“The duty of a revolutionist,” Abbie informed the cops, “is to finish breakfast.”
In 1969, a few years after my first marriage broke up, I had a two-night stand with Jada Rowland. She was an actress, on TV every afternoon in Secret Storm. I fell in love with Jada, but I hated soap operas. They were the ultimate creation of a value system that was the antithesis of my own. Their main function was to program viewers into becoming greater consumers by manipulating them to identify with the lives of other people who didn’t even exist. One viewer even sent a letter warning Jada that her “husband” was seeing another woman. Still, within that corrupt context, Jada maintained a sense of integrity. Once, the script called for her to put down her young daughter by referring sarcastically to her imagination, and Jada refused to say the line.
Richard Avedon had invited me to be included in a collection of his photos of countercultural people. I accepted on the condition that Jada and I could pose together, and we would choose the pose. What we had in mind was a take-off on the Two Virgins album cover, where John Lennon and Yoko Ono stood nude, holding hands.
We would be standing naked, too, smiling with our arms around each other. Jada would also be holding a patriotic cup with stars and stripes, and there would be arrows pointing to her breasts and crotch, and I would be holding a small American flag. Oh, yes, and I would have an erection. If Two Virgins was about anatomy, this would be about physiology. Jada was willing to risk losing her $1,000-a-week job to participate just for the fun of it.
“I think it was my idea,” she recalls, “to do a take-off on Lennon/Ono. I was on one of my rants, objecting to the fact that the penis could never be seen erect and that there was a certain hypocrisy in their pretended ‘innocence’ as it seemed to me that they must have known that everyone just wanted to see the tits of the girl who stole the Beatle away.”
I had ingested a capsule of THC powder before the photo session. Jada and I were now standing before the camera, and the only thing missing was my hard-on. I had heard that THC was actually an elephant tranquilizer. I would soon find out if that was true.
Avedon asked what music we wanted to listen to during the session. I asked for the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” but he didn’t have it, so instead he played my second choice, Bob Dylan singing “Lay, Lady, Lay.”
Jada and I began to kiss.
“This is obscene,” she whispered.
“No,” I whispered back, “it’s very pure. But you’re right, it is kind of goal-oriented.”
As she remembers it, “What was ‘obscene’ in my view was that I wasn’t in love or in lust with you, so giving way to your request that I kiss you so you could get a hard-on seemed obscene. I felt both uneasily guilty, as I became aware that I was taking advantage of your fondness for me in order to be photographed by Avedon, and quite uncomfortable that you were taking advantage of the situation in order to kiss me. Those were the only ‘obscenities’ in my eyes.”
We continued kissing. Dylan was now asking the musical question, “Why wait any longer for the world to begin?” My penis rose to the occasion, and the crew cheered us on.
I signed a release, assuming that the photo would never be seen because the publishing of an erection was so taboo then. However, in 1999—three decades later—my bluff was called. Avedon and Diane Arbus published a $75 book of photos, The Sixties.
A Los Angeles Times review said that I looked “sheepish” and “sustained an erection.”
Little did they know.
On the back cover of the book, there’s a photo of Abbie Hoffman, holding a toy rifle in one hand and giving the finger with the other. He is smiling broadly, sticking his tongue out, and on his forehead the word FUCK is written in lipstick.
A KINDER, GENTLER PAPER
A reporter for the Los Angeles Times interviewed me for an article she was writing on humor about the presidential candidates. As an example, I said that “I perceive John Kerry as being like an arranged marriage. I could learn to like him. He’ll certainly be a good provider. And at least he’s better than that wife-beater in the White House.”
But here’s how the Times ended up publishing it: “. . . better than [what we have now] in the White House.” If I may paraphrase Dan Rather, “I have documents that have been authenticated by our experts which prove that George W. Bush has beaten Laura, or my name isn’t Roger Mudd.”
This was all before there was any news about Kitty Kelley’s book on the Bush multi-generational mafia, The Family (also the title of Ed Sanders’ book about Charles Manson and his brainwashed followers). She writes that someone expressed fear that Bush was abusing Laura. To think that my metaphorical joke might possibly be an actual occurrence is overshadowed in absurdity only by an anonymous editor’s irrational censorship of my punchline in an article about humor.
Hey, it was a metaphor! Now I understand how political-party turncoat Zell Miller must have felt when he wished he could challenge Chris Matthews to a duel because Matthews took literally Miller’s metaphor about the military use of spitballs as a weapon.
Meanwhile, the Sunday Los Angeles Times Book Review assigned me to write an essay based on From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture by Paul Buhle. My piece included a long paragraph of mini-dialogues I’ve had with countercultural icons about various aspects of Jewishness. For example, I said to Ken Kesey, “I don’t believe that Jews are the chosen people, or that people are the chosen species.”
He responded, “I don’t believe that people are the chosen species, but I believe that Jews are—or were—the chosen people. [But] when the train that pulled into the station 2,000 years ago didn’t look like My Son, the Messiah, but like a beatnik in sandals and Day-Glo yarmulke, well the train waited around a while for the chosen to hop on board, then pulled on out. A few hobos hanging out in the yard—lazy yids and hustling goyim, mostly—slipped into the boxcar.”
On the Thursday before publication, my editor sent me an e-mail: “I’m not sure why this is happening now, rather than yesterday, but now my dear colleagues on the copy desk are doublechecking if it’s OK to print ‘yid’ in the paper, even in a quote.”
I argued that if they took out “lazy yids,” they’d have to take out “hustling goyim” too, and just put in an ellipsis to replace the whole phrase. Not only did “yid” stay in, but they also left in this quote from the book: “The most famous or notorious Jewish story of the Ed Sullivan Show was the firing of Jackie Mason for acting ‘too kikey’ on camera.” However, if Sullivan had called Mason a wife-beater . . .
I always thought that the reason Mason got fired was because he had given Sullivan the finger on camera. I once wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times, in which I mentioned a guest on a TV show who “gave the finger” to the host, but that was changed to “gestured toward.”
“The Times,” I was told, “is a family newspaper.”
FIRE DAN RATHER
A few years ago, at the 135th anniversary of The Nation, I was on a panel of satirists, along with Al Franken, Jim Hightower and Michael Moore. The event was held at the posh University Club in New York. I wore jeans, a red Bread & Roses T-shirt and a tuxedo jacket, but the gatekeeper informed me that I didn’t meet their dress code.
“But I’m an entertainer,” I explained, “and this is my costume.”
He instructed me to go around the corner, through the employees’ entrance, past the kitchen and up the elevator, directly into the ballroom where the $600-a-plate dinner was taking place. Liberal celebrities were milling around, including Phil Donahue, Harry Belafonte, Nora Ephron, Jules Feiffer and, sitting at a $1,000-a-plate table, Dan Rather.
He has excellent posture, which he maintains even when he laughs.
“Mr. Rather,” I said from the dais, “you ended your broadcast the other night by saying, ‘If you like the CBS News, be sure to tell your neighbors,’ and I just wanted to take this opportunity to tell you personally that I went around recommending your newscast t
o all my neighbors, but they kept chasing me away because they mistook me for a census taker.”
Rather had previously been ending his nightly newcast with one word—“Courage”—which is exactly what he needs now as he waits to see whether he’ll be booted off the CBS island in this real-life reality show.
More than three decades ago, George W. Bush ignored a direct order to take a flight physical while serving in the National Guard. Several Guard officials could not recall another pilot who skipped his mandatory medical examination.
“There were cases where they’d be a few weeks late because their regular jobs might get them in a bind,” said Jerry Marcontell, a Houston physician who spent ten years as the flight surgeon for Bush’s air wing, “but I don’t remember anyone missing a physical for months at a time. Certainly not a year.”
One rumor floating around has it that Bush wanted to avoid having his use of cocaine revealed during the course of a routine medical exam.
In any case, the documents upon which Rather based his story were apparently forged, and conservative media vultures were anxious to borrow Donald Trump from NBC just to spit out those two little words that Trump would like to copyright: “You’re fired.”
The irony is that, just hours before air-time, the journalistic thrill of presenting the National Guard scoop on 60 Minutes pre-empted a half-hour segment that was scheduled for the same program that night; a team of correspondents had spent more than six months investigating the Niger documents fraud, which purported to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium, a falsehood Bush included in his 2003 State of the Union speech to justify the invasion of Iraq.
And that’s why Dan Rather should be fired—for making such a foolish priority the basis of his editorial choice in the first place. Moreover, that pre-empted segment won’t be shown at all now, because CBS News says it’s too close to the election. Courage, my ass.
SCENE OF THE CRIME
To participate in the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, I flew to Berkeley, the epicenter of political correctness. This was the week before Columbus Day, so I wasn’t surprised to see a sign in a store window announcing that it would be “closed on Monday to celebrate Indigenous Day.” Ironically, a slogan that became associated with the FSM—“Don’t trust anyone over 30”—would today be considered ageist.
It was coined by Jack Weinberg, a graduate student at UC-Berkeley who, in October 1964, was arrested in Sproul Plaza for handing out leaflets about civil rights, in violation of a campus ban on political activities. The rule prohibited handing out leaflets or collecting money for any off-campus political cause, even advocating Lyndon Johnson or Barry Goldwater for president. For two weeks, the students tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with the administration.
At noontime, Weinberg was placed in a campus-police car, which was spontaneously surrounded by 3,000 students. The vehicle couldn’t be driven anywhere, having inadvertently become the centerpiece of 32-hour protest. Several students climbed on top to speak—but first they removed their shoes. The roof was soon dented, though demonstrators would later pay to fix the damages. One of the speakers was a 21-year-old philosophy student, Mario Savio, who two months later would deliver a passionate plea from the steps in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building.
“There is a time,” he told an an audience of 4,000, “when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine willl be prevented from working at all.”
Nearly 800 students were inspired to occupy Sproul Hall with a sit-in that would resonate across the country. They were handcuffed and taken away the next day in the largest arrest of students in U.S. history.
But Timothy Leary told me that “Such demonstrations play right onto the game boards of the administration and the police alike. The students could shake up the establishment much more if they would just stay in their rooms and change their nervous systems.”
“It’s not a case of either-or,” I argued. “They can protest and explore their 13-billion-cell minds simultaneously.”
Indeed, there was a false rumor that, during the mass imprisonment, a Bible which had been soaked in an LSD solution easily made its way into the cells. The students just ate those pages up, getting high on Deuteronomy, tripping out on Exodus.
Now, four decades later, there were 3,000 people gathered around a campus-police car in Sproul Plaza once again, only this time it was provided by the campus police. A make-shift ramp led to a wooden platform cushioned by foam rubber that organizers placed on top of the car. A photo of Jack Weinberg’s face was taped to the rear window.
And, although the San Francisco FBI office had put Mario Savio on the Reserve Index, a secret, unauthorized list of people to be detained, without judicial warrant, in the event of a national emergency (I was on the New York FBI’s Reserve Index), in 1997, a year after Savio’s death, the steps in front of Sproul Hall were named the “Mario Savio Steps.”
I guess those are signs of progress.
KERRY AND THE SEX WORKER
John Kerry didn’t know it was the 30th anniversary of the first national Hookers Convention when he told the New York Times: “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise.”
Margo St. James, a former prostitute and founder of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), had turned the finest trick of her life when she turned prurient interest back on itself to spread the message of the Hookers Convention. Their official poster featured an illustration of a woman fingering her clit, with the slogan, “Our convention is different—we want everybody to come!”
The event was held at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. In the lobby, T-shirts were on sale, flaunting a slogan, ’74—Year of the Whore! Reverend Cecil Williams greeted the overflow crowd: “This church is open to everybody. It has always been concerned with people who are misused and oppressed. I am delighted to welcome you.”
There was a growing awareness of the linear connections in suffering, which COYOTE had recognized by the range of its actions, from successfully protesting the automatic forced treatment for undiagnosed venereal disease of women arrested for prostitution—their presumably also-infected male customers went untreated—to the hookers’ boycott of crewmen off a ship docked in from torture-infested Chile.
Margo was invited to contribute an essay for the San Francisco Opera 2004-05 Yearbook to accompany an essay on La Traviata. “Today,” she wrote, “the St. James Infirmary, a first-of-its-kind occupational health and safety clinic run by sex industry workers for sex industry workers, provides primary health care for all sex workers in San Francisco. Our mission is not to reform sex workers but to reform society.”
I asked her to respond to John Kerry’s statement.
“Kerry, Jesse Jackson,” she said, “they don’t seem to realize the institutionalized racism and sexism produced by the prohibitions on drugs and sex work. There was a ten-year study in the Netherlands, 1985-95, where violence against women was reduced by 75 percent when the official stigma was removed by decriminalization. Look who is serving time—the majority are black. It’s also the means by which women’s wages are kept at 75 percent of wages for men doing the same jobs.
“The drug laws imprison non-violent youth, and allow the seizure of property—many times without an arrest—which is then converted to cash to fund the DEA. The two wars—on whores and drugs—are the foundation for the discrimination against women and minorities, and the justificatio
n for violence by the state. Actually, Kerry has probably never been a client or he would know that the prohibitions create the atmosphere for organized crime.”
John Kerry should choose his words more carefully. A real “nuisance” is a serving of dogshit on the sidewalk.
DUELING IMPRESSIONISTS
Lenny Bruce was scheduled to perform at the Village Theater on the Lower East Side a week after the assassination of President Kennedy. The whole country was still in a state of shock, and the atmosphere in the theater was especially tense that night. The show hadn’t begun yet, but the entire audience seemed to be anticipating what Lenny would say about the assassination. Now he walked on stage. He removed the microphone from its stand. When the applause for his entrance subsided, he stood there in silence for a few seconds, milking the tension.
“Whew,” he finally whistled into the microphone, “Vaughn Meader is screwed. . . .”
There was an instant explosion of laughter. And Lenny was right. JFK impressionist Meader had been scheduled for appearances on Hootenanny and To Tell the Truth, but he was canceled out of both, even though he had planned other material for Hootenanny and would not have appeared on To Tell the Truth as JFK. Yes, Vaughn Meader was indeed screwed.
Ah, but not David Frye—he could do Lyndon Johnson.
In 1960 I was a misfit among misfits attending a comedy workshop at a Times Square rehearsal loft. A group of would-be stand-ups met every week and tried to make each other laugh. There were two performers who did impressions: Vaughn Meader, whose specialty was John Kennedy; and David Frye, whose specialty was Richard Nixon. So it became an attachment beyond ordinary political considerations that motivated Meader and Frye to root respectively for Kennedy and Nixon in the presidential campaign.
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