I continued to contribute occasional pieces on a freelance basis, but Holly was right. Writing is a very insecure profession. I was in a state of being-fired shock. Suddenly, Social Security had become my only source of income. I was depressed for one day, but then, fortunately, my perspective returned—I mean I wasn’t buried alive under earthquake rubble in Japan, I wasn’t shot dead in the streets of Syria—and I realized that I had to be proactive. So, what was the silver lining in this double-media-whammy cloud? I took my plight as an omen and decided to work full-time on my long awaited (by me) first novel.
It’s about a contemporary Lenny Bruce–type satirist. Those scenes where my protagonist performs, I’ve developed onstage myself, although at times it felt like I was actually channeling Lenny, until the day that he said, “C’mon, Paul, you know you don’t believe in that shit.” Well, that ended that wishful-thinking delusion.
I told my friend Avery Corman—author of Oh, God and Kramer vs. Kramer—how I welcomed the challenge of writing a novel.
“But, you know,” I added, “fiction is really hard to write. You have to make everything up.”
And he said, “Hey, listen, you’ve been making stuff up all your life.”
“Yeah, but that was journalism.”
There were more than four hundred authors at the 2012 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The participants ranged from the late Rodney King (whose videotaped severe beating twenty years ago by sadistic police officers resulted in a riot that caused over fifty deaths and devastating destruction) to Judy Blume (her books for children and adults have sold more than eighty million copies) to T.C. Boyle (the author of more than twenty novels).
Rodney King was there, at the University of Southern California, to discuss his book, The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption. He had made famous his rhetorical question—“Can we all get along?”—but he spent the $3.8 million he was awarded in a lawsuit, and now that he was broke again, the new question for him, and so many of us, might as well be changed to “can we all get a loan?”
There was a panel titled “E Cannabis Unum.” This event served as one more step toward the decriminalizing of marijuana being accepted by the mass media and mainstream culture as the logical and humane thing to do. The panelists were Mark Haskell Smith, author of Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup; Heather Donahue, an actress who has written a memoir, Growgirl: How My Life After The Blair Witch Project Went to Pot; and me, the editor of a collection, Pot Stories for the Soul, which includes true tales by Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Michelle Phillips, Wavy Gravy, and Jack Herer, among others, with an anti-intro by the prolific science-fantasy author Harlan Ellison.
That collection was published by High Times Books in 1999. It won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award and later became a Quality Paperback Book Club selection. Now a new, expanded and updated edition has been published by Soft Skull Press. The attorneys for the Chicken Soup for the Soul series had originally sent a “cease and desist” warning. Although scientists and theologians alike agree that, while the soul cannot be located, apparently it can be copyrighted.
So the sequel, Acid Trips for the Soul, was re-titled Acid Trips for the Mind, but the distributor insisted that it be changed to Psychedelic Trips for the Mind. The second sequel, Magic Mushrooms for the Soul, was re-titled Magic Mushrooms for the Body, but then I changed that to Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy.
I sent a copy of Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs to my friend Todd McCormick, who wrote two articles for that book, but the warden rejected it “because on pages 259–261, it describes the process of squeezing toads to obtain illicit substances which could be detrimental to the security, good order and discipline of the institution.”
This was pure theater of cruelty. Federal correctional facilities do not have a toad problem, and outside accomplices have not been catapulting loads of toads over barbed wire fences to provide the fuel for a prison riot.
The panel I was on was moderated by Dean Kuipers, an editor and writer at the Times, and the author of Burning Rainbow Farm. He called on me first. I told the audience that if they looked under their seats, they would find a little baggie. Several optimists actually looked. It was my Oprah moment.
“The priorities are insane,” I said. “Tobacco is legal, and it kills 1,200 people every day, in this country alone. Whereas, marijuana is not legal, and the worst thing it can do is give you the blind munchies that lead you to raid your neighbor’s refrigerator. My position is, as long as any government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and which drugs are illegal, then anybody behind bars for a nonviolent drug conviction, they are political prisoners.
“I personally found out that pot enhances a nice dinner, it enhances going to a movie, it enhances making love—I even smoke a joint before I roll one, because it enhances the rolling experience. High Times once published a questionnaire, and one of the questions was, ‘Is it possible to smoke too much pot?’ And a reader responded, ‘I don’t understand the question.’
“I owe my longevity to never taking any legal drugs. Except, a few months ago I took an aspirin. But it was at a party. It was social toking. There was a lot of peer pressure.”
A review of the panel in the Times stated:
“Smith held forth on his experiences tagging along with the folks trying to find the world’s best weed (an honor that earns one an award called the ‘Cannabis Cup’) and Donahue described her life as part of a medical marijuana community in Northern California community that she refers to as ‘Nugget Town.’
“But it was Krassner who, to borrow pot parlance, Bogarted the show. An old hand at working the cannabis crowd for laughs, he rolled quip after quip that had the crowd chucking throughout . . .”
I assume that was a typo, that the reporter meant “chuckling,” not “chucking.” As in upchucking. On the other hand, there were a few students who did vomit. But it wasn’t my fault. I had seen them earlier, chasing toads around the campus, hoping to catch one and lick that slime at 4:20.
When I mentioned to Holly that on April 9, 2012, I would be eighty years old, she said, “Dad, that’s crazy.”
“I know,” I said, “but you can’t fight chronology.”
To celebrate the occasion, we had a family reunion. My brother and his wife came from Maine, my sister came from Florida, and Holly and her husband Dan came from Napa with their adopted-at-birth three-month-old baby, Talia Jeanne Dawson. Holly and Dan had been present in the delivery room, and he cut the umbilical cord.
The highlight of my birthday was meeting my granddaughter for the first time. While I held Talia in my lap, Holly put the radio on for some music, and Talia started conducting. Holly turned the radio off and Talia stopped conducting. Holly turned the radio back on and Talia began conducting again.
I showed Holly The Onion’s review of the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards:
“The first ‘pre-show performance,’ by someone called Cobra Starship: because I am very old, I experience a shiver of terror at the thought that they might be the latest iteration of the cryogenically frozen leftovers of Jefferson Airplane. They turn out to be a briskly paced anthology of everything I thought was cool when I was nine: shiny pants, sunglasses insouciantly thrown aside, fog machines, lots of G-rated writhing. I am not entirely sure that the disembodied head of Paul Krassner isn’t directing all this from behind the wings . . .”
I remarked, “To become a joke reference can be even a bigger honor than my lifetime achievement award.”
And Holly said, “A good joke lasts longer than a lifetime achievement award.”
Copyright © 2012 by Paul Krassner
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eISBN : 978-1-593-76492-0
Soft Skull Press
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Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 53
