One Hand Jerking (3 page)

“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.

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.