American Fun (43 page)

Fittingly, in the spirit of their nineteenth-century antecedents who refused to take fact-based journalism too seriously, it was one of the original and most influential undergrounds, the
Berkeley Barb,
that authored the 1960s’ biggest hoax, the “
Electrical
Banana.” In the
Barb
’s March 3, 1967, issue, Ed Denison, the music columnist, offered a tongue-in-cheek recipe for dried banana peels and suggested that smoking them had a cannabic effect. Denison, also the manager for
Country Joe and the Fish, had smoked banana peels with the band a few months earlier; the only effects they had felt, as he well knew, came from the LSD they were taking. His article’s recommendation for “50 mg. of acid swallowed” said as much. But the underground press seized on the story, and quickly
Time
and
Newsweek
joined in. Suddenly there was a run on
bananas in supermarkets from Berkeley to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the spring of ’67’s loamy cultural soil, the rumor sprang up like dandelions. Watering it was
Donovan’s song
“Mellow Yellow,” which had been
throbbing on the airwaves since January. Its third verse made the cryptic prediction: “E-lec-trical Banana is gonna be a sudden craze, / E-lec-trical Banana is bound to be the very next phase.” Even though Donovan would later specify that
his
banana was a yellow vibrator, his phrasing gave the rumor serious weight. And in May, the
Velvet Underground’s first album, signed
Andy Warhol,
boasted a peel-able banana sticker—though it had been produced too early to be related. Coincidence? Who cared? It all became part of the big banana craze. As with the great Moon
Hoax of 1835, or with Dan De Quille’s 1867 “The Traveling Stones of Pahrangat Valley” (which fooled geologists in far-off England), the people were too tickled to ask serious questions (banana smoking became a short-lived fad), and the scientists who tested it, like the
U.S. Food and Drug Administration, proved themselves to be total squares. To those in the know, sometimes a banana wasn’t just a banana. Thus did bananas become the people’s icon in the early months of the Summer of Love. Bananas were represented by a half-crooked, half-obscene finger gesture. Bananas inspired a “banana pledge” at the Central Park
Be-In. Bananas also provoked U.S. Representative
Frank Thompson (D-N.J.) to join the fun and propose the Banana Labeling Act of 1967.

THE DIGGERS BELIEVED
spontaneous fun was essential to a free citizenry. They goosed the public with pranks and jokes, and nearly every Sunday over the next couple of years—making good on their protests against
Bill Graham and
Chet Helms, whose concert halls they often picketed—they employed their skills at outdoor production and staged
free concerts in Golden Gate Park, where they always served free food for the masses and featured bands that charged admission at the Fillmore. Reminiscent of the 1760s
Stamp Act protests, where citizens of all classes swarmed into the streets to liberate themselves in masquerade, these Sunday gatherings attracted them all: “
aborigines, Tonto, Inquisitor-General Torquemada, Shiva holy men, cowboy bikers, every shade of gender bender, flower children, urban junkies, stockbrokers with cautiously expressed face-paint, dentists on dope, real estate agents disguised as flower-children”—as
Peter Coyote recalled. But these Sundays
in the park didn’t protest anything. They simply
were:
the liberated people in all their glory.
The first such party, the famed
Human Be-In on January 14, 1967, was fortified with five thousand free turkey sandwiches (turkeys courtesy of Owsley Stanley) and what seemed like the lowest-key American fun. A sea of humanity filled the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park for no other reason than just to hang out. Everybody did their own groovy thing—“
took drugs, danced, painted their faces, dressed in outrageous costumes, crawled into the bushes and made love, fired up the barbecues, pitched tents, and sold wares—crystals, tie-dyes, hash pipes, earrings, hair ties, and political tracts. Fifty thousand people played flutes, guitars, tambourines, tablas, bongos, congas, sitars, and saxophones, and sang, harmonized, and reveled in their number and variety, aware that they were an emergent social force.”
Hell’s Angels babysat missing children, and afterwards everybody picked up the litter.

Everyone liked the Be-In but the
Diggers themselves. It was too white, too commercial (thanks to drug dealers and the Diggers’ archenemies, the Haight Independent Proprietors [HIP]), and too stage-focused on celebrities like
Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and a sensational new radical named
Jerry Rubin. (
Emmett Grogan called it “
the love shuck.”) So they planned a weekend-long happening of their own—“The Invisible Circus: The Right of Spring”—to educate the district about having fun. It was advertised by word of mouth and a limited number of psychedelic red pamphlets and slated to start on February 24 at
Glide Memorial United Methodist Church on Ellis and Taylor, whose young black minister,
Cecil Williams, had been widening his congregation in recent years to accommodate “
San Francisco’s diverse communities of hippies, addicts, gays, the poor, and the marginalized.”

But even this ultra-hip church wasn’t ready for what the Diggers and their co-conspirators, the Mime Troupe and the
Artists Liberation Front, had in store. The chapel was split up into zones, each one vying to outdo the other in its “
improbable and outrageous” activities. The basement hall was piled three feet high in shredded plastic and divided into a free-love recreation room and a cafeteria serving acid-spiked Tang. The church offices became dedicated “
love-making salons”—tricked out with mattresses, “lubricants,” and dead bolts. A rather stuffy lecture
on pornography was interrupted, from behind, by a penis appearing through a glory hole and got much more interesting when a couple was carried in for a live sex demonstration. Naked belly dancers burst in through a paper wall, someone played Chopin’s “Death March” on the organ, and revelers and reporters coursed in by the thousands. Congas, laughter, and microphoned voices echoed in the candlelit air;
Hell’s Angels copulated in the pews with a woman dressed like a nun; prostitutes brought their johns, transvestites coupled, and the writer
Richard Brautigan wrote and published “Flash!” bulletins of everything he witnessed, with the help of his “John Dillinger Communication Company” toiling away in the basement. “
Several couples,” wrote Grogan, who was prone to embellishment, “were draped over the main altar, fucking, as a giant, naked weight lifter towered above them, standing on top of some sort of tabernacle in a beam of light, masturbating and panting himself into a trance.”

Grogan praised the “
surreal harmony” of this “incredible Fellini wet-dream”: “everyone moving, watching, seeing it all, and no one afraid, but laughing joyfully, happy, and then a scream followed by a hushed silence with everything still for a moment until the person who screamed would laugh and give away the joke.” Coyote, who was home sick for the Circus, reported from hearsay a similarly surreal sense of harmony: “
Permission was the rule, and despite the chaos, the conflagration of taboos and bizarre behavior, no one was hurt, wounded, shunned, or scorned.” No one, perhaps, but Glide’s dismayed deacons, whose church had been thoroughly defiled and who had been misled as to the nature of the happening. With some help from the cops, Glide doused the party’s flames before dawn, at which point the attendees moved their circus to the beach and watched the sunrise in the jittery manner, as one might assume, of the stragglers at the end of
La Dolce Vita
.

Wild fun was had at the Invisible Circus, Merry Mount’s blasphemous mission accomplished, and in this extreme case of American fun, Coyote’s “safety-valve” metaphor seems perfectly appropriate: “
it was simply like letting steam out of a pressure cooker: once accomplished, it was not necessary to repeat.”

Some Haight-Ashbury pressure may have broken, but the party was
far from over. And from then on out, the Diggers’ indefatigably antic spirit didn’t always keep the peace, not even at the laid-back Sunday gatherings in the park. By the spring of that year, 1967, when
banana peels were smoldering, when resistance to the draft was starting to catch fire, the crowds grew bigger and more intense.
Peter Berg, known to fellow Diggers as “the Hun,” had recently alerted media outlets that the nation’s teens would converge on San Francisco; with this prank, he created what the historian
Alice Echols calls the “
disastrous
Summer of Love”—when the Gray Line Bus Company ran a national
“Hippie Hop Tour,” when “seventy-five thousand kids spent their summer vacation in the Haight,” and when commercialism, addiction,
racial tension, and rape ran rampant among the disorganized masses. Some Mime Troupe members, under Berg’s leadership, seized on the chance to stir things up. During one of the late-spring parties in the Panhandle, while
Janis Joplin played and people got peacefully high on the lawn, the politically moderate young writer
Joan Didion observed Peter Berg and others, all in blackface, working the crowd with plastic nightsticks. On their backs they sported antagonistic signs: “
how many times you been raped,
YOU LOVE FREAKS
?” and “
WHO STOLE CHUCK BERRY
’
S MUSIC
?” They distributed flyers that warned “by august haight street will be a cemetery” because by “summer thousands of un-white un-suburban boppers are going to want to know why you’ve given up what they can’t get.” At one point they surrounded an African American, prodded him with nightsticks, and “bar[ed] their teeth.” The hostility was lost on one cheery kid, who told Didion that it was a “really groovy” thing called “street theatre,” but it wasn’t lost on a small group of blacks. One of them said, “Nobody
stole
Chuck Berry’s music, man … Chuck Berry’s music belongs to
every
body.” When a blackface girl badgered him about the meaning of “everybody,” he responded, simply, “Everybody. In America.” In one phrase he accounted for the spread of black fun from the earliest slave circles to events like this one.

But these minstrels weren’t interested in
that
kind of fun. They wanted blacks to attack the hippies in the name of economic justice. The blackface girl shot back at the black man: “What’d
America
ever do for you?… White kids here, they can sit in the Park all summer long,
listening to the music they stole, because their bigshot parents keep sending them money. Who ever sends you money?” The black man didn’t take the bait; he simply told her such tactics weren’t “right.” Predictably, their prodding came to nothing. For much as
A
Minstrel Show
had updated stereotypes for the civil rights era, so did Peter Berg’s blackface agitation grossly oversimplify African-American rage. To be sure, it wasn’t irritating street theater, it was
Matthew Johnson’s murder by a cop that had touched off the
Hunter’s Point riots.

11

T
HE
YIPPIES
, American fun’s most notorious activists, found their soul in
underground journalism, in ornery
rock ’n’ roll, in Che Guevara’s street politics, in
Herbert Marcuse’s Freudian
Marxism, in
Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, and in the Mississippi “
Freedom Summer” of 1964. They were also inspired by the
Diggers’ troublemaking. Like the
Artists Liberation Front (founded by Mime Troupe members among others), the Yippies wanted to marry radically democratic politics with pranks, street theater, disruption, absurdity, and sophisticated media blitzkriegs. Their fun resounded on a global scale.

Kurt Vonnegut called Yippie leader
Abbie Hoffman a “
holy clown.” Dashing, wild-eyed, raven-haired Hoffman had been (like Kesey) a college wrestler, also a psychology T.A. at Berkeley, a deeply committed activist in the
civil rights movement, and was a divorced father of two boys when, at age thirty-one, in 1967, he moved in with his new girlfriend,
Anita Kushner, on New York City’s
Lower East Side. Kushner, then twenty-five, had also studied psychology, had also worked for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was, in his words, “
a born rascal.” Their neighborhood was the center of East Coast radicalism, and soon the couple became its radical royalty, opening
their doors to wayward youths and the likes of needle-popping
Janis Joplin. Like the Haight-Ashbury, the Lower East Side drew what Hoffman called the latest “
waves of immigrants” into its run-down tenement houses: “They came not by sea, but from within America,” and they lived under the same septic conditions. Most of these “immigrants” were disaffected youths, prey to dealers and pimps. The older crowd of activists, like Hoffman and Kushner, mentored them and helped them to get organized. This older crowd also provided free professional services, in an effort to wriggle themselves out of what Hoffman called the “
strait jackets” of their careers: “Actors created street theater groups. Lawyers volunteered time for serious busts. Medical students set up a free clinic.” Leaders and organizers learned the ways of the street and in turn became “instigators” of hippie “style and values.” East Village radicals like the clean-cut Hoffman grew their hair as a sign of resistance, and commitment. Not a costume they could wear on the weekends, bushy hair, as Hoffman saw it, welcomed the kind of abuse typically hurled at blacks and Puerto Ricans. During their early months together in New York, Hoffman, Kushner, and their friends ran a
free store that was frequently raided by cops. In California
Diggers fashion, they didn’t advertise its address; they made interested patrons find it themselves.