An excerpt of the book Confessions of a raving unconfined nut: misadventures in the counter-culture by Paul Krassner
Simon and Schuster, 1993
from pages 212 - 215
A year before the Watergate break-in,
E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA for twenty-one years,
proposed a "bag-job"—a surreptitious entry—into
the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist
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
had been 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 Brussell corresponded with Davis, and after
he finished serving Liddy's time behind bars, he ended up living
with Mae. It was a romance made in Conspiracy Heaven.
Hunt also masterminded the Watergate
break-in. Three weeks later—while Richard 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
Brussell completed a lengthy article for The Realist, documenting
the conspiracy and delineating the players, from the burglars
all the way up to FBI Director Gray, Attorney General John Mitchell,
and President Nixon. "The significance of the Watergate
affair," she wrote, "is that every element essential
for a political coup d'état in the United States was assembled
at the time of their arrest." Mae proceeded to delineate
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 I had no idea how I would
get it, but as I left the printing plant, I was filled with an
inexplicable sense of confidence. When I got home, the phone
rang. It was Yoko Ono.
I had known her in the sixties as an
avant-garde conceptual artist. She had one project which took
place on a wooden platform in the Paradox, a macrobiotic restaurant.
People would climb inside these huge black burlap bags, singly,
or with a partner, and then do whatever they wanted, providing
a floor show for patrons while they ate their brown rice and
sprout salad. I had helped support the San Francisco Mime Troupe
and the Free Southern Theater, but Yoko's project was so absurd
that I gave her some money too. As a token of appreciation, she
presented me with a personally revised alarm clock. On the face
of the clock, there was a blue sky with white clouds, but there
were no hands. I wound that clock every day, leaving the alarm
knob up, blindly changing the time it would go off so that I
would have no way of telling when it would, but trying always
to be psychically prepared. It was just a Zen bastard's way of
learning to pay attention to the moment. I planned to do this
for a whole year, but I decided to stop several months into it,
on the day that I was in the middle of giving head to a temporary
soul mate on my vibrating chair when the alarm clock went off
and we both screamed out loud in unison. I took that as an omen.
Yoko had since married John Lennon. Now
they had arrived in San Francisco and invited me to lunch. At
the time, the administration was trying to deport Lennon, ostensibly
for an old marijuana bust, but actually because they were afraid
he was planning to perform for protesters at the Republican convention
that summer. I brought the galleys of Mae Brussell's article,
which provided a context for John and Yoko's current harassment.
I mentioned my printer's ultimatum, and they immediately took
me to a local branch of the Bank of Tokyo and withdrew $5,000
cash. I had never intended for the money I once gave to Yoko
in New York to serve as bread cast upon the water, but now it
had come back all nice and soggy, so precisely when I
needed it that my personal boundaries of Coincidence were stretched
to infinity. I could rationalize my ass off—after all, Yoko
and Lennon had been driving across the country, and they just
happened to arrive in San Francisco at that particular
moment—but the timing was so exquisite that Coincidence
and Mysticism became the same process for me. John Lilly even
told me about the Earth Coincidence Control Office—extraterrestrial
guardians who protected him by manipulating human events so that
he could carry out their higher purpose. At first I thought he
intended this as a clever metaphor. Then I realized he meant
it literally. And if they were doing it for him, maybe
they were doing it for me.
Actually, that melding of Coincidence
and Mysticism had begun when I wrote a comic strip, drawn by
Richard Guindon. It was about political witchcraft, a takeoff
on Rosemary's Baby. A key scene in that film showed Rosemary
moving around the letters from a Scrabble game so that instead
of spelling out the name of her neighbor the letters spelled
out the name of a warlock in a book she had been reading about
witchcraft. And now, scrambling the letters of the vice president's
name—SPIRO AGNEW—it became GROW A PENIS. Coincidence
had been my religion, but this was so appropriate that
it challenged my theology. After all, when Senator Charles Goodell
came out against the war in Vietnam, it was Agnew who called
him "the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican party"—thereby
equating military might with the mere presence of a penis. Around
that time, Mike Wallace interviewed me for "60 Minutes."
He asked me what the difference was between the underground press
and the mainstream media, and I told him about the GROW A PENIS
anagram, adding, "The difference is that I could print that
in The Realist, but it'll be edited out of this program."
My prediction was accurate.
Yoko Ono and John Lennon spent a weekend
at my house in Watsonville. They loved being so close to the
ocean. In the afternoon I asked them to smoke their cigarettes
outside, but in the evening we smoked a combination of marijuana
and opium, sitting on pillows in front of the fireplace, sipping
tea munching cookies. We talked about Mae Brussell's theory that
the deaths of musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and
Jim Morrison had actually been political assassinations because
they were role models on the crest of the youth rebellion. "No,
no," Lennon argued, "they were already headed in a
self-destructive direction." A few months later, he would
remind me of that conversation and add, "Listen, if anything
happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident."
For now, though, we were simply stoned in Watsonville, discussing
conspiracy, safe at my oasis in a desert of paranoia. At one
point, I referred to Mae Brussell as a saint. "She's not
a saint," Lennon said. "You're not a saint.
I'm not a saint. Yoko's not a saint. Nobody's
a saint."
We discussed the Charles Manson case.
Lennon was bemused by the way Manson had associated himself with
Beatles music.
"Look," he said, "would
you kindly inform him that it was Paul McCartney who wrote
'Helter Skelter,' not me."
Yoko said, "No, please don't
tell him. We don't want to have any communication with
Manson."
"It's all right," Lennon said,
"he doesn't have to know the message came from us."
"It's getting chilly," Yoko
said. "Would you put another cookie in the fireplace?"
Lennon was absentmindedly holding on
to the joint. I asked him, "Do the British use that expression,
'to bogart a joint,' or is that only an American term—you
know, derived from the image of a cigarette dangling from Humphrey
Bogart's lips?"
"In England, if you remind somebody
else to pass a joint, you lose your own turn."
Mae Brussell believed that her article could literally prevent the re-election of President Nixon. We held a press conference—but there was a lot of skepticism. It had been five years since I published "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book," and I began to feel like the little boy who cried "Wolf!" Only now there really was a wolf at the door, and I started running around like a graduate fresh out of Zealot School, getting copies of The Realist to the media and individual journalists.
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