One Hand Jerking (28 page)

When JFK was slain, Mae was a suburban homemaker with five children. Her 7-year-old daughter Bonnie was concerned about Lee Harvey Oswald. She saw him on TV. He had a black eye and he was saying, “I didn't do it. I haven't killed anybody. I don't know what this is all about.” Bonnie decided to send him her teddy bear. It was all wrapped up and ready to mail when she saw Oswald murdered by Jack Ruby on TV that Sunday morning, and then all day long, over and over again in slow-motion.

What then began as Mae's hobby would turn into a lifetime pilgrimage. One bit of research led to another—and another and another and another. Although the Ultimate Mystery would remain forever inconceivable, assassination research became her spiritual quest for truth. Conspiracy became her Zen grid for perceiving political reality, drawing her deeper and deeper into a separate reality that Carlos Castaneda never dreamed of. (Castaneda was, of course, one of the three tramps arrested at the Grassy Knoll.)

Mae started a weekly radio program,
Dialogue Assassination
, originating at KLRB in Carmel, California, and syndicated to half a dozen other stations. She
purchased the
Warren Commission Report
for $86, studying and cross-referencing the entire 26 volumes, without the aid of a computer. It took her eight years and 27,000 typewritten pages. She was overwhelmed by the difference between the evidence and the conclusion that there had been only a single assassin.

“Lee Harvey Oswald was set up to take the fall,” she said, “but the Warren Commission ignored physical evidence from the scene of the crime—bullets, weapons, clothing, wounds—and based its judgment that Oswald was just a disturbed loner on the testimony of some 30 Russian emigres in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Most of them, according to the testimony, were affiliated with anti-Communist organizations that had collaborated with the Nazis during the war.”

Next she began to study the history of Nazis brought to this country after World War II under “Project Paperclip” and infiltrated into hospitals, universities and the aerospace industry, further developing their techniques in propaganda, mind control and behavior modification. She observed how the patterns of murder in the U.S. were identical to those in Nazi Germany. It was as if an early Lenny Bruce bit—about how a show-business booking agency, MCA, promoted Adolf Hitler as a dictator—had actually been a satirical prognostication of the way Richard Nixon would rise to power. The parallels between the rise of Hitler and Nixon were frightening.

I first met Mae in February 1972. She was about 50, plump and energetic, wearing a long peasant dress patchworked with philosophical tidbits, knitting sweaters for her children while she breathlessly described the architecture of an invisible government. The walls were lined with 40 file cabinets containing 1,600 subject folders.

Every day Mae would digest ten newspapers from around the country, supplemening that diet with items sent to her by a network of researchers and young conspiracy students known as Brussell Sprouts, plus magazines, underground papers, unpublished manuscripts, court affidavits, documents from the National Archives, FBI and CIA material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and hundreds of books on espionage and assassination. Each Sunday she would sort out the previous week's clippings into various categories as though she were conducting a symphony of horror.

Mae had never been published before, but I gave her a double assignment for
The Realist
. One article would compare the rise of Hitler with the rise of Nixon—each resulting from a series of political assassinations. (Meanwhile, Nixon was having lunch with her father, Rabbi Magnin.) The other article would
be on the function of Lee Harvey Oswald and other alleged assassins in achieving that purpose.

I stayed overnight, devouring material from Mae's massive fies. The next morning, my head was still swirling in the afterglow of a fresh conversion. Previously, my religion had been Coincidence, but now it was becoming tempered with Conspiracy. On the bus back home, I pondered the theological question Mae had posed: “How many coincidences does it take to make a plot?”

A few months later, I got a call from her. No wonder she was so excited. The attempted burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel had suddenly brought her 8-1/2 years of dedicated conspiracy research to an astounding climax. She recognized names,
modus operandi
, patterns of cover-up. She could trace linear connections leading inevitably from the assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, masterminded by E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA for 21 years.

Three weeks later—while Nixon was pressing for the postponement of an investigation until after the election, and the mainstream press was still referring to the incident as a “caper” and a “third-rate burglary”—Mae completed a long article for
The Realist
, documenting the conspiracy and delineating the players, from the burglars all the way up to FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Attorney General John Mitchell and President Nixon himself.

“The significance of the Watergate affair,” she wrote, “is that every element essential for a political
coup d'etat
in the United States was asembled at the time of their arrest.”

Believing that her documented article could prevent Nixon's re-election, she delineated the details of a plot so insidious and yet so logical that the typesetter wrote “Bravo!” at the end of her manuscript. However, instead of my usual credit arrangement, the printer insisted on $5,000 cash in advance before this issue could go to press. I didn't have the money, and had no idea how I would get it, but I was filled with an inexplicable sense of confidence.

When I got home, the phone rang. It was Yoko Ono. She and John Lennon were in town, and they invited me to lunch. At that time, the Administration was trying to deport Lennon, ostensibly for an old marijuana bust, but really because they were afraid he was planning to perform for protesters at the Republican convention that summer. I brought the galleys of Mae's article to lunch. Her account of the government's motivation and methodology provided a context for John and Yoko's current harassment. I mentioned my printer's ultimatum, and they
immediately took me to a bank and withdrew $5,000 cash. The timing was so exquisite that Coincidence and Mysticism became the same process for me.

A year before the Watergate break-in, E. Howard Hunt had proposed a “bag job”—a surreptitious entry—into the office of psychiatrist Lewis Fielding, who had refused to cooperate with FBI agents investigating one of his patients—Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. It was the function of the White House “plumbers” to
plug
such leaks. The burglars, led by G. Gordon Liddy, scattered pills around the office to make it look like a junkie was responsible.

The police assured Dr. Fielding that the break-in was made in search of drugs, even though he found Ellsberg's records removed from their folder. An innocent black man, Elmer Davis, was arrested, convicted and sent to prison, while Liddy remained silent. Mae corresponded with Davis, and after he finished serving Liddy's time, he ended up living with Mae.

It was a romance made in Conspiracy Heaven.

“What part of recovery don't you fucking understand?”

That's the rhetorical question Steve Earle asked free-lance journalist Mitch Myers, who was assigned by
High Times
to write a piece on him. Earle had been a junkie for nearly a quarter-century, half of his life. Booze, coke, heroin, methadone, methamphetamine, crack, cough syrup—you name it, he drank, smoked, snorted and mainlined it. In the process, he temporarily destroyed his career as a ground-breaking singer-songwriter, not to mention his function as a dedicated political activist.

Earle also ruined friendships and marriages alike. He was a fool for lust in the guise of love, and has been married six times (twice to the same woman). Hard drugs so severely affected his health that his life almost became six weddings and a funeral. So, although Myers went into great detail about the expanded direction of
High Times
, it's understandable that Earle—who has even given up
cigarettes and coffee—might not want to be associated with a magazine that has been so strongly identified with marijuana.

“But,” observes Myers, “he still sings ‘Copperhead Road,' which is about, among other things, growing weed.”

Born on January 16, 1955 at Fort Monroe Army Hospital in Virginia—the same year that both McDonald's and Disneyland opened—Earle was a military brat, raised in Texas, first in El Paso and then in San Antonio. He saw Elvis Presley on TV when he was 3 years old and the Beatles when he was 9, he got his first guitar when he was 12 and smoked his first joint when he was 13, he began performing solo at local coffeehouses and tripping on LSD when he was 14 and he moved to Nashville when he was 19. He would become a musical hybrid, with one foot in country blues and the other in rock'n'roll, going on tour and playing the bar circuit, developing a cult following along the way on his extended and extremely bumpy journey to commercial success.

In a biography published in England,
Hardcore Troubadour: The Life and Near Death of Steve Earle
, Lauren St. John wrote:

“Watching the tree-lined interstates of Tennessee give way to the wide open spaces of Texas, Steve found himself humming songs from
Born in the USA
, the album that had recently catapulted [Bruce] Springsteen into the mainstream. Experiencing Springsteen live and listening to the album had had a profound effect on him. ‘I was intrigued by the fact that Springsteen opened the album with “Born in the USA,” that it was really a theme and an overture, and he opened the show with it.' Inspired, Steve wrote ‘Guitar Town' on the drive home, specifically intending it to be the opening song of his album.”

And, similar to Springsteen, it was the
Guitar Town
album which catapulted Earle into the mainstream in 1986.

Ironically, though, according to Bill Bennett, a respected rock promoter, “I used to argue with him and at the end I'd say, ‘Why am I arguing with you, you're a junkie.' And he'd yell, ‘Well, I wrote
Guitar Town
on junk, so fuck you!'”

When I was assigned by
High Times
to write a piece on Steve Earle, I was
not
informed that, only a week before, he had refused to cooperate with exactly such a project. And so, on a crisp October afternoon in New York City, blissfully unaware of that turndown, I bought a little tape recorder and headed for the combination CMJ 2003 Music Marathon and Do It Yourself Convention at the Hilton Hotel, where Earle would appear on stage, not with his guitar, but as a speaker.

Chicago Sun-Times
critic Jim Derogatis, referring to the Atkins diet, is teasing him: “Everybody thinks you're on drugs again since you lost weight.”

Earle responds, “No one that saw me when I was on drugs thinks I'm on drugs when they see me now.”

“Are you sick of people asking how can you eat all that red meat and be healthy?”

“No. I used to spend $300 a day on cocaine, not sweating meat.”

Amos Poe's musical documentary about Steve Earle,
Just an American Boy
, has played in theaters and is available on DVD. A soundtrack double-album from the film has been released by Artemis Records, with all of Earle's best known songs, some alone and others with his band, the Dukes.

“The [documentary] happened,” he says, “because Danny Goldberg [head of Artemis] realized that I was talking to some people that I don't normally talk to in the normal promotional cycle of a record, and he thought that we should document that. Amos made the ‘Transcendental Blues' video and the ‘Jerusalem' video, so when someone proposes a documentary film, for me that means 3 to 6 months with a camera up my ass. It was Amos who I know and I like him, so at least I knew
whose
camera was up my ass. It was easier to sit through when we screened it than I thought it would be. It was somewhat less uncomfortable than a hot poker in one of my eyes.”

Just as, in 1962, Lenny Bruce, in his most audacious satirical critique, perceived reality from Holocaust orchestrator Adolf Eichmann's point of view, so, 40 years later, did Steve Earle, in his most controversial song, “John Walker's Blues” on the
Jerusalem
CD, empathize with John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban captured in Afghanistan, wondering why Allah's master plan had U.S. troops “dragging me back with my head in a sack to the land of the infidel,” and observing, “If my daddy could see me now, chains around my feet, he don't understand that sometimes a man has got to fight for what he believes.” The chorus included eerie Arabic chanting.

Earle maintains that it's his “most poignant album, most proud moment of my career. I got a one-star review from the
New York Post
. I pissed off all the people I was trying to piss off, and everybody that I respect got it, so every bit of shit I got was like I expected to get from the quarters I expected to get it from.

“I worried more about my family early on, just because they worried about me, because their politics is part of the climate in this country. It's a climate of fear, and it's designed to shut us up and keep us from asking questions. And it's absolutely nothing short of that. Taking it any less seriously than that is jerking off.
That's what it is, the new blacklist. It's the new censorship, and it's very, very serious business to me.

“I worried about offending John Walker Lindh's parents, I worried about doing anything to endanger his case, and the closest I came to not doing it was taking that into consideration, and the reason I was sort of predisposed to think that way, I do a lot of work around Modesto [where Lindh's family lives], and I learned a long time ago that I'd never bring an end to the death penalty in this country if I was insensitive to the feelings of victims' families.