Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Abbie Hoffman got arrested for wearing an American-flag shirt. When he appeared on The Merv Griffin show wearing another American-flag shirt, network officials blacked out his image, or blued it out if you were watching on color TV.

  Ironically, Jerry Rubin wore a Vietcong flag as a cape and didn’t get arrested. He had appeared before the same Un-American Activities Committee a couple of years previously, wearing an American Revolution soldier’s costume. On another occasion he got dressed in black pajamas like a Vietcong. Later on, he wasn’t sure whether to go to Washington dressed as Santa Claus or a clown. He went as Santa, but got his accompanying statement mixed up, and said, “These hearings are a circus anyway.”

  An FBI memo had stated:To enlarge upon this obvious personality conflict [between Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin], our New York Office has prepared a leaflet in the jargon of the New Left which necessitates the use of obscenities to make the document authentic. The leaflet implies that Hoffman is using Rubin, Yippies, and the “Street People” for his own personal gain. This leaflet, mailed to a select few New Left activists and publishers of New Left publications, will unquestionably widen the personality gap between these two individuals and will tend to fragmentize the organization and hopefully lead to its complete disintegration.

  But, in 1984, Jerry and Abbie were together again. Jerry had become involved in the world of finance. He once wrote that a necktie was a hangman’s noose, but now he was wearing one. “Money is the long hair of the eighties,” he announced. He even sent out a press release requesting that the media no longer refer to him as a former Yippie leader. I envisioned the headline: “Former Yippie Leader Asks Not to be Called Former Yippie Leader!”

  Now, Jerry and Abbie were on tour with a debate titled “The Yippies versus the Yuppies.” One evening they were doing two debates at the Stone, a San Francisco nightclub. Alex Bennett moderated the first one, and I moderated the second. Jerry began:You may remember me from the sixties. I led thousands of youths into the streets, and presidents fighting wars quivered at the sound of my name. I was known and not wanted in many states. I was the cause of thousands of family arguments around the table between parent and child. Now I’ve taken off my beard and no one recognizes me anymore, so I carry my American Express card wherever I go [displaying it as in the TV commercial]. You too can have one.

  But first you’ve got to become a Yuppie. Now what is a Yuppie, anyway? The word stands for young urban professional, and was coined for the first time as the result of my networking events in New York which brought Yuppies together, exchanging business cards and advancing their careers.

  Abbie, in turn, suggested that Jerry “merge with Jane Fonda, so they can have ‘networkouts.’ What could be better—strong, muscular bodies with shallow, underdeveloped minds?” He had come prepared with props and proceeded to make a Yuppie pie for Jerry.

  Into a Cuisinart he poured the ingredients—spirulina, Brie, wine (“from Chile, made by stepping on the eyeballs of political prisoners”), some tofu (“soft, rubbery, sort of like the intestines of a Cabbage Patch doll”), natural vitamins, stock certificates (“stocks and bondage: Yuppie sex”), credit cards, business cards, the keys to a Porsche, a gold watch (“How does a Yuppie spell relief? R-o-l-e-x”)—and then he processed it all down to a fine, unappetizing mess.

  As moderator, I summed up:This debate perpetuates the myth that there is a separation between Yippie and Yuppie. We each have a combination of both spirits. The Yippie in us knows that there must be some kind of social revolution to counter the injustices that horrify us every day.

  The Yuppie in us knows that, too—but we want to watch it on our VCRs, maybe have some friends over for Sunday brunch. After all, what good is a social revolution if you can’t watch it at your convenience? If Abbie Hoffman were to throw money in the stock exchange today, this time Jerry Rubin would invest it.

  I never went to any of my high school or college reunions, but I couldn’t resist attending the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco. At noon on the summer solstice of 1987, young and middle-aged hippies—gray hair and potbellies not having erased a certain gleam in their eyes—were marching in an All Beings parade down Haight Street. Costumes ranged from a giant snail to Zippy the Pinhead.

  One fellow still in civilian clothes explained, “I was supposed to be Tarzan, but I had to wash the dishes.”

  Local countercultural fixtures were all there: The Mime Troupe, Rosie Radiator and her fleet of tap dancers, the Automatic Human Jukebox, and a panhandler asking, “Can you spare $100?” The buses now had posters that suggested shop the haight.

  The charm of that entrepreneurial urge was not to be confused with the mission of the Haight-Ashbury Preservation Society, whose targets were symbolized by a walking Big Mac cheeseburger, a prisoner of Thrifty’s in chain-store chains, mock pallbearers carrying a casket to mourn the wished-for death of Round Table Pizza, a sign warning don’t mall the haight! and somebody in a Merlin the Magician outfit with a placard, you don’t need magic to fight the franchising. A lone, sad-faced clown bore a banner with a white dove in a red heart.

  In Golden Gate Park, an emcee asked the crowd a series of rhetorical questions to rev them up: “How many people were here in the sixties? . . . How many are here now? . . . How many don’t know? . . . How many don’t care?” A musician announced, “We were told not to have amplifiers, but we decided to break the law today.” Hog Farmer Sharon Share-alike offered her roll of hard candy to novelist Herb Gold, which immediately aroused his fear of dosing. “These really are Life Savers,” he asked, “right?”

  The Summer of Love reunion continued at the I-Beam, a disco on Haight Street. Onstage, I compared the decades:In the sixties, marijuana was $10 an ounce. In the eighties, it’s $300. In the sixties, teenagers used to hide their pot smoking from their parents. In the eighties, parents have to hide it from their kids. In the sixties, the favorite chemical drug was LSD. In the eighties, it’s Ecstasy. In the sixties, Ken Kesey wasn’t allowed to donate blood because he had ingested acid. In the eighties, there are those who are afraid to get a blood transfusion because of AIDS. In the sixties, Lenny Bruce got arrested for saying “cocksucker” onstage. In the eighties, Meryl Streep got an Academy Award for saying it in Sophie’s Choice. Now, almost the entire audience at a Grateful Dead concert is younger than the number of years the band has been together—but these kids have less deconditioning to go through than we did. They have less innocence to lose.

  When a group of students and other protesters, including Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter, won their case against CIA recruiting on campus by using a “necessity defense,” attorney Leonard Weinglass told me that the turning point for the jury was the testimony of Ralph McGehee, who revealed how he had been recruited right off the football field by the CIA, only to become a star player in their assassination-squad program. Members of the jury would not have voted that way in the sixties because they weren’t prepared to believe such testimony as they are in the eighties.

  In the sixties, we knew that the CIA was smuggling heroin from Southeast Asia. And in the eighties we know that they’re smuggling cocaine from Central America. The same planes that fly weapons for the Contras to airports in Panama, Honduras, and Costa Rica come back to Florida, Louisiana, and Arkansas with their cargoes filled to the brim with cocaine, even though the administration is carrying on its anti-drug campaign. The pilots only have to be careful to evade the radar screen. So while Nancy Reagan is saying, “Just say no,” the CIA is saying, “Just fly low.”

  Meanwhile, the quality of co-option had not been strained. The slogan “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” was used in a TV commercial for Total breakfast cereal. Tampax promoted its tampon as “Something over thirty you can trust.” Beatles songs were used to sell cars, or, if you preferred to walk, they also sold sneakers. Time magazine was being peddled by the Byrds’ version of Pete Seeger’s song, “Turn, Turn, Turn”—based on Ecclesiastes—t
here’s a time for this and a time for that, get it?

  The Youngbloods once sent a copy of their song “Get Together” to every member of Congress and the Senate, with a suggestion that it be established as the new national anthem, but who could ever have guessed that it was really destined to become a jingle in a jeans commercial? Or that a Jefferson Airplane song would be used in a bank commercial? Or that Timothy Leary would model a Gap shirt for a full-page ad in Interview, and Ram Dass would peddle a rejuvenating skin cream at a Saks Fifth Avenue counter? People magazine was selling the twentieth anniversary of the Summer of Love with a feature story set off by a double-paged cover with psychedelic artist Peter Max’s signature on both pages.

  In red spray paint, on a brick wall just off Haight Street, standing out among the graffiti like John Hancock’s signature on the Declaration of Independence, this message summed it all up: love is revenue.

  In the summer of 1988, I attended a conference in Chicago, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the mass protest at the Democratic national convention. The conference was being held in the very same International Amphitheater where Hubert Humphrey had been nominated. As we were driving there, Dave Dellinger asked Carl Oglesby a rhetorical question: “And we were gonna walk all the way here?” Former Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was already at the amphitheater.

  “Bobby,” I said, “I’ve been saving this question for you for twenty years now. When you guys flew into Chicago for the convention in 1968, were you armed?”

  “Oh, absolutely—we didn’t know what to expect. So we had concealed weapons—this was before they searched people at the airport, you know.”

  Onstage, Yippie organizer Judy Clavir was speaking: “I work for a statewide agency that’s concerned with alcoholism prevention and drug addiction prevention. The sixties was a time of ‘just say yes to drugs, but just say no to war, just say no to exploitation, just say no to racism, just say no to sexism.’ We were definitely very experimental with drugs, there’s no question about it, and what we did not understand at the time was the nature of the disease of addiction.”

  Then it was my turn: “It’s a little bit strange to think that if Dan Quayle were a year older, he might’ve been in Chicago twenty years ago—but with the National Guard. The difference is, then we would’ve put flowers in the barrel of his rifle—today we would be putting a condom over it.”

  I couldn’t help but notice that Abbie Hoffman was sitting exactly where Mayor Richard Daley sat in 1968 when Senator Abraham Ribicoff was on the dais at the amphitheater saying, “With George McGovern [as president] we wouldn’t have gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” and Mayor Daley shouted from his seat, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home!”

  And the déjà vu became even more twisted. When I referred to the debate between Abbie and Jerry, I said, “It was a Yippie event in and of itself, but it was also a Yuppie event since they were grossing $5,000 a throw,” then Abbie started shouting at me: “That’s not true!”

  Although he knew it was true, he remained adamant about not being perceived as performing politically for financial gain. He once got a $25,000 check for the movie rights to a book, and he endorsed it to the Black Panthers to bail out a prisoner who he knew in advance was going to flee the country. I asked why, and he said, “Jewish guilt.” Abbie hated it when anybody would mistake him for Jerry and ask, “Do you still work on Wall Street?” But now his fury with me went much deeper than simple truth or falsity. Not only had I defied his wish, I had also gone back on my word. Later, we would have our confrontation.

  “Why the fuck did you have to do that?” he demanded. “I don’t want you deciding what’s on or off the record.”

  “Abbie, you debated Jerry publicly.”

  “And you insulted me publicly. You promised the Leffs that you would drop that debate shit from your routine. Then within a month you not only did it again, you did it right in front of me.”

  “I’m sorry. I just keep blurring the line between friendship and cultural chronicler.”

  “Look, Paul, I’m a public figure trying to build a movement, and I live a very dangerous life. Obviously I’m used to being publicly attacked or ridiculed or worse, and even by a few people who are friends, but I hardly am friendly or honest with them today. Sure, life is as funny, absurd, and ironic as you portray it, but it’s also extraordinarily fragile. You seem willing for the sake of a public joke or story to put in jeopardy the fragility of my life and friendship.”

  I apologized. That was the last time I saw Abbie, but we continued to correspond and talk on the phone. In one conversation, he poked fun at Robert McFarlane’s “feeble attempt at suicide” during the Iran/Contra hearings by downing “just a few measly tranquilizers.” Abbie killed himself in April 1989 by taking 150 phenobarbital capsules plus alcohol—exactly what his recommendation to McFarlane for a successful suicide would have been. Abbie was clinically manic-depressive. He chose to end his life because he couldn’t stand the pain of living.

  Both the Los Angeles City Council and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to adjourn in Abbie’s memory. A Hearst newspaper published an editorial in praise of his radicalism. In Central Park a marijuana smoke-in was held in his honor. At UCLA there was a write-in campaign of Pigasus for President.

  A week after Abbie’s death, the autopsy report was released, and his picture was on the front page of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, on the left side. On the right side was a photo of Lucille Ball, who was about to undergo serious surgery. That evening, I had dinner at a Hollywood restaurant with Steve Allen. CNN’s entertainment reporter had made an appointment to meet Steve at the restaurant, and he interviewed him there, twice, once for if Lucille Ball survived the operation and once for if she didn’t. Although I could understand the practicality of such foresight, somehow I was offended by it.

  Sure enough, the next day, there was Steve Allen on CNN, standing outside the restaurant saying, “We all hope Lucy will pull through. There have been many success stories in the history of television, and yet the affection that millions of Americans hold for Lucille Ball is unique.”

  A week later, she died, and sure enough, there was Steve Allen on CNN again, standing outside the restaurant and saying, “Lucy will be greatly missed.” Then George Burns came on and said, “I had a lot of fun with Lucy,” and I couldn’t tell whether he had taped that before or after she was dead. There’s no business like show business.

  A memorial for Abbie was held at the live-porn O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco. It took place upstairs in their office, although I considered this possibility: In the Ultra Room, two naked ladies are dancing and diddling each other. Now one puts a candle in her ass and the other is lighting it. Men are standing in little booths, watching through the glass, and jerking off. If a man puts a twenty-dollar bill through the slot in the glass, one of the women will attach herself to the glass like a Garfield-the-cat doll. Suddenly, a man who is about to come, feels someone tap him on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” I say, “is this the Abbie Hoffman memorial?”

  “Uh, oh, yeah,” he answers, “I think so—Abbie would’ve wanted it this way.”

  In Los Angeles, the memorial took place in a Unitarian church. I met Jackson Browne there. I told him that Abbie thought his song “Running on Empty” should’ve been used as background music for the movie of the same name, and Browne told me that his mother used to read The Realist. Backstage, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic said, “I’m gonna get out of my wheelchair and say, ‘Abbie gave me the courage to walk!’” Onstage, Whoopi Goldberg said, “Abbie gave me the courage to be different.”

  When it was my turn, I mentioned to the audience that in Abbie’s honor, I had rolled a joint “on the cover of People magazine,” which featured a picture of Abbie wearing his American-flag shirt. (The Los Angeles Times quoted me as saying that I had rolled a joint with the cover of People magazine.)

  The most tou
ching moment at this memorial occurred when Daniel Ellsberg unfurled a banner given to him by young people at an anti-nuclear protest, beautifully embroidered with this message: Sweet dreams, Abbie. You helped start it. We’ll help finish it. The audience went wild with emotion as Ellsberg presented the banner to Johanna in the front row, and they embraced.

  A few months later, another memorial was held in New York at the Palladium, a glitzy theater which usually presented rock concerts. As I ended my few minutes onstage, I pretended that I was being channeled by Abbie. I took on his Boston accent, his rabble-rousing growl, and—referring to the recent massacre in Tiananmen Square—I raised my fist in the air.

  “Free the Chinese one billion!”

  As I left the stage, there was the next speaker, a Chinese student. “Thank you very much,” he said, shaking my hand.

  “Wow,” I said, “that was fast.”

  Allen Ginsberg was backstage and gave me a tip on poetic emphasis.

  “Free the Chinese one billion!” he suggested.

  Daniel Ellsberg was also there, waiting to speak. I noticed he had something tucked under his arm. I asked him what he had there, and he showed me. It was the same banner that he had unfurled at the memorial in Los Angeles.

  “How’d you get that back?” I asked.

  “Johanna gave it to me,” he replied, “so that I could present it to her again today.”

  And I finally understood. Re-staging the unfurling of the banner dedicated to Abbie Hoffman was just a variation on the CNN reporter interviewing celebrities twice about Lucille Ball. And hadn’t I mostly repeated at the New York memorial, almost word for word, what I said at the Los Angeles memorial? I could no longer feel self-righteous about CNN’s premature sentimentality. There was a business like show business after all, and it was the radical memorial business.