One Hand Jerking Read online

  My mind had finally snapped. Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl began, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” and I had always identified with the “best minds” part but never with the “madness” part. Eventually I told fellow Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman, who was now on the lam as a fugitive, how I had tried to convince the CIA operative sitting in front of me on the bus that I was calling Abbie by using my ballpoint pen as a telegraph key.

  “Oh, yeah,” Abbie said. “I got your call, only it was collect, so I couldn’t accept it.”

  The turning point in my insanity came inadvertently one day while hiding out with my friend Lee Quarnstrom and his wife Guadalupe. I was sitting in the back seat of his car at a gas station. While Lee was out of the car, I noticed two guys staring at me. Just as I was convincing myself that now they were out to get me, I flashed back five years to the West Side Highway in New York. My secretary Sheila was driving her motor scooter, with me sitting behind her, my arms circling her waist. She was wearing a miniskirt. Truck drivers were making animal sounds and whistling. “They recognize me,” I joked to Sheila. And now, the moment I realized that these two guys in the gas station were staring, not at me in the back seat, but at Guadalupe in the front seat, my perspective began to return. I would be okay again.

  Losing my sense of humor had been the direction of my insanity. I had violated the 11th Commandment by taking myself as seriously as my causes. I developed an investment in my craziness, and I needed to perpetuate it. Only in retrospect would I realize that, in response to my megalomaniacal demands, what my dentist had said—“Hold on, Paul, let me get your chart”—was unintentionally, screamingly funny. By publishing controversial articles, I had been on a mission from the God I didn’t believe in. I had bought into a celestial conspiracy. I had gone over the edge, from a universe that didn’t know I existed, to one that did. From false humility to false pride.

  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 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 several 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 podiatarist 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.

  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 came when I learned that my neurosurgeon moonlighted as a clown at the circus. “All right, I surrender, I surrender.” Paralyzed from the chin down! I tried dialing—that is pressing—Nancy’s phone number with my nose. 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 trenchcoat 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.

  Early 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 round red plastic nose above his surgical mask. He could hardly reach the operating table because his outlandish, pointed shoes were so long, 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.” Nancy was waiting in the hall, and I was 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.

  In 1976, I attended a symposium held in Sun Valley, Idaho, “The American Hero: Myths and Media,” where I delivered a keynote address. I met Tom Laughlin, of Billy Jack movie fame, at the conference, and a couple of years later he invited me to a dinner party. He was a Thomas Jefferson enthusiast. In his home, there was Thomas Jefferson’s furniture, Thomas Jefferson’s silverware, Thomas Jefferson’s recipes—we started with peanut soup—and even Thomas Jefferson’s violin. I mentioned playing the violin as a child, and Laughlin invited me to play this one. I hadn’t held a violin for 25 years—not since I had used it as a prop when I started doing stand-up comedy—and four decades had passed since that concert in Carnegie Hall. It felt like a previous incarnation. But now Billy Jack himself was handing me Thomas Jefferson’s violin.

  “I’d like to dedicate this to Thomas Jefferson’s slaves,” I said.

  And then I played the only thing I felt competent enough to perform—“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” While I was playing, I stood unobtrusively balancing on my left foot, and scratched my left leg with my right foot.

  It was a private joke between me and the god of Absurdity.

  IRREVERENCE IS OUR ONLY SACRED COW

  Late one extremely hot night in the spring of 1958, alone and naked, I was sitting at my desk in Lyle Stuart’s office, preparing final copy for the first issue of The Realist. I had served my journalistic apprenticeship at Stuart’s anti-censorship paper, The Independent, where I had become managing editor, and now I was launching my own satirical magazine. The ’60s counterculture was in its embryonic stage, almost ready to burst out of the blandness, repression and piety of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking and Snooky Lanson singing “It’s a Marshmallow World” on TV’s Lucky Strike Hit Parade.

  I was supposed to have everything ready for the printer next morning. I felt exhausted, but there were two final pieces to write. My bare buttocks stuck to the leather chair as I created an imaginary dialogue about clean and dirty bombs. Then I borrowed a form from Mad and composed “A Child’s Primer on Telethons.” Our office was on the same floor as Mad in what became known as the Mad building, at 225 Lafayette Street.

  Mad’s art director, John Francis Putnam, designed The Realist logo and also became my first columnist. Although Mad staffers weren’t allowed to have any outside projects, Putnam was willing to risk his job to write for The Realist. Gaines appreciated that and made an exception for him. Putnam’s column was titled “Modest Proposals.”

  My second columnist was Robert Anton Wilson. I had already published his first article, “The Semantics of God,” in which he wrote, “The Believer had better face himself and ask squarely
: Do I literally believe ‘God’ has a penis? If the answer is no, then it seems only logical to drop the ridiculous practice of referring to ‘God’ as ‘He.’” Wilson’s column was titled “Negative Thinking.”

  This was before National Lampoon or Spy magazine, before Doonesbury or Saturday Night Live. I had no role models, and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded.

  In New York, the son of the owner of a newsstand in front of Carnegie Hall became my distributor. In Chicago, The Realist was distributed by the manager of an ice-cream company. Steve Allen became the first subscriber, he gave several gift subscriptions, including one for Lenny Bruce, who in turn gave gift subs to several others, as well as becoming an occasional contributor.

  I never knew where I would find new contributors.

  One time I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning. My radio was still on, and a man was talking about how you would try to expain the function of an amusement park to visitors from Venus. It was Jean Shepherd. He was on WOR from midnight to 5:30 every night, mixing childhood reminiscence with contemporary critiques, peppered with such characters as the man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the brand name of the refrigerator it came from and the year of manufacture. Shepherd would orchestrate his colorful tales with music ranging from “The Stars and Stripes Forever” to Bessie Smith singing “Empty Bed Blues.” He edited several of his stream-of-conscoiusness ramblings into article for The Realist under the title “Radio Free America.”

  At first the entire office staff consisted of me. I took no salary, but I had to figure out how to continue publishing without accepting ads, so naturally I got involved with a couple of guys who had a system for betting on the horses. Although I lost all my savings, there was one blessing in disguise. At the racetrack, I bought a handicap newsletter, The Armstrong Daily, which included a clever column by Marvin Kitman.

  I invited him to write for The Realist, and he became our consumer advocate with “An Independent Research Laboratory.” His first report, “I tried the Rapid-Shave Sandpaper Test,” called the bluff of a particular advertising campaign when he described his personal attempt to shave sandpaper with shaving cream. He also wrote sardonic pieces such as “How I Fortified My Family Fallout Shelter,” on the morality of arming yourself against neighbors who didn’t have a fallout shelter.

  Meanwhile, I was becoming bad company. Campus bookstores were banning The Realist, and students whose parents had burned their issues often wrote in for replacement copies. But I was publishing material that was bound to offend. For example, Madalyn Murray was a militant atheist who had challenged the constitutionality of compulsory Bible reading in public schools, and she concluded her first article, “I feel that Jesus Christ is at most a myth—and if he wasn’t, the least he was, was a bastard—and that the Virgin Mary obviously played around as much as I did, and certainly I feel she would be capable of orgasm.”

  I seemed to be following a pattern of participatory journalism.

  In 1962, when abortion was still illegal, I published an anonymous interview with Dr. Robert Spencer, a humane abortionist who was known as “The Saint.” Patients came to his office in Ashland, Pennsylvania, from around the country. He had been performing abortions for 40 years, started out charging $5, and never charged more than $100. Ashland was a small town, and Dr. Spencer’s work was not merely tolerated; the community depended on it—the hotel, the restaurant, the dress shop—all thrived on the extra business that came from his out-of-town patients. He built facilities at his clinic for Negro patients who weren’t allowed to obtain overnight lodgings elsewhere in Ashland.

  After the interview was published, I began to get phone calls from scared female voices, from teenagers to matrons. They were all in desperate search of a safe abortionist. Even a nurse couldn’t find one. It was preposterous that they should have to seek out the editor of a satirical magazine, but their quest so far had been futile, and they simply didn’t know where to turn. With Dr. Spencer’s permission, I referred them to him. I had never intended to become an underground abortion referral service, but it wasn’t going to stop just because in the next issue of The Realist there would be an interview with someone else.

  A few years later, state police raided Dr. Spencer’s clinic and arrested him. He remained out of jail only by the grace of political pressure from those he’d helped. He was finally forced to retire from his practice, but I continued mine, referring callers to other physicians he had recommended. Eventually, I was subpoenaed by district attorneys in two cities to appear before grand juries investigating criminal charges against abortionists. On both occasions, I refused to testify, and each time the D.A. tried to frighten me into cooperating with the threat of arrest.

  Bronx D.A. (now Judge) Burton Roberts told me that his staff had found an abortionist’s financial records, which showed all the money that I had received, but he would grant me immunity from prosecution if I cooperated with the grand jury. He extended his hand as a gesture of trust. “That’s not true,” I said, refusing to shake hands. If I had ever accepted any money, I’d have no way of knowing that he was bluffing.

  At this point, attorney Gerald Lefcourt filed a suit on my behalf, challenging the constitutionality of the abortion law. He pointed out that the D.A. had no power to investigate the violation of an unconstitutional law, and therefore he could not force me to testify. In 1970, I became the only plaintiff in the first lawsuit to declare the abortion laws unconstitutional in New York State. Later, various women’s groups joined the suit, and ultimately the N.Y. legislature repealed the criminal sanctions against abortion, prior to the Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade.

  In 1964, I assigned Robert Anton Wilson to write a feature article, which he called “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb.” A few months later, Leary invited me to his research headquarters in Millbrook, and I took my first acid trip. When I told my mother about LSD, she was quite concerned. “It could lead to marijuana,” she said. My mother was right.

  While covering the anti-Vietnam-war movement, I ended up co-founding the Yippies (Youth International Party) with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. After what was officially described as “a police riot” at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, I became an unindicted co-conspirator. I testified at the trial after ingesting 300 micrograms of acid. This was during my psychedelic macho stage. I even tripped when I was a guest on the Tonight show, and also while riding the subway during rush hour.

  I had been supporting myself by writing film criticism for Cavalier magazine, and with college speaking engagements. Cavalier declined to publish a particular column—my review of M*A*S*H as though it were a Busby Berkeley musical called Gook Killers of 1970—ostensibly on the grounds of bad taste, but I learned that three wholesalers had told the publisher they were pressured by the FBI and would refuse to distribute Cavalier if my column appeared in it.

  And my name was on a list of 65 “radical” campus speakers, compiled by the House Internal Security Committee. Their blacklist was published in the New York Times and picked up by newspapers across the country. My college bookings suddenly stopped. Just a coincidence.

  When I got married in 1964, John Francis Putnam had an idea for a poster that would be our housewarming gift. He designed the word FUCK in red-white-and-blue lettering emblazoned with stars and stripes. Now he needed a second word, a noun that would serve as an appropriate object of that verb. He suggested AMERICA, but that didn’t seem right to me. It certainly wasn’t an accurate representation of my feelings. I was well aware that I probably couldn’t publish The Realist in any other country. Besides, FUCK AMERICA lacked a sense of irony.

  This was at the time that a severe anti-Communist hysteria was burgeoning throughout the nation. The attorney general of Arizona rejected the Communist Party’s request for a place on the ballot because state law “prohibits official representation” for Communists and, in addition, “The subversive nature of your organization is even mor
e clearly designated by the fact that you do not even include your Zip code.” Alvin Dark, manager of the Giants, announced that “Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist.” And singer Pat Boone declared at the Greater New York Anti-Communism Rally in Madison Square Garden, “I would rather see my four daughters shot before my eyes than have them grow up in a Communist United States. I would rather see those kids blown into Heaven than taught into Hell by the Communists.”

  I suggested COMMUNISM as the second word, since the usual correlation between conservatism and prudishness would provide the incongruity that was missing. Putnam designed the word COMMUNISM in red lettering emblazoned with hammers and sickles, then presented me with a patriotic poster which proudly proclaimed, FUCK COMMUNISM!—suitable for framing. I wanted to share this sentiment with Realist readers, but our photo engraver refused to make a plate, explaining, “We got strict orders from Washington not to do stuff like this.” I approached another engraver, who said no because he had been visited by the FBI after making a plate of a woman with pubic hair. I finally found an engraver who agreed to do it. I published a miniature black-and-white version of the poster in The Realist and offered full-size color copies by mail. And if the Post Office interfered, I would have to accuse them of being soft on Communism.

  At a midwestern college, one graduating student held up a FUCK COMMUNISM! poster as his class was posing for the yearbook photo. Campus officials found out and insisted that the word FUCK be air-brushed out. But then the poster would read COMMUNISM! So that was air-brushed out too, and the yearbook ended up publishing a class photo that showed this particular student holding up a blank poster. Very dada.