One Hand Jerking (2 page)

He was the Swift of the Sixties. For a high school student like myself, his humor was a kind of comfort food, and it helped me realize that my angst and frustration with my sterile suburban lifestyle were legitimate. Most importantly, he made me laugh, and this book is no exception to that rule. The man knows funny. Unlike all the other great comic minds of that time, Krassner wasn't on vinyl, his words were on the page, which in a way made it more deeply affecting to me personally. He made me realize the importance of the profane, and if I have to explain that, we could be here for days. After reading the first few copies of
The Realist
, I was never the same, and I thank him for that.

If he wasn't pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, then he was making sure we understood that it's not the world that is off kilter, it's the people who run it. It doesn't really matter who is in charge, because Paul has always known and paid attention to the fact that power most definitely corrupts. Finding my own difficulty with authority figures, it was nice to know that I wasn't alone, and I was most definitely not crazy, because as crazy as Krassner may have appeared and still does to a portion of America, he is not. His insanity is stating the truth in no uncertain terms and doing it through humor without his object being financial gain. (If he were doing it for the money, then they wouldn't think he was so nuts.)

In many ways he was and still is the voice of the Sixties, but more important than that, he is the conscience we have tried to rid ourselves of. He was everywhere
during the Sixties and knew everyone from Lenny Bruce to Andrew Weil. One could call him the Zelig of our time. Only he was for real. These essays alone will give you a taste of that, but hopefully they will lead you into more of Krassner's work. For make no mistake, it is important. He has pushed the boundaries of comedy as far as anyone in print or stand-up ever has, and for that we should be eternally grateful.

The prevailing culture should be thankful for such a figure, even though they feel the thorn that he is in their side. His outrageous comedy defuses the anger that so many of us feel. He is the keeper of the flame of the profane, and if we were living in the time of the Greeks, he would be considered as an absolutely essential member of the society, which would no doubt upset him, but it is his due.

If you have read his work before, you know the joys that you are in for. If you haven't, start reading, and consider this your lucky day. For Paul Krassner is an activist, a philosopher, a lunatic and a saint, but most of all he is funny. If words were my mother, then I am his bastard son.

Enjoy.

I first woke up at the age of six.

It began with an itch in my leg. My left leg. But somehow I knew I wasn't supposed to scratch it. Although my eyes were closed, I was standing up. In fact, I was standing on a huge stage. And I was playing the violin. I was in the middle of playing the “Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor.” I was wearing a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit—ruffled white silk shirt with puffy sleeves, black velvet short pants with ivory buttons and matching vest, white socks and black patent-leather shoes. My hair was platinum blond and wavy. On this particular Saturday evening—January 14, 1939—I was in the process of becoming the youngest concert artist in any field ever to perform at Carnegie Hall. But all I knew was that I was being taunted by an itch. An itch that had become my adversary.

I was tempted to stop playing the violin, just for a second, and scratch my leg with the bow, yet I was vaguely aware that this would not be appropriate. I had been well trained. I was a true professional. But that itch kept getting fiercer and fiercer. Then, suddenly, an impulse surfaced from my hidden laboratory of alternative possibilities, and I surrendered to it. Balancing on my left foot, I scratched my left leg with my right foot, without missing a note of the “Vivaldi Concerto.”

Between the impulse and the surrender, there was a choice—I had
decided
to balance on one foot—and it was that simple act of choosing which triggered the precise moment of my awakening to the mystery of consciousness.
This is me!
The relief of scratching my leg was overshadowed by a surge of energy throughout my body. I was being engulfed by some kind of spiritual orgasm: by a wave of born-again ecstasy with no ideological context. No doctrine to explain the shock of my own existence. No dogma to function as a metaphor for the mystery.

Instead, I woke up to the sound of laughter.

I had heard that sound before, sweet and comforting, but never like this. Now I could hear a whole
symphony
of delight and reassurance, like clarinets and guitars harmonizing with saxaphones and drums. It was the audience laughing. I opened my eyes. There were rows upon rows of people sitting out there in the dark, and they were all laughing together. They had understood my plight. It
was easier for them to identify with the urge to scratch than with a little freak playing the violin. And I could identify with them identifying with me. I knew that laughter felt good, and I was pleased that it made the audience feel good. But I hadn't
intended
to make them laugh. I was merely trying to solve a personal dilemma. So the lesson I woke up to—this totally nonverbal, internal
buzz
—would serve as my lifetime filter for perceiving reality and its rules. If you could somehow translate that buzz into words, it would spell out:
One person's logic is another person's humor
.

There was, of course, an objective, scientific explanation for what had occurred. According to a textbook,
Physiological Psychology
, “It is now rather well accepted that ‘itch' is a variant of the pain experience and employs the same sensory mechanisms.” But for me, something beyond an ordinary itch had occurred that night. It was as though I had been zapped by the god of Absurdity. I didn't even know there was such a concept as absurdity. I simply experienced an overpowering awareness of
something
when the audience applauded me for doing what I had learned while I was asleep. But it was only when they laughed that we had really connected, and I imprinted on that sound. I wanted to hear it again. I was hooked. And the first laugh was free.

It was as if I had been destined to become a stand-up comic and editor of
The Realist
. Although I was notorious for publishing outrageous social and political satire, I also published investigative journalism and conspiracy theory. I researched cults, from the Moonies to Scientology, and assassinations, from President Kennedy to Charles Manson. In the process, I underwent a paranoid freakout from information overload.

But I could still pass for sane in public. At the peak of my psychotic episode, I still managed to keep a dental appointment without revealing the utter turmoil in my mind. However, I was on a bus from San Francisco to my home in Watsonville, and my thumb began to feel numb. It was obviously a direct result of the cavity in one of my molars having been filled. When the bus stopped in San Jose, I got off and called my dentist.

“I know who you work for,” I said, “and I have two demands. I want everybody out of solitary confinement. And I want a cease-fire all over the world.”

He hesitated a second. “Hold on, Paul, let me get your chart.” He was stalling
for time. When he got back on the phone, he asked, “Now, do you want my reaction?”

“No, that won't be necessary. I've gotta go. Goodbye.”

I hung up the phone and got back on the bus. The man sitting in front of me, an operative for the CIA, adjusted the ring on his finger in order to let his partner outside know that I was on the bus again. I had to let the man in front of me know that I was onto his game. So I took out my ballpoint pen. Clicking the top over and over like a telegraph key—this was before cell phones—I kept repeating, “Paul Krassner calling Abbie Hoffman”—just loud enough for the man sitting in front of me to hear—“Paul Krassner calling Abbie Hoffman.” The CIA operative fidgeted nervously. He knew I was onto him now.

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.