One Hand Jerking (14 page)

Q. “And he'd have to masturbate.”

A. “That's true. . . . But—you use that to point out how tragic was my solution, which is that he wins and still has to masturbate. I reply that at least it was more valuable than masturbating in the first place. Besides, he might have no desire to masturbate. He might lie down and send his thoughts back to the root of his being.”

Mailer concluded that “The ultimate direction of masturbation always has to be insanity.” He didn't mention anything about going blind or becoming a hunchback or growing hair on the palm of one's hand.

During the trial of fertilizer salesman Scott Peterson, the prosecutor presented evidence that, three weeks after Peterson's wife Laci disappeared, he added a couple of hard-core porn channels to the programming on his satellite dish. Defense attorney Mark Geragos called this “as great a form of character assassination as I don't know what.” His client was on trial for the murder of his pregnant wife.

Peterson had added the Playboy channel two weeks after Laci's disappearance. Geragos argued, “There is nothing different in the Playboy channel that isn't on HBO at night”—the couple already had HBO—but prosecutor Rick Distaso pointed out that, one week later, Peterson “canceled the Playboy channel and ordered two hardcore pornography channels.”

Geragos asserted that, without being able to show that Laci didn't want porn in their home, the fact that her husband ordered it after she disappeared is irrelevant and “It's meant to inflame the jury.” The jury convicted him, though not for porn.

But at least Peterson jerked off in the privacy of his own living room. In Creek County, Oklahoma, 57-year-old Judge Donald Thompson was accused of frequently masturbating under his robes while his court was in session, using a special device for enhancing erections. He admitted that he had a penis pump under the bench during a murder trial, claiming that it was a gag gift from a friend for his 50th birthday.

He was also charged with firing Lisa Foster, who had been his court reporter for 15 years, after she cooperated with investigators.

“On one occasion,” the complaint stated, “Ms. Foster saw Judge Thompson holding his penis up and shaving underneath it with a disposable razor while on the bench.”

Several witnesses—including jurors in his court and police officers who testified in trials—said that they had heard the “swooshing” sound of a penis pump duriing trials and that they had seen the judge slumped in his chair, with his elbows on his knees, working the device. They said that the pump sounded like a blood pressure cuff being pumped up.

Thompson, who had been a judge for 22 years, has since retired, though he denied the charges and didn't refer to them in his letter of resignation. He receives a full pension.

“But even the president of the United States,” sang Bob Dylan, “sometimes must have to stand naked.” Dylan didn't mention anything about masturbating but, according to Monica Lewinsky in the
Starr Report
, Bill Clinton jerked off into a sink after she performed incomplete fellatio. Clinton had previously fired Surgeon General Joycelin Elders for suggesting that we give our children sex education which would include some information about masturbation. The joke about Clinton was that at Oxford he jerked off but he didn't come.

Finally, a decade ago, I was at the home of a friend when someone visited him
in order to borrow some pornography—it was the late Francis Crick, who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his seminal (yes, I said
seminal
) discovery with James Watson of the double-helix structure of DNA. In a bestselling 1968 book,
The Double Helix
, Watson wrote that Crick was so elated on the day of that discovery that he announced to the patrons of a local pub that the pair had just discovered “the secret of life.”

That discovery in 1953 helped launch the modern field of molecular genetics, with far-reaching implications for understanding our biology, as well as spin-offs ranging from genetic engineering to DNA fingerprinting, not to mention DNA imprinting to be found in blood, saliva and hair follicles. Certainly, to reveal that Crick liked to play with himself is not “as great a form of character assassination as I don't know what.”

Of course, despite the fact that I have waited until after Crick's death to write about this, the seemingly incongruous image of a Nobel Prize winner masturbating to porn in no way diminishes his accomplishments. There is not the slightest bit of inconsistency between his jerking off and being described by Caltech professor Christof Koch, his collaborator for many years, in these words: “He was the living incarnation of what it is to be a scholar: brilliant, rational, dispassionate and always willing to revise his own opinions and views in light of the actions of a universe that never ceased to astonish him. He was editing a manuscript on his deathbed, a scientist until the bitter end.”

An obituary in the
Los Angeles Times
stated: “An inveterate collaborator and gatherer of thinkers about him, Crick mused over the years on questions as varied as why people dream, where life came from and whether much of the DNA in our cells was parasitic junk.” Ironically, in recent years, DNA has become a euphemistic synonym for semen.

And so, a fertilizer salesman, a judge, a president, a Nobel laureate—together they serve as a monument to masturbation as the great equalizer.

The voice of Homer on
The Simpsons
, Dan Castellaneta, and I have long been fans of each other's work. I was impressed by his versatility as an actor on
The Tracy Ullman Show
, as well as his live appearances with an improvisational troupe and his own one-person, multi-character show. He in turn enjoys my writing and has attended several of my stand-up performances. So, when Danny Goldberg, who ran Artemis Records, invited me to do another album, I felt comfortable asking Castellaneta if he would consider introducing me in Homer's voice.

He said it would be “an honor and a pleasure.” I was very excited. We agreed that the best approach would be for him to do the introduction from an offstage microphone, so that the audience could maintain their image of good old blustery Homer Simpson while they listened to Dan's disembodied voice. And then he would hand me the mike and I'd walk onstage. At the taping of
Irony Lives!
at Genghis Cohen in Los Angeles, I sat next to Dan/Homer as he was introducing me, and I felt as though I was being sucked mysteriously into Cartoon World.

I've always preferred apologizing in retrospect rather than asking for permission, since I've never had any assets that I could be sued for, but understandably Artemis Records felt it necessary to ask Fox TV for permission to include Homer's introduction. At the beginning of my performance, I mentioned that the introduction might not be on the album because attorneys for the Fox network wanted to hear the
entire
album before granting permission. I explained that Fox owned Homer's voice when it was done by Dan.

But they kept holding off making a decision. Then, when Fox asked for
seven
copies of the advance CD, I realized that they would most likely refuse to grant permission. The word in the industry is, “Never mess with Fox lawyers, they're worse than Disney.”

Fox continued to stall, and release of the CD had to be postponed. Finally, I was informed by an attorney for Artemis Records that, “Unfortunately, Fox declined our request, and in doing so failed to go into any detail as to what their reasons were.” I assume that it was because the album includes such tracks as “Terrorist
Attacks,” “In the Guise of Security,” and “My Cannabis Cup Runneth Over.” Well, Fox TV may own Homer's voice, but not the following transcript of what he said. And so now I'd like to introduce Dan Castellaneta introducing me:

Hello. Hello. May I have your attention, please. This is Homer Simpson. I have been asked to introduce our performer tonight.

There have been many great counterculture heroes that I have admired over the years. Steve McQueen, Dr. Demento, Dr. Denis Leary, and Wavy Gravy. Mmmmm, gravy.

But even some counterculture heroes go much too far and step over that line between dissent and in-dissent . . . sentcy. I'm speaking of Paul Krassner.

The first problem I have with Paul Krassner is that the only song I like that he wrote for the Jefferson Airplane was, “Crown of Creation.” And even then his name is spelled K-a-n-t-n-e-r even though it is pronounced Krassner.

Second, I have a problem with the fact that he is an atheist. If there is no God, then who has placed a pox upon me and mocks me every day? Of whom do I live in fear and mortal terror? Buddha? I think not. He's way over in China where thankfully he can't get at me.

I also have a problem with his constant use of words such as “penis,” “Larry Flynt,” “premature,” “ejaculation,” “CIA,” and on several occasions he has been known to use the words “Bush” and “Bush Jr.” in mixed company. Did I mention “penis”? Yeah, here it is—“penis.” (
Laughs
) Heh heh heh. (
To self
) Penis.

Let's see, where was I? I mentioned, “penis,” “gravy,” “Buddha,” “God,” “Jefferson Airplane.” No. That's it.

Will everyone please put their hands together for that raving, unconfined nut—let's hope that he opens with “Crown of Creation”—Paul Krassner!

This kind of censorship by Fox was not a First Amendment issue, since it wasn't being done by the government. Nevertheless, I couldn't just ignore it. So I leaked the suppressed introduction to Real Audio on my Web site, then spread the word exponentially, and in the first five days there were 58,000 hits; at the peak they were coming in at the rate of 2,300 an hour. At this writing, there have been 505,604 hits. I daresay that more people will have heard Homer's introduction this way than would have heard if it were on the CD.

The irony of
Irony Lives!
is that Fox's attempt to disassociate themselves from the album has already begun to backfire. But the question remains: Who ever
thought that some day Homer Simpson would become an intellectual property? And, answering my own question, I slap my forehead with the heel of my hand, uttering Homer Simpson's sacred mantra: “D'oh!”

Twenty years ago, producer Scott Kelman was watching the final nails being hammered at his new theater in downtown Los Angeles. It was opening night for my performance,
Attacking Decency in General
. (The name came from a memoir by the late ABC News anchor, Harry Reasoner, who wrote, “Krassner not only attacked establishment values; he attacked decency in general.”) Later, Kelman produced Peter Bergman's show,
Help Me Out of This Head
. Kelman thought that
Peter, Paul and Harry
would be a great title for a few weeks' run of an evening of political satire at the Museum of Contemporary Art, only he didn't know of any satirist named Harry.

“Harry Shearer,” I suggested. “He's brilliant. Let's do it.”

And so the fantasy became a reality. As a warm-up before each show, Peter would look in the mirror and make strange operatic sounds; I would hide behind a theatrical prop and smoke a joint; and Harry would be transformed into then-President Ronald Reagan by his personal make-up artist, imported from Iowa.
Peter, Paul and Harry
got great reviews, and it was held over for two extra weeks.

“If I had been named after my
other
grandfather,” Harry said, “this show would never have happened.”

He became an actor at the age of seven, at the urging of his piano teacher. As a kid on
The Jack Benny Show
, when the cast was doing a read-through, there was one line in the script where, Harry told me, “I just got it in my mind to do it with a slight Brooklyn accent, and when I did that, Benny just started howling, banging the table and laughing.”

That moment was an auspicious omen of Harry's future career. Today, foremost among his many talents is an uncanny ability to mimic the voice, mannerisms and point-of-view of countless public figures—entertainers, politicians, newcasters—with satirical precision, on his radio program,
Le Show
—now in its 21st year—broadcast every Sunday morning on KCRW in Santa Monica
(“From the edge of America, from the home of the homeless”) and syndicated to 70 stations around the country. But no longer in New York City.

“It took an age and a half to get
Le Show
carried by WNYC in the first place,” he told me, “and then the broadcast landed at the distinguished hour of midnight Sunday. Which was just theoretically in compliance with the only contract provision we apply to affiliates—the program has to be broadcast on Sunday. (
Le Show
is given to stations free, so I don't think one onerous condition is too many.) After a few months, the program was moved to 1 a.m., which, last time I looked, was actually Monday. Then, a few months later, it was moved again, to 2 a.m. At that point, I lost patience with them. On a broadcast, I had Ralph the Talking Computer play the role of WNYC's manager, and I fired the station on the air (although I guess they got tipped off, not on
their
air).”