I’d never do that. I would just unplug the microwave and carry it outside, and let the mouse go free.”

  “And then you’d race it to see who could get back to the house first.”

  “And the mouse would win.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I WAS A COMEDIAN FOR THE FBI

  The taboos were returning to TV comedy in the early eighties with a vengeance. When Saturday Night Live poked fun at religion, an organized write-in campaign resulted in seven out of thirty sponsors canceling. As a result, religion was no longer accepted as a valid target on that show. The writers were told specifically to “lay off” Jerry Falwell. They were also instructed to “de-emphasize” political humor, because the average age of their viewers had dropped to fifteen years and, said the producer to the staff, “Fifteen-year-olds are not interested in politics.”