One Hand Jerking (35 page)

“Sure,” Moscone said, “a man has the right to change his mind.”

However, there was opposition to White's return, led by Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the country. He had cut off his ponytail and put on a suit so he could work within the system, but he refused to hide his sexual preference. Now he warned pragmatic Moscone that giving homophobic White his seat back would be seen as an antigay move in the homosexual community. Even a mayor who wants to run for reelection had the right to change his mind.

On a Monday morning, after a brief conversation with Moscone, White shot him twice in the body, then two more times in the head, execution-style, as he lay on the floor. The Marlboro cigarette in his hand would still be burning when the paramedics arrived. White walked hurriedly across a long corridor to an area where the supervisor's offices were. His name was already removed from the door of his office, but he still had a key. He went inside and reloaded his gun.

Milk was in his office. White walked in and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute, Harvey?” White followed Milk into his inner office, then fired three shots into his body, and while Milk was prone on the floor, White fired two more shots into his head. He later turned himself in to the police. Moscone's body was buried. Milk's was cremated. His ashes were placed in a box wrapped in
Doonesbury
strips, and scattered at sea. They had been mixed with the contents of two packets of grape Kool-Aid and formed a purple patch upon the Pacific.

A day before the trial began, Assistant D.A. Tom Norman was standing in an elevator at the Hall of Justice. He heard a voice behind him speak: “Tom Norman, you're a motherfucker for prosecuting Dan White.” He turned around, saw several police inspectors, and faced the door again. These were his drinking buddies, and now they were mad at him. “I didn't know who said it,” he confided to a courtroom artist, “and I didn't want to know.”

In a surprise move, White's defense team presented a biochemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on compulsive gobbling down of sugar-filled junk-food. This was a purely accidental tactic. Dale Metcalf, a former member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters who was now a lawyer, contacted me during the trial. He told me that he happened to be playing chess with Steven Scherr, one of Dan White's defense attorneys. Health-conscious Metcalf had just read
Orthomolecular Nutrition
by Abram Hoffer. He questioned Scherr about White's diet and learned that while under stress White would consume candy bars
and soft drinks. Metcalf recommended the book to Scherr, even suggesting the author as an expert witness. In the book, Hoffer revealed a personal vendetta against doughnuts, and White had once eaten five in a row.

Flash ahead to November 23, 2003, when an article titled “Myth of the ‘Twinkie Defense'” in the
San Francisco Chronicle
stated: “During the trial, no one but well-known satirist Paul Krassner—who may have coined the phrase ‘Twinkie defense'—played up that angle. His trial stories appeared in the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
. ‘I don't think Twinkies were ever mentioned in testimony, ' said chief defense attorney Douglas Schmidt, who recalls ‘HoHos and Ding Dongs,' but no Twinkies.”

The fact is, psychiatrist Martin Blinder testified that, on the night before the murders, while White was “getting depressed about the fact he would not be reappointed, he just sat there in front of the TV set, bingeing on Twinkies.” Now Blinder complains, “If I found a cure for cancer, they'd still say I was the guy who invented the ‘The Twinkie defense.'”

The
Chronicle
article also quoted Steven Scherr about the Twinkie defense: “‘It drives me crazy,' said co-counsel Scherr, who suspects the simplistic explanation provides cover for those who want to minimize and trivialize what happened. If he ever strangles one of the people who says ‘Twinkie defense' to him, Scherr said, it won't be because he's just eaten a Twinkie.”

Scherr was sitting in the audience at the campus theater where the panel discussion was taking place. When he was introduced from the stage, I couldn't resist saying to him on my microphone, “Care for a Twinkie?”

Schmidt and Scherr appear to have forgotten another psychiatrist, who testified, “If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.” Schmidt's closing argument became almost an apologetic parody of his own defense. He told the jury that Dan White did not have to be “slobbering at the mouth” to be subject to diminished capacity. Nor, he said, was this simply a case of “Eat a Twinkie and go crazy.”

A representative of the ITT-owned Continental Baking Company asserted that the notion that overdosing on the cream-filled goodies could lead to murderous behavior was “poppycock” and “crap”—apparently two of the artificial ingredients in Twinkies, along with sodium pyrophosphate and yellow dye—while another spokesperson for ITT couldn't believe “that a rational jury paid serious attention to that issue.” Nevertheless, some jurors did. Observed one: “It sounded like Dan White had hypoglycemia.”

What should have been a slam-dunk verdict—guilty of first degree murder—
had morphed into the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter. Instead of capital punishment or a life term, White was sentenced to less than eight years, with time off for good behavior, ultimately on the basis of the Twinkie defense, in the guise of “diminished capacity.”

While White was serving time, the
San Francisco Chronicle
published this correction: “In an article about Dan White's prison life, Chronicle writer Warren Hinckle reported that a friend of White expressed the former supervisor's displeasure with an article in the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
which made reference to the size of White's sexual organ. The
Chronicle
has since learned that the
Bay Guardian
did not publish any such article and we apologize for the error.” Actually, it was 10 feet long, 3 feet 6 inches high, 3 feet 8 inches wide, and weighed more than a ton. No, not White's penis; I'm referring to the world's largest Twinkie, unveiled in Boston in 1981.

The “Twinkie defense” now appears in law dictionaries, in sociology textbooks, in college exams, and in over 2800 references on the Google search engine. Sirhan Sirhan told the
Los Angeles Times
: “If [White] had a valid diminished capacity defense because he was eating too many Twinkies, I sure had a better one [for assassinating Robert Kennedy] because of too many Tom Collinses, plus the deep feeling about my homeland that affected my conduct.”

In January 1984, White was released from prison. In October 1985, he committed suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He taped a note to the windshield of his car, reading: “I'm sorry for all the pain and trouble I've caused.” He had served a little more than five years for committing a double political assassination. The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie is seven years. That's two years longer than he spent behind bars, and a Twinkie which had remained in his cupboard would still be edible.

The FBI has labeled me “a raving, unconfined nut.” I prefer to think of myself as an investigative satirist. Irreverence is my only sacred cow. When I was writing
the script for a fake
Doonesbury
strip, that slogan would grace the cover of
The Realist
, even though the masthead stated, “Fact Checker: None,” I verified with a source in Mafia circles that Frank Sinatra had once delivered a suitcase full of money to Lucky Luciano in Havana after he was deported.

Recently I met a 25-year-old woman who told me about “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” not knowing that I had written it. She believed that the act of “necrophilia” had actually occurred. What I had originally intended as a metaphorical truth has become, in her mind, a literal truth. Thanks to current realities, that piece of satire is now a credible urban myth. When I moved from New York to San Francisco in 1971, I wanted to publish something in the 13th anniversary issue that would top “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book.” I had observed a disturbing element being imposed upon the counterculture—various groups all trying to rip off the search for deeper consciousness—and I felt challenged to write a satirical piece about this phenomenon.

Scientology was one of the scariest of these organizations, if only because its recruiters were such aggressive zombies. Carrying their behavior to its logical conclusion, they could become programmed assassins. I chose Sirhan Sirhan—in prison for killing presidential candidate Robert Kennedy—as a credible allegory, since Sirhan was already known to have an interest in mysticism and self-improvement, from the secrets of the Rosicrucians to Madame Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy.

In a list of upcoming features for the anniversary issue, I included “The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy.” Then I began do my research. I even developed a source (Deep E-Meter) within the Scientology organization. The goal of Scientology was to become a Clear—that is, a
complete
zombie—moving up to higher and higher levels by means of auditing sessions with an E-Meter, essentially a lie detector. John Godwin wrote in
Occult America
that the E-Meter “made lying difficult for the impressionable.”

I decided to try one at the San Francisco Center. The stares of the Scientology practitioners seemed to be tactical, their smiles unfelt. In confronting their guilts and fears through the medium of a machine, they had become machine-like themselves, and they responded like automatons. I took hold of the E-Meter's tin cans, one in each hand.

“Wow,” I said, “I just felt a surge of energy go pulsating through me.”

“Paul,” my auditor replied, “they're not even attached yet.”

“Well, such is the power of auto-suggestion.”

There was no charge for the personality test by which prospective Scientologists
screened themselves into “the world of the totally free.” It consisted of 200 questions on topics ranging from fingernail-biting to jealousy.

In
World Medicine
, David Delvin reported that when
his
answers were processed, he was told, “You've got quite a bit of agitation and you're moderately dispersed, but we can help you to standard tech. . . . So, you see, it's all
very
scientific—thanks to the fact that our founder is a man of science himself.”

Dr. Delvin confessed, “I hadn't the heart to tell him that his super-scientific system had failed to detect the fact that I had marked the ‘Don't know' column against all 200 questions in the test.”

Founder L. Ron Hubbard's original thesis in his book
Dianetics
(which became a bestseller because Scientologists had infiltrated the
New York Times
and learned which bookstores the
Times
based its list on) was that traumatic shock occurs not only during early childhood, but also during the pre-natal stage.

In
Neurotica
magazine, G. Legman took off on that concept with his own cult, Epizootics, “demonstrating the basic cause of all neurosis in father's tight-fitting jockstrap.”

Not to be outdone by parody, Hubbard in 1952 turned Dianetics into Scientology, which traced trauma back to
previous
lives—not necessarily incarnations that were spent on this planet, either. In fact, Scientologists were forbidden to see the movie
2001
in order to avoid “heavy and unnecessary restimulation.”

By what? When Hal the computer says, “Unclear”?

In 1955, Hubbard incorporated Scientology as a religion, based in Washington, D.C. This would enable its ministers to gain entry into hospitals and prisons, not to mention getting tax exemption. He issued the
Professional Auditors Bulletin
, a handbook for luring prospects into the Scientology fold.

One example was the “illness research” method, taking out a newspaper ad, such as: “Polio victims—a charitable organization investigating polio desires to examine several victims of the after-effects of this illness. Phone [telephone number].” Hubbard explained, “The interesting hooker in this ad is that anyone suffering from a lasting illness is suffering from it so as to attract attention and bring about an examination of it. These people will go on being examined endlessly.”

Another example, under the subhead “Exploiting,” was the “casualty contact” method, “requiring little capital and being highly ambulatory.” All it needed was “good filing and a good personal appearance.” Hubbard elaborated:

“Every day in the daily papers, one discovers people who have been victimized one way or the other by life. One takes every daily paper he can get his hands on and cuts from it every story whereby he might have a pre-Clear. As speedily as
possible, he makes a personal call on the bereaved or injured person. He should represent himself to the person or the person's family as a minister whose compassion was compelled by the newspaper story concerning the person. The goal is to move the customer from group processing to individual attention at a fee.”

In 1962, Hubbard wrote to President John F. Kennedy, claiming that his letter was as important as the one Albert Einstein had sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the atomic bomb. Hubbard insisted that “Scientology is very easy for the government to put into effect,” and that “Scientology could decide the space race or the next war in the hands of America.” Kennedy didn't respond—the bloody fool, daring not to answer a question he hadn't even been asked.

The E-Meter was presented as a panacea that could cure such “psychosomatic” problems as arthritis, cancer, polio, ulcers, the common cold, and atomic radiation burns. In October 1962, the Food and Drug Administration was investigating Scientology, so Hubbard wrote that the E-Meter is “a valid religious instrument, used in Confessionals, and is in no way diagnostic and does not treat.” Nevertheless, in January 1963, the FDA raided Scientology headquarters, seizing 100 E-Meters. Scientology claimed that this violated their freedom of religion, and Hubbard wrote to President Kennedy again. He wanted to meet with him so that they could “come to some amicable answers on religious matters.” Again, no response.