Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders

by Paul Krassner

  “Why? They’re not gonna hit us.”

  “Yes, they are! Run! Hurry!”

  The police had been let out of their cage and they were absolutely enraged. Marilee got away, but I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee. I fell to the ground. The cop ran off to injure as many other cockroaches in his kitchen as he could.

  Another cop came charging and he yelled at me, “Get up! Get up!”

  “I’m trying to!”

  He made a threatening gesture with his billy club, and when I tried to protect my head with my arms, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my ribs.

  Oh, God, the pain!

  The cops were running amok now, in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming, “Get the fuck outa here, you fuckin’ faggots, you motherfuckin’ cocksuckers!”

  I managed to drag myself along the sidewalk. It felt like an electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs. Marilee drove me to a hospital emergency ward.

  At the hospital, X-rays indicated that I had a fractured rib and pneumothorax—a punctured lung. There were several others already there who had been beaten in police sweeps. Another wave of victims would soon arrive after the cops carried out a search-and-destroy mission on the customers in a gay bar, Elephant Walk, at Castro and Eighteenth Street.

  Although Dan White had acted on his own, he might just as well have been a Manchurian candidate for these cops. When the verdict was first announced, somebody sang “Oh, Danny Boy” over the police radio.

  After six weeks of celibacy while the healing process took place, I thought I was ready for sex again, but when my partner embraced me tightly during her climax, I felt a sharp pain and groaned. She got turned on by what she interpreted as a moan of pleasure, and she squeezed me even tighter, which only made me groan louder, turning her on even more. Tighter, louder, tighter, louder. We were riding on a vicious cycle.

  The City of San Francisco was sued for $4.3 million by a man who had been a peaceful observer at the riot following the verdict. He was walking away from the Civic Center area when a cop yelled, “We’re gonna kill all you faggots!”—and beat him on the head with a nightstick. He was awarded $125,000. I had wanted to sue the police myself, but an attorney requested $75 for a filing fee, and I didn’t have it. I was too proud to borrow it, and I decided to forego the lawsuit. This was one of the dumbest mistakes of my entire life.

  The injuries affected my posture and my gait, and I gradually began to develop more and more of a strange limp.

  • • •

  In 1982, psychiatrist Martin Blinder—who had helped establish Dan White’s Twinkie defense—aided Arizona police officer John Clarke in plea-bargaining his way out of sexual assault, kidnapping, and armed burglary charges. Dr. Blinder testified that the cop had assaulted, bound, and sexually abused a woman while he was suffering from “Fugue State,” a disorder which sometimes accompanies hypoglycemia, wild fluctuations in blood sugar.

  The psychiatrist testified that the policeman blacked out for ninety minutes while driving his car during a hypoglycemic attack. The officer ate doughnuts daily, up until the day he followed a young woman home from a supermarket, confronted her with his service revolver, forced his way into her residence, tied her up, and fondled her breasts. He said it was only later that night he realized what he had done. He was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree burglary, for which he would receive probation.

  In 1983, the San Francisco Chronicle published a correction: “In an article about Dan White’s prison life, Chronicle writer Warren Hinckle reported that a friend of White expressed the former supervisor’s displeasure with an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian which made reference to the size of White’s sexual organ. The Chronicle has since learned that the Bay Guardian did not publish any such article and we apologize for the error.”

  It was ten feet long, 3 feet 6 inches high, 3 feet 8 inches wide, and weighed more than a ton—no, not Dan White’s penis—the world’s largest Twinkie, which was unveiled in Boston.

  In January 1984, Dan White was released from prison. He had served a little more than five years for killing Moscone and Milk. The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie is seven years. That’s two years longer than White spent behind bars. When he was released, that Twinkie in his cupboard was still edible. But maybe, instead of eating it, he would have it bronzed.

  In November 1984, prosecutor Tom Norman was convicted of drunk driving. He had been arrested for driving through a stop sign and over the double line twice. Previously convicted for reckless driving, he now received a one-year suspended sentence.

  In June 1985, Sirhan Sirhan told the Los Angeles Times: “If [White] had a valid diminished capacity defense because he was eating too many Twinkies, I sure had a better one because of too many Tom Collinses, plus the deep feeling about my homeland that affected my conduct.”

  In October 1985, Dan White committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He taped a note to the windshield of his car, reading: “I’m sorry for all the pain and trouble I’ve caused.” White’s defense attorney, Doug Schmidt, said, “I expected that he would kill himself. And, in certain respects it vindicates the defense. I don’t think a well man takes his own life.”

  • • •

  During the trial, an old friend, TV reporter Joyce Shank, who was also covering the trial, came to my house so we could compare notes. While she was visiting, there was an earthquake. She immediately jumped under my desk, just as she had once demonstrated on television what to do in case of an earthquake.

  Now she said, “Paul, get under here with me, hurry up.”

  I quickly hunched next to her under my desk. Our thighs were touching. Was it possible that my secret lust for Joyce might now become fulfilled?

  “Put the radio on,” she said.

  I got up and put the radio on, then joined her again.

  “Not music,” she said, “the news …”

  Okay, now that incident is even more embarrassing than saying “Thank you” to the guy who frisked me in the courthouse, but it served as a catalyst to my understanding of the psychological overtones of the Dan White case, because it’s such a blatant example of how the process of projection can affect your perception, your empathy, your rationality, your behavior.

  And, indeed, it was the lustfulness of George Moscone and Harvey Milk which may have underlain the more obvious motivation that sexually inadequate Dan White had in destroying them. It was well known around City Hall that Moscone had a predilection for black women. Police almost arrested him once with a black prostitute in a car at a supermarket parking lot. And Milk had once told White, “Don’t knock [gay sex] unless you’ve tried it.” When political opponent John Briggs debated Milk, Briggs perpetuated a stereotype of gay promiscuity with a statistic that 25 percent of gay men had over five hundred sexual contacts.

  “I wish,” said Harvey.

  Over the years, I developed an increasingly unbalanced walk, triggered by that police beating, so that my right foot would come down hard on the ground with each step. My whole body felt twisted, and my right heel was in constant pain.

  I limped the gamut of therapists—from an orthodox orthopedic surgeon who gave me a shot of cortisone in my heel to ease the pain, to a specialist in neuromuscular massage who wondered if the cop had gone to medical school because he knew exactly where to hit me with his billy club, to a New Age healer. She put one hand on my stomach, held the receptionist’s hand with the other, and asked her whether I should wear a brace. The answer was yes. I decided to get a second opinion—perhaps from another receptionist.

  Meanwhile, my twisted limp became increasingly worse. In 1987 I went to a chiropractor, who referred me to a podiatrist, who referred me to a physiatrist, who wanted me to get an MRI—a CAT scan—in order to rule out the possibility of cervical stenosis. But the MRI ruled it in. The X-rays indicated that my spinal cord was being squeezed by spurring on the inside of seve
ral discs in my neck. The physiatrist told me that I needed surgery.

  I panicked. I had always taken my good health for granted. I went into heavy denial, confident that I could completely cure my problem by walking barefoot on the beach every day for three weeks.

  “You’re a walking time bomb,” the podiatrist warned me.

  He said that if I were in a rear-end collision, or just out strolling and I tripped, my spinal cord could be severed, and I would be paralyzed from the chin down. I began to be conscious of every move I made. I was living, not one day at a time, not one hour at a time, not one minute at a time—I was living one second at a time.

  I was one of thirty-seven million Americans who didn’t have insurance, nor did I have any savings. Fortunately, I had an extended family and friends all over the country who came to my financial rescue. The operation was scheduled to take place at the Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York.

  A walking time bomb! I was still in a state of shock, but since I perceived the world through a filter of absurdity, now I would have to apply that perception to my own situation. The breakthrough for me came when I learned that my neurosurgeon moonlighted as a clown at the circus.

  “All right, I surrender,” I said to myself. “I surrender.”

  Paralyzed from the chin down! I fantasized about using a voice-activated word processor to write a novel called The Head, in which the protagonist finally dies of suffocation while performing cunnilingus because he can’t use his hands to separate the thighs of the woman who is sitting on his face.

  I met my doctor the night before the operation. He sat on my bed wearing a trench coat and called me Mr. Krassner. I thought that if he was going to cut me open and file through five discs in my upper spinal column, he could certainly be informal enough to call me Paul. He was busy filling out a chart.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Krassner?”

  “I’m a writer and a comedian.”

  “How do you spell comedian?”

  Rationally I knew that you don’t have to be a good speller to be a fine surgeon, but his question made me uneasy. At least his hands weren’t shaking while he wrote. Then he told me about how simple the operation was and he mentioned almost in passing that there was always the possibility I could end up staying in the hospital for the rest of my life. Huh? There was a time when physicians practiced positive thinking to help their patients, but now it was a requirement of malpractice prevention to provide the worst-case scenario in advance.

  The next morning, under the influence of Valium and Demerol, I could see that my neurosurgeon had just come from the circus, because he was wearing a clown costume, with a big round red nose over his surgical mask. He couldn’t get close to the operating table because his shoes were so large, and when he had to cleanse my wound he asked the nurse to please pass the seltzer bottle …

  “Wake up, Paul,” the anesthesiologist, said, “Surgery’s over. Wiggle your toes.”

  My wife Nancy was waiting in the hall—there she stood, my favorite “biological quirk” (as she described her own existence)—and I was never so glad to see her smile.

  That evening, at a benefit in Berkeley, Ken Kesey told the audience, “I spoke with Krassner today, and the operation was successful, but he says he’s not taking any painkillers because he never does any legal drugs.” Then Kesey led the crowd in a chant: “Get well, Paul! Get well, Paul!” And it worked. The following month I was performing again, wearing a neck brace at a theater in Seattle.

  But, over the years, I gradually got gimpier and gimpier. My hip was so out of kilter that my right foot turned inward when I walked, and my left foot continuously was tripping on my right foot. More and more often, I found myself falling all over the place. Dozens of times. Finally, after I started inadvertently knocking down other people like dominoes at a book festival in Australia, I realized that I would definitely need to start walking with a cane. Since then, at any airport, I had to put my cane on the conveyor belt, along with my carry-on bag and my shoes. And then the security guy hands me a different cane—a wooden one, painted orange—to help me walk through the metal detector without falling.

  One time, in a restaurant, I tripped on my own cane and fell flat on my face—bruising myself badly, yet grateful that I hadn’t broken any teeth. That’s my nature—to perceive a blessing in disguise as soon as I stop bleeding. However, this time I was left with a dark, square-shaped scab between my nose and my lips. It looked like a Hitler mustache, and I became very self-conscious about it.

  Now I really am a walking time bomb. I cannot afford to fall again. I must be careful when I walk. I have to be fully conscious of every step. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Any fall could injure me. It might even be fatal. I have surrendered to a process that is truly an ongoing lesson in mindfulness. I’m learning that when you are mindful in one aspect of your life, you’ll strengthen mindfulness in other aspects. I am, after all, a Zen Bastard—a title bestowed upon me when Ken Kesey and I coedited The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog—and I certainly have no desire to trip while hobbling along my particular path.

  • • •

  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the double execution, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that, “During the trial, no one but well-known satirist Paul Krassner—who may have coined the phrase ‘Twinkie defense’—played up that angle. His trial stories appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. ‘I don’t think Twinkies were ever mentioned in testimony,’ said chief defense attorney Douglas Schmidt, who recalls ‘HoHos and Ding Dongs,’ but no Twinkies.”

  Apparently, Schmidt forgot that one of his own psychiatric witnesses, Martin Blinder, had used the T-word in his testimony.

  Blinder now complains, “If I found a cure for cancer, they’d still say I was the guy who invented ‘the Twinkie defense.’”

  The Chronicle also quoted Steven Scherr about the Twinkie defense: “‘It drives me crazy,’ said co-counsel Scherr, who suspects the simplistic explanation provides cover for those who want to minimize and trivialize what happened. If he ever strangles one of the people who says ‘Twinkie defense’ to him, Scherr said, it won’t be because he’s just eaten a Twinkie.”

  Scherr was sitting in the audience at the University of San Francisco theater where a panel discussion of the case was taking place. I was one of the panelists. When Scherr was introduced from the stage, I couldn’t resist saying to him on my microphone, “Care for a Twinkie?”

  • • •

  Soon after the Dan White trial, I got a phone call from Lee Cole, an ex-Scientologist I had met in Chicago while researching the Charles Manson case. He wanted to visit me, but I said no.

  “Suppose I just come over?” he said.

  “You don’t know where I live.”

  “I can find out.”

  “If you find out, and you tell me how you did, you can come over.”

  I wanted to determine how carefully I had covered my tracks, or see which friend would give out my address. A little while later, Lee Cole called again and told me my address—he said that he had obtained it from the voter registration files—so I told him to come over.

  He took me to see Lowell Streiker, author of The Cults Are Coming! and a deprogrammer who had counseled one-third of the Jonestown survivors. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned my theory that Jim Jones had served as a pimp at City Hall and maintained power by implied blackmail.

  Dr. Streiker told me of his friend—a member of Jones’s planning commission—who had told him about the technique that People’s Temple had used on the mayor. They sent a young black female member to service him, as a gift, then called the next week about a serious problem—she had lied, said she was eighteen, when in fact she was underage, but don’t worry, we have it under control—just the way J. Edgar Hoover used to manipulate top politicians with his juicy FBI files.

  So Jim Jones had taken Margo St. James’s sardonic advice after all, on how to achieve political power: “Arr
ange for some of your women to have sex with the bigwigs.” And he had taken it all the way to a mass suicide-murder—which occurred simultaneously with a mass demonstration by the women’s movement in San Francisco, called “Take Back the Night!”

  They completely shut down traffic on Broadway. But there was not a word about that event in any of the media. It was knocked totally out of the news by the massacre in Jonestown.

  When Dan White was paroled in 1984, he called his old friend, Frank Falzon—the detective who had originally taken his confession—and they met. A decade later, Falzon, now in the insurance business, told Mike Weiss about that encounter.

  “I hit him with the hard questions,” Falzon recalled. “I asked him, ‘What were those extra bullets for? What did happen?’”

  “I really lost it that day,” White said.

  “You can say that again,” Falzon said.

  “No. I really lost it. I was on a mission. I wanted four of them.”

  “Four?” Falzon said.

  “Carol Ruth Silver—she was the biggest snake of the bunch.” Silver realized that she might have been his third victim had she not stayed downstairs for a second cup of coffee that morning. “And Willie Brown. He was masterminding the whole thing.”

  While White had been waiting to see George Moscone in the anteroom of his office, the mayor was drinking coffee with Willie Brown, chatting and laughing. Finally, Moscone told Brown that he had to see Dan White. Brown slipped out the back door just as Moscone was letting White in the front way. Thirty seconds later, White killed Moscone.

  Dianne Feinstein, who was president of the Board of Supervisors, succeeded Moscone as mayor and is now a senator. Willie Brown later became the mayor of San Francisco. Jonestown and Kool-Aid continue to serve as occasional joke references for stand-up comedians and metaphors for politicians and pundits alike.

  As for me, my physical condition has gotten worse, including my balance, and I’ve had to substitute a walker for my cane. I exercise at a gym three times a week, but they won’t allow me to use my walker on the treadmill.