The Parts Left Out
I don’t recall how it came about that Paul Krassner got in touch with me when I was (briefly) overall editor of the Welcomat in Philadelphia. He may have called or it may have been through some intermediate relay. It was pre-email, in the early ‘90s, and he was not doing well, on the long downslide of what our generation had hoped would be a permanent change for the good.
It wasn’t. Notice that?
As founder, editor and wielder of The Realist in the '60s, Krassner was one of my heroes. He was doing what a satirist should do at all times and in all places: Sticking it to not just the Establishment but all that is Right, Reasonable and Held Sacrosanct, in an era when the mainstream press was rolling over and asking to have its tummy scratched. If you read the obits on Krassner this week, dead at 87, you can get all the skinny, so I’ll ignore most of that here.
In the roil of the post-'50s world, The Realist was delightfully scandalous, a mad scamper that didn’t give a flying fuck about what was expected, what was supposed to matter. If you believed any of what was printed there you were deranged. If you didn’t believe what it stood for, you were far more deranged. One issue included an “interview” with British mini-guru Alan Watts. I still don’t know if it was a celebration or a satire – Watts came off as a drunken unbalanced dipshit.
The most scandalous petard, in 1967, was “The Parts Left out of the Kennedy Book,” which described in loving detail vice-president and prexy-in-waiting LBJ fucking the wound in Kennedy’s throat on the flight back to Washington. A third of the readers laughed, a third were incensed. And a third believed it. It scandalized just about everybody, including supposed left supporters. You don’t say such things.
In 1993 I think it was, I sent Krassner a personal advance before we printed his story in the Welco; he was on his beam ends in Venice Beach, California (he paid me back immediately after getting the piddling Welco check). Why? I’d never done that for anyone else. Because, faded from view, he was still important, would always be important. Also – this is true – what he sent us was actually a chapter left out of his about-to-be published autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture.
A Welco writer from the early '80s, the superb visual-arts reviewer Tam Mossman, later worked at Running Press in Philly when they put out a paperback compendium of The Realist, including (of course) the Kennedy bit, plus Wally Wood’s sketch of all the major Walt Disney characters fucking the scum out of each other – my favorite is the 3 little pigs linked in a daisy chain of sodomy. (Woods came out of Will Eisner’s studio in the 1940s and penned the last weeks of “The Spirit” around 1951.) I had the joy of visiting Running Press on 22nd St. and thumbing through the paste-up layouts.
After leaving the Welco, I dallied with a few folks who put together the Schuylkill Scallywag, a free quarterly mailed out to a minute number of subscribers. (The Schuylkill is a Philly river you don’t need to know about.) We ran an article from one of our contributors describing an extended morning ride with Alan Watts who shoveled down a crawful of scotch. Watts came off as… a drunken unbalanced dipshit.
When I wrote about The Realist in the Scallywag, someone (where have all the details gone?) handed me a box packed with ratty Realist volumettes from the '60s. What a gorgeous gift. Seven years ago I almost lost them in a fire in my wife’s potshop (“pot” as in “ceramics”). I dare not read them now for fear of their disintegration; they’ve turned a mortuary gray that I’ve never seen in any other publication.
Later, I came by a tape of one of Krassner’s standup routines. From the context, it was late 1995 or early 1996 – he mentions the deaths of Jerry Rubin, Kurt Cobain and Jerry Garcia and suggests the soon-to-be-end of Timothy Leary. The performance runs uninterrupted for an hour and a quarter.
The humor starts slow, gains steam as he talks about cattle-prodding a dwarf at a Coney Island ride, launches into an hilarious take on porn involving donkeys (have you ever…? well, don’t knock it) and ends with a plea for optimism delivered by another dwarf at a leftist talkfest. Funny, yes, but also instructive, intelligent, studied and caring. Think of merging Eddie Izzard with John Oliver.
Here’s a quote from the LA Times obit on Krassner: “If I had one thing to tell everybody, it would be: Do it now. Take up music, read a book, proposition a girl – but do it now. We know we are all sentenced to death. People cannot become prisoners of guilts or fears. They should cling to each moment and take what enjoyment they can from it.”
True in spirit. Does it still matter in such a wretched, disintegrating, malignant, blown-sideways, fucked-up, uncaring, blindered, weeping, disfigured, snarling, misaligned, gobsmacked, wailing-on-our-knees, bring-back-Jesus world?
Depends on your outlook, I guess.
by Derek Davis